 So here's our steering committee members again. We waved this is a list of our names, and you can find us online at npa5.org. And we also have a home on the Burlington website. And we have Scott here and Fosca here who are our liaisons. More on that. Maybe later during public forum if you want to introduce yourself. We're on CCTV. Thank you, Charlie. And you can always email all of us all at once at that email address on the slide. You can go to the next slide. Here's some zoom stuff. You can unmute you can start your video you can stop your video. Feel free to raise your hand during public forum or when we're having discussions. And feel free to pop a question in the q amp a if anything is not working for you on zoom. Next slide. So here is our agenda for today. We're going to get right into public forum in a moment. Here's from hopefully some folks in the room and on zoom. And then we're going to get into neighborhood code. We have Sarah and Charles from city planning, glad to have you here. We're going to hear from counselor grant from the central district about the declaration of drug use as a public health crisis. And then we're going to have a community discussion about both of those things. How can we come up with some creative solutions to drug use and housing crises and all the things that we're seeing in our community. We have the tools, and we'll get to talk about it. So without further ado, let's get into public forum. The ground rules are please identify yourself and where you live. It's okay if you don't live in word five, but we still want to know where you live. If you're affiliated with any entity. Love to hear about that. And in the interest of time, please limit your comments to four minutes total. And I'll give you a little wave if you're passing three. So with that, would anybody like to speak in public forum. Anyone online. Oh, great. Go for it. My name is Robin skank and I live on Howard Street, and I've lived in the same house on Howard Street for about 35 years. I live just down from where shy guy used to be. So, long and the short of it is that I've been listening a little bit to the resolution from the city council about public safety and the piece of it that I worry about a little bit is what about the public safe. It's a huge national issue but what about the public safety of the folks that are substance abuse addicted. I had my car stolen a little over a year ago it was recovered with two addicts living in it. I was informed by the court system that they had committed many other crimes. And they were in commission of a crime when they were found. They were released immediately because it wasn't a crime against a person. I was updated regularly by the courts. Last June I was contacted by a victims advocate who said we're thinking we're going to release this gentleman because we think we could rehabilitate him and I'm a special educator I said, do you have a job for him? Do you have a place for him to live? Is there a treatment program? If you're asking me my opinion, tell me this. And she said I'm not at liberty to tell you this and I said, well, nothing would please me more than to have this gentleman rehabilitated, but I don't think this is going to work. And two months later I received a note from the court saying the case has been dismissed. The guy died. He overdosed. So, yes, it's a public safety issue to people on Church Street when we see crimes being committed but it's a huge public safety and health issue to those who have become addicted to drugs. You know, it is not just Burlington I'm really clear on that but I don't think when I hear that we're going to have warming shelters I like that that's wonderful. I think it goes deeper and I, all of these people this guy who stole my car and who's dead now, he's somebody's sonny somebody's brother I happen to have found out I know his cousin. They're all somebody somebody. And I had a couple of close connections like that so I'm here to bring that forward to say they're all somebody somebody. And the guy who stole my car is dead. And that broke my heart. I was never angry when I found out that it was stolen by people who were living with it I was sad that people were addicted and living in my car. So that that's why I'm here and I'm not here to just complain. I'm here to say, in that case we could have done better. He died, and they asked me my opinion I said this doesn't sound good, and it wasn't good. So, there you go. Thanks so much for sharing other folks for public forum anyone online looks like maybe not. Yes, go ahead. My name is, my name is Richard Gleesh. I've been living on Ferguson Avenue with my family for the over the past 25 years. I love living in Burlington. I consider myself a very engaged citizen. I love the community. I love them. Where two years ago, your famous reassessment happened, and lots of us got really, really bad surprises when something that was supposed to be revenue neutral, ended up increasing property tax for a lot and a lot for the vast majority of residents and many of them by a very large percentage, making it much less affordable for many people on fixed income to live in Burlington. At the same time, commercial property owners saw their overall tax be reduced by a substantial amount. This is a mechanism that assess residential properties on their market value and commercial property on the business's income and this being in the middle of COVID, most businesses down on being hospitality and office buildings and and some retail stores of course their own are low. So we, we created we, we enshrined those rates for the foreseeable future based on a situation that was anything but normal and average on the net result and was very well documented by seven days at the time I went into the city budget, which one numbers was that basically every year there's about $2 million that are overpaid by residential taxpayers that goes direct that reduces the amount paid by commercial property owners. So we pay an extra $2 million before the city sees an extra penny of our tax of income tax. The city could easily fix that by adjusting rates to commercial and residential taxpayers to bring back the proportion of of the space to what it was pre COVID because we can all agree that businesses are back in business and doing really quite well in Burlington. So, all that to say that I don't think any of that is happening. I'm still paying a lot of taxes. And I did one thing that last year that I never ever thought possible I would ever do and I voted against the school budget. Not, and it had nothing to do with the school budget but at that point I decided that I was not going to support any increase of my tax rate. Until this issue was resulted until that we bring we bring some justice that brings the property, the commercial property owners back into the fold and pay their fair share of our tax base. And we are losing part of our populations the low income people the seniors people on fixed income because for no fault on their own they they haven't moved nothing just by being property owners or, or renters for the matter of fact. I cannot afford living in Burrington anymore. And I don't think it's a good calculation for the sea on long run, and it needs to be addressed. And the future the other thing is for, if anything revenue neutral should be separated revenue neutral for residential owners revenue or for property owners. I mean the city was asleep at the wheel when it happened we apply the mechanism automatically without looking at consequences, because we're in a special situation. And now we're in when that situation. Thank you. Thank you. Question boy. They know that he's the mayor disappointed. I think subject to city council, a new head of the new city assessor. So we're going to start any day now. If it is a new city assessor might be a good time for you to talk to that person. Thank you. I'm going to go in the meantime freeze. It's going to make an announcement. My name is Marie. I am a volunteer for the people's kitchen. We are a mutual aid project based on the south end here. We distribute food to families where low income and, and, and more mostly immigrants, but also sometimes we have been here for generations. We distribute food distribution every Friday at South Meadows and Baird corner of South Meadows and Baird. And that's every Friday at 530. We are always looking for volunteers. If you know somebody who also is in need of food, please let them know about our project. You can email me for read at worker center.org or tax to 802-491-3491. I'm going to make sure like everybody knows like there is help for food if, if you know of anybody who needs food. Thank you. Go ahead. My name is James Ballady. I'm a Burlington resident. And I'm here because I'm a member of Vermont justice for Palestine. And we've been around town collecting signatures for petition to put on the ballot. Petition will be a resolution to support our commitment to freedom and justice and equality for the Palestinian people. And this resolution, if we get 1500 signatures, it will be presented, it will be presented to the city council. And then hopefully we'll be a warning posted on the town meeting day, which will be next year, March. And I just want to go over a thing about petitioning the government in the Constitution. It says there is a right to petition the government. And locally around the country, towns past petitions, ending apartheid in South Africa, ending the Vietnam, promoting the climate, decentralizing police departments. Local communities would just would have the police department serving their neighborhood instead of a central location. But this petition will set a precedent because other towns will petition, whatever is whatever concern they have and when the momentum bills, it will develop peace talks conflict resolution, because I personally believe what happened in the Middle States, because there was no active peace talks going on, and the young people to 1 million people right now are in a humanitarian crisis. They're drinking dirty water one meal a day. And this all could have been resolved that we if we had active peace talks going on where people could sit down at the table, and we have conflict resolution by democracy not warfare. Okay, thank you. Yeah, go ahead. Thanks much. Matt Somerville, Burlington resident of the house on birchcliffe Parkway. Just trying to figure out a way to express my concern for public safety. I work for a company that's been based in Burlington for 45 years. During the pandemic we had 150 to 200 people working a day on church street now we have about five, and in large part because of the public safety issues on church street was talking to a vice president the other week, and they're considering moving out of Burlington. And the safety on church street was the reason that she noted our lease is coming up. It's not just for rent, it's, you know, not just safety there's pandemic and remote work issues but it is really affecting businesses and their long term decisions. And so that's the first point the second point I was driving my son to homecoming at Edmunds last week at high school. He was driving by battery park and he said, he was talking about battery park and he said yeah I don't go there because, you know, it's just known that there's, you know, people, basically masturbating there is the words he used, completely desensitized on a Saturday night on the way to his prompt 50 meters from the police office. He was thinking about where BHS is located, and, you know, it's proximity. You know he's noted in the beginning it's proximity to at least five or six dispensaries, which is one thing, you know, I'm all for it but the amount in the desensitization that has become it's not an issue of public sympathy or whatever. It's not desensitized to it to what they see on the streets, and it's not. Yeah, I don't know what the right words are, but I'm becoming increasing increasingly for active enforcement to show that it's not something that we tolerate, and I don't you know I'm not looking for a certain type of enforcement but an openness so that it's not something we walk by, but that our city officials and is any way that as a