 And what we're about is having conversations that affect our neighborhoods and our communities. We want everybody to feel welcome and included. So what we're going to do to start is do a quick round robin, just very briefly if you would say who you are and where you live. And then we'll jump into a very full agenda. So I'll start by saying that I'm Cindy Cook and I'm here just to help with moving the conversation along. I live on East Avenue and glad to see some of you here. Peter Hayden, I'm on 120 East Avenue. Matthew Anas, also 120 East Avenue. Just pass it. Jonathan Chappell Sokol, Ward 1, North Prospect Street, and I'm on the steering committee. I'm Fletcher. I'm on Riverside F. Hi, my name's Rebecca. I live on Brook South. Hi, everyone. My name is Liv Penya. I live on South Willard Street, and I'm also on the steering committee. I'm Selena Colburn. I live on Latham Court, and I'm a representative for the Chittin 6-4 District and the Legislature. Sharon Busher. I live on East Avenue, and I'm the Ward 1 City Councilor. Hi, I'm Keith Pillsbury. I live on University Terrace, and I'm the Ward 8 School Commissioner. Hi, I'm Jack Hansen. I'm the East District City Councilor. I live on Pearl Street in Ward 1. Hi, everyone. I'm Hannah King. I'm in Ward 8, and I'm on the steering committee. Good evening, Joe Spaddell. I work at UVM. I live in Ward 3. My name is Nithu Ruhal. We have recently opened up a shop just nearby, so I'm here to provide some information about it. I leave it because it's just sorry to be here, but I thought it was a good opportunity for us because we are part of this community because of the salon that we have recently started, so thank you for the opportunity. Welcome. Hi, I'm Lisa Kingsbury. I'm with UVM Planning, Design, and Construction. Hi, I'm Jim Barr. I live in the old East End on Chase Street, and I'm the DPW Commissioner for Ward 1. And brand new, Ward 8. Bill Church, Ward 8. Nancy Kirby, Ward 1. Karen Long on the steering committee, and I have bright cards to keep us on time. Richard Hilliard, I live on High Grove Court. Happy New Year. Tom Garrett, I live in Ward 1. Zariah Hightower, Hildre Drive off of Riverside, Ward 1. Caitlyn Halpert, Loomis Street, Ward 1. Brian Sewell, Loomis Street, Ward 1. Dave Colley, Nash Place in the old East End. Patricia Seeland, Nash Place, old East End. Hi, I'm Linda Rizvi. I live on Hunger for Terrorists, Ward 8, Steering Committee. Vine Crandall, East Avenue. Martha Lang, Cochester Avenue. Pat Kimoni, Ward 7. I'm Jason Williams. I'm the Director of Government and Community Relations here at the UVM Medical Center. Ben Hajie, Ward 8. Janet Schradberg, 3100 for Terrorists, Ward 8. Sandy Wynman, Field Ad, Ward 1. Linda Shihimians, Field Ad, Ward 1. Charles Winkleman, College Street, Ward 1. So again, welcome everybody. It's great to have such a large group here on a cold evening. And we're going to do something about the budgets for the two neighborhood planning assemblies before we get into speak out. And speak out will be a time to make announcements and speaking about your new business and other meetings and other things that you want your neighbors to be aware of. But I'm going to pass it over to Jonathan, who's on the Steering Committee, to talk about budgets. Thanks, Indy. You may recall a couple months ago, Ward 8 and Ward 1 kind of set up some budget committees. Admittedly, the Ward 1 Budget Committee was the Steering Committee. And Ward 8 had a couple people from outside. With the idea of trying to figure out how to spend the money, the kind of windfall money we got this year, $2,500 up from the $400 that each ward would get has gotten in the past. And so the ward's put together a proposal, but it's still, it's very drafty. And what I was hoping we could do tonight is kind of talk through the, first of all, we only have a few minutes, but talk through the lists and describe very generally what the items are and what they cost, and then kind of get a show of hands by Ward, just yeas and nays, you know, yeah, no, to see how the group feels about it. And excited for healthy habit change. And then we'd move from there. And one of the things we may want to do at the end of this process is just ask if the Steering Committee can start spending some of this money, because in actual fact, we are already spending the money. There's been food at all our meetings, and that comes out of this budget. So let me pull up the list. This is the drafts that we've created. There's a number of items here and I'll read through these items. This is kind of what we think the total cost is. This is what Ward 1 thought about putting toward it and Ward 8 talked about putting toward it. And you might see some discrepancies. We'll talk through those. But just to start with, can I make a suggestion that we focus on the first column of the items and how important those are. And the numbers maybe are less important. Thank you, yeah, I would agree. Can I just have a, we'll do a little practice. Can I have a show of hands of the Ward 1 people in the room? Yeah, and can I have a show of hands of the Ward 8 people in the room? Okay. And anybody who doesn't know, because there's no shame in that, the words are complicated. So yeah, so what do you know for? But just one, all right? Yeah. And so, do you say one? Oh, yeah, okay. So welcome to Ward 1. Okay, so let's start with food at meetings. And we budgeted this for about $1,300 for the year shared between the wards. That's approximately $100 a month. We'll spend less in some months and maybe in other months we'll be a little bit fancier. But $100 is about the going rate that we've been doing. Could I hear Ward, could you, not hear. Can I see, and I'm hoping somebody, another steering committee member will, thank you. Ward 1 Yays? Yeah, to keep this as a budget item on that order, that number order. This isn't gonna be precise. I'm just waiting for Karen to, which we need, yeah, it's more impressions, but. Are we going fast? No, no, I think we're just getting a sense. It's not, the absolute numbers are probably not as important as if, you know, everybody says no, we wanna know that. Ward 1 Yays. Okay, Ward 8 Yays. Okay, Ward 8 Yays. Wireless microphones, we're, Sarah has been doing a fantastic job of working out all the bugs in the system and right now, as of this moment, it feels like the microphones we have in this room are gonna work fine without squealing and screeching and maybe we'll be able to do with what we have. And so what you'll see is, is Ward 1 actually zeroed this out based on Sarah's recommendation. Ward 8 kept it in. We think that it's worthwhile to keep a placeholder here, probably at around $500. And it would be used either for microphones, it could be put towards streaming as that technology, as we can develop that technology, or it could be something like a donation to Channel 17 for the tremendous work that's done to get these, the programming on the air and online. So it's more of a communications item now that we'll work through as to what it was, what it would be. The Ward 1 Yays, Ward 1 Yays. Empty house, good. Ward 8 Yays, Ward 8 Yays. Parties, block parties, community gardens, some kind of community activity that would probably happen in the spring. We're thinking probably spending something on the order of 600 dollars per ward. They'd be spent separately. There'll be Ward 1 activities and Ward 8 activities. Ward 1 Yays, Ward 1 Yays, Ward 8 Yays, Ward 8 Yays. Speakers, guides, and we thought of stipends, maybe for having special guests come and talk, or guides to offer tours of Centennial Woods or the intervail or something like that. We thought maybe that would come to something like $250 shared between the wards. Ward 1 Yays, 8 Yays, Ward 8 Yays. Physical signs or posters to announce meetings and connect the NPA to the community. We don't expect to spend a ton of money on this, but it may be that there will be some way that we can do a little more publicity. This might also include something like a donation to Front Porch Forum, who do a huge amount of our communication for us. So this is another kind of communication line item at about $100. Ward 1 Yays, Ward 1 Yays, Ward 8 Yays, Ward 8 Yays. So the question comes up, we wanna serve more food, but we wanna do this in some kind of a responsible and sustainable way, and two alternatives come up. One would be to actually purchase reusable dishes and somebody on the steering committee, probably the person standing behind the microphone right now would take them home and wash them. But if they're reusable, I did a little scan of Goodwill and resource, and I don't think that I think we could come up with a bunch of plates really inexpensive that we could use over and over and over again. The alternative would be by compostable plates, and if we did that, it might be a little more expensive, but it might be a little easier also. So we're talking about up to maybe about $250 share between the wards. And could we just have a show of hands by Ward for reusable, compostable, or maybe something else altogether? Reusable, compostable, something else? Throw away, just burn them in the dump. Bring your own plates. Okay. Okay, we'll make a note of that. And then finally, kind of on the same line as that would be if we got a set of water bottles with the NPA logo on them, the wards one and eight NPA logo, we got to hand them out, and then we wouldn't, or it could be a sticker, it could be somebody else's. Yeah, but then we wouldn't provide any cups either. We would probably just rely on everybody. We could bring drinks, but let everybody bring a container that they drink out of. Who among the one thing maybe we should get some logo of water bottles? Well, how about stickers? Who don't, okay, who don't think we should do that? That's, you've spoken. Any other kinds of logo materials like hats or anything else that may just be publicity for the wards around town? Any interest in that? Raise your hand if you're interested. Got it. That's the list we got. Thank you very much. We got ideas from group or for anything of interest. Yeah, so maybe what we could do is in speak out. If people have ideas of other things they might want to see, just do it in the course of the speak out. Perfect. Okay, so that's a great transition to speak out. We're, speak out is the opportunity to make brief comments, announcements, and about meetings or new things going on in the neighborhood. And Yisra said that you had an announcement, so let's start with you. Thank you very much. My name is Bidu Dahl. We originally came to Vermont as a former botanist refugee settled here in Vermont in 2011. And me and my wife have been working hard and my wife went to Cosmopolages School. And since November we have started a campus hair salon right across the street near 95 Colchester Avenue. And we came with 18-month-old child and we had one child here in the UBM Medical Center, one little girl, both of them are now little girls, six years old, my son is nine years old. And so I work at UBM, UBM at a program under the PD address department called Berman Lenn Program as an educational coach, outreach professional. I'm from Putinies Nepali community background. I come from that background. So I am here, I saw the announcement on the front porch and it was very helpful for me and for my wife to come here and announce about it. And I would like your help to come and spread the word about our salon and help us to grow. I have come with visiting cars, please take one. I'll come around or I'll leave on that front, thank you. And please stop by, my wife will be working there. I'll be assisting her on and off but I'm not doing any cosmetology school but because I'm not trained for that but I will be certainly helping her and we have been, it's been a great new route. Thank you so much. And thank you for this opportunity to announce it. Please, you are all welcome at the campus of salon. Thank you so much. So let me just get a show of hands of how many people want to speak and speak out. People have announcements? Okay, so what I'm going to suggest is we start back here with you Mark and then we'll bounce sort of go zigzag across the room. What's up Monday family? I wanted to just share with you just one event that's happening on the 20th at Arts Riot. I'm myself and Reverend Arnold Thomas from the Good Shepherd Church of Jericho are going to be presenting a version of a thing that we're doing across the state. I guess I have two things which is hidden in plain sight. What we're calling this one is is the making of a game changer. It's really action oriented. We're going to be showing a video from, hey Sharon, we're going to be showing a video from Tricia Rose who's the chancellor's dean of professor of Africana studies at Brown University and she's just really tremendous on systemic racism. So I just want to invite y'all out if y'all want to go and actually do something on MLK Day and actually get