 Hi, this is Mel Peel, your Civic Forum, and we're doing the elections for Town Meeting Day. And fortunately, we have all three contested races. We've had all six candidates. They're sitting on the web. You can look at them. And I would suggest you do. Each one is a really interesting program with an interesting discussion. We have the school budget. We have the city budget, which includes John Holler's last year as mayor and John Holler's last budget. That's good session as well. Tonight, we're going to cover the uncontested mayoral race. And to my left is a person who a lot of you know as my son's former physics teacher, my son's former Frisbee coach, my son's former District Two City Councilperson, and Watson. Hi, Richard. It's great to be here. Your former, you still are, you still are a physics teacher. All of those things, yes. In terms of being a school teacher, how many years? This is my 13th year. So it's been a little while. In terms of being the ultimate Frisbee coach. Gosh, we started back in 2010, so that would make it eight years. Yeah. Yeah. It's also been a little while. That's had some exciting growth this year as well. How has the teaching of physics changed? Oh, wow. Well, do you mean in general or my teacher? What are you teaching of physics? Oh, gosh. Well, just every year it gets a little easier, it gets a little better. You know, you do an experiment enough times you learn, like, what? Dropping the egg. Yes. Yeah. We actually just were doing that today. Actually, we were doing some egg bungee jumping where students had to calculate how much rope to attach to a giant rubber band so that they could get the egg in a little bag as close to the ground as possible without breaking. And it's just delightful. You know, every year, you know, I'm trying to improve my curriculum and steal cool projects from my fellow teachers and, you know, I mean, other people have great ideas and they're worth sharing. So, as much as I can, you know, incorporate something new and interesting and cool that is also on point, all the better. And last year's ultimate Frisbee teams, how did they do? Oh, gosh. Okay. So I coach the boys ultimate team and the boys team has been in the state championship final, like championship game five out of the last six years, which is great. We've won twice of those five times. And yeah, we lost this last year to Burlington and, you know, we're looking to avenge that this year. Our girls team this past spring, won the girls side state championship for the first time ever, which was very exciting and their numbers are growing. So that's doing really well. That's great. City Council, when did you get on? So I was elected in 2012. I'm sorry. Let me rephrase. I was originally appointed and I think my first election was actually 2013. And I believe I interviewed you for that. Yeah. I think you did. Yeah. Let's go back to 2013. Sure. Or 2012, actually. What were you looking forward to doing on the council? Oh, gosh. Yeah. I mean, being a teacher is so time consuming and being a counselor is so time consuming. Why the council? Yeah. So one of the things that I love about teaching physics is energy. Energy matters a lot to me. And oh, that's a terrible pun. Oh, gosh. But I had been paying attention to the district heat project at the time. Which was a proposal at the time. Which it was. Yeah. And so that was the meeting. I think the fairest way to say it is that my first vote was on the district heat plant. And so it was really matters of energy that got me on the council. That got me interested in participating. And that has continued to be a theme for me. Looking at our policies through an environmental lens, this whole time has been really important. I mean, other things. There are other values that I'm excited to work with as well. But that's been something really dear to me. Now district heat was one of those slow motion projects that we had that we're famous for. The Carlisle, the One Taylor Street project is the most famous of the slow motion projects. Did district heat turn out the way that you thought it would? Yes and no. Yes, it turned out the way I thought it would in terms of supplying a reliable renewable source of heat for downtown buildings. There's been, we actually had a connection issue at the police station, which has since been resolved. But that was not something we expected. But one of the other things that nobody I think really expected at the time was for oil prices to go down. Even fracking. Well, right. Yeah. I mean, just in terms of other energy, fossil fuel energy becoming cheaper. And so the projections turned out to be not quite as good. But people are still saving money because burning wood chips is still cheaper per BTU. So it's still a good thing. It's just not as much of a good thing as we had originally planned. Now what month were you appointed in? I believe that was August. So you came in right before a budget session. Yes. Now we're going to go into the budget. Sure, sure. And you were fresh to the council and fresh to the budgeting process. At that point, who was the mayor? It was John. Okay, it was John. So basically you had his version of an austerity budget because John is always, even as school board president, stressed austerity budgeting, although he wouldn't call it that. Right. I was going to say your word, but yep. What was the budgeting process like for you coming in as a novice and what's it like now? Well, I had dealt with budgets for other organizations that I've been a part of and I think the degree of accountability that the council wanted to hold the city to I think was a little different than what I had experienced with other organizations, which is taxpayer dollars. We want to be overtly and deeply responsible for what we're doing with people's money. But we had just gotten out of Scott Construction. Right, yeah. The $400,000 error, auditing error. So I don't mind having difficult conversations about the budget, but I also hear something that Bill Frazier says, almost every budget cycle that I've been a part of is talking about whose role