 and adopt the agenda as follows. Thank you so much. Is there a second to that motion? Thank you. Seconded by Councillor Doherty. Is there any discussion of the motion to amend or adopt the agenda? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favour of the motion to amend, to the motion to amend the agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes and I'll just note that we have we have Councillor Travers, Councillor Grant and I did see Councillor McGee but I think maybe as oh yes, Councillor McGee is back. So we have three councillors that are joining us by Zoom this evening. That moves us to the next item. The second item on our agenda has been removed as we just noted and we do have a work session on Cambrian Rise that's scheduled for 6 p.m. In the interim, we will go and move those items that we can address prior to public forum. We'll go back to item number four, which is the public forum later at 6 p.m. And at this point we can go to item number five, which are climate emergency reports. Is there any councillor or the administration that wishes to offer a climate emergency report? I do not see anyone. So we will close out item number five and move on to item number six, which is the public health and safety emergency reports. Is there any councillor or the administration that wishes to offer a public health and safety emergency report? We'll go to Councillor Doherty and then I see you, Councillor Grant will come to you next. Thanks so much, President Paul. President Paul, I just wanted to note for public interest and to just draw attention to item seven. Well, I don't know which item number it is, but it is it's in the consent agenda and it is a letter attached to an email from Amy Mellon Camp, who is the chair of the library, the Fletcher Free Library Commission, drawing the city council's attention to a violent incident that took place recently at the library and asking the council to direct its attention toward the library and specifically public safety issues related to the library. I wanted to call everyone's attention to that because I think it's so vital. From my perspective as both a former English major and a parent who has relied for years and years on Fletcher Free Library, I just I really believe that a healthy public library is just it's just such a core part of our civic mission and the fact that our public safety issues are negatively impacting that mission I think is really, really key for all of us to pay critical attention to and work with the library to do whatever we can to mitigate that situation. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Doherty. We're going to go to Councillor Grant and then we'll come back to Councillor Carpenter. Councillor Grant, please go ahead. Thank you and thank you to Councillor Doherty. That was also on my list. It is item 7.11. I just also want to extend my thanks to the people at the Fletcher Free Library who continue to work very hard to make that space a welcoming and safe place for the community to be and they have part of their jobs have now become to be engaged in community safety in a way that they might not have imagined before. I'd like to draw people's attention to and the Consent Agenda item 7.10, a letter from Kevin Walters and his experience in policing and some comments about how complaints are processed in terms of police oversight. I thought that it was an interesting letter. I agreed with a lot of it based on my experience as a police commissioner and I think the public would find that interesting. The other two things I wanted to mention was that the Public Safety Committee meeting that occurred on the 24th. This was an extremely interesting meeting. It came in just under three hours so I know everyone might not have time to watch it all at once, but we heard very full reports from Chief LaChance and Murad. It took a lot, it had a lot of information that kind of took a look at what happened in 2023. A lot of data, a lot of challenges, a lot of things that we need to continue to work on. Extremely informative. So when people say that they're not sure what's going on, they're not sure what the needs are, this meeting is very, very informative and once again that is the Public Safety Committee meeting that occurred on the 24th. On the 25th I was happy to attend the Ward 8 NPA and I did a segment on public safety and I think that is also a good watch. I talked about what we're seeing, addressed some issues around misinformation around the drug crisis. Also talked in detail about what police can and cannot do for us and how we as community members play a role in our own safety. What we need to be doing in order to help our officers. There are simply certain types of crime that aren't really preventative. Officers come in afterwards maybe to try and find stuff that's been stolen, find a car that's been stolen. There are things that people in the community actively need to do to protect our staff. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Councilor Grant. We'll go to Councilor Carpenter. Thanks. I just want to follow up on Councilor Doherty and Grant's pointing to the library letter and respectfully asked without having done a resolution maybe that the Public Safety Committee could look at it and as we put together our budgets for this next year just give that some consideration. Thank you so much Councilor Carpenter. We'll go to we'll go to the mayor. Mayor Weinberger. Thank you President Paul. I just wanted to further update the public and the Council on the extension of the Motel program. This is and I think this is you know directly related to the issues just being discussed at the library as that letter from Commissioner Mellencamp notes. One of the things that put heightened pressure on the library over the last year and the rest of the downtown was the closing of a partial closing of the Motel program last June that put 800 people statewide out on the street at a time when we have no excess shelter capacity and a vacancy rate of less than 1%. The AHS has made a plan to do that again this April with another five to six hundred folks that are expected still to be living in the motels on April 1st. We have been opposing that and I've shared with the Council a letter that we sent to the legislature on this. We've also Sarah Russell our special assistant and homelessness has given testimony on this and happy to say the the Fall House did vote to extend the Motel program through June on Friday of last week. So this now moves over the Senate and hopefully there'll be a strong vote there as well. We are concerned that this is potentially a measure that's subject to a veto so it's important that there be a strong vote. I want to just remind folks who haven't seen in our letter by extending this is not just this is this is a measure that is also resolving this winding down this pandemic program through the way Burlington has proposed and that the Coordinated Entry System is successfully housing 20 to 25 households a month. The final 56 households that are expected still to be in the hotels in Chittenden County in April would be housed by June if we by the end of June if we continue to make that progress so and I will point out that we actually project that there will be only there'll be less money spent doing that than if some kind of new emergency shelter was tried to set up to house some percentage of this. We do think new emergency shelters are needed because of the broader unsheltered challenge that we're facing right now but we shouldn't be making a new population unsheltered through throwing them out of the hotels on April. Thanks President Paul. Thank you so much Mayor. Someone has their hand. Counselor McGee is that you? You have your hand up? Yes. If you wanted to did you want to speak to this agenda item Counselor McGee? Yes please. Sure go ahead. Thank you President Paul I'm doing my best to get down to be in person with you all without missing too much of the agenda so I'll be driving down after this. I just wanted to note quickly that Counselor Grant and I stopped at T-Rug's last week to check in with the owner and the staff after the troubling incident that happened there last Monday and we had a good conversation and you know just gratitude to the law enforcement professionals that were involved in that incident and managing the situation and bringing it to resolution with minimal injury. Thanks to the quick action of staff and patrons in the bar at the time most of the folks were able to get out and say for a couple of folks who also were pretty heroic and bringing about resolution to the conflict so I just wanted to make that quick note and I'm just grateful that you know community showed up in that moment and folks to care of each other so thank you. Thank you very much we'll go to Counselor Zhang. Thank you President Paul and the City Council did pass a resolution about public safety I believe it was a joint committee and to that resolution had a component of creating two public forum about public safety I think they already took place right and they were also very well attended I was not able to attend but those who attended are asking question about now what is next from there and highlighting the distinction between doing these forums and actually no action to follow it is it best use of our time and also to think about when these type of things happen again and we want to do it right from my perspective it is to identify people in the community who deeply care so that they can create a task force or ad hoc committee because this conversation should continue it should not be just we do two and we're done I think the public safety is a concern for many people and allowing the voters to dictate or to participate in solving this problem would be beneficial for each and every single one of us but this is also a question for those who brought that resolution for the administration that put those events together what is next from there thank you thank you so much councillor jing I'm happy to speak to it I we we try with these public safety and climate emergency reports as well not to get too into a back and forth but the idea behind the community forums was to educate the community so that we were all so to speak on the same page we all understood what the challenges were we had speakers come in and talk about what their challenges are and also to educate the public on what they're able to do and what they're not able to do and I think that we fulfilled that and fulfilled that well and my personally my appreciation to the administration particularly the chief of staff Jordan Riddell for putting those for a large part of the work and putting those community forums together the the other part of the of the idea with the community forums was to create an opportunity for residents to come forward with ideas suggestions sort of modeled on after what we had seen the success that we have seen with the fire department in the emergency response team that they have put forward that came as a bottom up approach from from officers who are from firefighters who came to the chief and here we have that that that program that is so far showing lots of lots of indications that it is a successful program that was the idea and was to allow residents an opportunity to bring forward ideas either something that they'd heard somewhere in the country or just a new idea something that we haven't tried that was the idea was to really invigorate the public to come forward with some new ideas and those ideas would be taken and then funneled by the administration into the appropriate department that is the work that I think the committee feels you know has yet to be done and I know that counselor Grant is working on a third community forum I don't want to take the take that description away from her I'll let her speak as she's next in the queue to speak on the public public health and safety updates so counselor Grant I'll go to you now thank you with regards to that I just wanted to make sure that in addition to making sure that all the questions that it submitted had gotten some type of response so there were questions I would submit it in advance for the first two and then also really to have a way for people to talk about what they're experiencing in addition to hearing from Burlington business employees and employees of the city city of Burlington similar to the what was just expressed in the letter from Fletcher Fletcher library I would also say that it's important to to do a deeper dive and harm reduction because I I feel that it's still not fully understood in the community how essential that part is we we cannot get to the other side of this drug crisis without adequately increasing the resources on that end to get more people into recovery so hopefully more information will be coming on that just trying to tie down a location and hopefully that will be tied down this week I want to go back to T rugs and just say the the people who were there really work together to get people out safely and there were two people who were in there because one was in the bathroom and one was having to deal with this this individual and just just took their opportunity to grab a stool and whack and then that allowed our law enforcement to come in and put it into the situation but it was it was just really amazing to see people someone who saw their moment took it and everything was able to be resolved safely because it could have been a much worse incident thank you thank you so much councillor grant seeing no others in the queue we'll close that item and go on to the end of our agenda we'll we'll cover the consent agenda and deliberative after public forum and that would move us to item number nine which is committee reports are there councillors who wish to offer a committee report councillor councillor bergman thanks I thought we might have had a tax abatement recommendation to deal with today but we do not we will be having that at least some some of them I believe on the 12th we're still working through some of the the logistics on that so look forward at our next meeting hopefully that meeting won't be too too packed because like it or not there's a quasi judicial hearing that the entire council sits as the board at and we hope that you will follow the recommendation when we get it but it's it's a full board and hearing so it's ours to deal with so we need to have enough time thank you okay thank you there any other committee chairs who wish to offer a committee report councillor hightower the cdnr committee I just got back into my city council email so I so I'm just finding out but the cdnr committee is meeting tomorrow to discuss both updates on business and workforce development advisory youth appointments to the advisory board and the shelter and transitional housing programs great thank you very much councillor hightower any other any other committee reports the public safety committee as councillor grant mentioned did meet on the 24th of january and we did come up with a date in february I don't have it in front of me I don't know councillor dory or councillor grant do either of you have it on do either of you have it on the right on your screen when the next public safety committee meeting is I believe it's in mid february I just don't remember the date president paul I do remember that we did not schedule it for valentine's day that's the closest I can get for you okay so it is definitely not we don't know when it is we just know that it is not on valentine's day I believe it was that week but I think it might be that it might be the 16th I I can't remember we'll have another meeting between now and the public safety committee meeting we will definitely get that date correct I'm gonna say the 15th but we will have to get that correct because the 16th is a friday and we never do meetings on the friday okay fair enough it is on the 16th um or on the 15th um that will move us on to um excuse me president paul uh yes sorry I was in transit so I can raise my hand um the parks arts and culture committee met last week we had a full presentation on various elements of the waterfront and heard from the departments that uh interact with wastewater our drinking water the frame we got a presentation from the harbour master and our deputy harbour master so it was very informative uh a full overview of the waterfront that uh I don't feel like I have received in my time on the council and uh it's unfortunate that it is coming so close to the end of my time on the council but uh if anybody is feeling like they don't have a full understanding of the city's role in managing the waterfront I encourage folks to uh take some time to watch that presentation it was very informative and pardon me I'm out of breath um uh that is all we did also receive an update on the planning for the solar eclipse on april 8th it is sure to be probably the biggest event that the city has seen in some time if not ever um and it is just really encouraging to see how that is coming together uh to see how many city departments are working together to ensure that that is safe and also uh educational and entertaining for not just bro and tonians but all of the folks that were expecting to come visit us great thank you so much uh if there's no others we will move on to the next item which is uh item number 10 uh city council general city affairs are there any counselors who wish to discuss general city affairs uh council jang thank you president I wanted to pay attention for the community also the city council that relatively new organization created in 2020 the vermond new american advisory council did provide its final report to the city with recommendations about understanding gun violence affecting new american youth and also supporting their families it is a comprehensive report with six specific recommendations that we feel that the city council will will benefit from through a presentation but just a agenda been full lately but we hope that anytime soon it will come for a full update to that same organization also in collaboration with cctv council bergman the clerk's office did also um had an information session about rank choice voting what is it what does it mean non-citizen voting those are new voting procedures in the city of burlington that we thought it would be imperative for each and every single one of us to understand what is it and how does it work I think in addition to that consular bergman and I have scheduled um some door knocking throughout the city especially around franklin square riverside avenue bobbin mill and many other places in order to let people know that if you are live here legally you can vote and this is a way to do it I just want to say thank you to the city thank you to the voters for allowing both of those to pass thank you president right thank you so much and that that presentation will be on I believe will be on the 12th of February at our next council meeting is there any other councillor councillor mickey thank you president Paul in keeping with the elections theme I just wanted to make a point and I'll follow over email but I have heard from folks in my ward folks that require accommodations at the polling locations and with redistricting some polling locations may see voters that previously went to another polling location and while work clerks at the previous location might be aware of those accommodations that that might be an additional step that will need to be taken to ensure that all of our polling locations are ready to meet those needs and so along those same lines just making sure folks know that they might live in a ward different it might be voting in a different place than than usual I know that's a little bit less of an issue now with so many folks returning ballots by mail but it will still be a cause for confusion on election day so I want to make sure that folks are getting that information great thank you so much councillor mickey councillor grant do you have your hand up for this item or did you not take it down um I have my hand up for I since we're talking about voting uh something came up in a conversation that I was having this weekend with um people asking if Burlington's ever had election observers there is uh as we talked about um there were issues um out in wards four and seven with the npa and one of the individuals um serves as an election official and so there have been concerns about that person serving in uh that capacity and past behaviors um so I guess I'm throwing it out there as a question as to if we've ever done that um and if not is there a way to do it is it something that we have to elicit volunteers to do um so I'm not sure who would get back to me about that but um I said I would ask thank you uh thank you councillor grant I'm sure someone in the clerk treasurer's office will get back to you with an answer on that um that'll move us to item number 11 which is council president updates just wanted to remind everyone that um as part of our new approach to legislative priorities we will have an opportunity to discuss our priorities get an update on the progress that we're making in Montpelier with our legislative team on February 12th so there'll be a work session um most probably from five to six p.m and it's just another and there will be another opportunity to meet with our team um after there were six of us who did go to Montpelier and meet with our legislators in person it was great it was a great opportunity we'll do that again um before uh before the end of the term but the legislative team will be with us again in person for a work session in March um we do have a couple of minutes before six o'clock that would bring us to the last item on our agenda and then we'll go back um we'll go back to item number three so item number 12 uh you rarely get the opportunity to speak during prime time uh but mayor mayor Weinberger the floor is yours thank you president ball um i did just want to say a couple remarks about one item uh before the council meets again uh if plans come together as expected the great street main street project will be in construction and this will be the start of a long construction process it will be over three calendar years that this work will take place the initial work is going to be focused on uh the uh rebuilding of the ravine sewer which is a multimillion-dollar intervention that should allow for substantial new investment in the heart of the downtown and then this project will continue on and and uh rebuild the three blocks of main street from when you ski to pine and this um this is really a transformational project for main street it's one that we've been working towards for basically an entire decade the benefits will include not only the opportunity for substantial new investment by the private sector in housing and in businesses there will also be a complete rebuilding of all the public infrastructure for these three blocks and as we rebuild it it will be will have major new amenities that are not on main street currently whether those are protected bike lanes tree wells so that we can have healthy street trees on main street once again like as we historically as you can see in those old historic photos but which we haven't really seen in many years uh and there will be much wider sidewalks for various public activities as well um it will also be a greener downtown on the other side of this not just with those additional leaves and gardens but that we will be doing a better job of protecting Lake Champlain once the stormwater infrastructure and rain gardens that are part of this plan are built so this this work is is getting started it's going to be a reality in the downtown for some time there will of course be construction disruptions there's no way to rebuild all main street without having some impact a number of things are being done I think it's important for everyone to understand to minimize those impacts first of all the the construction is being focused in the less busy times of the year to the greatest degree possible there will also not be construction on weekends so that the downtown when we see the most people in the downtown on weekends the it's not competing with that construction activity there is also care being put to ensure that there is access pedestrian access to all the businesses along Main Street throughout the construction period there's also going to be a lot of information and work available for on the city website the Great Streets website as well as the Park Burlington website about temporary parking facilities that are set up and available to the public to replace on-street parking that's lost during construction and other information about detours and and and other important information for the public to know during this period so it's exciting there will be some impacts to this on when we get through this at the end it will be a transformed and better Main Street and I'm very grateful to the huge team of city staff that has been involved with this as well as our various partners that is finally making this a reality thank you President Paul thank you so much Mayor Weinberger well the time is now 6 p.m. so we're on a roll we're we're keeping to our schedule we will close out the the last item on our agenda and return back to item 3.1 which is the work session regarding Cambrian Rise for this item we have with us a CEDO director Brian Pine assistant director for community work Samantha Dunn and the owner and developer of Cambrian Rise is with us this evening Eric Farrell thank you all for being here if you want to come forward I'm hoping that you can provide the City Council in the community community with a presentation on the amendment that you proposed in the first 10 to 15 minutes or so then we'll have that will give us about a half an hour for questions and comments from the Council but also because this is a work session it'll also give us time for the public to ask us any questions whether they're joining us in person or joining us online so with that I'll leave the presentation to the three of you thank you very much I'm Brian Pine the director of the community and economic development office for the city Samantha Dunn assistant director CEDO thanks for some time tonight to spend a little time trying to give a context and to frame the requests before you tonight the property that is today referred to as Cambrian Rise for I don't know 100 years or so was also called the St. Joseph's orphanage and has a very very troubled past and Eric when he when he took on the project told the community that he was hoping to bring something that would add value and bring some some restorative goodwill to the community and set out to both develop housing and provide important public access to to natural area to the bike path to community gardens and so the city endeavored to create a development agreement that would essentially have the city ending up with ownership and control and perpetuity of about about a third of the property really when he came down to the trail the trail to the community garden and the eventually the keys like house which is also called redstone house but the so this is eight years ago almost just about two weeks ago was the a year mark from when the development agreement was first entered into between the city the Vermont land trust and Farrell real estate the full rehabilitation of the orphanage took place as I think the very first phase of the project and it was followed by a Champlain housing trust in Cathedral Square building all together just over 140 units of permanently affordable housing and Erica's continued to proceed with the remaining private sector homes or the private market rate homes about 12 acres of the land is conserved in perpetuity providing the access to both the bike path and community gardens and what we're here tonight though is really to focus on is the portion of this development agreement which limited and put a cap on the number of housing units at the time I think it's it's fair to say that the cap was viewed as something which would both provide a need for new housing but ensure that maybe the scale was was perhaps less than could have been built there and it was really I think somewhat of a compromise if you will at the time not eight years ago we didn't face nearly the housing crisis that we have faced for the last several years certainly exacerbated by pandemic and that cap was actually increased in 2018 or 2019 2020 sorry 2020 to from 750 to 950 and today the tonight the main request is really just to have that cap go away as a city imposed cap to the development agreement and have Eric as the as the owner and developer get the approvals needed through the comprehensive development ordinance and the development view process to govern how many units based on their review and their determination of appropriateness and then they issue a permit based on that so Eric's going to talk more about it smith and I are here to answer questions from the city any members of the public but we want to give Eric a chance to run through the overview that he has I need someone to enable screen sharing we need to be able to screen share a screen so while they're doing that I can tell you that the original cap was 770 we increased it to 950 180 units and we did it largely by eliminating commercial uses and it was very specific in our first amendment to the development agreement that implemented that that we didn't add any buildings and which we didn't we got blanket approval for at the time it was 14 buildings some of those buildings have been consolidated together so the other the important thing that happened is by eliminating commercial uses and increasing residential by 180 units it actually had a slight decrease in the overall traffic impact and I think you will find the same that will happen this time when we go from 950 to we want the cap removed but I can guess that will be we'll probably add around 100 units and we're going to do that in part by but we currently have approvals for a 64 unit 64 room hotel we're going to eliminate we have general office space of around 13 and a half thousand square feet we're going to reduce that by probably seven or eight thousand square feet so the and we have a high turnover sit down restaurant that we're that we're going to reduce the size of from 5000 to probably 3500 so that I don't have precise numbers but I think it's fair to say that the net impact of the reduction of non-residential uses in the addition of 100 or so homes will probably have about a zero impact on the overall traffic it's pretty well known that residential is less of a traffic generator than than most commercial uses and that seemed to have been a topic of discussion over the years you know what are the traffic impacts so apart from that it's interesting to note that the underlying zoning doesn't limit density the amount of development we can do at Cambrian rise is controlled by what they call floor area ratio we've got about 20 acres of 21 acres of developable land so in theory we could build about a million eight square feet we're hovering around a million two we'll never get anywhere near the maximum amount of development that theoretically could occur under the current ordinance so in that rendered site plan that you're looking at that's that's what's permitted today it represents about the same number well it does represent the same number of buildings and locations of the buildings that were approved back in 2017 so and so I we don't that that footprint or that basic mix of buildings in circulation isn't going to change that probably isn't much else to say about that on the aerial if you so this is an aerial view from the northeast looking across the site at Lake Champlain that's what it will theoretically look like when it's done and that's probably if all goes well five years from now there's another shot from the southeast looking across the site and you can see Liberty house fronting prominently on north avenue the building south of it and then across Cambrian way is cathedral square west of cathedral square is Laurentide Champlain housing trust west of that is a 117 unit building being developed by sd ireland uh scheduled to open this fall and across from Laurentide is a building that 134 units that we're building apartments market rate apartments that will open in june so that'll bring us to about 567 units overall and we've got something less than say somewhere around 500 to go depending on what our final account is so what we're asking is that you eliminate the cap and we will still be required to go through the folding complete permitting process for any changes to any of the buildings and I'm happy to answer questions great thanks thank you again um so are there questions we'll go to questions from the council and then if there are members of the community who wish to ask questions now would be that time going to the council are there any counselors who have questions counselor Bergman thanks for the the presentation eric and