public we can engage as well I won't in that but just just want to share those two little things. Thank you. Other folks, yes, go ahead. I just pulled work by resident 11 red rocks condos. I just on the note of the property taxes wasn't originally going to do a public comment on this. There was exploration by the Ways and Means Committee at the state level to look into and evaluate a land value tax system instead of our current property tax so what that property is instead of so like where's commercial is based on income and residential is based on the building improvements primarily land value tax basically values the land that the parcel is based on for its best use so you know if you had a single family home on, you know, quarter acre lot, basically, and that area is owned high density residential, you pay taxes that a high that you would if you had a high density residential building there. So it's just an approach. One it's a more. It seems out of the 1800s this guy or Eric George I think is his name, but they do it in a lot of other countries, some states Pennsylvania I think is a good example. But it's basically a way to both be more equitable about taxes. I think if you think the commercial downtown, the golf course pays $75,000 and occupies 132nd of all the land usable land in Burlington. Whether you agree with that use or not I think is separate thing but that feels low. But the land value tax basically especially in concert with the neighborhood code work can encourage development, because right now a lot of people, if they want to improve their property, don't because it ends up raising your tax bill. That's a general thing so if you want an email house and ways committee members and ask them about it or or where that discussion is gone. Great folks vibrant public forum anyone else. Okay, I'm going to say something for public form really quickly and then we'll move on. When I am not serving on the NPA steering committee I work at the interval Center, I run food access programs, and we're starting a market called Arlo and abbreviation of affordable reliable and local, or you can buy bulk food. All local stuff in the winter will be at the old North End Community Center once a month. If you have if you have three squares you can get 50% off. If you use help buying food, you can get 25% off, and then you can also pay full price if you're able. There's a bunch of flyers with what will have in November, and the dates, I will be here for the entire meeting, and would be happy to talk afterwards. Okay, switching hats. All right, looks like we're good online. So, let's go to y'all from city planet, take it away. Awesome. Thank you so much for having us. I'm going to pass around a couple of flyers that are a little bit relevant for the conversation. There are also some at the back of the back of the room for those online. They can also be found on our website, the city planning website under neighborhood code at the bottom, additional resources, and we can definitely chat that as well. Thank you so much for having us. I'm Sarah I'm with the Office of City Planning here tonight to just give a quick brief overview of the neighborhood code and talk about the high level ideas of what the neighborhood code is, as well as talk about other opportunities for feedback and learning more as well as the joint committee process. Overall, the neighborhood code is about how we build on the strength of the city's communities, evaluate the zoning tools that regulate new homes in these areas today and also identify opportunities for new neighborhood scale housing citywide. So neighborhood housing neighborhood scale housing refers to housing types such as duplexes for plexus cottage quartz, and even some into some neighborhood scale multiplex structures that are not currently in most cases in Burlington allowed to be built in the majority of the residential zone districts due to today's existing zoning regulations. So the neighborhood code is about how these housing types can fit alongside the existing buildings within residential neighborhoods. And as I'm sure you're all very familiar our office has been involved in a number of zoning changes recently specifically focused on housing and these changes proposed in the neighborhood code hope to implement the citywide comprehensive plan to kind of really look at how we're using and will use in the future the city's land limited land area. So most of the zoning changes that have that we focused on recently have focused in this area in gold, which are areas planned for the most intensive future growth. Not all of these areas will accommodate housing, necessarily, they include public school sites and areas that are zone for non residential uses, but an area that we are planning, and we're planning to look at is this area and blue to the right, acknowledging that downtown in this gold is only 4% of the city. Through the neighborhood code hoping to really explore how we can look at infill housing in this in the existing residential neighborhoods. And while we have successfully in the last decade added 1300 new homes across the city, they've mainly been either, they've mainly been larger apartments in these gold areas. The neighborhood code is about how these areas in blue that make up 40% of the city's residential or that make up 40% of the city's area. How they can allow for more of these neighborhoods scale housing types. So as residents we all have very strong connections to our neighborhoods they're very unique and we care a lot about how they link us to each other to the past to the future and how the neighborhood code acknowledges that not only are they very important to us but they also have the capacity to really shift and change and meet current and future needs of residents. So more, you can all acknowledge that with these, there are a lot of opportunities for missing middle housing types to improve the existing conditions at on and provide neighborhood scale solutions. So these homes require less land per home that are utilizing infrastructure these areas in blue that we looked at are already served by a lot of existing infrastructure. There are more, there's more housing choice, and there are opportunities for multi generational housing and aging aging in place. We have a really strong partnership with AARP focused on this project that will talk about a little bit later. And this also will allow for an expansion of the tax base sharing the tax burden across more households. Finally this will allow us to comply with Vermont's home act of 2023, which introduces new statewide zoning requirements for duplexes triplexes and four unit buildings. So as a reminder, these are the types of building that were built buildings that were focused on in the neighborhood code, and these housing types offer new opportunities for homes in these existing neighborhoods. These can make up the housing options across the individuals, lifelong journey of housing needs while also still staying in the same neighborhood. For example, we know that early career adults young homeowners and retirement age people make up about a third of the city's population. And one of the reasons why AARP is really interested in this type of project is that much like ADUs, these types of housing offer another tool for older adults to be able to remain in place to age in place in their homes and existing neighborhoods and surrounded by a community that they're familiar with. And also have options for potentially lower maintenance housing costs. So though, especially down in the south and you might see examples of these housing types across cities different neighborhoods. But the majority of these are not as we can see here legal or permissible to be built in the city's residential districts today. And a good example of this are duplexes. So they're one of the lowest forms of density to add lowest forms of density to add to two existing neighborhoods, but despite and despite policies that have long allowed them in theory. Many of the Watson city don't allow actually in practice for you to build one. So in this case in the case of the duplexes, the minimum lot size and density works together primarily primarily throughout these low density residential zones. And the upshot is that zoning standards require at least about 8000 square feet to build a single family home with 10,000 square feet to build a duplex and residential low density. The average lot size is in residential neighborhoods is just for just between seven and 8000. An interesting pattern that you can kind of see in Burlington's land patterns is that many of the lots that can accommodate them right now are more towards the edge of the edge of the city. And less so in for and more central walkable older neighborhoods of Burlington. So there's a number of reasons why a lot of our current why we want to look into allowing for these structures it also acknowledges in this in this work that our zoning ordinance is not reflective of what's on the ground in Burlington today. So Burlington has been working and adjusting zoning through after adopting it since 1947 with these standards adjusted nearly every decade, which has resulted in neighborhoods and large parts of the city that are not reflective of what's on the ground. So, for example, some of the current low density residential districts are miss for miszoned compared to past decades. For example, the density is a big driver of this, this lack of cohesion in what is in the zoning ordinance versus what's on the ground. So you can kind of see in this map. The residential areas require specific standard lot sizes or a lot size minimums density limits as well as frontage indicators, and everything that's not in blue does not comply to one or both one or more of these factors. So just talking a little bit about density limits word, which are one of the bigger drivers of this lack of conformity. They regulate exactly how many units can be built based on the size of the property. So on the left here you can see four different structures in a medium residential neighborhood that from the street look very similar in scale. However, the ones on the right are not permitted to be built would not be allowed to be built today with the same number of units because of these density standards. When you when you say that can you go back one slide that they're 80 and 53 units per acre is that primarily because they're on. Yeah, yep. So these I believe they're all for plexus located in the older fund and they have they vary in lot sizes. So again, the two on the right. The lot sizes are not large enough through today's standard to allow those for those four different units. So another example is this cottage court that has kind of has been rendered on a property in the old north end and this is one of the rendering the phone back of the handouts that also discusses some of the opportunities and barriers for this. So this could allow for five additional single family homes owner or rental with ample open space and off street parking opportunities. However, one of the reasons and one of the barriers that this couldn't be built today is that our residential zones load and see do not allow for free multiple freestanding units on on the same lot, or they also don't allow for small lot subdivisions. And this is that example of the multiple freestanding units on on one single lot. This is again in the new north end of four plex on North Avenue across from the Hannaford. You can see a duplex of four plex on all six units opportunity parking in the back, but again not permitted under current zoning regulations. So, like we look at just earlier, this is what would be allowed to be built today and this is a little bit about what we're aiming towards, we're aiming to allow to readjust our zoning standards to not only reflect what's on the ground today but also see if we can intensify move away from density instead look towards intensity through different standards and this is a little bit what that would look like throughout the city, you can see instead of primarily single family homes allowing for new missing middle housing types and more intensity around major corridors. So this is these are