 people. That one's, yeah, close. And you know, since a lot of people, you know, but I was taking a year off until I was in Minnesota. I haven't updated the representatives. I don't know if he also sang a while or he had sang a while. You always sang a good chorus. You got to join the rinse course. So that was the last time I sang the whole district. You didn't do anything else. It was the biggest That was like the last time I ever did a song in your room up there, aren't you? Yeah. Oh, really? Down there. The newsletter. I don't know how to add people actually, but I think it, let me forward it to you. I think at the bottom, like there's an opportunity to kind of like, let me forward it and see if that You can also just add. Are you would convert? What was your Cultural heritage, family celebrations. Oh, okay. The holidays and holidays. Yes, yes, exactly. I sort of said, okay, so we're going to come in and be members here, but I'll be so I can work. But yeah, I didn't know that was here. Oh, now we go to Yes. I think we are going to call this meeting to order. This is like exciting. We have almost a room full of people, which is the most that we have had in person for a long time. So I just want to start by welcoming everybody. There is still plenty more pizza in the back of the room. Anybody can help themselves during the meeting and anybody who's online that feels like coming down to join us here in person, please do and start by getting pizza. Are announcements that people would like to make? Are there any public comments that people would like to offer? This is like a deafening silence and nobody online either. You know, I am assuming that if somebody online were doing that, we would see a hand raised or something. Okay, so our first order of business is the nomination and election of new steering committee members. We have four folks who raised their hands and offered to help us out. Our steering committee had gotten very slim. It was down to just Nelson Martel and me. And we put out a call for help and got some great response. And so do we just nominate people and then have an election? I think. And I would say if you just announced who a possible slave is, you could take a motion from the room. I think we'll do that. Thank you, sir. I second that. So our slate of new steering committee members is Boota Reagan in the back of the room over there. Nancy Harkins in the middle of the room. Mills Forney over here taking minutes for us because he's already doing the work. And I should say everybody has already been doing the work. He's just doing work right now as we speak. And Anita, is it Rapona Raponi? Anita Rapone. I would move. The slate of board members for the steering committee. Do we have a second? Second. There we go. Any discussion? So voting is open to all residents of Ward six. So I know some of our guests are not necessarily residents of Ward six, but anybody who is a member of Ward six who is in favor, please signify by saying I, I any opposed? I would say it was unanimous. And I will say I am really grateful for the help and excited to be working with all of you. Likewise. There we go. Let me just put in, if you want to be heard on tape or by your people online, you need to get near a microphone I was speaking. So don't be afraid to grab it. That's great. You're almost close enough. Okay. The gentleman in the middle is definitely close. The only person to me is not going to get covered. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for that reminder. So tonight's meeting is entirely devoted to learning about the candidates in our upcoming election, our local candidates. And it was a little bit confusing because these are votes that are based on state districts, not on city wards. So this is the Ward six NPA, which is divided amongst three house districts. And when I was looking at the map, I read it wrong. And so invited folks from a fourth house district. There we are. And we are divided among two Senate districts. And we have a variety of folks here from different districts who are not necessarily running against each other. And that's fine. This is not intended to be a debate. It's intended to be an opportunity for the folks who are running for office to introduce themselves and connect with some of their constituents. So I'm thinking that we'll just go in the order that is listed here on the agenda. And Tiff, I believe that would put you up first. It would. I think Charlie can advise you if you're in a good spot and if you're close enough. It's okay. I suppose that I do not need to speak to my colleagues here. Well, I'm really thankful for the invitation. My name is Tiff Bloomley. I live in the Five Sisters neighborhood. I have for, I guess, the last 20 years and moved to Vermont because I felt like Vermont could be a welcoming place for my family. And it has proven to be just that. And I have, I've been a non-profit leader. I'm a mom. I'm sorry. Want me to just. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Non-profit leader. I have taught taught school and and two and a half years ago I decided to run for the legislature and really to my surprise because I had thought I was a very happy advocate but we were facing the first months of the pandemic and all of a sudden we all became aware of certain things issues that I've been working on for a very long time. And it seemed as if this was an opportunity to really address some of those issues in a more systemic way. And so over the biennial we did a lot and some of them related to pension. I mean some of them related to the pandemic and some of them not. We came up with I think an pension resolution that was embraced far and wide by and we passed over the governor's veto unanimously. We made changes in the pupil waiting for English language learners which affects Burlington significantly and passed a number of tax credits that benefit different groups in different ways but a lot of our work was really focused on the pandemic and addressing the issues in the pandemic and that's food insecurity, housing, healthcare access. We learned what we learned a lot more about what wasn't in place for people for whom English was not a first language. Keeping childcare centers open and I'm trying to understand look at my writing and understand what improved BB access. What would that be? I'll just come back to that. But anyway, so what? Oh yes, thank you. Thank you. Okay, that's why he's a senator and I'm a house member. These are new needs but they were really kind of brought to the fore magnified by the pandemic. So what did we learn through the work that we did first that the mental health system isn't a system and we are not meeting the needs that have made themselves very, very clear. The role of childcare centers not just as places where our children learn some of their very first lessons but as an economic lever as critical to the economy. We learned the importance of paid family leave especially if we didn't have it. The impossible shortage of housing and a trend line in available housing that has been going down, down, down and then became got to a crisis point when people started moving in property values started going up and people were priced out of the market and we learned that we don't need to incarcerate as many people as we do because for the pandemic sake we emptied our prisons of nonviolent offenders and so I'm very hopeful I don't get to set the agenda but I can certainly use my voice to influence it. I hope that we will work to prioritize those issues and in both the house and the senate but the job this job isn't just about policy making and I'm kind of wonkish about some things but really a lot of the work is about responding to people who call one minute you said okay great people who call who had problems getting their unemployment checks who had problems with qualifying for rental assistance etc and those are really I didn't realize that state officials would return my phone calls or emails way more quickly than when I wasn't writing from a legislative address and it's really satisfying to be able to help people with some of these those issues and the job also involves coordinating with local officials the city council because we don't we don't operate in our own little vacuum there are many things in Burlington that then happen in Burlington or Burlington has needs that need to be addressed by state government so we've spent a lot of time Gabrielle and I in building those relationships and then finally trying to anticipate what the needs are by by talking to service providers and local businesses etc so that that can inform the priorities that we set and at any rate I am I hope that I have earned your trust and and your support it's been an honor to to serve um and it's and I and I hope I've I've done well by you all thank you I'm gonna switch to uh Gabrielle Stebbins who is online um she is in the I'm here please go ahead Gabrielle excellent thank you so much first of all I'm sorry I'm not there in person I'm actually heading down to a non-partisan uh conference uh in Rhode Island um which is the national uh caucus of environmental legislators um and I I just say that because I would be there in person otherwise so I apologize I'm not um Tiff covered so many of the things that we've worked together on as well as with all of the other reps and senators in the room and on the line uh and I'm not going to repeat what she said I do want to just say uh one thing which is about how we work together you know we've received some comments occasionally like this is weird you guys really work a lot together uh are you the same um and I just want to say we're not the same um which if you as you guys start to know each other you'll know that um but we find it really really helpful given how much comes across our desks how many different types of votes we need to make um and having Barbara Rachelson and in a third um in a a different committee from the two of us really helps us understand way more than we might be able to do if we were uh working just uh more as an individual so Tiff mentioned many many things um as many of you know I uh work my day job in clean energy consulting um so just to highlight some of the areas that we made progress in terms of uh environmental and energy considerations we um I mean that the eight point three billion dollar uh budget that we passed this past year uh with no increase in taxes um was to Tiff's point incredibly transformative but it also uh you know really harnessed quite a bit of the federal dollars that were uh brought to us to do really boring but critical things like shoring up our roads uh maintaining um free public transit or zero fair public transit for another year uh extending you know hopefully uh in the next few weeks finishing up the roundabout um right at root seven uh Shelburne Road um we put millions and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars into water quality improvements um into uh revitalization of downtown community centers in ways that are um you know as environmentally sustainable and also economically sound as possible one of the bills that I was very excited to work with quite a bit even though I'm not in that committee um was the workforce economic development bill because frankly uh if if we don't figure out how to really harness the strengths of Vermont in terms of um our natural resources our people uh and really prioritize where we can connect the dots in terms of employees and holes in employers uh offerings um that we're missing an opportunity for taking all of these federal dollars that are coming our way right now and reinvesting so that we have a long term um robust growth plan ahead of us in Vermont which