brian um okay so a hundred more units approximately uh no additional buildings no additional buildings uh height what are you projecting i know you're going to go through the permitting process but i want to hear what your intentions are well the unbuilt buildings are already approved to the to the maximum height allowed um there's only a couple of locations where these additional units would go and i can show you on the map if you're if you want to see that um sure at the height limit is it's about six 75 65 70 feet so the building in the northwest corner q i think i can't read it but q yeah so uh under the current um our current cap of 950 there'd be about 50 or 60 units in that building and so the additional 100 will end up in that building and excuse me so you're gonna do this by reducing size of units is that the building will will the footprint of that building will will change slightly and um i think it's already approved at six stories so it can't get any taller um originally when we went to 950 largely that was as a result of small unit sizes that's mostly in apartments but we're now moving into home ownership construction so the average size of home ownership units a little bit larger than the apartments we've been building okay so you're not looking to just make a lot more by smaller units is it that's not okay uh is there an increase in the number of inclusion areas units and this may be for brian as a result of the increase of 100 units what what will that be is at 15 or 25 um the the required percentage is um is something that um right now the this is this is basically this is a vestige of all an old zoning designation so this is um neighborhood activity zone waterfront and waterfront zoning districts by ordinance have a 25 inclusionary requirement um right now the rental inclusionary has been met and and then some because of the cht and the cathedral square properties um we'll have to be working we're going to be working closely have been working closely on um a plan for how to meet the going forward requirement but yeah that would be do i do i understand though that there'll be an increase in izzy units and approximately 25 somewhere the requirements around 25 for this zoning district so then okay that that's good and just to confirm you said that you're going to be eliminating the hotel and office space uh and the last question i have relates to parking um any changes in uh your your the space that's dedicated for for parking no no and i think we'll we'll probably maintain the same ratio of parking that we we're currently accommodating the additional units and you've got transportation demand management features as part of that and are they doing how are they doing in relationship to well that's above my pay grade but i think we're i think we're minding the store you know okay yeah we'd love to hear more about that uh or get somebody who's at the pay grade but thanks very much you're welcome thank you so much councillor bergman uh are there any other councillors uh councillor shannon thank you president paul and thank you for the presentation just a quick question which is what is the ratio of home ownership to rental housing both currently built and to be built so out of the 500 when the two buildings that are under construction nearing completion are done out of uh 567 units there'll be 39 home ownership there's one home ownership in liberty house and there'll be 38 in the building that ireland is building um so not a lot it's been mostly rental so um when you want to know when we're when we're done i think there'll be um cht i just signed an agreement with cht to build 70 units 30 of which will be home ownership um 30 36 38 i think there'll be about 450 home ownership units at cambrian rise um let me do that again make sure 160 about about 450 out of uh say a thousand fifty so pretty good ratio of home ownership thank you very much councillor shannon um if there are no other uh councillor carpenter thanks um i've been following this and working with eric a lot but this is somewhat more for the public and actually on that same question with home ownership and you turn it down to share this but if you've gotten any editorial comments on the difficulty of developing those home ownership units because it's a question we get asked a lot about why aren't there more home ownership units in these large multi well it's i mean in today's climate it's hard to build anything because costs are are significantly higher than they were a couple years ago and the low interest rates used to make up the difference well they don't make up the difference anymore um and so um it's the other challenge is that it's it's notwithstanding what i just said about costs it's been fair banks have been fairly willing and eager to finance apartment rentals because they're uh because our vacancy is almost zero and if you build them they'll fill out so it's a from a risk perspective it's uh it's easy to underwrite for a lending institution home ownership is entirely different operation so when you want to build a multifamily building that's home ownership um usually when you call a bank and ask them if they would like to talk about that the next thing you hear is click so yeah it's very difficult to finance home ownership units uh in this market so thanks i i am aware of that but i just want everyone else to be aware of it because it's a challenge we're going to think about um two other things um if you could give an update on the uh path to the waterfront and how's that going in addition just to remind folks that part of that will be a memorial um a healing garden for the voices of st. joseph's orphanage that we the council took some of our discretionary money and put into funding in as well as the city so that would be a useful update and then the other question just a little more detail on what you will end up with in terms of commercial space there what you think you will so the path that you know you were there we had a meeting with those with folks who are sponsoring that um but the redevelopment of keyslick park has been we spent about 18 months with public works working out the detail plans of that it's like 95 done i think in this second amendment i've committed to having the path built by the by the end of this year um and in that would include i assume that would include the memorial assuming they're ready to go uh so we hope by the end i expect by the end of you know probably late fall that that the keyslick park improvements will be completed and the the path is actually a city obligation even though you're you get to pay for it right well the the city got a got a donation to pay for the path which covered it ended up covering about less than 50 of the costs so i entered into a memorandum of agreement with parks about two year two three years ago saying okay you you contribute the money that you have and then we'll pay the difference um and so we're gonna absorb it recognizing that even though it's public property it's going to be a huge amenity for camry and rise as well and the people that live there and what was your last question about what you do think you'll have for commercial space there and and i i guess any non-residential amenities for the occupants well the the um the at the corner of camry and uh way and north avenue across from cathedral square on the corner of that building we've got a storefront space about 3500 square feet which we're holding for cafe grabbing go food coffee shop small you know cafe style restaurant because we think that would be a great amenity for the people that that live at camry and um there's i have my office is office space there um it's i think there'll be some service businesses you know we'll we'll have space for some service businesses there's a couple of locations in ireland's building there's one in the small space in the building across the way um i'm planning a co-working space of about 4 000 square feet right in the middle of the project um as part of the aurora condos when we build them so i you know we'll we'll have a lot of service it'll be largely a residential neighborhood but there will be some service uses and uh that will be amenities for the people that live there for sure thank you thank you so much councillor carpenter um councillor mcgee thank you president paul and thank you to the three of you for the presentation this evening eric i appreciated your willingness to engage early on in this process and um uh address some of the concerns that i raised uh which will ultimately be addressed by the permitting process for these additional units i i'd raise concerns about wastewater and um increased demand on our public safety services with the fire department and the police department um and so look forward to those questions being answered further down the road here um but i just in this moment wanted to ask for uh you to reiterate what the total number of units that cht will develop under the new agreement that you sign with them uh and what the mix is there well a cathedral square develops 70 units of um of affordable senior housing cht did um 76 units of affordable family housing rentals both rentals and the building uh that cht will be building probably a year from now is going to be 30 units of affordable iz home ownership units and 40 um additional rental iz units thanks so much councillor mcgee uh if there are no other questions um if there is any member of the public i'm sorry i my apologies i wasn't quick on the uh that's quite all right we we have we have the screen we don't have all of everyone showing up on the screen because we have a screen share so my apologies if i missed you go ahead no no worries thank you for all the information i'm just curious is there like a kind of updated one sheet the council could have on the buildings that are already up or in process of being built with the breakdown that you just discussed i i took notes but i would i would love to see a one sheet with that information with regards to the mixture of home ownership what will be coming online with a percentage of home ownership and then the numbers that you just discussed with the square and cht absolutely we can create that thank you appreciate it that's it great thank you so yes thank you that would be great um if there's no other councillors in the queue will go to any community members if there are community members that are joining us by zoom or if you're joining us in person and you have a question um i this is the more informal aspect of the of the council meeting during a work session you can just raise your hand and come forward and ask the question um silvi if you just want to have a seat at the table and just state your name for the record and then we'll go to your question to face with you because i really wouldn't have recognized you but the question that i had is um early on in the development there was a um when rolling to telecom was actually owned by the city the there was a lot of excitement about the co-working space and combined with the housing so the 20-somethings could sort of live in a an affordable housing and have shared public spaces and in a co-working space and i'm wondering i know you mentioned something about that a co-working space but um what happened to that because there was quite a bit of enthusiasm about it and then it just sort of you know btv ignite just sort of has sort of gone dormant and so i don't know maybe it's happening and i just haven't heard anything about it that that was very well received by young people that are in the after college uh 20 somethings thing um so i'd be great to hear what what might be happening she might be referring to there's three four years ago that we were approached by a group that wanted to purchase one of the pad sites and do exactly that um and we worked with them for a couple of years and then they just vaporized they wanted to do us like a smaller version of hula so you know i'm not in that business but we but we do see a need for it and in all of our in the apartments that we build we out we create a lot of amenities spaces so people can get out of their units but work in the building but not in the particularly in the unit but we're going to build 4 000 square feet that would be available to folks uh at at camry and it might be like a might be a membership arrangement like hula where so that people can work from uh you know can work from home without state without actually being in there in their apartment or their condominium so um but that's a couple years out great thank you so much um i don't see anyone using i great uh karen if you wanted to just come forward and just state your name for the record and then your question again it's different than your agreement that you have a cht it's not recognized as affordable housing correct cambrian rise it's different than your agreement you have a cht it's not recognized as affordable housing well cht built a building in cambrian rise that is affordable housing that satisfies part of my inclusionary requirement okay and also is it recognized as marketed as a luxury look due to the location a bit close to the water and all that are you guys marketing it as a luxury apartment at all we don't we haven't built anything that we've called luxury apartments we um no we haven't done that yet okay that's all madame president great thank you so much um and that's karen's currency for the for the record um uh i do see one person on who has their hand raised online we'll go to that person and then if there's anyone else um joining us in con choice you're welcome to come forward um i did see your uh your hand raised uh sharon if you'd like to speak now we we can hear you okay thank you so much president paul um you know usually i'm i have lots of concerns about development but i just have to say this is sharon busher i live in ward one and when eric first started this project um he invited every city counselor to see what he was doing and i took advantage of that and i have been incredibly supportive of all of this i'm very happy about the 12 acres of public land that was part of the deal but i think that this is an appropriate site to add housing i like the fact that there's going to be more home ownership i wanted to just ask eric in the house in the the motherhouse in the original structure um where some of the units were very small but there were so many amenities where people could get out of their unit um there were places there was a at the top floor they could look out onto the lake are the new buildings going to incorporate some of those amenities i know those they're not living space you're not going to recoup rent but will they have some of those features in the basement i mean i remember it like yesterday eric you know the bike wash the dog wash i just i was so impressed because i thought that you had covered all of the needs that i could think of for most people not every need but it was just wonderful public space great varying size units um not always affordable but you are dealing with that in another way but i just wondered in the new buildings will that aren't home owners uh ownership um will these new rental units have some of those amenities so the short answer is yes not only the new rentals but also the home ownership units we we've made an effort to to focus a lot of energy on on common spaces in the building because we we i've told many people residents who live there that you may rent an apartment from us but we consider the entire building your home so we have club rooms and uh we even have a pool table in one of the buildings uh we are planning the building that's going to open uh in june has two verandas one at the northwest corner one at the southwest corner uh we have a club room in that building um we have pet washes bike washes bike racks storage uh so we kind of go overboard on amenities in in our buildings and we will continue to do that as we build out thank you um thank you and i just wanted to um also say that um like councilor grant i'm hoping that the fact sheet that you present to the council will be in the public record because i was writing trying to write down all the information you were sharing and i couldn't keep up but it it was important info and something that i can refer back to so thank you so much thank you so much Sharon um i don't see anyone else who has any questions and actually this is questions of also of cito if you want to join join eric at the table um if there are no others um then we will uh we'll close out this item we will be making a motion on the on the agreement under the deliberative agenda but we need we need to do public form first um so there as i say there is an action item that will be taken um right after we finish with the uh the neighborhood code and public forum um in the meantime my thanks our thanks to brian to samantha for your time and eric for your time and commitment to this amazing project and thanks so much for taking the time to be with us tonight we really appreciate it um we are now at uh 6 32 and public forum is not until 7 p.m so um what i've what i've asked of the city attorney is whether or not there are some items that we can do the overview of a an agenda item on the deliberative but not do the vote or any action item and the one that is probably easiest since most of these are resolutions um without a presentation would be um would be the uh the issue of the annual city meeting the increase in public safety tax rate for fire and police purposes um we will we will leave this item and go to public forum should we run over at 7 o'clock um but the administration does have a presentation mayor Weinberger if you wanted to tee this off or CAO shad which however you'd like to do that and then we'll and then we'll continue with the presentation thanks for your flexibility great thank you president paul i'll just have a couple remarks to start and then i will turn it over to CAO shad who will um uh show to the the full public um basically the the power point that we discussed at the work session last week although we have had um uh an important addition to that um in response to basically the discussion last week and questions that we've received since from counselors including some back and forth as as recently as today the here's what we're here's here's where we are with this tonight is the the last night that the council can act to put an item on the town meeting day uh ballot um uh I Catherine and I um the administration is recommending um a number of steps be taken before uh between now in the end of June with respect to next year's budget um which will be passed in June as usual and it will be a new council and new mayor that um are are making those decisions but sitting where we are now in January um we see we know that we have a substantial budget gap which is not unusual for this time of year this is a bit larger than we have dealt with in some years but um it is uh it is typical that we have some kind of gap that we are working to fill at this time of year um we are projecting a nine million dollar gap and we have laid out and we'll go through in this presentation a whole number of steps that we think should be taken to close this uh by the time the budget is passed in June one of those steps um must happen tonight however if uh it is going to happen in time for next year's budget year it either has to happen tonight or in a special election after march special elections can be done and have been done for various items they uh it is it is an interesting thing in this post covid world special elections are substantially more uh costly than they used to be given the way we now run all of our elections with mail ballots so um what used to be I used to we used to think of it as kind of about a fifty thousand dollar special election cost it's now um you know more than a couple hundred thousand to um I believe to for to convene a special election and it's and it's and there are other costs and disruptions to it as well and you have many less people who vote in special elections so um uh it is our recommendation that we put on the town meeting day ballot in addition to these other steps a three cent public uh police and fire tax increase this would amount to about a four percent increase in the municipal tax bill this is and a reminder that the municipal tax bill at this point is about is just under 35 percent of the total tax bill that you receive from the city 65 percent of that is collect the city collecting money to be sent to the state for the state education fund so this would be a four percent increase on just that smaller that 35 percent of the total bill is what what we are asking the council to act on tonight and that would be before voters on town meeting day just before this meeting the board of finance met again about this we've met a number of times about this over months and the board of finance voted uh three to one to recommend that the council take this action and put this on the on the ballot I think with that I I will probably jump back into interject or help answer questions but I will turn the the microphone over to our CAO thank you mayor as the mayor mentioned some of you have heard this presentation before but we want to make sure we get out as much information to as many people as possible so a little context on this budget um there have been um sorry change that slide a little too fast um there have been numerous changing budget pressures since the last time we had a voter approved tax increase which was several years ago in FY 20 there have been increased costs across the general fund and for the first few years of COVID we had emergency and one-time funds available and we use those funds to balance the budget um those funds are now decreasing and that's why we're coming to you we are projecting a significant gap in FY 25 if no action is taken and so this presentation lays out our plan and recommendation to close that gap um first we'll start with some of the challenges that we have overcome um we created a new public health service during the pandemic we are one of the cities that does not have a public health department but we are proud of the services that we provided during COVID and continue to provide um one of the post pandemic realities is um sustained increased inflation and although we're starting to see that drop off now it's important to remind ourselves that since we had a tax increase we have faced more than 17 percent increase in inflation and that affects all of our costs especially staffing we've been busy rebuilding our police officer ranks after we lost 40 percent of our officers and we have created a lot of important new public safety resources including our community service officers our community support liaisons and our urban park rangers in addition to those important public safety investments we also made investments in racial equity and justice our language access program and livable wages um and those are in addition to creating our racial equity inclusion and belonging department we also signed four new union contracts over these past several years um and in the midst of that we were coping with record low unemployment rates and that sustained inflation that I mentioned we launched an equitable economic recovery by creating a new department specifically to provide more support to our workers and our businesses and we know that houselessness continues to be an issue in the area and in response we've opened three new shelters and the community resource center um and that has come while we are responding to a 500 increase in unsheltered people following the motel evictions from the steeped um in the face of these challenges we've had budget challenges in fy 23 we asked for a property tax rate increase and that was narrowly rejected by the voters last year we included four million dollars of the one-time funds I mentioned earlier and we were very clear when passing that budget we would need to replace those funds we would not have more one-time funds we would need a sustainable source um we mentioned inflation so I won't talk about that again um but specifically with the police contract um the new professional positions the increase in officers all of that leads to personnel costs that are 1.7 million higher than they were in fy 20 so what is our proposal to balance the budget um it's a multifaceted plan and we'll talk about each one of kind of the spokes of the plan um part of it is we will make sure that we're capturing growth what I refer to as organic growth that is going to happen anyway thanks in part to some of the new development like we just heard about some of it will come from really taking a tough look um a deep look at the city's operating costs and looking at those not in the fire department or the police department but across the rest of the city looking for efficiencies we will also complete a review of non-property tax revenues and work with the council to see where they could be increased we are looking to see if there are one-time funds while we do not intend to um use them to the tune of four million dollars like we did last year um there may be and it appears there are um a few more arpa dollars that we could use to kind of lessen the impact um in terms of the tax increase for next year and then lastly as we know we're here to talk about increasing the police and fire tax cap by three cents on town meeting day so kind of taking each of those in turn and this gets to one of the questions we received at the board of finance earlier today um the first place we always look for closing revenue holes uh and these sorts of gaps are where is revenue that we can kind of count on anyway revenue that's happening because we are a healthy city that has new development and new businesses happening um and that's where we that's what we see in this slide um we're expecting about three hundred thousand in new property tax revenue that is not your property taxes going up this is new properties being built um or expanded and us taxing them appropriately that's what that three hundred thousand is the six hundred thousand is um the two percent uh some people call it the meals and rooms tax or the gross receipts tax and just by um virtue of businesses expanding that tax the one percent of local option tax and franchise fees which is something you'll see on your water or electric bill we see some growth in that every year and based on historical performance we estimate that at six hundred thousand so again uh i put this slide here so that we you can see we expect about nine hundred thousand dollars of growth this growth is going to happen regardless of what this council does or doesn't do sort of in a grand scheme in terms of um approving a tax increase or not um one of the things that we're proud of uh that we'll be taking a good look at this year is an operations and efficiency study of the largest general fund city departments we won't be looking at the public safety departments because the police department had a study from cna just a couple of years ago and the fire department is in the middle of um their own staffing study but we're looking at um the rest of the general fund um with the consultant and the goal of that study is to reduce our non-public safety spending by at least three million dollars um on a hundred one million dollar overall budget that is quite large and when you take out the 45 million dollars that we spend on public safety um it becomes a significant amount um a couple of people have asked about the timing of this study and we do expect to have meaningful information back in april or may uh and that will help us to make these decisions in time for final budget passage at the end of june one of the other spokes to solve this problem that we spoke about was raising user fees and user fees are any of um the fees throughout the service throughout the city excuse me um that you pay for for service so not your taxes but if you pay for a class through burlington city arts or perhaps a camp through the parks department parking boat slips um and we while those fees um some of them have um gone up over time and because of inflation we don't have a citywide policy about when to increase them how often to increase them and so we've hired uh another consultant who will be working with all the departments who have user fees um to ensure we are both capturing all the costs of what it takes to say offer that clay class at burlington city arts and then to bring that information back to this city council um to make sure that we are then offering the class for the fee that we want and we are projecting that um we will be able to increase our user fees sort of across the board um and in gain 1.3 million dollars a year i will note that we are paying special attention to youth scholarships and access to ensure that that remains available we've also asked the consultant um to ensure that we are comparing ourselves um with uh i think it's five cities um that are similar to ours so that we can make sure that um we remain competitive we talked a little bit about one time funds this year's budget contains four million dollars of one time funds um in this next year's budget um we are proposing including one million dollars of arpa funds um we had come um to the board of finance in december and let that body know that the 27.2 million dollars of arpa funds the city received from the federal government had been fully obligated and that was true but in preparation for the f y 25 budget we did a careful audit of all of those funds and realized while they had all been obligated there were some programs um for instance the property tax lag relief program um that had actually wrapped up a few months ago and there was still um a rather significant amount of money that had still been obligated in that program so if we de-obligate that um there's about a million dollars left and we propose um using it in this budget um now we kind of get to the heart of the matter lifting the police and fire tax cap um if we do so um our plan fully funds the police and fire budgets including increasing officers for the according to our rebuilding plan it also provides an additional 250 000 of funding that is intended to be a flexible fund for the police department for emerging needs um the mayor mentioned this but it is a critical point um the police and fire tax only funds one third of the total cost for the police and fire departments um so while lifting the cap does not commit this body to implementing the tax increase um it is an important option for us to have as we continue the budgeting process here is a look at the increased public safety costs since f y 20 um you can see in the first two lines how personnel costs have increased for both police and fire um we have also provided recruitment incentives for the police um in all of our general fund departments over the past two years we have held operational costs meaning um not personnel related not salaries or benefits we have held those costs level for the past couple of years so because inflation has been increasing at such a rapid rate that actually means departments have effectively faced a cut and this year um in conversations with fire and police that's really started to catch up with them and so this request is for those items that they have not um been able to afford over the past couple of years that are really necessary um the next cost is the personnel cost for the urban park rangers which do sit in our parks rec and waterfront department and then lastly that flexible response fund that i mentioned this is just sort of a graphical look at what i mentioned that the public safety tax for f y 24 only raises 4.4 million dollars the general city tax um which of course in theory should fund more than just public safety it should fund general city operations um we'll bring in about 11 million and if we put that together you can do the math it's just about 15.4 million dollars um and again that is far less than half of what we need to run both the fire and police departments so um for those of you who've seen this before this is a new slide so you might want to pay attention um this is some of the benefits that the tax increase would provide um it fully funds our rebuilding plan it budgets for 77 uniformed officers um we had used ARPA money to ensure we have recruitment incentives to attract officers and um that money has been obligated so um this tax increase in this budget allows that to continue along with competitive compensation we talked about the fact that we have created an entire new department or um division within the burlington police department and that's our community service division and that includes our 11 community service officers our community service liaisons our crisis advocacy and intervention programs our urban park rangers all of these um incredible auxiliary services that we've come to depend on um and so this allows us to retain those it fully funds um important upgrades to our body cameras um it does allow for the flexible