 I will call to order the Winniesky Liquor Control Board. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Councillor Oakley. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Okay, so up first we have on for approval outside of consumption permits, 2022 renewals for Sour Hall Foods, doing business as Wicked Winnies. Any staff comment? No, actually yes. After the previous meeting I had emailed them because I had attempted to email them several times regarding the hours and he just wrote me back and he said 11 a.m. to midnight work. Okay. So that's what it is. Any questions, concerns, or counsel? Would someone like to make a motion to approve? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Next up is a new restaurant license for Bandy and Kebab House at 65 Winniesky Falls Way. Any staff comment on this one? He called me earlier to say he would be here at six o'clock. It is a new restaurant, no liquor, just a restaurant space license only. And is this a vacant space? Is this refurbished space? Is this where Schaefer's, Deli? Yes, yeah, that's where it is, yes. Yeah, I know it's like they've been open for a while so good to see someone there. Oh, I'm not wondering the record. Paul, is there anyone in the Zoom chat? I don't have it open yet. Are some folks there? Is there a name I'm looking for? Oh, do you know? No, because it's the second owner, so I didn't have his information. Doesn't make sense to do gallery mode. Yeah, somebody, attendees list for this item, you may use the raise hand function. I can be here if we have a Kathy Voight Walsh. I believe she's here for public comment. Oh, Kathy, are you here for public comment? We're doing just the license right now, our real license. Yes, there you are. All right, hang on to that comment just for a few minutes. Okay, if you're here for Ben-Yan Kebabhouse, could you use the raise hand feature? I don't think you're here, but... Yeah, he said he was the second owner, the first owner who I've been dealing with was unable to make it, he called me this afternoon, but the second owner said he was gonna try to be here by six o'clock. I mean, it's only six o' three, but... Are there any questions or concerns from council? I'm done. Someone wanna make a motion to approve? To move. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Item C, restaurant license transfer of ownership for Subway. Any staff comment? Yes, so this was a previously approved license for Subway, a restaurant only, but it just sold. So there's new owners, so I thought before May 1st, before the actual license period begins, if they could just submit the paperwork, which they did to have a new restaurant, so they're reopening Subway. Are there any concerns from council? No, this is... Motion to approve? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. And finally, unvercruable, caterer's license for our house bistro. Anything there? Any questions? Is this the first time they're doing catering? They've done it before for Awaking Windows, yes. All right, done the motion to approve? To move. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. So we are at the end of the liquor control board agenda and the owner of Tommy and Kebab House just arrived. Oh, okay. If the Kebab House owner is here... Oh, you are here in person? Yes, yes. Do you wanna come up and say anything about your restaurant? Yeah, sure, yes. If you could speak into the microphone. Welcome. Hi, thank you. My name is Aurang Zeep. Hashimi, I'm actually a graduate from Green Mountain College in Polzny. Nice. I came to Vermont in 2012 and it doesn't make a different scholar. And then it happened that I stayed here, became a citizen and brought some family member here. Went to University of Denver and got my degree in strategic management, my master's. So since my family has a background in restaurants and I'm originally from Afghanistan because of the situation that happened recently in Afghanistan and most of them had to leave Afghanistan and evacuated and came to Vermont. And there are a lot of them and some of the most of them don't speak English. So we decided to open a restaurant and also to help them have a job as well as to introduce the Afghan culture to the greater community of Vermont and especially in Manuski and Burlington. It's a great story. Thank you. Do you have an opening date? We are right now waiting for inspections. Okay. Everything to be done from the Vermont Health Food Department from the five marshals. But as soon as those things are done we are hoping to start as soon as possible. Yeah, wonderful. Well, it's exciting to add a new cuisine to our restaurant scene. Yeah, it's very cool. We already approved your license before you sat down. So you're all set with the city and thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, I'm excited. Thanks. Okay. With that, do I have a motion to adjourn the liquor control board meeting? Some of. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Yeah, thanks for coming in. Okay. So it is 6.06 p.m. I will call to order the Manuski City Council meeting first up is agenda review. Any questions or concerns about the order of the agenda? I don't. So now it's public comment time. This is a chance for members of the public if you wish to speak to a topic not included on tonight's agenda. If you are here for an item on the agenda please hold until we reach that part of the agenda. We will open it up now. I believe you would have someone here. Hi, Kathy, whenever you are ready. Hi, thank you. I think I unmuted, do you hear me? We can, it's a little quiet. Yeah, I came into the meeting a little differently than I usually do in Zoom meetings. So I don't know if you can even see me or whatever anyway but can you hear me okay now? It's better now, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm basically gonna read to you the comment that I sent in but you have a copy of it. I wanted to contact you too because I'm interested in ensuring that the COVID-19 wastewater surveillance that we, data that we started to collect just a couple of months ago is going to be well used. So originally I was just interested in trying to get Winooski to do that collection but I found out in short order that we had already begun to do that but I know that these systems are new and therefore it might be easy for this information to fall through the cracks, especially given the fact that COVID seems to be having a lower profile in the public's mind regardless of whether the case counts are going up. I'm sorry, I deviated from what I wrote. No, the city has recently begun collecting COVID surveillance data from the wastewater in conjunction with the CDC and the purpose of it, hopefully, is to prevent COVID-19 infections in our community. The questions that I have are what steps are being taken right now to publish this information to use it for public health purposes in the city. And can we cooperate with Burlington in following and publishing the data? I gave you a link to CDC National Waste Water Surveillance Information page so you could take a look at it. The new city manager sent me some information. I just got it just a few minutes ago. I haven't had a chance to look at it. It's also a spreadsheet and it's very technical. So I didn't really introduce myself. My name is Kathy Voight Walsh. I'm a fairly new resident of Winooski just about a year and a half. I'm a former nurse, but I've always had an interest in public health and I've never actually had a job in public health before, but this crosses over with my interest in racial justice because I know that Winooski is a community where risks can be higher for people for a variety of reasons, both racial and also economic. People may not have resources or bandwidth to follow technical stuff like wastewater data. And also that, like I said, the systems are pretty new for collecting these samples and then getting that information over to public health in a usable way. So it's a situation that is asking to have something fall through the cracks. So I wanted to make sure that it was on your radar and as a community member, I am happy to do what I can to support whatever actions need to be taken and I'm happy to continue to be a squeaky wheel if that's helpful. So I just wanted to raise the question and from my perspective, the faster we get this data into public health translation, the better. I know that it's taken Burlington a little time to get their stuff together. They do have a very usable format in terms of looking at the data, but if you don't know what it means, I mean, it looks to me like there's a trend upward right now in Burlington's data from the wastewater surveillance that they have, but I'm not a professional. And then so if the same thing was happening here in Manuski, how would we translate that into messaging to the community, providing an increased number of masks to people free in places, encouraging people to just be aware of that. There may be a higher risk. So I guess that's probably it from what I wanted to kind of put out there to you all. Thanks, Kathy. Wendy, I would ask if staff can speak to what are we doing with the data now and do we have any plans for publishing? Certainly, I'll give an overview and then John Rocher's here, I see Ray Coffey's here and John Audie is physically here also. The city just started collecting the data and the way that we collect the data, we actually collect the samples and we send the samples to a company and then the company provides the results to us, to the city and also to the state health department and also to the CDC. So the data is getting where it needs to get, which is the first important step. And these are all really good questions, Kathy. So thanks for bringing them up. Winooski is not yet where Burlington is in terms of displaying the data and we may never be and John Rocher can speak to that. And Ray probably has something to say about the COVID huddle that's been going on for probably two years now, which would be a good thing to communicate to the public. So how about John go first and then Ray and then John Audie can speak to the public health. Sure, thanks Wendy. Yeah, so we did volunteer for this. It's a federal EPA program where we basically send them samples like Wendy mentioned. They do, as a courtesy, send us back the sort of the raw data of what they're testing for. I don't say it's not intuitive. We're not health professionals here, so we definitely aren't gonna take a crack at what that means for our local community. So that's where we do rely on the state agencies, the health department to really work to interpret that data. We don't have that expertise on staff to try to make those decisions based on this federal EPA data. So the difference with us versus Burlington, so Burlington has a very robust program. They've partnered with UVM, they've got some other backings. They are a separate program that we unfortunately don't have the resources that they do to put that kind of program in place right now. We can obviously reach out and see if there's any, if they would be willing to add us into that program. But then again, I think we'd be relying on the state to really leave that charge and like give them the data to present it. So that's kind of where we're at. Yeah, unfortunately it's not as simple as they give us the data that shows us immediately what's going on directly in our community. It is much more complicated than that. And our John Audier safety officer and I have looked at it and it's not clear cut that we can make any policy decisions just from the sampling we're doing. And thanks for that, John. And Cathy, just to chime in, it's a good question. So we've been running, as Wendy had mentioned, for the last two plus years, a regular COVID huddle meeting which has included officials from the Department of Health, the city of Wenuski, city of Burlington among other partners. And we've actually been using the Burlington wastewater data which as John said is a little bit more user friendly and clear cut, definitely as a sort of data point that we're kind of monitoring over time to see trends. And it's been really helpful actually to sort of predict where things are going and start to see where the curve starts to turn upward. We're getting a little bit of a sort of canary in the coal mine, so to speak there from the Burlington data. And it's been actually a pretty good proxy and approximation for what's going on here in Wenuski. So throughout the pandemic, Burlington and Wenuski have worked really hand and glove on the issue. And we've seen pretty consistently the trends happening on one side of the river or the other tend to follow very shortly after. So I guess I just wanted to say we are using some of the wastewater data. It's just not the local Wenuski data at this point given that, as John said, that data is pretty new for us. And we don't have the luxury that Burlington does of having sort of a team of data analysts that can kind of crunch those numbers for us and get them into a more user-friendly space. But we are looking very closely at data over time and using that as a tool in our decision-making. And then Chief Idy. Good evening. Not a lot to add. John and Ray covered it very well, Wendy. You know, our posture right now is following the state and CDC guidance. We do check the county-wide infection rates. Weekly it gets updated every Thursday. For instance, last week was two counties or three counties. This week it's nine. So there is an upward trend across the state. But again, our posture right now is following the state guidance. They are endemic kind of focused right now, but acknowledging these upward trends. And even through the worst part of the pandemic, if you will, we followed the state and CDC guidance. You made some policy masking mandates. But again, that was kind of, that stage was set from the state level, gave you that option, you did it. That's expired. So that's been our posture. And so we continue to check it, monitor our own staff, monitor our operations. And certainly are in touch with all of our partners many times a week. And I saw Kathy edit a question in the chat and not the total. So that's been a weekly call. I don't know if that's changed, Ray, but it's not a public meeting. It's the organization's collaborating together. Yeah, that's correct. She also asked who we consider the contact person in state public health. I guess like whoever, who are we mostly talking to? So there's no one person. There's been several people, Ray can speak to it more about at the huddle. I mean, there's a team, there's several data analysis folks that bring us the state. Data, they bring us the Burlington-Wanewski trends. You know, there's 12 or 14 different people for many different partners, which include the Department of Health to our local partners to Burlington. So there's at the huddle, there's several partners at the table. And just I want to add representatives of the communities that would be most affected too. That's true too, yeah, community organizations. I would say Kathy also asked about volunteers. I, there's no need at this time for volunteers in the huddle. I mean, are we still to be massed to some extent? Yeah, I would suggest that she look at the commissions and she might want to apply to be on one of the commissions, maybe the safe, healthy, connected people if she wants to help, because she certainly has an interest. We do have several resident volunteer boards, commissions, that provide some policy advisory to the city council. And we are soliciting new volunteers for those right now for appointment in July. Are there, is anyone else here for public comment? And you can use the raise hand feature in Zoom. Okay. So we can move to the consent agenda. We have our liquor control and city council minutes from April 4th, the accounts payable warrant and payroll warrant, an amended resolution for a municipal planning grant and community services department recreation position descriptions. Are there any questions from council on any of these items? No concerns. I'm going to pull out item A, since I was not in attendance for that meeting and seek a motion to approve the liquor control and city council minutes of April 4th. To move second. Motion by Bryn, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. I am abstaining, motion carries. Seeing no questions on items B, C or D, I would also entertain a motion to approve all three of those together. So moved. Second. Motion by Aurora, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. So we are on to council reports. Bryn, I'll start with you. Sure. First, I want to extend my sincere thanks to our acting city manager, Wendy Harrison. I've been essential to the city these last four or five months. So thank you so much for all the time and effort that you've brought during this time of transition for us. So thank you so much for that. And on a more somber note, I do want to take a moment to condemn the violence and murder of Fernfeather and violence against the trans community and LGBT community. It's definitely a big impact to those in Fern's life and throughout the community. So I just want to take a moment to pause and give some remembrance to Fern in Fern's life. And I do want to move to a local community member, Kyle Tipson, who recently passed away. He was a big member of, I knew him as the RCKs and as a really close friend and family member over at Last Stop and want to extend my condolences to his family as well. Thank you for that. And other items of business, the Municipal Infrastructure Commission. Easy to say. We'll be at this Thursday, the 21st at 6.30. I believe we will be meeting in person here at City Hall. Welcome anyone with interest. I think we may also have a Zoom link set up, but I can look for that on, from Porch Forum and then our city newsletter for the update on the agenda and a potential Zoom link. Earth Day is Friday, April 22nd. Greenup Day will be May 7th. We hope we see lots of folks in the community supporting us on that day. And then I also wanted to extend thanks, sincere thanks to the Winooski Mutual Aid. I did see over the weekend that they had announced that they will be disbanding their services and I know that they've been quite an asset over the last two years to our community here in Winooski. So I want to give them a special shout out and thanks as well. Is that for me? Thank you Bryn for leading us in moments of condolence and recognition for some of the new things. Thomas? That also like thank you Bryn for what you said about Furn. I know it's been weighing on a lot of people so that was really great of you to think to bring that up. As far as updates, I have not had a commission meeting yet so I don't have anything to update you all on. On April 12th, so last Tuesday there was a joint meeting of the Housing Commission and the Safe Healthy Connected People Commission. The focus of this meeting was on kind of bringing the Safe Healthy Connected People Commission up to date on a lot of the work that the Housing Commission has been done and a lot of the work around housing. Thinking really about how these two, how housing kind of falls under some of the work that the Safe Healthy Connected People Commission does as well. So really thinking about how can we hold those two things together and work together. So in addition to that overview and there is some looking at the, considering Winooski, you know, the different unique things in Winooski such as the highest percentage of rentals. The overall age of the housing stock, thinking about concerns around gentrification and how these are all things that are kind of being weighed and how we can approach housing in Winooski. Also looking to as well with the Housing Trust Fund and I think there's gonna be an additional update later in the meeting on that. We also had equity director Yasmin Gordon also presented some really exciting things including, probably most exciting, thinking about having a Winooski Housing Summit. This would be similar to what Burlington held relatively recently I think in 2019 to really bring together all different stakeholders to create action items. So again, thinking about like what are actual things we can do in considering the different things within Winooski. So from home owners, renters, landlords, local organizations and other interested members of the Winooski community. So a lot of things just considering that these are the two commissions are meeting and this is also hoping to give this update too for Jim who isn't here tonight but is the liaison to the Housing Commission. Thank you. Somewhat related. So there has been a weekly meeting of housing partners related to the 300 Main Street evictions which have stopped. So there's been some community and housing partners meeting. That meeting is going to continue on a monthly basis. And so last Friday the group discussed how to carry that work forward and continue to monitor and advocate for other issues that are occurring. There's some crossover with the potential future Housing Summit. So just wanted to let the public know that that work continues. The Planning Commission met last Thursday and continued to review potential language for incentives for priority housing which as directed by council, the priority areas are affordability and units larger than three bedrooms. So they are working through potential changes to zoning to create some incentives there for that type of housing. Their next meeting will be May 12th where they will continue that discussion. And the plan is to also have a public hearing on May 26th that hasn't been actually voted on yet