is easier said than done given um you know what we learned yesterday uh about OPEC um cutting how many millions of of barrels of oils which is going to hurt everybody which is why moving forward um in the next three in the next two years um I will be hopefully uh working quite a bit on uh continuing to identify ways that we can help Vermonters save money on how they heat their homes how they drive their cars um so that ideally it's it's easier to pay for all the things that we say we want. I also want to just say as Tiff and I have been uh holding lemonade stands what we've heard from folks um in terms of really top priorities we've heard lots of priorities but top priorities are definitely public safety uh and affordability and um the the concern around Burlington High School and I I do know having spoken with quite a few of our Burlington delicate um folks and and colleagues in Montpelier that there is a deep understanding that we need help to get that one hundred sixty five million way down um there is a deep understanding that we need to identify uh a longer term uh plan to address those who are very mentally ill uh and should not be living on our streets um but prison isn't necessarily where they should be either um and also in terms of housing how do we actually make it so that we're seeing a lot more housing uh you know from UVM for our students um how are we going to be a lot more creative to make sure that Burlington is still uh and or Burlington is more affordable uh as opposed to what people are feeling right now and I'll leave it at that I apologize I'm yeah sorry that's that's time right there okay I'm just I apologize I'm gonna go on to my headphones and I'm happy to answer any questions but I'm gonna uh get back on the road and thank you so much for the invitation. Stebbins for Vermont you can just google it if you want to read a little bit more about me thank you thank you Gabrielle um I don't see Tom here but before we move on from Chittenden 13 I just want to make sure that's right so Chittenden 14 Barbara Rachelson hi my name is Barbara Rachelson I'm running for my sixth term and I have represented um Burlington's Chittenden six six district which has been a one seat district and um it has morphed with the reapportionment and the increase in population in Burlington uh Chittenden six six well all the old numbers went away but Chittenden 14 became a two-seat district with um one extra um representative for Burlington so that's really exciting news and while those of you most of you who are listening or in this room were part of um six six not all of you were because we discovered very close to election day for the primary um that certain people that were expecting Chip and Gabrielle on the ballot saw my name on the ballot and so um the maps were not readily available in the beginning and um I'm excited about representing a district twice the size and um so Tiff and I share a lot of common uh background in terms of coming from the nonprofit sector and in fact when Tiff joined the legislature two years ago I was thrilled because I kept saying we need more nonprofit folks in the legislature because I think the mindset that we bring in addition to being tireless advocates is really looking at how money is spent and what is the return on investment and are we doing right by the people with the money that um we are spending there's like a very very strong fiduciary responsibility and um I've served my first term I served on house education and have become an advocate of um looking at putting the $1.8 billion we spend on a shrinking number of students into education teaching and programming and less into supervisory unions um different districts things that really bring no bearing on outcomes for kids so I have famously um introduced a one school district bill for many years I don't get people laughing at me anymore Hawaii has one school district and I think what um we mean by local control can still happen without having 280 school districts that are very costly from an administrative standpoint um I've also um served on house judiciary and a lot of the legislation that I've worked on has been related to um looking at how do we how does our judicial system work we don't handle the corrections end of it um I also serve on the judicial nominating committee which has been fascinating so I bring my perspective um I've been a CEO at three different statewide nonprofits for over 35 years um I know what it's like to run a business I know what it's like to have expenses go up and not have revenues go up I know what it's like to not have enough employees and um again we need to be looking at how we can help for Monter's continue to afford to live here that's one thing I keep hearing as I go door to door is how expensive it is and looking at different ways to pay for school funding besides property taxes um the types of bills that I introduce tend to fall into the categories of things like consumer protection and some of that could be anything from um making sure you know okay oh boy it goes fast um uh looking at um privacy issues and making sure that um the government and the private sector are not using your information inappropriately and um looking at in general evidence-based um practices so that we're not passing laws that feel good but aren't necessarily making issues better um and I hope to be re-elected for another two years and um thank you for your your time and your support for six we figured out somewhat belatedly I've read the maps wrong but I Brian just want to give you a chance to say hello since you are so kind as to show up and then I want to open the floor up to um questions um from anyone for any of the candidates you could say more of a hello than that if you like I didn't say hello I can hi but is it shall or may you know a legislative joke um so hello I'm Brian Cina um I'm Brian Cina I live in the old north end um and it's uh chit and in what are we now 15 it's so confusing to me but um people thought maybe there was a piece of Ward 6 and then I looked and there wasn't but I'm happy to meet with people anywhere like in the state if they want to talk so um it's nice to come to the south end um I'm not sure like what we're supposed to say or if there was prompts um yeah I mean I I guess I I would say that um I heard people talking about priorities I in the next session I'd like for us to follow up on what we've done with housing and and expand the work on housing and I have a lot of ideas about that that I'm happy to talk with people about I think we need to look at um with with the rise of violence that's occurring we need to really look at um what is driving that violence and the governor put out a 10 point plan to address the violence and I think that's a start but if we're going to increase policing and we're going to increase prosecution then we need to make sure where people go makes the problem better and not worse and I think this is the the moment for us to look at the Norway model and to look at corrections reform so that when people when violent criminals go to to a facility that the facility doesn't make them more violent that it actually rehabilitates rehabilitates them and integrates some back into the community and I encourage everyone to look at the Norway model um and maybe I'll end with this like speaking of the Norway model this isn't really um necessarily related to legislation but it's connected to this concept that went um like last year around this time the city evicted the Sears Lane encampment um and without anywhere for people to go and people have been languishing in hotels people have been sleeping in tents in the woods as arrows are shot into the tents at night like people have been really traumatized but the city's moving towards creating the pod village and as part of creating the pod village uh we were is good Isham street gardening and other optimistic doings it's a community group that I started on my street many years ago and we've expanded out and we're helping people around the city um we're working with um people who are going to be living in the encampment and the neighbors and we're going to try to to bring the neighbors the existing neighbors together with the new neighbors of the encampment or their village to garden and then the idea is that if we start that now before people move in them when they move in they know each other and then we want to expand those gardens from that point to link with the is good gardens as an sort of experiment and it sounds like a lot of the ideas that came out of the feedback of the of the Sears Lane residents are happening like the city is going to consider building housing on that site in three years that they get priority to move into and so I share this because um the administration is looking at what we're doing with this encampment as a test to see what might be done around the state and I think the link here is that perhaps we could work to look at the strengths uh and challenges of that model and see if there's a way to create temporary housing around the state on a mass scale in places that will eventually get redeveloped so that we put people somewhere now but then eventually they get to live in the real housing that goes there so I'll stop there I just I want to give you an example of how it all fits together so thank you as well to uh raise your hand or unmute and we'll be happy to recognize you hi my name is Megan Ipler Wood I live in word six um I haven't had enough time to study why the high school uh budget is so enormous and I know that the um our counselors here our representatives may have had to study this already but tell me if you haven't uh because I know that the state is going to be involved in ultimately helping to finance it um just today in seven days I read that the bid is based on out-of-state contractors which I just learned like 20 minutes ago and um I'm just wondering you know I just perhaps missed it over the summer but I haven't seen the due diligence on the pricing of course we want a high school I don't think that's the issue and it's bothering me that everyone's making that the issue is affordability first of all for those of us that live here and second of all how how necessary is that enormous cost and and how will the state view that so anyone that's had a chance to look I'd be so appreciative I'm I'm happy to if uh so I'm I haven't really introduced myself yet so I'm Phil Baruth um I will we be doing okay in advance of that you're perfect for this um uh just a few things first so in terms of due diligence I just want to speed it up on behalf of the school board they have and Tom Flanagan the superintendent they have scrubbed that bid and reduced it a number of times through absolute diligence and going again and again through what's necessary what's possible it's still predicated on the state coming through with some money I'm looking into uh we put together an emergency fund of 32 million dollars at the end of last session for not just Burlington but everywhere in the state is undergoing mandatory PCB testing and we've already had Cabot has found that they have an auditorium that's it you know much higher than the allowable readings so they are out of that space and are going to need to tap that fund there's a two and a half million dollar addition to that that's supposed to be treating emergencies between now and January all the way of saying that the state the district the superintendent everybody is trying to keep the price down as much as possible what I will say is that I was on the school board 20 years ago and even then we were being told that the high school threatened our accreditation because it was not up to 21st century