response fund and it allows for increased training for our EMS and for mental health resources for the fire department um this shows in a kind of chart form the what we've been talking about of how do we um propose to balance this budget how do we get to the nine million dollars um and this sort of lays it out in one sheet all of these items that we've been talking about how would this impact um someone who is a homeowner in the city um this would give you uh an idea you can see um appraised value on the left um and then what the municipal tax is under fy 24 and then you can see how much it would increase year over year and it's about four percent um this slide includes both the municipal total as well as the school total and as the mayor mentioned um we think it's important to ensure that citizens have all of the information the municipal tax total is significantly less than the school total people have to pay on both and if we have time we're ready for questions and discussion but I think it's six 58 so maybe we'll save them uh thanks so much Catherine that's a very informative presentation um we will will I'm sure there will be questions um we'll probably bring that we'll bring the presentation up um uh later on in the deliberative agenda um uh and go back to that when we go to a motion as far as the as far as the public safety tax increases concern and putting that on the ballot but we'll return as the time is now 7 p.m. it's now six 50 six 58 um and we will return to item number four uh which is the public forum um before we begin public forum as we have a number of people that are here and some who may not have been to our public forum before um would like to note that we do have a process for public forum and I speak for the full council as we all share a strong commitment to a very orderly process for public forum and one that honors all voices and a respectful discourse um we do have a hybrid system for public forum so community members can speak in person um or you can also speak online you can join us via zoom and speak online for those who are in con toys if we if you wish to speak there are forms on the table to my right in the back corner of the room uh if you just complete that and I believe the clerk can actually take them from you when you have completed them um and uh she will bring them to me and I will call people off in the order in which they signed up on each um on each one of the uh sign ups there is a number on the corner so that's why we're able to keep very good track of who signed up and uh in what order um there also is um a a separate there is a sign up that says burlington resident then ones for property owners or representatives of burlington organizations and then last for non for non burlington residents um no one will be able to speak unless you have completed a form have written your name and your full name so that you can be identified for the record uh when your name is called if you could just come forward take a seat at the table in front of me we do have a timer system on the table that has three lights a green light will shine when you begin speaking a second yellow light when you have 30 seconds left and then there's a red light that will shine when your time is up please complete your sentence when the sound and light indicate that your time is up so that everyone has the same amount of time and we can keep the public forum moving along if you wish to speak uh and are joining us via zoom um please go to burlington vt.gov forward slash city council forward slash public forum and a form will come up please complete the form and your answers will come into a spreadsheet that I have in front of me I will call on you in the order that you have submitted the form um and uh and as well when we go to online speakers we will set up a timer system on the screen we don't have a light system but when your two minutes is up and the clock winds down to zero please complete your sentence so that we can move on to the next community member it has been our practice that burlington residents have first priority to speak we will go to burlington residents in con toys then to burlington residents um who have submitted a form as well online we will then come back to con toys for anyone who is a property owner or a representative of a burlington based organization um and go back to uh online and then we will wrap up with non burlington residents who are joining us in person and then uh complete complete this process with online burlington residents joining us online um during public forum we ask that you please use respectful language we would like to remind everyone here uh this evening and joining us online that there are families who watch our council meetings as their connection to civic engagement parents use this form to teach our city's children about city government and we expect that everyone we will refrain from using any profanity please when you are when you do come forward to speak um please face me direct your comments to me as the chair and not to anyone else at this table nor to anyone in the audience that is gathered behind you and please do not personalize your comments this rule will be strictly enforced again we want to hear what you have to say and it's a lot easier for us to listen and really hear you um if you speak respectfully uh with that we will go to burlington residents who are joining us um in con toys uh the first speaker is Brett Yates to be followed by Solveig Overby thanks so much welcome uh all you need to do is right in front of you there should be a button that says push push that and a green light will come on and the microphone is on great hello um i'm here today to encourage the counselors to work either individually or collectively toward establishing a more systematic and transparent framework for determining when a non-binding popular initiative should or shouldn't appear on the ballot uh during last week's meeting i listened to several counselors discuss why they agreed or disagreed with the text of the anti apartheid petition or why they may have believed that some other process such as a facilitated discussion would be more useful than the ballot measure and advancing an understanding of the situation in Palestine in other words they were explaining why they themselves would or wouldn't have authored such a petition or why they would have voted yes or no on the question if they'd encountered it on a ballot i hope the counselors can come to understand that an appropriate determination to place the vote to place a voter initiated question on the ballot or to withhold it requires a separate rationale for one counselor that rationale may derive from a commitment to a conception of open democracy that would compel them to accept any advisory question with sufficient signatures well another counselor may for instance reserve the right to intervene against advisory questions containing racists xenophobic homophobic anti-semitic sentiments as they have the power to do the point the point is that such potential guardrails shouldn't be instinctive or arbitrary or subject to public pressure they should be clear and consistent it shouldn't matter how you feel about the advisory question it shouldn't matter how community members feel about it fairness to the petitioners and fidelity to the intended purpose of the petition mechanism ask that you develop a defined set of criteria for dispassionate evaluation it isn't good enough to reject an advisory question because some people in the community may say that the question makes them upset or disturbs their sense of safety anybody can say whatever they want about anything that's politics if the question must be withheld because anti-semitic for example we need you to be able to point to the specific language that in your view constitutes anti-semitism without such a standard in place i think you may too often default to denying ballot measures you personally dislike or or just trying not to get in trouble with your own constituents please show respect for vermont's democratic culture for the political will of berlingtonians and for the right to for their right to fight among themselves politically please don't misuse your authority over nine bonding articles thank you thank you so much our next speaker is solveig overby to be followed by romeo von herman good evening hello um my name is solveig overby you all know me i think um i brought these concerns and questions to the board of finance earlier but i wanted to share them with you as well i've got two written documents which i will drop off to lori um i'm concerned that you get access to the finance audit reports from the fiscal year 2023 i regularly put together a document that summarizes the the real problems that the the auditors find in the way that we cap monitor and report on our just manage our capital project accounting so i'm trying to update that report and i have not been able to get that document so i hope you will be able to ask for that because it's it's going to be critical for voters to know about that information and i would love to be able to update my report that explains the problems we've had over the last 10 years the second thing is i would want to point out the three million dollar cut in the non-public safety expenditures which you're going to get some reports in april or may but i think i would be very concerned about where that's where that's going so that's an important thing and the other thing that i had a question about i there's no mention in the letter of intent about the gateway block concerning the cost of the up to eight hundred dollar eight hundred thousand dollar cost that we uh committed to sure is to when we sold burlington telecom and so we've committed eight hundred thousand dollars to remove the burlington telecom equipment from the basement of a memorial auditorium i did not see that in the letter of intent and um so i'm just wanting to know whether or not that equipment has actually been moved i understand the mayor said that there has been something taken care of that but if not i'm wondering why that is not been mentioned in the budget where is the eight hundred thousand dollars allocated in the budget planning that you're doing in these documents and or if it has been already taken care of that would be great but that's a significant chunk of money that we're on the hope for that i don't see anywhere in any of the financial documents that you're looking at right now uh according to this budget thank you very much thank you so much these our next speaker is romeo von herman to be followed by kathy allwell good evening good evening my name president it's good to be here my name president mr mayor city councilor city administrative team as fellow burlingtonians as always i'm here to express my strong support for the deliberate item agenda eight point five for climate policy review next steps for existing commercial and industrial building less than five thousand square feet resolution sponsored by councilor travers and the barlow this resolution marks of course a significant step towards addressing urgent need for sustainable practices within our city particularly the commercial and industrial sectors uh regarding item uh eight point six i kindly advocate for a community forum if that is even possible uh hosted by the city to discuss the impact and possible outcome for proposed public safety task tax hike but i will admit that after listening to the uh the cccccccc i apologize from ceo um uh i feel like the questions had been answered but i would appreciate if there is a community forum just for the pros and cons so it can be discussed thank you madam president thank you so much our next speaker is kathy owell to be uh followed by karen long to be followed by michael long good evening good evening and my name is kathy owell and i live in ward one and i'm here to ask you about the neighborhood code that is supposed to be voted on tonight and i would like the council to please give the citizens the 45 days that we have asked for to before you bring these proposals before the board this is something for for instance that the npa in ward one very much would like to discuss before with our counselors before it goes to a vote and we have not seen the final change and i know it's a big change from what the legislature was asking and it would affect work one very deeply most likely so can we please have that time can you please not vote on it tonight and put it on for 45 days from now so that all npa's get a chance to talk about this thank you so much our next speaker is karen long to be followed by michael long to be followed by sandi win i'm sorry what is there a button i well if the microphone is on and that would mean that the green it was a shining green you should be good to go okay great thanks sure neighborhood code does not address runoff or parking or the desirability of attracting and providing suitable housing opportunities for young families in the neighborhoods near downtown and the university these are glaring omissions the extreme increases in density and lot coverage and elimination of green space trees and backyards have negative impacts and are not consistent with addressing the climate crisis or with creating diverse neighborhoods that college students young professionals families infants teenagers and old people can all call home the greatest opportunities for increasing density responsibly are not in the neighborhoods already most dense but in those areas where larger lots and buildable area opportunities the density increases from seven units per acre to seventy or eighty as permitted does not qualify as small or subtle the pitch seems to be if eight or ten units are allowed it won't happen on every lot so don't worry i'm sure it won't happen instantaneously but when it happens even the first time the response might well be to jump on the bag wet bandwagon or flee to the suburbs or both which we have seen happen many times before and those neighborhoods that are the soul of our community will be gone just like some of the neighborhoods many of us remember neighborhood codes state specifically that neighborhoods within the r.h. district are typically immediately adjacent to downtown and the institutions the map reflects this accurately for downtown neighborhoods but all of the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the institutions are still rl this is inconsistent with the definition of r.h. in the document thank you thank you so much Karen our next speaker is michael long to be followed by sandy win to be followed by a gordon dragoon good evening regarding neighborhood code density is great but extreme density degrades neighborhoods neighborhood code would be especially destructive of appealing walkable bikeable neighborhoods because it increases unit density and lock coverage beyond reason even small lots would be permitted eight or ten units on a typical street density would increase from eight units per acre to an astounding 80 while allowing extreme density is the most obvious shortcoming of neighborhood code the socioeconomic inequity and the green space loss runoff increase and the missed opportunities to build stand out to the wealthiest neighborhoods all remain rl others are arbitrarily reclassified from rl to rm these two zones differ not so much in unit density as in lock coverage and lock size perversely areas with smaller lots and existing dense development would lose scarce protected green space while areas with ample greenery and room for more units and growth are passed by one size fits all with unit caps applied uniformly to lots whether a tenth of an acre or an acre and a tenth neighborhood code protects the suburban template and directs the most severe and negative impacts at the under pressure neighborhoods that can least tolerate them in these neighborhoods that are up against the mcneal plant the f-35 runway or other neighborhoods already sacrificed to undergraduate housing neighborhood code tackles the housing crisis by envisioning the same sort of small overpriced units people are desperate to rise above this is not an effective or legitimate response it is piling on units and deregulating to the point of not regulating at all we must do better thank you thank you so much our next speaker is sandy win to be followed by gordon dragoon to be followed by to be followed by nick persampieri good evening i hit the button it should already be on i think is the green light on yes yeah then you're good to go okay my name is sandy win i live on manfield avenue the demand for more off campus student rentals continues to be strong putting more pressure on our housing market particularly in areas north of the uvm campus the return on investment renting solely to students especially given that 75 percent are now from out of state guarantees rents no average working family or individual can compete with the current housing plan ironically called the neighborhood code is a misnomer it is a plan to reward investors landlords and contractors at the expense of destroying targeted neighborhoods near uvm like mansfield henry street and brooks while protecting other areas equally close to uvm this is blatant blatant discrimination if you can prove you don't discriminate support discrimination by treating all rl areas equally to create housing opportunities everywhere stop protecting exclusive areas in the rl like the hill section near the golf course streets like south prospect summit crescent at the expense of destroying neighborhoods like mine by changing our current lrl zone to rm treat everyone equally here's one way to prove that you want to be fair and equitable eliminate all rl zones everywhere convert them all to rm regardless of where they are rather than targeting neighborhoods mostly in ward one have everyone share the burden of solving our housing problem thank you thank you so much our next speaker is gordon dragoon to be followed by nick prosampieri to be followed by rye sherman i hope i have your last name right you do great excellent it's not normal let's see here i'm going to oh man uh i recognize that i am privileged advocating for college graduates that have the opportunity to go elsewhere but would have rather stayed here if it was feasible we all know that there are many people struggling with far worse troubles homelessness and poverty are not issues that have avoided this city i'm here to tell you that these changes are the start of some real changes that need to happen in the city cheaper housing and more density is the silver bullet that reduces homelessness attracts workers and buy extension businesses and gives our ability to gives our city the ability to fund things that we agree need to be funded if you look at a map of where our town's revenue comes from it overwhelmingly comes from the denser areas this is because a variety of factors but ultimately it's because the cost it costs the city more money to provide services to less dense areas while also pulling less tax revenue from those areas i've heard a few things tonight that it degrades the neighborhoods and hurts bike ability on the contrary more density makes areas more walkable and it makes them more bikeable because no one wants to bike a half hour to their destination but biking 10 minutes to their destination is a lot more feasible and that is only possible with extra density and mixed use zoning but that's a different conversation i urge the counselors to consider that if we are to fix the issues that our city is facing this proposal requires you do consideration uh thanks for your time thank you so much our next speaker is nick prosampieri to be followed by rye sherman to be followed by uh Emma Shaw good evening thank you nick prosampieri ward three i ask you this evening to support the proposed ballot measure that would ask voters on town meeting day to authorize the city to make a small specific but very important change that would improve the carbon pollution impact fee and all voters are being asked to allow the city to do is to extend the fee so that it applies to all fuels and thermal energy systems that emit greenhouse gases it doesn't propose to increase the building subject to the fee or increase the fee this is needed for the fee to work properly without it we are incentivizing non-fossil fuel systems that have significant greenhouse gas emissions including advanced wood heating liquid biofuels and renewable gas um this ordinance and the fee the fee applies only to new systems and it's clear that the best thing to do with new systems is to electrify the state and looking at the clean heat act likes um biofuels and renewable gas because they can be used in existing systems but we're what we're talking about here is new systems so i ask you to make that change i also want to i also ask you to support the neighborhood code i think it's a needed step in the right direction to increase density which helps us provide the housing we need and it's also a climate measure thank you thank you so much our next speaker is rye sherman to be followed by emma shaw to be followed by ashley adams good evening hello city counselors um thank you for your service my name is rye sherman i'm a burlington resident and a student at the university of vermont this weekend i attended a climate rally in montpelier um and i was really inspired by the amount of people who believe in climate action here in vermont while it was inspiring um i also recognized that it was organized because not enough is being done currently i am incredibly scared for my future and we need real climate policies it's up to you as our elected officials to stand up and lead us towards real climate action i'm asking you to please vote yes on the resolutions that allow burlington voters to say yes to climate action and to vote no on the resolution that avoids action with 10 months with spending 10 months of generating a new proposal it is important to put put fees on these fuels that emit co2 pollution rather than falsely treating them as zero emission fuels it's also important to expand our policies beyond their currently very limited coverage of buildings as of now we also do not have time to wait for 10 months for a new report to come out we need voters to vote on climate action right now the science is clear we need to radically reduce emissions from buildings and burlington voters desperately want that and please give a give us a chance to have our voices heard thank you for your time thank you so much our next speaker is Emma Shaw to be followed by ashleigh adams and jack tiano good evening hello counselors my name is Emma Shaw and i'm a student at the uvm and i'm lucky to call burlington home i want to see that home protected i want to see climate action i grew up in a generation driven by fear for our future in every corner of my career goals and personal aspirations the issue of climate change has had tremendous influence i went vegetarian to lessen my carbon footprint when i was a freshman in high school and put serious consideration into the treatment of climate change when choosing a university and this pattern is not unique to me my peers and i are forced to consider things such as how our jobs will impact the earth and what cities will be livable by the time we finish our education i'm asking you to treat these issues with the same level of understanding i see around me all the time please vote yes on the proposal to put a fee on clean polluting fuels such as wood and renewable natural gas and buildings and use the and and additionally vote yes on the proposal that would put climate decisions on the ballot in august additionally please vote no on the proposal that asks the burlington electric department for a 10 month report that would consequently delay climate action until november thank you thank you so much our next speaker is ashleigh adams to be followed by jack tiano to be followed by uh caron vassine comes i'm uh resident of ward six and i'm here to urge you to support the town meeting day 2024 carbon pollution impact fee ballot questions sponsored by two councillors bergman and king during the course of the last year dozens of residents have written to called and met with city councillors many have spoken before three took meetings and three ordinance meetings asking that the city not incentivize polluting and harmful false climate solutions in this deeply flawed carbon impact fee ordinance which went into effect this month you received well research science-based information about the harmful environmental and health impacts of so-called renewable gas liquid biofuels and so-called advanced wood heat most of the democrats on this council refuse to listen to residents or heed the science but instead enacting an ordinance favorable to burlington electric vermont gas uvm medical center and uvm which confuses me because you say you care about climate and i've heard that from each of you this resolution before you would allow voters to decide whether to authorize the city to impose a carbon impact fee on non-fossil fuel heating systems and fuels that emit greenhouse gases the resolution does not ask for an expansion to existing buildings if you agree the city should not be in the business of incentivizing polluting and harmful heating sources please support this resolution and allow voters to weigh in on this important issue there would be ample opportunity for stakeholder engagement prior to writing the ordinance should the ballot measure pass i'm also here to ask that you not support the resolution sponsored by councillors travers and barlow respectfully climate policy review and next steps this is unfortunately not a resolution that addresses the climate emergency it's a resolution that delays action and does not seek information from a credible source if you must support additional studies from burlington electric please recognize that any previous v ed studies have been nothing more than rate payer funded propaganda it is your fiduciary duty to ensure that any future studies have a formal rfb process that is commissioned and that it's commissioned by a committee of the city council such as tuc with ample opportunity for public input thank you thank you so much i just wanted to let those of us that are burlington residents um are actually all all all people that are joining us online who have signed up to speak during public forum i see that your hands are raised um you don't need to raise your hand i do have you in the queue we have six people that are left to speak uh who are burlington residents who are joining us in con toys and then we will go to burlington residents that are joining us online just wanted to make sure you knew that um uh thanks so much jack please go ahead making sure it was still me i wasn't okay um so there there are murmurs of sending the the neighborhood code tonight back to committee and not moving it forward um there's also calls from the public to bring it back to the community um this this this policy spent a full year in the public guy at farmers markets and open houses and just left the ordinance committee uh the people who are appalled at the ordinance do not understand it um because they didn't attend any of the meetings or review any of the notes um they don't understand that the city as it stands is incredibly overbuilt compared to our current code they don't understand that the new ordinance would still leave a sizable number of the lots in the city as non-conforming because they're too dense um you're they're they're looking at this ordinance and comparing it to the existing ordinance and saying this is a massive change but in terms of what's actually on the ground it's not um as a housing advocate i don't think that this goes even remotely far enough as a city we need to be building at least or about a thousand units a year to maintain a healthy housing market and we're currently building 125 even this proposal will probably yield a few hundred units over the next decade but you know uh 50 50 units maybe a year um that's 175 we're still 800 units below what we need like this this is this is such a small step in the right direction and i don't think that we should be talking about bringing this back to the ordinance committee like it's just political theater it's emboldening people who don't engage with the legislative process step out of the last second and say hey i don't like this actually i could have i could have been engaging but i didn't let's slow down and take a bunch more time on this and do the things we literally just did we need to be taking such bigger action and usually try to have my comments written out but it's so frustrating i guess to have spent personally the amount of time that i've spent engaging on this and to see the possibility of this you know being kicked down the road again at the last second um please don't do that stand up and tell people you know we've we've been in the committee we watched this happen this is this is moving forward thank you thank you so much our next speaker is Karen Vastine to be followed by Jack Hansen to be followed by Chris Gish good evening Karen um good evening so i'm Karen Vastine i'm the senior community relations officer at the uvm health network i am here to speak on behalf of leadership at uvm medical center including dr steven lefler our president and coo we strongly support the city's net zero goals and have a demonstrated commitment to do our part to reduce our carbon footprint at the hospital we participated extensively in the thoughtful months-long public process that went into the drafting and adoption of the carbon fee ordinance on november 20th 2023 as a large institutional partner we engage in long-term facilities planning and development often between 10 and 20 years out this is to ensure we are able to meet the long-range health care needs of this community and this region for us the manner and speed in which the proposed pollution impact fee ballot items came forward after the november 20th vote significantly erodes our confidence in the durability of decisions made by this body furthermore achieving the city's net zero goals requires collaboration and teamwork we appreciated that the carbon fee ordinance provides a clear pathway for institutions to partner with the city to recoup a portion of the fees made fees to make modifications to reduce their alliance reliance on thermal energy the proposed ballots are both silent on this and as such removed an important avenue for the type of partnership needed to address the climate crisis so thank you for hearing us out we hope that you'll vote no on both pollution impact fee ballot items and yes on the climate policy review which is aligned with the level of transparency and collaboration we appreciated in the drafting of the carbon fee ordinance thank you thank you so much our next speaker is jack hanson to be followed by chris gish to be followed by lizzie mccullough good evening thank you good evening it's a hard position to be in to look at our future as young people but more than young people as a society as a species as a planet and see over and over the lack of action and even actions that feel that are that are really inadequate with what the science is telling us is necessary the scale and the scope of change that is necessary and our own internal city goals and documents that say we want to achieve dramatic change in just a handful of years and yet even policies that just take small steps towards that we can't muster a majority of votes and we can't move forward are the leadership of our can't city can't move forward and furthermore won't even allow the people of the city to say yes to moving forward um i think we need to do better we need to bring more people in i think ballot measures are the best way to bring the most people in there's going to be special interests that are going to weigh in every time in these processes and that are going to advocate for their specific needs and i think the job of this body is to weigh that against the broad needs of the community and our environment and i i would love to see the council just take more leadership and really be pushing our community forward rather than what i think is happening now which is it feels that we're being held back by our leadership um the people are being held back right now thank you thank you very much our next speaker is Chris Gish to be followed by Lizzie McCullough to be followed by Richard Hilliard and Claire Bradley good evening excuse me my apologies do you have the red at the green light on in front of you i think now the mics now you do cool yes um i am here to start again please to urge you all to please let us vote on the town meeting day carbon pollution carbon pollution impact fee ballot item um this would let us fix uh really straightforward and clear loophole in the current carbon pollution impact fee um currently as it stands the fee is assessed on fossil fuels but not on other fuels that also cause climate change and this kind of leads to