but that's what we discussed. And that will be worn publicly as usual. And as you mentioned, Deputy Mayor Jim Duncan is not here. He has shared some notes with me. So throughout the meeting, I'll share with you all what he's said about some of the topics but he did want to share an update that the tree committee met and that they're excited to be planning for a centennial tree planting May 7th at Richards Park. And with that I will pass it to Wendy for city updates. Great, thank you Mayor and Council. Regarding COVID first, I think we are getting more complacent but I need to let you know we have three staff people who tested positive in the past week. All the cases were mild but still COVID and they are following all the protocols but it's here. It requires monitoring as we just spoke with the, you know, under comments from the public. And then kind of as a segue, there's fire department news. So I think we got this across earlier but Chief Audie who's the fire chief is also the health officer. So if he's able to come up here now and update the council, there's some news going on regarding sprinklers, sprinkler replacements. So good evening again. Hulking properties. So there's 400, I believe 470-ish units at Hulking housing units at Hulking has downtown. Back as the pandemic started, we experienced, they experienced two very large sprinkler failures in the building, two different buildings. There's about 130 units affected in different times. So, you know, at one point we had like 90 folks displaced all at once. So they stayed in the hotel for many months while there was, while the building, the water damage was mitigated. The owners have decided to essentially install a new sprinkler system in all of the properties that they own downtown. And so in all the 470 plus units. So they'll be removing what is a plastic blaze master type plastic sprinkler pipes. They'll be alongside those, be installing steel sprinkler, a brand new sprinkler system. It's something they're doing on their own. It's not paid for by their insurance. So, you know, a couple of things I really commend those folks for doing, you know, doing the right thing trying to prevent such a, you know, such a thing. And I think it shows a huge commitment to them, to Winooski. So, to that end, we've worked with them. We did some prototypes, meaning we worked with them to take a couple of units that were vacant and they staged their contractors. So they understood the scope of the work and how long it would take. And in May, they will start one unit per day. So you do the math over a year and a half-ish while they go through all 470 sub-units. We're confident in the system they have together. They have a project manager who we're very familiar with. They have a tenant advocate on staff that they've hired to work. So there's been a lot of communication. And we're working with them on the testing because obviously we need to sign off. The state needs to sign off on testing but we can't be there every day to witness the test. So we're working with technology where they'll do the test and record the test. And we will go witness a certain amount of them. So I just wanted to bring you up to date on that. So it's a big deal for the tenants there, the residents. But again, I think they very creatively thought about how they could do this. And we worked very hard to support that effort. Just a couple of other things. The pool pass sales we talked about last time, those are going strong. And I just want to remind folks that the scholarship process is much simpler than it was previously. So don't let cost be a barrier to getting a pool pass. And then registration for Thrive summer is open. Spots are filling up fast. There's seven weeks of programming July 5th through August 19th. And it will be free this year for all Winooski kids in grades K through five. So check out the city's website. And I'm gonna give you a phone number, it's 802-655-1392. And then on April 30th, it's a Saturday, there's a prescription drug take back day. There's a big effort and you go to the police department and it's eight to eight, eight a.m. to eight p.m. But if you can't make it that day, that's okay. You can take prescription drugs to the police department anytime and don't flush them please, because get into the wastewater. Greenup day is May 7th and the ARPO survey is still on the website. So go ahead and avail yourself of that. That's what I have. And we have our council retreat. Oh yeah, May 21st will be our annual strategy and priority retreats that the city council engages in with staff leadership to plan our priorities and work plan for the coming year. That is a public meeting that gets publicly warned as well. So hold that time, it's nine to one. Typically is what we've done. Okay, so we're moving into our regular items and first up item A on for discussion is the equity audit report, which as a meeting will introduce for us. Thank you so much. And if I start coughing uncontrollably, just give me a moment, I might mute and come back. So we have some wonderful guests with us. Thank you for attending tonight folks in the audience. This is really exciting. This is my first big project for the city and we have been working in partnership with these folks since this past fall. I wanted to give everyone a little bit of just a quick little background of this project and what it entailed and kind of how it came about. It was one of my first charges as the equity director for the city and it was on the work plan that was developed before I came on board that the city was very interested in conducting an equity audit for the municipality to try to figure out where some of our gaps in opportunity lie. We conducted an RFP. We obtained a small grant, a municipal planning grant and it was a small budget and so it was gonna need to be a small scale project. And so initially it presented with some challenges to try to figure out how we could best fit what are the scale of the project to be able to maximize the results that we were looking for. And to my wonderful surprise, the folks from Opportunity Consulting, Iris Von Gill and E-Time Misrub responded to the RFP and we talked about the small scale of the project and they eased my concerns very quickly by talking about this wonderfully innovative approach that they have that is outcomes led. And I'll let them explain that to you when they come on but basically, when I said, we really want to figure out all the things, all the things in the city and we know that we're not gonna be able to do that. So how can we best support the residents and support folks in this community who basically have not had the opportunity to come to the table and find out more about their experience. And E-Time said this one line that pretty much had me hooked from the beginning. It was, well, we let the people tell the story. And that's exactly what they have worked towards. That's exactly what we have done. We have done this in partnership with the school district, which has been wonderful. The school very graciously partnered with opportunities because they saw the importance of connecting education with some of the outcomes that folks experience as adults within the city and drawing those similarities with one another. And so we really focused on leveraging community input and knowledge to drive where we were going to go with this project. And so we had a very small focus. We had a very narrow focus, but by allowing the people's voices to come through right from the beginning to lead us to where their experiences were not quite matching with the intent of our city's efforts were, has been quite an amazing journey. And I hope that you all can see that reflected in the report that was provided. We will have, the report was included in the agenda packet for tonight. However, if folks from the public would like to view that, we will also have it online, probably in the next couple of days under the equity audit initiatives on the website, that tab on the website. So without further ado, I would love to invite Iris and Etai to talk to us and to talk to us about the findings and to talk to us about some of the recommendations that they have for us moving forward so we can really, you know, start to take that deep dive into this work that I know Winooski has been chomping at the bit to get to for quite some time now. Welcome, Etai and Iris. Thank you so much. Thank you, Yasmin. And if it's okay with you all, I do have permission to share my screen, which I will do shortly. But before I share my screen, it's nice to see everyone for a moment. And I just wanted to provide a few opening comments about what we're sort of here doing tonight. So first of all, let me start by just saying, thank you for this invitation to be here, to present to you and engage with you and the public tonight about some of the insights that we've learned over the last several months conducting this equity audit. As Yasmin mentioned, we've done this in partnership with the city of Winooski and we've also worked in parallel with the school district, the Winooski school district. And so both of these together really give us a rare opportunity to look at some of the most important government investments that impact the public across this city and really any city. And so it's been really a privilege that we've had doing this work with you all. Our hope for tonight as we walk through some of the findings from the report and briefly through some of our recommendations, our real hope tonight is that this is a start of a conversation that can help Winooski be more equitable and inclusive and most importantly to improve residents' lives, which ultimately we know is the goal of the work that you do and certainly the goal of the work that we do as well. So a few of our team members had an opportunity in February when it was very, very cold to spend a few days in Winooski with city leadership and leadership from the schools. We had a chance to hear from members of the community at that time, which we'll share more with you about. But I wanted to just start by saying how much we enjoyed being in the city, how much we valued the diversity that we saw there and how much we appreciated the candor and the engagement with the residents and with those of you who we had an opportunity to meet. And so we expect that conversation to continue tonight and to continue as we listen and get more information and then eventually finalize the report. And then just wanted to close by saying that we also know that this work, we do this work across the country is not easy work and that the fact that the city and the school district both in Winooski, both contracted with an outside group to come in and unpack inequities that impacts the city residents and students and families really demonstrates the commitment that you all have to this work, particularly to residents of marginalized communities. And not all cities are making these kinds of investments. Not all cities are using their power and influence of their institutions in the ways that you all are to advance equity. So we believe that this investment you all are making is noteworthy in and of itself and just wanted to name that tonight as well. So let me go ahead and share my screen. So my name is Iris Von Gill and I'm CEO of Opportunity Consulting and my colleague, E. Time Mizrov joins me tonight for this presentation and he also served as project director and you'll hear more from him in a little bit. A little bit about who we are. Opportunity Consulting is based in Washington, DC. We work with school districts and municipalities, nonprofit organizations and foundations across the country to help them improve outcomes and advance equity. And so this is really core to the work that we do and this work in Winooski is exactly what we set out to do when we started Opportunity Consulting. And before I turn it over to E. Time to talk about some of the findings. I wanted to just ground us for a moment in the purpose and what we set out to do. I think that Yasameen spoke to it really well when she talked about the work was initially a pretty small size grant and one that we just found so fascinating and wanted to work with you all on. And really the charge was to look about, look at how community engagement could be improved so that city services would be more equitable. And so that's sort of the charge that we went in with. We also then in starting that work and really moving on to seeing more about the school district had conversations there. And again, this work became both an equity audit for the city and an equity audit for the school district where we were able to take a holistic view across, as I said, all of these government investments, housing, education, access to jobs and civic participation and bring those findings together. And so what we'll be talking about tonight is sort of one equity audit, if you will, where it's not siloed necessarily in the ways in which government services are set up, but it's really in how residents of the city experience it. They experience it because they are people who seek jobs and have children in schools or they may rely on the schools to be critical resources to them when they're looking for housing. And so there's a holistic way in which people experience the services and this sort of equity audit providing these findings in a joint way really gives us the opportunity to present it from the viewpoint of residents. And so from there, I will pass this off to my colleague, Itai, who will briefly walk us through the findings and then we'll walk the recommendations and try to spend the most time really engaging and hearing from the other. Thank you so much, Iris. And it's good to be with you all. And my apologies in advance that it seems like I have some connection problems today. So let's hope we'll get through it with a clear connection. The findings are based on our approach, which includes four pillars that I'll wanna share with you before I continue. I'll dive into the outcome that equity in a second, but our work emphasizes local context and lived experiences. Like Iris said, we're taking the perspective of the resident that has a child in the school system and that applies for or tries to get housing or applies for a job in the city. You'll see some examples of maybe of the report. For example, we talk about the investment in the pool versus the investment in student transportation in a bus to investment that comes from completely different sources. And probably no one ever talked about them in the same kind of conversation. But from the resident point of view, these are two investments that happened in the city. And the resident may not know which revenue stream it came from, who made the decision. And we're taking the resident point of view, the lived experience point of view and helping use that to reflect on policies and practices. I'll explain in a second. But it was important for us to come to Inoski to not just talk with people and the leadership, which we did, but not just about people who are underserved in the city, but also have face-to-face conversations with them. And we went to the community center and we went to the school and we went to tour the city and looked at 308 and talked to the residents to get a good understanding of what's going on through their perspectives. A focus on the possible, the findings and the recommendations are aimed at identifying what the city could do. It's not a shiny report to just put on the website and say, here's a perfect equity report and how we'll eliminate inequality in one year. It's not the way we do it. It's a technical report that focuses on drivers and levers and things that the city could actually do. And then we want to make the findings and the data accessible for everyone, the visualizations, the language, make sure that people can read them, understand them. It's not for researchers, it's for everyday residents and of course it's aimed, it's for the leadership of the city. I do wanna take a slightly deeper dive into this idea of the OLE approach and I'm gonna share my screen for just a second and I'm sharing actually the report itself. And in the report, you'll be able to see what's posted on the city website. This image, it kind of describes our approach, our structure. And the way we do it is kind of reverse engineering, OLE outcome-led equity, reverse engineering inequality. The first step is understanding in which ways are the school and community life are unequal. And then we wanna break that understanding after we've established how inequality looks back. Student outcomes, we looked at pay in city hall, many different outcomes, look at the inequality. Then establish what are the areas of impact of the city, what are the areas of impact of the school and what are potential drivers or areas that could explain the inequality that are unrelated to what the school system or the city could actually do. And those are on the side. We're not really looking at those. We're interested, as I said, focus on the possible and those areas that are under the control of the city and school system. So those are kind of the two areas that we're looking at, drivers of inequality and each one has guiding questions, guiding questions that led the work of the audit. In reality, the direction is the reverse. Disparities or discrimination in hiring may lead to a city-controlled driver of eventual inequality that we're observed. But our process is gonna take the opposite route. And that connects to those lived experience that I've talked about. So why a school and a city report that is joint? We had those as two separate projects, but we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to look at those connections. Once we saw the opportunity to have a joint report, we recommended that to the city and the school system because that is, again, the lived experience. So we wanna look at what is the outcome that we're seeing and only then think about the policies and practices that may create it, wherever those may be. So it's not an audit that's contained to a certain way of doing things. For example, a pool is funded from this stream and a bus is funded from this stream. It's a process that lets the data lead us where the data wants to lead us. And eventually, that's what we're gonna be sharing to find where the data actually led us. Iris, you could share back your slides and we can go through the findings. And two quick things I would say there are more findings and guiding questions and school than the city because it was somewhat of a larger scope of a project but it's definitely a wealth of findings to the city as well. What I wanna do is go through them quickly because we wanna have the majority of time dedicated to questions and a deeper dive into those findings that are more interested to you. So I'm gonna give you an overview of the findings and then Iris will share a little bit of the recommendations and then we'll open it up to conversation. We can come back to any finding that is of interest to you. So the report is built around seven themes that were identified. Each theme has between one and four findings that are either for the school, the city, or joint. And you could see those connections as I will explain it in a second. So seven themes I'm gonna walk through each of them but hopefully that also makes for an easier read for someone who's particularly interested in housing or particularly interested in voting. Although we'll talk about the connections between those things. Let's go to the next one Iris. So I'm gonna start with the first diversity, equity and inclusion in Rinooski. This is an introduction finding. It's kind of that first one of the what stage that very first piece where we're looking at inequality not yet explaining it, the first step of our process. So when we're looking at the outcomes of Rinooski we're seeing both a city and a school system that are obviously a model, certainly a state model for diversity. And that's not to be taken for granted. The city through its practices of welcoming people from different backgrounds and created life that is more diverse than other cities in Vermont and the school system was able to maintain that diversity in the school system as well. But the work in Rinooski has taught us a lot and I think we teach anybody about the differences between these three terms that we often lump together. DEI, right? Diversity, equity, inclusion. Diversity is very successful. Equity and inclusion sense could be more of a challenge and we'll talk about what characterizes that challenge but definitely a state model for diversity. I'll show it in a minute to just a chart and kind of share a little bit about the challenge. But adding to that, if we think about the outcomes the students who are BIPOC in the school system are consistently, systemically underperforming. We see that across different grade levels and across different subjects. And we're trying to use some of the what we're learning about the city to help explain that and we'll talk about that. Go to the next one. So one interesting chart that I wanted to share with you is we're seeing the one on the left that shows us that middle line in black, the 7.7% BIPOC in the state of Vermont, but Rinooski is much higher than that and higher than any other city in the Burlington area which is great. It makes for a better and more diverse life but that diversity may not be felt among the residents because if we're looking at the chart on the right, that one looks at segregation by neighborhood in Rinooski and we're looking at the Rinooski percent