standards so in Vermont we have gotten lax we've gotten comfortable with the idea that the state will not help build new schools that's because in the 60s and 70s we had a bunch of new schools but now we're hitting the point where not just Burlington but many many districts have old sometimes crumbling buildings buildings without HVAC systems we really need to as tough as it sounds we need to tighten our belts and we need to build a new school so I hear you and the out-of-state contractor piece I can't speak to because I wasn't a part of that particular decision-making process but I will vouch for the fact that having seen the original bids which were over 200 million they have successfully brought it down by tens of millions and that I have a daughter right now at the Macy's she's not happy about it and I'm not happy about it so if we can get a school built out of this it will be one silver lining out of a very horrible 10 years I just wanted to add quickly to that yesterday in Front Porch Forum Gabrielle and I put a little announcement about a an online forum that will feature some students who are right now at the high school give you that perspective plus have some school board members present to answer questions about the budget because they really are the ones that have you know seen it through the whole process so that's next Thursday and we're going to put it out again probably tomorrow and another announcement on Monday well anyway we're going to be staggering so we get a full audience we've already got 20 people signed up at present because that people had a lot of the same questions that you did can I speak to that question and I'll say we do have a bunch of hands online Martine so I'll ask uh in infinite co-cleasure put his hand up first and then Cara Simone and then you can go after that so I'll just note that the expectation was that we would do that the House candidates and questions for them and then the Senate candidates and then questions for them but I think a question comes up and people have something to say so we'll figure it out as we go along so uh uh infinite would you like to address this yes please thank you so much for noticing that my hand was up I really appreciate that um I I you know I just wanted to affirm the the questioner um the questioner's curiosity around due diligence um and not that the school has hasn't done that and that they've been scrubbing um you know contractors as best as they can um but what what what I can I also have questions about is uh the extent to which the community has been engaged on this process and so I think that's why so many questions are coming up about the costs um because some of us feel like okay when did you know what what meeting that I missed where you know where this was being discussed so I just wanted to affirm that questioner's curiosity around um the process thank you so much thank you and um uh Kara am I pronouncing your name correctly uh Kara Kara and did you have a question or I I did I just wanted to comment on the high school issue and maybe refocus what the issues are for voters anyway or at least this household and a few others so I I just want to say that you know as as a Burlington resident I love Burlington and we obviously need a high school my kids graduated um two years ago and three years ago from Burlington High School in the midst of the pandemic and the PCB crisis and you know as a I've lived in my house now for 20 years here right next door to where this meeting is being held but um you know it's frustrating because I think there was so much lack of um a good management at the high school there was so much maintenance that was deferred and you know I'm not thrilled that my daughter was exposed to PCBs for four years of her high school career or you know that my son ended up in a Macy's it was a terrible experience for him I know other kids have had good experiences but I think that the frustration is that we have so many bonds we have a hit in the middle of the city and they just passed um you know another they were starting another project to redo Main Street and I think the high school is probably our priority but it's tough as a taxpayer right we keep hearing that you know our taxes are going to double and my taxes are crazy and the you know there's a housing crisis my college age kids can't find housing that's affordable and our you know my the value of my house keeps going up but that's not a good thing for us because we're paying more and more taxes and you know I um you know I'm looking at retirement and that's there's no way my you know my kids are taking out loans I'm paying crazy property taxes and we're not saving for retirement so it just feels like there's a um that folks aren't looking at the big picture of course we want a high school and I'm not accusing anybody of doing due diligence but there's um it seems like we're kind of all over the map and um I would um just um second what infinite said that there's not good communication to what the big plan is to make this affordable for those of us who live here and pay taxes yeah and my husband's chiming in that how do we keep Burlington affordable because you know it's we just went through the renting of an apartment for my daughter it was it's crazy it's crazy what they're charging and the lack of apartments that are available it's really hard to thank you Cara I think I think we're going to take that both as a comment on the high school and perhaps as a next question about housing and affordability but before we turn to that routine I wanted to give you a chance to to comment on the the question about the high school specifically. Thank you Dale I actually didn't hear the question but I'm gathering after listening to Senator Baruch's response that it had to do with the fact that the contract was not awarded to a local contractor is that was that correct? Part of the question included the fact that the estimate was based on an out-of-state bid but I think the important question is really just about the affordability of it. Okay um then I yeah I'm not going to chime in on that I wanted to speak specifically to the contract and I'm mainly here just to introduce myself as a senate candidate tonight. Okay well we'll finish up I think Cara did raise a great question that I would like to offer um specifically the house representative candidates a chance to opine on which is just this general question of affordability in Burlington and in the state and in the state as a whole because it's something that I know that I've heard concerns about from plenty of people and and it's not limited to any one particular house committee um anyone who'd like to comment on that it'd be great to hear what you have to say. Brian. There's um it's a really complicated affordability is really complicated because like what are we talking about like inflation are we talking about the price of one specific thing specific thing or another I'd like to talk about housing affordability for a second because it's it's one of the significant um challenges right now for people and um I want to talk about potential solutions not the problem um one solution I would like to see happen is for us to give renters the right of first refusal to buy a property before it goes on market at fair market value meaning that they would get an appraisal the seller would get an appraisal they'd compare them determine some kind of fair market value and they would get the right of first refusal to either buy it individually or create a cooperative or work with an agency to buy it because that could then stabilize the rents if you have more owner-occupied housing and we're also could help people like lift people out of poverty and generational poverty if people start owning their own homes that my generation can't do something that two generations ago could anymore because of the way the housing market housing is treated as an investment versus like a right another thing I'd like to see is um and I'm not everyone's gonna agree on this and it's okay that we um we deter we come up with some formula to determine what's fair market value for rent and if a landlord wants to pay more the higher they go the more tax they pay and then there's a point at which the tax they pay is so much that it's not worth charging that much so we really have strict penalties to cap rent and then the other way that if they lower rent they get a tax break so we start saying to people you know what you can get a tax break if you charge a little bit less and so there's just two ideas of things we could do with housing that might help letting more people own and making it easier for people to own and making it so that people oh another thing is I think there should be some kind of speculation tax for people who buy properties and flip them for higher prices within a certain amount of time I just think we have to start doing that in addition to building housing because until we do that as long as we keep treating come on housing is this like commodity um that you're extracting wealth from like the backs of people who are in a desperate place because it's a it's a right until we change that it's only going to get worse so if you don't agree I'm happy to hear your your opposition at some point but I those are just some starting places of solutions would any of the other candidates like to and Gabrielle if you're driving and can do so safely you are um included in that invitation Tiff you go ahead well I just want to I want to echo um my concern about housing because it's it's one of the bigger expenses that any household bears and um and I you cannot we there isn't one solution there are probably 15 things that we need to do and they they range from zoning changes um to um doing some additional regulation of people who own multiple air bnb's that have taken you know a lot of housing stock right off the market um and I think we're investing in workforce housing there are a number of companies who are going coming to Champlain Housing Trust saying we are willing to put up some money for housing a certain number of units you know can you help us and they don't really want to own the the housing they just want to have a place for for workers to go um because they can't they can't um hire them because they can't find a place to stay and I think that we need to think um more about how to make starter homes how to incentivize building them we did a little bit of that this year um and I think that we need to explore how other places are approaching that because that's the biggest hole in our housing market um um so that's all I have to add thank you anybody else yeah I'll just add that uh I believe I heard a statistic last week um whereby like 17 percent Tiff or Barbara help me out here 17 percent of um either the sales in the last year or general like uh overall ownership is by investor owned um companies and not people and so one of the one of the ideas um that has or that has been raised just as a as an idea is do we end up taxing you know if it's if it's purely an investment property do we end up proposing a taxation structure that's higher for um that business um I do think there's there it's important I and I don't mean this as passing the buck but it is important to remember that we've been um shunting this problem for about 30 40 years and so even though we put a lot of money into housing over the last two years with the federal dollars um it's going to take time to see the impacts of that and uh unfortunately also we're seeing that quite a bit of what we appropriated is taking even longer um to actually get out the door so that is something that we're going to have to focus on when we get hopefully back to