a completely unnecessary and perverse set of incentives in which we're incentivizing the switch from one polluting fuel to another this is a really straightforward change it would not change the mechanics of city policy it would just expand it equally to all allow the city the authority to expand it equally to all fuels that cause climate change i don't have time to go in depth about why biofuels harm the climate but in short all the biofuels that are available to burlington have serious environmental impacts at least comparable to their fossil equivalents um wood omits more co2 than any fossil fuel it takes many many decades to reabsorb that co2 has more particulate emissions than any other fuel liquid biofuels use vast amounts of land and compete with food production and they're inherently tied into global markets that are clearing some of our last tropical forests to grow biofuels and then renewable gas is largely a sham um all serious climate experts recommend that it any renewable gas that has to be produced should be burned on site for energy not injected into a pipeline system the gas that would be available to us here in vermont vgs who's here might tell you otherwise but it has to travel more than a thousand miles from new york into canada back to vermont it would never get here have abundant opportunities to leak and cause further climate change and i've heard um that there hasn't been a lot of public process here but i just want to say that letting us vote on this is the start of public process then any ordinance would go to at least two council committees then the full council there would be plenty of opportunities for everyone to weigh in so please let us vote on this issue thank you thanks very much our next speaker is leslie mccullough to be followed by richard hilliard and claire pardley good evening hi um i'm a ward three resident i'm just here to support the resolution to put an item on the upcoming ballot um to allow the voters to weigh in on the current loophole in the carbon pollution impact fee um i just generally support allowing this issue to go in front of the public and trusting the voters to weigh in as it impacts all of us um i'm myself and concerned about the existing loophole for pollution from biofuels and that the current city policy incentivizes these fuels um i came to the symposium that this council uh hosted on these fuels and thought that it seemed that the verdict from scientists at this event was pretty clear and straightforward um that these fuels cause emissions that contribute to the climate crisis um it seems like a really common sense improvement to the current fee so i'd like to see the citizens have an opportunity to vote on this measure thanks thank you very much our next speaker is richard hilliard to be followed by claire bradley richard hilliard resident ward one uh i'd just like to thank uh richard could you just make sure that the microphone is on right in front of you the green light is on yeah and just get right next to the microphone that'd be great thank you okay thanks go ahead uh i'm just here to thank to thank uh sharon busher paul billman uh michael long uh for their letters that i think are in your packets uh and like to endorse everything that they say and also everything that sandy win recently uh spoke about uh please let's achieve our mpa goal and have consequential changes go through a 45 day cycle of communication and so whatever you vote on on on neighborhood code i hope it's exactly what has been through the public process thank you thank you very much our next speaker is claire bradley to be followed by lina greenberg good evening good evening city counselors my name is claire bradley i'm a resident in ward three as a young person there isn't a day that goes by when i don't talk with my peers about what our future is going to look like and the science tells us that our future is not going to look like what it did for a lot of generations before and so we need to act aggressively to reduce the catastrophe berlington claims to be a leader in this fight but there is still so much to be done so i'm asking you to vote yes in support of the town meeting day ballot question as well as the carbon pollution impact be and i'm asking you to vote no on the climate policy review and next steps resolution because we don't need to waste time generating a report when we're we know what we're facing and 10 months is simply too many to delay in taking action against the climate crisis and for a more habitable future thank you thank you very much our next speaker is lina greenberg to be followed by collin palmer to be followed by dan castragano good evening hey everyone good evening my name is lina greenberg i live in ward five in the king maple neighborhood just got off my bike and a little out of breath um you may have heard of bill mckibbin he says that winning slowly is exactly the same thing as losing um he is pulling a page out of the book of the fossil fuel industry which for much longer than i've been alive has been delaying climate policy delaying climate policy is the same thing as not doing it at all it causes tremendous irreversible damage to our planet to our communities and to our children and the item that would ask us to study something that we already know the burlington electric department doesn't want is a delay it's the same thing as losing we really need climate policy the interval is going to keep flooding that's our local food source we're going to keep seeing folks moving here seeking refuge from warmer climates out from under the cloud of wildfire smoke that seems to creep east every year we need burlington to be a place of refuge for people who are here and people who are coming here and it is your responsibility to let us vote on the climate policy we all agree we need thank you thank you very much our next speaker is collin palmer uh to be followed by dan castragano good evening good evening uh i'm unfortunately not prepared a speech um however i believe that all carbon emissions need to be taxed as soon as possible um just seeing mont peeler and waterbury and the rest of vermont flooded over the course of the summer and even earlier this year um and the fact that it was not declared as a disaster um really broke my heart um and it's just going to continue to keep happening if we continue to keep pushing climate policy off it's just a really scary thing and it's going to affect all of our futures and yeah thank you thank you very much uh and our last speaker joining up burlington resident joining us in contois is uh dan castragano thank you my name is dan castragano i live in ward four um it's really hot outside um all the snow melted again um we're in the mid 30s again this week burlington is the city out of every city in the whole country whose winters have warmed have heated up the fastest seven point seven degrees nearly eight degrees since 1970 we're we're number one um you can feel it in your bones right it is it is hot outside and it is deep winter um i agree mostly i just got here but with what lana said what chris said and i missed some of the speakers before too but incrementalism and delay is just the new climate denial it is soft climate denial we have to have urgency we must have urgency and we have to get to zero emissions as fast as possible and that means whenever you burn something you create carbon dioxide so um going through my organizing emails vote yes on one and two vote no on three we don't need have 10 months i've chatted with the sun risers high school students i have two year old we have to act faster please don't listen to corporate interests please don't listen to special interests we have to act faster and we have to stop burning things for energy because our climate and ecological systems are collapsing in real time thank you thank you so much so we will go now to burlington residents that are joining us online we'll set up a timer for two minutes and um there are a number of people who wish wishing to speak um who are joining us online the first is um i believe it's mitzi mitzi baefi and uh mitzi i have found you and enabled your microphone and please correct me if i've mispronounced your name hi can you guys hear me yes we can fantastic my name is mitzi mitzi pape i live in award eight and i'm here today because of last meeting i witnessed citizens negating uh what cannot be defined as anything other than a genocide currently taking place in gaza for the city council members to further diminish the disgusting state of affairs bothers me on a very deep level i would like to put in perspective that the gaza strip is 141 square miles this is approximately twice the size of washington dc there has been more than 26600 confirmed deaths this is not including the over 65 000 wounded the 7 000 missing most of which are children and the nearly two million palestinians displaced if we are to consider only the confirmed deaths there is over 88 per square mile you cannot step there without touching some sort of bodily fluid to call pointing out facts anti-semitic is appalling the facts will not change because it offends you the grieving parents will not find peace in their children's brutal murders because a jewish woman in america doesn't want to be associated with the systematic ethnic cleansing currently taking place to negate the suffering of others to appease the the citizens today who are not going through that is disgusting and appalling i sincerely hope that for people who feel similarly they visit gtbflyers.com and maybe understand why this narrative is being pushed thank you for letting me speak today all right thank you so much our next speaker is ursula haverbeck and ursula i haven't i can't find you online if you are and you're under another name i just use the raise hand function and i will come back to you the next speaker is michael chaucer and michael i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak just on mute on your end all right thank you my name is michael chaucer my wife and i are homeowners and residents within the proposed residential corridor district and we fully and strongly support the proposed changes to the zoning ordinance outlined in the neighborhood code document i also work in residential architecture and development in my professional opinion the proposed changes will not only help ease the housing crisis in burlington but it will also positively impact the walkability of the city and may even increase property values for homeowners within the proposed residential corridor district i hope the city adopts these changes without hesitation so that homeowners and developers can begin to build additional housing units as soon as possible i would like to see the burlington city council remove the explicit density limits from our zoning ordinance altogether since those limits nullify many of the proposed changes in the rm district that said i wouldn't want that sticking point to get in the way of adopting the overall positive changes proposed in the neighborhood code thank you for your time thank you so much our next speaker is rex uden and rex i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now yes good evening am i coming through all right yes just great okay my name is rex uden um i've lived in uh ward eight for about eight years now my call is to speak on two issues one is um the racist equity programs being used in city ordinances and one is the restriction of free speech being done across the nation at the behest of the anti-defamation league these are both within your purview because you and other localities use the equity program to um decide how to distribute county county and city funds and as well as opportunities that is using race as a factor in that is using race as a factor in any of those discussions or ordinances is racism it's racist it's illegal affirmative action was just struck down after 30 years of being in effect and damaging many people's lives over race um i was looking today at the equity initiatives you know we that's stuff that we have in place right now that we are doing and you know what does equity mean other than stealing from white people and what does inclusion mean besides the exclusion of white people and what does diversity mean besides fewer white people um i would ask that you please look at these equity programs and understand that um and understand that uh i'm sorry i'd type this out i'm getting a little bit nervous i don't speak publicly very often um i'm just gonna skip it how many lives will you damage in the meantime you know by removing the opportunities for the native born population you know the naturalization act of 1790 said that this by our you know from our founding father said this nation was the nation for european men of high moral character um so next i'd like to go to free speech we have a movement going on right now in our country with the adl where they're claiming that free the that free speech criticizing criticizing jews is somehow threatening and hurtful to the point that they have they have to be scared and they can't participate and so on um i want to remind everyone if they've never heard of it the hallowed demore was done to christians there was 30 million christians slaughtered genocided an ethnic cleansing done by the jewish bolsheviks to the christians but you don't hear the christians every time they are criticized talking about the hallowed demore and being scared about being in public and stuff like that thank you so much every time thank you very much um our next speaker is scott mason and scott i have found you and enabled your microphone hi can you guys hear me all right yes we can please go ahead that's wonderful thank you for giving me this time to speak my name is scott mason i've lived here in the city in a few different spots for well over 14 years now so i did want to echo the concerns of the last speaker and then two speakers ago um yeah i do find it very very disturbing what's been going on in uh in palestine and what's been happening to to gaza and what really really troubles me uh is that our country and and our city and and there's a lot of zionism here and it makes me sad that these people can't they can't see past uh what what's really going on they're taking orders and it feels like um that they don't really understand the damage that's being done uh on uh on behalf of the israeli government we're just giving so much money to them and it's wrong yeah so i did also want to talk about the hallowed demore so that's something that a lot of people don't speak about we just had a holocaust remembrance day what was that saturday the 27th um and i think that we could i'm asking for a resolution for the city to uh declare i don't know exactly what day but we needed to set a day aside for international a lot of more remembrance day um it's a real um it's the real uh it's a real genocide um and i think that it's we should look at all the facts um there's a really good website put together where you can learn more about the hallowed demore and uh palestine and and all the stuff going on gtv flyers dot com g tv f l y e r s dot com thank you so much for having uh for letting me speak and have a wonderful rest of your evening thank you thanks very much our next speaker is christie berry and uh christie i there you are i see your hand is raised um you should be able to speak now hello can you hear me now yes we can please go all right great great thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak i have a speech here um you know it's clean leftist media keeps pushing the lgbt narrative confused children as a sicken our society the western world is the only place where this filth is tolerated we need to stand against the pedophilic degenerate cult in islamic nation would and will never tolerate this it's disgusting to see leftist cheer for drag queen shows with children convince them that they are the wrong gender encourage surgical genital mutilation leave the children alone how can regular people who just want to be left alone who exists in the group that literally want to destroy children what is a woman the cambridge dictionary says a woman is an adult female human being does taking hormone blockers make you a woman does castrating yourself make you a woman there's dressing up make you a one does believing you're a woman make you a woman no doing all these things just makes you a mentally ill man it's wrong for society to cater to a seriously ill minority of people and expect us to go along with their delusional thinking when someone suffers from schizophrenia we don't reinforce the delusions as truth and we shouldn't for transgenderism either how can we take anyone seriously when they can't even know what gender they are transgender women are men transgender men are women kill surgery imagination won't fool scientists your dna won't change just because you have an unhealthy fascination pushing this stuff on a children is child abuse and we shouldn't condone it what chill why did children need to learn about gender pronouns when they can't even tie their shoes why are teachers telling students not to tell their parents about the topics of discussion why can't liberals leave children alone if teachers the media and society do not push the transgender narrative we wouldn't have so many confused people the lgbtq plus culture is a cold mentally ill minority must not be allowed to rule over the rest of us where do we draw the line having children taken from their parents for not going along with the mob having sex offenders teach children at this point nothing is off the table for the woke thank you thank you so much um before we go to the next person uh there are a couple people have their hands raised and have not signed up to speak during public forum if you wish to speak during public forum and you're joining us online just simply go to burlington vt.gov forward slash city council forward slash public forum uh when you do that there will be a form that'll come up please complete the form and your answers will come into a spreadsheet that's in front of me and i'm happy to call on you at that time we're not going to have anyone um speaking unless they have completed the form or completed a sign up in person uh the next speaker is uh alex johnson and alex i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now uh good evening everyone my name is alex alex johnson and as i put in my little form that i filled out i'd like to talk about diversity equity and inclusion um from what i saw of the room earlier i'm happy to see that it is somewhat diverse and from what i saw about the council and the little zoom box that i had going on earlier i'm happy to see that is diverse as well we are a diverse nation as americans but what i'm worried about is the lack of diversity in our cabinet now for example in our current administration janette yellen the secretary of treasury anthony blinkin secretary of straight wendy sherman deputy secretary of straight estate and david s cohen the director of the cia just four members they all happen to be jewish now i think that's an over representation because i thought that we lived in america not in israel and actually if you want to look it up 80 of the current cabinet administration is jewish and i think that flies right in the face of diversity equity and inclusion if we're going to be teaching kids this stuff and forcing this down their throats and forcing this out in hr departments nationwide statewide even here locally with businesses i've worked with they all have dei mandates but for some reason our current administration and even the last administration they're completely exempt from the diversity equity and inclusion laws i find that very very biased i mean why don't we have more mexicans on in the cabinet why are they all israeli why don't we have any dual citizenships with germany with france with australia hell i'll even pardon the language even say well that's real canadian on there because if we're going to have our cabinet filled with israelis then maybe our cabinet is pushing israeli issues and israeli interests instead of pushing american interests and maybe they're not putting america first maybe they're putting israel first that's why we don't hear about them killing raping maiming and drinking the blood of children right now in gaza thank you uh thank you uh our next speaker is evan guld and um uh evan i have you twice i'll give this one a try um hopefully that'll enable you you can just need to enable your microphone on your side evan you're just you just need to unmute on your side is that better uh yes that is you had signed up sorry i think my web my web connection wasn't working so i apologize for that no worries no worries go ahead cool my name is evan guld uh i'm a long time resident of burlington uh and also a long time resident of ward five i'm here to speak on the neighborhood code ordinance before you uh to say that you should continue to move forward the ordinance to public hearing we've underbuilt and it's not just slightly but tremendously some of you have been on city council for some time and you may have some understandings of why you'll hear that this is a drastic up zone that it will completely open the floodgates to developers the truth is that even with these changes and the planning department can show you they have these graphs that between 25 and 50 of the units in these neighborhoods will still exceed the dimensional standards that will be allowed under the neighborhood code half of our buildings in some places the current zoning ordinance is still more conservative than every ordinance before 1970 where the city had a single high restriction of 55 feet and yet we are not covered with 55 foot buildings these type of upzonings evenly distribute development pressure people had the opportunity to make small changes many of the people against this are longtime residents some have been here since the 80s why didn't these they make these types of changes in 2002 or 1994 or 90s or 87 or 74 why did we further restrict zoning instead the reclassifications are not arbitrary they were chosen based on non-conformities above 50% why is the only housing we build far away from places anyone works why is there no housing and job centers we're dealing with this small issue this is a major economic issue people are commuting to the health center from st albins or waterbury or even further now the number one contributor to co2 in vermont is vehicle travel and commuting and yet we continue to limit housing opportunities here that further exacerbate the carbon emissions that we create i want to echo the sentiment that uh upzoning rl completely to rm would be more equitable thank thank you very much um uh ursula haven't haven't haven't hoverback i do see you and i saw that you would raise your hands your hands so we'll go back to you um i've enabled your microphone you should be able to just unmute on your end hi can y'all hear me yes we can please go ahead fantastic my name is ursula haverback um my goodness some of these comments uh you know personally i was raised southern baptist i was raised you need to respect everybody um especially people's religious rights because on a base you know most religions when you read them they they teach about respect in everybody and really just being the best type person you can be whether that's christian or your baptists your Mormons um recently though i've noticed there's been a lot of people really speaking out against one specific religion i've heard it's not in here um so i've done some research as to why this could be because it baffled me you know and i i found out that they have two different religious texts one is what we all know you know the Torah then they have the talmud and my goodness some of the things i read in there uh such as yabba month 19 or i'm sorry 98a all non-jew children or animals i mean getting 57a says jesus is in hell being boiled in hot eschermint that's not even the worst though it kebemoth 11b says a man who is engaged in intercourse with a girl less than three years of age has done nothing i just at first i was upset because the whole group of people was being systematically hurt and then you hear what they believe what they're being taught from a young age and i don't know how anyone can stand behind them it breaks my heart to find out that these people are as disgusting as they are and they view us as animals i mean that says in their book that all non-jew all non-jews are beasts we're goyems we're not even human to them but we're supposed to respect them thank you so much thank you very much our next speaker is uh sharon busher and um sharon i oh yes okay sharon i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now uh thank you president paul um i sent a communication to each counselor um regarding the neighborhood code and i'm not going to obviously it would take me more than two minutes to read what i sent to all of you um and my point for the neighborhood code is that it started in the summer it was a very good process of inclusion and what evolved was a very different product at the end and so what i am asking is that because and and one one speaker said well not many people attended why didn't they attend because i think people thought that what they were told at the npa's and the coffee meetings was what was going to happen but it changed and it changed significantly so what i'm asking is that i i want to include burlingtonians i don't care whether they support it or don't support it i just want them to know what is being proposed i think it should go back to the npa's and should go back to those coffee meetings or whatever format but at least the npa's to get people awareness so that when you vote on it people you will get some feedback that is informed and i really i feel democracy should be inclusive not exclusive understand one of the peoples and architect and followed it i went to all the meetings also and spoke all the time and wrote communications but that's not the point my point is i want the public to know when we did city hall park it took a long time when the parks did their master plan it was a long process and they went back to the npa's over and over to keep them updated with changes that's all i'm asking this is a significant zoning rewrite i'm not speaking about it i there are a lot of good parts to it but i just want the public to know what you're going to vote on thank you thank you very much um our next speaker is um jake shuman and jake i have found you whoops um found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now uh good evening thank you uh excuse me i just want to say first of all thank you Sharon for your continued service to our community um i think it's really great that you get stuck into the weeds and and help find those things that might otherwise be missed that is not lost on me this is now the fifth meeting of this body that has taken place since December 11th vote and i told you at the last meeting that i'm going to keep showing up until something is done where this body says that our community has this value that we do not like hate crimes we do not like gun violence i don't think that's hard i don't think that's divisive i don't understand why that should wait until the next city council is seated i think it's incumbent upon you to deal with that before your terms are over um it seems interesting to me that before i spoke tonight five eight filled white nationalists uh put in their names their full christian names uh and spoke before this body spoke their hate um i am 33 years old and i was 17 years old and i was there when obama got inaugurated so for those first 17 years of my life i remember that racism was not any less than it is now but racists were in the closet and as a gay person i understand the experience of being in the closet but i'm here tonight saying that i believe that our shared community value is that we all believe that racists should be in the closet around here don't be spewing that nonsense in public shame thank you very much our next speaker is collin larson and and call uh collin i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak hey can you hear me yes we can please go ahead yeah real quick i want to say i'm i'm pretty appalled by the white supremacist talking points that we're hearing at city council today i know that's not the council's responsibility i do feel that you know you would have been within your rights to cut them off um with some of that stuff anyway what i'm really here to talk about is uh neighborhood code um just want to echo a lot of what jack tiano said earlier we've been through a really long process with this there were a lot of public engagement points both with the meeting um the joint committee meetings public meetings um coffee chats the planning department produced a lot of documents related to it i've just urged you to move this on this is a very common you know thing that we see with any housing zoning changes that go through lots of people come out at the very end of the process and say hey i don't like this this is going to disturb my neighborhood that i'm particularly attached to we have restrictive zoning that's developed you know over time that has frozen the city and the development state that it's in that has not enabled additional housing to meet demand i happen to think that this is the single biggest reason why we're in the predicament we're in more than anything else is restrictive zoning um so this is a way to remedy that it's a way to ensure that the city can grow more organically in the future um and uh i also think that the longer this gets sent back and forth to committees and worked on and people just get fatigued around it and then it just dies and then the people who are happy that the the zoning doesn't get updated win and they get to you know protect their little corner of the city and not allowing change or any new people to live there um and then just to address and some of the other comments people said in the joint committee meetings it was proposed to upzone the entire city to residential medium and this was you know at the end this was shot down i actually am supportive of this i do think a broad based full up zone of every single neighborhood is equitable um so hey if you want if you want to reconsider that go for it otherwise you know let's move this on and get it done thanks thank you very much our next speaker is uh Todd LaCroix and uh Todd i am unable to find you online if you are here under another name please use the raise hand function um the next speaker is uh Nolan Rogers and Nolan bless you Nolan i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now bless you hello can you hear me all right yes we can hear you just fine please go awesome uh thanks so much um thanks for the council for continuing to have these meetings and conducting them so uh officially really appreciate that despite some of the comments um i am mostly here to say uh please put the carbon fee on the ballot please vote to penalize all greenhouse gas emitting heating and generating fuels um we currently have a greenhouse gas problem not really an economic sustainability problem um so it's not really about just like fossil fuels it's about the greenhouse gases um we don't have a way to take the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere right now um at least not one that requires more energy to take the gas out then um we would use otherwise um i want i want to say also please lower the threshold for which buildings need to follow for the impact fee um 50 000 square feet is really big and we need to make the limit as low as we can for new construction um so buildings basically last forever so uh if you're not having strenuous really um defined and and penalizing laws now then those buildings are going to last forever and um like we're not going to build that many buildings so oh let's make them strict now um so we don't have to deal with it later on um and then also please op zone our community um and even go further to remove all zoning restrictions um i want medium and high density housing around me um i've lived here for a while i want to keep living here uh i kind of hate walking across really big um roads and things and having single family housing just continuing to spread uh you know shulban road and williston out into never ending flatness that requires driving everywhere um and uh yeah that's basically my whole thing i think the council has done a great job in getting these things moving i just want to keep seeing that progress continue so thank you so much thank you so much our next speaker is bob duncan and bob i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak thank you president paul i appreciate the opportunity sorry i couldn't be there in person this evening i just want to encourage you to move the neighborhood code forward in the process uh it's been a long time coming i'm not concerned about increased density i think in fact act 47 mandates increased density and would allow for