engaged and kind of hone some skills to make a change. Reverend Arnold Thomas and I are going to be presenting that. And the other thing is that there's also just check Facebook because if it's on Facebook it's true, right? Just check on Facebook and see the series. We're doing a community forum series around the state called Hidden in Plain Sight. The truth about systemic racism and that's in conjunction with the liftoff that we're doing at the state house on the 15th. Could you show hands again? Yes. Just for those of you who don't know, my name is Rahae Tavern. I'm running for city council in ward one. My flyers are up top if you want to grab one and happy to answer any questions afterwards. And then in regards to the budget, I'd love to see some more advertising spent instead just for I've religiously found a front porch firm but I know a lot of my friends who don't. And I think it'd be great to have bigger meetings and have more people here. So also expanding the food budget, I know that is really helpful in other wards in terms of getting people out. If we can have a main dish then maybe people bring sides or drinks. Right. Any thoughts that people have in terms of other ways to get the word out? Thank you for all of these. Thanks. I'm Dave Carly. Another idea for the budget would be to, recently we did a survey in used survey monkey and there's a fee to use that. And so, but having that service available, they're really easy to put together, really easy to get the results. So a lot of times there's issues that come up here that we could be like quickly getting feedback from the community. So I recommend maybe a subscription to that. That's a great idea. Maybe something we could work with CEDAW and have it not just for our wards but for other wards as well. Hi everyone. My name is Liv Penya again. I live in Ward 1 and I am part of a group called the Greater Burlington Women's Forum. And so we're a group that hosts events in the Burlington area and they're not just limited to folks who live in Burlington and they're not just limited to women. So we're having an event tomorrow during lunchtime from 12 to 1.30 in the auditorium in City Hall and the event is focused on the Winter Blues which is more officially known as SAD, Seasonal Effective Disorder. And so this is an event that's gonna have a panel of three experts of various different involvement I would say with SAD. So come on down, bring your lunch. There's gonna be a comedian there as well to make light of a tough time of year. Hi everyone. My name is Adan Hajji and I'm officially running for School Board, Ward 8. So you'll be seeing me around your neighborhoods. And again, I really do value the NPA meetings just getting together and seeing what neighbors are up to. So again, I'm gonna be running for Ward 8 School Commission. Good evening everyone. My name is Jane Stromberg. I'm a Ward 8 resident. I live on 31 Hungerford Terrace. An idea for turnout for these nights, maybe we could have a designated person do some reach out and be in charge of the media to gather more folks here and another very important thing. I am running for Ward 8 City Council and I have some literature. I'll be leaving up front but I'll be here after the meeting to talk more with folks and yeah, all right. Thank you very much. Thanks. January 10th is the Vermont Women's March and the main event will be indoors at Castleton. But they'll be streaming all across the state at all kinds of facilities from houses on up. So you'll be further information coming but put it on the calendar, 18th month. Any questions? Richard. I heard a rumor and I wonder if Sarah can confirm it but I heard a rumor that you've got a fixed date, zero, on channel 17 for the telecast of this meeting. Is that correct? Jared would ask the question and I passed it on and my recollection is it was something like Sunday afternoon, excuse me. He was looking for evenings. Sunday one to three is what I heard. Oh, okay. So you, I'm sorry. So it sounds like other people know better than myself. I'd have to look back at the email. If it's correct. I understand that thanks should be due to you and it would be great if it would be published on front porch forum every month. And also you're probably aware that within a couple of days so Friday say you should be able to see it online at the 17 website but it sounds like you're helping me remember. I think you said one to three on Sunday afternoons. It's on the cable. So we'll look into that and publish on front porch forum and also the NPA website. We can see it on cable and information on how to stream it because it's accessible 24 seven online after a certain point. Yeah. Thanks. Just a very quick announcement for folks who may be at the state house next Wednesday, January 15th. We have the homelessness awareness day it's a statewide event at the state house. We have a memorial vigil and speak out at noon on the state house steps. And we invite all of our honors to come on our folks who have lived without housing over the last year. Thanks. Anybody else? Not necessarily related to the budget but on the idea of getting more people to these events. I know Ward two and three does Facebook events to help remind people and keep it on their calendars and that's something we should consider as well. Continually trying to figure out how to live stream these so the people at home can participate in real time. We're still working on it hoping the hospital has been very helpful in seeing how they can make that happen. We'll see how that goes. So another announcement is that it's come up that there's a forum for city council members next in February and that's the same time as the NPA meeting ordinarily would be the second Wednesday of the night. So that'll be at the YMCA and we'll so we won't be having a regular NPA meeting in February. And I saw somebody pointing over here. There's another. Oh, sorry. So yeah. Thank you. I just have a question about the YMCA in general. Is there any plan to move the NPA meetings to the community room at the YMCA? I don't think the steering committee has thought about that but it's a great idea. We've been wondering about how we should meet a lot of people who really like this space. Others have concerns. What's that? No? It's not big enough. It's not big enough. Well, the steering committee will get back to the group. Again, I think we have, well, we're looking to it. It's a good idea. Yeah. So the, did you have something? No. No. So the city councilors ordinarily take a bit of time to give us an update. They've graciously ceded a bunch of their time to the state representatives because we don't get to have them here that much. But I understand that Sharon and Jack want to speak briefly, particularly about, I forget what now. I do want to make one something different. So I am actually now Adam Roof because he sent a text and he is ill tonight. So, but he was at the public safety committee meeting earlier and they were discussing the city's sheltering on public lands and the policies about outreach and removal of encampments that are either illegal prohibited or those that are not prohibited. He didn't give any details about those policies but that was the discussion tonight. And that's been a very important topic for many of the people that live in those encampments. The other thing he wanted to mention was that regarding UVM housing, that he's working on a plan of action to move forward with discussions regarding this housing, UVM housing realizing that that would result in a net increase of undergrad beds and I'm gonna paraphrase this. So Adam forgive me, but a few things he wanted us to all remember. It's a responsibility that the city administration negotiate the new agreement and that no project will move forward without support from UVM administration and the majority of the 25 member board of trustees and that, let's see, well, while frustrating, UVM does not make decisions like the city does and to ignore that is a mistake. Anyways, he looks forward to being part of these conversations in the future and I know that's a hot topic for all of us. I'm gonna be even briefer. Oh, I'm speaking for myself. I wanted to let people know that as part of the ordinance committee, the ordinance committee is working with the planning commission and last on Monday night at the city council level, we looked at the ordinance that was passed out with accessory dwelling units in a nutshell. Owner occupied, no parking required, maximum size 800 square feet. It can occur anywhere in the city, any zone except RCO and Urban Reserve, but any zone, so stay tuned for that. They'll be back on our agenda on the 21st. On the 14th, next Tuesday at 6.30, the Joint Ordinance Planning Commission meeting will take place and one of the big topics is gonna be short-term rentals. The other issue that I just wanted to hit briefly before we go over to the legislators is the issue of Amtrak. So Amtrak is slated to return passenger service to Burlington in 2021 or 2022. Yes, I'm glad, I'm glad someone cheered for that. It is very exciting and I hope we don't lose sight of that. However, there are a lot of different complications that come with that and a lot of logistical challenges and difficulties around where to overnight the trains and service them and store them overnight, but also the way they impact Vermont Rail's operations which happened just kind of south of Union Station at the bottom of Main Street. So there's a lot of negotiation. We just had, in the executive session, the city council on Monday was strategizing on how to negotiate here, but the state legislature plays a role, Vermont Rail systems who has a 50-year lease and so essentially they control that land and they're demanding a second track be placed on that section which would pretty significantly impact the waterfront, especially the bike path right in there. So there's a lot of moving parts going on right now that we're trying to negotiate. One meeting that I will mention that's important is next week on the 16th. We're gonna have a meeting with the two committee that I serve on, transportation energy utilities and that's where we've been doing most of the discussion around this issue. We're meeting on the 16th at 6 p.m. at Riverside Apartments to discuss the possibility of doing the overnighting and servicing of the Amtrak station down next to the McNeil biomass plant. That's one of the possible options. The other main option that's been discussed is doing it right at Union Station. So it's a little hard to summarize that issue, but that's an important meeting and city council is going to be taking most likely taking a position on where we would like to see the Amtrak service and overnight and potentially taking position about this second track discussion as well. We have a deadline to do that and make our reserve by mid-February, so I'll do that. Thanks. Thanks to all of you councilors in absentia. So I'm gonna pass it on, yet we're just gonna keep moving because we've got so much to cover. We have our state representatives here to give us an update. Brian said that because he was here last time, he probably won't be involved in the update so much, but he's here to answer questions. So we'll get brief updates and then an opportunity for you to ask your reps questions about this session or beyond. So, Chris. Hi, everybody. Chris Pearson, I'm one of the state senators who are here at Chittenden County. I live down on Brooks Avenue. Nice to see you. We don't have a lot of time and there's literally hundreds of issues we could talk about, but open to questions maybe after. I thought I would just tell you a little bit about the legislative climate solutions caucus. I founded the caucus, I was one of the co-founders in 2012 and I've recently found myself back as co-chair. And this summer and fall, we set up a process really increasingly frustrated that we weren't making enough progress in the legislature. So about 40 of us met in May as Selene and Brian are part of that and started a working process where we charged folks with coming up with an agenda that was achievable in the four and a half months that we're meeting. In other words, we could get from start to the governor's desk and it would be significant. And we had a large process that went into that and we then this fall in October, November, December went around the state and talked to the public about it trying to galvanize some energy and sort of corral activists. Climate solutions are challenging because no one's ever done it and you can't just say, well do what Oregon's done and then you're good. There are little pieces that you can collect from around the world but there's no one single agenda that gets you there. So it can be hard to also corral activists. In the short story is we have an agenda sort of a five part agenda. Transportation, that's the biggest source of emissions for Vermont. Building efficiency, that's the number