of BIPOC individual of 25 and what it looks like in each neighborhood. What are the differences? And if the neighborhoods were diverse then we would see most of the dots close to the line of the diversity in Rinooski but we're seeing that most of them are actually far from the line that the diversity that we talk about is being the most diverse city in Burbac, that's not the story of every neighborhood where some of them are significantly more populated with BIPOC and new Americans and others have close to zero. So that tells us that again, the issue of equity inclusion, something we want to look at, where are the drivers of that outcome and that's what the finding starting, the second team are gonna tell us. So the first one is a good one, promising community engagement inclusion practices which we've seen a few. First of all, WSD, the school district is a true community school. A lot of places in the country are trying to invest now in community school. There was a wave of more kind of choice and charter over the last two decades and now we're seeing more trying to spend money on building community schools or kind of a community hub. California is spending $3 billion on that right now. Winooski already had that. We see that the school is a community hub. We see that the school is used to acclimate people in Winooski. We see that it's used to communicate with people. We see that people who do have kids in the Winooski school district have somewhat of a portal to community services which we need to think about those who don't have kids there but it's definitely positive and something a lot of places aspire to. And specifically in the school we see the use of community liaisons. Those professionals that are there to connect the educators with the non-English speaking families as really a national best practice. We think it needs to be expanded. We think they may need to be hired by the city and we talk about that in the recommendations but the teachers, the families, the students, them themselves are all talking about the big benefits that really changes the game in terms of community engagement. And we think that's definitely something to build up for city services as well. And here's a quote by one of the teachers. I won't read it now, I want to move forward but it talks about the importance of the liaisons for the work. So now we're starting to talk about the drivers of inequality and some of the things that we may want to think about and work on. So the next I think is a good example of the power of connecting the city and the school work to one report. And that is connecting what we're seeing in disproportionality in discipline and the school system with the disproportionality that we're seeing in traffic stuff in the streets of Winooski. So in WSD we see that BIPAC students are significantly more likely to get disciplined than any other students significantly across great levels. We look at, we had data on all of the disciplinary incidents in the school districts and we find systemic assignment of BIPAC students to these disciplinary treatments which research connects. I'm not saying that it's happening in Winooski but research connects that treatment to kind of both on the kid side and on the system side to this thinking that may result in criminalization later on. So research connects what's happening in the school with then practices as adults as far as law enforcement and so on. So connecting to that we're also seeing and I always think there's a chart that gets skipped to the next one. We're also seeing here you go. So the one on the right shows us traffic stuff in Winooski and the data has caveats and it's only from one point of time but the disparity is significant. We're seeing that black or African Americans are in this data the only group that has more traffic stuff than people and it has a lot more traffic stuff than people. The disparity here is quite significant. Now you see on the school side, by the way it says BIPAC one, BIPAC two, BIPAC three because of student privacy issues Winooski school district has a restricted version that includes the actual group names but they're often suppressed in other reports. We don't like to do that. We wanted to keep them in each group no matter the size but you see a disparity there with the BIPAC groups and then black people in the city of Winooski stop traffic significantly more. So there's definitely, we think a connection between the two. The next team lack of diversity in the city and WSD workforce. So we find using the focus groups and data that we have that Winooski's approach to recruitment promotion retention prevent the city's workforce from diversifying the city workforce is not as diverse as the city does not represent the demographics of the city. And we also find that lack of diversity and low pay so that lack of diversity that results from the recruitment practices. Plus low pay results in high turnover for both BIPAC and female city employees. Iris can skip to the charts, I believe on the next one. We can show you how that data looks like. So this is the representation on the left. The representation of female in the Winooski city government, 49% of the city residents are identified as female. And then you see all of the lines and this is level. So the entry level, mid level and leadership level in the city of Winooski, they all go left. They all go disproportionately lower. And the same goes for BIPAC. There is a representation problem in the city hall and frankly in commissions as well, we'll talk about voting and related issues in a second. Move forward. And here's the disparities we're seeing in pay. So again, we always wanna, we use this visualization with that middle line because we wanna know if when we break things up to different groups, do we see the dots close to the line or do we see them further away? Meaning does the average or the median that we know of is that representative? Cause that's usually the story most people tell themselves. They look at averages and medians, the very popular statistics. But do they actually capture the experiences? And the answer given this chart is no. There are almost no dots here that are near that median income of 43 or 44,000. If you're male, you're making 3,000 more. If you're female, you're predicted to make 2,000 less. White 2,000 more and then the rest of the group between 3,700 and 7,000 less. So these are significant disparities in pay. Could skip to the next one Iris, which could be a result of a part-time job. But for us, that's not the end of the story. So why are there more part-time workers, systemic from that background? So the last piece there on this theme is a lack of teacher diversity in the school district. It's actually not an issue that we officially looked at because there's a parallel project that's happening at the school district with another company, TNTP. However, we couldn't over because of how it connects, how research connects it to other things that we found like, for example, this proportionality is in this clip and disparities in student outcomes, frankly. So similar to the city, we see a lack of teacher diversity in the school district. And again, that's something that research ties with outcomes, so it's definitely something to work on. And we're wondering whether some of the root causes are similar between the city and the school district. Going to the next one, we have three more. So in equitable resource distribution, we're seeing that investments in equity are not prioritizing the city or the school district. Teachers talk about getting what they need, but not more. And when they're saying not more, that's in reference to the resources that they need in order to get students to start from maybe a different position because they don't know English as well or they experienced something before coming to Inusky, to a place where they can get to the same outcome. And then I've mentioned this example. So we're talking about these two investments. The school bus is a community pool. So the school bus was something that was talked about with so many parents and students and teachers as something was really game changer for particularly new Americans, but not only. And had a profound impact on tiredness and under experiences because we're talking about, we were there at the peak winter and we looked at that walk and that walk to school is will surely have an impact on the school day. And we asked, we asked the city, we asked the school district about this investment. And the first thing I'll say, some of the people we spoke with city leadership and the school leadership have described the investment in the school bus as kind of an equity investment or even investment in plowing the snow and the sidewalks as an equity investment. But we don't actually think it's an equity investment. It's for the way we see it's kind of a core service to provide to residents. And yet the school district struggled to provide that service because of bus driver shortage and other reasons. But we think that greater investment, particularly raising drivers proposed pay would have potentially solved the problem. And if it would have been prioritized not just by the school district, but by the city as well, because the schools literally connect the city to the schools. So even though it's something that, traditionally we know the school needs to pay for, we don't think it's necessarily the school that needs to pay for it. It should be something of a collaboration. And then on the other hand, we're hearing about the community pool that a lot of money was invested in that pool and it's not used by or it's disproportionately used by the white residents of the city and for several reasons that are not a coincidence that are not out of our control. It's not really used by the new American community and generally by the BIPOC population of Rinooski. So why was it prioritized that investment in that pool and what we interpret as the prioritizing the investment in the school bus and I can dive deeper into that when we do some questions. The next team silencing of BIPOC voices and lack of representation, who very quickly curriculum instructions are needed inclusive for a representative of WSD students and then BIPOC students do not feel like they have a voice that impacts them. We can dive deeper into this if you're interested but I do want to connect them to what we're seeing in the city as well. So if you want to go to the next one Iris, so it's not just the kids. So that connects us to the issues of voting. Go on up Iris, we're seeing in Rinooski that lack of access to voting representation and a voice in decision that impacts them. When we asked people in 300 Maine, which, did you go to your council member? Did you, who did you turn to? When you experienced this problem, most of them don't know who the council member is and nobody was able to name them in our focus groups. We talk about a group of reasons in the report. One of them is the electoral structure in the city, one district which makes them insignificant electorate in terms of, you can get elected without campaigning with that community. Maybe a different structure would have changed that. Probably worse than not voting is not even trying to get elected. These are communities with community leaders. We've identified some of those leaders and those leaders are not putting themselves out there. And we see a bunch of group of reasons that have to do with policies and practices, not set in stone that result in this outcome. And we think that a more targeted and intentional effort to not just increase the vote, but have intentional civic participation that includes both voting and getting elected is necessary, not just for reasons of social justice and improving our democracy, but also in order to get to better housing, better schooling, better public health. These are people that need to be involved in the community and we're seeing that they're systemically not involved. The community try to skip to the charts quickly. We use the focus group to corroborate what we've seen in the charts that is across the commissions and with all the elected positions, we're seeing a lack of representation for these individuals. Let's move forward. Finally, the last one, inequities in housing policy and practice. We believe that the approach to housing management and planning generates trauma for BIPOC residents and students. It's important for me to point this out that this is both a city and a school finding. We talk to folks at the schools, teachers, leaders, who sometimes we ask them, why are we seeing different results for students from a different background? That's not an actual outcome. Why is that happening? And many people have talked about the trauma that these students experienced in the past tense pointing to what happened with those students before they arrived in Winooski. But what we're seeing is that the trauma is generated in the city, not in Congo, not in Syria, but in Winooski. When people are evacuated from 300 Main and they don't have to be evacuated, other cities have other laws around that, I'm very happy to hear about the progress there. We were thrilled to hear about the community were proven to have the problem fabulous. But that is an example of a trauma that we've identified that is generated in Winooski and definitely have a profound impact on the students, students' lives, students' performance in schools. The day they read the evacuation letter, they read it to parents who don't speak English, they go to school, they don't do well on the math hour. Okay, so that connection is very important for us. And then Winooski did not provide the American families with the knowledge and tools to advocate for the rights of the Senate. And we think that there are ways that are proper for municipalities that are not the work of nonprofits or advocacy groups that suffer what we're aiming for. We're talking about tools for municipalities that could make that different. And I think I'm gonna turn it to Iris to quickly take us through the recommendations and we can open it up. Yes, thank you, Itai. And I will just quickly walk through these recommendations. I think that the conversation and all of the discussion around the findings so far really set this up well. So in terms of recommendations for the Winooski School District, we have a couple. One is a recommendation you heard a little bit about the educational materials and reading strategies and particularly for multilingual learners. So you could read more about the recommendation but we're really talking about how to leverage students' native language in both their teaching and in the materials that they can see themselves in. The second is to implement strategies to reduce exclusionary discipline policies and experiences of exclusionary discipline that's disproportionately impacting students of color. And so we have some examples about how to go through and do that. What looking at research and best practices from other school districts and jurisdictions. The third recommendation is affording students the opportunity to provide feedback and to really have a voice in decisions that impact them in school. This is always one that is critically important for students to have a voice and a choice and particularly as a trauma-informed strategy. We heard a lot about this from focus groups we did with the middle and high school students. So we give recommendations around that. And then the fourth is to develop a strategy to diversify and localize the educator workforce. And specifically we give some recommendations around how to think about growing your own, how to think about a pair of professionals that are critically important in the school right now that could be invested in if we wanna think about the workforce and really how to develop our own people internally and leverage the strengths and all of the assets that exist right now in such a community-driven school. The next is three recommendations that are really about the school district and the city. And so the first there, Itai did speak to this idea that there is so much alignment between what's happening in schools and what's happening in the city. And one area that we believe could be strengthened in this sort of need for collaboration that we see is the idea that the Winooski superintendent is a leader of the school, a leader of the school district and also a leader in the city. And that that is one way to really think about how to build this connection is to add the superintendent as a key leader to the Winooski city leadership. So that there are meetings that city leadership attend the voice from the school district that impacts so many families and is such a hub for the community should be present there and should also inform decision-making at that table. So that's one of our recommendations. The sixth one is to expand the community liaisons program. We do talk a lot about this in the reporting time mentioned it as well. What an asset this community liaison role is that is an investment that the school district is making community liaisons are not just people who come in and translate but they're very much seen as leaders in the community. And so we recommend that the city fund positions full-time positions that the liaisons can also work not just with the school system but also across other areas so that they can encourage support for translating services that the city needs as well community meetings, et cetera. And we believe that that is the type of role that could sit under the director of equity and could reach across the entire set of services that the city has. And then the seventh is to provide transportation by increasing driver's pay. So this is really talking about the school bus again. This is one area that you've seen us really kind of talk about because we heard so much about it. So we didn't come in with the notion about anything with the school bus but what we heard and what we saw when we left made us really realize that this is one area that the city could also support an investment in. And so working with the school district to think about how to leverage hybrid positions that may already exist in the city or in the school system that are part-time that could be used to also drive buses part-time. There's lots of different recommendations we give in the report based on how other school districts that are small in size as well may look at it. How do you incentivize people to get licenses? How do you think about competitive pay, et cetera? And then the final set of recommendations are really for the city. So there are four here. The first is to develop an affordable housing research and action plan. I know that you all know that this is something that has to be done. It wasn't necessarily within our charge to do deep dives on any of these particular areas but I think the one part we walked away was realizing that to address affordability and availability, the city really does need to spend time identifying what the drivers of housing inequality are, looking at the impact of zoning laws, the interaction with income, home ownership programs, just a number of laws that exacerbate residential segregation and prevent people from finding affordable housing that funnel people into housing that is well known to have quality issues, particularly refugees and new Americans. And so it's one area we believe that the city can invest some additional funds to really develop a plan, an action plan with the community that works for the community. The next is to educate and train landlords and renters. I think there were lots of conversations with people who didn't understand their rights as renters and didn't have a clear understanding of where fair housing would come in to play with them. And we believe that this is one area if the city could also leverage community liaisons to support these kind of efforts to ensure that there's knowledge dissemination so that landlords and tenants can know their rights. Next is a recommendation on changing the way that we advertise and recruit to diversify the workforce. So a number of changes could be made there. We heard a lot from the workforce around how particular jobs are not necessarily something that they learn of or hear of and in particular the areas where the workforce is diversifying in the city is around more service jobs or with people who consider community outreach positions. And so how do you diversify across all areas to develop a real plan for that? And then finally to develop strategies to increase civic participation among BIPOC residents and we provide some additional more detailed recommendations there but we believe that the city could invest in civic education explaining why voting is important. We know that there are languages that the city has translated ballots into and there are languages that haven't been translated but languages is critical but it's not sufficient. And so even if every language was translated we don't believe that based on everything we heard and saw it would exponentially increase voting participation and other participation. We believe there are some systemic barriers education being one and then there are some other structural barriers as well to potentially how elected positions and commissions are set up, low pay, et cetera that don't allow people who don't have the privilege necessarily of taking on lots and lots of work without any pay can provide for them. So those are I think are recommendations and we did a lot of talking and so looking forward to just sort of pausing and opening