increased density in all rl zones anyway i also think that our current economic climate will serve as a mitigating factor for development that folks might be concerned about because it's so incredibly expensive to build anything now that it may not even with more incentives it may not be possible but certainly increase the amount of housing that's available uh will have an impact on supply which will have an impact on demand which will have an impact costs ultimately so i encourage you to move it forward i've been living in burlington long enough to have participated in the 1974 update and i didn't understand why it was so restrictive then i spoke at meetings then asking for it to be liberalized and and less restrictive and it's been a long time coming and it's time to move it forward thank you very much thank you so much our next speaker is martin king and martin i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now here i yes we can please go ahead as a resident of burlington but all the issues surrounding our community and uh really appreciated people's takes on climate today um and really appreciate the free speech being provided for people of all opposing viewpoints that way people have their own decisions and they have their own ability to hear things hear facts and to look them up um about the climate you know as as a leftist you know an activist like i was very very involved in climate issues you know and i learned very early on that big companies the big corporations the big banks you know they have an agenda to kind of sequester that technology and to figure out a way to control it and to own it before it got released so that way they could have the maximum profits and the maximum control over the situation and the deeper i looked into it i was appalled to find out that the reality is they're not willing to change anything that they actually do you know they purchase carbon credits and they hold their symposiums and they do their thing but in the end of the day it's all corruption and what it really is is it's all about restricting the people's rights to have their ability to have wood burning stoves or you know all these separate issues and we already know that much of the environmental thing is a sham it costs way more in materials and in carbon emissions to create these so-called green energies and i just want to point out that the far left that are environmental warriors and the far right who are environmental warriors have a lot more in common than it's made out to seem and national socialism and what it represents is actually a good answer that where you can kick out the kite usury that controls this world gtvflyers.com thank you very much thank you so much thank you very much my point of order thank you president paul i point of order yes what's your point of order i have some sense here that the council is being zoom bomb so to speak by an anti-semitic organization i think i have reason to question whether or not the individuals who are speaking are actually burlington residents i know that folks in a public forum like ours have a great deal of latitude beyond what we would consider common decency under our constitution but i am questioning whether or not the individuals who are speaking are actually burlington residents and i'm wondering if if this continues whether or not the council should actually close public forum given the hate speech that's being used in our public forum thank you thank you very much council travers um when people do fill out the form there are a number of people who are really truly filling out the complete form they are putting their address um you know this we do ask you this for a reason for those people who have filled out the form and have filled it out completely and have given a straight address i will continue to call on you um the next speaker is is bill cooper um and bill i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now all righty thank you chair um yes i would like to talk about diversity i'm going to read some statistics from the fbi national incident based reporting system uh these are murder rates per demographic um per 100 and i'm bringing this up because it's a safety concern for our city uh the white female 59 per 100 000 next is the hispanic female 174 per 100 000 shockingly is the white male at 274 per 100 000 now that's shocking because the black female actually commits murder at a higher rate at 423 per 100 000 that is followed by the hispanic male who commits murder at 819 per 100 000 and the most shocking i mean it's probably not shocking to people but the black male 45 108 per 100 000 that means one in 22 black men will commit murder at some point in their life so i'm really opposed to diversity i would like to live amongst my people there are a lot my apologies to my apologies to all of you that are gathered here um you know i take people at their word when they say that they're burlington residents and they fill out the form i i take their word that they're they are and that they're here to inform us about things that really that really matter to all of us uh so my apologies um there was only one person who is left in uh online who is a non-burlington resident and um at least through at least through ways that we are trying to be able to verify who they are it does appear as though their name is not real um so we're going to continue with uh we actually have it's now 819 so we've we have we have had uh an hour not quite about 80 minutes of public forum just want to let the council know that there are two residents in um that are in con toys burlington residents that wish to speak uh a property owner or representative of burlington organization that also wishes to speak and then there are uh two non-burlington residents so hopefully we can cover that in 90 minutes but just wanted to let you all know um the two burlington residents that wish to speak uh one of them is harry dorer and the other is lee morrigan good evening welcome sorry your mic yeah the microphone just in front of you there should be a little there's a thing that says push right on the base okay there you go please start again thank you um good evening i'm harry dorer i live in burlington as a college student um and i wanted to come speak in support of the changes to the neighborhood code um i hope that the city will uh advance these changes to uh more public hearings um as we all know many cities in our country are facing housing crises um the state of vermont uh has set goals for building new housing units by 2030 and i believe that the burlington area must accommodate like 10 000 of those new units and increased density is a very good tool to help us meet those goals that is all thank you thank you very much our next speaker is lee morrigan good evening lee hello hi my name is lee morrigan my pronouns are they them i live in word seven and i am a very proud trans person i feel moved by the spirit to be uh claiming my seat tonight and i just want to say that it is because of the actions of this council and this administration that i feel perfectly safe in this room tonight and there is nothing that anybody could say tonight or any other night that would make me feel unsafe and that truly is because of the actions that this council has passed and you know i i just hope that that my community understands that the most effective form of resistance is trans joy you know i i said over and over again i'm kind of a very dangerous thing to people who don't like me i'm trans i'm happy and i'm successful you know we have to keep doing that and so i just again i want to thank you because you all are the reason why when i step out of here in a few minutes to go on with my night i will be leaving feeling just as good about myself as i did when i walked in so thank you to everybody thank you very thank you very much lee uh we do have um we have three more speakers and then there is one speaker that signed that has just signed up online uh so the next speaker is um elizabeth dolce um you'll you'll correct my you'll correct my bad pronunciation to be followed by neil londerville and then karen cita good evening good evening elizabeth paul check um thank you for your service difficult things to navigate uh my comments tonight are um i'm representing the university of vermont i run our office of sustainability and these comments are regarding the carbon impact fee resolutions on the agenda um uvm has a 2030 carbon neutrality goal that aligns with burlington's net zero goals and we hear the concerns of our students loud and clear and we take them very seriously we advocate tonight for moving forward with the fee in its current form allowing uvm to establish systems and processes to analyze and track the costs of the new fee on our buildings and then build that information into our decision making processes we were heavily engaged in the development of the current fee we built a strong working partnership with bd during this process and we support the implementation in the documents under review tonight we applaud the inclusion of permission to use payers fees on projects in our own buildings uh this will help us deliver on ghg reductions and we also applaud the inclusion of extensive analysis and stakeholder input of implementation options in the implementation resolution however we have concerns about these resolutions in the carbon ballot fee item resolution under discussion tonight there's a proposal to exclude renewable natural gas as an allowable fuel the proposal is that the allowance of the fuel incentivizes its youth further emitting greenhouse gas emissions um but we're actively drilling for geothermal energy on our campus and we need time to look at those analyses and build the buildings and build the infrastructure so rng and geothermal in our view are not mutually exclusive um in the interim if vgs offers an option that reduces ghg emissions we would like to use it without penalty so we'd like to focus on the operational implementation of a very strong new carbon impact fee and get to work on the policy that you've passed thank you thank you so much our next speaker is neil londerville to be followed by karen cita good evening good evening counselors and first thank you for your service especially in the face of such terrible horrific comments tonight i'm neil londerville president ceo of vgs formerly general manager burlington electric for four years and i am passionate and dedicated to bold climate action paired with sensible energy policy in the state of vermont at vgs we welcome an ongoing and robust partnership with the city and our goal and our shared goal of combating climate change i was proud to sit here just a few months ago to support renewable district energy from the wood burning generator at the mcneil plant in that spirit i'm here tonight to urge your vote against the 8.3 the carbon fee ballot question that was fast tracked for the council for consideration that action will will slow efforts to cut emissions it will increase costing complexity for customers and undermine progress to meet the state's global warming solutions act the state of vermont has recognized that we must use data and science to make good decisions to smartly reduce emissions this is not the time for a doctrine error approach that puts a thumb on the scale of one solution over another specifically prohibiting proven alternative supply options like renewable natural gas runs counter to the expert testimony given to this council on the committees it contradicts the public utility commission which is time and time again ruled to support renewable natural gas as an effective solution to fighting climate change it undermines vermont legislature including every single brewing representative and senator who voted to unanimously codify and statue renewable natural gas as a viable alternative supply measure and finally it goes against recent decision of vermont supreme court that ruled unanimously to affirm the public utility commission's finding that renewable natural gas supports the requirements of the global warming solutions act to say that the council proposed action is on shaky ground is an understatement pros the council stay true to the course and not support this measure thank you thank you so much uh so our last speaker uh is karen sida good evening madam president and the rest of y'all may i start madam president okay great i'm in my justice nancy waple's era that's why i have red lips because i'm going to tell the truth and nothing but the truth so help me god all right so to my muslim beloved friends salam aleyka to my people dear allah my friend my dear dear beloved friend does he know that you guys are going to allow a lesbian woman to be your next mayor a one that's okay with children changing their gender does allah know this make sure you ask him next time you face the east to my jewish people i speak to you as a woman with a black woman with a hebrou name a jewess myself does your jewish mothers and rabbis know that you're gonna like this woman are they aware that you guys are refusing to use your intellect and knowledge to realize just how deceptive and problematic she is for the city now listen i want the best for vermont's that's why i constantly speak out that's why i'm constantly here it's out of love i operate out of love and nothing but love and it's time for us to operate and love for the city and recognize what's good for us now with the whole diversity and equity i have problems with that too one if they really cared about diversity they would hire black women that were married you can't find any black women that were married preferably to a black man way to inspire the children way to inspire black children to marry black be with black but they couldn't do that again you know we need to understand this woman who just came here and said that she's so happy to be a transgender woman ask her that one in two a.m. in the morning when there's no one's around i mean with these cameras people are good actors and i know an oscar winning actors okay point of order thank you no we're not going to continue that i'm sorry speak free speech no that is no i'm sorry i said love didn't i not say love no thank you karen thank you rin uh we're going to move on we're going to move on we're going to move on point of information all right yes what is your point is your point of information counselor hi we're not in russia this is america free speeches free speech under the law protected you can fight me in the supreme court if you like i'll love to meet you there great i just want to say for everyone who just saw this public forum that thank you for being citizens of burlington black and brown bodies belong in burlington lgbtq bodies belong in burlington um jewish bodies belong in burlington muslim bodies belong in burlington and i'm just so happy that we are the community that we are and that we have all the people in it that we do and thank you for being here uh thank thank you so much uh to all who came and spoke during public forum uh we're going to continue with our next and we're going to close the public forum at 8 30 um our next agenda item is item number seven our consent agenda uh is there a motion to move our consent agenda um and take the actions indicated thank you so much counselor uh travers is there a second to that motion thank you counselor barlow is there any discussion on that motion seeing none all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye any opposed please say no uh that motion passes unanimously and we've approved our consent agenda uh that moves us to our deliberative agenda um we have um we have a number of items on our our deliberative agenda uh just a general reminder to all counselors regarding the five-minute rule please do your best to self monitor and be mindful of your time and i will kindly interrupt you if you uh go way over that limit um but please try not to um i have no desire to interrupt anybody um the first item on our agenda is item 8.1 which is an ordinance uh za 2402 regarding the neighborhood code and uh we have a presentation but before we get to that uh we will go to a motion and for that i'll go to the chair of the ordinance committee uh counselor travers thank you very much president paul i would move to waive the readings suspend the rules and warn the proposed ordinance on 8.1 for public hearing i would ask for the floor back upon a second great thank you so much councillor travers is there is there a second to that motion uh seconded by councillor carpenter councillor travers the floor is yours thank you very much president paul um so i'm very excited by the neighborhood code proposal that has now made its way to the full city council we have here with us uh director tuttle and sarah morgan from our planning department as well as the chair of the planning commission uh andy montroll uh who will be able to speak to this in more detail um but just very briefly it was a privilege as chair of the ordinance committee along with councillor carpenter councillor shannon and councillor hightower to uh join the planning commission in an extensive process in reviewing the proposal that is now before you um before that process began i've i've said it to director tuttle and i'll say it now i believe our planning department has really been uh sort of the standard bearer for our city in terms of public engagement and allowing uh our community members an opportunity to weigh in on these items the community discussion on the neighborhood code started many months ago with public meetings jointly held with organizations like the aarp where public feedback was solicited in in building the proposal that ultimately was brought forward before our joint committee uh the joint committee started meeting on on wednesday october fourth and nine meetings of that committee were held since then i know director tuttle will be able to speak to it more but i believe during this process there's also been a number of other public meetings opportunities for public engagement including at um our neighborhood planning assemblies if if i'm not mistaken um the item that we now have before us again director tuttle and chair montroll will be able to speak to it in in greater detail but in very broad strokes this review was prompted at least in part by a statewide law known as the home act which is requiring municipalities like burlington to consider significant upzoning as many folks during the joint committee process and spoke here this evening upzoning is incredibly important to burlington being a more livable and sustainable city to our addressing our climate goals to being a denser and i believe the proposal that's before the committee right now strikes an important balance to those goals as we'll hear in the presentation over the course of these nine meetings the committee really on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis took a look at maps and data to determine the best path forward from our perspective there was a significant debate uh on on each of these neighborhoods but ultimately the proposal before you right now is is is far from arbitrary um it was the result of a careful deliberative process um in broad strokes you know we've heard some discussion now between the differences between low residential zones and and medium residential zones um the biggest difference in terms of the proposal before you right now is in terms of lot coverage right now if you're low residential your your permissive lot coverage is is less than 40 percent under the neighborhood code and a low residential zone your permissible lot coverage would increase to 45 percent in a medium residential zone your lot coverage would increase to 60 percent and we really took a look at the data and what the data showed is in those neighborhoods that the proposal is putting forward as as being increased to residential medium meaning that it could increase to 60 percent lot coverage in those neighborhoods more than 50 percent of the lots for the most part are are currently greater than 45 percent lot coverage so if if that neighborhood was kept at low residential then again more than half the lots in those neighborhoods would be in a place where they could not grow any further if you look at those areas that the proposal still has as low residential you'll find that the number of lots that are less than 45 percent lot coverage are are are are significant so with both those neighborhoods that are proposed for residential medium and residential low it's allowing a great opportunity for lots that have historically been limited in the ability to grow to expand for additions and renovations it goes even further than that many neighbors have had hurdles to being able to grow in place that's my understanding as to why an organization like the AARP has been involved in this because they are are limited in their ability to to renovate because of issues non-conformity issues like in terms of lot size and setbacks I could ramble on much further but Megan and Andy will be able to speak to it greater than this I'm looking forward to the presentation and the discussion to come and think this is a very exciting proposal thank you thank you so much Councillor Traver so we've a lot about 45 minutes for this presentation thank you all for being here and then we'll have an opportunity for a little discussion great thank you so much President Paul and to Councillor Traverse for that opening we are going to start off our presentation of the neighborhood code to you tonight with some remarks from the Planning Commission Chair Andy Montrell and we also online have Kelly Stoddard-Pore who's the Associate State Director for AARP who has been a partner in both providing us with engagement support and technical assistance support that has contributed to the code that's come forward so we're going to hear from them both briefly and then Sarah and I will present the more of the specifics about what's in front of you tonight thank you I'm going to be relatively brief with my comments but thank you Councillor President Paul so on behalf of our Joint Committee with the Planning Commission and the City Council Ordinance Committee we're really pleased to present to you and to bring to you tonight our neighborhood code that we've been working on for quite a while now has been said on our committee we had on our Joint Committee we had nine different meetings beginning in October but the work on this code predates that by probably a year or two if not more the Planning Commission and Planning staff have been working at this for quite a while laying the groundwork that that culminated in our meetings over the last four months or so what came to us at the beginning in October wasn't the beginning of the process but it was as we brought all the pieces together the code together the proposed code together a lot of the thoughts together together and that's when our committee started work so as Councillor Traverse said when we began on each of the different subjects our committee was far from unanimous we brought a broad range of perspectives to it and as we had our discussions people came together we all listened to each other we heard each other we heard from members of the public we heard from many members of the public and listened to the collective voices that were being that were being spoken and through that process came together and ultimately unanimously supported moving this forward with the exception of one member who wasn't present at that meeting so what comes to you is you has the unanimous support of our committee and what our goals were were to make Burlington's code comply with the new state law on the housing issues implement begin to implement further our comprehensive plan that was adopted by the council I think a couple years ago or a few years ago listen to the housing standards put forth by the mayor's office and address the significant housing crisis that we're facing here in Burlington today bringing all those pieces together resulted in the code that's in front of you today and with that I will turn it over to Megan and Sarah who I think have done just a phenomenal job pulling all the pieces together and helping us through the process I I will just say the work that you see in front of you today could not have been done without the just the amazing work of our planning staff so thank you thank you Andy and Kelly would you like to share a perspective before we dive in yes thank you so much hi everyone I'm Kelly Stutter poor with AARP Vermont I'm the associate state director and I'd want to first on behalf of AARP Vermont thank the planning commission the ordinance committee members and the staff at the office of city planning for the tremendous amount of work and time that has been put into developing the neighborhood code and for your leadership on for taking action to address the needs around housing for Burlingtonians AARP Vermont supports the efforts of the zoning changes outlined in the neighborhood code as we know there is a real shortage of housing but particularly there's a shortage of specific housing types such as duplexes forplexes cottage courts because they're not allowed to be built right now due to zoning constraints at AARP we see that as a problem because there are significant benefits of this largely missing housing type especially when we're considering the demand the increased demand for smaller more affordable homes among older adults and there is a real mismatch between the types of housing that's available on the market and the types of housing that people need and that they want it is no surprise to everybody here but we are an aging population and as we age our needs change and the homes that we've lived in for many years may no longer fit our needs or our lifestyles our kids move out of the house bedrooms can sit empty mobility changes or mobility creates new challenges for us making sometimes climbing stairs difficult or maintaining our home and a large yard can also be challenging even if older adults want to downsize in Burlington from their larger single family home for a more modestly sized alternative the current housing supply isn't meeting their needs and for too many older adults downsizing can often mean leaving Burlington altogether by allowing for the construction of smaller more age friendly homes we can respond to the changing demographics and housing needs of Burlingtonians what we call as missing middle housing is good for older adults and we also think it's good for families too because it provides more housing options and this can include multi-generational housing and ultimately making more inclusive walkable and diverse neighborhoods for community members we know that missing middle housing in the neighborhood code is not a silver bullet and it won't solve all of our housing issues but it is an important part of the solution as it addresses the mismatch between housing the housing stock and our housing needs it helps with affordability and it uses the available land and infrastructure efficiently in the city over the course of the last several years we have worked really closely with the office of city planning on a number of initiatives um that we have invested in after we worked on accessory dwelling units and this included technical assistance that we brought in from the congress for new urbanism to help do a code audit doing a code reform roadmap for Burlington and then this followed with bringing an opticoast design to conduct test fit tests so modeling potential for middle housing types in Burlington on Burlington City lots um and then last in June of sorry July of 2022 um ARP we launched a citywide livability survey uh surveying those 18 and older on a number of livable issues and we it showed very strong support for this sort of gentle infill development and for housing and this missing middle housing types that people wanted we also worked closely with the city on engagement and stakeholder outreach facilitating a workshop in October of 22 to really talk about the opportunities and barriers facing housing and then doing a number of missing middle housing walking tours and facilitating community conversations and public coffee chats um in all the neighborhoods in the city so housing needs change as we age but it is also possible for our homes and our communities to be livable for people of all ages and life stages the neighborhood code will support the city's efforts to be a more livable age-friendly community and expand housing options building upon the existing neighborhood character and we're really excited to see this move forward thank you so much for the chance to to share our perspective from ARP thank you Kelly um so we'll dive into the presentation that we've prepared for the council tonight um as councillor Traverson and um chair Andy Montrell noted we are coming back to you tonight with the proposed neighborhood code as a result of the joint committee's process over the fall we were here back in the fall to propose the joint committee process to you as a way to bring together the perspectives and priorities of both the planning commission and the city council um so we're here to share that tonight and I think as a refresher we'll just note that um the neighborhood code is talking about a range of housing types that we talk about as being um kind of fitting in alongside existing neighborhoods this explicitly includes allowing duplex triplex and four unit buildings citywide and also enabling more uh small multi-unit buildings and townhouse type buildings in some locations as well um we'll skip over the next slide because I think all the speakers before us have covered this and I'll turn it over to Sarah for just a little bit of a background great guess we'll we'll be pretty brief I think our speakers did a really great job in summarizing a lot of what this is about um a lot of our most recent uh residential amendments have focused in this area that's planning to grow um which is mainly focused on more intensive development across burlington which is really also focused on a lot of downtown and these are mainly large scale apartments uh large scale of residential uh which while we've been very successful in adding about 1,300 new homes across the city over the last decade the last majority or the vast majority have been uh downtown in these large in these large developments and we know that these locations as pointed out um by AARP don't necessarily meet all the changing needs across one's lifetime and the neighborhood code is about really the these areas in the map on the right uh focused on the 40 percent of our city in residential areas and how they can be a place to allow for more and different housing types and this proposal recognizes that our neighborhoods can and should be a place that support the needs of current and future households in burlington as well as help us address and respond to the chronic emerging housing challenges and make a tangible effort to address the climate emergency in an incremental way these are some examples of middle housing types in burlington that exist today and one in south burlington we can see an example of the cottage court on the bottom right of the screen and these are the housing types that focus that are the focus of the neighborhood code and very few of these are explicitly allowed and permitted in burlington at the moment and for many of those that are theoretically allowed the standards present major roadblocks for realizing them the goal of the neighborhood code is to make it more feasible for these housing opportunities across the city and over the course of the discussions uh with the joint committee small multi-unit apartment buildings were discussed in some areas that we'll talk about and address in this presentation with the neighborhood code seeking to make it easier to build these uh build these housing types we know zoning changes alone are not going to resolve all of these challenges the joint committees work and with other stakeholders and community conversations over the last year we know that we know that things like cost of land cost of new construction building codes utility connections and other realities mean that these will be hard to create in a lot of cases and while we've had success with recent with the recent work supporting ad use in the last few years we've seen just a dozen new ad use created since and we expect that this could support 100 that we suspect that the neighborhood code could allow for hundreds of new units across the city this could be achieved over time and it's important it is an important addition and step to our housing stock but is not necessarily as intense of a growth that can be achieved in other mixed use areas across the city and just one quick note uh that's we've seen dozens of ad use just dozens of ad use um that's an important point because we have seen success with that thank you now the focus of the neighborhood code is in areas with the within the residential districts such as low density medium