 Hello, and thank you for tuning in to Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of Town Meeting Day 2024. My name is Bobby Lucier. This is one in a series of forums that Town Meeting TV hosts in advance of Town Meeting Day, which this year is on Tuesday, March 5th, which features municipal officials explaining what you will see on your ballot as well as candidates running for local office. In tonight's program, we're diving into the proposed budget and ballot questions for the City of South Burlington. And we're joined by Jesse Baker, South Burlington City Manager, as well as Tom DiPietro, who is the Director of Public Works. Thank you both so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Awesome. So, before we get started, just a reminder that you can call in if you're tuning in live. We welcome your questions anytime at 802-862-3966. You can give us a call and we will hear your question live on the air. So, with that, I will hand it over to you guys and you can pull up your slides here and share what South Burlington residents should see on their ballots. Great. Well, thanks very much for having us here tonight. It's a great opportunity to talk to the community and have them understand what they'll see on the ballot. We have the privilege of being here to share this information, but this is really the product of many, many hours of work by our leadership team and our city council to consider the budget. They've been talking about for the last two months and unanimously supported moving this budget forward to town meeting day. So, I'm going to spend some time talking about our FY25 budget that will be on the ballot. Tom's also going to share with you some details on an upcoming bond vote, as well as a charter change, and we'll end with who's on the ballot that's here in South Burlington. So, to begin with, for the FY25 budget, this is the citywide budget. Our citywide budget is about $65 million. Of that, only $35 million is the general fund, which is what people usually think of in terms of what's raised by property taxes, core municipal services, et cetera. And of that, those funds, only $21 million is raised by property taxes in South Burlington. So, this budget, this year's budget is brought forward to the voters, really tries to achieve three main goals. One, the council wanted us to maintain our core services, maintain public safety, public infrastructure, recreation, library programming, et cetera. So with this budget, we're investing in public safety. We're implementing our second ambulance. We currently have one ambulance operating in the city. We're going up to two this year, as well as adds a highway position to Tom's team. It increases funding for sidewalk maintenance, adds a part-time librarian. It increases funding for our affordable housing trust fund, as we really try and be a partner in the region to solving the housing crisis. We also wanted to continue our investments in school safety. The schools are incredibly important in our community, and we wanted to make sure that our children and families always felt safe at school, getting to school, and on school campuses. So with this budget, we're reinstating South Burlington Police Department youth sergeant, youth services sergeant. That officer will work very closely with Officer Bre, who's our very popular school resource officer in South Burlington. It also includes funding to fund half of the cost of crossing guards at our schools. The other half will sit on the school budget. And it proactively puts some funds into our capital plan for work Tom and his team are doing on Dorset Street around our middle school and high school campus. And then finally, this budget takes the first financial steps to implementing our climate action plan. So the council adopted our climate action plan last year. And with this budget, we're investing $190,000 of general fund dollars into staffing and consultants to really roll out that plan, as well as $417,000 of ARPA funds to make capital improvements in the city. So all of that with our budget assumptions, which include our grand list growth assumptions, our local options tax assumptions, and then expenditure assumptions around cost of living increases, the new child care payroll tax, which adds about $50,000 to our budget, as well as health care increases, results in a 5.82% increase in our tax rate. So that's what the voters will consider. It's about 2.9 pennies on the tax rate. We always like to share what impact that will have on our property tax payers, because of course, affordability is also a real concern while we're maintaining core services. So for the average condo owner in South Burlington, that results in $85 for the year, if adopted. For the average homeowner, that's about $125 for the year. We also, part of this budget, of course, is our utilities, our water system, sewer system, stormwater system. Those rates are going up primarily based on staffing and benefit costs and needed capital costs. And the average rate increase for those combined is about $64 for the year. And then always like to talk about just where those dollars go across what services. So as you can see, primarily we're funding public safety and public infrastructure. Administration includes community development, HR, IT, finance, legal, all of those backbone organizations that support all of the services in the city, as well as the city clerk's office. That's our FY25 budget. And with that, I'll turn it over to Tom. We do have a bond vote on the ballot this year. And Tom can walk us through that project. Thank you, Jesse. So yeah, South Burlington voters will see a bond vote related to construction of a new water tank on Dorset Street. We also refer to it as the East Tank. So right now, or the proposed tank is going to be very similar, look exactly the same as the existing tank. It will be a 2.1 million gallon welded steel tank by Nicholas Circle. And it will be painted the same way and everything like that. So on the slide, you can kind of see a rendering of it. Very quickly, our system overview, I always think it's important to have folks understand where our water comes from. So our source of water is Lake Champlain, specifically Shelburne Bay. The Champlain Water District is located in South Burlington. And they pull water from the bay, treat it, and pump it to a couple of different locations around the city where our storage tanks are. And from there, it flows through pipes that are owned by the city, part of our distribution system, to everybody's home and business. So a little bit more about the project. So in South Burlington, we