two. Energy efficiency, changing efficiency of Vermont that only works on electricity but to all fuels. Increasing our dependence on renewable energy, our mandate to utilities and finally accountability. We have had statute goals and statute of reducing emissions. They've been sort of things were aspirational. We're gonna make those or some version of those law. Keyed in the short term to Paris and by 2050 joining New York and Maine to hit a net zero standard for the state, make them mandatory and give an accountability to the public for holding state accountable. So a citizen right of action in that. So that's a very broad agenda and I don't have enough time to get into it but that is something that we think is in many ways foundational, something we can build on going forward. Somebody said it's like we're in the first inning of the game. Of course we should be well into the series by now unfortunately but this would be foundational. The transportation is a 12 state agreement potentially. All of the Northeast it's about a quarter of the country's economy with a cap and vest system for transportation fuel. So some really things that we can build on in years to come but would set us down the path to really try to tackle this. Obviously you've got to reform our economy to get away from fossil fuels. So I'm working on a lot of things but that has been something I know a lot of the public's interested in and if people have questions I'm happy to try to address them. There's a lot of other issues but I'll turn it over to Selina for now. Well I'll say, so I'm Selina Colburn. I'm former city councilor but now a representative with Brian Tina, my district mate for Chittenden 6-4 district. And you may recall that we ended the legislative session somewhat abruptly last year when the House and the Senate could not come to agreement on paid family leave and minimum wage increase bills. So we have those bills in front of us right now. We just went back yesterday. Today we sent the paid family leave bill to a conference committee. I think some advocates and some of us have concerns that that bill needs to go further than it does but now the Senate and the House will hash that out and then we at some point will be voting on a minimum wage increase that's now keyed down to a two-year increase that gets us to, I think there's gonna be some adjustments made but I think it was like 1250 in two years was the original proposal and then we'll do some, continue to work on that. So those bills are moving forward. We also have some bills that were vetoed by the governor at the end of last session. So we have a bill that would allow Vermonters to have when toxic polluters are the cause of known potential health hazards and harms. The idea is that they would be able to be held accountable when people needed ongoing medical monitoring to assess the development of conditions and that was a bill that the governor vetoed. We're kind of right on the edge of being able to override that veto so there's some work happening there. There was also a firearms waiting period bill that was vetoed and I think we're well short of the votes unfortunately to override that. So those are some of the things that are like right back with us. I serve on a judiciary committee in the house and so a lot of the work that I'm doing in my committee this year is looking at criminal justice reform for the state and there is also in the house and in the Senate a corrections committee and given all of the revelations that came have come to light about our corrections system. I know that those committees are immediately taking up the question of what's happening in our corrections system, what's happening with guards, what's happening with oversight and I think that will be a long ongoing conversation. We've also had a couple of groups really looking at the whole system of justice in Vermont that have made some recommendations. So one is something called the Sentencing Commission that's come up actually several times over the years but they've come back with some recommendations about really looking at a more comprehensive system of how we classify crimes, really just revisiting a lot of our criminal code and really with the net effect of reducing sentences overall and then we've also had a consultant group who's looking at what they're calling justice reinvestment in Vermont and they're making a number of proposals. One of their key findings has been that over half of our incarcerated population in the state are people who are back on violations of furlough, parole or probation and in the case of furlough like the vast majority of those violations are technical violations. So it's people who've been sort of in one way or another placed in community supervision and then maybe they miss a curfew, maybe they relapse with drugs or alcohol, maybe their approved housing falls through and they're re-incarcerated. So we're really looking at some much needed changes to that system as a way of reducing our prison population and then there are lots of individual bills in my committee that I could talk about including some racial justice initiatives including domestic violence initiatives including we just today in my committee we're looking at trying to draw cleaner lines between sex work and sex trafficking but like Chris said, we don't have a lot of time and I think we really wanna hear from you and hear your questions and thoughts so. Okay, so I think, so this works better if you turn it on. Let me get a sense of how many people have questions for these folks. Mark, Sharon, that's it. So we're gonna start with the civilian. I had a question for Chris about some of the things you were talking about around climate and if there is anything that you're discussing around how to reduce the impact of animal agriculture in terms of methane emissions, pollution and things like that. So I happen to serve on the Senate Ag and Forestry Products Committee, the vice chair actually. So we are looking at that. Just today we're talking about feed additives which is kind of an emerging solution around particularly cows and cows burp and a lot of methane. And methane is several times as potent as carbon. So this is actually a significant issue for Mont. We've also set up a process where trying to look at well this is a little off topic but in the ag and forestry sector, getting state forest lands into carbon markets the potential to do that which would protect our forests potentially stop deforestation and breaking up of habitat. And also set up a committee where we're about to get a report back on so-called ecosystem services. This is the idea that a farm in a simple way, we've been paying farmers for one ecosystem typically in Vermont making milk. And so every ounce of energy and dollars that goes into that farm is to maximize milk. And along the way we're depleting soils. We're creating runoff that's polluting the lake and on and on and on. So the concept is getting steam is could you reward farmers for building soil? And thereby creating a carbon sink, creating flood resilience, reducing runoff. And so we're trying to get our arms around what kind of a solution that would be. I will say I'm sort of new to the ag sector. I think strategically we need to be thinking we are thinking of incentives as opposed to mandates. Farmers are a stubborn bunch in some ways. In many ways they're very independent. They like to be left alone. And we need farmers badly. Three quarters of our open land in Vermont is controlled by dairy. Dairy as we all know is not a promising economic prospect. So we need to protect that open land. We need to keep it working. But the idea that Montpelier can come in and say you gotta do X, Y, and Z is tricky. It is very, very difficult. And we're already mandating a lot of changes on farm lands because of water quality. So I've been really focused on the sort of incentives. How do you pull people in as opposed to trying to push them if that makes sense? Ecosystem service, as I gotta say, is one of the more promising solutions that we're looking at. And after all we're spending millions, tens of millions of dollars on clean water. And we're depending on the ag sector to deliver a lot of that cleanup of phosphorus reduction. And bizarrely, the Secretary of Ag has not been in there demanding a commensurate amount of clean water money. And a lot of us are saying why wouldn't we invest in farms to make it easier for them to partner with us on clean water in particular. Most of that would also have a carbon sink benefit. And you don't get very far down that road before you start looking at confinement operations for large feed operations. You know, this is totally unsustainable. We're in a moment where we're trying to reduce phosphorus runoff into the lake. We are importing phosphorus into the state of Vermont for feed for animals. It's ridiculous. But it is tricky to instantly turn around to say the least. Thanks. Hey, thanks y'all. Thanks for serving. I was in the state house today and it was so calm and I was just wondering what the hell's going on up there. Cause it's usually such a zoo. I guess it starts tomorrow. Data. It'll be calm tomorrow, that's for sure. I'll be there for the governor's, you know. Selena, the H-284, gotta talk about it. Those in the room, it's the data bill. Right now we've been collecting up police data. Title 20, 2366. And we haven't really been doing that very well on the back end, which is why we came out with the dashboard in November. But yeah, just wanted to know if you're, you know, what that looks like. I think Justice Reinvestment, they definitely nailed us on data and I think what everything I'm hearing is our data is the worst in the nation, okay? And those are the, I think what concerns me most about it and first what we're talking about is we're talking about the rest of the criminal, so-called criminal justice system, you know, in the state's attorney's office's judiciary and corrections. But, you know, keep in mind, we also have a racial equity executive director who's supposed to be collecting data across housing, education, employment, economic services, and all the good stuff, health services, access. So we need a data infrastructure because that is what you use to make your decisions. And what has been happening up until now is, is that all of your reports have been basically spot reports and snapshots in time. And there's no trend analysis capabilities that you have, except for if you got two reports side-by-side, you know? So we won't even talk about the mess of the 79 agencies of law enforcement. It is critically important that we get to data. So that's one, and the other thing is, I don't know whether either of you would be able to speak to this directly, but maybe indirectly is, is what about cannabis taxation and regulation? You know, we just saw Chicago come out of the gate and they changed the life trajectory of thousands of people in eight days. And we can't seem to figure out how to do that in eight years with the legislation that we have proposed. Thanks. So I can, I can talk to the data bill and then I don't know, maybe we could all talk to tax and regulate, but so there is a bill that I introduced with a number of other legislators working with the ACLU, working with Mark and others that calls for data collection kind of in all the stages of our criminal justice system. So that's the H-284 bill that Mark was referencing. So it really looks at when police are making arrests, when police are stopping people, we want that data and we want to understand who they're interacting with and how, when then prosecutors are charging people, we want to understand how that's working and if there are disparities there. When judges are sentencing people, we want to understand how that's working if there are disparities. And finally, we want to see who is actually ending up incarcerated. And it's true that we have just seen these point in time snapshots. So corrections often will come into my committee and give us like, here's who's incarcerated right now to on a typical day to answer a question, but then they tell us, essentially, you can't infer anything from this because it's just a point in time. So the idea of this bill is to try to overcome some of the barriers to addressing the inequities in our criminal justice system where we're constantly being told, well, we just don't know where it's happening or we don't know why it's happening because we don't have enough information. I do think that this bill, at least as a vehicle, maybe not in its precise form is going to see movement this year. So I think it'll probably be up in my committee either this week or next. Like, I think it's gonna come up quickly. And I think the findings of justice reinvestment have been really critical to getting this bill moving because their work, first of all, was delayed by the difficulties they had getting data about our criminal justice system. And