it up for you all to tell us where we should talk more about. And thank you. Thank you so much both of you. This has been absolutely enlightening. I'm hoping that folks in the audience have enjoyed this. Just so you all know the way that we kind of go about this is that when Paul our communications director notices that someone's hand is up he will pull them over into the panelists section so that they can ask their question or say their comment and then we'll also be monitoring the chat. So we'll open it up now for folks to let us know what they think. Well, thank you so much Iris and ETI for presenting the findings. As a reminder to council, this is our chance to ask questions of the consultants. We can have a follow up discussion with staff. So I did want to share a couple of questions that came from our deputy mayor who was unable to attend this evening but he reviewed the reports and shared some feedback. He had a question about the traffic stop data and whether your analysis includes the rigorous work done by UVM surrounding racial bias and policing that had findings specific to a new ski? No, I don't believe it was. Sorry. I don't believe it did. Okay. Sorry, go ahead. I was asking if that was data that you had considered or had seen. No, and law enforcement wasn't the focus of the audit but we were the city did share a data set with us around traffic stops and we decided to incorporate it given what we saw in the schools as well. Okay, thank you. I had a similar question about the data on wages with the city and how our like grade and salary system intersects with, right? Like we have a process which we hope would eliminate disparity. So I wonder if you could speak more to how those two intersect if it's about a rolling level thing. I think you mentioned that a little bit. Yeah, so this chart is deliberately not controlling for roll level whether it's full-time or part-time because from our experience using working about these issues, working on these issues with other cities and school systems, these are I would say insufficient explanations to explain those disparities. So if this is because of let's say grade, then why, that means that women are systemically lower grade pay grades than men. So why is that the case? We are seeing the disparity in pay as an unnatural disproportionality, something that needs to be addressed. And the next question after understanding this finding, which was probably not in the scope of this project, but what are the root causes of that? And the root causes may be experience, may be grade, may be other things, but those are also kind of man-made policies and practices that resulted in this disparity. We know that there's a lot of work that went in to ensure equity in pay, but we also know that when different grades and positions, when those salary discussions were taking place, those were also very personal discussions, right? Because there's only one man in that grade, in that department. And eventually we wanted to have a perspective that doesn't see all of that, to just look at gender and race disparities and allows the city to hypothesize why that may be the case. Okay, thank you for that added context. Last question is how many residents were you able to interview as part of this process? Or how many communities were you able to interview? Yeah, so it's in the report we had, I believe three focus groups that included residents, some of them were parents in the school system, some of them were not, three focus groups that included teachers, two focus group for students, one focus group with the school district leadership, and then a focus group with city hall employees, and a focus group with, I think that's it. And then we had interviews with, I believe, eight members of the city leadership. So all in all, I don't have the specific number in my head for the number of residents we had, that's something I'm happy to share back with you, but it was probably over 20. Okay, no, actually your description of the types of focus groups is more helpful to me. Thank you. We also interviewed community organizations and leaders of community group based groups as well. Oh, that's excellent. For likely residents. Are there, so those are like based questions, are there other like questions that folks have about the findings? I guess I have some questions about the recommendations. Thank you so much for the work and the presentation as well. You know, in terms of as we, as the council approaches and staff approach are strategic and priority planning, and that a great deal that is influenced by our master plan. Are there, of these, you know, top 10 recommendations that you have, 11 recommendations or so, is there anything in particular that you believe would have the greatest immediate impact or short-term impact? You know, one characteristic of this work is that, you know, we often, again, we think about DEI and we put it in the silo of an office and a director of diversity and equity and inclusion. And that's the case, cities and school districts and organizations, corporations all across the country. But the truth is that the drivers of inequality are not in Yasemin's office, right? The drivers of inequality are in the housing commission, in the school district, in the health, in public health work. It's on topics that don't have equity in their name. So, hopefully this report would help the city to think about what equity means for these different topics that don't have equity in their name, because that's where inequality is formed. And, you know, we think that Yasemin's role is critical and we even recommend to expand it by adding the community liaison through that office. But we also think that the director of diversity, equity and inclusion is the city manager. And the higher director of diversity and equity and inclusion is there to support the city manager to implement this work and to point to those drivers of inequality. So, if I would give one recommendation for that strategic planning, it would be not to include an equity initiative in that strategic planning, but rather to look across the different domains of the city plan and the city work and look at the report and think about what equity means and what are the tools, what is the toolbox that the government has to improve and to make outcomes more equal across these different domains. That would be my number one recommendation. I agree with that. I think from a, we hadn't really discussed this first, but I think housing is such a critically important area that impacts every other government investment and from the resident's perspective, we heard about housing from every group we spoke to, including even students that raised it at times, right? Students are sometimes translating for their own parents, some of those kinds of letters that come. So I think coming up with a plan for how to address housing that is a short-term and long-term plan of where the city invests and really diving in and understanding the role that the city can play in the research that's looking at other jurisdictions is its own body of work. So we're doing an equity audit in a city right now in California and that is the sole focus of it to come out with an action plan for housing. And so I would really recommend that that's something that if you could invest in, I think that there would be a large impact in the work that you all could do and in the services and the equity that could go for city residents. And I just said, we are so optimistic and we believe in this so much. It's such a wonderful community and we are to visit it and we can see how, it's a great community that can even be better and even more inclusive and more diverse and more equitable and everyone would benefit. And this type of work, the housing work, we really believe that the city does have a toolbox in its disposal that would allow it to address these disproportionalities. We constantly share our sentiment with the city leadership that the city's hands are not tied and that there are definitely actions. There's practices to take from similar cities that are similar in many ways. That could be implemented to support better housing equity. Thank you so much. I do want to share this is actually really good timing to receive this information. We do have a municipal planning grant coming up that is hopefully can support some of that housing effort. We are working on zoning updates in our planning commission. So this is something I would be passing along to those members. And coming out of the 300 Main Street having that housing huddle with those partners in place positions us better to take some action here. I also wanted to share for background. When we did our equity summit in 2019, which included city school leaders and residents, one of the recommendations that came out of that was this idea we've been referring to as city tours in the Working Communities Challenge Grant, which is meant to be sort of that civic engagement that you all are hearing is a need. And then also the role of the liaisons was really important in those discussions. And Jim wanted to share that he was excited to see that that was caring through here as well. Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead. Can I ask, I actually have two pretty specific questions that I just wanted to kind of get your ideas on, I was wondering if in your other work with different cities and schools, you've found ways, I think a lot of issue is you mentioned like licensure, but even more than that, it's how do we elevate or help people who have degrees from outside the U.S. that aren't considered in the same ways as U.S. degrees? Like, are there ways that the city and the school can both better support people with those degrees, either to get licensure or just to recognize those degrees? And are you asking on teaching or in general? Sorry. I think we have some ideas around teaching, so I would love to hear in general too. Yeah, so first of all, licensing, of course, is a government practice, right? So licensing is part of our optimism. If licensing is the root cause, then that means that there are things we do to create that disparity and things we can do to eliminate that disparity, it's not set in stone that someone who comes from the grid that currently don't license is not gonna get a job. We made that and we can make that disappear in a thoughtful and strategic process to benefit the community. The teaching example is a good one where over the past probably five years that conversation has intensified, we have come to realize that the licensing work works against us. We know that teachers represent the community, create better outcomes. They are more effective teachers, they retain longer, and they eliminate a lot of those things that we're seeing in schools, like this portion of the assignment to give them talent and the spread and discipline and serving as role model, all of those things are what diverse workforce do and licensing, which is there in order to ensure that we get the better people and the right people in the classroom to teach in front of a child works against us. And more and more districts understand that. They work to revise their licensing practice. So I won't get into the details of that, even though we do so much work around diverse and future workforce with districts across the country, but there are definitely best practices that we could talk to you about, that you can borrow from the education work and to think about implementing in other fields as well. The goal should be, again, lived experience, resident perspective, city perspective, not policy perspective, not the tradition perspective. So the goal should be to improve lives, improve government practice. And we think that if we think there's a licensing component that does that, then there's a process in place we could put to take care of it. Awesome. Laura, if I could add to that. Representative Colston actually got a bill passed a couple of years ago to have the state office of professional management do equivalencies for foreign credentialing. Yeah. I think that implementation is still under way, it hasn't actually happened, but there is something happening at the state level. Yeah, so I'm thinking about, I think getting some best practices would be great, considering that, especially with that, as well as the education licensure is held so much by the state, but are there ways that we as a city can either have one have some ideas of best practice and even possibly put some additional pressure or recommendations to the state so we can really uplift our citizens and our teachers, our residents and our teachers. And of course, so that licensing wouldn't be enough, right? Because that may not get at those root causes. Like we don't predict, maybe we're wrong, we don't predict the change in legislation around new Americans or non-citizens residents that can vote, we don't predict that it would substantially increase the vote given everything else to the other barriers. We think I've proceeded to this area and I have the same token, opening up the license doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna see a lot of applications and those applicants actually being selected to positions in city or in others, we're gonna have to deal with the other barriers as well. Awesome, thank you. I appreciate that. Another kind of specific question and this might be getting at best practices as well, thinking about the increase of stipends or how best to, is it stipends, is it some kind of hourly pay, some kind of recommendation for compensating people who are working especially on our council committees and commissions I think are probably the two big ones, I think we have a lot of great commission work but only certain people have the access and ability to be on those commissions and I think really best practices and like is it, I think in the past there's been a debate, oh do we give it a specific childcare stipend or is it, I think give people money so they're able to say oh I can skip a shift to go to this meeting or I can pay for childcare to go to this meeting so I'm just wondering if there are any best practices around thinking about stipends for increasing access and participation in committees and commissions that you have. I think there are probably some good practices out there to look at, this is not an area that we delved into enough to understand about the root causes of what's preventing it, we have a number of areas that we've sort of listed could potentially create barriers. We think that going out specifically to the community and hearing more about that from them to really identify in Winooski what are the barriers and dig into that a little bit further would also provide more guidance for you as you think about what those practices are and how you could apply it in Winooski. We do know that there are circumstances in which for instance the pay and the amount of work and commitment level and hours is a part of it. We also know that people don't necessarily know who their representatives are right now. We know that there aren't, each council member represents the entire city and so that's sort of a structural thing as well that creates some additional barriers to maybe getting to know particular communities that aren't high voting. And so there's just, it's a lot of issues that are involved and sort of as with any complex issue in sort of systems work, you've got one change will impact 15 others. And so again, this is an area we could definitely look at a number of best practices but to really think about which ones to apply there would I think require a bit of a deeper dive. Awesome, thank you. Yeah, first I'd just like to thank you for putting together, well, for doing all this work and putting together this report. The recommendations are all great and I look at many of them and hope we'll be able to implement them soon and others I hope or wish we had a magic wand so we could pay for some of them. But it's, the work's really great, so thank you and I'm sure staff is gonna have fun diving into these. One thing and more of a commentary, in your report you spoke about BIPOC students really underperforming in the school as well as being disciplined more in the school. And I can't help but think those two things are incredibly intertwined as well as when we look at pay for citizens, if you're underperforming in school that's probably translating to either not getting into college or also underperforming in college and then coming out and not making as much money. So I just really wonder are these things that the school system was aware of that the BIPOC community was underperforming more so than the other communities and the same with the discipline or is this kind of a new finding to them as it is to me today? Well, first of all your hypothesis is supported by an overwhelming body of research suggesting exactly that. So it's a well-informed hypothesis those things are of course connected and I wouldn't, I would be shocked if Winozki is different from any other place that those connections were recorded. Of course the school district was aware of those disparities. Absolutely they were. They, that's part of the reason why they decided to do this equity review process. And again, we think that that's a courageous decision. A lot of school districts in the country book anti-racism training. There's evidence that as important as they may be they don't get at the root if they're done in siloed and just a one-time training. But then they say we're trained. Doing an equity review is a different process. It's more vulnerable. They let us in, they share with us data. They let us write recommendations. They shared with them that we're presenting today and said, go ahead, present. So they are aware and that's what I'm doing to do. I don't know that they were aware of what are the drivers of those studies that we wrote about. I want to think and hope that some of these are new to them and that those would allow them to establish new ideas and strategies at the school level to address that disparity. So now we know that there's this proportionality in this thing. We know that research says that a diverse workforce deals with that problem. There's research at that state, for example, gifted and talented. White students are twice as likely to be assigned to gifted and talented programs as black students with the same test scores, same test scores. And with a black teacher in the classroom, that difference is eliminated completely. So diversifying the workforce would be an avenue for the school to explore to deal with the disproportionality. Did they address diversity sufficiently so far? No, and they know that. And I think the next step for them, I think they're very much interested in that then, is to think about strategies to diversify the workforce. So I think it's more, they're definitely aware of the finding one, the inequality. It's more on the drivers that hopefully there are some new ideas for them there. Wonderful, thank you so much. I have one more question on behalf of our deputy mayor. He asked if you, if there's any tools that you could recommend for evaluating policies and procedures, structures of sorts. We recommend our tool, the outcome letter equity approach. We think that that's the right tool and I'm have joking, but that's exactly what we told you Samina in the first meeting. Let's not go and evaluate your housing policies. And if we do that, you know, I know that you, that we do ski is the number one city in Vermont and investing in affordable housing. 