some of the recommendations that we're looking at and discussing during our joint commit joint committee. One of the four, one of the four proposals is regulating building mass instead of building building density, focusing on building, building footprint height and the number of stories guiding the overall building mass, allowing for smaller lot sizes rear set having smaller rear setbacks and also higher lot coverage. This would inform the building location and overall development intensity. So enable smaller lots and flexible subdivision which would allow for greater utilization of existing lots and creation of desired housing types and these last two are really focused on creating having creative ways for home ownership in addition to the existing the existing parcels today. And lastly the creation of cottage courts that we looked at earlier in townhomes with more variety and housing types shared land cost and potential ownership models. So we've done a lot of research and have worked, we're working with a consultant on developing this and really focused on proposals and standards that would create very livable units as well and also maintaining the existing character of of Burlington's neighborhoods. And the last thing I do, I want to invite everyone to is that we are having our joint committee process we are two meetings in with the next one being next Tuesday, the 24th these are for these are hybrid. They're also hosted at City Hall they're also recorded with all the presentations made available on our website. Other events that we're doing one in partnership with a RP are coffee chats. These are really great opportunities to have a casual conversation with us about what this means and ask very kind of dive into the nuance of these conversations. Sorry clarification committee, which, which are the committees. Oh, I'm sorry the neighborhood code joint committee is made up of the city council ordinance committee and the planning commission. The next copy chat is actually the 25th at zero gravity at 9am and then following into November, we are going to be hosting a virtual community meeting the evening of November 13. And again, all the information, as well as these presentations and materials are available on our website as well. So any, we're here to take any questions if time if time allows. Yeah, let's, let's do it this way, since we're going to have a bunch of time for community discussion about housing and what we're about to hear about from counselor grant. Let's do like if there are any quick clarifications or if folks are not understanding some of the, the core stuff that you were talking about let's take those now and then I'll hand it over you. Any questions along those lines. Yeah, conversation. We're going to have a conversation and I think probably 20 or 30. I need for a discussion about the need for housing and addressing the drug costs. Yeah. Okay. Like, I do want to, like, ask some questions specifically about neighborhood code, but it's like, I think it can find. Okay, you're called yet. If you wanted some questions for some of them. Yeah, you want to come use this Mike. I have a question as well but it's supposed to short one, why don't you go. While Jack is coming up I will just say that in counselors fans here she is on the joint neighborhood code committee who had some really great questions about this study at the most recent meeting and those are all recorded. Yeah, you can find that on town meeting TV. The next meeting is really focused on addressing those questions and comments so if you leave this meeting with your own questions I urge you to watch that these portions of it toward the end. Yeah, please pay attention and we're going to be doing Sarah mostly is doing the MP a round so if you want to attend some of those meetings as well to get just to keep up to date, please do. It's also been traverse the other counselor from here is actually online though. Yeah, we have a lot of word five representation on the committee so. So I guess my just to kind of like. Just introduce yourself. Yeah sorry my name is Jack Tiano I live on St. Paul Street, the word five side of St. Paul Street. I just kind of wanted to like frame this a little bit and then ask like one or two quick questions. As I because I've been really involved with like digging into this, this initiative as an advocate as a renter is just a resident of the city. And in my kind of looking into this, it's hard for me to look at the larger like historical narrative of like how zoning has evolved in Burlington, and not see zoning basically being one of the key limiting factors of Burlington's overall. You look at the original 1947 zoning code, and how you know Burlington's growth as a small city kind of like it gets stunted there and then you hit 1973, and it basically stops until 2010. So these these zoning, these zoning, these rezoning initiatives tend to, especially in the past in the history of like kind of suburban development of cities trying to like grab a hold of urban development and and make sense of it it takes this kind of natural evolution of the city, and then like freezes it in place it's like it's like this moment of trying to grab lightning in a bottle and keep the city exactly how it is and not let it grow and I think we're looking at right now. You know, the consequences of, you know, 80 years of that kind of mentality. And so, as this is open right now, and we're kind of talking about this I know that this is specifically around enabling a certain type of building form which is this missing middle housing. And I think that the work that's been done on this so far has been really great. In that regards I don't want to like, so that there's like bad work going on like this is all really really great work. And my kind of concern is around. If that's what we should be doing in terms of like to meet the moment that we're at in terms of housing in the city and did the city. Overall, I mean it took 12 years of a, you know, of a very focused administration on getting our city budget back in place. Kind of there but that took 12 years to get things worked out and we're already kind of like over bonded on the school and all of these different things and so the city as a whole is kind of still stifled in terms of how it can grow and where it can go from here and how zoning ties into this. So the two kind of quick questions for you all is about kind of some specific things around the setbacks and the high medium low density. From my understanding, it really feels like both of those things really serve to essentially just like preserve aesthetics for people who want aesthetics in their neighborhood and not really something that's like good policy that lets the city evolve and grow in the way that it needs to. And so like, am I missing something. Am I wrong. I know that this isn't really neighborhood code related specifically. But yeah, so like for setbacks, I know that the proposed changes are not going to really change the front and side setbacks but will change the rear setbacks for like backyard buildings. But when we think about how does the city want to grow if someone wants to build something that's within building code but maybe not zoning code why would we restrict how the city can grow in that way and then the same thing for high, medium and low residential zoning. Why do we need different density, not even density but why do we need different intensities at the zoning level. If we, you know, consolidated all of those today, we'd end up with the same city. It would just be now that any part that needs to grow can grow in the way that it, you know, naturally would grow. So just those are my two questions like do those two things do anything other than aesthetics. Yeah, sure. I can start with an answer and Sarah can add. So first on setbacks. So today, I know that the rear setback is often a big challenge for people it's 25% of a lot depth so if you're if your lot is 100 feet deep, your rear setback is required to be 25 feet. And that might work perfectly fine and some neighborhoods in the new North and particularly but really doesn't work in much of the rest of the city particularly the areas where demand is really high in the old North and South and close to downtown. So setbacks, given that that the neighborhood code is proposing to reduce allowable a lot with those setbacks really do need to be held in place to, let's say just guarantee building separation I mean the building code will the building code which is separate from the building code so the building code is a state adopted building code that all development has to conform to that will require a minimum separation between buildings and that's mostly related to the fire and safety. That's the reason why side setbacks are staying in place. Preserving character I think is, you know, is part of it but it's, it's, it's also not because the neighborhood code is also introducing things like row houses and townhouses where ostensibly your side setback will be zero. Those are very narrow lots. There are some row houses all over town really but downtown at the corner of Union and college, yes Union College, right down the hill from the YMCA. There's some really fantastic historic row houses and those are, you know, side by side and so that's what the neighborhood code will allow in a lot of places. Side setbacks are another housing type where buildings can be multiple homes can be located small homes can be located on a single lot and in those cases they may be located closer to each other than, you know, side setbacks otherwise would. It's a it's a balance I mean we have to also acknowledge that people did people have purchased homes and neighborhoods and expected a certain kind of character. Yeah, someone who doesn't own a home is someone who's a renter someone who's like being forced out of the city like actively do we have to respect people's aesthetic preferences like I think that people own a plot of land. They're entitled to do what they want to do with that lot of land and like when we enforce and we enforce their aesthetics on an entire neighborhood or an entire district like, is that something that we should be doing with zoning should zoning be used as that kind of it's a good question and I think this is a question we also heard at the neighborhood code committee and I think it's going to be part of the ongoing discussion and thank you jack for for raising this question. It is important. I think it's also important to acknowledge that the neighborhood code is a big step in the city's housing policy and that there's also additional area planning that has to be done. There's a new north end plan that's going to be coming down the road and that may look at specific changes to the new north end and how these changes might be adapted for that neighborhood. Sarah I don't know if you had anything to add. I just do want to base on that and Jack I know that you saw some of these, these maps on Tuesday. I do want to say just acknowledging the feeling of like the city kind of becoming more stagnant in the 1970s it was at a time when density was first adopted as a concept for regulation and one of the reasons why we are looking so much into into adjusting that and removing density is that as that measure I do want to just kind of show opportunities for the how the cities are going to be changing. Let's see. So, right now, you can see on the screen you know we have allowing for duplexes in residential neighborhoods, you can see this massive change, allowing for these types of housing types. If we only follow Act 47, it would really not do much for adding for plexus into these residential neighborhoods. But through this we will allow for every lot over 3500 square feet to have at least four units on it which is a major adjustment. There are easier pathways for so small lot subdivisions to allow for small lots to have four units on them, allowing for cottage courts on these midsize lots. And as you can see there are very much more on those those boundaries of the city however allowing for townhouses on corridors and new these mixed use districts so in terms of trying to understand like what you mean by like the aesthetics