Montpelier in January thanks Gabrielle Barbara oh I want something to say could we just let the candidate finish first and that'd be great thank you so I just want to list a couple of things one again is looking at how we are um funding our um school education through property taxes I know that that's been a complicated issue we need to continue to look at a different way because we're gonna people's property tax bills are just continuing to escalate and it's it's not sustainable um I was recently speaking to the director at Cathedral Square Corporation and she was mentioning the long waiting list that they have of people waiting to get into either assisted living or senior living that are in those starter homes in many cases and want to give up their homes or they're living in the hospital um we know that there are also some people in prison waiting for housing still um so there are places where people are living that's either very expensive or could be available to other people and I'm wondering as we know that the commercial market is um not having the same difficulties as the residential market is looking at creative ways to fund um redeploying commercial spaces into residential spaces not so much an issue tiff mentioned zoning um act 250 is an issue that's keeping holding people back in other parts of the state and again we also should continue to look at accessory small dwellings and um adding those into the housing stock thank you yuta did you have a question uh no i have a problem you know actually i do have a question because um i think it was six or seven months ago that i read that the state was involved to look for regulations in the short term or anthem and after i read it it went dead so what happened uh are you talking about a bill yes yeah um i'm sorry it it it never got off the wall in our committee it was never discussed um i think because we had other big housing bills to deal with and we could have incorporated some language around um short term rentals but that is a pretty politically charged issue and and i think that there are i i think this session it may come up um but uh there it's it's controversial because that's how some people are making their living well what did they do before i i understand and i'm not saying that i don't support it it's just i'm trying to explain why it never got discussed in our committee um but but partly partly we had we had to to get the federal money out and prioritize how that was going to be spent and before we took up some of those other issues and i i think that there's a wide open field and i'd love to talk to you more about that if that's an issue care about i really think if you consider how many how many ordinances are on the books to protect the communities from these kind of rentals and they are not enforced i'm just in a big question mark here why is that i there are there are ordinances on the books and they are not being enforced you know well you're you're bringing up something i don't i don't know enough about to really have a conversation about no no no i know and if anybody else has i i just think but i what i want to say is i think that is going to be one of the topics of conversation in the house general um committee in the coming in the coming session because it's one of the places we haven't even touched we haven't dared touch it okay i think we should move on and give the senate candidates an opportunity to introduce themselves um a few of you who have already participated in the meeting but that's all to the better um but i want to give each of you uh five minutes or so to tell us who you are and why you're running and um so phil baruth we'll start with you uh thank you and uh hello everybody i'm phil baruth i'm running for my seventh term in the senate uh ironically when i started my first biennium we had tropical storm Irene and i found out uh the hard way what that means when you're in the legislature all of your pre-planned bills and activities and agendas go out the window and you're then dealing 24 seven with the emergency and so um i was new in the senate and i found myself out in richmond in sellers mucking out sellers um helping people find and restack wood that had been swept away by the flood helping people um stabilize their homes because the water had moved them on their foundations um so i was doing a lot of uh physical work out there because i wasn't yet long enough in the legislature to have my hands on the levers that could move money that could uh ease regulations that sort of thing fast forward to the pandemic um i didn't mind myself at that point in a much different place i was chairing the ed committee when the pandemic hit federal money started to flow in and so in addition to providing oversight of the administration which all of us did house and senate you're you're always uh keeping a weather eye on what the administration is doing making sure that they're keeping their promises making sure that they're operating efficiently but in addition we were trying to figure out how could we spend the federal money as efficiently as possible so we had a bunch of school managers and um engineers come in and we put the question to them we have millions of dollars flowing in what's the absolute best way we could protect our kids from the pandemic and they all said the same thing HVAC air handling systems because at that point we had just figured out if you remember the beginning of the pandemic we were all wiping everything down then all of a sudden it shifted to the respiratory phase when we when we knew that that was how it was being transmitted primarily so uh we put ultimately about 20 million dollars into a program run by efficiency vermont uh they queued up all the needs in the state for all the districts independent schools uh home schooling operations in some cases uh child care operations that were in homes and public schools and we put them in a queue according to need and at this point we've upgraded almost every system in the state so we found out in the course of that that there were at least 10 districts in the state that had completely non-functional HVAC systems they were turning the switch and nothing was actually out so think now about PCBs think about radon all of that was just unknown until we went through this effort that was one piece and we're still tracking that to this day just to go back to where I began with Tropical Storm Irene if you look in the budget for last year you will still find Tropical Storm Irene items that are still being spent and updated and care taking so this uh pandemic is not over for us we will be doing this 10 years from now and we do it on behalf of the community we do it for very little money people uh somehow have this idea that we're getting paid a lot of money it's not true we're hardly paid at all but um I just want to give a shout out to our reps they are fantastic Berlin has has the best set of representatives that I can think of and the senate has 10 new people coming in uh great energy as well as people like Tom and Ginny who I've worked with for years so I think the state is in good hands coming out of this pandemic I just want to go back and finish the job thank you uh infinite cold pleasure you're on thank you uh Dale hi folks my name is infinite cold pleasure and I moved to Vermont in like 1991 at the 18 year old so I've been here a little bit and uh you know this has become my home uh for better for worse while it was not that easy for me to um to thrive here as you know as a black male you know living in the old north end and you know trying to figure out how to uh you know survive in the underground economy but the University of Vermont uh and folks there you know like Will Miller and uh Laura Fishman and uh Joan Smith uh took me in and you know I was able to finish my degree there and work with Beverly Colston um and work at Spectrum Youth and Family Services for a few years before I went off uh back to New York City for a graduate degree in urban policy um did some field work in and New Orleans uh with the community development finance institution down there and then came back to Burlington in 2012 and started a job with Voices for Vermont's Children uh an independent multi-issue child policy research and advocacy nonprofit right and so we are uh lobbyists at the state house for children uh youth and families and you know we've worked on uh issues like oral hygiene uh we advocate for reach-up benefits every year and uh just recently was able to get um a public advocate office in a state for children and families and so you know I think of myself as a policy advocate uh by by trade and and the community organized by vocation because the first five years I did uh grassroots community organizing and the Burlington and Winooski schools and and worked uh hand in hand with families who were marginalized and um you know sort of disenfranchised from the political process and you know our work created really brought restorative practices to the district uh it brought uh an advisory program to the high school uh the work we did brought uh transportation to Winooski schools uh for kids who you know live in Elm Street neighborhood and need to you know walk to school and in the coldest winter months and so I was really fortunate to get to know the people on the ground uh in these communities who are you know really struggling to get by and this is you know not just uh you know the the new American communities just as communities who have been here for generations and so that has been sort of my orientation to you know I would say the policy policy and the politics that you know sort of come downstream from uh the state house you know I've also uh studied and collaborated with community organizers across Rwanda uh we're organizing projects demonstrated real world examples of collective power and and I've also uh had the opportunity to see that here uh so you know specifically with policies in Montpelier some of the things I have advocated for in in in the recent future act 70 x67 which is a bill um related to equitable access to high ed high quality education through community schools s114 was a literacy bill that was still looking forward to seeing how it rolls out I've also worked with act one the ethnic studies and and social equity in schools working group for the past couple years and uh yeah I mean I've also really uh you know just watch the process as a lobbyist advocating for folks who um don't have the opportunity to show up and testify for themselves so this is kind of the you know the perspective that I'm hoping to bring to the state house and really engage communities in a different way than we have been in the past thank you infinite uh martin um gulick you're on thank you dale can you all hear me okay I've got my earbuds in yeah okay great thank you so um yes hello to everybody um and thank you to all our fabulous leaders I agree with senator bruce that we have some of the best in the state and I'm really happy to see you here and thankful for your service um I'm running for state senate as you probably know at this point um I am in four zoom meetings tonight so I might pop off at some point I've got another one coming up um I just got off a zoom with the vermont school board associations where we were talking about good governance and how important it is and that was fascinating um I grew up this district is is a great district for me because I grew up in south burlington on the other side of the lime kiln bridge so when uski was really close to where I grew up um Essex is where my my father worked for many years and where I worked at the high school there and the tech center and then burlington is where I've lived for the