is it to set the budget. John's preferred method has been to say, what is our target number? What's our bottom line? Right, like what can we tolerate? And then, okay, Bill, go get us a budget that meets that limit. And I think that's worked to a degree, but that also, as Bill would say, that means that any of the budget choices are ones that he's making and not the council. And really, it's supposed to be the council that's taking the political risk, that's holding the vision for the city, and so if we're going to have increases or cuts, that should be on the council and not necessarily on the staff. But my style of leadership is pretty collaborative, and I want the staff's input. I want Bill's opinion. But in the end, I want it to be clear that we, as a council, are choosing whatever it ends up to be. Can the council buffet itself from the hectoring public who will come in shouting at council for parochial issues? This is Montpelier, and we had that when we had the various groups coming to the back of the ballot for funding. I think that we put together that commission in order to bring some order to that so that council didn't have to make those decisions publicly and could shelter itself from having people bring their friends. Do you think that that's a problem when you're doing the budget the other direction? Do you mean that we may somehow be too generous? No, it's not too generous that you'll have groups of people coming, lobbying for increases in certain areas, and it'll be more difficult for council to sit and hold the line. I think people absolutely should show up to advocate for whatever they are passionate about, whatever city service is they think are not being funded appropriately, either too much or too little. I guess I don't see it necessarily as something that we need a lot of insulation from, especially on budget issues. We often don't get a lot of feedback, and honestly that would be welcome. The only thing that I'm, in terms of limiting input, the only thing that I'm interested in is just keeping the meeting moving. The famous Montpelier four hour city council meeting. My intention at this point is to try to keep an equitable, reasonable cut off for people to speak. I mean if somebody wants to speak for more than two or three minutes, I want to hear what that person has to say, but we can't let people go on forever if we're going to get out of there at a reasonable hour. So I may end up interrupting people, as John has done as well, interrupting to say, thank you for your comments. At this point we got to stop and I'll invite you to submit anything further in writing. It's not that we don't want to hear you, we do, but we got to keep going. In part that I'm feeling pretty prepared to do that because I'm a teacher and that in part managing groups is what I do all day long. So yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. It did. We have a 2.4% increase this year of which that includes measures that city council didn't put on the ballot that were put on by voter initiative. Is that a reasonable increase? Is it too high? Is it too low? Does it feel right to you? It feels right to me. I'm pretty sure that we set the percent increase at CPI. And I think it's barely above that and that consumer price index. Yes. So thank you. Yes, inflation. So, I mean, in my philosophy of budgets, theoretically, if we were funded at the appropriate level, we would anticipate that if we just kept doing everything that we were doing in an ideal world, which we know it's not, but ideally speaking, the budget should increase by inflation or decrease by inflation, I suppose, every year. And that's almost, you know, never quite what it is. And so it's the difference between that and, you know, whatever increase that I think needs a hard look. Health insurance. Yes. We got by, we were lucky this year. What does next year look like and they projected that? I really couldn't tell you. I don't know. Because that's something that's going to confront you as an unknown that we just can't control. For sure. Exactly. It's something that's out of our hands. And we want our employees to have good health insurance. I think that it's really important that we have made available really generous and responsible health care options, you know, until the state or the federal government takes over health care, you know, it's up to us to stay, you know, giving people their due rights. Our personnel went up 1.5%, which is very little. Yeah. Are we too lean? I think there's probably some opportunity for a couple of things, for a couple of staff positions that I think could be more generously funded. I mean, one possibility, one thing that I'm interested in is looking at even the possibility of a collaboratively funded grant writing position, something like that might even pay for itself. Even in terms of facilities management, looking at someone who could, again, be doing projects that would in the end save us money. You know, it's also very possible that we may need to hire either, well, possibly another police officer. I was just about to ask about that. People say we're down what, one or two policemen? Right, right. You know, that's a conversation that I am interested in having. We want a well-functioning, not overtired, well-trained department. And so I am not opposed to hiring someone if we think that they're, if that's well-warranted. You're from Berry Street. I am. Renters. Yes. Should we put a position into planning that would be funded by landlords to inspect rental properties? So this is something that I had raised previously. And the, more or less the conclusion from that conversation was that we didn't have enough information to know if that was really warranted. So one possibility is that renters don't know who to complain to if there is a problem. And so I'm interested in doing some, at least as an initial step, getting out the word about some renters' rights and creating some really clear channels. Because if we are hearing from renters on a more regular basis about what conditions are like, if your landlord's not fixing