density and high density and the neighborhood layer really paints a almost incomplete picture of the city because it is important to also acknowledge that there are mixed use districts in this yellow layer that also allow for housing at a variety of different scales including multi unit buildings housing for institutions and other other mixed uses and about the about 40 of the city's land area within the district does not allow multi family uh or i'm sorry the about 40 of the city's land area across the city is can serve for parks and open space as opposed to residential districts and outside of these areas only a small portion of the city's otherwise otherwise prohibits residential uses mainly the remainder of the enterprise district in the south end great so um we provided that background just to share how this fits into the framework of our comprehensive planning goals which andy mentioned at the beginning one of the things that we are also working towards in this neighborhood code is to comply with some of the standards of the home act there were many pieces of the home act that relate to burlington but just four of these major issues that we have been specifically trying to address in the neighborhood code the first is that the home act requires minimum residential densities of five units per acre right now most of burlington zoning ordinance zoning districts allow that density actually greater than that density with an asterisks we do have what is called the rl larger lot overlay which applies to some neighborhoods within the rl district that district actually limits residential density to a lower standard than what is required so we needed to address that um we also know that the combination of things like lot size requirements setbacks and other standards that regulate what can be built on a lot actually have the effect of reducing the allowable density of what could be built to less than what our zoning allows otherwise so in in many ways we technically were not meeting the standards even though our zoning said that we theoretically were so the main way that the neighborhood code proposes to deal with this is by regulating building mass and scale instead of a numerical density based on a lot size and we'll talk about that here a little bit more the second major issue is that duplex and single family homes with accessory dwelling units must be treated the same as a single family home without an accessory dwelling unit right now in our zoning standards in residential low districts we actually require that lots are larger in order to have a duplex than they would otherwise be to have a single family home so through an iterative discussion with the joint committee about potential ways we could resolve this the proposal ultimately was to remove the minimum lot size required in rl which i'll note is the only district in the city currently that requires a minimum lot size the next issue is that statewide anywhere that is served by water and sewer must require three and four unit buildings as an allowable use anywhere other residential uses are allowed in burlington this is effectively all of the city we do not currently allow three and four unit buildings in the rl zone even though we have density standards that suggest that you might be able to so again the neighborhood code proposes to replace some of these standards with specific provisions that would allow up to four units per building in the residential low district six in the residential medium and allow new and other types of housing construction in the residential high and along these new corridors and then the final issue relates to just the review standards the discretionary review standards that boards like the development review board are allowed to apply to permits housing projects that they review the state specifically says that that process may not otherwise limit the density building footprint or height that would be required other than what is allowed in the ordinance and while burlington is not explicitly out of compliance with this we do have a development review process we are proposing to maintain it we do propose some clarifying standards in our language about the development review process to make sure we're meeting that as others have alluded we have a long history of doing research performing analyses i'm not going to read this slide to you i'm happy to share this updated slide as part of your package that's on board docs but the point here is that um we have provided a number of analyses that have helped us better understand what's on the ground in certain neighborhoods today how that relates to our existing zoning and ultimately what the outcomes would be of the neighborhood code recommendations both in terms of the sort of policy level um thinking about different areas of the city that would be impacted and also working with we've been working with an incredibly bright group of architects and designers that have been helping us work through the realities of what would it actually mean for buildings to be developed using these standards and making sure they're meeting our intent what we've learned through this process is that i think we've shared some of this with you before is that while we have zoning standards in place today that um seem like they are kind of articulating a vision for our neighborhoods we know that some of these standards don't reflect what's already been built and in fact almost 40 of the properties that are in our residential neighborhoods don't actually conform to some of the zoning standards we have in place today we've been focused on this issue because it's important in terms of thinking about how properties that exist today even evolve in the future if your property is already over the lock coverage limit allowed in zoning adding an addition on the back of your home could even be very difficult in order to provide flexibility for what your home can do in the future let alone any potential for expansion that might create new opportunities for new homes we also know as we've meant as i've mentioned that some of these standards serve to actually prohibit things that our code has theoretically allowed i think in the context of housing discussions across the country i'm really proud to say that burlington has very rarely had a period in its history of zoning where it hasn't at least allowed duplexes in every part of the city but we know that the combination of our zoning standards has actually meant that about half of properties in our residential neighborhoods actually can't meet the rules in order to actually have a duplex and you can see if you can see the red green on this map you can see that sometimes what this means is that the neighborhoods where theoretically are unwalkable locations close to bus lines close to bike lanes close to neighborhoods supporting commercial uses can tend to be the ones that have smaller lots and are effectively the places where we can't have those housing types we also know that some of these standards don't directly translate into the types of housing that we may be okay with seeing more of in our community we've used this example a number of times these are four duplexes that are all within a couple blocks of each other in the old north end nearly identical in every way in terms of their shape and what they offer as homes however our density limits today as a units per acre standard mean that only the two on the left could be built new today and the two on the right could not even though they're nearly identical this is just a function of how large the lot is and can is just another example of the things that we learn as we dug more into the effect of our zoning code as we think about some of the other housing types that we don't have as much of here in burlington and particularly as we think about you know we hear a lot about home ownership and the interest in expanding home ownership we've also heard a lot about the interest in having more free standing home opportunities in the city or single family homes we don't have a lot of land in the city to build out with those new housing types so we have to get more creative about ways that we can find infill sites within existing neighborhoods that can accommodate more of those housing types and so that's where something like this cottage court example becomes really important kelly mentioned some of the resources the AARP has been able to help us with actually connecting with architects that helped us look at a real lot in the new north end and explore how five additional single family type homes could share one existing one acre lot there are many reasons why our zoning wouldn't allow this we similarly have been looking at places again along transit lines and along our major bike infrastructure that could allow for more of these small infill building types that would allow for more housing in those locations and trying to uncover the ways in which our standards do not allow those today so I share those examples just to say that while the package of zoning amendments that's in front of you seems very dense it is very dense there are a number of recommendations that we've been able to distill out that are the most impactful when we think about some of those barriers that we're seeing today and the proposed neighborhood code suggests changes to things like minimum lot sizes lot coverage a switch from regulating density to regulating the sort of form and intensity of buildings through things like footprints height and numbers of stories and does propose some changes to the boundaries of these districts in order to ensure that all neighborhoods have opportunities to access the new housing types that are being proposed by the neighborhood code I won't go into detail about what's summarized in this chart but Sarah put together this very helpful overview of how the existing standards for everything from lot coverage and setback to density exist in our various zoning districts today and how that would be proposed to change under the neighborhood code you've heard other people reference that some of the the most important changes are to the lot size that is required we are proposing to eliminate the minimum lot size requirement that remains we are proposing to increase modestly the allowable lot coverage percent for RL and RM and we are proposing new standards that would regulate the overall size of buildings both in terms of their footprint and their overall height as we've been thinking about these recommendations and working through them with the committee we've been applying them back to neighbor different neighborhood context here in Burlington you can see you can't see if you're sitting in the room but hopefully you can see online that we have been trying to fit these different housing types that could be created as a result of this code into different RL and RM neighborhood context to understand what both existing buildings with new units in the backyard or additions might look like as well as new buildings entirely how they would fit into the sort of existing pattern of neighborhoods we have in the city we've also been looking at this at the sort of lot level and thinking through how would this actually get implemented what could new buildings look like what could additions to buildings look like or what could new buildings in the backyards of existing homes look like and trying to understand kind of what the scale and order of magnitude might look like from some of these changes we have been talking about a different sort of framework for the residential high and residential court this new residential corridor district this is one of the things that evolved over the course of the joint committee's discussion we heard a lot of interest in places like North Avenue places like Shelburne Road corridor that currently have low density zoning applied to them to allow a much more permissive overall framework and this is one of the places where Andy mentioned that we found some compromise in allowing for taking this sort of framework where we were trying to promote zoning that could allow for a row of maybe three to five townhomes and saying you know if we feel comfortable with buildings of that scale that could allow for those housing types should we allow for buildings of that size to be more flexible in terms of also allowing them to have multiple units in them as well and so this is one of the things that came out of that that committee process for this new residential corridor and then again we've been applying this to real lots and trying to understand what the cumulative effect of these changes could be you know how large would a lot be that need to be in order to actually accommodate two buildings surprisingly still pretty large but trying to test out and see you know if somebody is complying with all of these rules what is a potential realistic case that could be implemented as a result and that third distilled point discusses about the changing of the residential boundaries and the residential districts right now we have five residential zoning districts residential low density waterfront low density medium density waterfront medium density and high density and the first of these proposed recommendations is to streamline the existing zoning districts by combining waterfront low density with existing low density as well as medium density with waterfront medium density this would impact areas like South Cove and Appletree Point as well as the Tank Farm at the end of Flynn Avenue and one that's in a lot of our conversations is focusing on the RL and RM and other areas that might be misaligned or what the zoning might not reflect what's on the ground today and how we can really overcome those barriers to allow for those housing type housing types so this would involve rezoning areas like the old old north end east or that north hill area five sisters south union and climber Hoover and lakeside from RL to RM as well as the area at the intersection near Pine and Maple which is surrounded by downtown and south end commercial zoning districts from RM to RH and you can see here one key point one key criteria for the decision to move from low density to or from low density to low intensity would be the close alignment with the lock coverage so you can see online hopefully you can see on the screen here you can see the over 45% lock cover parcels and within these districts in brown with that over 45% lock cover would be non conforming with that lock cover and really not allow for future development this would allow them to closely align with what's on the ground and provide that housing flexibility and the initial recommendation made those distinct those very strong distinct distinctions and uses with lock coverage in each district I'm just going to pause really quick right here too because I'll note that in the spirit of you know sharing what things the committee really grappled with this was another one of them we really dug in really deeply to the number of properties in different neighborhoods that conform to either our existing zoning or the proposed standards and talked a lot about the overall number of units that should be permitted in buildings and ultimately the committee spent a lot of time thinking carefully about what this proposed map should look like and and the decision to make a distinction between RL and RM in terms of the maximum number of units that could be allowed in a building we came back to that a lot because there was a recognition that in neighborhoods that are RM there are examples of properties that have more than four units already and that there was an understanding that some of these neighborhoods might be good locations again in walkable places that might be able to accommodate more units in a building than in other areas so that is one distinction that came out of the committee over the course of their work. Additional map related changes involves the corridor zone that Megan had just mentioned this would allow for a greater flexibility of those housing types along major thoroughfares including North Avenue, Colchester Avenue, Shelburne Road and St. Paul Street and this is an effort to allow for more development along transportation oriented areas this also includes a rezoning of Champlain Elementary over Pine Street from RL to RM which is reflected which is to help implement the vision for that infill housing from plan BTV south end and there are two other additional smaller zoning recommendations including 60 Austin Drive and a portion of 2076 North Ave two moving portions of those two RL to allow for residential housing development where it is not allowed today. All right so this just summarizes the overall changes that would be recommended by the neighborhood code in terms of how the maps would change again on the left is existing and on the right is the proposed map. We also talked about some related issues I'll move through these pretty quickly as a joint committee we again we talked about the fact that we have this RL large lot overlay zone that it does not meet either the standards that are required by Act 47 nor the goal that we had identified for the RL districts citywide and the committee recommended removing that overlay zone which currently applies to just three small neighborhood areas. We are also proposing to eliminate what is called the RH high density bonus overlay this was created at one point in time to help facilitate the redevelopment of some commercial properties immediately adjacent to downtown and it has no functional utility remaining based on the way that it's written so we felt like that was a pretty easy one to clean up. We also heard a lot of feedback from the public over the course of our meetings about enabling more commercial uses in residential areas this is something that some communities in across the country have tackled in a much more you know progressive way I guess I'll say we felt as a committee that we wanted to make sure we were keeping the focus on our housing goals as part of the neighborhood code but did recognize that we were hearing a lot of support for the idea of expanding commercial uses and making overall making commercial uses more walkable to all of our neighborhoods across the city. So the neighborhood code recommends that for the residential corridor areas again North Ave, Shelburne and and Colchester that uses like restaurants small grocery stores dry cleaners would be allowed in that new district and this really helps us to expand on existing rules that we have for how commercial uses could be incorporated in historic or existing commercial buildings within our residential districts and also allow for home occupations. So Sarah helped us just kind of map where parcels in the city that could theoretically have commercial uses on them today how that would relate to the walkability from different areas of the city. The green shows people that would be within a five minute walk of an area that could allow for commercial uses and under the neighborhood code you can see how that expands that the vast majority of the city's neighborhoods could be within a five minute walk distance including within the new north end which is something we hear about a lot and then I think to just bring it home here we've got just two more slides just a quick highlight of our outreach last fall fall of 2022 we had some very well attended opportunities to provide education on what missing middle housing is as well as how these zoning issues affect the housing choices available across the city. I think we saw several people come out to our trivia night and this past summer we transitioned to discussing the recommendations and getting more specific feedback on what this mix of housing types could look like and what that looked like in various neighborhood scenarios. You saw you probably saw a variety of different farmers markets, beach bites, coffee chats with AARP with our scenarios and just discussing what these look like and what it means to have a neighborhood scale multi-unit in your neighborhood and recently we've been we've been presenting on general frameworks of what this neighborhood code is intended to do and have invited public participation in the joint committees last nine meetings spanning October to January. All right and then the last thing to close us out the recommended zoning changes that are on your agenda tonight are just the first part of the neighborhood code work. The joint committee recognized that as we start to dig into the regulations in our residential districts there are many many related pieces and we tried to bring you an amendment that addressed the core issues related to some of these goals we've articulated but we know we have other things that we need to do namely we need to spend more time working through some of the specifics for how a cottage court could be implemented in the city. This is something that the committee really wanted and supported and that the planning commission will keep working on. We know we also need to dig in and do some more work around the standards for unique small lot configurations so that we can enable more freestanding developable lots particularly if we want to see more single family homes developed from existing lots and then there's a bunch of related standards that have to deal with or that deal with how we translate some of our existing planned unit development standards or development bonuses that apply to our existing residential districts that we'll need to work through in a subsequent amendment. You also see here that there are a ton of issues that came up over the course of this conversation that we agreed are very important issues for the city to talk about but we're not directly within the purview of the neighborhood code so we tried over the course of the committee's work to capture these issues and make sure that people saw and understood that we were hearing them and add them to the future work plans of the planning commission and your ordinance committee as well. So I think that's it for us and happy to answer any questions that you might have. Great, thank you. Thanks so much for this presentation. We'll go to the council for questions, comments, to our guests or others regarding the neighborhood code. Councillor Bergman. Sure, why not start. So thank you. That's really good. I have been focused on lots of other stuff. I have to admit to all you all, to everybody, I have not focused on this and let me be honest it's overwhelming and anybody who would be in my situation who is not overwhelmed by the detail and the seriousness of this is either an Einstein or is fooling themselves and everybody else. Okay, so with that let me just say that I know we need lots of housing and as a general proposition I look at all of the work that you've done and I go, oh this all looks great. So really what I'm needing to do is grapple with where it all meets the road, the actuality of stuff. So let me just, I've got a few things that I need to understand. What's the time frame for this? I mean we're referring it for public hearing. The motion didn't include a first reading so I just really need to understand what we can expect so that I can understand how much I've got to reorient all the other work I'm doing and focus on this. So the Joint Committee wanted to refer this to the Council in order to give you time to consider it if you wanted during this current Council's term. Tonight the action that was recommended was to warn it for a public hearing which would realistically happen in about a month and would give you opportunity to hear from members of the community and from each other about what's proposed and would also give the Council time to make any potential changes and have another public hearing based on that feedback before the end of this Council's term. So I think the timing in terms of what you would like to do with this as next steps is within the purview of the Council. So we're here for another two months as a sitting Council about 60 days. So I don't know that that is too much or too little for us. I mean depends on how vigorous we act and how much objections there are to detail. So I just want to lay that out and I would just say that I'm in favor of referring this to public hearing because that's where you actually get the particular objections to the particular proposals and I would just say for those of you who have spoken tonight in opposition to that for a decision maker like myself it will be very helpful to tie specific objections to specific provisions because generalities is really not where we can where I can fully understand what to do since in a general frame in the general framework is we're looking to increase housing. So I would just sort of make that and encourage that and encourage a process that would do that. And one particular question is why didn't you upzone the whole city? Yeah, I support that by the way. You know, just as well. So I think as Councilor Traverse mentioned the proposal that we initially brought forward was primarily looking at how all properties citywide could be allowed to have up to a four unit building and or multiple buildings on a lot. That was our main focus is making sure all neighborhoods had similar opportunities for those housing types. And in terms of whether or not to recommend a neighborhood be zoned RL or RM just has to do with the specifics on the ground. How big are the lots? How much is the existing coverage of impermeable surface on those lots versus how much of how much land is there that somebody could actually add units on. And ultimately one of the things that we saw as being really important was the lot size and the lot coverage as being important levers to ensure that all neighborhoods either had that opportunity or didn't. So for us our initial staff recommendations were based on that. Over the course of the committee's discussion there was also interest in considering the number of units that could be allowed in a building and that became another factor in terms of some of the discussions about RL or RM. But I would say that the neighborhood code together on the whole represents opportunities for increased housing in every neighborhood. If I could just add to that, the committee was very split on that. We had a lot of discussion whether the RL should be converted to RM throughout the city but ultimately by a split. But it was decided to do it the way that's being proposed in large part because what we ended up focusing on was opportunities for new housing on lots. And in the places where we decided, where the committee decided to allow the change from RL to RM, those were the ones that in the current way it is right now there's very little opportunity overall in those districts to allow more housing on them. In the other lots, in the ones in RL that are opposed to remain RL, there's still in those areas a lot of opportunity for more housing there. So really we look to see what was on the ground and where the opportunities were. But it was a fairly tight vote on that or tight consensus on that. I'm probably close to my time. So let me just say it would be, we heard from former Councillor Busher that what started out as a missing middle had morphed into something much bigger. There were concerns about stormwater and the loss of green space. It would be really helpful to me to have the specific objections that have been placed into the public record already addressed with references to the sections that are applicable and how we're going to deal with that. We have heard that stormwater on Willard Street around Pearl which would cover this. I mean it just inundates the area. So Paul Beerman has said this for 20 years and we want to make sure that we don't want to exacerbate it. I have a constituent on Booth Street who is talking about the great density that exists in the Loomis Street area particularly with college students. We heard that here tonight. I got an email about this. So those are serious concerns because as far as I'm concerned that area is really dense right now. The Loomis Street, School Street, Green Street, Hickok Place. So I just need to understand that. And the last point I would just make and we're talking about this in two is in doing the zoning, to me it would be important to also deal with the siting so that we can maximize and this is more other places in the city than the old North End. To be able to have solar installations on rooftops and we heard that there may not have been a consideration or maybe that's a part due. I don't know but I just want to throw that out in terms of the maximization as we are going to do this. We want to be able to maximize the amount of solar that we can get on our rooftops to deal with all the climate issues that we've got. And thank you for your indulgence. No worries. We'll move on. Councillor Grant I do see you. Councillor Hightower will go and then we'll come to you Councillor Grant. I think I just have to say because I have to say it every time we have such a great planning office and I just love working with you in the way that you can have a committee of not just the planning committee but city council committee ordinance committee which even has extra people on it so just so many people go through the process I think just speaks a lot to how your office works and tries to be a really neutral information provider and just so much appreciation to you all. I think it's hard because to some like worse like I do think that there's a little bit of like nimbyism that was going on with the up zoning of like people being like well I don't want this in my area or if I do want it in my area then I want it in everyone. I am supportive of up zoning the whole city to RM but that being said it's like I don't think that like I was on the development review board for a while and there's also cost to being you know in a lot of our neighborhoods in the east end the majority of the homes are already so when we're saying that's already dense that means there won't be a lot of opportunity even after we up zone to infill any more housing because it actually already is at that at that next level and so when we say in the north hill section that 68 percent of homes already have locked coverage over 45 percent that means that those probably won't actually 68 percent of homes probably won't be able to up zone after even after they're now under RM and so I think there's also like there are equity issues with like what we're talking about up zoning but there's also equity issues with you know like folks not being able to do things to their home because they're out of compliance and so they have to go in from the development review board and ask to do things that other people in the city just get to do because they're not out of compliance with their zone so there's I just like there's it's not necessarily a bad thing that is happening to the people that live there sometimes it's actually like an opportunity and if you want to add another door to your and a small porch to your home that that's not something that you can't do because you're already seen as out of compliance and so I very much I do think that the east end I supported a lot of up zoning on the east end not least because we were often the ones who were on the threshold of like so many of our homes were already up zoned to the next to the next level and that said I do think that I I think that taking that to like there has been a lot of public process on this but sometimes it's hard to engage in public process until there's a product right because either you have to go to all of the meetings or you just go to that one last meeting at the end and I think it's unfair to expect people to have come to every one of the many many meetings that we had and so I think it's okay to slow down take some time I'm fine with sending it for public hearing if we want to do that but I think giving time for that I think we still need to do it this council term because we've taken a lot of time to get this planning committee and this council informed on this issue and I think we need to make a decision one way or another but I'm certainly supportive with keeping it to the the march meetings and and maybe setting a hearing earlier and making sure that we as counselors take the responsibility to bring that to our march NPAs thank you thanks so much councilor hightower we'll go to you councilor grant thank you um excuse me so I I went uh to a lot of the um the public engagement around this process I was either in person I watched it on zoom and I've been really supportive of all the conversations and I think this is really important for our city but looking at the amount of yellow I'm very disappointed this screams equity issues to me this screams that people who live in certain areas they're being protected in a way that I just I'm not comfortable with so I really think we have to think about I think every every part of the city should be our we should just jump right there and and not have areas of the city that quite frankly have