of it but at least the general allowance for housing types with will definitely change across the city regardless of what that what that zoning district is. So I hope that kind of clarified a little bit. Maybe, Jack, if, and you can follow up with me about this, is it mostly the side setback that you're concerned about or front setback as well or. I mean my main concern is that it's still it's too it's too opinionated and it doesn't allow the city to grow in the way that it might want to naturally I think an example would be like if someone had 1000 square foot lot that they managed to figure out a way to build something that was livable that someone would buy or move into and met all of the building codes but like zoning said there's not enough room for setbacks. Why would we do that building code is already telling you that there's some amount of distance that needs happens between buildings why duplicate that in zoning so that if we may change the building code we then have to come back and change the zoning so it's like, how do we simplify this and get to this and again, I want to say that I really do love all of the work that's been done here I know that this isn't really the task but just like in in a setting where we're talking about zoning on the table to just kind of raise some of these things whether that's addressed here or is like something that we as a community can learn a little bit more about and say okay when we get this done and we have these building types, you know, legalize what's the next step how do we how do we keep going so just to say I'm not I'm not saying they're doing a bad job I just there's I do want to. There's there's more that we can do and I wanted to ask some questions. With this it's really, really readjusting how what tools are used to regulate housing so it does come with like a heavy amount of nuance and does require a lot of these types of conversations and just clarifications to and I just want to say that counselor Shannon and also Travis if you want to like feel free to add anything at any point you feel feel inclined. I think we're all, you know, we're, we're all learning this actually about the same time as everybody in this room so it's a it's a lot to digest and it's helpful to hear the conversation and what. Thanks. I think just to echo some of Jack's sentiments I'll reintroduce myself having more five precedent. The, I, my biggest concern is the is the front setback to be honest and it's primarily like right the addition kind of the closest that I would consider my neighborhood. A lot of the buildings are like very mid lot oriented. And so, because the current zoning code is basically like five feet of the two adjacent lots, even if you got rid of one if you want to do like cottage court, like other building types I think would be difficult with those unless you like alley loaded it or did something weird. So I, I understand the purpose of side setbacks and front setbacks and stuff. I would personally prefer to see kind of like a max, like I'm not necessarily like 100% against the idea of them, but I think closer to like a max standard kind of like we have had with like rear setbacks. And I think that just changes to those but I think that just gives a little bit more flexibility to have some like, you know, if somebody wants to move a building forward and then have a cottage court or like front loaded building because a lot of times like front lawns aren't like, they're really like a family gathering space like they're just kind of like people maintain them or don't maintain them and sometimes there's issues with with maintenance and so in general, like, I just find backyards to be more useful space and so allowing people to, to kind of change the focus of their building to allow that if they want to, especially when you're tying a four plex for a community backyard I think is a more useful space than a front yard. Or like even I think, right counselor Shannon's neighborhood, a lot has like a lot of those buildings are very like road loaded and and I think it's a very aesthetic neighborhood so just having that option. Yeah, I see that counselor traverse is one timing. I think I was able to unmute myself. Can you hear me alright. Go for it. Okay, good. Thank you very much sorry I could not be there in person. Very much appreciate the presentation as always and planning has done an excellent job putting these presentations together. Sorry, can you hear me. Sorry, hello. I'm sorry can folks in the room hear me or not. Hello. Well, thank you for your patience. Sorry, I could not be there in person this evening I was going to say was really appreciate the presentations put together by planning I think as always. The department really sets the gold standard with respect to these kinds of presentations. Really appreciate the public advocacy of folks like Jack and then Evan and others during this process it's been really valuable as counselor Shannon mentioned. You know we are still relatively early on in this process would certainly welcome folks to join us we still have a number of meetings as our joint committee and then even after that. It's an item that will head to the full city council for consideration. So it would welcome folks to participate. I suppose from my perspective there's there's lots of nitty gritty that we're going to have to dive into in terms of issues that someone like Jack is is raising here about lot size and set back and so on. To me, the most substantive changes that are being considered here going to be with respect to where we draw the boundaries as to what we consider to be our new zoning districts I think, as was reflected in the presentation in those areas that are currently as as light residential thing five sisters neighborhood think the addition neighborhood think the lakeside neighborhood where you can currently on any lot build a duplex. The proposal put before us now is is that there you would be able to build up to a four unit building, but as you get closer to the major transit corridors in the city. Pine Street Shelburne Road here in the south end Colchester Avenue Main Street North Avenue you can think of where the major transit corridors are. There's a proposal that that along those corridors that that you would be able to build substantially more as was outlined in the presentation you all just saw and I think that is perhaps going to be from my perspective. The most important part for the community to weigh in on, because these areas that are currently again flagged as these light residential areas where you can only build up to a duplex could potentially as proposed have put in this quarter zone have no limits, other lot size and density and setbacks and so on as to how many units. You can build in the building so it could potentially very much change the look of Burlington as you're driving into the city on Shelburne Road or driving into the city along Pine Street and so as this continues will very much appreciate feedback from neighbors on on that particular issue. What the changes are potentially going to be along our corridors and corridors and the neighborhoods immediately behind them. So, thanks for the opportunity to speak and thanks again for the presentation. Thank you. Okay, yes, and then we're going to switch gears. Go for it Jason. I am curious about the role of the fire department in particular the fire marshal in this process. Yes, the fire marshal is, believe it or not always involved so the fire marshal helps to, you know, inform the city's adoption of the building code. So that is one way. The types are permitted under the building code, mostly according to what the fire marshal and the chief and the department are comfortable with. Hang on, you said that very fast are comfortable with. Yes, and this is a, this is a national issue right so the the international building code that the United States and Canada, almost exclusively used it's actually not that international really does limit the type of residential buildings that can be constructed, especially when you look at other parts of the world. Latin America, Europe, Asia, different types of residential buildings are permitted. Especially ones that might not be permitted here. So that's, that's one way. So what does fire marshal think about cottage courts. Well, I think the fire marshal's only real opinion on cottage courts have to do with guaranteeing that there is access to each of those individual units in the event of a fire so let's say if there's five units built on a property. Maybe they can get a fire truck, deep enough into the property to provide fire service to those properties and any other kind of emergency service so that's one. So it's really like driveway width and driveway surface sort of construction just to make sure that a big heavy truck can drive on on that surface ladders as well. I. Thank you that's good to hear some of the details. I'd like to put in a pitch to our counselors who are on this committee to work with the fire department as a partner but not allow them to be a gatekeeper for these changes they are one of the key community needs that need to be balanced and they should not be allowed to have veto power over any other decision which I have seen historically happened in a number of cases in the past and we need to shift that dynamic I don't know the current I think it's a little bit more partial I tangled quite a bit with the previous one. I hope the new one is more of a partner to this kind of work, rather than a, and a prover, because it's bigger than just fire protection, as important as that is. I'll just say the one of the other issues is sprinkling and I'm not an expert on this I don't want to say any more about that but I'm hoping maybe the neighborhood code committee can address this at some point just you know what are the rules regarding sprinkling these different housing types. I just have a quick rhetorical question for the benefit of the room which is, as the fire department consider getting smaller trucks. Get trucks for the streets don't build streets for the trucks. Right, it seems like we are going to have a robust discussion when it is actually discussion so very much looking forward to that. Thank you both so much. Hope you stick around and I'm going to turn it over to counselor grant to hear about what the city is doing about declaring the drug crisis a, I'll let you use the words that you want to use. Thank you. Yes. I, I'm actually here to do a little show and tell, as well. For those who don't know my background, I, after the incident with the Millie brothers, I kind of became activated one of, I joke with people and I say I was a slack to this. I was a word of friend of mine used, I would vote, I would talk about issues, but I really didn't go out door knock for anything and I, I, this really affected me, it affected my neighbors, it affected my kid who knew him and they were the Millie brothers. So it really changed the way I saw our city I was like, wow, I knew we had some of these issues here but now it really hit home in a way that it hadn't before. I applied to be on the committee to review policing policies. And then I applied to be on the police commission which I served almost three years. And then I ran for city counselor so here I am part of being on the police commission. I really believe that there was a lack of public engagement in the city with our police department, which led to some of the relationship issues that our police department had with the public. And I think that's a big part of why so many officers left the same way they left other cities and towns the same way they left Vermont State police and the same way they were been leaving the profession across the country. I wanted to do more of the type of engagement that I did in terms of going out in the neighborhood as a police commissioner and talking to people talking to people about what they were seeing, what was going on in my district which is towards two and three. Historically, we have had, when you talk about quote unquote crimes of opportunity or crimes of poverty people breaking into cars, people stealing packages from porches. That part of the city, we've always had more of those type of crimes. 