20% of the housing is affordable. I've learned that great. That's something to be proud of. But if we were to go and go about this work to evaluate the policy, the reccommend that the finding would have been good job. We knew ski 20% of the housing is affordable and top city in Vermont, very good. But instead we go to the outcome. The outcome is that everyone who got who was supposed to be evicted got eviction orders to remain, share the sentiment that they don't believe they have a chance to find affordable housing in Winooski if they are evicted in Gelat. That's their perspective. Now it's either representative of reality or it's representative of their perspective. Either way, there's some policy saying there is affordable housing and they don't know where it is or if there isn't affordable housing and we think we're the top city in the state measuring against Vermont index is not good enough. We need to measure against the outcomes of the residents. So the way that we recommend through this report and in our approach to evaluate policies and practices is through that process of first looking at the outcome, agreeing on the outcome, creating consensus of the outcome. It's not the city's fault. It's a lot of different contributors but then asking, okay, then what is the chunk here that belongs to the city and what we can do about? That's our recommendation. It's our approach. Thank you. I'll add to that too. I mean, I think what you're talking about is the next phase of this work. And so this audit we did stopped short of where another one might go, which is to say now that we've got a sense of what the drivers are, now let's look more deeply at what policies are in place. What are the practices that contribute to that much more directly? And so we've kind of given you some ideas of practices, right? And some ideas of based on research and based on our hearing and what we've uncovered so far. But there is a next level of this work that would really go into a deeper dive into what are the zoning laws in place and those kinds of identification of practices and policies and then setting up a real clear action plan around who's doing what and how to really address those things. That is a level of analysis that goes beyond the scope of this work, but one that we really recommend and that's sort of our recommendation in your housing work specifically, for instance, to really do that next level of taking this outcome led equity approach does go into the how you're going to do it. It's just we stopped a little short of that for this project. That makes sense. Thank you. Sure. Any more questions from council before we open to a comment? Not yet. Questions in the audience? Or raise your hand if you're on Zoom. We've got one starting. Kathleen, can you hear us? Yes. Can you hear me? Yes. Welcome. Wonderful. Thank you. This is amazing and enlightening at the same time for me and for a lot of us. It's not surprising. That's one thing I wanted to say and I'm very grateful for being able to participate tonight and to hear this report. One of the things that I do as a facilitator with the Peace and Justice Center is to always try to listen to believe. The phrase we use. And I encourage city council and Winooski leadership to listen to these folks that did this audit to believe. I believe it's the responsibility of this was mentioned. Responsibility of every department to embed the work of equity. I do believe that. Or we'll never get there. We'll never get to the place that we want to be for the children coming up. The senior citizens living here now, et cetera. The quality of life will absolutely improve when that happens. One of the things, this is my last point, my last comment. I've been doing this kind of work as a community member all my life, basically. And the piece of the work that is too often left out is the belonging piece. You can recruit with stellar, stellar effort. You can hire some of the most amazing people, pay them fantastic salary. But if they don't feel like they belong, it all falls apart for everyone. And so I want to throw out that word belonging and I do this anywhere. I have a chance to say it. I have seen so many colleagues at the University of Vermont come and go. I've had friends in the community, in decades of living here, come and go. Because they don't feel like they belong. So those are my comments, thank you. Thank you, Kathleen, for sharing. Daisy, did you have a... A little bit of a moment. No, I don't see any other hands missed. I just wanted to say thank you for supporting us for all of you and especially to Yasmine, our brave, intelligent and fearless leader, director of equity. I know Kathleen mentioned belonging and I think Yasmine has persisted and just shown such stellar leadership in initiatives like this and out in our community. And I think we need to lift her up and thank her for continuing to lead this work here at U of C. And I hope that we can make the same commitment to her that she has made in doing this work here before us. And my question for the consultants who have so beautifully packaged this work that just really invigorates me of the parent, of two young children here in U of C and I chose to live here and die here and I just, this really is just innervizing and it definitely gives me a bit of some things that we need to do and it's helpful. And I know we don't have a map on how to do that and as a member of the community, I hope that the council will definitely invest in getting a roadmap of how to do this thoughtfully, intentionally and exclusively with everybody in the community and Yasmine at the helm. And my question for the consultants is, can you share with us a picture of kind of, I imagine a spectrum of clients you work with and what they do next after getting an initial kind of gap analysis like this. What direction do folks go with this next? Do some clients kind of fall off the map? Can you share with us a story of kind of the two ends of the spectrum of clients that you have? What have cities done who have really led the charge with addressing the inequities in their community and then tell us kind of the other end of the spectrum? Yeah, I think it's a great question. Definitely there is a scale of clients and the way they want to implement this. I would actually go and say that this stage right now between findings and implementation is the most dangerous one maybe because that's where a lot of reports, kind of here's the report. A lot of people are supportive of the report but once we get to changes, once we get to know, okay, let's think about these changes we've identified, let's how do we implement? That's when there's also more opposition. So far, Winooski, everyone that we've met shown a lot of support for this work and see leadership in school leadership, residents. But I've never worked at a place where when we got to implementation there wasn't a position and it got my expectation that there wouldn't be opposition in Winooski for this work as well. So I think it's a critical step. You gotta hit the iron wire, it's hard to move quickly to implementation and some clients do that and others don't. The difference between them is probably leadership. That's probably the number one kind of factor. This work requires courageous leadership. It's about taking practices that have been that way for many years, which is convenient to some people because we can think about other people, people who have died already that are responsible for this practice and not think about ourselves, people who may change them as the people responsible. But some leaders do consider themselves responsible and say I wanna take this work forward and those are the places where you see more success in implementation. Again, it's much, much harder and it requires, and like I said before, it cannot end in the ins and ins of this door. That's again, that goes to leadership. It's about mayors and city managers and superintendents and those are the people who would move this work forward to implementation supported by their DEI directors, but no DEI director alone without staff, without resources, without authority could ever make the changes that are required to be made of housing and discipline and test scores and public health and public safety. And no DEI director could do that in those types of circumstances. So I think again, it's about leadership and from everything that I've seen, I am very confident that the leadership in Wojcicki is serious about this work and is interested in implementing it. Again, I'm very optimistic. And I would add to that. One thing we talk about sometimes is also mindset. And so thinking about what are the levers within our control is a critical part of this conversation. And I'm so happy to have heard that earlier in one of the very first questions, which is, hey, we've got an opportunity coming up to make some investments. Which recommendations of these ones should we invest in? That is absolutely the kind of mindset that makes some things happen. So one of the things I would really recommend is thinking about what are those opportunities that are for tomorrow? Like Itai just said, strike while the iron's hot, you all are thinking about this work. We've got some recommendations in our hands. We've got some momentum coming out of an equity audit that's been going on for several months. What are the leverage points right now in our system? And how can we make moves? Whether it's something that's maybe lower hanging fruit that you can do right now. There's, you know, we've got a great model of community liaisons that is working in the school system. How do you expand that? Like that might be something that you can do now. But I would say that mindset, that optimism, that sense of what's possible and what's within your control is oftentimes what makes a difference between a group of people who say we can't afford this and shelve a report. And the ones that say we've got some opportunities and maybe we need to make some trade-offs because these things are important. And so I just, you know, think back to that question and I think that's part of what's gonna make this successful. And one thing to add on that, I think it's super important, given the council's role is kind of monitoring the city's work, there is no expectation and the report should not suggest that that the city could go and implement all the recommendations tomorrow. We actually think it would be a mistake. That's not what we're saying. And like I already said, if the city would go and say, this is, we can't do this one, we can't do it. But maybe we can do this, this, this next year. That's a very good way to move forward and would show, I think, a beginning of a process of reversing those systemic inequality one step at a time. But there is absolutely no expectation that the city could implement all of its recommendations. Yeah, did you know the question? Just a comment, a little comment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, I have two comments. One is I appreciate and completely agree that the manager has got to be fully engaged and direct this. And I mean, part of the theory of city management is that it needs to be for all of the residents and you need a fair city. Obviously, that's difficult to do. And that's the ideal, but this fits perfectly in the theory of city management. And then getting to the practical. One thing I think you can do is just look for opportunities now that you know the list or this year's list, because I would think you might want to redo this periodically, something that's coming up soon. You're going to be talking about parking, which, oh gee, that sounds boring. But on the list of parking is transit. And so that overlaps with the bus. And maybe not perfectly now, but that's something that you could look at. So when you're looking into funding opportunities, those might come in the guise of a different program that you wouldn't necessarily think impacts equity. But if you are alert to those opportunities, you can kill two birds with one stone or satisfy two birds with one nest or something else. That's what I wanted to say. Thanks Wendy. Yeah, I think that is the charge for us right now is to stew on this, think about how it intersects with what's coming up already, what our commissions are focused on. And then more importantly, letting this inform that strategy and priority session that we do. Before we close it out, I would ask our consultants if there's anything you want to add or YAS if there's anything you want to ask or share with us or to wrap us up. I see that there's one hand up in the attendees. I'm not sure Kathleen, if you just forgot to put your hand down or if you had something further. I did want to say one more thing. So when an organization attempts to change, there is inevitably the need to shift culture. And that I firmly believe is something that must be embraced. It's not easy, it's not always comfortable. But there are things just in the way that city council meetings are run that will have to shift and they will. As things move forward. So I wonder if anyone wants to reflect on that idea of the need for culture shift, for equity and belonging to become a thing of Winooski. Thank you. No, thank you, that was wonderful. That was actually a wonderful way to close out. If there's nothing further, then I would love for us to continue moving on to some of the other items. But once again, I'd like to extend my absolute thanks to Iris and Itai and Opportunity Consulting. I think we all know and believe that this is not the end of our partnership. We will absolutely continue to lean on each other and be a resource to each other, moving forward with this work in Winooski. I'm extremely excited now to start having these conversations and to start building the implementation phase of all of this work. And I know that there are many folks in the city that are right alongside with me. So thank you all so much and feel free to log off or remain if you'd like to see what the rest of our city is up to. But I know that we have, I can hear that there's some littles running around in the background and I know that we all have other obligations. So thank you again so much for coming and we'll definitely be in touch. I'll talk to you very soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good night. Thank you all. So moving on to item B in a related vein. So what we have here is called the Declaration of Inclusion. This is a statewide initiative meant to make a statement to citizens and others that our town believes in treating everyone fairly, recognizing that everyone doesn't look or act alike and that we expect our municipal government to update ordinances, hiring practices, protocols to not favor a white majority or diminish the rights of others. This Declaration of Inclusion has been adopted by quite a few cities and towns in Vermont. The governor also made a proclamation in 2021 establishing an inclusion week which would be May 9 to 15 this year. You know, as was surfaced in the last discussion, Winooski prides itself on being welcoming and this declaration, I wanted to include it with the previous agenda item tonight to re-enferm that we are committed to that to inclusion and belonging and commit to continuing to take steps, right? Like we have just had this report about some areas we need to focus on with no actions taken tonight, but this is an action where we can say that we are taking this seriously and want to keep moving forward. So I have the proclamation on here. The resolution at the end is the actual Declaration of Inclusion statement. Wonder if there's any questions from council about this? I don't have any questions. The Declaration of Inclusion, I'm really glad that we're participating in this. I think that it's something that I know on council we all believe in. I think that most of the residents of Winooski believe in but it's nice to kind of make it official. So thanks for adding it to today's agenda. Thanks, Alex. The one question I have, I guess, is just more of a curiosity of the, I see there's a result and then there's a further result and I'm just wondering why they're separated. That is how the Declaration of Inclusion was written. Fair enough. I guess my kind of would be that for the, I guess the groups that are called out in the section resolved, I would want to emphasize that it's not an exhaustive list and that really the emphasis is, welcomes all persons and everyone to feel safe. Yeah, Jim actually sent a comment suggesting that, so the declaration is written to condemn racism, that we might update it to also include sexism, anti-LGBT-KYA plus bias and other forms of discrimination and oppression. And then, yeah, so you're saying a note about like this is not an exhaustive list. It essentially is. Yeah. Would you all be supportive of adjusting the language for our adoption of this? Yes. Make a note of that because we'll have to update the document. But, oh, are there any questions from members of the public actually on this? Again, you can raise hand and zoom or in real life. Okay, so let me just make a note of the language update before I forget. Okay, so the declaration is the city of Wunewski condemns racism, sexism, anti-LGBT-KYA plus and all other forms of discrimination and oppression and welcomes all persons regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity or expression, age or disability. And this is a non-exhaustive list and wants everyone to feel safe and welcome in our community. As a city, we formally condemn all forms of discrimination, commit to fair and equal treatment of everyone in our community and will strive to ensure all of our actions, policies and operating procedures reflect this commitment. We'll see it further resolved, the city of Wunewski has and will continue to be a place where individuals can live freely and express their opinions. Do I have a motion to approve the language as updated? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. We'll have that edited and then we will sign it once those updates are made. Oh, is there a comment? Yeah, I think that though the word disability is considered, I think with some ability, we can make that change as well. I know that there is some pushback against that though from disability advocates. So might there be a consideration for, I don't know, in addition to? Consider discounting it. Yeah. If you explore that equaled out. So thank you for all of that. Yeah. It is 810. I would like to call a five minute recess and reconvene us at 815, please. And I will be presenting the housing goal update as part of the policy priorities and strategies. I would also welcome any of my colleagues that are in attendance, either in person or on the Zoom meeting to interject as necessary as this is not my area of expertise right now. So, but this is the, I believe the fourth policy or sorry, the fourth update on housing that you're receiving, the list of the specific priorities is included with the agenda as part of the memo. There are seven priorities that are listed, one of which the last one, the form-based code initiatives was previously included in the economic vitality update, but has been shifted to housing because of the specific nature of that update. So not much has changed since you last saw this back in November of 2021. Everything is generally still in the same status where either things are proceeding as planned or slightly slower than planned based off of other initiatives. In particular, there's a couple of items that were related specifically to the equity audit that are proceeding slower than planned, which is why they're showing up in that regard. And also you'll notice the housing trust fund has not yet started, sorry, the evaluation of the effectiveness of the housing trust fund has not yet started because we haven't fully rolled out that program yet. One item I would like to note on page two of the memo under the funding potential for the housing trust, there was a slight change in the item under the ARPA funds. There was some initial rulemaking indicated that we probably would not be able to use ARPA funds, but in conversations I've had with Angela, it sounds as though we can use ARPA funds to offset our government services, which would then free up our general fund tax revenue to be put towards the housing trust fund. So not directly, but indirectly we would be able to use ARPA funds to increase the funding available in the housing trust fund. Otherwise, the other items that were listed, the community development budget reserves and the small business loan fund are still not recommended by the housing commission to support the housing trust fund. Similarly, the TIF revenue was still being recommended as support for the housing trust fund by the housing commission. Otherwise, everything is, like I said, generally in the same trajectory that it was the last time you saw this, happy to try to answer any questions you might have. Yeah, can anyone on staff speak to the actual timeline to launch the housing trust fund? I believe we were waiting on translation. Is that underway? I think the translation is almost complete on some of the forms and I've looked at Paul who's been working on that. I know that was one of the final pieces and some of the training I think is still to be done with some of the partner organizations, but I'm not sure the status of that. Thanks, Erica. It's been real quick. The translations for those documents is a total of 24. We have the base language delivered from the translation service at ALB. I should be able to get the rest of those completed by the end of this week. And again, that's just the physical forms that could be printed in those eight languages. Thanks, Paul. And then who's owning the training for partners? I think we may need to reach out to our partner at Opportunities Credit Union. There was a training that they were requesting as part of the MOU that council previously approved. I don't have an MOU that has been executed by Opportunities Credit Union, but I do have contact information for the person that we were working with over there. His name is Tim and I can reach out to him and see where we're at in terms of their agreement to the MOU. Thank you, Angela. I had a question from the gym submitted to me via email as well. He asked if staff could elaborate on plans to move forward the public building registry updates. So that falls mostly in my shop. This was started for Jesse Baker left. We have not found the space to focus solely on that. You know, say every day operations of the 300 main streets, you know, just no excuses. It just simply isn't enough hours in the data. We just have not squarely gotten to it. So with the other transition happening, a new manager starting, I think it's a good opportunity to kind of, for me to kind of focus on that start date and make it a priority to work with Elaine and get that work moving forward. Isn't that work hasn't been done on that? I just, we have not collected it all together to bring here. Okay, thank you for that. And then he also wanted to ask if there were additional education sessions about Butternut Grove held with additional language groups in November, 2021. I'm guessing maybe this is something that was talked about happening. Yeah, that I'm not sure. I'm not, I don't know if maybe Ray or John or... Yeah, I can try to answer that, Christine. As we're kind of the point person from the city that was organizing that, and I see that she stepped off the meeting, but we did have, I believe, four, I'm trying to remember, it's been a little bit, I think we had four, if not five language meetings