that broken window or is not fixing the rotted out step or whatever it is, the city wants to know about that. And I'm not sure that all renters are aware that the city wants to know. And then let's create some clear channels, okay, so who at the city would be the right recipient of that complaint? Would that system to work well? Would that be inflationary on rents? Because the cost of bringing the property up to snuff would be passed on, I assume. It's possible. It's possible. I mean, if it's a matter of life safety, then it just, it matters too much. But if it's not a matter of life safety, then, you know, we're not necessarily going to have a lot of enforcement power. Are sprinklers and single-family homes a matter of life safety? Well, that's a great question, right? So this is a balancing act that the city has just went through. It's a really interesting and tough question. So just to catch people up, I mean, we had, Montpelier had a sprinkler ordinance on the books since 2003 that was over and above the state's requirement. And that included putting in sprinklers in any single-family homes, as well as any additions or mother-in-law apartments, that kind of thing. And that was really, well, there was some anecdotal evidence that that was preventing people from developing here. Or for the people who- You mean $8,000 on time? Well, gosh, I mean, I've heard numbers as high as $30,000, particularly where there are places that don't have enough. Whether water pressure or flow-like volume capacity. So one of the city councilors, Rosie Krueger, one of her priorities was- From what used to be something- Yes. Yes, right. Now it's Flint. Flint's playing. Yes. One of her priorities, to her credit, was to reexamine that. And so I was on that committee and we ended up amending that language to create what we thought or felt were clearer exemptions as well as criteria for variances. And in the end, the council voted to remove any reference to single-family homes. Or duplexes? Well, so single-family homes and duplexes in City Lingo are effectively the same thing. So yeah, I mean, that was a tough one for sure and the council was split about it. So the statistics we heard from the fire chief were that the presence of sprinklers reduces fire-related deaths by 80%, whereas just a fire alarm reduces it by 50%. So yeah, it is- It's a cost-benefit. Yes, it's a cost-benefit. It is statistically safer to have a sprinkler, but at $30,000, whew, that is- Or even ace. It's tough. I get it. It's a tough call. Well, we talk about variances. Yeah. How much of your life was spent worrying about the master plan? The master plan or the zoning? Well, I include them in together. Oh, okay, okay. The rewrite of the master plan, which seemed to go on since you were first on the council, or maybe even before then. Well, so the zoning has really taken quite a lot of time, but to be fair, the council was not specifically that involved with it until this last year. And we, I forget how many hours of testimony or discussion we end up taking. It was substantial, though. It was multiple meetings. It was multiple hours at each meeting. Back to Montpellier's credits, any number of citizens at one point or another weighed in on this. That was great. It was, you know, for as much as I either agreed or disagreed with people, it was wonderful to see the turnout for that. Even though it was highly technical at points. Sure, yeah. No, there were certainly some very technical parts. Where we ended up was a compromise. Yes. How did that compromise sit with you? What elements did you feel that might have to be revisited once we've lived with them for a while? Well, I think it was a fine set of compromises. I, for one, am interested in seeing more development in Montpellier. I'm excited about the possibility of more affordable housing in Montpellier, and... Where? Well, you know, honestly, I could see, well, there are some projects already planned, but even besides those projects, I mean, I would love to see some kind of development in Saban's pasture along there. Before I have grandchildren? Well, wouldn't that be great, right? That's been going on about as long as Taylor Street. Yeah, right. No, for sure. And, I mean, one possibility is that people were waiting for the zoning to be done. You mean certainty. Right. Exactly. If it may be now that that's done, then we can move forward. Another possibility is that it won't, but another factor at play there is the TIF district and looking at whether or not... TIF stands for... Tax increment financing. Okay. Now, what is tax increment financing? Okay. For those of us who haven't watched the other shows where I asked the same question... Sure. The idea is that whatever the tax rate is now on a piece of property, that would remain unaffected. But any increase to the value of a property gets... That increase gets taxed in a slightly different way. Part of that goes towards paying for public infrastructure that made that project possible. Okay. So, as an example, let's use the distillery. Sure. The distillery out beyond you on Mary Street. Yes, yes. So, one of the things that they might need in order for that project to happen, that is one of the gates, by the way, the public infrastructure has to be needed in order for the project to go through, one of the things they need was a substantial enough pipe so that they could get water out there. And sewage. And sewage. Yes. So that's public infrastructure. So we actually didn't use tax increment financing for that. We used slightly like a city side, basically, TIFF, because the tax increment financing also uses the school money as well, which is why it involves the state. But anyway, right, so the city would take on the burden of building the necessary water and sewer and... So the distillery is still paying their fair share of taxes. It's just earmarked towards a city project instead of going into the general pool. Exactly. And only the increase of the value of that property is going towards paying for that infrastructure. So, it freezes the property at its present value, and