then, yes, one of their final findings, I was just looking at their final report. Tonight really calls out the data. We also had the opportunity to speak with Susanna Davis, right, who's the new director of racial equity for the state and yesterday in my committee. And she also cited the data issue when we talked to her about that at length. So I think there is a critical mass moving forward on that issue. The question will be what form it takes, right, in terms of actually passing legislation. Tax and regulate. Boy, we keep hearing that it's like coming in the house, at least from the house majority leader. I think the speaker has, is maybe a little more non-committal on it, just in terms of her personal support for the bill. But there is clearly a critical, enough people to pass that bill in the house. And I believe there is every intent to pass it this year. Really a racial equity and reparative question. What's the question? Well, so tax and regulate is sort of moving forward. But the question that I think Mark's referencing is people with a criminal record for marijuana possession, going in the past, and we've ruined their lives, and you might argue, and now we're gonna say, hey, enjoy this marijuana that's available on the street on the store. So I have a bill into an automatic expungement bill. It's in the Senate, I can't remember the number, because we introduced it last year. And it's a good reminder that I wanna see if we can tee it up. I think that maybe wisely the two issues in terms of tax and regulate and expungement have been separated because tax and regulate's confusing, and not confusing, it's controversial enough on its own. I'll tell you, this is like a technical thing that we run into a lot. It seems simple, right? If you have a prior conviction of marijuana on your record, and now we've legalized marijuana, remove the record. It's not so simple. So one of the sticking points is we've legalized possession of up to an ounce, but you might have a charge of an ounce and a half possession. And so they tell you, I said, okay, I wanna file a bill to do this automatic. They say, well, it can't be automatic because some poor schmo is gonna go through every one of these files and see what the possession amount is, and blah, blah, blah. And I said, all right, that's never gonna happen. We're never gonna pay for staff to do that, and it's gonna take too long anyway. So let's decriminalize possession of up to two ounces, and then you can expunge all of those records. And that sort of takes care. After two ounces, we've always been in a different category. So, which is to say, it's a little more complicated than just automatically doing that. But I think that that is the right direction. I know there's a lot of appetite to do this and not only do the half piece of it in terms of taxing and regulating, making it legal going forward, but cleaning up records for people whose lives have really been destroyed for a plant or deeply impacted across the board. So I'm very hopeful we'll do that. I don't have a good read of whether or not we'll do that this year, but I don't, I think it's irresponsible to do them, not at the same time. I think you gotta have the honest discussion. I know I'm more pushing for that. We have two more questions. So I'm gonna ask both the questioners and the responders try to be concise. I don't wanna cut you off with important information, but also I wanna keep to the other stuff on the agenda. So Sharon and Jonathan, I believe. So I have a couple of comments and a question for Chris, but comment is, I applaud trying to increase the minimum wage, but when we start, we have a goal, but by the time we get it passed, we've already fallen behind. And so I just, that's a frustration for me. And the minimum wage, a livable wage in the city has been linked to whether you have health care benefits or not, the minimum wage is not. And so once again, you're in a catch 22 depending on where you work, et cetera. So I just, enough said, I just hope that people realize that it's so difficult to get anyone paid fairly. It's just so frustrating to me. But anyways, that's one thing. Number two is Anthony Polina tonight talked about taxing people that make over $200,000 and that money would be utilized, I believe, to address public transportation, but I wasn't certain. And is that a bill that's really moving forward and could, and it's in the Senate, so could our senators speak to that, please? Sure, I think just to the minimum wage, it's important to remember Governor Scott vetoed a $15 minimum wage a year and a half ago. So, you know, so we are losing time. The Polina deal, sometimes called the Green New Deal bill for Vermont, looks at the fact that the term tax cuts gives wealthy Vermonters a huge, huge benefit and says, well, then we can have a little bit of that for our clear needs. I'm not sure that's poised to move immediately. It's a good discussion for us to be having and it is a good marker for when the legislature, I mean, I signed on to it, so I support it, but when the legislature turns and says, okay, how are we gonna make investments for climate solutions, someone's gonna say, well, how are we gonna pay for it? And he's starting to start to have that conversation. So I think that's really important. He doesn't specify exactly how you would spend the money. He says, you know, it could be X, Y and Z. Public transit is a clear one and those of us here in Chinatown know that our bus system is on the ropes, as it were. So, I think it's a foundation moving forward and I hope it will gain traction. So, did you want to comment? Well, speaking of financing, something that you can keep an eye out for is that the Progressive Caucus and the House plans to work on a variety of suggestions of ways to raise revenue to fund some of these investments and we can keep you updated. Can I just keep it brief right now? That's one last question. Thank you, this is for Selena. I'm interested, it's a question and a couple of comments. Don't let the comments distract the question. I'm interested in what you were gonna say about domestic violence initiatives. A couple of comments. One is, from the domestic violence standpoint, I heartily, from every standpoint, but from the DV standpoint, I heartily endorse Mark's work and the work on data gathering. It's very hard to get good data on domestic violence incidents and we really need it. We need it across the state. The other is that Human Services wants general assistance money, the GA funding, to be administered locally, which we think is a wonderful idea, but they don't seem to have a taste to pay for it and the administrative costs just don't seem to go along with it and I'm wondering if that's something also that might get worked on as well. So as I say, don't let that distract you. I just, that's editorial. Thank you. I might have more information. I hate to presume here, but I sit in appropriations. I'm a lobbyist for the Fordle Housing Coalition and they're actually considering, in the appropriations committee through the budget adjustment process, $10.7 million additional ask for a tele voucher budget and that's really bringing this conversation about devolving the general assistance program to local providers and not having the state, well the state would still have a stake in it and fund it, but your concerns are, I think warranted and it's gonna be a discussion for the FY 21 budget. Oh, did you wanna, I was just gonna, did you want a little more information on the domestic violence stuff too? So I think we're looking at, we heard from a number of witnesses today about really looking at the whole landscape, but particularly focusing on an annual report that happens that's called the domestic violence fatality review commission does an annual report. And so really looking at some strategies that have worked in other states that are things like creating intensive teams around high risk situations, regional teams of providers. I think that's something there was a lot of interest in in the committee, but it takes resources and a number of other strategies and interventions that we looked at, particularly around the relief from abuse order process, but we're also are looking at firearms and continuing to look at the link between firearms, domestic violence and particularly fatalities and domestic violence situations. So we'll be looking at a bill tomorrow that looks again at the question of what happens in those situations when firearms are present. So that'll be part of our conversation, but we're also looking at another, a number of other sort of judicial and programmatic approaches. So all I wanted to say before we end is that the last MPA, someone asked about us posting updates. And so I wrote an update. It was too long for one post. So I posted part one today and part two hopefully will be allowed to go out tomorrow and I won't get like reprimanded for sending two in a row. So if anyone wants a more detailed update about some of the things I've been working on, it's not everything, but it's some of the bigger things. It's on front porch form right now. So I just want to let you know that in case anyone remembered from last time. Thank you very much. And also thank you, Shadow, to your front porch form because it's such a great way to communicate. So appreciate that and we also appreciate that there's some people that don't communicate that way. So we're working on that as well. So thank you all and we really appreciate it. Well, it's gonna be hard to follow that. So as you may recall over the last several years, the issue of housing has come up and we only have a little bit of time and we just get into what the issues are and that's as far as we get. So the steering committee has been talking about doing a more concentrated evening or a set of evenings on housing and Lou and I are just starting that conversation. I'm gonna pass it over to Liv. I hope I don't need to double microphone. I'm also gonna stand in front because I don't want to have my back towards my friend Linda here. So as Cindy said, at every meeting, housing comes up in some way, shape or form and there's just never enough time to talk about all the issues. And I think depending on what your role is in housing or the way that you live in Burlington, whether you're a tenant or a homeowner or a landlord or anything in between housing impacts all of us. And so there's many ways that a broader housing conversation could look. So we really want to put it to you all and see what would you all like from a meeting focused on housing. Some of the ideas that we've bounced around have been related to tenant rights or UVM student housing or housing conditions. I also want to add that I'm a member of the housing board review. So again, there are many different ways that this can look. So we're open to any and all ideas. I have a suggestion, which is I feel like in the conversations that I've been involved in for a bunch of years now, particularly around student housing, one approach that doesn't come up enough, but I think that there's genuine interest in is cooperative student housing. And so I think there's some really great and interesting models out there, but they're just not really being put in front of the student community to really think about and investigate and then that community turns over within a four year period often. So I just would really encourage looking at cooperative housing models for students as part of that conversation. There's a lot of potential there. Thank you. I would just suggest making sure that you invite someone from Shemford Housing Trust and who are housing authorities, so you know, some local housing providers and obviously in our area, student housing is a huge issue. Thanks. Selina may not know this, but 20 years ago we had a couple of student housing co-ops. I helped develop them and unfortunately, they didn't survive and one of the reasons they didn't was we actually went to the UVA Board of Trustees and asked them to help invest in those and invest some of their endowment in them to get a socially responsible rate of return and they refused and eventually the student co-ops folded. But it's definitely worth trying again. Yeah. Did you have a question? I just wanted to ask Selina if you could describe that student housing cooperative and how that works and maybe you know as well. I think it has worked different ways in different communities and others may know more, but sometimes the institution plays more of a role in hosting the housing and then students kind of form a functional cooperative around it. Sometimes it's more independently owned or run by students or even a nonprofit structure. But the idea is communal living space and I have that similar to a dorm, but different, right? More self-organized, more. And it's come up a couple of ways for me like that when I was campaigning and Slade Hall, which was a long-term, a long-time sort