2021 the increase spring of 2022 something was really dramatically happening. We saw a lot of increase in the bike thefts. The car theft started increasing, as well as other types of larcenies the increase in the drug overdoses so that people would say, how can crime be going down but crime is going up right we heard a lot of that. And what was happening is while at that time we still had overall incidents, continuing to go down incidents related to the drug crisis, we're going up. People were stealing to eat, get a fix on house we had a lot of, as everyone knows, the pandemic affected a lot of these issues as well. So we were starting to see a lot of that. And now is all over the city. So I started again as a counselor, doing the type of outreach. People would email me, I would meet them where they are I would take a look at the situation. And I hear again over and over where people just don't understand what's going on. And they don't know how to find data, and things like that. So I decided like I did when I was a commissioner, I kind of hit the road hidden in PAs. And now I am doing that again as a counselor so that's, that's why I'm here to start with that. So on August 17, we had a public safety committee meeting and I serve on that committee. And I had been working with counselor Paul who's the chair of that committee, and I had been expressing, I expressed publicly at multiple city council meetings. When it came time for, there's a time in the meetings where counselors can talk about issues that they're concerned about and I said we need to declare this as a crisis. And it wasn't happening. And at this August 17 meeting. I really pushed the issue. And it's very interesting, I think conversation if anyone needs the link but I'm going to show you how to get there. But if people would like links directly emailed to them, I'm happy to do that. But it was having a conversation with counselors Paul and Dorothy and saying that when I talk to people. And when I see what the council is doing, especially now that I'm on the council right, I am part of this. When people say the council wasn't doing anything. They were right. We weren't doing anything because how do you tell what the council is doing. You tell by what's on the agenda. In large, except for when it came to approving certain things through the budget, like the new cares program which is going to be like the cahoots model, modeled after the program and Eugene Oregon. We weren't talking about it was not on our agenda. We felt that we needed to lobby for ourselves in a way that we have not done before, we don't have anybody lobbying for us in Mount Piliar, the way that we need them to do. There is opioid settlement money that is coming into the state of Vermont. We're getting allocated towards some ideas but allocated and actually being released into the neighborhoods into the cities and towns that need it. That has been very, very slow and I've had these conversations with the mayor about it. And there was even information that he had that he wasn't always sharing right away with the city council, I'm like okay, you're mad at me because I said, a, because you say I don't know B, but you haven't told me. And that's, that's a problem so it was about how do we increase the communication. There'll be some public forums coming up the part that these forums will be to talk about what's going on. Now my vision of the forums was for people to tell their stories. Everyone's got stories we heard earlier. Your story which was very powerful about what is happening. And that's the type of story that the governor needs to hear that legislatures need to hear, because we have to what we are doing by and large is not working we are doing some things that are helping a little bit but we have to be willing to take new steps, try new things, track the data so that we know that the data will show us that that these, these new options, such as overdose prevention centers, something called drug checking which is from testing, just things that we don't have in Vermont and we need legislature to change some things and we need the governor willing to pass some legislation that did go through, but he vetoed it. The previous time we had and the mayor's talked about this a lot when we had the opioid epidemic years ago. We had Governor Shumlin who was in fact very dedicated to that crisis. He devoted a state of the state address and says this is our number one problem we got to get with this. He was open to trying new things and we did try new things and it helped. We have fentanyl now we have xylazine. We have a variety of other mixtures of stimulants so that the ball games kind of change so we need we need some new rules with regards to it. So we really need to get through to the governor I hope people look out for the information on those forms which will be happening in November but I also want people to film themselves. They need to report themselves not just emails, they need to put a face to the crisis, this is how we are burlingtonians are being affected by what's happening in our area. Our businesses are suffering our businesses have business from tourists, but are seeing significant drops in business from Vermonters from Burlingtonians from people in Vermont how many times have we all heard that people don't want to come to Burlington. And that's a very real thing outdoor gear exchange which I consider to be the quintessential Vermont business so crucial as an anchor store downtown. The fact that they are now going to be moving significant part of their business over to Essex is extremely concerning. And they told me they were down 30% and they knew they were losing it from Vermonters so it's it's of grave concern and if we don't change something this winter. Things are going to definitely get a hell of a lot worse before they get better. So that discussion led to working on a resolution and the resolution would have specific goals. I think it's worth listening to the discussion and kind of see where you fall into it. I think that's interesting thing to critique I think we all need to be more involved than we have been we, we do a lot of complaining but we need to be more active. One of the meetings was almost four hours long. What are we putting in this resolution fighting for a balance. There was a law enforcement side, and there is a harm reduction side. We are funding very heavily our police department. They've been given a lot of funds. We have new programs going into police department. We've been doing work on harm reduction, but we need to catch up. We have a thirst in our community and our state and our country for these drugs so we have to address harm reduction in order to get people in recovery, and we're now dealing with drugs that is harder to recover from. So we talked about that and then there was another meeting where there was another almost two hour discussion and then we voted on the resolution. So the resolution folk has a focus on harm reduction and has a focus on informing the community about what's going on and has a focus on engaging people with regards to that. So I hope that you'll listen to some of these meetings, look at some of the documentation and what we'd like to do right now is to go to the sites because I am always finding out that people don't know how to get to city meetings. And one of the places we can start, thank yous when you go to the city of Burlington's website and you go to the calendar. This is where you find in the blue button that says government meetings calendar. This is exactly where you go to find out when the city council's meeting when various committees and commissions are meeting you see right there ward five NPA under October 19th. Oh, by the way, the link to the agenda didn't work just as a FYI. Yeah. So this is telling you who's meeting when they're meeting. And when you click on a link so if we go to October, what was that meeting October, go up to the last city council meeting. The 10th was it the 10th. Yes, there it is regular city council meeting. And you open that up and it's going to give you the zoom link if you can't attend and it'll tell you where it's happening city hall contours auditorium if you can't attend you have your zoom link, and then you have your link to the agenda. The city used to use something called board docs. And now we're using something called civic clerk. The civic clerk is much better than board docs but when you're learning anything new, you've got to kind of play around with it. So you're used to, to searching for it. So if you could click on the regular city council meeting. Thank you so much. And if you click on meeting overview in the top beautiful. Excellent. So I like this view this is a view that I use myself as a counselor. I don't have like an internal view but I always use this view to make sure that everything is visible to the public that needs to be visible to the public. And this shows you the agenda. And V, are we in the right day V Tang this is actually coming up right. Okay, if we scroll down a little bit. Scroll down, scroll down. So there, these are things that are discussed these have attachments of information. And I just want to get to the fire department information. This is a 10th but doesn't this look. How does this look like the were there. Okay. There's a big consent. The consent agenda is essentially things that we don't talk about we just vote to approve it all at the same time. People should look at the consent agenda. That's how your money's being spent. That's how your property tax dollars are being cons. I'm pretty much convinced that issues of money that went to Burlington telecom was probably in the consent agenda hidden away. So let's keep going down to we get to deliberative deliberative agenda is what we actually end up talking about and thank you so much. I so this has a copy of the resolution that we voted on it's worth it to look and read it. And you'll see this was there's a lot of blood, sweat and tears over this so I, I really would like to hear your feedback on it definitely give feedback to to your, your city counselors for this area. And then if we could go back and I'd want to find the documentation from the fire department. Yes, the community response team. Thank you. The fire department with their amazing within three weeks of having a discussion about how they can more efficiently respond to the overdoses the number of overdoses it's all day every day it's, it's horrendous. They had an idea about stocking a truck, having an EMT and a firefighter and patrolling the city. Chief Lachance, the fire department chief, he did a heat map I just about cried I love, I love data. And he did a heat map that was tracking the overdoses that were occurring in the city. And what times and what locations they were most likely to occur. So that's what this team is going to be using in terms of staffing particular hours. Right now their staffing is volunteer overtime. So, there's a lot of attention to our police department, which is rightly so, but our fire department is out there and they're on the frontline of this as well. The documentation includes a lot of data if you could click the bottom Burlington fire department response data and just kind of scroll down so everyone can kind of see an idea. People ask for data so as you can see, when we look at the response totals, how dramatically of an increase, they're going to have in 2023. And if we continue to go down they have some other data around overdose totals, people who are transferred to the hospital versus people who weren't average overdose responses per month. Sometimes the data is different for the police department the fire department because they don't always respond to the same overdoses. There are additional graphs showing the situation so this is the type of information that I think is very valuable for people to take a look at to have a sense of what is actually going on at the public safety committee on our normal monthly meeting. There is a chiefs report from the fire chief, and from the police chief, each one of those reports has visit stats, each one of those reports has information about what's going