that goes into the general pool and then on top of that, the if-but. Yes. Well, and to be fair, it's not all of it. There's some percentage of that increase goes towards paying for that infrastructure. So there is still some benefit. Now that infrastructure going out to the distillery over on Barrie will be a hop-a-skip and a jump away from Saban's pasture. Yes. Yeah. So it's an investment. It's a sitting investment in a possible future. Yes. Right. I'm so grateful for them and for lots of reasons, but one of them is that that is really one of their key reasons that the bike path extension got worked out. And so we're planning on building that bike path out beyond Granite Street right now. You know how the bike path ends at Granite Street. So we're going to extend the bike path out to the edge of town, actually. Over to the Civic Center, right? Yeah. Right. So it also potentially opens up, especially with the dense zoning along Barrie Street, opens up for some really interesting possibilities in Saban's pasture. What would some of those be? Well, housing is one of them. We're... What about the upper bowl? The upper bowl. Do you mean like just the open? Yeah. Well, so that's one of these. That's a very highly charged question. It is a highly charged question. That's a place that feels really sacred to Montpelier. I mean, there's been a lot of discussion about what should happen there. And I'm over the opinion now that we should probably be looking at dedicating either some or all of that space to being a park space. And we'll see what comes out in the master plan this year so we can make decisions based on the green print map for that area. Now, of course I don't recall it, but when John was here, bicyclist John Howler, his eyes lit up like a pinball machine when he talked about beyond Civic Center. And if there's connectors bicycling that you could bicycle, how far? Yes. Oh, gosh. Well, that is supposed to be a part of the Cross Vermont Trail, which would, you know, if for one completed would connect the state east-west, which I think has huge potential for tourism, for bringing people into town. I know they were raising some money. The Cross Vermont Trail organization was looking to raise money for a bridge not that long ago. I think they're probably still raising money. It's very exciting. I'm excited to figure out how to help support them in the future. Let's go back to Barrie Street. Let's head over to Main Street. Is there going to be a traffic circle at Main and Barrie? I couldn't tell you. Is that discussion still alive? I think there's discussion as to what should happen at Barrie and Main, and especially if there's a TIF district, I mean the congestion, if there's any development that happens on the lower part of Saban's pasture, that is just only going to increase the congestion at Barrie and Main, and so that's a legitimate concern that we will probably need to figure out either looking at making Barrie Street one way or a traffic circle or even putting in a light. I don't know. But one of the tricky things about a traffic circle at that location is that my recollection anyway, don't hold me to this, but my recollection is that putting a traffic circle that close to a stop light where Main Street meets Memorial Drive is not good practice. I thought it was that they would have to purchase land surrounding it, that it was such a small area. Right. It would cut into some of the surrounding properties. That would also need to be true, but the question as to whether or not it's even a good idea is still up in the air. There's a pedestrian bridge coming in. What is that? So you won't have to walk on the bridge looking below, making sure you don't slip? So I should probably just say that anyway. So with the Taylor Street project, it's not just on the lot that's across the street. We're planning on building a pedestrian bridge parallel to the railroad tracks over where the blind building is. Yes. It's connected to where the, right, it's since moved, but the old Center for the Blind is there. And that will also be a part of the bike path. I guess we should probably be calling it a shared use trail. No, I'm not sure quite what the right word is there, but that'll connect up to Berry Street. Now I got this. We went on Orca and had a survey monkey on front page 4 asking people, are there questions you'd like to ask the candidates? And I asked this of John and I'll ask it of you. There's a sculpture going into the multimodal terminal around there. People in Northfield want to know what's going on with the rock sculpture that's the Econelodge, the pile of rubble. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know where they're at right now. I'm delighted that they took the building down. That was a huge step. But there has been a remediation plan for them, so I don't know where they're at in their plan. But ultimately that pile of rubble will dissipate. Yes, ultimately it will go away. And I don't know that there are solid plans yet for what it will be going on into the future. For those of you who didn't watch the discussion with John Howler, I'll take many of the same points with Ann. Berlin pond. What was the disappointment? Where are we in Berlin pond? Berlin pond, it has been disappointing to see the development there, and the development I'm referring to is that I'm not sure where they're at in this process, but there were plans to build boat access into Berlin pond. And where are we now legally? Well, so we're looking at, as with any water source that is a drinking water source, there has to be an exclusion zone. People have to stay a certain distance away from the intake pipe, and so we're trying to figure out where those boundaries ought to be. So that's where we're at right now. And in the future, I mean, it would be a really awful thing if we got contamination, number one from zebra mussels, that would mean that we'd have to replace all of our piping on a probably a regular basis. Does the state accept that argument, or have they rejected that? I don't think that they have accepted that, yeah. And