last 27 years where my husband and I raised our family and where our kids attended school and where I am currently a three term school commissioner um as a teacher as a high school teacher uh I got to see as you can imagine um many issues that are facing vermonters uh from food and housing insecurity to mental health issues to systemic racism to labor shortages these were all part of my daily existence in a school district um so you know seeing this and being on the ground in in these situations really has always encouraged me to be part of uh public service and advocacy I spent the last year um working really hard on getting our education funding formula changed I wasn't always very popular because not everybody wanted the system to change but as someone who worked in districts around the state um woodstock for example Essex south burlington um I I saw the inequities um I would go to work uh during the day and I would come home and view the school district where my kids were were going and the district where I lived and and I saw some of the inequities in in how things were funded and the resources that we had and how we were supported so I knew I had to do something I got involved with the coalition for vermont student equity and went to Montpelier and lobby to change that formula so that it funded adequately students living in poverty students living in rural parts of the state and english language learners and um again I know I wasn't always very popular but I feel really confident that um this work has gone through and that hopefully we will see um a change in how we support our students and you know a budget is a value statement um if we're going to call ourselves a progressive state we all have to work together uh for what's right for students um so as part of you know as part the main part of my platform is around education and it is around um early education and child care I actually met dale years ago um when I helped her with some child care issues um so investing early in children and families to me is absolutely critical it um pays dividends obviously in the form of of jobs and a healthy community um and it looks to the future so it's an optimistic way of of looking at the world and looking at the future um another part of my platform that is really important to me is investing in technical education um you all know that we haven't had a tech center in burlington now for the last couple of years but tech center is super important and the tech center tends to have higher graduation rates tends to graduate a skilled workforce and we know that um companies have been reporting uh difficulty in hiring it's at a 15-year high right now so we need to get involved and we need to again put money where our values lie and technical education is a critical part of the learning landscape that we have and it's an investment that we that we just can't ignore um as you all know I've been hearing it echoed tonight the last few years have been extremely difficult for the burlington school district not only as there been a pandemic but our high school and our tech center were closed because of PCB contamination um yeah time's running I'm sorry um I could go on and on um yeah I will I guess I'll leave it there um I would love to serve all of you um I would love to serve you in the senate and if you have any questions obviously reach out I'm always available as a school commissioner and as someone who's running and just as a community member um and I'll I'll stop talking now thank you so much thank you um I I know Tanya Bayhavsky wanted to join us but wasn't sure if she was going to be able to I don't see her online um okay in that case we'll go on to the candidates from Chittenden southeast uh Thomas Chittenden you want to go first it's working Charlie you can hear me great I don't recognize a lot of people here I'm I'm Thomas Chittenden so I'd love to meet all of you afterwards I introduce myself I live about four miles from here and for the past about nine years I've spent just about every Saturday morning at Callahan park with my two girls playing Greater Burlington Girls Soccer League so uh I love the south end um I uh I'm running for office for my first reelection for a variety of reasons but I think it comes back to just my my life growing up as a serial volunteer um in college I was a resident assistant I worked on the Howard Dean presidential campaign I was a volunteer firefighter in Williston then I was agreeing out in transit chair then I had some kids in there they were very time consuming when they were small and then I would have been serving on the south Burlington City Council for the last eight years and during that time on the city council I saw some opportunities for the state to do things differently for us to look at regional solutions like regional dispatch which is still inching along uh what we're doing with the Howard Center is funding sources and supporting mental health supports across municipal boundaries through a service that can reach out to where it's needed when it's needed across all the different area uh towns in the area I'm running for reelection this year I was just making notes to remind myself but for many of the same reasons as the house members already stated and I don't disagree with anything the house members say so rather than go through those points again I just add a few things that are on my mind as we go into this new session I've been going to different child care facilities to really get our hands around child care because that is a workforce problem that is a woman's equity problem since more often than not that falls um disproportionately on the female household member in charge of rearing the children I'm seeing opportunities to look at the commercial spaces that I heard Tiff speak to to have property tax rebates when I was at a facility out in Essex where they are paying the same rent that a store would be paying if they were renting in that space we need to look at zero through five as the professional services that we see as the important services that we see in our public schooling and we need to have property tax the budget statement the value statement that is the budget reward and incent commercial infrastructure to want to find and make way and make it easier provide the child care where needed so I would rather see a way for that facility to get a rebate on their taxes assuming they have a qualified child care facility that is actually signing a form saying they're using that facility for child care and that rebate doesn't have to go in the pockets of the landlord and not at all it could go into providing the supports the infrastructure the services or the reduced rent for the child care facility so I think there's ways to look at having child care be a tax exempt status for a property taxes another thing at the kindergarten entrance age there's a small tweak in Vermont law that's somewhat unique or not as common in the rest of the country that I think could help alleviate some of our child care pressures in the state on housing I definitely agree that it's both there are act 250 things that I heard Representative Rachelson speak to but increasingly I'm seeing local zoning issues I have some notions that I want to pursue in the legislature about interim zoning I live in South Burlington over the last 20 years we have enacted interim zoning four times I feel that we need to look at when it's being enacted what it's being enacted for and what it really is accomplishing or not and that has to do with some of the pressures we have on our housing stock and where we're going to build houses so I would also say in that something that I really love to hear Senator Baruth's perspective on having served on ways or appropriations we have had in our funding formula a penalty an overspending penalty when certain districts spend a certain amount more per pupil than other ones similarly I'm seeing municipalities I live in South Burlington I love South Burlington but South Burlington has recently passed land zone laws land use laws which I would say excessively concerned parcels of land that have air have arable land attached to sewer services that is Virgin's clay and not good for agriculture and that is now mandated a conservation puny I'd like to look at and explore if we have regional targets for housing density maybe an undergrowth penalty so not an overspending penalty but looking at what our regional housing growth goals are and maybe communities that choose to over conserve land that is ideally served for housing because it's a proximity to existing services and population centers don't tell my friends in South Burlington this is being recorded so this is going to come back and her but this could translate to communities that choose to over conserve as having to pay more taxes and that's a choice they can make okay I definitely want to pursue more gun control I have long admired Senator Bruce leadership on this and I stand at the ready to help him on multiple fronts there happy to talk about that I also want to see us use tax policy to tax what we don't like and subsidize what we do I support taxing sugary beverages I think a gallon of milk should cost less than 2.2 liter bottle of soda I want to see online sports online sports betting as a tax stream online sports I don't want to see casinos and booking parlors but I want to see a revenue stream to support our education I want to tax guns and ammo I own guns I support individuals rights to bear arms but there are things that we can do to to match our values or public safety values with how we have guns in our society today and I think assessing them on their purchase and sale makes sense and I've also got this crazy notion but I'm out of time all right the last thing I'll say is happy to talk about fees it's hard to run on a platform of raising fees but Governor Phil Scott has not raised fees during his three terms so far those fees are creating revenue pressures on our budget and so if we have those graduate at an incremental amount especially in these inflationary times that'll create flexibility elsewhere happy to talk about any of this afterwards thank you thank you um Ginny Lyons you can tell it's your turn you're reaching for the microphone thank you all right thank you thank thanks for having us this evening I'm Senator Ginny Lyons I have been in the Senate for many years and I look forward to returning there are so many issues that you're hearing about tonight many of which I am very much engaged in I think all of them we each find our own niche when we get into the Senate or in the House but we also are very much involved in all of the issues that you're hearing about I currently chair of the health and welfare committee and so with that in mind the pandemic of course has really overwhelmed the work that we've done and we I feel that we have been highly effective in that work and part of it is about enhancing our workforce by providing for different types of licensure and we've worked closely with the Secretary of State's office in our committee to expand licensure for out of state consulting for folks who are retired and want to continue their work as physicians or as nurses and so that that work was highly effective in helping our hospitals and our clinics get through the pandemic but the health care economy is still in trouble and I think you've all heard and read about the hospital our hospital and all the other hospitals across the state really are very much approaching the red again they were in the red many of them before the pandemic and now they are going back in in that direction medical inflation is significantly higher from what we see in our own inflationary