on between each department within each department. And the police report chiefs report has a lot of information with regards to where we're at with staffing. And that's a very common question that people ask a lot, where are we with staffing. It's going to tell you how many we have how many administrators how many are certain positions and then how many are training and getting down to how many are actually available to be on the street. And it also shows their. Oh yeah there's that heat map I love it. I love data, because we can't, we can't be successful without data. Because even with these new initiatives that we're trying, if we're not tracking how successful they are, we won't know if the money that we're spending is is well spent. With the police chiefs report, it will also have a reminder of what the priority response plan is so that people know the different types of incidents that they are. They're assigned a certain level if something's a level one that's the one that is supposed to get a response, but sometimes it does get stacked. It'll say how many incidents are getting stacked. People ask that because it's a very common complaint I called they don't come, what's going on they direct me online but I don't get any response online. So what we had the last police commission meeting which is something that I do recommend that people. Anyone cares about public safety should be watching the police commission meeting should be trying to watch the public safety committee meeting they're both really important. But talking about the online incidents reports, they have a backlog. They have a backlog and they're finally saying that publicly, they have a backlog but it's still worth it for people to submit those reports. It's especially important if you've had something that's been stolen, because if it is found that's really the only way to get it to get it back. There are certain things that are we are going to continue to have problems with that are not police can't prevent even if they were fully staffed in the climate that we have with the type of thefts that we have you can put it 100 officers on the street tomorrow, but they can't be next to every bicycle. They can't be next to every unlocked car door. Right, we're getting ready to go into winter. Last winter, more cars were stolen simply because you go out, put the key in, warm it up for a few minutes, then go back into your house, someone would walk in, get just drive your car away. You go to Cumbies, get a cup of coffee in the morning, you leave the key in the car, because you're only going to be in there for a minute, two minutes you come back, your car is gone. Cumbies, Jarlies, Maplefield, all the city, South Burlington had the worst year for car thefts that they had ever seen. They have had significant shoplifting Williston's had shoplifting. It's, it's all not happening to us alone, but it doesn't necessarily make us feel better. But these are things we do have to keep in mind. We have to lock these guns are being stolen out of cars. That is not okay. But people do not leave your gun unsecured in a car. Don't leave your gun in a car. The stolen guns out of cars are being used in crimes. So we have to be more vigilant. We have to encourage our neighbors to be vigilant. If we have visitors to the city, we have to let them know, don't don't leave computers don't leave anything of value. If you leave it in your car, then you should be prepared to do without it. It's not going to get it's going to get worse before it gets better with regards to that and that is just something that we as a community have to do to help the department. If your car gets stolen, they'll try to find it but more than likely you're going to be using one of the online with a lot of great community mutual aid. The bike index has been really successful and helping people get bikes retrieved. We do need to do some education with UVM students. I've had two stories about UVM students buying bikes in City Hall Park for 25 bucks. So I did some outreach to UVM about that. How did you get that bike in City Hall Park for 25 bucks? It's like, it's my bike, you know, but yeah, so that has to help. So this is how you get to agendas. So Civic Clerk, just kind of go in there, play around. You can click on a calendar that brings you to specific dates, but it's just really worth it. Now this meeting is mandatory. You have to listen to this meeting. You have to. There was a presentation. In particular, we talked about the resolution, but there was a presentation from the drug unit from the police department. And everybody has to listen to it because you need to understand what we're dealing with. October 10th. And if we could go to Town Meeting Day's YouTube site please. So we don't have a street crimes unit due to the staffing shortage. That is a huge, huge problem. I won't go into any of it. It is covered in the meeting. I really recommend that everybody watch it and send it to all your neighbors. It's important knowledge that people need because we are going to have to be continued to be a little bit more self-reliant. That's not what people want to hear. It is the reality that we're in right now. Town Meeting TV, they've made finding these meetings easier. So when you go to the, to YouTube, you just type in Town Meeting TV, Burlington comes up, and you see where it starts at home as you go over to the right, you'll get to playlist. And when you click on playlist and you scroll down a little bit, it has curated playlist, and they have an area for municipal meetings. And there's the first one is the city of Burlington. So when you click on the city of Burlington, on the right side, you will see the dates and the names of the various meetings and usually the most recent ones are first. They are not always in exact date order, but just scrolling down, you can usually get to what you want. So you just find the City Council meeting for the 10th, and you can just jump to that presentation from BPD. I think, I think it's really very important and I've been just encouraging as many people as I could to watch it because there's a lot of information about just the state of things in the city. And the fact we don't have a street crimes unit, which is why we don't have street level enforcement. They are working on some pretty significant cases in terms of getting some pretty big stashes of drugs off the street. But in terms of what was being given to lower level dealers and what was being sold, but in terms of actual street level enforcement, we don't have it right now. We could say we want it. We don't have it right now. So that's a lot of information. Thank you so much for listening and happy to answer any questions, any concerns. And if people need links to some of the other things that I was talking about my contact information is in grant at Burlington vt.gov and all the city counselors our contact information is on the city's website. Thank you so much. Thank you. Let's let's use this time. It's a little after 830. I know that we have all been here for a little while. And I think we should use this time to ask questions about what we just heard and have some discussion if you're thinking about both what we just heard and what we heard a little bit about from city planning, feel free to share. And how about around 850. We try to wrap up just because I'm sure people have things to do next morning. Things to tend to this evening just want to respect everyone's time. And before we, before we close the meeting we're going to talk about just a quick preview of a resolution that our NPA is going to talk about next month. Stay till the end if you can manage it, but I want to open the floor to discussion. Go ahead. Matt summerville again. I guess the, you know, thanks again. Yep. Love it. The data that I'm most interested in is breaking apart our drug challenge from homeless issues from urban neglect and I think it's it's looking into urban neglect now it's that intersection of those two. I had homeless people who are not using drugs living. I've been living in the same house as I'm living in town and it's a very different house. I live in a house that's like a few meters from my house all last summer. And you know, so it's a very different piece. And I actually want to know more about this population where they're coming from because I also believe, you know, one of the ways to here and don't have a connection here, it's going to be harder to find that support that's going to be lasting. And so that's what I wanna understand more about the population of people who are interacting with my son every day. My son and the kids at BHS, they have nicknames for the various folks around Church Street, not in a derogatory way necessarily, but in order to identify people as safe and unsafe. And people they laugh about because they're proselytizing and people who they avoid and they identify them as individuals. And so I'd like to, I'd like actually to know better who the population are within our city. The drug issue does not bother me as much, frankly, if people are doing drugs in their homes, it's a very different issue than the drugs on the street. I mean, it's not that doesn't bother me, but I just the decoupling of issues. And for me as a, as someone who's worked downtown for a decade, that's the issue that concerns me the most because that's where the heart of the city is for me. But I'm expecting answers, but make those decisions. Yeah, no, no, no, that's great. And thank you for recognizing that not everyone who is on houses has a substance use issue disorder. That to me has been one of the more frustrating, I hear people using the term vagrants. There's that term that I'm sure we've all heard, compassion, fatigue, quote unquote. That's why I thought your words were so powerful because people are, the fact that some business owners were complaining about a warming shelter just blew me away because I've seen those same business owners complain about people sleeping in their alcoves. It's difficult. I would like to see more, there isn't any, there is a little bit of a lack of a coordination with some of these numbers. We have people that are definitely working on both issues and they're tracking numbers in a specific way. Sarah Russell, who, if you remind me, what is Sarah's title? The Director of Ending Homelessness. This is something, it's a great title. Thank you, thank you. She's, yeah, she's been doing a lot of great work. There were meetings once a week for a period of time and now they're once a month, but then when they were once a week, it was more urgent because it was right before, I referred to it as the first motel dump because that's what happened to these people. They were dumped and we knew we were going to see an increase in Burlington. There was no, we knew it, we knew it. And it was immediate and that is why they walked back the next dump because I feel that that is literally the way they treated people. So a lot of the increase that we have seen is related to that, to people who were in the motel system were kicked out of the motel system and have not been able to get back into the motel. And there's, Brenda Siegel has been doing amazing work, working with people. Once you're out, it's harder to contact you and if you're not getting contact, you're not getting notices that you need to respond to in order to try to get the housing again. I think there's a lot of misconceptions too about the motel program. People assume the same people that started going into the motel program are the same people that are still in it. People are cycling out. They are getting the help they need and they are cycling out. It's just not as fast as we like because we don't have those units. There were people who were ready to go, who had the vouchers, were waiting for units to open and they were tossed out in the street. People with medical issues were tossed out. I don't remember what the numbers are. I can tell you that Sarah is very clear that most of the people who are unhoused in our community have Vermont roots and ties. There's this myth that because we offer the services that we do, we get all these people coming from out of state and that we have some, but