then the second thing is if we got cryptosporidium as a contaminant, that would be terrible. That would mean a boil water notice for the whole city. And we would... All right. I will play normal citizen. What is cryptosporidium? Cryptosporidium. So it's a kind of bacteria that can make you sick, sort of one of the indicator species for the existence of cryptosporidium is E. coli. And so I think it has its name, cryptosporidium, in part because it's hard to detect. Has the state accepted that argument? Well, I guess I would just say that's something I'd like to keep talking about, yeah. Keep out of our city. Well, that's really what I would like to see. I would like to see continued moratorium on activity on the pond. Can we drive towards Mount Pilier and stop at the water treatment plant? How do you get to the point? The uphill one or the downhill one? And the downhill one. How did we get to the point where we need so much maintenance on it? Oh, you're thinking of the upgrades to the wastewater or the water resource recovery facility. Yes. Yes. So there's just been aging infrastructure that's... Haunting the entire city. Yeah, that's hot. Exactly. I mean, a lot of our infrastructure is 100 years old. And I mean, the wastewater, the water resource recovery facility is not necessarily 100 years old, but these things, they have a lifetime and a lot of them are coming due. How much is the bill? So right now we're looking at basically a minimum of 9 million. Yeah. What does that do to our water and sewer rates? Nothing good. You're going to have to build a whole lot of houses and savings past it. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting question, right? I mean, there's a trade-off to building out the system and is the price sufficient enough to pay for any maintenance of those lines that we extend out to those places? I mean, that's... As long as there's enough density, the answer will probably be yes, but we've got to know what that density ought to be. How many years do we have before that bill is due? So some of these projects can be put off, and that's really the question. And DPW, as well as the company that we're partnering with, Energy Systems Group, ESG, they're both trying to figure that out as well as looking at our capacity to bond over time. So because we really can't bond for that all at once, but how we're going to space that out is really the question. Now we take that and we go underneath the streets because you mentioned the street. Well, let's stay above the street. When you got on console, console started an initiative to raise the amount of money that we were spending per year to fix the streets. Yes. Could you discuss that? Sure. So one of the issues that Terry Garlane brought up and I'm so glad he did to his credit was looking at what the appropriate funding level was for a mile of road. So if you want that mile of road to last as long as possible, you have to do some amount of maintenance to it on a basically yearly basis or every other year or so. And if you neglect that, then the road deteriorates much faster. And so we looked at the quality of our roads, actually, which is quantified by something called PCI or Pavement Condition Index. And so we have those numbers for all of our roads in Montpelier and then estimated what it would, you know, looking at how much we were spending on road infrastructure and then how much it should be costing us in terms of keeping our roads at a high quality. Or at least a reasonable quality. Reasonable quality, yep, over the long run so that in the long run it would be cheaper for us because it's easy to just say, well, we're not going to do anything with that road this year. It deteriorates and then cost us more, you know, the following, you know, ten years to pay for that. I think the million-dollar figure was thrown at? Yes, yeah, we were something like a million dollars short and so we have been adding something like a hundred thousand dollars to our budget every year just to work up to what ought to be what we're calling a steady state appropriate budget for the roads. And I think that's the right thing to do and it was also interspersed with some bonds and to again to reach, you know, an appropriate level of funding. And we're, I forget exactly where we are in that process. I think we're in year four or so of a ten-year period. We're crawling towards getting to a sustainable budget level, yeah. You talked about Terry Girlane. I'll talk about Tom Galanca, who actually talked about what's underneath the streets. And Tom was the one who championed the idea that our sewers and our water are in sad condition. Addressing that sounds just ghastly expensive. Yes, yeah, that's something that we're also under paying for right now. And you know, one of the other options that we have is to bring in more contracts. So one of the things that we're looking at is we're examining the possibility of bringing in a substantial number of more contracts and then using that effluent to that has organic material in it to generate energy. What's an effluent? Oh, just. Come on. You're a science teacher. It's just the liquid waste, not waste necessarily, but like the liquid output from the plant. But using all of that material to generate methane and then burn that methane either for heat or for electricity, which would substantially lower the costs of operating that facility and could end up helping anyway with the coming budget costs to replacing those pipes. Well, our DPW, our Department of Public Works, has been working under the streets and replacing those. Yeah. They're working on the streets. Yes. At what point are you just stressing those people too far and expecting them to do too much? Well, I mean, one answer to that question, I suppose, is if we wanted to go faster, we might have to contract out more of that work. And I've been really pleased that the Council lately has been taking a more holistic look at the streets. If we're going to dig up, say Northfield Street or Harrison Ave or wherever, that while we're digging it up, we're also going to replace any of