wide areas like we are so you know I'm in the central district and we are so so packed in um in most of our areas already um um and just to to leave such a it's a big amount of space as RL is just I I uh I want to move this forward but I'm just people are not looking at the equity issues around this they're really not understanding um and that's incredible because we have a whole bunch of equity issues in this city and this is just to me something else that um I mean I hear what you're saying that it was discussed and it was split and I just I just think it's it's a mistake and a bad look thank you thanks so much councilor grant we'll go to councilor dory and then councilor McGee thanks president paul um like the other counselors I also really very much appreciate all the work you've done this presentation all the work that the committee has done particularly the level of engagement I know it's been a sustained effort um and I know how much thought has gone into it and I really appreciate that um I also you know support the goals uh of this endeavor um I think we all do I think we all recognize that um you know the city needs to build more housing it needs to build more housing desperately and it needs just this level of of work um to get us there um I though uh and I will try not to be repetitive really do um echo councilor grants concerns about equity you know what what leaps out to me um when I look at the proposed changes is that the dividing line you know seems to be main street um between you know what areas get get switched over to rm versus what areas get switched over to rl um I I think I understand your thinking and the committee's thinking about you know looking at this from existing lot size perspective um and looking for opportunity um but to my mind um that is something that needs more attention um and particularly because of course I represent the east district you know particularly when it comes to neighborhoods that have been for so long subject to such incredible pressure um that arises from the university of vermont's failure to you know build housing commensurate to its its student growth which is another issue that we are of course addressing um there's always attention right there is always attention between engaging in public process um making sure people understand the issues giving people the opportunity to weigh in and the need for the city to move forward on important decisions we're going to talk about this in a moment with respect to uh the carbon fee tax and some other issues and there's always attention there um I for one though um feel like this needs more time and I am really concerned with this two month uh window counselor bergman talked about sort of the einsteins on the city council and those who are fooling everyone um you know as someone who's definitely not an einstein and who's definitely not fooling anyone I am concerned about this time frame um and making sure that we are really taking seriously the possibility of unintended consequences uh with these important changes thanks so much councillor doherty we'll go to councillor mickey and then to mayor wineburger thank you president paul and thank you to the three of you for the presentation I have not followed uh as closely as those who are involved but this is something that I've been interested in for a while and um I live in a building that is currently on a lot and excuse me currently is out of compliance with uh with zoning and I have a shed that's falling down and can't be replaced because it uh was built before current zoning laws were passed so um I think this is a really important step forward I really want to echo the calls for us to consider uh making uh medium density the the floor I think you know provided the opportunities exist for um higher density housing in any of our neighborhoods um I think we need to make that a possibility and not stand in the way of it um I think that is something that we can get done uh in this council term and uh would encourage all of us to lean in to do that work because I don't think it behooves us to delay this um beyond march thank you thank you so much uh councillor McGee um uh and did you want to respond yeah I just want to talk a little bit more if I may for just a moment about the um the difference between the r.m. and the r.l. zoning um first on our committee as I said before as we were considering that issue we were fairly tightly split and on the split that even those who were on one side or the other could probably for the most part have been easily swayed from one to the other so if the council wants to make a change on that I don't know that there'll be very many on the joint committee that would be that disappointed one way or the other having said that though just want to make sure that everybody um looks at the difference between r.l. and r.m. that the r.l. which is a low density and r.m. which is the medium density both were vastly changed the proposed change is quite significant on both of them what you're able to do in r.l. and what you're able to do in r.m. under the proposed zoning is significantly more than what you were able to do under the current zoning so even in the r.l. zones there's a lot more that you could do in r.l. under the proposed zoning that you can do currently under the existing zoning so as you look at this I encourage you just dig into that a little bit deeper maybe maybe you want to talk a little more about that I was only going to add that it can seem very counterintuitive when we're talking about a framework of a zoning district that we've always seen as the low density district the proposed standards that we're talking about today are much more comparable to each other than they have ever been in the past but I think the big thing comes down to just like I think councilor hightower noted this you know where is there going to be space for these homes to be created and it's often within the r.l. areas where there is more physical space and so that's one of the things that when we were thinking about the extent to which some of the standards may need to evolve in order to help implement the code that the amount of change that needed to happen in the areas that are currently or continue to be zoned r.l. is not as great as some of the areas that are r.m. and so we're happy to provide some more examples of what we mean by that it's it's a super wonky thing to visualize and you know we can provide some examples of kind of real properties and what it might look like thank you so much we'll go to mayor Weinberger thank you president paul um I'm very I'm really kind of thrilled that we're here having this conversation tonight I did not know when I proposed the neighborhood code a little more than two years ago as part of 10 a new 10 point plan how the next couple years would evolve I had very little sense that this um that we would have so many young people in this city focused on this housing issue creating engaging the public process as we heard again tonight and as they have throughout the nine committee meetings and and other housing issues we didn't know that state law would change and and add momentum to the work that we are doing here and we certainly didn't know that what has been a low level crisis for decades really was going to metastasize into the hot acute crisis that we are are facing right now with our unprecedented levels of homelessness and unsheltered homelessness and incredibly low vacancy rates and rising housing costs for everyone I am so thankful for the city team that has worked so hard on this and that has done so much to give us visualizations and graphics and great data to think through here and to analyze as as we come towards what I hope is the near the end of the process I'm thankful for the commissioners the planning commissioners and the counselors who have put so much time into this and I've put this before us in a way that we can get this done I am and then we can get this done this administration and this council I am sympathetic to the comments we've heard from counselors tonight that this is a lot to take in and that this is going to is daunting to think about finishing this process I and clearly we are you know the step that is proposed tonight is to get more public comment and to consider that comment formally through the public hearing process and you know we need to do that we we are getting to this stage of the process where often more voices come in and need to be heard I would urge us to find a way to keep our eye on the calendar and take the steps need to be taken so that this can pass by the end of March the kind of effort that you have seen here tonight though the work that has gone here tonight this is this is difficult to sustain it will be dramatically interrupted if we wait and hand this work off to a new group of people that is likely to include you know numerous new individuals and there's a real risk that all this work is is wasted and comes to not if if we do that you know we heard tonight from Bob Duncan I was quite moved by Bob's comment that he has been waiting he has been urging change like this since 1974 he lived through the long period in which we were moving in the wrong direction as a city and and tightening and tightening and making it harder to build I here's a moment here's a chance where we can take a big step corrective step back in the other direction I tend to I I'm quite sympathetic to concerns about unintended consequences certainly that happens frequently in public policy decisions and we're right to be mindful of them zoning decisions the nature of zoning and building is such that it's hard for me to imagine what the unintended consequence would be here in that but not impossible I mean I I think generally the error we might make here is to make it possible to build more housing and I guess I can envision how we might get that wrong and have some really negative impact on neighborhoods that are our beloved neighborhoods I don't think that's what's going to happen I don't think generally building new buildings does that but you know if it were to happen the nature of zoning is that these unintended consequences can be corrected and corrected quickly we change the zoning ordinance all the time if there's really something we don't get quite right here it can be it can be fixed in the future and so I hope we don't let a concern about undefined unintended consequences get in the way of us taking critical action probably the most significant action we will have taken in my time here to really try to do something meaningful about the housing crisis thank you President Paul thank you Mayor Weinberger we'll go to Councillor Shannon thank you President Paul and I want to thank Megan and Sarah and the city staff that has worked on this for so long because the work you did before it ever even came to the committee really presented a new opportunity for the city for for very thoughtful change to provide that missing middle from the beginning of this process there was a decision to fast track it to have the ordinance committee meet with the planning commission rather than successively and I objected to that but I think I was the only one who objected to that so on we went and I think it was a good process I think it was good to engage the ordinance ordinance committee earlier but our council rules actually require us to refer it to the ordinance committee and it was agreed that that could be done and I know a lot of people don't want to do that and I said I would wait to hear from the public before deciding whether I would refer this to the ordinance committee or not so I want to explain that between the in the decisions about whether to up zone just certain RL districts to RM or all of them the concept to up zone all of them came from the committee that that did not come from the staff and it was pointed out that there was a logic behind increasing some neighborhoods to RM it wasn't all on one side of Main Street but I when I saw the neighborhood around Loomis Street being up zoned to RM I did mention in those meetings some concern about this is where there are a lot of student housing pressures and there could be really dramatic change there based on this zoning change and I was concerned about that my own neighborhood was also up zoned from RL to RM as was South Union Street and there are probably some others that I'm not thinking of at the moment but it wasn't limited to one side of Main Street the other decision that came through the committee process was the ability to have many more units per building the concept that was initially proposed was we currently have a the zoning only allows for one primary building on a lot and some people have wanted to build a tiny house or something and they've been prevented from doing that so that was kind of the original process but that morphed into something much more intense in the committee process and I think that's also what's bringing a lot of concern for for those that live so close to the university about the potential to be taken over by an increase in student enrollment by the institution and since 2019 they have added 1000 new students to our neighborhoods I think this is a very reasonable concern that people have I also think that one of the speakers was right that a lot of people probably don't really understand what is being proposed here because as counselor Bergman said there's a lot and we need time to to digest that but but the reason for changing some of those are changing the RL zoned areas to RM was made based on the data that was provided by staff that showed the very little change even though on paper you can go from 35% lock coverage to 60 based on what's on the ground very little change would be allowed because you're already what's built long before there was zoning is already exceeding that so in order to allow changes which is often exactly the kind of changes residents want they just they may just want to put on addition on their property it's not even necessarily changing it from a single family home to a duplex or they could change it from a single family home to a duplex were not for a few extra feet of lock coverage so it allows those changes to happen I think if we refer it to ordinance at this point I don't think we get it back to this council in time I don't think the entire process of referring to ordinance sending it back to city council and getting two warned meetings happens within the time frame that we have allowed so while I I was considering referring it to the ordinance committee what I'm hearing around the table is that people want some time for the public to be able to weigh in for the further to give further consideration and the possibility for changes but I also hear around the table a desire to do it with this council so I am not going to make that motion at this time but I think I would appreciate it if if staff and if you can tell me if this is possible if staff could communicate on French porch forum some of the changes particularly from what was originally proposed by staff what we have in front of us now so that people and it's because it is very complicated it is very hard and I have personally tried to reduce this to a front porch forum post and I know you have also been sharing this information on from porch forum but I think that would be helpful to people to just highlight how this has changed it's intended to be infill development it has gotten to something more intense than that and the other issue that I it did come up in committee about considering stormwater runoff and our infrastructure's ability to absorb the potential development that's being proposed here and the answer was that's not really a function of zoning but if we were proposing this as you know as what were if we're proposing as a singular development the kind of development were expected they'd have to go through major impact review and all these things would be considered so it'd be good to get some input from the affected city departments about water and sewer and if everything is being electrified our ability to meet those needs and with that I am willing to let this go to a public warning and and consider I don't I still don't rule out the possibility that we decide this needs more work by the council and a possible referral to the ordinance committee recognizing it wouldn't get done with this council and there are drawbacks to that but it doesn't sound to me like that's where we are at this time and I do think that this is a wonderful opportunity for the city in my own neighborhood I always reflect on the fact that it was built before zoning and it's really varied in you know we have at least one lot that's almost a hundred percent lock coverage and very very dense housing and then it's varied throughout the neighborhood and personally I like that that it's not all uniform and there may be more opportunity to do that kind of thing with this this type of zoning it doesn't mean that it is monolithically built out to it was also pointed out where we allow up to 10 or 12 units on a lot in theory you're gonna have to meet you're gonna have to meet the affordable housing requirement after five units which makes it pretty unlikely to build it out to that intensity but the possibility is there thank you thank you so much we will go to council carpenter and then council travers thanks and thanks council shannon and and I appreciate all of that and I too really want to go forward there's we have done so much work but I appreciate that the public can't digest it so I'm just sort of suggesting that if we move along with the public hearing process somehow we ask planning to wedge in a public work session because I I do think people are not necessarily accurately interpreting what they're reading they may be assuming that there'll be all of these new ginormous buildings on some of these lots and I just think if we could plan a session where people could actually ask questions and and I know in in the you know the committee process we're more flexible about that when we get to a public hearing process we're usually not people just tell us what they're thinking so perhaps in the next few weeks we could think of a public session where people could come and ask questions um maybe um understand better because I I think there is some misunderstandings about how we could apply this but at the same time not slow it down thank you council carpenter we'll go to council travers thanks and um so director total not to put you on the spot but I was going to have the same comment as as council carpenter there which is from your perspective I mean my understanding is that the hearing here would be warned for two meetings out from today and whether or not between now and then what your office is bandwidth is to conduct any sort of public forum and engagement session like that council carpenter was discussing yeah I think that we can put something together um we would need to take a look at the upcoming schedule of npa meetings and other notable evening meetings to make sure we could find a time but um typically we can find a night in there somewhere um and I'll say too that councillor bergman asked at the beginning about the public hearing warning date we don't always include a date in your motion because there can be some flexibility in terms of the schedule so um if for some reason we would have a challenge with finding an opportunity to do a public q and a session before that public hearing we can also circle back to you about the date of that hearing and confirm whether it's two meetings out or if there's some more flexibility there so happy to work with you on that okay um and then this is more of a process question just for the council to fully understand there's a couple parliamentary inquiries whether for you director tell or for the city attorney's office which is um if uh whenever that public hearing was warned the council were to make any substantive changes to the ordinance my understanding is it would then have to be worn for second public hearing is that correct that's correct okay so if we uh were to and the earliest meeting we can warn this public hearing for is our meeting on february 26 correct okay logistically yes all right so um if we were to wait until our meeting on march 11th for example and make any substantive changes then that in all likelihood would then bump this into the next council year because we would need more time to warn the second public hearing on those changes is that right okay so um that's my roundabout way of suggesting that uh we we try our best if the interest in this council is for uh this to be accomplished within this council year which is something that that i would strongly suggest and support um that we work towards warning this for a public hearing at our meeting on february 26 and to the extent it's it's possible for your office to do so to put together a public engagement session i suspect that the npa meetings in february are likely fairly town meeting centric and built out already in terms of an agenda um but that doesn't mean if your office were to put together a public forum that uh we couldn't invite our npa steering committees and ask for their assistance in um getting those advertisements out to their groups as well as uh us on the city council in your office advertising this on front porch forum and and and other forms as well so that would be my suggestion my other parliament are inquiry for the city attorney's office is whether or not although this is being worn for a public hearing does that preclude the ordinance committee from deciding to to meet on this even though it's not actually before the committee um to discuss as a committee whether or not um there's any items that we would like to bring back for the council's consideration at the public hearing no i don't think it precludes you i don't think that you're being charged by the city council per se as the full body is not taking an action to move it back to the committee but i think as a group of city counselors who sit on the ordinance committee if you chose to warn a meeting and hold a discussion around the item and look to again add substantive um changes and bring that forward then yeah by all means you are permitted to do so okay um great thank you very much for that and certainly an item for the ordinance committee to potentially take back up i would look forward to a public engagement session like that um director tutel um you know i i appreciate that i have the luxury of nine joint committee meetings to fully understand the proposal before us and hear what council bergman and others have been saying about needing some additional time to get their heads around it you know it was actually towards the end of that uh a process that we were going through that we took a look at the data like councillor shannon mentioned and it really helped to sort of crystallize what we're trying to do here from my perspective and we've heard from some neighbors and some council members about the neighborhood around uh you know luma street and henry street and ward one for example councillor doherty and you know we looked at data towards the end of that process that showed us that right now in that neighborhood um you know 68 percent of the lots there are already built out to more than 45 percent lot coverage and so if we were to keep uh that neighborhood as residential low then that means that 68 percent of the lots in that neighborhood would have no opportunity to grow beyond where they are right now 93 percent of the lots in that neighborhood are currently non-conforming because of other considerations like setbacks and lot size and so on so if we were to keep our ordinance as is right now 93 percent of those lots have some restrictions right now in one way or another in terms of renovations and additions or potentially an accessory dwelling unit even in moving that neighborhood to residential medium still 36 percent of the lots in that neighborhood are already built out to more than greater than 60 percent lot coverage so even in doing that uh the lot coverage on on 36 percent of the lots in that neighborhood can't grow any further but I can say that I think from our committee's perspective and I agree with chair montrell's comments here that there was there was some debate on this but ultimately I think where the joint committee landed is that it's it's better to give 64 percent of the lots in that neighborhood an opportunity to grow than it is to give only 32 percent of the lots in that neighborhood an opportunity to grow and that's where we landed on a on a data-driven decision but I hear the concerns look forward to further engagement with the public ultimately I'm excited about this proposal I don't think it takes us a big step in the right direction thank you thanks councillor travers uh councillor dory and then uh my apologies councillor grant uh your hand is raised are you did you want back in the queue but you did okay so we'll go to councillor dory then councillor grant and then we're going to go to a vote thanks president paul a number of meetings ago probably at this late hour or similar late hour uh councillor bergman uh on some issue it's said that he understood how to uh lose gracefully and count votes um I see that there appears to be little or no support for a motion uh to refer this to the ordinance committee um so I'll spare us the making of it um but I just want to note that I am still uncomfortable and I am somewhat comforted but not comforted enough uh about the timing issue and the level of public engagement um and not completely persuaded by the arguments uh although thoughtful that have been brought forward so I will not be voting uh yes uh to move this forward thank you councillor dory we'll go to councillor grant thank you uh so a couple of things I I heard the arguments for like this white waltz of yellow why it would stay low as opposed to medium I hear what you're saying I just feel my comment stand I think RM should be the floor period um if we want to be real in creating opportunities throughout the city it really looks like favoritism I and then I also want to kind of give a shout out to the uvm mou because that comes into play here when I look at the issues in my district about how we have uh I've heard the term student vacation recently just like all these students in these particular areas um and the way investors are moving in and and what they're doing to these communities so there's there's definitely a real feel uh fear of that right and I know um my neighbors up in ward one definitely have this concern as well and so a big part of this is what do we do with the uvm mou how can we improve it so that these concerns that we have about um the rapid increase in student population you know what more can we do because I feel like the two are kind of related um so I just wanted to to to bring that uh into the discussion as well and I feel if if if both pieces um I I don't know I guess we're not where I would I would say we should be um with the mou and I think that that is what gives some discomfort with how this would affect certain neighborhoods that are already dealing uh with this issue of student housing that is pushing out families pushing out people who might consider coming to work in burlington etc but I think that we have to have um for the sake of equity and looking like we care about equity um we have to know that other areas would be willing to uh take on even more even though going to rl could allow them more it should just be rm should be the the floor thank you thank you council grant uh we're gonna uh we're gonna go to a vote um and this is remember that the the the motion is to waive the reading suspend the rules and warn for a public hearing it is not part of the recommended action the date however the date of the public hearing will be uh February 26th um since we have someone joining us by zoom and it does not appear this will be unanimous we'll go to a roll call vote Councillor Barlow yes Councillor Bergman yes yes Councillor Carpenter yes Councillor Jang yes Councillor Doherty no Councillor Grant yes Councillor Hightower yes Councillor King yes Councillor McGee yes Councillor Shannon yes Councillor Travers yes City Council President Paul yes 11 eyes one day 11 yes and one no that motion passes so that is referred for a public hearing that will be held on February 26th then in the meantime there will be efforts by the planning and zoning or planning office my apologies it's force of habit um to uh to bring the public in a little bit more and uh have as have uh even perhaps more than one opportunity for the public to really engage in this as well as potentially ordinance and ordinance committee meeting so thank you very very much for all of your work and all your effort is there if there's any is there anything else you wanted to add before we move on no we'll look forward to following up with you about additional opportunities for input and I appreciate force of habit I said board docs earlier so yeah I heard I heard that I heard that it is a force of habit after 12 years of using board docs it's hard to hard to snap out of that um we will move on to item number two or 8.2 which is a resolution Cambrian rise the development agreement second amendment and for a motion I'll go to Councillor Carpenter um thank you um I would um move the agreement um as presented on city civic clerk I was going to say board docs um and recommend waiving the reading and adopting the resolution okay so motion is made to waive the reading and adopt the resolution is there a seconded by Councillor Jang um Councillor Carpenter did you want the floor back um just one second when we saw the presentation um I think it was well explained the importance of this and um I certainly hope we can support it and go forward it's certainly been a great addition to my neighborhood great thank you so much Councillor Carpenter um are there any other Councillors who wanted to speak to this resolution seeing none uh we will go to a vote and we'll give it a try um all those in favor of the motion to waive the reading and adopt the we still need to do a roll call because we have one Councillor absent on zoom okay I thought that if it was potentially unanimous we could do that no if it's a hybrid it needs to be a roll call oh okay I don't even know why I disagreed with you we'll go to a roll call thank you Councillor Barlow yes Councillor Bergman yes Councillor Carpenter yes Councillor Jang yes Councillor Doherty yes Councillor Grant yes Councillor Hightower yes Councillor King yes Councillor McGee yes Councillor Shannon yes yes Councillor Travers yes City Council President Paul yes 12 ayes uh that motion passes unanimously which moves us on to item 8.3 which is a resolution town meeting day 2024 carbon pollution impact fee ballot question I believe I am going to Councillor Bergman thank you I would move the way of the reading and adopt the resolution and ask for the floor back after a second please okay uh is there a second to that second well seconded by Councillor King um I egregiously was very bad during the neighborhood code discussion about keeping to the five-minute limit that was all of that was a free pass for everyone okay I will not point fingers but that was a free pass for everyone we're going to start with the five-minute rule starting now on your mark get set go um so winter rains we've experienced this week uh floods are happening all around so let's be really clear about the ongoing crisis that is costing a lot a lot of money what this resolution simply asked for is to allow the voters to decide whether to authorize the carbon fee on all fuel systems that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases not just fossil fuel systems um it closes a loophole in last year's vote that we were told before the vote was brought to us but when the when it was brought to us and people complained and asked us to keep it off the ballot and we said well no at least I did and voting for it to get on the ballot we're going to be able to address that but this is important the perfect will not be the enemy of the good we went forward now is the time to allow us the opportunity to close that loophole to allow us to tailor our ordinance for when the state passes its clean heat standard which is not going to happen everybody talks as if it's in place and we're somehow out of compliance with it we are not and this vote would not put us out of compliance with anything because all it will do was give us the opportunity to change our ordinance and to do it in a timely fashion in line with when that standard is going to be adopted a year approximately from say today um we absolutely need to cut to the greatest degree possible emissions and this really does allow us to create a process to be able to do that let me conclude pretty much by saying this doesn't lock us in the arguments against putting this on the ballot just our they still don't hold up it doesn't we were told tonight that we're