overwhelming numbers have Vermont ties. And I think what they're continuing to do is to work with the state. We have a lot of housing projects in the pipeline, but we don't get those up as much as we do. We have extraordinary rental rates. We have, I mean, I don't have to do a whole housing thing. I think we're all very, very, very much aware. I was disappointed that the governor did not allow the state building on Cherry Street to be used as a shelter. I thought that was cruel. And I think people are gonna get very sick or possibly die this winter because we have a lot of people down on the bike path and what you were saying about your son in Battery Park, in the walking path by Battery Park, there's a lot of activity in the garage next to the school. I've talked to the hotel down there and they've been wanting more signage in the garage to remind because they deal with so many visitors from out of town. They've had people come in, come back to their cars and people are sleeping in their car, they've had motorcycles stolen, things like that. So there is a whole element of the city is a whole element working, a whole group of people working on the unhoused situation. If you'd like to email me, I can give you some information about Sarah and some of the numbers that they've been tracking. But her meeting includes not only people from different organizations in Burlington, but within Chittenden County and other parts of the states, people who work in libraries, members of the fire department. Sit right there. Okay. I'm just more than curious. I would love to hear more about where we're going with the no boots on the ground. I know that we're totally understaffed. Everybody everywhere is understaffed. It applies to the things you're talking about. I'm a runner and I was running at quarter of eight in the morning the other day. And there was a gentleman who was clearly under the influence of something with a hunting knife, walking to himself, pounding it into an electric pole as children were walking to admins. And so I called 911. To me, that sounded like an emergency. They transferred me to the Burlington police and the dispatcher said to me, I don't think that's illegal, ma'am, sorry. I said, it's not on me. Thanks little kids, walk into school. This guy's got a hunting knife. And I don't know that Burlington Electric would have thought that that wasn't illegal. That's their property. I would have thought, you know? So what are we doing? I know that we're understaffed. And I'm not, I love the, you know, I'm the white, I'm a little white lady. I've been treated very nicely by the police in my time. And I know that that's a privilege that I've had. But what do, what do we do, you know? For things, what do we do? When we have people running into people who, when there's clearly a danger, when there's clearly a danger. Yes, one of the, and that's hard, right? Because if, one of the things I like about the CSOs is that they can't do the same thing that a sworn officer can do, but a CSO has eyes. And if a CSO says that something is a problem, that is more likely to get an officer if they're available. The time of day issues and the availability for officers is a huge issue. I can't sugarcoat it. And there are a lot of things that are not being responded to, but there is a phone tree to get to us, the community service liaisons, the CSLs, because they have the ability to do these things type of wellness checks on individuals. They also are going now to some of the various encampments. We're starting to see pop-up in different areas of the city to try to work with individuals to make sure they get access to services. And we don't have, it was something that I as a counselor had brought up, the mayor didn't want to do it. It's like, people are gonna camp. Should we give them a place to camp? So they're just not camping anywhere and just didn't want to have any sanction camping in the city. So that's kind of what we have right now. We have people going where they can go and get away with being and... Just so you know, I was not hatched over to even a CSO, the dispatcher said, sorry, that's not illegal, ma'am, that was the end of the conversation. And it seemed dangerous to me and there was, you know, I would, you know, yes, I'd stop by being up, I'm ready, I got my boots on the ground, but there's certain places I'm not going, I'm not going to be a guy talking to himself without you. I can run fast away from him, but those little kids are not gonna know to do that. No, they're not. So what Annie suggests is what do we do? I, you know, sometimes you have to keep watching to see if something escalates. If depending on the type of, I would bring it up to the school, you know, how far was it from the school? I know that some of the people that work as crossing guards are more vigilant about certain things. So I would bring it up in that way to see. I think there definitely needs to be more bulletins from the school with regards to certain behaviors going around in the school. That can kind of be scary. I've heard some debates about that. Well, we don't want to overly alarm people. Well, that ship has sailed. So we do really don't mean to be dissing the police. I know how I understand. No, no, no, it is just a statement of a fact that the, the staffing isn't there. The staffing is slowly getting better. We actually are short some CSOs right now, but for good reason, some CSOs have been like, wow, okay. I like this kind of work. Sorry, can you just say what CSO? Oh, sorry. The CSO are the community service officers. So they are on the chief's report for the police department. There's a whole list of incidents and they're color coded as to what CSOs, the community service officers and the CSLs, community liaisons, what they're able to respond to. And then also some of the data that we've asked and you put on the last report is the percentages of incidents that they're responding to because what they can take care of polls is able to keep the officers doing other things, the more serious, higher priority incidents. So with the CSO, for example, they can handle a traffic incident, a traffic report. Fender Bender, why do you need to have a sworn officer there? You don't, you can have a CSO do it. They've actually gotten commendations, I believe. Oh, everyone, that is Sarah. Have you all met Sarah? Sarah Tim, she is the BPD's public information and community engagement officer. So she's been hanging out at the NPAs. You all should get together, have her do a presentation and she's been working on some community engagement with the department as well. So I appreciate her listening to me rant last week about a bunch of things, but she's great. And I'm very happy to have her here in Burlington because she's able to do something that the department hasn't always been able to do well on their own because they have other things that they need to do. But we do have to look at repairing certain relationships so that officers feel more welcome and then in all areas of the city have that trust and our officers that will definitely help. I have a suggestion about the lifting night thing. Yes, you can. I'll speak into the microphone. So I think it's important to remember that dispatchers are people and fallible humans and it can be helpful if you think you're not getting an accurate response. I've found the chief to be super responsive to emails. So if that interaction just didn't feel right to you with the response, I suggest emailing the chief and just say, hey, I just wanna put this in front of you because I mean, it's happened before where people have gone to the chief and his assassin has been, okay, that maybe wasn't the right response. That's a very good point. Thank you. Because you can do that if you give the time, the date and the time that you call, they can listen to the interaction because those calls are recorded. If you think it's something more serious, you can put a complaint through the police commission and they can request to hear a call. There are certainly people who've done that where they were concerned about the level of response they got or they didn't get. I was more concerned about the kids. Yes, yes, no, of course, of course. And to your point earlier, they're getting desensitized. They are getting desensitized and that may also make them not as aware as they need to be in some instances. You've got, sorry, we've got Councillor Travers who's been waiting for a minute. So let's hear from him and then, yes, back to the room. Go ahead, Ben. Yeah, thanks. I just wanna say really briefly in response to the last comment, I understand and agree that the police department is short staff, but from my perspective, anyone who's calling for help should not go without that help. And I believe the police department feels the same way. If you feel like you haven't received a satisfactory response when you've reached out for help, I would welcome your reaching out to me, be Travers at BurlingtonVT.gov. I'm sure Councillor Shannon would say the same and either one or both of us will definitely reach out and follow up on your behalf. One other thing that I wanted to raise is that I think a number of folks are aware of this, but for some of the speaker earlier referring to these more urban blight type issues, graffiti, needles throughout the community, pieces along those lines, C-Click Fix Online. In my experience has been one of the fastest, promptest ways for those types of issues to get attention. So folks are not familiar with C-Click Fix, it's available online and you can also download the app and get it done that way. And then in terms of recruitment, I do pretty firmly believe that actions the council has taken in the last year in terms of standing up a new contract and standing up new positions in terms of recruitment are paying off not only in terms of the CSOs and CSLs, but right now we have six recruits in the Vermont Police Academy who will soon be here in Burlington. Councilor Grant is right that unfortunately since our ranks were depleted a couple of years ago we lost our street crimes unit, but the presentation we received from the BPD drug unit at our last city council meeting laid out a staffing plan for over the next year or two then being able to restaff that vital street crimes unit. So it's not tomorrow, but I think there's some hope on the horizon in terms of our building back up the ranks and addressing some of these staffing issues we've been seeing and suffering from. Thanks so much. And yeah, so I just wanted to say that the October 10th police presentation, which councilor Travers kind of said also goes through the hiring pipeline and what is being done to try to short those positions and where people are with filling in some of them. And then councilor Travers, thank you for reminding me of C-click fix. I feel like the response to a lot of things in there has been very slow as of late. I don't know. I know there's been a lot of turnover in DPW. So I don't know if it's a change, but I know I've reported a lot of things and I've seen some things on there that have been open for three months, six months, seven months or longer. So yeah, just I think it's a great system. I love that we have it. There are certain things, especially for needles. I think the response is pretty quick. Howard Center gets notified and then things get picked up very quickly. But for other things, it's definitely felt slower this last year. Yeah, thank you. The Q and A here, I don't know if you can hear me. Yeah. I don't know if you can hear me online. I'm just going to try something. Okay, perfect. Okay. So we had a push of how to be contacting community service officer, they encounter someone who is in trouble, a threat or disruptive. Sounds like calling the police is not a health solution. So we're going to call these now. Early regular situations. So there's a phone tree when you call in I kind of want to have the phone tree as a project for the Public Safety Committee meeting, but you can listen to the prompts to get to the different positions that you have if you don't have the number for the department. You just remember 911, just describe exactly what you're dealing with and ask