have two service areas. The high service area, which is east of Spear Street, generally speaking, and the main service area, which is west, serves kind of the Route 7 corridor through South Burlington. And so the Dorset Street tank, or the East Tank, will serve the high service area. A couple of the project benefits I wanted to highlight, with construction of this tank, we will have enough water for the foreseeable future. So we're estimating 50 or more years. So that's great for the city. We won't see another bond vote for additional storage for quite some time. It allows us to meet regulatory requirements. And I have a little bit more information on the next slide about when we have to provide more storage within our system. But that requirement is up and met. So that's why we're moving this forward at this time. And it provides more water in the event of an emergency. So whether a pump were to fail and CWD, for whatever reason, might not be able to get water up to our tanks, will have more water available for the community while they work to resolve that issue, and provides more water for firefighting activities. Also has a benefit here with the two tanks next to each other. We are much more easily able to do maintenance on the existing tank. So if there's maintenance of interior components, we can take one tank down, do that work, put it back online. So that's great for our operational staff. I just wanted to note from a pressure perspective, the tank will not increase pressure throughout the city. It will allow us some operational flexibility so we can maintain water higher in the tank. But it's not going to increase pressure to areas where we didn't previously have water pressure throughout the city. And this is the slide I referenced previously. So this is pie chart showing sort of where the water in the tank goes or is utilized. So the big blue portion of the pie chart, that is the water that we use on an average daily basis. The 500,000 gallons in the yellow portion, that's what's allocated. So allocated means somebody has put in a permit to the city. They're going to need water to build a new home or a business. We figure out how much water that's likely to need, and we allocate that out so we sort of reserve it for them. There is a small allocation within this tower for the town of Shelburne. And then fire flow demand. We have to set some gallons aside for fire flow. Because we get water from the Champlain Water District, we actually get a pretty good, I'll call it reduction or discount to the amount of water we have to store for fire flow capacity. And then you can see there the 42,000 gallons of excess storage. So we've used about 98% or allocated out 98% of the water in the tower. And state regulations require that when we reach 90%, we start planning and then construct additional storage. So this is probably a little blurry on your screen. But this is kind of an engineering plan view. And again, it's the new tank, very similar or the same as the existing tank. It's going to be right next to the existing tank. And it'll provide a total of 4.2 million gallons of storage on that site for the high service area. Total project costs. So all in, this project is about $5,750,000. $4.3 million of that is in construction costs. So that's really the large portion of this. I'll note that we have already received a half million dollars in grant funding from the Community Recovery and Revitalization Program. So that's great. We love to have that kind of support. And I'll also note that our project was recently, we applied and we're recently ranked number one in the region for a regional priority list for economic development. So that's great. So we're hoping that that ranking will allow us in the near future to apply and be successful obtaining additional grants to help further reduce the burden on our rate payers. And if you go to the next slide, it shows that. So again, using current rates, about a 30-year term and a 4.5% interest rate, our annual loan payment would be about $350,000 on this. So that would increase our water rate by about $4.80 per 1,000 cubic feet of water. And that would result in an annual increase of about $38.66 for the average residential user. I do want to note I'm presenting here kind of the worst case scenario. So I haven't even backed out that half million dollars in grant money that we already have or maybe prospective grants. This is kind of the worst case scenario. I wanted to show folks this evening. I always think it's important, too, talking about rate increases. Just want to remind folks, we have some of the lowest or if not the lowest water rates in the region and maybe the state. So you can see South Burlington on the left here. So even with these rate increases, we will be on the lower end if not the lowest. And a couple of words about the project schedule. So we've been working on this for a while now. Currently, we're doing final engineering in permitting. And we hope to have a positive bond vote, which would allow us to kind of move this forward and put it out to bid this summer. And we could begin construction this fall. We may decide to delay that slightly for reasons related to the timing of payments on a loan as things come up. But again, this represents the most aggressive schedule where construction might start as soon as this fall, assuming a positive bond vote. And my last slide here is just an example of the ballot language. It's always ballot language, so it's a little bit long. But it's pretty straightforward, yes or no question. And in this case, if voters approve the funding to construct the town. And then we have one other critical ballot item on the ballot this year. And that is a potential charter change. So about 18 months ago, two years ago, our charter committee was convened to look at governance models in South Burlington. As the second largest city in the state, we have five city counselors who all run at large, five school board members who all run at large. And we want to have a community conversation about, was that the right model for us? So the charter committee spent many months doing a lot of public engagement and feedback to have conversations in the community about those governance models and came to the recommendation to consider expanding the school board and the city council. The city council has had a discussion at their table about moving forward those recommendations and with the unanimous support of the school board are moving forward a charter change proposal to the voters to consider expanding the school board. So that would include adding a new