world so the effects of inflation now are exacerbated when you walk into the medical community and so there are lots of things that people can point fingers out within at within the health care world and say well some administrative salaries are too high or things need to be pulled the belt needs to be tightened here and there and we do need to consider that but overall we cannot lose we cannot lose our hospitals and we need to ensure that they continue so I look forward to some of that work I am working about looking at the Green Mountain Care Board and how they regulate I am looking at other areas of the health care environment including workforce and and along those lines one of the things that we do in our committee each term is to look at is to relate very much with appropriations what's going on in appropriations because health care and human services are a significant amount of our budget I think it's like 20 percent that's huge and so I spend a lot of my time working with the chair of appropriations and understanding and working with her and other members of appropriations to sort of sort out how our human services and health care budget will have and our policies that we pass in our committees relate to one another so one of the things that I worked on yesterday I was at a meeting for a higher to higher and child and family advocate we passed we passed a law last year as a result of some pretty difficult situations in our state including St. Joseph's in the orphanage issue including the current hat in school where there were complaints about abuse of children and so one of the things that we are looking at is hiring an advocate a child and family advocate in our state to provide some oversight and some support for the administration and some oversight for folks who might be have some difficulty so a place where people can go the and it's and it will extend to folks in the world of disability so this is a big step for the state it's one person but it's a lot of work so I look forward to going back into the state house to work on public health issues related to climate change I look forward to going back and continuing my work on the extension of the pandemic issues and most importantly looking at mental health issues child care issues and the world we can we can just continue forever PCB and schools PFAS in our drinking water and in our consumer products so thank you all I and and please consider voting for me I this is this is my district right here now and it's been trimmed down so much it used to be all of Chittenden County now it's about half the size it's just really great but so I it's great thank you um I believe that's all of the senate candidates who are here um and we do have about uh five minutes or a little bit more for questions so once again I would open the floor for um anyone who's here or online to ask questions of the candidates if you heard something in particular you want to follow up on or um if you just want to hear what any of the candidates have to say about an issue of concern go ahead yeah I know um Senator Chittenden and um I know Governor Ruth I'm sorry Governor uh Senator Ruth can talk a lot about uh gun control and kind of my question is um and I'm not 100% sure that I mean let's just say that there are more gun violence episodes going on right now where do you see what do you see as the key variables and the key issues that are leading to the growing gun violence and I'm just leaving it open I won't make any suggestions I'll just leave it to the two of you or anybody I anybody who wants to start please can please do happy to start um although we'll all have something to say uh if you're talking about the incidents in Burlington recently the shootings in Burlington um those seem to be um I would say uh I don't know if they're gang related but they they always include the line in the media account that the subjects knew one another and went looking for one another with a gun um so I think then we get into uh you know the opioid epidemic we get into um the movement of drugs and guns across state lines gun trafficking that sort of thing so so that's a whole area of the judiciary committee um that that I would be working with the other thing that I would say though is in Vermont because for so long we have been an extremely safe rural state and gun rights were just um never opposed by questions of public safety in any meaningful way um so the idea of proliferation of guns has never been something that we've had to worry about in the way that I think we do now so if you go back and you look at statistics for the last 30 years you will see that there's been a massive uh proliferation of the sale of guns nationwide and in Vermont every time a democratic president is elected now gun sales skyrocket why is that is it a coincidence it is not you have a very well funded effort on the right that connects doomsday uh sort of propaganda with the idea that FEMA is going to come with a list and take your guns and so you need more guns to protect yourself and by the way buy gold and store that and buy survivalist uh foods store those so there's a money making machine out there that is connected to radical interpretations of the second amendment I would say that is driving the idea that every community every place every situation benefits from more guns not less so what happens when we have a mass shooting immediately the rights start saying we need to flood our campuses with people good guys with guns and that's the solution more guns so with uh Thomas Chittenden with Ginny Lyons with other senators we have developed now a very strong majority in the senate for sensible gun laws so over the last few years we've been able to raise the purchase age to 21 ban on high capacity magazines ban on guns and hospitals ban on bump stocks a whole host of things including uh something near and dear to my heart which was universal background checks those things all came within the last six years so um continuing down that road of finding sensible ways to keep the guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them um Thomas has some great ideas about uh linking training and permitting which he may want to get into um Burlington a few years back had charter changes that would have created gun free zones for instance in bars I don't understand why that was opposed in Montpelier but it was killed in the in the government operations committees so um on those issues I think there are five or six things at least we should be doing but those are some that I think we should continue with I think a couple of the folks online may want to chime in on this too uh infinite I saw you had your hand up in martin I saw you put your camera on so uh infinite you want to add something to this conversation sure um was was uh senator chitin in the queue there he hadn't told me he wanted to speak by any way that I saw but there's time for everybody okay thank you um you know I I guess uh again thank you for seeing my hand um what what I really like to add to the conversation is that you know there are human beings on every end of the violence that we're we're seeing and experiencing and you know the the the trauma across all these communities are something that we all have in common we have all experienced trauma at some point in our lives right and so we we have to rely on the news cycle in order to interpret why this violence is happening as opposed to having uh close relationships and and an heir to the ground and relationships with the families of the victims and and also the the families of the of the perpetrators right because everyone loses when when violence happens like this right and I just have to say from from my own experience you know to uh you know to conflate gun violence uh with drug activity is um sometimes not always that accurate and uh you know unfortunately I have relationships with people of the family members of the the disease um not just of of the most recent shooting but of previous shootings and and it's a much deeper than that issue than in how we're talking about it I think one of the things we're missing from all this is that you know people don't wake up one day and and decide that they want to engage in drug activity right you know especially folks who uh don't have a lot of options around um employment and and economic you know you know vitality in in in our community right and so we do have this underground economy it does exist and I do think there are ways that we can you know address our violence and I don't think it's going to come from the top down I don't I don't think it's going to come from Montpelier and trickle its way down to um our communities right and so I would just really hope that you know we we we go deep with this and we we just kind of take a step back and really you know think about the families involved and maybe even you know consider being in touch with the families involved you know just you know as a way of really showing that we are in this together and that we are you know still going to be humans you know with one another and relate to each other like human beings at the end of the day thank you um martin did you have something you wanted to add to the conversation I actually did not and I actually have to go but I want to say thank you to infinite for that answer and to senator baruth I do think if I were to stay and if we had another few hours to talk it you know discussing decriminalizing drugs might be something that we'd want to do but that is a conversation for another day I just thank everyone for having me tonight and I I hope those of you who can vote for me well thank you thanks martin did you have something you wanted to add Tom I'll just say two things to the point that senator baruth raised that so I have in my wallet I got this when I first became a gun owner when I wanted to buy a handgun I was going to have in the house with kids I am a concealed carry permit holder in the state of Florida and this is a reciprocal you recognized in 34 states throughout the country I support a 24 or 48 hour waiting period and I'd further say that if others go through the training I have met with a firearms instructor on three Saturdays we went through safety and cleaning guns and storage proper storage that I would welcome the type of registration to for those law enforced law law abiding citizens that want to own a carry firearms to then maybe be able to waive a 24 hour 48 hour period if they've already qualified themselves as knowing how to handle a firearm similarly with assault rifles I would like to cease I always compare this to cars cars are as dangerous as guns and we would need them both in times of war and I would say when if I want to drive a big rig truck I need to get a special license a commercial driver's license if I wanted to buy an assault rifle something that can do a large amount of damage in a certain period of time I feel additional training should be required and that's I think safe safe regulation fair regulation that will just make it so that guns are more of a challenge to get to so that they're not lying around or as easily accessible and I also support safe storage and all the other good things that have come up over the years so that's just some of the notions I think are worth discussing thank you Yeni did you have something to add yeah just briefly um the having read you know increase in red flag laws so to keep guns out of the hands who folks who might use them irresponsibly I think is important but I my comment is related to something that infinite was talking about and that is the issue around prevention and the long-term solution is about people and it's about looking at how can we change