here at the O'Brien Center with CHT that were specific to different language groups. I'd have to look back through my email to see what those specific languages were, but there were several of those meetings. And I believe they were recorded as well. And a video was gonna be reused by CHT and they were doing communications, is my understanding. Okay. That was, it was a pretty general question from him. So I think that's enough language follow-up information. Questions from other members of council? I do have one more question. Are we expecting to see an updated gentrification report or is that on hold given that the person that owns it is no longer here? That is a good question. I don't know if I have a good answer for that. I think it's probably on hold right now until yes, given the fact that the person that does that did that is no longer, no longer works for the city. But I can check in with other staff to see if anybody has looked into that. Okay. Has there been any, sorry to jump in. No. Has there been any focus groups about the around the paperwork to complete the housing trust fund approvals, consideration and approvals? I'm not sure I fully understand your question council. So given that there are procedures that the city has opted to put in place to ensure eligibility requirements and thresholds, I don't know if you or anybody else on staff might know if, I know we have commission work goes into that but was there any additional work to review the paperwork, the forms that need to be filled out to see, like, are they overly burdensome? How accessible are they? So it's not just a language translation component, but also like just. Right. Are we, is the design of the structure, even though it hasn't been rolled out yet to make it as successful as possible? Has there been a review from that lens, I guess. I don't know specifically if there has or not. There may, it may be that, and Angela, I may look to you to jump in on this, that the specific requirements with opportunities credit union might dictate some of how cumbersome that is, which I think some of the training may be related to, but I don't know if it's been, if the forms have been specifically evaluated to determine if there's a barrier with the information that's required going forward. Yeah, I don't believe that that has been done. It's not something that was on my radar, though Heather did do a lot of this work on her own before she left the city, but because this is subject to credit approval by opportunities credit union as our administrator of this program, they did dictate some of the information that will be required to be obtained. And for anyone who's new to this discussion, we have a vacancy in a housing and economic development position who used to manage this, which is why some of this information is scattered right now. Any more council questions? Any questions from members of the public? Again, you can use the raise hand feature or raise your brilliant. Is there an anticipated timeline for when the trust fund might roll out or is that all dependent upon refilling this position? I don't think so, right? Like Angela, could it be launched before we have someone in there in that role? It could be. So I believe that the initial evaluations are done by the small business loan committee that has a membership quorum regardless of somebody being in that seat. But I will reach out to opportunities credit union because the ability to roll this out is gonna be contingent upon them being ready to administer the program. Thank you. Thank you, Angela. Anything else? It's too bad that it didn't line up with Butterna. Oh, yeah. Well, Butterna is bringing some affordable, large units to our community, which is excellent. And hopefully the housing trust fund will support that initiative as well going forward. Thank you, Eric. Absolutely, thank you. We'll move on to item D, the update overview on master plan goals and objectives. Yes, thank you very much. I will handle this item as well. So included with your agenda tonight is a list of the goals and objectives from the city's master plan that was adopted in 2019. This is generally a list of, well, it's not generally, it is a list of all the goals that we included and a status of where they are currently, whether they be in process, whether they be complete or not started yet. These generally align or are somewhat consistent with the policies and strategies that are included in the goal updates, like you just saw with the housing goal update, but not exactly. There's not a direct crosswalk between the two. What we wanted to do is get this information to you tonight as we start planning for the next policy and priority strategy meeting on May 21st. Yeah, May 21st, so that you have a sense of where we are with the status of our master plan goals going forward to help inform those discussions at that meeting. So there's no action that's required on this tonight. It's really more just an informational piece. One thing I would add is that as part of our statutory requirements with having a master plan, we have to do a check-in every four years with the Regional Planning Commission and update them on where we are with our goals or progress on our goals and objectives. So this will help inform that discussion as well. So it's really more of something we've been tracking to kind of keep an eye on where our progress is and if we need to start on some items that haven't been started and be able to report that out. Ultimately, these goals and objectives would be completed or in some level of progress within the lifespan of the master plan, which is eight years. So we're three years in now. I think we're in pretty good shape for the most part. A few things haven't started yet, but there are a lot of other items that are either going on now or have been completed. So happy to try to answer any questions about this, but really just wanted to provide this for information so you can get a sense of where we are as we prepare for that meeting. Thanks, Eric. Yeah, so we'll talk priority at the retreat, but now would be a chance if there's items in here that you're not familiar with or have questions about to ask. I was wondering if it might be helpful to, if there's a capacity with staff review this again in the next meeting too as we get a little closer, just considering how much other stuff we have before and after on the agenda. Yeah, I think we could bring this back to our next meeting. Sure, absolutely. And then I would just say if there's anything that is, for example, number, I think it was at the bottom of the, it's number 21. So there's a note there and then the status. I would say in addition to the three statuses of complete and process, not started if there was any, if there was a potential fourth status of like should not move or don't recommend moving forward. Yeah, absolutely. Basically just to make it clear between the not started so that it's like actually if you have put in work we have reviewed it and for, and then in the notes it can capture the reasoning. So just that that distinguishes that further from simply just saying not started which alludes to a need to start. Yes, we can add that. And sorry, council, that was in reference. I was just, number 21 was an example. Under the safe, healthy, connected people, I presume. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I remember having some conversations about that particular item during the process of developing the plan. And so, yep, absolutely. Oh, one correction that I will note and I will update this in the next version is under safe, healthy, connected people, goal one, the reference to municipal infrastructure should be number eight, not number nine. But I will update that for the next. For the next draft. Before moving on, just see if there's any questions from the public. Okay, so we'll revisit this next meeting. Let's move on to item E. This is on for discussion. It's a parking inventory analysis and management plan. Just wanna frame this that much like our equity audit presentation, this is a time to ask questions, get information, not take action or discuss the policy should be yet. We'll get to that eventually. This is also the final report. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we can do your proper introduction. Yes, thank you very much. So I will do a brief introduction here, but also we have, I believe we have Jonathan Slason with RSG and Jason Charest with the Chitton County Regional Planning Commission on the call as well that will be providing the bulk of this information. This is an effort that we received funding through the Chitton County Regional Planning Commission's unified planning work program back in FY21 to do a parking inventory analysis and management plan to help us collect some quantitative data that will inform our parking management policies and the management of those as well as our land use regulations to see if there's changes that can be made related specifically to parking, whether we have too much, whether we don't have enough where it's located, things of that nature. So this is the final report that's been prepared for you all to review tonight. I believe Jonathan has a brief presentation to share as well and can help answer any questions. So I will look to them to see if they want to add anything else. If I don't know if Jason wants that or if they've been brought over to provide any information, otherwise this will be a very quick item. Thanks for having us. I'm also, I don't need to do any more introduction. I'll give it right over to Jonathan. Very great. Thank you, Eric. Thank you, counselors. So I should be sharing my screen. I'll look for Jason or Eric to give me a thumbs up since they're in my field of vision. All right, wonderful. So thank you. My name is Jonathan Slason. I'm a director at RSG based in the Burlington office most of the time here on vacation dialing and with you tonight. So pleasure to be here and been with you since the beginning. So I heard the references to transit and equity. So we might even touch upon that but we'll go as quickly as you can through this presentation to focus on the recommendations and then any feedback, any questions that you might have so that we can wrap this up. So I know tonight's is for discussion and then there might be another council meeting at some point in the future. And I think while we want to be mindful of time just please just jump in if there's anything that you see that you wanted to cover make sure you answer or make sure you have a question answered. So quickly first is why a parking management plan? We have a challenge for us in front of us. Sorry, trying to move them things off my very small screen. We want to develop tools and analysis on to inform how parking regulations can be changed to achieve the city's transportation and land use objectives. Namely is that there's continual improvement for parking management. We're looking at reviewing the current strategies and reflecting the goals and direction of the city. We always know there's additional pressure to always do more with the same or less and the same thing in the way that public space is being used. So our public right of way is being asked to do more for our residents and our members of the community. And namely we're looking to manage future land use changes in a responsible and equitable manner. So in the context that we start with is a transportation master plan that was completed in 2017. This was a citywide plan and parking was identified as one of the top priorities in that plan. Number six, I think was identified as saying there's parking challenges we need to investigate further. And that's what led to some of the impetus for this plan. Then there was a net effort that happened also concluded in 2017 which was focused on the downtown area. Primarily the emphasis was the parking garage and how that there were some challenging shared parking arrangements there. But also to identify what were the demands from the myriad of parking generators in the downtown area from the residential units. At that point the student dorms that were there then also just the mix of commercial residents, restaurants and all the different shopping uses with VSEC and CCV and all those different land uses. That was the big part of the downtown study. So moving to this plan is that it was centered around several steps that we'll discuss here shortly. But there was an outreach and public presentation throughout this process that we aim to solicit input from the public. We went to some of the, we had representatives from an advisory committee that represented the downtown Winooski. We also represented particular land developers, the general public at large. So we met four times during critical junctures of the study that was informed. That was our core emphasis of public engagement was the advisory committee. It was supplemented with a project website which was available. Any of the meetings was recorded. We had the presentation notes that were after the public meeting as well as any other written narrative was available on the website. We then also conducted a small survey about 290 folks participated from across Winooski. We're able to use that as insight as to how parking was behaving, where people felt there was parking pressure, the amount of cars that people owned and therefore required parking. We also were able to validate that to say roughly what's the parking rate per capita or per household in the city. Also, what's the general age and distribution of income of those who participated in the survey. So it was a helpful sense to get an idea from a mechanism particularly because this was peak COVID times where we weren't doing public meetings. We also then relied on the technical work that Jason Shrest from the RPC and Eric from the city and also John Rauscher from DPW and others participated and was guiding the project and decision-making throughout on the day-to-day process. Other identified goals that we had a little bit more focused was that we were looking particularly on regulatory reforms regarding the amount of on-site parking, particularly for new developments. We'll talk about affordable housing as part of that later on. Developing options to manage on-street parking in areas that are experiencing elevated levels of parking pressure. And then that also goes toward forecasting in the future where those elevated levels may occur. We're also looking at defining an implementation process for selecting the most appropriate management options. And so it became quite clear that there was not a preferred one management approach fits all and it requires a much more customized street-by-street issue or methodology for doing parking management. And so we identified certain factors in a process for that. Overall, the study was conducted using this general framework. We conducted numerous observations. We'll talk about that in the next slide. Then we conducted that web survey that I just discussed. And then we're using local data with national data. And this allows us to then develop a shared use parking model in which we were able to basically calibrate to reflect the conditions on the ground in Winooski. And we felt really good about that because of the quantity of parking observations. We were also able to compare to pre-COVID conditions and we were able to then pivot and say, generally the parking is in line, particularly for some of the residential streets. While hour by hour, it might vary the net results, particularly during the PM peak period, which is when most people would be home anyway, that seemed to be the time where we had some of the most stress on our streets. And so we were able to feel comfortable that our local data, our parking observations, combined with national data to say, this is what the whole parking data set has said in the past, said land-used operates like this, we felt really good that we were observing things today in Winooski. And that then allows us to forecast to the future and identify then how changes in the parking supply, but also how changes in the land use would affect the net demand for car parking. And that gives us our future conditions and then also what management strategies and practices we could put into play that could affect the demand for car parking in the future. Our study area, we covered, I don't know the number of how many miles out of the overall street miles of the city, but we covered 16 streets and about 70 different unique street segments. So it gave us a good sense of the parking in the city. We had a variety of geographic kind of different demographics that were represented by some of the streets. We had different functions of how much on-street versus how much off-street supply was adjacent to these study area sections. Some of them were 100% residential versus obviously Main Street has a variety of land uses along its length. And we also had something like St. Peter Street where you have unique generators right there that were very intense for short amounts of time and then open for other amounts of time. So it gave us a really good sense, but you will notice that it also is all outside the downtown core, which was intentional because there was that previous study that focused in the downtown area. One thing I'd like to point out, John, before you go off this slide, in a couple of instances, we only looked at portions of the streets. So if you look at La Fountain Street and Bellevue Street, we only analyzed that first block. So in those cases, when you read information in the study that talks about the potential parking pressure on those streets, it's really only in that first block. We decided to only go through that first block because generally speaking, the observations that we had after that first block was that there was almost no cars parked on the streets so on those two segments. So when we talk about parking pressure and capacity and occupancy of vehicles for those particular instances, it's only for that first block, not the entire length of the street. Yeah, thank you, Eric. In the reports, there are some failures, particularly around the figure 16 and 16 to 20 or so offhand, which do talk about changes in parking occupancy and demand for the future. And you'll notice that Bellevue Street particularly shows some elevated parking, but there is a caveat to that, that we are only looking particularly in the section closest to Main Street. Now that was also intentional, it's not only just because of observations that was suggesting that further away from Main Street, the demand goes down, but the idea is that we're looking at trying to develop a process that acknowledge that Main Street is gonna change in the future, here rather dramatically. And we also have some land use changes that are more intensely, I think focused along Main Street. And so we acknowledge that Bellevue Street will increase in attractiveness for parking. And so we realize that it would probably be the first couple hundred feet away from Main Street that would see that parking pressure at first. So this chart acknowledging that it's not maybe intuitive from the first glance is that it's a really good way to quickly say that Winooski is in a good position today, is that by and large, if we use the bottom axis here, the average parking occupancy by segment is out of those 70 segments that we studied is that the vast majority, if we look at the Y axis on the left is that fewer than 5% of the segments reach over 60% occupied over those AM and PMP periods. We got a few segments in the afternoon that are really full today. And we've got a little bit more, kind of that 60 to 75% occupancy in the afternoon as well. But you can see by and large, particularly in the AM, the vast majority of street segments are in that kind of 20 to 30 to 40% occupied. And that means that you've got majority of your space is open. Not it, but it doesn't diminish anybody's one experience because we know that some blocks particularly are of demand and it does vary by time of day, but that's why we use the approach that we had and we tried to estimate then how it varies throughout the day and the mix of land uses and all of that fed into the parking model. The amount of on-street observations is that we conducted over 1200 unique observations and some of you in the audience participated in some of those observations. And so it was much appreciated that people went out all different times a day. And the benefit is that we used an approach that values every observation because it had a unique time of the day and it had a unique location. And so we were able to help calibrate the model to say, well, at 9 p.m. it's supposed to do this. Okay, at 2 p.m. it's likely doing this. And we also had numerous city staff out there driving up and down the streets, conducting their day-to-day business and doing on-street parking observations. So many thanks to everybody who participated because the amount of data that was collected really helps us with a rigorous analysis. The amount of off-street observations also provided us that at least every parcel was looked at. We tried to stay out of private property and stay on the sidewalk and try to get a sense of how many cars were parked behind the building and it made it difficult. But again, thanks to the RPC and others really leading that charge for how many parking observations we were able to collect. So really what I wanna leave you with at this slide is that the general sense is that Winooski's in a good place and we're getting ahead of any of the parking challenges that we really