of small communal housing situation on campus, people really were like, we want more like this, but we're having to fight to keep it. And then I also remember talking to students at a time when we were really pushing kind of amenity rich. Well, not we, not me, but some in the city were really pushing like downtown, amenity rich, privately developed student housing. And students said, well, we want like East Avenue co-housing, but for students, you know, so I just think it could be part of our discussion and part of our model, but there's a lot of different ways of work. So we're running late, so I'd ask you to be concise. All I was going to say is that I think that the co-housing option should be broad. I don't think it, I mean, I support it for students, but I think that I'm always surprised with a fair amount of development that's occurred recently that there's no appetite apparently for any other co-housing project. We only have the one on East Avenue and that model works really well and they used to have a wait list. So I'm interested in that, but I'm also wondering do we have, we've acquired or we've got a bunch of questions that people have put forward from this NPA. So is the goal to address those questions or are you trying to formulate new topics to address? I guess that's really what I'm asking both you and Cindy. You may have a different answer, but I think we're just trying to get our heads around, how to get our heads around the myriad issues that are all interconnected and how to have a meaningful, full conversation that isn't just going off in tangents. So we need to be focused in particular areas and we're just trying to figure out how to do that. So sometimes it would, sometimes a room that would have like tenants housing, co-housing, student housing, quality of apartments and you could have little stations and people that would be, it would involve more than one meeting, but you could have people go and then navigate and you could generate a real result from that input from all of us and then you might then prioritize that and have a invite people to solve some of the problems we've identified. I like those station approaches, thank you. Great, thank you so much. One more? As someone's lived in D.C., I've always been surprised by how weak tenant protections are in Burlington, so I'd love to have a conversation around what some of those could be and some of the things I've been talking to people about is right at first refusal or the right to repair and deduct. And you know, there were two other organizations, I don't know if I need to say it since Charles is here, but making sure that the Burlington Tenants Union is also part of those conversations. Thanks. Running? I mean I guess it'd be important to know what is motivating the Steward Committee to talk about it and what the goals are before kind of formulating how a form might or a form might look like and to have it not go off into lots of tangents. So I would be interested in knowing about that. And I'll just say one more thing on student co-ops, which is there's a National Association of Students of Cooperation that are a National Association of Student Cooperatives. They're a great resource. There's really large co-ops in some of the large university towns. Remember in Berkeley, California, there's a multi-storey student co-op owned and operated by students of cooperation. And also very strong in Madison, Wisconsin, Ann Arbor, a lot of universities around. Have those. So we have this sign-up sheet and if you would like to shape the conversation, which is basically the aim of this little mini, very, very mini conversation, feel free to sign up. And if you want to add a little comment feel free. And we get the sign-up in the past and we have that list. We just have spent a little bit of time not getting this done because of the holidays and other stuff going on. But we do have the list from two months ago, I believe, and I appreciate it, People's Energy. And briefly to speak to your question with the steering committee's interest, there's a lot of interest in the room. There's a lot of interest in the community. Obviously housing affects us all and the community in all myriad ways. And so we want to look at that and see if there are things that we as a group can do. So with that, I'm going to suggest that we move on to... What's next? What's next? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Would you do that? We forgot something at the beginning of the meeting. If you recall from last month, we are seeking nominations for the Community Development Block Grant Committee. I won't go into a lot of detail as to what it was because you were all here last month, I know. But it's the... Briefly, the CDBG is the advisory committee to the city to distribute HUD money that comes as a block grant to Burlington. There's two block grants to the state of Vermont. One goes to Burlington, one goes to everybody else. The advisory committee actually does make decisions, and those decisions are held. The city, the mayor, the city council follows the recommendations of this committee. So it actually is a committee with teeth. And we need one representative on the committee from Ward 8 and one from Ward 1. And why don't we start with Ward 8? Because there's only one person in the room. No. Was there somebody from Ward 8 who was interested in... Hannah, is there anybody else? Would somebody from Ward 8 put Hannah King's name to nomination? That would be Keith. Is there a second? Is there any second? We got the two people from Ward 8. Okay. All those in favor of Hannah being on the CDBG for Ward 8, say aye. I think I heard you in the midi on that. Okay, Ward 1. You are... Rebecca Rowland. Is there anybody else who's interested? I am, but I'm not... I could see you to Rebecca. Yeah, it's just a matter of nominations. He can ask that. Can I hear a nomination? Okay, is there a second? Is there any other nominations? Hearing none, all those in favor of Rebecca Rowland, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Yes. Okay, Rebecca, congratulations. It's wonderful. It's a great thing to do. Thank you. Okay, so next up we have the... some folks talking about the Riverside Avenue development. As you may recall, they were here a few months ago, I believe. No, no, no, that was a different... different Riverside development. We only have ten minutes. I believe this is an introductory piece. You're not looking for the NPA endorsement at this moment. You're just doing a presentation. So if you could give us an overview concisely. That would be great and welcome. And there are some summaries. If you're particularly interested, there are only 20 copies. But these are summaries of the proposal that you're about to present. And we'll post that on the NPA website. I'll try and be brief as we only have ten minutes. My name is Benjamin Avery. I'm with Black Rock Construction in South Burlington. And we, since 2015, have been a developer of a variety of senior projects across Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire. With the recent boom in senior care, which has been going on across the country, but in our part of Vermont as well, we've seen a growth in the assisted and memory care sectors, which has really created an opportunity for some additional independent living for lower acuity seniors who are really looking to maintain an independent lifestyle. We connected with the landowner here on Riverside Avenue several years ago and wanted to explore the opportunity of bringing a market-rate senior housing project to Burlington. We were attracted to this particular location due to its proximity to the hospital, to downtown, and to businesses and services both in Burlington and Winooski, which are easily located from this site. This particular project is proposed to be between 55 and 60 units. It is primarily a market-rate project of senior apartments that will range in size from some smaller studios, maybe 600 square feet up to 1,000-plus square feet, two bedrooms. I always like to stress that we prefer to build apartments, not units. We really view independent living as a transitional, even though it is often downsized for folks. There will be an affordable component of this project, so 15% or a little more of the apartments will be affordable. So we're really mixing in a variety of housing options for a variety of incomes. We really view this type of housing as being very important in the community, not just suburban communities, and we are enthused to bring a little more robust programming to senior living, as opposed to just apartments or age-restricted housing. So we do offer programming that includes activities, that includes wellness. All of our projects we build physical therapy suites into, we have third-party groups who are coming in and working with seniors without having to go out and seek those services, as well as having full-time staffing to just generally keep the facility moving along, keep the programs moving along, and to try and assist seniors with any needs they might have or questions or assistance facilitating things. So with that, I'm going to ask Jeff to just quickly go over some technical details of the project and take it away. Hi, my name is Jeff Zueber. I'm an engineer with VHB. We're working with Ben Averett on this project, and it's great to see this proposed senior housing located along our side. I'm sure being the guest of this ward, we're familiar with the Riverside corridor. There's a lot of apartments surrounding it to the southeast and west, right along Riverside. There's some aging buildings, especially to the north, just across the street. There's some buildings that Riverside needs, some of these older industrial buildings to kind of be replaced with more modern apartment buildings and things that can support Burlington's wildlife. So the current parcel is nine-tenths of an acre in size, and there's four units there that can be replaced. This is looking across the street, so it has a lot of infrastructure that seniors want. There's a sidewalk on the south side, a shared-use path on the north side, and bike lanes along both sides. So there's a lot of infrastructure there that these units can take opportunity of. This is the closest building to the south owned by Burlington Housing Trust, and that's a Burlington Housing Authority, and it's a real storage shed. This is looking to the north, but that white building is one of the buildings on the parcel that will be developed. This is the existing conditions showing it's basically a gravel parking lot in the middle with a few small houses around the side. This is the... Looking south from Riverside Avenue is the front where it would propose renderings. We're still looking through some different configurations of the elevations, but this is generally kind of consistent with what we expect to see along the Riverside Frontage. This is from the northwest corner. This is flipping back to the existing conditions in the middle. There's a lot of gravel pavement on site. The stormwater comes, it's flowing off of asphalt roofs over the gravel, kind of eroding down the middle to the north, and passing over the sidewalk directly to Riverside. So we think we can improve the stormwater, provide some onsite on both storage and treatment measures. This is looking back towards the site along that shared multi-use path on the north side. We've been working with DPW, trying to figure out what infrastructure this project needs to construct and what's there that can be utilized. That's kind of a recap of the project. I think it's a great location. All the amenities and infrastructure are there for the city, but like I kind of said, some of those existing buildings along Riverside, it still needs to continue to be improved. So thank you for the preview, and we understand that you're in the initial phases, and you'll be coming back to get a design review from the NTA once things get a little bit further developed in terms of fewer plans. Is that right? Yeah, we've already been to sketch plans. As far as the form and the function and the number of units in configuration, this is pretty much it. We still need to go through. There's a lot of boards left. We're going to go to Conservation Board, Design Advisory Board, and then final BRB. So we'll definitely keep the city of Burlington apprised of the progress. It isn't the last hearing that we'll be at as far as all the boards, but as far as NPA goes, this is pretty much how the building will end up being. Hang on a second. We have a couple of quick questions, but we want to have more time with you to talk more in depth about this. Right now we just have ten minutes, so we'll have these questions be just basic information once, and then we'll ask you to come back, okay? So do you have a date for the DRB yet? We haven't said that yet. Okay. The second thing is that when River Watch was put in, there was known a dump site in that location, not where your housing is, I don't believe you, but I don't remember where it went, and I just want to alert you to that fact. I hope you've already been aware of that fact, and we're going to perform a phase one environmental assessment to make sure that we understand what the environmental implications are and remediate if need be. Okay, very good. Thank you. And then I just want to say similar concerns that I think were voiced in DRB now as a neighbor who would be living on Hildred Drive. We'd love to see the front being a little bit more integrating with the Riverside Ave and also to the extent that you could have some kind of food servers or something that could maybe even be open to the public. So you've got that interface with the community. That would be absolutely great. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, gentlemen. And apologies if we don't have more time now, but we will be looking to have more of a conversation once you have a little bit more detail. So thanks. So next up we have a conversation about the India House. These two have been working actively on... Is this Riverside? I think so. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, if you could be brief. Yeah. Do you want to go first? Yeah. I'm concerned about halls and hitches is about ready to go into the Winooski River along with a few other pieces of property that have been in the paper with the landslide that we had from the October Halloween storm. And I'm really concerned about the unstableness of that whole area. Do you have a response? We can offer that we are certainly aware of the surrounding area and on the north side. This project will address anything that needs to happen. We're certainly aware of erosion control and things that need to be improved. But yes, we understand. And then I was just wondering if you could at this time speak to any sustainability initiatives for the building in terms of energy consumption or materials or anything like that? We haven't gotten to the architectural level. We're kind of working from the outside in. A lot of the best energy efficiency things are related to the mechanical equipment that'll go in there. We haven't reached that level of design yet. Some of the things that we have gotten to though, a lot of the parking will be underneath the building. So it's reducing that footprint of exposed asphalt pavement to the extent practical. And then stormwater measures, making sure they provide treatment. So that's the things outside of the building, but we haven't gotten to the specifics related to the inside of the building. And we'll be looking for those kinds of finer tuned stuff when you come back. And where I can't speak to this specific building yet because we haven't really engaged formal design. I can say that I think every building we've built in the last five years here in Chinook County has been enrolled in some level of efficiency Vermont Energy Efficiency Program. And two or three years ago, we built one-to-one the award for it. So that's a concern to us. This is a building that we will be retaining ownership of. So long-term energy efficiency is not just a social mission. It is a economic practicality for us. Thanks. So we're going to move on to the conversation about the India House. So take it away, Pat, please. Do you have a microphone? Does if you turn it on. Here you go. Hi. My name is Patricia Seeland. This is my husband and partner, co-mortgager Dave Colley, and he's going to operate the slideshow. These are the results of the survey for the new business idea for India House. And this is a very brief little thing. Let me start my timer. So the current situation is that India House was a restaurant on the corner of East Avenue and Colchester. Most of you know it if only to give directions from it. And the formal address is 207 Colchester Avenue, which was surprising to me. I thought it would be East. I mean East Avenue. It was in operation for nearly 30 years. And it just closed its doors in late 2019. According to the realtor, I've been in touch with the realtor. According to the realtor, the strategy of the owners is to retain ownership of the property. Sell the restaurant equipment and the other existing fixtures inside those booths and tables for $10,000. To lease the space for $4,000 a month and to request a five-year lease. There's no interest in selling the property. It's owned by United India. The realtor, which is Peter Yee of Yellow Sign, has had several calls but Mo followed through as of this past Monday. I've talked with him a couple of times. Cindy Cook has talked with him. And he's saying that nothing's happened yet. The origin of the survey is that there was a discussion entry on Front Porch Forum December 5th by Jen Lazar. I don't know if she's here, but she lives in East Village. And she said, let's dream together about that corner and what we would do. So I jumped on, several people jumped on. I said to Dave, it would be great to find out really what our neighbors think about this space and what would they want. And he said, I could do this with that monkey survey, survey monkey thing. So he put that together. We got some questions on it. I reviewed it. He had some other neighbors review it and then we posted it on Front Porch Forum. There are only 10 questions. We had 119 respondents, which I thought was pretty good. And 93 of them completed the survey all the way. And most people live in this neighborhood. There are friendly neighbors or non-friendly neighbors. And 50% of the participants of those people who responded want to stay informed about what's going on. Speaking of which, we have a sign-up sheet here on the front desk which allows you to put on your email if you would like to have more updates about what's happening. I announced this survey at the NPA meeting. Cindy expressed interest. And we've talked also. So the key findings, my page is out of order. There it is. One, the restaurant is a good idea. People want some place to go to select their own food and sit down to connect. And only 10% said no to a food place. The second finding is that, excuse me, will I rearrange my pages? Is that they want to dine in and a takeout. People want to come in, they want to sit down, they want to have a copy of Brioche, something to eat for breakfast. And then they want to be able to take home something for dinner or lunch. Which fits in really well with our neighborhood configuration here with the college, the hospital, the ball games, all of that. Key finding three is they want a cafe. 48% said they'd like to have some type of cafe. Only 13% said they want a table service, which is like kind of go in and sit down with a menu and have somebody serve you. So people want to come in and get their own food and sit down. And it's kind of an informal hangout kind of place. Key finding number four is that most of our neighbors are going to walk there. And a lot of them said, wow, I would love to be able to walk there and stop in and get my coffee, read my paper, talk to my neighbors on my way somewhere in the neighborhood. Whether it's here or to the college or down the road. Diverse opinions have preferred cuisine. That was kind of surprising to me because there were a lot of international requests, but nobody wanted pizza. And I think there was a pizza place there before. So some of you may remember that. When they said cafe and bakery and this type of come in or take out or go, I thought about stone soup, money, water, scout, August 1st. That kind of a friendly, informal gathering place. The themes, and this is something that, you know, you can look and see what words are larger and pop out at you. But they want a quiet dining place. They want to come in, like I said. I'm going to say it again. They want to come in. They want to hang out. Say hello to your neighbor. Get something good to eat, something good to drink. And just be there. Somebody had put on every response, she wanted couches. I would like a couch. I would like a couch. I would like a couch. All right, all right, I got that one. But the second choice was to have some live music in the evening. And that would be more acoustical live music, like jazz or blues or something like that, not necessarily rock and roll. And local art on the walls. That came up often that people want a local art, like a gallery type of place where they could have that. Outdoor seating. There are just so many nice visions of this corner and what it could be for us. Other business ideas. The other small percentage said, how about a laundromat? How about a bookstore? How about a produce market, like city market? A fitness center, affordable housing, bike shop, cafe, art gallery once again. So that was our theme there. So what are steps have we taken? I got the survey and Dave helped me figure out how to put it into some kind of readable format. And I communicated the results to, I went right to campus kitchen and said, hey guys, this is what's happening here. And they had expressed some interest in the past about expanding, but they are at a really tiny little spot. So I said, well, you know, here it is. This is what your neighborhood wants. And you already have the good food, and you would not have to do a whole lot in order to expand. And they said, well, when it came up, we talked about it. I talked to Rob. And then he said, I will go back and talk to Bill again. So that would be fantastic, I think, if they could do something in addition to what they have at campus kitchen. Second of all, I sent it to Peter Yee, the realtor. And then we posted it on our front porch forum on December 26th. I talked to the realtor on Monday again. And he said, I work for the owner, and I will accept any new tenants. Ideally it will be somebody your neighborhood likes, but I'm going to put anybody in there. I work for the owner. I said, OK. I said, how can we help you get the right person? He said, send them to me. Give them my name and phone number. I said, OK, got it, got it. One of the issues was parking. Jim Barr told me that. He sent me an email and said that the parking across the street there at Trinity has guest parking. So that's available. Sharon also contacted me, Sharon Bouchard, and said that the UVM health building, that went on that corner, that that may be a possibility, that she's worked with UVM in the past. But now, yeah, but now it's owned by the hospital and I have not followed up on it. The holidays and illness intervened. So the next steps is that we're going to continue the survey to see what the students want. They'll be back and the staff and the medical center personnel here. And we're going to share the results with others. I'm meeting with CEDO on Friday to talk to them about some other things as well as this. And then I met with Cindy Cook and Cindy had some ideas about who may know other entrepreneurs or restaurateurs who would like to do this. Vendors, you can get the results at the front page forum 2587, December 26th. You can add your information on the sign-up sheet. And please give Peter's name, Peter, at yellowsignvt.com. Anybody you know, but it's basically, it comes down to us. And do we want to manage to work together to get something in there that we want? We have a vision, but it's up to us to put that energy behind it everybody you know. I thought about contacting City Market. Do they want to put it in a produce stand or the farmhouse group? They seem to be successful at starting restaurants. Somebody had mentioned a bagel place, whatever. So that's it. I'm out of time. Stop. Nine minutes, 19 seconds. So thanks. There's a sign-up sheet here. There's a sign-up sheet. So that people want to keep abreast that we'll get to you on this. So I think it sounds like there's a lot of really interesting and diverse ideas. And I wonder if this could be a space that could house all of those. I feel like pop-ups are really popular right now, or maybe they always have been, and I'm just starting to pay attention. But I wonder if this could be a space that it's a coffee shop, but they also have like a rotating residency where Monday it might be Maria from Cafe Mama Juana. And then the next day, it's Miranda or Louisa's pierogies or something. I think there's a lot of options there. And maybe it's not just one idea, but maybe it's multiple of these ideas. I think so too. I think we have a lot of opportunity here, but we have to coordinate and join forces. Well, thanks for all your good energy and work on this. We really appreciate it. And we'll probably hope to be hearing good news down the road. Thank you. Thank you. And there's a sign-up sheet here. So next up is folks who are going to do another sort of flash preview about a proposal on hunger for terrorists. And is that, have that right? Yes? Yeah. No, go down. So here's one of these chairs from Heasel. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, I'm Bruce Baker, and this is Greg Durimas. And we have a property on hunger for terrorists, and this is hunger for terrorists itself. And let's see, it's hard for you. This street view is looking north, and way up would be the mobile station. This is a property we own at 21 Hungerford. There's a middle building at 11 Hungerford, and then there's one at, right. So there's 11, 15, and 21, consecutively, that we own. The middle property, can you show that, is interesting. It's a building that was modular construction back in the 70s. So we can actually recycle it, take it apart, two sections, and move it somewhere. So we're hoping to find a doni for that as part of it. And we've got some plans to take it apart. We have some experience in modular construction and have actually done this before. So we think it might be an interesting way for someone to get a start with a home. It's three bedrooms now? It's a four bedroom home now. But a small home, very nice. The lot slopes down in the back quite precipitously down into the gully. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Soils are challenging. It's a pretty, and stormwater is a challenge. We have a lot of challenges with the site itself. So what we're trying to do is to establish something with some scale so that we can improve the stormwater and improve where we can there. And we're at the early stages. We wanted to come early to gain input before we drafted final plans. But we're looking at, so the idea here, this is the same street view without the trees, to try to balance out the streetscape. We have two buildings here, and this one and this one would be, more than the one across the street from it, and a little shorter than this one. And it would be, we're looking at 12 to 14 units, one, two and three bedrooms. We're taking one away, that's a four, so a net 13 new ones. Of course, new stormwater and all that. I heard someone mention energy efficiency. We try really hard to make them as tight as we can because we do own them. So that would be obviously an aspect of it. And that's basically it. We're really early on in the process and we're open to feedback so that we can make it better, obviously, than it is now. Right now it's a challenging site to take care of. Any 10,000 foot questions? I'm not surprised that you might have one. Hunger for Terrorists is part of the National Register of Historic Places. And I would just encourage you to try to have the architectural facade at least match the neighborhood. So that's interesting. We always have this debate about historic when we talk to the historic folks. The historic people in the city that we talked to would like it to be distinct. I agree with you. I would think it should match. And their logic has been as it's been described to me is that it shouldn't try to mimic the older. So that's, and I agree with you Sharon, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me but we've been through these meetings before and they've been pushing us in that direction each time. Who has come up with that? That's Mary O'Neill's suggestion. Of course, she's the expert. Maybe we can talk to some city councillors about that. Sure. That'd be interesting. Hang on a second Sharon, because Brian's the head of you here. Hi. So I'm not a professional architect or anything like that, but I'm really interested in the environment and how the environment affects the human experience and the experience of animals and my two cents in this economy, my two dollars is that it can be both distinct and blend in, that it can blend in with the style of the street but it can look unique. And I think that's one of the issues with a lot of modern buildings that we're seeing are they're like these bland cubes, like chunks, cubes assembled and they're not beautiful and there's architecture that we see in some of the other cities in the world that might not be appropriate for your site where you do see unique shapes and nature integrated into the design and iconic buildings like the pyramid building in New York or the forest building in Milan or whatever it's called like there's some really iconic architecture but the majority of what we're seeing like what we had planned for downtown in the giant hole was like this cubicle stuff. So I guess what I would ask is, because Hungerford Terrace is a few blocks away from my house what I would ask is for something that blends in with the character of the neighborhood but is distinct and in 100 years when people look back they say look at that building that's 100 years old and look at that building that's 200 years old and look how they're similar yet different and also I would ask that you think about the green space. I know that you took the trees out symbolically but that's actually happening all over Burlington. A lot of trees are getting cut down as much as they're being planted so I would just ask that you also take into account the green space and the landscaping. Sure. I just wanted to know the trees really are going to be there though, right? Oh yeah, we're not taking out trees. I mean that was a very big concern because we seem to forget the value of the trees and how they clean the air and I'm just really worried about this. I mean it was just stated now and also do you have a picture of the street if I was facing the old and the new building I'm looking down but can I see it face on like how they look? I don't feel like I can see the front of it because I don't really feel like I get a good sense of how it's integrated at all and so I think that's something that I think everyone would like to know. So at this point we haven't gone to we haven't applied for anything yet so we're working on these we're not fully baked in terms of all the plans but I agree with you, first of all the trees we have to be really conscious of creating parking areas that cause heat to radiate so we're keeping as many trees on the site as we can we're making a shading plan that makes sure that it would basically be covered and you wouldn't have the heat radiating and the trees on the street were not taking we had to take one in front of the house in question, the city asked us to do because it was dying but if anyone notices that we didn't want to so we're going to we had to remove this this tree is gone now but we were required by the city because it's dead we have one more question Thanks, what's happening with the gas station right next door to this property is that yours also? No, we tried really hard to talk to him about right now it's a parking lot that has a violation on it he won't, so my dentist happens to be Dr. Levoie next door and I'm trying, you know he struggles to find parking for his for his employees and we want him to stay there, same with Dr. Averold next door there would be a really nice way for us to get together maybe build a nice brick sort of place where you couldn't see any of the parking so a parking lot cannot be a parking lot in that zone per se and that's why it's a violation but it can support another use if you merge the lots and we've been trying to talk to him but he won't respond he doesn't seem to want to sell or lease to us we would really like to clean up the site maybe someday but I'm not hopeful So what about building a building that doesn't have parking? Well we'd have to talk to the zoning people because we can't do that under a current zoning ordinance right now we do really believe in TDM strategies and we implement them and we have a long list of things that we do with our tenants to make sure that they're we try to work with our tenants so there's only one car or less per unit we give free bike we give free, we have a trolley that attaches to a bike So wait a minute a second I'm sorry but we're going to we have another question and we don't want to get into the weeds here now because again we're going to have you guys back So I recognize this might be more complicated but if you knew there was demand would you be interested in making it a cooperative housing? Sure I'd have to look at the zoning by a lot of see if it works each zone has their own uses and I don't know if cooperative house is allowed at one point I looked at like a hostel there or something but you know that didn't please me because I want to provide housing that's more long term for the community but sure we would consider something like that So thank you gentlemen and apologies that we didn't have a lot of time for you if you could send us electronic versions of these elevations that would be great It might be a couple weeks because we'd like to get what you're asking for a little more detail and the architects are a little busy for the next few weeks but we will be back with something more definitive than this And you probably know the process that the one of the first steps in the review process is to get the NPA input which this evening is not about so we want more particulars from you and then we do a review process here before you're going to Yeah I'm not sure how that works We can talk about it We don't need to do that now So we have another one more important conversation I don't want to give a short shrift So Mark Hughes is on the Police Commission Is that the right terminology? Yes So we would have had ten minutes but we have seven and that just goes to show you how important this subject is not only did they put us all the way on the back end but they stole three minutes from us on the front end because we were talking about trees but what I'm here to talk about is is to talk about civilian oversight of law enforcement and it is a lot more important to a lot of vulnerable categories than it is to others and I'm a police commissioner here in Burlington and what I wanted to mostly do is just answer some questions I can tell you just a little bit about what we do because I think that will probably clear up some things The fifth and the sixth articles of the Constitution it is state what they do is they provide us the ability to elect officials and by proxy those officials have responsibility for the management of the law enforcement folks in each province The 25th rule of the House of Representatives provides the government operations committee in the House oversight responsibility of law enforcement in the state What we have in terms of law enforcement in terms of major bodies of civilian oversight of law enforcement in the state is the State Police Advisory Commission I think people have heard of that before That is the preeminent commission the preeminent civilian oversight of law enforcement apparatus in the state which has oversight responsibility for one third of the state police which cover 90% of the land mass that's the state police The only other agency in the state that has civilian oversight law enforcement capabilities or responsibilities is the commission here in Burlington that's us and we have responsibility for about 105 officers that's us Those are the only two civilian oversight apparatuses of law enforcement in the state Okay The city council has responsibility for the delegation of our responsibilities We have low responsibilities in the absence of their delegation The only responsibility that they have delegated to us is to review outcomes of complaints that is all It's all we do and in our recent events that have occurred that circumvented us we didn't even see that So it's bad I'm going to stick around to make it better I'm here to answer questions from you but at the end of the day if you don't have adequate law enforcement oversight in Burlington you can only look to yourselves because you elect the city councilors and they delegate our responsibility What are your questions? Hang on a second, there's a question over here first because the microphone and I'll get around to you Yes sir I may not have any answers but The commission's responsibility I think you said is a narrow one to deal with complaints, right? Is that correct? The commission's responsibility as delegated by the city council is to review outcomes of complaints Okay So my understanding is that the recent things that have happened at the police department and put us in a position where now kind of began with some complaints that Mr. Winckelman made that were not actually addressed it seems like they were sort of smothered I guess I'd like your take on kind of what happened and where we are now I don't know what happened and that's kind of the point we still have to figure that out at this point as your commissioner I'm standing in front of you and telling you that as the commissioner of your oversight apparatus I do not know all of the details surrounding the case of Mr. Winckelman Here and then over to you Pat I was just wondering what is the best way to contact the police department if we have feedback or complaints if we're seeking an actual response I think it's just you just calling in like normal there's just a regular call in line I don't understand I'm glad you asked that question because I feel a little silly because I'm not quite sure but I