three-year term and a new two-year term for a total of seven members. Four of them would have three-year terms, three of them would have two-year terms, but all elected at large from our community to represent the school district as a whole. So this will be on the ballot on town meeting day. As folks likely know, charter changes also require legislative approval. So if the voters decide that this is how we want to govern ourselves, then we'll go to the legislature for consideration and then to the governor. So to be in effect in 25 or 26, depending on the biennium. And as Tom was mentioning, we love complicated ballot language. So this is how this will appear on the ballot. We need to show what is changing in the charter and what is being added. So these words all say that we are adding two school board members to the school board if the voters so choose. And then finally, we have a number of great candidates running for office in South Burlington. So we have three folks running for school board for three terms that are up, and you can see them listed there. And then for our city council, we have a three-year term, a two-year term and a one-year term. Each of those will currently be vacant. The incumbents are not running. So we have two candidates for the three-year term, three candidates for the two-year term and one candidate for the one-year term. So that is our town meeting day ballot. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you all so much. I wanted to just return back to the city budget for a second. So could you just share a little bit of context for that budget increase, the tax increase, is that compared to the last couple of years, is that larger or smaller than what we've seen than what South Burlington residents have seen in prior years? Yeah, that's a great question. So it is larger than the historic average over the last decade. It is lower than last year's increase. What we're experiencing is during the peak COVID years when there were so much fiscal uncertainty for our neighbors and for our government operations, the council really wanted to hold as a less than 1% tax rate increase. So we were able to do that, but honestly, we did that through holding some staff positions vacant. So as the finances are returning, as expectations for our community are returning, we're reinstating those positions. Example the youth sergeant position and that's really kind of climbing out of that very low tax rate increase here. We're climbing out of that with this tax rate. Additionally, we're funding new things. So funding specifically the implementation of the city's climate action plan. That has been a huge community value of our community for several years with the adoption of not only the climate action plan, but just on Monday night, the council adopted our city plan 2024, which is our master plan for the next eight years, really centering our work to address the impacts of climate change in South Burlington. Great. And I'm not sure if either of you can speak to this, but in terms of the, were there public hearings about this budget? Could you characterize any of the, like what was the input, if there was any from the public or on the proposed budget, was any of that incorporated or what did public input look like on this budget so far? Yeah, we had a fair amount of engagement this year with the budget public hearings and just council discussions of the budget as well. I should note that when the leadership team first presented the budget to the council in early December, we presented an operations budget to maintain core operations and a policy budget to implement the climate action plan and other policy decisions the council had previously made. That original budget contemplated over an 8% increase in the tax rate. So as the council discussed the budget, heard from the community about their values, what they really heard was a strong commitment to maintaining core services, making sure our infrastructure was well maintained, making sure our public safety services were well funded, but there was some concern about affordability. So as you saw in the presentation, the council decided to use some of our ARPA money for those one-time capital costs associated with the climate action plan and take that off the backs of the property taxpayers. So lower that increase from over 8% down to 5% in order to be responsive to the affordability concerns of our community. Great, awesome. Anything else that you either of you would like to add about, or I mean, if nothing else, maybe just how South Burlington residents can vote? Sure, happy to answer that. I will do one quick pledge if you don't mind. So we have, as you probably know, we have a growing downtown, our city has contemplated having a city center for decades. It is coming to fruition. Market Street and Garden Street look completely different than they did four or five years ago. Last year we had our Illuminate Vermont event, a big street festival in December. We are doing that again this year in time for the eclipse. So Illuminate Vermont will be the weekend before the eclipse. We anticipate lots of visitors into our region. Our neighbors looking for opportunities to come out, connect with one another, enjoy each other, enjoy a street festival. So mark your calendars for April 5th and 6th on Market Street in South Burlington. We'll have food trucks and artists, vendors, and opportunities to hear music and just connect with one another. So it's gonna be a great time in South Burlington. But before that, on Town Meeting Day, folks can certainly vote on Town Meeting Day seven to seven at your district voting place. That's either at City Hall or at one of the elementary schools where folks can go on to SouthBurlingtonVT.gov to figure out where they specifically vote. They can also vote early. Ballots will be available starting right after Valentine's Day. You can come into City Hall at 180 Market Street, go to the clerk's office during regular hours of operation, eight to 4.30, and vote early as well. Or call the city clerk's office and she will be happy to send you a ballot. Awesome. Thank you guys so much. Thank you so much. Jesse Baker, Tom DiPietro. Thank you for coming to our studios here and sharing what will be on the ballot in SouthBurlington. And thank you for tuning in to Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of Town Meeting Day 2024. You can find this forum and many others that we will be hosting in the coming weeks on cctv.org slash 2024. And you can also find them on our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel. Thanks so much, so long.