see, particularly for outside of the downtown core. Now, the reason why we did such an extensive existing conditions is that we built that parking model, as I mentioned, so that we could assess how changes in the future conditions might affect the parking demand. Over the next few years, Eric's just was talking about the future housing challenges and the rate of growth that we're experiencing is that we expect over 300 new housing units and let's say it's five to 10 years from now and probably more than that within the 10 year horizon and up to additional 10,000 square feet of non-residential space. So the primarily the driver is residential development that seems to be occurring and that with those 300 new housing units, it's projected to add approximately 450 off-street parking spaces. What we'll discuss here then is that on and off-street parking demand will grow, particularly where these land uses are occurring. Main Street and East Allen Street, we realized that the main street revitalization, it's going to reduce the amount of on-street parking from today. And it will inevitably shift some of the parking demand onto the side streets and increased competition for those that remain. And so it's going to change the conditions for those who live and work, particularly on those side streets, but also a long main street. And so that's what part of this whole study is all about is to saying who's going to be affected by these changes and then how can we get ahead of it and manage it. Other side streets such as Manso, Bellevue, La Fountain, they're all anticipated to grow and accommodate some of that overflow demand from some of those key corridors that are changing. So the next few steps, I'm going to say out of all that changes, what does it mean for us and how do we move ahead? Chapter six in the report sets out a process. There's a phase one and a phase two for how we can implement the findings. First is that we're getting ahead of the issue. The PMP, the parking management plan identified areas where we have those elevated area levels of parking, occupancy, going to start challenging us, where it's going to be harder for folks to find that one or two parking spaces on a block face. And we identified that we can start to monitoring their streets and more active management and monitoring because right now we don't have a systematic process put in place where we're observing parking. Now we have a method or at least we have a report here that says these are the streets that are most likely going to become a parking problem or become elevated for residential and commercial tenants. And that we can say how can the city start to monitor whether when these thresholds are starting to be met. And typically we use a threshold of 85%. That generally means it's a rough rounding but almost two vehicle spaces on a block face. That's the general length of how many parking spaces we're talking about, about 10 spaces. And if you can find one to two parking spaces. If once those thresholds start being met continuously for several hours, that's the general threshold that we would say we want to do something and we need to be more proactive on the management strategies. So the second set of bullet points here is that what are those strategies? So we have a set of rules and management strategies that are set out in the report. And this is not rocket science is that the set of rules are rather well-established. The challenge though is identifying which rules to apply where and to acknowledge who will be the most affected. We first define and prioritize the users on those streets and so that we can identify what management strategy would be the most appropriate for them. A residential street would have a different mix of strategies than a predominantly commercial block face. We then look at once we identify what management strategies might be the most appropriate for the particular block face, we then looking at phasing the strategy implementation is that it's a first to go in with a low minimum effort, hopefully lower financial obligation and cost from the city's point of view. And then we start to affect change slowly, but surely. And then over time, those changes become a little bit more significant, both in terms of the impacts on parking demand, but also to those to the city in terms of the level of effort that it commands. So we have three more slides here. We go through these recommendations. This is the first short-term recommendations. First thing is that we need the mechanisms in order to do any enforcement. In many parts of the city, it's not well-defined where exactly the parking could be, how close are you to the driveways? It's codified. There are some codes in our comprehensive in the ordinance. However, people day to day may not be realizing it. So we need improved signs and striping. Then the idea is to say, when are things gonna be coming a problem? We can start to develop a monitoring schedule. Alternatively, we could set up a mechanism to engage the residents and say, can they do a, I don't know what the process is in the city, whether it's a C quick fix or something like that, but whether there's just call your counselor or set up a email ping on a website to say, hey, this street is starting to get busy for parking. I would love some observations and so we get some real data again. So that's what that second bullet points all about because you need to start from a place of some confidence. There's a number of short-term parking zoning requirements that should be recommended to be updated. And I know so Eric's already been well aware of these things and some of them are probably underway today. But probably one I wanna call out is that the idea is parking requirements for affordable units being sensitive to equity and where we are just talking about today is that this is a difficult subject is that the facts are persons experiencing lower income typically own fewer vehicles and therefore they need fewer spaces to park them. The second fact is that parking spaces are expensive to build. And so if we have individuals that may be experiencing lower income, I think it's factually, it's not a big jump to say, well, we need fewer parking spaces. The question of eliminating it and then also the downstream questions is to say, are we preventing those who would like to reach job opportunities further afield once they need a vehicle, are we somehow restricting that ability? So that's where there's some others, there's some much more conversations that it's difficult. But I think there is a recommendation that at this point in time, there's sufficient on-street parking, particularly around most of Wyniewski that we would recommend removing the marking, the minimum parking requirement for affordable units. There's also opportunities to reduce the net parking minimums for residential streets. There's numbers that we've provided in the report and to Eric to say what those numbers might be. And so there's an opportunity to phase that in over time. There's a number of other zoning requirements here that we're not gonna go into. One thing that I will point to is the idea for residential permits and more formal process for soliciting interest in that. So moving into the medium and long-term recommendations is that unfortunately, but typically it does pay for itself is that it does require additional budget and staff training for the initial data collection and enforcement of parking. The idea of whether the fines of parking enforcement pays for that staff and what's the financial mechanism of that and the cost center, that is a whole other subject is whether the pricing of the fines are sufficient so that one, the behavior reduces, but also that it's not penalizing those that are unable to pay for a variety of other ways of other reasons. So again, that's a difficult one. There are transportation demand management strategies. These are the opportunities to say, does a development move in? Do they provide sufficient bike parking? Do they pay for transit for their residents? Do they fund other multimodal means of access? Do they have other financial compensations to avoid driving their private cars? So these are all transportation demand management strategies that could be required for certain land-use developments. Transportation impact fees, which we've discussed in the past in other contexts is that there could be other ways to raise monies for those investments to support a non-auto-centric means of travel. We could support funding for mobility hubs so that's kind of a grandiose term for where you could go to one location and get access to either transit, e-bikes, the bike share, the car share, other resources that would benefit you so that you don't have to have your own private car. Additional bike share and car share infrastructure and other non-motorized travel infrastructure could be funded through impact fees. And then lastly, I know is the one that we mentioned about, the earlier mentioned is that increased frequency and transit routes is a desirable solution to facilitate non-auto traffic and maybe it would be an equitable way to improve mobility throughout the city for students, let alone residents. And so if we provide transit options to Winooski, to major job centers in Burlington, to Essex, whatever it might be, if we can increase those frequencies we might provide greater opportunities for people to not only improve their economic viability and sustainability, but also prevent them from not needing to own a car and then parking spaces. So any conclusion here? So thanks so much for listening and we'll have some comments here, but the city's in a good place today. We've done this at the appropriate time period. We're just starting to see this, the parking pressures in certain areas outside of downtown. We realized that there's some opportunities to change that here today. We are also in a situation just before main street gets underway that things will change. And so now we have a plan to help us better understand and get ahead of it. Then we're building in a process for engagement. So we just followed up some of the other conversations today is that engagement with the community is a continual and evolving process. And we realized that parking will be part of these myriad of many other conversations. And so we're gonna start to hear from our residents and employees and business owners to say where parking pressure is challenging them and how they might provide solutions for that. So hopefully the report provides a good comprehensive review of everything that I've covered here. And I'll let Eric fill in any pieces that he might wanna jump in here with before we open it up. So thank you all. I think the only thing that I would add is that you did receive a copy of the full report and the appendices that has all the survey information that was collected. So there's a lot of data there. And if you have any follow-up questions, happy to try to answer information on that tonight or at a future time. A request. You mentioned this before the consultants presented about those segments only looking at the one block off Main Street and seeing far less usage next to that. Yeah. I'm wondering, Jonathan, if the report could be updated. So where these charts are about future parking occupancy to make it really clear that when we're saying Bellevue or LaFountain is at high occupancy that we're not looking at the entire street. So that if residents are looking at this, they have an understanding of that. Yeah. I think that's, we'll find a good way to put that within the limited space. We don't wanna clutter too many tables, but maybe a footnote, caveat, little asterisks, is that appropriate? Yeah. Like a sentence above charts or something. Great. Questions from council about this data? Bryn? I did participate in the draft meeting and review. And I at the time had mentioned electric vehicle charger considerations. I don't see anything that mentions that in this final report at all, as far as like future demand or further for further consideration. There is a section, section five eight that does talk about electric vehicle supply equipment and gets into some of that discussion. My control of fine did not pick it up then. Yeah. Going from memory and Eric, please the conversations that then unfolded. So thank you for bringing that up. Is that it's again, it's a tricky one. Once we put a charger at a location then you're really gonna have parking there forever or at least for a long time. So the question is whether we want to have that type of commitment to a parking space on the curb. The second piece is then the decision is who owns that infrastructure? And by and large, I know VTrans for instance, they do not wanna own these chargers. They're looking to find third parties to own them. And so the question would be, does the city want to go through a process of procuring and maintaining their own system? And so it was my professional guidance is that there would be some disadvantages to that. And so the city should really consider maybe an RFI or some opportunities to identify third party interest, particularly on curb spaces, just because of the density of chargers is so low, one space or two, one device for two ports, it makes the operation cost quite high. And then I don't see anything in here about, so it looks at your, you know, this one and a half, one and a quarter pages, doesn't go into anything about the economic opportunity I guess that can come with having fees associated with the chargers or with the reality that right now a level three charger does require up to a half an hour for a full charge and how that could bring additional stimulus to our local businesses. So I know that was not the primary focus of this, but you know, having maybe future research, I'd hate to lose, have a new ski lose out on economic opportunities that our sister municipalities are taking advantage of because we're not thinking about the future of transportation and the transition away from fossil fuels. But again, I know that that was not the focus of this study when it, on its own side. Yeah, thank you for that comment. And I think we'll see if there could be something out of there, Eric. Oh, were you gonna say something? I just wanted to follow up on the chargers and maybe you're already planning on doing this, but one thing you can do is have chargers be on private offsite property, you know, not off street property and require them, particularly in large developments. That's a way to do it so that you're not taking up on street space. And just a comment, electric cars versus regular cars, they both take up the same amount of space. So when you're talking about environmental sustainability, yes, electric has benefits, but when you're talking about traffic, they're the same. So that's just an important distinction to keep in mind here. And then there was a question in the chat from Michael about the ratios. And I think you answered that, Jonathan, when you said the 85% is the goal of parking usage, basically, that, and you implied that less than that is not efficient, which was what Michael's question was. He was asking if 20 to 60% ratios mean that the public space is not being used well. So, and if you wanna answer that quick. Right. Yeah, so the question is, he's reading it correctly that there is sufficient capacity today or that it's being underutilized to its full potential. The growth that is anticipated, particularly along Main Street and East Allen, does as well as the Main Street reconstruction, those areas will see there that available capacity go down significantly. And so it will, those are the areas that are gonna see some parking pressure. Other parts of the city will remain that there are streets that have a fair amount of capacity for parking, but it does vary by time of day. And so it used to be sensitive to that. Two things on that, one, going back to the chargers, is that something that would fit in with like transportation demand management strategies for developers? It can, it can, and that's actually something that we're, so there are some requirements through the, I believe it's through the commercial building energy standards that the state of Vermont requires that they do for a certain size of project, they do require a certain number of electric vehicle chargers to be included. CB Sony applies to above four stories though. Well, right, that's the thing. So for the, which is based on the size of the project. So there aren't many that are hitting the threshold yet, but we are, it is something that I've been as a request basically through the review to request right now that the developers look to include the chargers on their projects. It's also something I'm looking at developing as an incentive so that we can, we can exchange a certain number of chargers for parking spaces or something similar that would incentivize developers installing the EV chargers so that it's, it's the private side responsibility and not the city's responsibility to, to maintain and ensure that they're, they're, they're part of our, they're not part of our asset inventory. Okay. And then following up on the utilization, I'm glad we have this data. I'm looking forward to it being shared with planning commission and zoning recommendations at a future date. I think one discussion point that has continuously come up in planning is a concern about not having street capacity to have parking and bike lanes. And I think this data is saying we do have that capacity in much of the city. And so we can continue to consider both uses. That's it. And then I just have, in some of your short-term recommendations, I was mentioned about line striping. Is that similar to what was requested on Manso to optimize spacing by actually painting in spacing? Yeah. Yeah. In some cases we either where we've striped spaces, it's just worn down to the point where you can't tell or there's just never been, there's never been striping. There's also the, there's a discussion about in some transportation circles about whether it makes more sense to just strike, to strike individual spaces or strike the whole area where you can park because sometimes you can put more vehicles if they're smaller into a parking area versus individual spaces. So it's really just a matter of what makes the most sense for the on-street parking that we have. Thanks for clarifying that. Yep. And I know last year there was an issue with paint availability, which is why a lot of the spaces did not get re-striped, so. That's important. Jonathan called out staff, staff time and cost for enforcement, but there is also a staff time and cost for doing more striping throughout the city than we currently do. So any of these will require more resources essentially. So something to think about. Any more questions? One thing that I'm seeing with this is that and kind of one that the data from this looks like it can be applied to some of the actually higher priorities that are at least that people identified for prioritizing transportation actions. So it sounds like this report kind of includes some of that and I assume that's going to be expanded upon like I'm thinking about, we're talking about traffic safety with lines and stuff like that. And I'm also thinking about the ways that first, like how does wayfaring is one of our master plan goals? How can this tie into that? So it feels like this data can be expanded in a lot of different ways. So I'm just wondering about like a distribution to I guess different committees and commissions that might be able to pull parts of it. Yeah, I think so. And I think ultimately a lot of where that's gonna end up is what recommendations you all want us to move forward with and how we start to roll out some of these initiatives or these recommendations. Obviously I think some of the commissions can help feed back into to your decision-making. So it's yeah, but I think it's definitely something that can, this information can be useful across a broad spectrum. Awesome, thank you. I just have a quick question. It's on the one long-term recommendation of enhanced transit service. I believe with the public transit services there's a cost share that's involved and I believe that's generally the largest barrier, but I was just wondering if that is a true assumption on my part, if there are other things that the city can do to try to increase that. Public transit? Yeah, sorry, go ahead, Mayor. Yeah, we pay evangelists, like $260,000 a year to GMT. Maybe it's higher, because they just stopped it significantly. It's 300 something now. I think it's just over $200,000, right? One will be going up to $260 next year. Yeah, and we have had ongoing conversations. So during the budgeting process, I can't remember his name or his title, but somebody from GMT came to meet with us and spoke to some of the challenges they're facing and also heard from us, you know, what we're hearing from residents about wanting more service or different service lines. And I think that's, we're gonna have to follow up on that and like keep in dialogue with them. Yeah, and I think there are some things too, where it also depends on what our other towns are paying into. I think there's an issue, like Colchester doesn't, so people who wanna go up to the Shahs, like have a line up that way, don't have access to that. So yeah, it's such an important issue, but there's so much that GMT holds that we, like how do we best manage that relationship, I think is part of it. And also, I think one thing that's considered a lot is, you know, opinions other than the people who are