the water or sewer infrastructure that needs it while we're there. And so I've been really glad that that's been our approach. And as long as it's happening in a timely and cost-effective manner, then I'm happy. Council approved some software for DPW that helps them to inventory what's under the street. Are we better off inventorying the entire system first and then working off of the inventory? So that's a great question. The trouble there is that we don't even necessarily have a complete inventory to work off of. So we don't... Because in Northfield and Harrison Street, they found surprises. Right. So there's likely lots of surprises. Should we peel back all the streets and see what we had there? There's rumors that we still have some cedar logs under the streets. Very straight wisdom. Yeah. And if you haven't seen the cedar logs that used to be used, there's some down in the basement of City Hall. I'd recommend to anybody to go check those out. It's kind of neat that that was a thing. What a great Vermont solution to getting water around. But yeah, there are just things that we're not going to be able to inventory until we're there. I mean, it seems like we're playing whack-a-mole. You see the burst all over City. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and again, if we're going to... There would be theoretically such a thing as a steady state budget for our water and sewer system. And by virtue of the fact that we're playing whack-a-mole, I think evidence is that we're not there. So we need to take a hard look at what that budget ought to be and how we can reasonably get there. Now, we're downtown. Yeah. You know, we're talking about downtown. Talk about our downtown. Yeah. It's a small town, downtown, and a town of... Is this a city or a town? I ask everyone that. I think of it as a city. And I think that's actually pretty important to think about it and talk about it. How does it differ from a town? Well, just in terms of the nature of the walkability of it as well as welcoming businesses to town and having that kind of community, I think is really important. Welcoming businesses to town brings us to the Economic Development Corporation. Sure. Yes. Would you talk about the Economic Development Corporation you were involved on, Council, with the development of that? Sure, yeah. What was the theory behind it and what's the execution? Okay. One of the issues that the Council has been dealing with for years is that we don't exactly have an Economic Development Department. We do have a Planning Department. They're great, but it's not necessarily or hasn't necessarily been their job to bring businesses to town, even though they did do some of that work, which was great. But it's actually theoretically possible for a Planning Department and Economic Development Department to be at odds with each other at points. And so one of the philosophies was to create an entity that could be an Economic Development Shepherd for the city using some public dollars, but have it be separate from the city so there wouldn't be that conflict potentially with the Planning Department. Because it's quasi-public. Is there a conflict with openness? Well, I mean, I think there... If you look on the city website, you see copious amounts of minutes archived forever. You see video or a video embedded in there. You see agendas on there. You don't see that for the Economic Development Corporation or Montpelier Live. Sure. At least for the Development Corporation, I actually think that is relatively appropriate because they're dealing with developers who maybe don't want to go public. And so them coming to an entity like that, I mean, they wouldn't want to be on record necessarily saying, these are our plans. So I think that's fine. And the accountability for that organization really is the public funding from the city if we want to change their direction or say this isn't working well, then we have that right. Actually, you were part of a robust discussion on what are the metrics of success for that organization as well as Montpelier Live. Sure. Right. Yeah. And so one of the things that I hope is something that this organization will do in the near future, especially as they're looking to bring on a new executive director, is to keep these kinds of statistics. So part of the reason that they came to be was because of an Economic Development Strategic Plan that the city did. That was one of their recommendations. And in that plan, they also laid out some metrics that they hope that the city would improve on. And it was things like jobs and housing and I don't recall if like vacancy rate was a part of it, but that kind of thing. And so it seems obvious to me that the Montpelier Development Corporation ought to be at least keeping that data. But that's actually a part of a larger thing that I'm very interested in is having some kind of a dashboard of... As Burlington has. Yes. And I haven't dug into that too much, particularly as to what Burlington has. Just in thinking about how are our statistics? We have a lot of anecdotal stories about how we're doing, but what does the data tell us? And having that baseline, I think, is really important to evaluate whether any policy decisions are effective to know whether or not we're spending our time on the right issues. That just seems almost like step zero for me because we don't have a great mirror right now to hold up to ourselves to say, how are we doing? A lot of that data does exist, but it doesn't exist all in one place. Which it does on the dashboard in Burlington. Exactly. And there may be... So some metrics are going to be general and things that are indirect like the number of jobs and the number of housing starts. But then there's other pieces of data that the City Council has more direct control over. Things like time... What percentage of calls were responded to within three minutes if they were police or emergency calls, that kind of thing. Speaking of that, what about our public safety initiative with Barry? Oh, so the Center Vermont Public Safety Authority. It's another thing