for the position. You could do that. And then also the Howard Center street team as well. And we should probably have all those numbers posted somewhere on our site. I think that we have a lot of issues with the city's website itself because it's sometimes not easy to find the information. But that's a good question because I think we don't really have a comprehensive document like that on our city site, do we? Well, I mean, I think you call the police department and then you get put into the voicemail. You get into put in, but I think like to be clear, you can't call a CSO directly. Right. You have to get sorted. You have to get sorted through that system. Yes. But I'm thinking that it might be helpful to the public for us to have posted somewhere on our site or under the police department's tab, numbers also for like the Howard Center and other things like that. Cause I don't think we have a comprehensive document with that. That's posted anywhere. Sarah, I have a project for you. Thank you. Yeah. Just in terms of the state of where we are, we still only have, you know, we were staffed at 105 police officers when Brandon Del Poso was here. We were pretty close to that. We may have hit 105 once and then, you know, between 100 and 105 for a while. We were down when COVID started. And we now only have 24 officers available for patrol, according to the Chief's September report. So we have been between 20 and 26 officers available for patrol. So even though you're here, we're having these successes in hiring, we also still have attrition. We also still have people leaving and it's a very long pipeline from the time you advertise a job in the police department. And we could not advertise a job in the police department until our numbers had hit 74. So the officers available for patrol is different than that total officer count. So the total officers right now, I think we're still below 60. But there, you know, we have a detective unit, you have supervisors. So we really, that is to cover all the shifts, 24, seven, 365. So our numbers are profoundly low. And as Councilor Grant said, we do also have CSOs and CSLs to fill in, but we're short on CSOs. We're short of all workers in the city. Our city attorney's department is extremely depleted, you know, fixing the frozen pipes that are supposed to, that are going to come this winter. We need like nine people and we have two. So it isn't, we have a real worker shortage. And I think when we look around our community, we can see there are people in City Hall Park who used to be workers. And we are losing, we are losing people. And, you know, we need to get people help. We need to get people back on track. And Lee, I just want to say how much I appreciated your comments at public forum about your own journey. And we really need to help. I don't think our firm permissiveness and tolerance of open injecting and all of the behaviors that we are seeing is doing anybody any favors. I think that people need help. And sometimes that help comes in the form of saying no and setting some boundaries. So I have heard that we can expect to see more action on that front. I do think, I think our reduction is important. I would say the pendulum has swung pretty far to that side. And, you know, we're not, we're not seeing a lot of enforcement. It's true the police can't prevent somebody from stealing your bike. But when your bike gets stolen, it'll be really nice if there was a response to that. And when people are in trouble and there is somebody violent, that really is something that even under the short staffing situation, we should expect a response to somebody who is armed and dangerous. So yeah, if it comes to something like that, I know that Councillor Traverse and I, you know, definitely want to hear about that. Definitely want to try and correct that. I think it's sometimes hard, dispatch doesn't, you know, they're not seeing what you're seeing. And I know there have at times simply been a misunderstanding of what is being reported. And that's why it's important for those calls to dispatch to be reviewed and understand where's the disconnect here? Because your story, I think to probably everybody in the room is like, yeah, that needs a police response. Even if we only have two on duty, you know? The 911 person knew that, sent it to the police, Burlington Police, the 911 person, like immediately. Yeah, I hear you. I'll just say it's not right. We need to do better. And if that's happening, we need to figure out why and correct it. Well, I actually, would you mind looking for a Civic Clerk, the last Police Commission meeting would have been the end of September. I hear everything that Councilor Shannon just said. I don't like this term permissiveness to be perfectly frank because I think there are a lot of people that are not okay with what's going on. It's just that you're not gonna go and you're not gonna escalate a situation. What is happening is because we don't have the street crimes staffing to have that unit handling that type of open air drug dealing market. So I don't think it's a matter of per, I mean, there is a thought that we don't want to arrest people who are suffering from substance use disorder because when they go to jail, until recently, they're starting to think about the programs that they need to put in our jails and our prisons because we have serious issues with people who are repeat offenders and they're repeat offenders because they're part of this crisis. So that's why it's important to get them into recovery. So arresting people doesn't get people in recovery. We've got to put in these additional systems, not having the staffing to have a street crimes unit is why we're seeing all this open dealing. And I'm not saying I'm happy with that situation or I think that situation is okay. I am just being very frank and direct about what's happening now, where we're at, we're gonna be here for a while and what do we need to do to watch out for each other? And I mean, bikes have been stolen in Burlington forever, never to the mouth. Cars have been taken before, never like they're being taken but it continues to be issues with people leaving doors unlocked, people leaving keys, people leaving valuables, including guns in their cars and that we just have to get the word out that it cannot do that. Oh, I'm sorry. So it'll actually be a meeting for the police commission, so not the city council. I wanna just pull up so everyone can see for those of you who've never seen what the chief's report looks like and if you go, yeah, let's see if that'll work. The search field. Looking on this, just wanna acknowledge that we're a little after nine. So if you have to go, thank you so much for all of your time and we're gonna wrap up this meeting pretty shortly. Thank you all for sticking around. I would go back to the calendar. I'll go back to the, okay, actually take out police commission, thank you so much and then scroll back to September. Yeah, it takes a minute to load the past events and you can just keep scrolling back up. It does have like a slight delay. It's not you, it actually has a slight delay. And to, okay, actually slow down and go back to September, September 18th, a little keep going down, September 26th. It's not showing. Close that and go back to the, from the city's website. Yeah, I was looking for the last police commission meeting. Oh, nope, you're in the right place. Hit the government meetings calendar. And go back toward the end of September and we're looking for the police commission. Can we just maybe leave it at that given that we're over time? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, the, so if you can go through and, oh, there it is, there it is, Burlington, September 12th, Burlington police commission meeting. And you'll need to scroll back up. See, this is the thing about Civic Clerk. It doesn't bring you back. So please simply email me, I'll send you the direct link. The chief's report has this information. People ask all the time, where are we at with officers? It has that information. It has the level of, click on meeting overview and scroll down chief's report right there, beautiful. And if you scroll down a little bit, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. Okay, that gives you a snapshot of where we're at with the sworn officer head count. Keep going, swearing in of two officers. This is the breakdown. So every month he does the breakdown of where we're at and it tells you the different, the supervisors, detectives, the airport officers, the special assignment, marketplace officers and how many that leaves on patrol. Four CSOs of 11, five CSOs of six. Some of the CSOs have gone into the academy, so that's a good thing. So just a very quick question, don't need an answer now, just to put a bug in your head. I see airport six officers and I have trouble wrapping my head around how the airport needs a quarter as many officers as the entire patrol body. No answer needed, I just, I would hope that the city council does not take this breakdown as a given, but rather engages with the police department to assess whether it's the optimum mix. And if you can scroll down a little bit more. Oh sure, changing proportions of sworn officers versus additional professional positions that have been added. And then if you can go down to just the incidents, this is a very good report to take a look at. Total year-to-date incidents and then go down to the next one. So these are selected incidents that he pulls out of what they call Valcor, which is a system where they keep the data. Take a look at the overdoses. 2018, 41, 2019, 34, 2020, 2021, 2022, we thought 155, now we're like 350. These are undercounted too, right? Because Narcan is being widely distributed. People are being helped by friends so they're not calling the police department or the fire department. And then we have the dramatic increase in stolen vehicles the last two years and people are living in them. A lot of vehicles are often found with people sleeping in them, et cetera. But the information, thank you so much for your time and your patience, but these are the documents for you to see. Thank you. Thank you. All right, folks, we are gonna bring this meeting to a close. I just wanna give a sneak preview of something we're gonna be talking about and voting on at our next meeting. This is a resolution that at this moment is titled a resolution affirming norms of respect regarding gender identity and expression within neighborhood planning assemblies. And in short, it is a non-discrimination move by this NPA that we hope other NPAs will adopt as well in some form or another. There are copies on the table at the back of the room. Feel free to write to us if you would like to talk about this or see the text in another way. It's on the screen as well. Lots more to be discussed in November, but we're gonna leave it here for now. I just wanna check briefly. It's on our website. Yes, to see if Councillor Traverse wants to say anything. Would you just go back to the Zoom? And one thing to note is that this is a draft and it can continue to evolve based on feedback between now and the next meeting. So- Next one, then we'll just vote on. Exactly, if anyone who has thoughts on it, please contact the Ward 5 NPA and you know, feedback is welcome. Yep. Is this just this here? So this is anybody who lives in Ward 5 who is present at the November meeting. Thank you so much for asking that. Is there a requirement for killer? I think it was great. Great, thank you very much. Thank you for asking. There has to be more community members than steering committee members. That's the requirements. That's good to know. All right. Excellent. Okay, that is gonna be all for tonight's Ward 5 NPA steering or NPA meeting. Tired. Thank you all for joining us. And we'll see you next month. There's a couple. During that. You were thinking about it. I quote. You definitely needed it. From Asheville to the Stenwood meeting. I think I did to the area. I think that's what was there. Hanging out for the whole time. None of the hall meeting. That's a good question. I'm doing the steering. All right. Yeah. Great. Thank you very much. That's great. That's great.