think you just call the police We have a police department Are you setting me up or something Hang on a second Good evening my name is Jay Lawson I'm actually one of the lieutenants at the police department I have recently been reassigned I've been with BPD for 20 years my anniversary is in 16 days I actually spend a great deal of my time as the sergeant in this district and I've recently been reassigned like I said from the downtown business district to your area 1 and 8 So quick question There are many ways of doing that online reporting directly to your council representative city hall you can always call the police department we try to make it as easy as possible we understand the difficulty is for someone to make a complaint to a police department come on into the police department when you had a bad interaction we get that so we try to make as many ways as possible for that to happen and we're looking how we can increase that as well and on our website too in an online process particular to my responsibility this is my first NPA in a long time for you guys up here there was a gentleman I recognized the accent from the city council meeting the other night who was yes sorry I forgot your name sir but mentioned not having good representation in here for you guys when I was here I tried to make those appearances before even before Lieutenant Sullivan was visiting here so I plan to be here as much as possible I'm actually going to be working the evening shifts once I get back from an injury my name is Jason Lawson but I go by Jay so please consider me your resource I plan on getting the officers in your district to come to these as well I think it's important that you guys meet them so you have a face to recognize when you do see them on the street or if you do need our services at some point so I don't want to take Mark's time because I know it's important so I just want to introduce myself and if there are questions I'll be around for a little bit afterwards thanks for showing up too I didn't understand your question as a complete call I thought you asked just how do you contact the police so there's a complete apparatus online as well okay so did you ask for us sir Ryan? hi just to clarify do you review the results of a complaint does that mean you do not know what the complaints are until the results come in I've seen some complaints and really I haven't it's been sporadic I've been on the commission for about seven or eight months this one I didn't see and as I understand this complaint this particular complaint I think it spanned across the period of about four or five months and I think what we were doing was we were dealing with an officer's behavior as opposed to the genesis of that particular complaint and the entirety of that complaint so I'm not quite sure what what it all is so I'm hoping our next steps I don't know that the commission actually we didn't go into an emergency session until just I think it was yesterday as the first time we were in an emergency session through all of this I disagree with it I pushed back on it hard I'm one of eight commissioners and I'm not the chair I think we should have been in executive session on day one that's my opinion we've got a lot of things to cover as far as understanding our internal processes and how we deal with things like this but I think most importantly I think what we really got to understand is that again you elect city councilors city councilors decide the scope of our responsibility this is the scope of our responsibility and this is what you got I would just add not to belabor the point but outside of either cop watch BTV or mark those are really the only two people organizations at this point I would go to if I had a complaint about police frankly the police commission the chair and the vice chair really did an incredibly poor job and I would not ask anyone to go and deal with the kind of gaslighting that I and Michael Fife and others have seen I don't want to take up any more time thank you thanks Charles Charles and I haven't talked to you either we're set together I haven't even had a conversation it's first time I've been in face to face actually I had a question which I'm sorry if this isn't actually within your purview about this can't answer it about the special committee and I know for many many months it seems like everybody who's been part of that is really frustrated and they're not really coming to any real resolutions or recommendations if you could talk to that body and tell them what you think that should be like if they had recommendations about the committee and how city council should consider changing the committee what would those be so I think what needs to be happening is first of all maybe we should make this an elected office or maybe there should be at least some type of criteria that's defined so it's a meritocracy so just a minute we got a cue here so it's a Jack Jonathan I'm sorry I don't know your name and Sharon that was going to be one of my questions is do you think it should be elected and I'm glad that we're starting that conversation not only here but other places so I'll jump to my other question which is what do you feel like should be the role of the police commission you know what I think is I think you should be asking that question to your constituents because you are for them I'm only one and I happen to be a commissioner and I don't mean that negatively because so if anybody doesn't know this is a really good friend of mine that's what I'm trying to do right now and I think you offer a really valuable this is the venue to have this conversation with constituents so I would pass the microphone and ask folks in the room to respond but I think it's a valuable question what do you think and I think the commission the special committee that you appointed I think they were charged to answer that question too I would imagine but they're not answering so I don't want to touch the answer to that question because I've given the extent to how it is and I want to answer it and again the city counselors just like our legislators because the same thing with the state police advisory commission why is it that the chair of the state police advisory commission works in law for right here in town and defends police in a regular course of her job on a regular basis Nancy Sheehan Nancy Sheehan why is it that the state police advisory commission chair works in a firm with the uncle of TJ Donovan right here in town why is that because you guys you're the guys who elected the legislators who made the decision to put this person in place when you say civilian oversight of law enforcement it's civilian oversight of law enforcement it's your job you're the one to elect those officials by article 6 of the constitution of this state and they they knew forward with the power that's invested in them by article 5 of the constitution of this state in article 25 in rule 25 of the house rules is what gives the house oversight of them but you're the ones who put them in office and when they're not doing their job and when that oversight is not sufficient then you need to call them into accountability I don't know if I can follow that I want to speak to you I understand the very narrow the very narrow charge that you've been given I recognize that you're explaining to me the very narrow charge what I'm curious about is is there a formal process or is there any kind of process by which those complaints go to the commission so it sounds like you hear some but you don't hear some to review and that sounds like there's a gap somewhere upstream also I think that's very astute to observe and I would just say that obviously that's that's been in flux for what seems to be yours all you think I can tell you about is what's been happening for the last eight months and from that assessment from what I've seen, if it is it's not consistent so there's no formal process there's no guarantee that the complaint will end up in there has been no guarantee that I have seen all of the complaints that have come okay I want to be careful about what I say because we have been kicking around sharing if you recall there's one process one process that we have and what it is is it defines how it is we go about reviewing complaints and it's been going back and forth for the last several years literally through to us and then over to the folks at public safety and I think we're in our second iteration but as far as formal process that's what we got other questions we got to get out of here Mark, I just wanted to make sure I mean my understanding is that the police commission also is responsible for the policies that govern the police department and I just wanted you to speak to that if you could I have I have no there's no formal delegation of our responsibility for policies from the city council but what I have seen is that there have been discussions about policies in the commission when there's been proposals to revise policies and yes we've had discussions about them because I've been to a few not recently but a few police commission meetings when a policy was being revised and the police commission did weigh in on that and I am not aware of any change in that responsibility I wouldn't disagree that you've been to meetings that we've chimed in on reviews of policies I wouldn't disagree with that I've already got a mic I guess one thing I would suggest is going back and check to the question about voting for commissioners I don't think voting for commissioners makes a lot of sense unless and until commissioners have more power that's conveyed to the city charter there's been over 40 years process of consolidating power in the mayor's office and in the mayor there used to be a lot more power in the commissions some of this came because back when Bernie was first elected the commissions were not accountable in any way to the mayor and they could basically you know folks who were near the Berlin didn't have heard that infamously Bernie couldn't get as an assistant way back in the early days and a lot of that had to do with too much power in the commission and so it was a 20 year trend of taking commission power away from the commissions and ultimately having the mayor having the hiring and filing power of department heads and so I personally actually always thought that there was some of an overall reaction and I think it's something that should be reconsidered there's very ultimately to have power as a commissioner or as a body you need to have some form of accountability from the head of the department whether it's other department head and right now accountability is sidestepped it's directly to the mayor because as commissioners you don't have any kind of hiring and firing power and I think personally that should be reconsidered there should be some kind of I would say the power should rest absolutely with the commissions or absolutely with the mayor's office and I think that's a place to start commissioners get more accountability to them and have more say whether you're talking about police commission or one of the other commissions thanks Mark I'm Keith Billsbury I'm Keith Terrace ward 8 but I've been an award one before we're long term residents and one of the things my wife and I never understand is why a policeman seemed to shoot to kill rather than shoot to wound when they're feeling threatened and is that a policy that you that police police commission where does that come from I can honestly briefly we don't shoot to kill we shoot to control the situation and the last opportunity we have so use of force is something that is a difficult difficulty I'm more than happy to come back to more people outside of this venue about this and bring in the experts that can speak to it I'm not an expert in use of force I'm trained in use of force I've experienced it for the first time put my uniform on so there's different tears to it but we don't shoot to kill people we shoot to control the situation that's presented to us not the ones we try to present so it's a very challenging thing and I would love to hook you up with someone who could explain that more precisely than I can but we do just to clarify that we'll follow up on this, we'll have you back and I think the other thing is I want to be really clear about it going back to something that you said over there is that this is not about whether the commission has all power or no power I think the relationship that we have and I have a pretty good relationship with law enforcement but the relationship that we have with them is defined by our duties and responsibilities and if every time you see me it's because somebody said you did something wrong then what kind of relationship is that there's a bunch of food here speaking of refreshments we have plates and stuff please take it we want it to go to good use and thanks a lot and we'll see you again at the February debates and then back here in March