that Council has spent a great deal of time on. Yeah. So this is... There are Councilors who want to pull the plug. There are Councilors who don't want to pull the plug. Yep, and we'll see. I think it'll come down to... Could you explain that issue? Why people want to pull the plug and why people don't want to pull the plug? Sure. Yeah, there's a couple, like you said, a couple of different trains of thought on this. One possibility is that regionalization of services is... Such as dispatch. Such as dispatch, such as police, fire, that sort of the broader picture. In general, it's possible that we could merge our services and see some efficiencies and see an increased, potentially even an increased quality of services. And that's something that is very interesting to me. Has it panned out the way that you hope to pull it? Well, it's... Is there a product from it yet? Well, no, that's just it. So the other way of thinking about this is that we've been funding this project, this initiative for, gosh, a few years now. $100,000 worth of a few years. Yes, exactly. And we have not yet... We're not yet at the place where Montpelier is ready to seat authority. And we've said anyway that this is the final year. Either you come up with a workable proposal or we're done. And that's something that I'm willing to hold to. Because it's also possible that regionalization is the future, but maybe this isn't the right path towards regionalization. So we'll see. I got an email on the question of actually a question that came in on the shooting. And on our policing and whether in the future, should we cede those types of things to the Vermont state troopers? Do we have any choice in that? And then another question came in on our relationship to immigration police. Could you talk about just the sense of how policing is done in this community and whether those concerns are warranted? Sure. So just to back up a step, I mean, that was just such a terrible situation. And I think everyone is just sad that it worked out the way that it did. You know, as to... I mean, the state police were involved. And they were leading. Exactly. And as far as whether or not they can or should be, that's something that I'm not sure that I can really comment on. I mean, that's as far as what the state is allowed to do. That's certainly out of our control. Whether or not that was the right call, what I do feel like I have some faith in is that there isn't going to be... There is an investigation into whether or not the shooting was warranted. And I'll just be very interested, along with everyone else, to see what the results of that investigation are. And I mean, it took something like 45 minutes of trying to talk this fellow down and that wasn't happening. Those must have been pretty frightening 45 minutes working in the school with kids nearby. Yeah, so I was in the school at the time and my classroom was on the opposite side of the building. But, you know, I just want to give some really serious props to Mike McRaeath, the principal there, who it was really because of his leadership that people were as calm as they were. And we all felt... I mean, there were some students who were pretty anxious about it and upset. But a lot of the students that I was with, I mean, they were... At the time, they were working on projects. And so we knew we were safe in the building and so we did what we could to carry on. Now you look under the Black Lives Matter flag and you have the resolution and support of the Black Lives Matter. Anything on our police and how they relate to minorities? Do you feel that there's a conscious effort to work on that? Or is that necessary? Oh, I think it's absolutely necessary to work on it and to continue to work on it. And as far as I know, the police chief has high standards for trainings that do pertain to that. But I think there's absolutely more work to be done. And there was recently a report done by UVM about basically almost like a report card for police departments. And I think it showed that Montpelier still has some space to improve. But at the same time, I know that that's something that we also value. What about our undocumented residents? Yeah, so I guess it was just this last year that the council passed a resolution that expanded an already existing practice of the police department to not inquire about immigration status to the entire staff. And so it really just put in a little more of a solid form, something the police were already doing. I think that's really important that our police maintain that distance, that we are not border patrol agents. We want people to, regardless of immigration status, to feel safe coming to the police if they have a problem. And just to be clear, that sort of the flip side of that is, it's also not to say that the police won't report something when it is germane to the investigation. That's something that had caused a little bit of confusion with some people in Montpelier when that was happening. They thought it meant that the police won't talk at all to immigration. But in cases of human trafficking, if that's reported to the police, those are things that you actually do want ICE to get involved in. Do you see the legalization of marijuana causing any difficulties, any serious difficulties when it rolls around? I mean, I am worried about it in terms of driving. And I also anticipate that there will probably be a spike in use as it's legalized. Amongst my age group probably, haven't been there for decades and decades. Yeah. But I mean, in general, I'm not that worried about it. What about pain pills? Opioles? Oh, that much bigger problem. So that's something that, so the city implemented something called Project Safe Catch. Would you explain what that is, please? Well, so I have to be a little careful here because I'm not sure that I understand it fully. But what I do understand about it is that it's a way for people who are addicted to, it's for them to get connected with services that they need. Without fearing that they'll get arrested. Exactly, exactly. And I think it's, I wonder if people