excluding renewable natural gas that's just as flat out wrong all this says is that we can put a fee on it if we so choose it's disingenuous fear mongering to put that out I'm disappointed that somebody of the stature that did did that um people complain about the process but there's nothing in allowing us to vote that short circuits a decent process that includes all the stakeholders and again what this will do is allow us to tailor it to the clean state standard which means that we can have sliding scales it does not have to be an all or nothing approach like we did I ask you to support putting this on the ballot thank you at three minutes and 15 seconds thank you councillor bergman uh councillor king and then we'll go to councillor barlow thank you to everyone who came out tonight to speak in support of this item specifically the young folk and more date residents I will be supporting this item as councillor bergman so eloquently spoke to it we're living in a climate crisis and we see those effects each and every day I frankly fail to see how this item is controversial the approval that went forward last year didn't include all necessary fuels and so this is literally just closing a gap and so I hope that the rest of you can vote in support of it thank you so much councillor king we'll go to councillor barlow thank you president paul on november 20th uh this council passed the carbon pollution impact fee ordinance on buildings over 50 000 square feet and on new construction that ordinance went into effect this month um the ordinance the ordinance was developed following multiple years of stakeholder and public engagement and data analysis by bed and dpi department of permitting permitting and inspections and it was deliberated at six meetings by two committees ordinance and in the end the ordinance kept renewable biofuels like renewable natural gas in the mix of compliance options both state policy and our own net zero energy roadmap contemplate renewable biofuels as tools for achieving our goal of eliminating our use of fossil fuels this is not a loophole this is intentional stakeholders affected by this new ordinance have been supportive of its development and implementation but they also need regulatory stability and predictability as they do capital planning and they have signaled their concern about the city potentially changing compliance rules in the near term uvm uvm mc and bba all came to took on our meeting on january 9th to voice their opposition to tinkering with this new ordinance so soon after passage uvm and uvm mc came again tonight to express their concern during public forum asking for the authority uh to increase the carbon pollution impact fee and to regulate biofuels are changes that significantly impact the institutions who worked worked with us in good faith on this ordinance and i will not be supporting this resolution even though i respect the work of my fellow counselors on tuc thank you thank you so much councilor barlow we'll go to councilor mcgee thank you president paul um i think it's important to note for the public and for counselors that this doesn't tinker with the ordinance it simply gives us the ability to include these fuels uh in future discussions so it's not as though this ballot measure passing on march 5th means that these fuels will be included on march 6th it just simply gives us the ability to accurately reflect be it what the state policy suggests is good uh good uh carbon emitting energy uh versus what we know to be true that those are still emitting carbon into the atmosphere and whether we like it or not decades of failed failed policy have gotten us to this point and it does not make sense for us to stand in the way of us further uh furthering our climate goals um by passing this and putting it on the ballot and letting voters decide um whether or not we should move forward with this i think uh we all should be supportive of giving voters the chance to say whether or not they support this thank you thank you so much councilor mcgee councilor grant thank you um we keep kicking the can people keep wanting to kick the can and uh we're just running out of room uh so we need to really move this forward and um we just need to move this forward uh i i don't know how much um more delay that we can have and taking serious steps i think if anything it'll make these larger institutions work harder and faster to resolve these issues and questions that they have um and i just agree completely with uh what councilor mcgee just said thank you thank you so much councilor grant uh councilor carpenter thanks um i was um worked a lot with the first resolution that went on to the ballot as as a charter change and it took a lot of explaining as they say um i can't approve something where we don't have the data that we need about who this affects what it affects um and and this is there's an alternate uh proposal that we take the time to get the data if we're going to promote this and really get out there and try to get it passed i need to understand what sits behind us we did have an opportunity this fall um during the ordinance and the tuc process to propose a ballot amendment to propose it five weeks before we're going to vote on it just seems um not prudent if we'd wanted a ballot item three months ago four months ago tuc could have considered it ordinance could have considered it um but there was no conversation about a ballot item there was conversation about what was covered and as councilor barlow pointed out there was a decision not at this point in time to include this so if we're going to change the rules of the game i think we need to take the time we need um to figure out what's behind that and that's the prudent thing to present to voters thanks thank you so much councillor carpenter uh councillor bergman round two i wasn't going to say anything more but i have to say the tuc spent a really long time focused on the ordinance under the rules that we were given we then let the ordinance committee do that and that is what happened we made it very clear and we tried to work within those when that was all done then this came and it came at a totally appropriate time months november is and there is no possible surprise since we have been talking about this throughout the whole process of the ordinance adoption raised right at the beginning of the discussions in tuc in terms of the problems and we tried to deal with it within the confines of that battle ballot item so it is not a fair argument against bringing this forward one wants to say all the other things that were raised about this but that is just we did nothing but work within the rules that we were given and we worked diligently my co-sponsor and i worked diligently to try to make that all work we actually split on on that process i think in part because of the confines of the existing authorization that we have we have a chance right now to cure that and we should take that opportunity thank you thank you so much councillor bergman um seeing no others in the queue we will go to a vote oh of course go ahead councillor jen thank you president and this is for councillor bergman or the makers of this resolution upon passage of this ballot item from the borders will they have another opportunity to weigh in on the amount of you know fees that will be associated with it the answer is yes absolutely because this does nothing but says that it can be applied so it has to then go to the ordinance process there will be a long process i i i am committed to that okay wonderful thank you great thanks so much uh with that and seeing no others in the queue we will go to a vote and remember keep in mind this is a resolution um it is um the motion is to waive the resolution to waive the reading and adopt the resolution uh we will go to a roll councillor barlow no councillor bergman yes councillor carpenter no councillor jen yes councillor dority no councillor grant yes councillor hightower yes councillor king yes councillor minke yes councillor shannon no councillor travers no city council president paul no six eyes six nays uh six eyes and six nays so the motion fails um that will bring us to uh item uh item 8.4 which is a resolution the implementation of a carbon pollution impact fee um i believe i'm returning to councillor bergman uh please go ahead thank you and i hope that this will be very short uh because we're at a time that we're going to need to suspend our rules but to start i'm going to move to waive the reading and adopt the resolution and ask for the floor back after a second okay so a motion is made to waive the reading and adopt the resolution seconded by councillor king uh the floor is yours councillor bergman thank you um this is closer to what was originally referred to the the toke but it basically has the to referring it to the toke to work through the details of the the the size of the buildings that would be involved the the fee the um the fuels that are involved this and the next item on the um on the agenda are in my mind not necessarily in conflict with each other and i have tried to work with the sponsors of that item as well as my co-sponsor in this and um would it be appropriate i think if you would a nod to just at this late hour i think that we are still going to try to work to thread a needle and come together with a proposal that can garner widespread support and i'm committed to trying to do that and uh that blends these two things um and and also gets to the voters something that is significant and important and with that i would move to postpone to our uh february 12th meeting okay so what it sounds like you're doing you've made a motion first to waive the reading and adopt the resolution you're now making a motion to postpone a postponement to a definite time um those would appear to be in conflict with one another so it would seem as though uh a motion has been made you can amend your motion and it sounds to me like that's what you're trying to do that is the that is the appropriate parliamentary proposal so we don't have to be unless the seconder finds it friendly a friendly amendment to the motion does the seconder find it friendly the seconder finds it friendly uh so i don't need to get into a pretzel a sound i just want to get it referred to okay we understand um that's no problem so a motion to postpone for a definite time uh we have a second uh we can debate that um perhaps maybe we won't need to um but we could if we need to and then we can go to a vote um is there anyone who wishes to speak to the motion to postpone to our next meeting on february 12th uh councilor carpenter and then we'll go to councilors i'm just trying to get a clarification which sounds like um the maker of this motion and the maker of a subsequent motion are looking to get together and see if they can come to more consensus that is correct yes uh thank you councilor carpenter councilor travers yes thank you to offer some further clarity on that when we get to the next agenda item i will be similarly moving to postpone that item until february 12th um if i could just speak to this item briefly i think that you know we've heard from some members of the public and we received some comments that um the next resolution was in one form or another and uh an opportunity to sort of kick the proverbial can down the road um and speaking for myself that was in no way the intention of uh that resolution i think even our last agenda item as well as this agenda item um it talked about uh potentially putting ballot language together on uh ordinance changes that would take effect in uh january of 2025 and uh my commitment to council bergman is in reviewing the item that we're postponing now and in reviewing um the item that we will hopefully be postponing here momentarily um that the intention here would be to uh review the items um that are included in this motion including at least the possibility of an expansion of our carbon fee to uh view what is proposed in our next agenda item which is to ask the the city staff and and the experts at bed in dpi to provide uh input and feedback on their own recommendations as to uh the best climate policies in order to address greenhouse gas emissions in our building sector for that review to include um both a review of uh our existing part of the information yeah isn't this motion let's try to keep to the resolution before us please motion to postpone i think that's what we need to talk about motion to postpone this one well as best you can please yeah i i i believe it's germane because it's explaining why i'm supporting the the motion to postpone because uh i i do believe that we have an opportunity here um to combine uh and and and look for some consensus on both uh the items proposed in this agenda as well as the next resolution as well as to consider um looking at the the renewable fuels portfolio as well in some ideas there so um so i do think that there's an opportunity here for us to still postpone this bring it back to the council and do something meaningful on the same schedule that is proposed in the matter before us thank you thank you councillor travers uh if there is no one else there is uh councillor barlow uh thank you president paul i just want to simply acknowledge the willingness of councillors king and bergman to collaborate with councillor traverson i on this so thank you thank you so much um just wanted to also note um so that we're because we're we're going to be going to the next one we'll go to the next resolution but before we get to that just do want to admonish the council that we have a very busy agenda on the 12th of february um i would ask that parties work diligently to find um find common ground in a way that does not take up huge amounts of council time if at all possible i would rather see a motion to be made to uh to move this to the next meeting if it can't be done by the by the 12th just simply because we have a very very busy agenda that evening um at least at this point um if there's no one else who's in the queue uh we can go to a vote um so this is a motion to postpone to our next uh our next meeting um i i think we should probably go to a roll call vote councillor barlow yes councillor bergman yes councillor carpenter yes councillor jang yes councillor dority yes councillor grant no councillor hightower yes councillor king yes councillor mickey yes councillor shannon no i'm sorry no thank you councillor travers yes city council president paul yes ten eyes two days ten eyes and two days the motion passes which moves us to item eight point four i'm sorry my that was eight point four um eight point fire resolution climate policy review and next steps for existing commercial and industrial buildings less than fifty thousand square feet uh point of order could i um make a motion to suspend the rules uh to allow us to um complete our deliberative agenda that would be a wonderful i would like to do that motion um seconded by councillor mickey uh thank you for reminding me all those is there any discussion on the motion to suspend our rules to finish our deliberative agenda uh seeing none we'll go to a vote all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye any opposed please any opposed please say no that passes unanimously so we're we're good to go until we finish our for the for the remainder of our deliberative agenda um uh we going to a motion i believe are we going to councillor travers sure yes okay i would move to postpone item eight point five to our meeting on february 12th okay motion to postpone this resolution till our meeting on february 12th uh councillor hightower were you making a second seconded by councillor hightower uh is there any discussion on the motion to postpone seeing none uh we'll go to a vote uh we'll go to a vote i do not know if this will be unanimous so we'll go to a we'll we'll go to a roll call vote councillor barlow yes councillor bergman yes councillor carpenter yes councillor chang yes councillor dority yes councillor grant no councillor hightower yes councillor king yes councillor megey yes councillor shannon no councillor travers yes city council president paul yes ten ayes two nays ten uh that motion passes on a vote of 10 to 2 which brings us to the last item on our deliberative agenda that's 8.6 resolution march 5 2024 the annual city meeting increase in public safety tax rate for fire and police purposes authorized and for a motion i will go to councillor barlow to move this forward i move to waive the resolution or waive the reading and adopt the resolution thank you thank you so much motion is made to waive the reading and adopt the resolution seconded by councillor megey um councillor barlow did you wish the floor back i did not i i was expecting the administration would like to speak to this okay so we started off our evening what seems like quite a while ago um with a wonderful presentation from the cao on um the issue of uh that is before us um perhaps it would be wise to bring that up again i don't know if there will be other questions and councillor grant um we're gonna uh uh cao shot is going to share a screen so um if you if you do wish to speak you just speak up um because i can't see you uh so i believe that you had finished you had finished the presentation we got through all of that um are there councillors who have uh questions of the administration uh or comments on uh the resolution before us councillor high tower um i'll be brief which is just to say that um we asked most of the departments um to cut their budget by two percent not too long ago and now we're looking for additional cuts within those departments um or efficiencies however we want to call that um and at the same time i feel like i still don't know like we don't have a lot of information on what this is going to and um i don't feel like i have a total understanding of um why even before we implemented some of the retention services we didn't seem to have any savings in the police department budget so i think there's i guess there's a lot of question marks that i have and a lot of concerns that i have um but i'm not gonna keep this from going in the ballot especially given what the administration has said um i wouldn't want to put the next administration in a tough spot or in an unable to make that plan um so i will be voting to put it on the ballot um which is not necessarily an endorsement of the item itself thank you thank you so much councillor high tower uh are there other councillors so wish to speak to uh councillor chang and then we'll go to councillor burton um thank you i think i just heard a beautiful characterization of this issue and this is again a tax increase public safety tax increase coming to the voters of burlington which i believe is not timely which i believe we could have prevented it from happening and which i believe is um not fair let's say to the burlingtonians it seemed that this city we've been focusing on rebuilding for quite some time without even paying a close attention about spending within the burlington police department from my perspective we have bigger issues in front of us which is how do we educate our children well how do we build them a new high school right and also how do we keep low income and um families and people within the city of burlington people are being taxed out of this city and as a member of the board of finance over and over and over again i witness this city council this board of finance changing reclassifying a lot of positions and most of them also you have to go back retroactively and pay the time in which this was reclassified it seemed as if we have billions and billions of dollars and the time has changed we need to try to work and stay within our means we need to stay to become a little bit conservative this is not only about the police department at the same time i completely agree and i am thankful that this administration is already working on every single department to be reviewed again we are working with consultant in order to understand what our saving mechanism we can identify and make it happen to that we left out the burlington police department i believe that public safety is eroding and i don't believe that just increasing the tax for things that are not related to the bargaining with the unions that we have is not founded but what councillor hightower just said i voted against it in board of finance i'll be voting in support to go to the ballot and this is not an endorsement of me supporting this i'll be voting now when it goes to the ballot thank you thank you councillor jang uh councillor bergman did you wish the floor yes yeah just just very briefly to say um i support putting this on the ballot i think there are a lot of reasons for us to support the the passage of this there are serious questions that have been raised by my fellow councillors just now um we raise them and you know this will give an opportunity to um to to find other efficiencies and other sources of revenue i i spoke to this somewhat lat at the board of finance a week ago um today's was helpful and i look forward to continuing the conversation um because we absolutely have to fund the commitments that we have made and do it in a way that really is very holistic in our approach to public safety and this will allow us to to do that so um i'm in i will support this thank you councillor bergman we'll go to councillor barlow thank you president paul i also will be supporting this tonight um as i have said in the board of finance i would prefer to have a lot more clarity on where savings can be had but i also realize that we don't have the operational analysis yet to do that that sort of deep dive and to understand what the potential savings are um what we're asking is the authority to tax up to one to fill 1.8 million dollars of the projected shortfall this year every penny of the public safety um tax increase amounts to about 600 000 of um of additional revenue and i'm hoping that we even though we're asking for this authority that we won't have to exercise all of it and that we'll be able to ask for something smaller um but i also know that we can't as the mayor pointed out in the board of finance ask for this um sort of mid fiscal year we have to do it on town meeting day or we have to do it um by i guess june 30th correct so um we don't have a lot of time um to to do it so we may as well put it on the town meeting day ballot rather than hold the special election which we were also told at um board of finance would cost upwards of 200 000 so i think it would be imprudent to hold off and get a better um understanding of what the actual tax increase need was um so for that for that reason my long-windedness at this late hour i'm supporting i'm supporting this tonight thank you so we'll go to councillor McGee and then we'll go to councillor jane thank you president paul um i have heard concerns from constituents essentially since i got elected uh a number of years ago to uh about the affordability crisis that we face here in the city and that is only worsening as the arpa funds uh are allocated and spent um and that means that we're going to be having some really difficult budget conversations uh largely will be put on the shoulders of the next council and the next administration um and so i am supporting this tonight because it would be i think imprudent for us to uh remove that tool um for a future council and a future administration it would not be wise for a special election to be called for a tax increase uh potentially careening us towards a government shutdown at the end of june um and i think uh you know this leads us to broader questions of the sustainability of our property tax system um and i i just hope that uh in having this conversation about raising the public safety tax uh leading up to the election in march uh and leading up to the budget discussion in may and june that um we do place a greater emphasis on working with the legislature to to reform the property tax system because i think not just with the municipal side of the property taxes but we're seeing it with the increase to the school side across the state as well so i think not just burlington but many communities are going to be having these hard conversations and this is just the beginning of that so i will be supporting this tonight thank you thank you councillor mickey we'll go to councillor jang um and then carpenter i pass okay uh we'll go to councillor carpenter and then councillor shannon um i don't want to repeat what my colleague said i just keep wanting to remind us that built into this is a three million dollar expectation that we can find efficiencies and that's a big number so we need this increase to put the package together um and and make us whole and the devil will be in the details during our budgeting sessions in may and that we got a lot of work behind us and i do want to just make one comment relative to councillor mickey that i hope we continue our advocacy um with the state particularly on those issues how the homestead credit works or does not work um because remembering 70 percent of our taxes are education related and that's in my opinion not working very well thank you councillor carpenter we'll go to councillor shannon thank you president paul i just want to say that you know the sad fact is that the taxes are unaffordable and basic services are required and expected by our constituents and so looking at um this this tax only funds one year of the rebuilding plan it doesn't get us to the 87 officers that we have approved and that are broadly um accepted as a minimal number that's needed for our police department to be healthy um it it requires three million dollars worth of cuts to we don't know what but i have served long enough to watch the council struggle with with decisions that are tens of thousands of dollars of cuts um and i think that this will be difficult with 17 percent uh inflation and only uh four percent tax increase since the last time we had a tax increase this is modest in comparison with the growth in wages the growth in housing costs um so i think that this this is a reasonable proposal in terms of tax policy there is a proposal in montpelier um to address the property tax and uh you know that would be that would be helpful to all of us as council carpenter just said 70 percent of our taxes are through the education fund um a big portion of the tax increase there is due to needing additional bonding to build a school that nobody else in the state had to build but i'll i'll leave it at that i am supportive and i think that even though i agree with councillor jane that our top priority is educating our students i also hear from the parents of those students that their number one priority is public safety thank you uh thank you councillor shannon um we'll go back to councillor jane and then we're going to go to a vote thank you if i could get in after council of course sure right right after my apologies go ahead yeah um so anyway i i think it just reminded me of an event that i attended just yesterday over 30 people showed up in the new north end to meet a candidate and i think the number one priority including parents right even students were there the number one priority that i have heard from the people over and over and it's been six years that i'm here that affordability is a big problem in burlington i think what we're trying to solve here is a decision that we made in 2020 and i think that cost of that decision the the the consequences of our decision is now starting to catch catch up on us right but if we have two competing priorities which is educating our students building the high school of a 21st century for them and at the same time trying to provide a level of community safety which is greater than public safety where do we need to put our our our box where which one do we need to choose and from my perspective it has been very clear the future generation including climate change the future generation including the education of the future generation of the city i think should should be something that we need to prioritize things have been adding up for quite some time and it has impacted many people right and let's think about this as we deliberate as we move forward in 2025 i'll be supporting to put this on the ballot but i'm not endorsing any tax increases to the taxpayers other than educating the children for now thank you thank you councillor jang we'll go to councillor grant thank you um so yes affordability is a huge issue um vermont has some of the highest uh tax rates um on our residents in the country and i am low especially with the tax increase um on the education side that is coming because we are having to pay for expenses that the with regards to the new high school that quite frankly should have somehow come from the state or the federal government like the fact that um our school district has had to assume um so much of these expenses for a school that was essentially poison is a really huge issue now having said that with regards to using the full funding up to 77 officers we have to be very careful what we say because we don't want to make false promises to the public there's a reason 77 is being used and that is because even though but this plan in place we've increased the salaries retention bonuses sign-on bonuses etc we've done that got this awesome contract we aren't we had some great progress last year but we only have one person going into the academy this year we just lost a lateral transfer possibly because of housing they were having to live over in clackford so so we are not at the pace that is is what we would have wanted to see so we can say yes we can go up to 87 but we're not building back at that rate so we have to understand what that means so 77 is is kind of saying that this is what we would be able to do in the next fiscal year um community safety is something very different now oh quick update in the report um it's not community service liaisons the position actually community support liaisons we have we're doing something really innovative here in barlington the way we are thinking about community safety and how it's including all these other positions that we need desperately to deal with mental health issues and then also we need to be really beefing up harm reduction and different types of services that deal with the drug crisis so um i would i would say that i would vote for this to have the flexibility and also to wait for all these other things we're doing like we're we're looking at all these fees and and and we're we're going to be looking at where we could save other money but we're not there yet and no way do i want to spend money on a special election that's just horrendous and and kind of defeats the purpose of trying to have this extra money um so i would be voting for it although i would probably vote no if it was on the ballot but i want to give people an opportunity and i want to see what the budget's going to look like uh when we we get to the point of working on um getting to the final budget and seeing where we can increase in fees decrease in other areas um so i'll leave it at that but don't make promises you can't keep everyone i mean we have so much information about public safety it's a huge issue we got 77 funded because that's the pace we can't control who's going to submit an application we can't control if they would be qualified we can't control if they go to the academy they come out of the academy we can't control if they get out of the academy and they hit the street that they'll stay we cannot control those things thank you thank you so much um based on what i have heard uh i think maybe we could try to give this a uh uh uh we we could try that we could try this all at one time um seeing no one else um wanting to speak we'll go to a vote uh this is a motion to waive the reading and adopt the resolution which wouldn't mean that this item would be placed on the town meeting day ballot all those in favor of the motion please say aye all right but any opposed please say no that motion passes um and um i know what you're going to say and i am not going to i'm not going to embarrass the the city attorney um that motion passes and i will clarify for the record like me too but i will say president paul was correct if it is a unanimous vote you and and we have a hybrid situation we don't need to worry about a roll call however doing a roll call there is no issue around that so it's always welcome if you want to do that you're welcome to but clearing the record okay so that motion passes um and uh with that that completes our deliberative agenda and and finishes off our entire agenda so i would ask for a motion to adjourn uh made by councillor bergman and seconded by councillor McGee as always um and uh all those in favor of the motion to adjourn please say aye aye any opposed please say no we're adjourned um just to keep in mind for the public our next meeting will be monday february 12th and we will look forward to seeing you then have a good evening