the culture that is a culture of solving problems by using guns and that does relate very much to the trauma that people experience when they're when they're young and so we know that the social determinants of health are things that can change the people's behavior and over the long term so having a long-term plan for prevention is something that we have worked on in the house and in the senate we have a very strong prevention council in the department of health we also have a chief prevention officer in the governor's office and now the governor has through executive order added a person in charge of preventing violence I'm interested to know how those two will work together and and then we also have a trauma informed specialist in the agency of human services somehow somehow we've done we started that discussion at the state level and it has moved down into schools and it has moved down into communities and schools are actually leading in the area of trauma prevention which I think will ultimately so it's the long term it's not tomorrow it's not passing a bill today but in the long term will modify the culture and behavior that we're seeing today it's really sad I mean it's just so sad to see how people are solving problems in such violent ways I want to say a big thank you to all of the candidates for making time to show up here and share your thinking with us and get to hear from us a little bit I wish we had more time for this but we do have one more item on our agenda tonight which is to learn a little bit about the ballot item on the Chittenden solid waste district bond and so Michelle Michelle would you walk us through that please yes oh yes so how do you want me to do the prep do you want me to unmute or use let me get this so I'm going to screen share thank you all for letting me tag on here that was a lot of information to the board so I appreciate the time that you give me I'm going to screen share my presentation I hope this works so I will just go through this as quickly as I can and still have it be informative because I want to allow plenty of time for questions and answers I do have a back sheet here um and I think I have enough for everyone as well I'm going to Q&A sheet so please I have to leave um or if you just wanted more information please take one of those just a little long so I am Michelle Morrison director of communications for the Chittenden solid waste district and um I'm going to just give you a little information about why we have issued this bond um how you can get our ballot because it does not be included in the general election ballot and I'll explain why that is and um just any other information that you'd like to have about that for those who may not have me get the media in for municipal district um created by our member towns including Burlington so every county in Chittenden County is a member of CSWD we operate many facilities folks may know us from our drop off centers um the environmental depot has a waste facility we have the compost facility in Williston we have lots of programs and assistance that we offer and we own the one of two large single stream material recovery facilities in the state so we call them reps that's what they're called all in the world and so what's a murk a murk is where you send your recyclables your blue bin recyclable to be sorted process and then marketed that's all a murk does so CSWD owns the one that serves the northern half of Vermont so it's not just Chittenden County it's um all of them do it in Vermont it's in Williston we own the property there the building and the contents it's operated by Pasella under contract with us it is the only publicly owned murk in the state the other one in Rutland is owned and operated by Pasella here's why we need a new murk the current one was built in 1993 by us uh it is that maximum capacity that image that you're looking at there normally that pile in the back corner behind the person you see there is what we see that's called our tip floor where material comes in and then it's pushed up against the wall it could be sorted out and bailed that pile in the back corner is what would be one day's worth of material the two people in our baler broke and this is three days worth of material so it's at capacity you can't make it any larger there's no ability to expand our footprint and it has one baler which it's never a good thing when that's the heartbeat of your facility when the baler breaks and then the water it has no flexibility meaning let's say you have I don't know a global pandemic where suddenly everybody's ordering things online and the amount of cardboard that is now coming to everybody's home studio cycle goes through the room um we just had to deal with it with the machinery the facility the capacity we had we couldn't redirect it or adapt our process to deal with that we just dealt with it so it limits the quantity for monitors in the recycle and my savior monitors because we do sort of have to be um that facility was designed to have a 25,000 a year capacity it's processing an average of 47,000 that's not an informer's but we are really stretching it's inefficient and sorting those gentlemen you see there are the workers who sort all the containers in that facility um it's not 21st century technology like I'm stretching and that means we're losing some valuable recyclables these guys and it is just all guys um coincidentally are pulling these materials off as fast and they can and as accurately as they can and they're they're tossing the thing they've been trying to sort for into a bunker some kind of stuff that's stuck together they're moving really quickly they may miss some things miss sort them some of it what is supposed to be trashed it's no normal war and then that's swept out but sometimes they accidentally pick valuable materials and put them in the trash by accident limited storage um so what you're looking at there is what we call hi-dens we polyethylene by and large um it's extremely valuable plastic milk tubs we're selling for more per ton than aluminum during the pandemic um it's only 6% or less of what we get plastics um are only 6% of what comes to material the facility they do have quite a bit of value you don't want them stored outside because the conditions the sunlight and UV rays weather degrades the value of that but we're at capacity when the bale storage are in this fold we have to go outside and it limits our marketing flexibility because we can't ride out a lull in the markets you know a way till prices pick up we have to move stuff out as soon as we haven't failed so let's moving on to why what this new mark would get us um the site that we've selected after looking all over the county is property we own on redmond road in williston it's about two and a half miles from the current facility um and this is the redmond road is where my cursor is moving up here the blue box shows you the square footage of the current facility just so you have that for comparison of the new component site or components building which would be 40% larger and alleviate a lot of those issues I think the technology that we would get we have already selected a vendor for the equipment and they have been in business for decades and the technology we're talking about is not bleeding edge it's it's tried and true tested for many many years optical sorters and eddy currents so an optical sorter that's what this machine is you see here basically the material runs underneath this machine and it uses infrared and very high speed um and high quality cameras to identify the materials instead of a human doing this these things can pick 600 items a minute and then they very accurately jet blow it into the correct bumper and eddy current is a way of sorting aluminum it basically gives that aluminum a charge that repels it to the right bumper instead of having a human stand so because this technology um will not be eliminating jobs at the new facility because the human won't anticipate retaining the same number of jobs but instead of having human sort all day they'll be doing quality control which is what people do well the machine don't um and right now frankly there aren't enough workers at the merc because you can't fill the jobs more square footage is higher quality output because your conveyors are not stacked deep with material that's spread out and so it's easier to sort and you get um better quality better more accurate sorting and we have plenty of room for bail storage and then all the processing is indoors right now the latter half of the processing of the glass that comes through our facility is outside because there's no room for it inside and so during half the year well about a third of the year when bad weather is here we have to ship that out of state for further processing because our machine the machinery can't operate and get it to the fall so it would give us 40 more capacity the quick bus this facility would be able to last the next 30 years so it would give us that ability to adapt we were having a conversation earlier tonight at this table about well what does that mean you can take then we can't tell you right now because we don't know what 2025 is going to bring us in terms of the markets the types of packaging but we know it would give us that flexibility to consider other types of packaging one example I can give you is like flat beer and soda can carriers that we have now that's that high value plastic we do accept it but it acts like paper in our facility because it's flat and so it's very hard for it to go into the right place and oh some of it ends up in the paper some of it ends up in the trash this facility would not have that problem at all because of this office that's just one example something we know would be better environmental benefits when you're going from 47,000 terms a year to being able to divert up to 70,000 a year out of your existing last landowner state that's a benefit keeping materials in in circulation you're not using virgin materials we've calculated the anticipated impacts of that on reducing Vermonters environmental carbon footprint and preserving limited resources sorry I lost my my advanced thing well here we go lastly but top of list and importance we're maintaining those jobs as I mentioned and with better working so it has anybody here toward our existing facility we do offer public tours and it's a very difficult job it's difficult conditions the lighting isn't great this would be much more open better ventilation just 21st century conditions for everybody so money this has been a topic this evening and it's very important that I explain this because this is different from the school bond situation here's how we would get the the funds to build this we anticipate the total though would be $26 million 16 of that 16 million coming from the bond bank that's why we have a bond issue to vote on 6 million the closed loop fund that's a fund that funds municipal infrastructure for closed loop processes keeping things in circulation excuse me our contribution three and a half million we have cash on hand but there's some eta grant funding that has just opened this month and we'll be applying for that in an effort to reduce that cash contribution recycling partnership is another grant the closed loop fund is a zero percent loan by the way it's not a grant it's a loan so how that bond will be paid for we are seeking voter approval because we're a municipal district we have to get approval from our members so that's chitney county voters to go to bond so we're seeking approval to borrow up to $20 million we are going to pay back that loan over the next 25 years through operating revenue the operating revenue at