know that that exists, that that's an option for them. Because it's, I mean, it is a public health issue. It's a matter of getting the help you need to get out of addiction. That's really real. So, and it is in our community. And this is not just a problem not peculiar, but it's a national problem. And I'm really interested in looking at solutions that are working around the country in terms of addressing this. But I think it's also, I actually had some really robust conversation with students about this not that long ago in our in our homeroom or our teacher advisory group. And the students were saying, you know, what we would really appreciate is more training in dealing with anxiety. And I think that there's something really to that, you know, that living in difficult times and and, you know, having tools to cope with anxiety is really, it's really key. And, you know, self medicating is something that people are turning to. And if it's an opioid, that that is addictive and can be a problem. And so getting out from that and finding other tools to deal with anxiety is, I think, absolutely a part of public health of our community. Our community includes a commercial downtown. Yes. And when we talk about these projects that take forever in Montpelier to get consensus on, Bill and John had worked forever seemingly to get the farmers market to move up from next to Julio's and move on to State Street. And they're doing it next summer and presumably for all the summers beyond. What's your feeling on that? Oh, I'm excited about that. I think that I think it's a great move. I from all from most of the reports that I heard back about that was just really positive for stores on the street and for for the merchants themselves, the, you know, the farmers themselves. And gosh, what a great way to create some visibility and community for that. You know, I'm, I'm also interested in, you know, once some new businesses have moved into Langdon Street, opening up the conversation about potentially closing either regularly or permanently Langdon Street. Boy, how would you do that when deliveries are going down there? People don't have back doors. Is people living on that street? I would imagine you'd have to work at sort of like Church Street. I mean, people still do get deliveries on Church Street. You know, they make that happen. I think there would certainly be some exceptions like that. But, you know, as a, as it could be generally closed to, to general traffic. What's your feeling on the recreation center when we're on again, on projects that are going for forever? So just to catch people up as to where we're at with that. So there is a feasibility study out there right now that's looking at our current recreation facility. And I mean, one possibility is that we dump a lot of money into it to get it up to where it needs to be up to speed. And then the other possibility is that we build a new facility. And I mean, I'm going to refrain from any judgment on that. Because there's a feasibility study and then. Exactly. I want to see what that study says. Well, we have a, we've thrown out a lot of bonding for the future. Yes. You know, we've talked about bonding under the streets. We've talked about bonding above the streets. We haven't talked about the retaining walls. We haven't talked about other kinds. Will there be a comprehensive look at bonding of all sorts to see what the city's capacity is? Well, right. So there's, in my mind, there should be such a thing as the theoretical steady state budget for the whole city. You know, not just looking at what's steady state for roads or what's steady state for water and sewer, but looking at all of the municipal city assets, you know, including buildings, keeping up all of our built infrastructure. It needs to be, I agree, I guess, that there needs to be an encompassing understanding of what that will all cost. Can our tax rate go up and can we still attract people? Well, so. Our combined school city tax rate is the highest in the state. So we no longer are the highest tax rate. Well, who took us over? Well, I forget exactly, but I know we're down a few slots now, which is, you know, a little bit relieving. But this is one of the reasons why. So once we know what that steady state, all-encompassing budget, ought to be, then we can also consider, okay, well, what do we want our grand list to be and divide one by the other and you've got your tax rate. So, I mean, we, we, if we're going to reach the steady state budget for the whole city, we probably do need to have a bigger grand list. And that's, that's going to be. That's like building off of in the air, you know, that's easier said than done. Sure. Well, and it's all a process. It's not like we're going to jump to that steady state budget next year. It's something that I think both are going to have to grow together. And thank you so very much for being here. Yeah. Thank you for running for mayor so that we don't have anyone running. So no one would run for mayor. I don't know what would happen. I'm sure someone would have stepped up. But I do appreciate it. And I, I want to talk to you and say that I appreciate you're watching this show. I hope that you'll watch all of the candidates. They're all good shows. I hope you'll watch the city budget with John. I hope you'll watch the school budget with Jim and Bridget. And these shows are pleasure to do. And they're good. They're good for you to do. And they're good for you to watch and read the bridge because they have good profiles, asked excellent questions. Times Argus has been covering this. There have been forums, candidate forums, like at the senior center. Those are on Orca. Educate yourself. But most importantly, get out and vote on town meeting day. It's the heart and essence of our democracy is participatory. And in Montpelier, Lord knows we have enough boards, commissions and all. And people step forward and volunteer for those. So please get out and vote. Tell your friends to vote. Have your family vote. Let's see a reasonable turnout on town meeting day. Thank you very much.