actually using the buses. So thinking about how can we actually talk to the people who are using the buses and get their experience of both things that are lacking and things that are working well. When thinking about, I think with the equity and what's just thinking about getting feedback, we're talking about from the community on the parking too. Like, mm-hmm. All comes together. So for next steps, question for staff is, given the timeline of the Main Street project, when would staff feel it would be appropriate to start implementing anything? Like what kind of runway do we have to make that decision? Yeah, well, I think some of it's already being implemented, quite frankly, or we're working towards it, in particular with the recommendations related to land use. I mean, that's definitely something we're already exploring. Additionally, with the enforcement, that's something that we generally evaluate, whether or not we should be expanding the paid on-street areas or, you know, what that looks like and when we should start evaluating those areas for more enforcement. So it's, I mean, some of these things are already happening. It's just a matter of to what degree we're working towards implementation. So I think for a lot of the short term, it is, you know, there are things in place that we're doing and some of the issues we know about and are thinking about ways to refine. So for example, like the resident parking permit process. That's something that's a little clunky right now in our regulations that we've had conversations with the parking team about how we better refine that or what that looks like going forward. So I think some of it's already kind of programmed into our day-to-day and isn't really requiring much additional resource at this point. I guess it's maybe a long way to say that we're already working on some of this. And will this, especially thinking about the land use, will this actually help speed up or at least bring some more leverage into that process? So that's a great question. I know one of the discussions we've had continuously with the Planning Commission is related to parking and we've consistently held off on having those conversations until this report was finished. So this I think will definitely help inform those discussions and hopefully help speed those along. Okay, awesome. Thank you. I was just gonna say, whatever is involved, just a whole lot of change management. All right. Any other questions from folks? I just had a quick comment if I may about transit funding. I just wanted to alert you all that we did just wrap up the CCRPC, just worked with a consultant on transit financing and it explored various different ways and it kind of, you know, we're well aware of the problems around financing transit. And so that report I think we've just got finished in December. I don't know if it's quite on our website yet, but I can follow up with Eric so that I can get that into your hand so you can maybe take a look at it. And there's plenty of recommendations for how we could possibly fund transit differently in Chinatown County and throughout the state, but it'll require some political willpower, I think, to make some big changes, as you may imagine. Can't wait to see that. I see we do have a public question from the public. Hi, Sarah. Hi, how are you? Yeah, this is, I am Sarah Van Rijk-Forcel and I serve on the planning mission. So I wanted to have one comment about the eliminating parking on the affordable housing. And I think I would feel more comfortable if the city had some ideas about in the future, if people in affordable housing say needed to get cars or have vehicles and have parking for them, that we have some kind of a plan for those people, whether it's vouchers into the public parking spaces. I think I'd just be more comfortable as saying, well, they don't have as many cars, people don't have as much money to buy cars. I think that's going back into the equity conversation we just all sat through. So thank you. Thank you, Sarah. I think Jonathan framed that up a little bit too for us in his presentation. Are there any other public comments? Well, Jason, Jonathan, thank you so much. I know this has been under work for a very long time. And it's data that has been in demand as well by our commissioners. So thank you very much. Thanks, Sarah. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll work to get an updated draft for a future meeting. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, so item E, right? No, item F. I have put forward tonight a resolution in support of adjusted student weights in Vermont's education funding structure. So for a little bit of background and for members of the public, in Vermont our education funding is based on the number of students in a school and students with higher needs like poverty or limited English proficiency are counted at a rate higher than one. The higher rate is called a weight and the weights are intended to equalize the cost to educate students so that districts with higher poverty or more English language learners like us don't have to spend and tax more than higher income districts, for example. Several years ago, our state legislature commissioned a study from UVM and Rutgers that looked at equity in our education funding system and said unequivocally that the weights do not provide the necessary level of funding for students at this time. The legislature then created a task force to figure out how to implement recommendations from that report. And after a lot of advocacy, the task force recommended updating the weights in the funding formula. The Senate then created a bill that would carry out that plan that as is process, their bill was passed to the House and the House Ways and Means Committee that's looking at that bill now is pivoting away from implementing the weights as were recommended by the study, by the task force and in the Senate bill. And so this resolution is aligned to one that the Burlington City Council is also, I believe, looking at so that we can make a statement as counsel to the state legislature to not make that change and to continue on the path of updating the weights. So I put this for you tonight for consideration. Does anyone have questions about this? No, I have full exposure. Yeah, it's so important. Okay. Public comment. I don't think we have any. Okay. So I would entertain a motion to approve the resolution supporting adjusted student weights in Vermont's education funding. So moved. Motion by Brennan, second by Thomas. All those in favor please say aye. Motion carries. Thank you. We'll get that signed and distributed. Perfect. We are on to item G, ARPA grant funding assignment with Angela. Oh, you're muted, Angela. Yep. This is related to the item that was brought last week as an update that Treasury issued the final rule regarding ARPA funding and we have received guidance from VLCT and professional auditors that recommends that as a municipality receiving less than $10 million that we elect the standard $10 million revenue loss. This will allow us to use this funding towards government operations and report the use of all our ARPA dollars in one year. This will create a reserve of our tax dollars at the end of the year that we can then use for those initiatives that we've been discussing such as housing trust fund and business loans and those types of things that we're hearing back in those surveys that the community is submitting. So staff is looking for a motion by council as the administrator of this grant to authorize the use of ARPA dollars as revenue loss with most of the money being assigned to the general fund for general government operations and a sum of $250,000 to be assigned for revenue loss for the on-street parking fund which saw losses due to the free parking and non-enforcement during the height of COVID with revenue loss between, I think 20 and 40%, about 30 and 46% between the two years. The additional funding being sent to the on-street meter fund would allow us to meet our obligations with regard to the 70 parking project and keep that project moving forward. Thank you, Angela. Brandy, you have a question? I have, yeah, Angela. So with this memo, I don't see that it calls out the 100,000 that was council approved for small business so it doesn't specifically call it out. What it says is that less any other council authorized uses so we can assign the use of reserves for those other uses. We did receive only three applications for the COVID recovery grants. Okay, all right, I knew you had it in your head. I just wanted to make sure that we had that called out in this memo. Yeah, I think it was just one very small sentence. Yep, we would still have reserves equal to our award less any funding that has been allocated by council, including the COVID-19 recovery business grant program and PPE authorized to date. Perfect, any other questions? Looks good to me. Okay, I am seeking a motion to authorize the use of ARPA money as revenue loss, assigning $250,000 to the on-street parking fund, the rest of the general fund less any pre-authorized uses. So moved. Second. Motion by Aurora, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Okay, next up item H, the fees for community services program and Thrive. Hey, how's everybody's doing? So as we do typically on an annual basis here to come and set rates for Thrive, which is called for in the city ordinance chapter 28. And also to add some fees here for programs that we had not yet established a cost for in resolution in the past. As you'll see here, most of them are non-resident fees. Reason being that we anticipate using ESSER funds to cover the cost for Winooski residents, but we have in past summers had some non-resident participation. So wanted to set that fee to allow for that, allows to build for that moving forward. So pretty straightforward, but I answer any questions that you might have. Questions on this one? Are non-residents able to apply for financial aid to lower the fees? Yeah, you have a great question. So in most cases, yes, the one place where we did opt not to allow that was for pool passes. So we did restrict scholarships for pool passes to Winooski residents, but in most other cases non-residents can apply for scholarships, yes. And then just in terms of non-residents using things like the pool, like do we market the pool outside of Winooski broadly at all? So it's interesting you say that and I have not done it on the numbers, but I'm seeing all the pool pass receipts as they're coming through. And we are seeing a lot of non-resident passes being purchased right now. I would say just anecdotally based on what I'm seeing in my inbox probably about half the moment of the passes purchased to date have been non-residents. So it's interesting in that we haven't actively marketed that beyond the city. We've done a little bit of local marketing. We're planning in the next couple of weeks to do sort of an email blast to pass holders from last year, which would capture everybody regardless of their residency. But it's an interesting question and definitely something we could look into as a way to kind of boost those sales. Right. Are these consistent with the fees from last year or are they an increase? So they are by and large consistent. One of the, so some of the newer programs. So for instance, the dance programs and then the swim team. So the dance programs were set based on a rubric we've been using with the ESSER contract to establish the billing rate for various programs. So these rates are consistent with what we'd anticipate billing those out to the school at. Swim lessons are same thing. We realized actually that we had not set a non-resident rate last year. So that's a cleanup item. And that's the same amount that we bill to the ESSER grant. The swim team rate is actually a little bit less than what was being charged in years past. We're taking that on this year as a new program whereas the Y had run it for years. And so the idea, the difference being that they used to offer a multiple child discount which was going to be pretty complicated for us to manage through our rec management system. So we dropped the rate for per child. But I think it'll come out in the wash in terms of not applying a multi-child discount for families that have multiple kids swimming. But again, that's a program with access to scholarship resources as well. Okay. And as a follow up between the ESSER funds and these fees, will that, what would be shy of having the program self-funded I guess at that point? Yeah. So I mean, so it's been a little bit of a complicated question to answer given some of the vacancy we've had. So with any leaving her role in January, our kind of winter early spring slate of programs is less robust than we were predicting it would be because we've been down bodies. As we're looking towards the summer, we've got a really nice slate of programs planned. We did just make an offer today to a new rec manager. So that's in the works. So I think from an ESSER billing perspective, we're feeling some confidence that that will pick back up to the point where those costs will be breaking us even. Beyond ESSER, I think that that's still a work in progress where we are seeing really good response to the scholarship prompt or sorry, the donation prompt in our registration software. So as folks are registering, we're asking every time, would you like to make a donation to support youth programs? And we are seeing a decent response there, which is good, but that's definitely not enough to sort of sustain those programs over time. It's enough to more or less cover the scholarship requests, but in terms of covering program costs, that's something we need to sort of continue to think about post ESSER and how we're gonna sustain over time. All right, thank you. Yeah. One question I have, and this was within the equity audit, so hasn't been out very long, but there was a specifically calling out new American residents, not knowing that the pool even existed or how to access it. So I'm just wondering, kind of considering that if there's additional outreach planned. Yep. So Claudine and I actually went up to the school, gosh, I think about three weeks ago now and met with the full group of liaisons that work there and gave them sort of an overview of the subsidy program that supports Thrive, what it's gonna take to get folks signed up for Summer Thrive and then also pool passes and gave them both a kind of verbal overview and then sent some written information as well. So it's definitely something I will say, again, anecdotally, looking at the initial sales, it tends to be more what I'm gonna guess are English speaking families buying those initial passes. So that is an area where we've got some outreach planned in the coming months, just to sort of try to get some more new American families engaged in the pool that way. Awesome, thank you. Yeah, no, great question. Any other questions? I'm not hearing any concerns. So would someone like to make a motion to approve this resolution setting fees for community services programs and Thrive? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thanks, Ray. Thank you very much. Right. And now we're on to item I, chapter 28 fees. I think Angela's coming back again. Yes. Yep, so this is just another one coming back to you since you had gotten the text of the ordinance a little late at the last meeting. You wanna give you time to digest it before requesting that council make the introduction of the changes to the ordinance as proposed and set a public hearing date for your next meeting. Again, these were mostly fees to update, to be in conformance with statute, to meet costs associated with those fees administratively and to set fees for the public record request policy that was approved by council. Thank you. Are there any questions from council? Okay. Well, hearing no concerns, I'm looking for a motion to set a public hearing for May 2nd. So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. And which councilor will be introducing the ordinance for our city charter? Oh, that's new to me. We don't often make ordinance changes. Yeah. It's just introduced by one. Volunteer. Deputy Mayor. That's fine. Volunteer. We'll have councilor or deputy mayor. Oh my God, why is Jim's last name is speaking to me, Duncan. Yes, yes. Okay, thank you. You passed 930. That's exactly what's happening. Okay. Very good. So we are on to item J, appointing an interim city manager. Is John still with us? I think he is. Yep, there he is. Oh yeah, okay. I see you now. And then I'll just talk until he gets his microphone on. So this, you need an interim from tomorrow through May 15th and, because Elaine will start on May 16th. And John has graciously agreed to be that person. And he handled this as co-interim previously. And has been the backup for the city manager role for some time? Yes. Do we need to do anything formal, formal paperwork on this? Or can we just? There definitely needs to be a motion. Well, yeah. Yeah. But we don't need, okay. Yeah, not that I know of. I can double check with the attorney. Okay. John, do you have anything to say? No, just happy to fill in for the little bit. Thank you. Yeah. Do I have a motion to appoint John Rusher as our interim city manager? To move. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Appointed through May 16th when our new full time starts. Right. Thank you. Moving on to item K. Wendy, I have a new thing for us. Right, this is a new item. And if you're interested in continuing to do this at other towns where I've been at the end of the meeting, the board will hear about potential items that are scheduled for the next meeting. And so it's just kind of a memory job because the public also gets an opportunity to hear because they don't get those agenda planners that you do. So what we have scheduled for the May 2nd meeting, we have the green up day resolution. The public hearing for chapter 28, the fee ordinance, which you just approved, airport commission appointment, consideration of applications for COVID recovery for local businesses. And then today you decided to put the master plan goals also on that meeting. So if you have any other ideas, you can mention them now. You don't need to. This is not at all equivalent to a warning for the meeting. For the meeting, it's separate and apart from that, it's not intended to say these definitely will be or if I don't mention something, it doesn't mean it won't be on. It's just an additional opportunity to discuss the following meeting. Yeah, and for public information, stuff often gets moved, so no commitment there. I had the airport commission appointment on for tonight until a couple of days ago when I realized we had a hefty agenda coming up, so things do get moved at the last minute. Will the ARPA survey be ready for review of that? I don't think so. I think, I don't know if Angela's still, I think there's still outreach happening. There is outreach happening. Paul may have a little more information regarding the in-person outreach that they're doing to non-English speaking communities. We're trying to get responses from those communities in addition to all the ones that have been submitted through the website. Speak a tiny bit to that. Thank you, Angela. Yeah, so Yasemin and I are currently in the development plan of that plan. And we will be coming back to you as council with more details at a future meeting. Thanks, Paul. It'd be great to have a timeline around that availability. I think some of it's depending on making sure it's accessible. So I feel like prioritizing accessibility than having a hard timeline is kind of where I'm leaning. Like I would obviously need long to know on anything that we can have before our kind of strategy meeting would be great, but also acknowledging that with the kind of our flexibility with how we're using the ARPA funds if we then make sure we get more input, use this additional time to get more input, I do think that's important. Let's settle for, can you give us a timeline estimate? Not right now, when you get back with the outreach plan. Moving forward, that sounds good, thank you. Let's move on to L, the settlement agreement. Do you want to share anything in open session or should I move right to open session? No, we should go into executive session because I doubt that you'll take any action tonight, but I can't tell you that for sure. Okay, and I am inviting you and Angela? Yes, please, and the attorney. Oh, interior and stackable. Should the acting, the interim, the new interim city manager? In this case, no. Okay. Yeah, so I need to wear that. Yeah, I'm looking for a motion to find that pursuant to state statute 3131E, pending a probable civil litigation to which the public body is or maybe a party, necessitates the need to have this conversation in executive session. Moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. So now I'm looking for a motion to enter into an executive session, including Angela Aldiari, Wendy Harrison, and Karen Stackful. So moved. Okay. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. We're going to move into executive session to discuss only just one item, no other business will be discussed. We'll come out of executive session solely to, well, if we take action on this one item, that could happen or just two adjourned, but no other business will be acted upon this evening. Should we move into the bet? Let me, I think we could do it here. Oh, can you, are you able to shut this down? Is she able to? Never please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you.