the merc is the sale of recyclables and the tip fee that we charge haulage when we bring those to that school so as a municipality we keep our lows our lows our fees as low as we can because we don't need to make a profit we don't have shareholders we just cover expenses and we set to these at a rate that covers the gap between the revenue we get from sale expenses i mean sale of recyclables and our expenses we may have answer questions about that in the evening um how to get your ballot changes to vermont election law meant special elections could not be included in the general ballot election ballot this year that's why the ballots you receive do not have our bonds on them and the secretary of state or cswd are also not allowed to mail this directly to voters that's the law so you can get the cswd ballot three ways you can go to my voter page it'll be it'll show up there now and say yes send me the cswd ballot just select it and you'll get it um you can call or visit the count works office they all have them now and get it from them if you want to vote early or it will be at all the polling places that you shouldn't have to vote on there so it's available in all those ways we just were not my law allowed to you know that's my presentation i wanted to allow plenty of time for questions answered yes i'll vote for the bond issue if you'll figure a way that i don't have to drive to patch it with the prospect parkway to drop off one cfo in a couple of flashlights batteries which have been sitting on my car for now for three months i hate that and we are working with burlington public works to look at whether we can expand the current drop off center on pine street the recent drop off center of pine street no no i mean the facility that's taking food scraps where we had the location on pine street so we don't own um the city owns it and no actually that might be the only one we do own i shouldn't say that at any rate we're talking to burlington to see if we can expand into the property next door so that we can safely take all the things that we have taken in that or at least most of the things we've had taken in the past i just want you to know too that hardware stores accept batteries and fluorescent lights and i can send you a list of all the stores or you can get it through our website that lists so they're doing yes so they're covered under products to richard laws and there are many stores that accept those materials look how useful it is to come to these meetings we should have a separate meeting where you just let me answer all your questions we've got a question online from matt grady matt do you want to unmute yes thank you very much i just wanted to follow up i really don't feel like we need a larger place in burlington we just need to be open more than uh like eight or 10 hours a week and staffed by more than one person and then one person if they can't make it it's closed so we need like six or seven days a week hours before and after work then we're fine we don't need more space so can the cswd work with burlington to just expand the hours not expand the space so so the the i'm sorry i didn't get the gentleman's name on the map so matt this is matt grady thank you okay thank you matt um so i think that the confusion is right now we're only taking food scraps and the reason we can only accept food scraps at that location is because we've learned that we cannot safely manage all the things that the state says by law if you take trash you have to also accept food scraps recycling and other materials you can't just take trash and recycling for instance we we can't safely manage all the other materials we were previously managing because of the growth of the use and the volume of those materials in the 20 years that we've been operating that so matt that's why we're looking at expanding because we want to bring services back to burlington that we know burlingtonians want and need locally and we want to serve this community favor of that too but really all i want to be able to do and right now it's compost which i almost very seldom can do because it's almost never open right i've taken in stages solve that problem also okay i hear you i will take that back to our operations team i can't say that the reason the staffing issue is it's just we have the same staffing problems and when we have two or three people call out we literally don't have bodies to staff facilities so i'm matt thank you for your comments i will definitely make no to those and the other gentleman and and take those back and thank you very much nancy did you have a question yes uh thank you michelle what happens to the current mr when we don't know right so that is on our q and a sheet but i'm happy to answer it what happens to the current mirf when uh if the bond passes and we build the new one we have options because we own that we could sell it we could use it we could lease it out to another property or another business rather we're not a business but to a private private business if they wanted to use it for something like that or we could use it for other services like bulky waste is something you know bulky rigid plastics is something we've looked at adding to our collections like kitty kid pool kitty pools right big wheels that sort of thing but we don't have the space to aggregate them and be able to market them or we could do pilot programs you know partner with local businesses that have hard to recycle products and figure out how to make that work so we have options it would be up to our board of commissioners to decide i had another question over here and and then right next to you next i uh i was wondering if there's a look at how to change that for you know future mail-in ballot balloting i mean is there a way to change that but also just on the side i was very curious about the china connection to your property your product sales sure so regarding the ballot the secretary of state is very aware of this from our experience because we were caught off guard in surprise the last time we went for a bond issue was 1992 that's not what we do you know we're we're not experts in this so we've had to really scramble to just get the ballot produced so i think the law they realize now that there were unintended consequences that happened because of this we don't expect it to impact us in the future because we don't intend to go for a ballot a bond issue again anytime soon but it will affect other special election votes in terms of china i can tell you that no material from vermont recyclables from vermont are being marketed overseas so that's not from our facility or the rutherland facility they are all being marketed in the united states and canada i thought there was a big problem with us being you say there's quite a bit of demand which surprised me and that's why i asked about the china right so so china had a thing called the chinese sword and this was before the pandemic but just after the recession in 2008 and it's complicated but the on the face of it the way it played out was they said we're getting too much trash we don't want the world's trash anymore because it used to be if you ship it to china they'll buy it and they'll use it because they were the world's largest economy and growing so they shut down everything the good news is that it has spurred long needed investment in us domestic recyclables processing so shuttered mills in the midwest and main and the east are coming back online ironically a lot of them with chinese investment because china still needs the raw materials to make their boxes to sell us their stuff so that's just a glimpse into recycling is both global and hyper local does that answer your question that was plenty thank you you're very interesting so i'm mark howe and my question is concerning the proposed new facility so the the existing one you can't expand it will the new one if it's approved will it be expandable so that in 30 years when there's new technology can that be can that be well the life span of a mirf is generally 30 years and you know a lot of that who knows how large jitney county will be in 30 years or how what recycling will look like in 30 years it's not it's it would be built not to serve our current capacity needs but to have the ability to grow into the facility to serve growth we've we have financial modeling available that was shared with our board of commissioners it's on our board in our board packets i'm happy to share that link with anybody who wants to see it that talks about the percent annual growth that we've built into the models and worst-case scenario best-case scenario and all the factors that we put into that does that yes thank you welcome any other questions yeah at the beginning of your presentation you were going over the cost of the of the bond and everything can you just clarify one more time how that does or does not compete in the mind of the voter who's going to be voting for this and for the school thank you yeah we are concerned about that and we are you're going to see seeing more and more on this issue in front porch forum letters to the editor we've done a couple of op-eds and digger and on the news tv news and places like that trying to draw that line and make that distinction we are not funded by property taxes is the bottom line so cswd is a municipality but our funding is about 50 user fees so that's when you drop your trash off at the drop-off center you pay a user fee or that includes tip fees when hauling companies bring their loads to our compost facility or the mirf they pay that user fee right that's 50 of our income comes from those another 20 percent is from material and product sales so that's the recyclables that we sell from the mirf as well as like scrap metal that we collect at our drop-off centers our compost sales that's another 20 percent of funding another 20 to 25 percent is the solid waste management fee that's a fee we collect on every ton of trash that's disposed in shitting county the remainder is like seven percent in grant funding none of that ever is property tax that's just not the mechanism we use so the mirf itself pays its expenses through its operations it does now and that's how it will and the other piece is that we have modeled maintaining the tip fee at the mirf right now is $80 a ton we've modeled maintaining that on average year over year for 10 years that same average rate um we will be creating a sinking fund to pay um to that we can draw from to pay for the bond obligation for the closed loop fund which is a zero interest loan with first six million dollars and then we anticipate having revenue that would cover the remaining bond obligations thank you you're welcome hey matt is your hand raised from before or did you have another question oh that's from before i'm also thank you okay uh any other questions well thank you michelle that was really informative and i appreciate you uh sticking through to the end it's i'm happy to i was happy to listen to it we've been thinking of our long-term plan has been retiring to burlington and so these we'd love to have you all very close room closer so so this is all a great interest to me but thank you for having me and and really if it's uh you know if you want to hear more about any of the work we do um or just let us hear from you more directly we're always happy to come and have this conversation i mean it changes to the flyer if you send us the latest version of that then we can include them with a minute of that oh sure yeah i'll incorporate the pdfs for you but remember there are hard copies here for anybody who wants them that's great i think we're done all right people should eat more pizza or take some home all right thank you