 For those of you watching at home, you can now tell that I'm not and Watson. First item on the agenda is to approve the agenda. There any changes anyone wants to make to the agenda. Mr. President, if we could move item 16 to the end of the meeting, it doesn't need to occur where it. Okay, that's a potential executive session. So sounds good. Anything else? Yes. Just the only thing I had noticed it says design review board appointments. I think it's the design review committee. So just to clarify that for everybody. Good point. Thank you. Okay, hearing no objection or other suggestions on the agenda approved. Next on the agenda is general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any person to either physically present or online to make a statement about any item that's not on the agenda. Good turnout. Probably mostly talking about the budget item or ballot items. And so you will have the opportunity to see that but if there are people who want to be heard about any other item. Now it was the opportunity and I think I will take people in the room first. And as always, we ask people to hold your comments to roughly two minutes. Which I don't think there's any basis for in law. I think that it's been an arbitrary way to cut off people who have done deeper research than the counselors in many cases. On the way into the building, I just watched the Greyhound bus pass two people who were standing in dark clothes with their suitcases. And I am reminded that Greyhound started service here up again months ago, and we built a transit center years ago. And it's another example of absolute dysfunction that we haven't arranged with Greyhound to use our transit center. These people had to walk all the way down to Kenny drugs and cross frozen ice patches of sidewalk to get their bags to the bus. And I went and flagged the bus and made sure he stayed blocking traffic from the through light of Main Street. You know, but it's just an example of how dysfunctional our city mismanagement is public records. Again, I'm not going to let you hear the end of it until you produce the records. I filed an appeal to the head of the agency regarding the police records related to the radio system and the body cameras. And city manager mismanager responded but he refuses to comply with statute statute requires you either produce the records or certified that the records are not available. And or, and you also notify someone of their right of appeal to the court. But despite our manager making more than a lawyer would that would ensure that city council and the city staff that here to public records law refuses to comply with public records law. Similarly, there's a body cam and I'll bring this up in the budget. There's a record there's a proposal for body cams that was supplied by the company, the major leading company of the equipment that Berlin uses called axon, and they're hiding it there. They either destroyed it or they're hiding it but an axon representative told me they did supply a quote for Montpelier and the quote included I told him it was a problem to include tasers because we've had that battle. They need separate quotes. But my point is when they are asked for a specific record and refuse to provide a specific record. It turns from ineptness to corruption. Right. And they're being asked for, they're asking for money. The budget says that there's money in there for body cams. They have not done their due diligence. And they haven't done due diligence on radios they haven't done due diligence on cameras, and y'all are not asking the right questions and you're in effect condoning the city manager, violating public records law and continuing to sweep these records under the rug. It's atrocious and you really need to do your jobs. Thank you. Anybody else in the room who wants to be heard. Councilor bait. I want to announce that I'm rerunning I'm running for reelection to represent district one city counselor. And I want to express my great appreciation for all my fellow council members and staff bill and Cameron, and many, many others who support us as we hear so much expertise that we really respect one another. And that's very helpful. And I just want the public to know that when we come together, we're hearing one another's opinion, most of the time for the first time. And it's really important that they understand that we need to talk to one another. Yes, we need to hear from our public, but we need to talk to one another, and that the public by all means can talk but they also can email us call us many do and that's great. But we also need our discussions so I appreciate that you all come prepared to have those discussions. And I just want to say it took a lot of courage to make the cuts we did immediately in the response to the pandemic in 2020 cut budgets 21 22. And this year we had an opportunity to put things back. And yes, it is an increase. But in proportion, it's not over time that big of an increase, and particularly for our infrastructure. We know people have trouble with our roads, and we can't do that without the bonds, we can't do that without the staffing. So it's really, really important that I hope that people can see the whole picture. And I think for me, I really try to look at the whole picture. It's like economic development. I may not vote to put $100,000 in the budget for it, because I think first we have to have the housing. And we have to put attention on our downtown and our bike paths and walkability, our parks, and then we'll have economic development so I sort of come in from a different doorway in way I vote and support things so it's hard to do a campaign that says, I support economic development, I do, but mostly backfill that then makes economic development happen. So anyway, I support. I want to take your vote from people in District one, and also that people call me. And when you call a council person. Yes, it's great to call the district person that represents you to call all of us, because you may have a piece of information a perspective that somebody else doesn't have. So thank you for your support in the past, and I'm done. Thank you. Right, I don't have a speech prepared but Councillor Bates it's a tough act to follow. But I thought I'd join her and also that's my reelection for District two for Council. It's, it's really the last two terms have been a great honor, just serving with all of you and serving this community. It's amazing the conversations you have, you know, not only here in City Hall, but you know when you're buying a ruggler in the, in the supermarket, it's such a dedicated dedicated community who really cares about each other. And I think that's been shown more than ever during the most difficult times with this this pandemic. In the first term there was a lot of ribbon cuttings and everything. It's, it's gotten a lot harder since and we've really had to make some decisions that have a real and immediate impact on people's lives. And I think we all take those very seriously. There's miles to go. I'm proud of what we've accomplished. I'm proud of really the compassion of my colleagues here and the city staff in trying to make sure we care for our most vulnerable in the city. And I have a lot of work to do as well. So, yeah, I'm eager to have a conversation with folks I'll release a statement next week, but just want to put on the record I'm running and really appreciate anybody support so thanks so much. Thank you. Anybody else in the room who wants to make a statement. Yes, Councilor Morton. I understand like this. I also would like to announce that I am an officially putting my self out there to run for district three seat. This has been a really fast learning curve and I feel like I'm just starting to really feel super invested in this position and my community while I'm already invested in my community but doing this kind of work stepping out in front of all of my neighbors and trying to make a difference and showing my kids that you don't have to, you know, have a college degree to help your community sorry I'm getting really choked up right now I didn't think I would. Anyways, I will write an official announcement but I just wanted to follow my colleagues here and think the community that got me here in the first place me which. Great, thank you. I see some hands raised on zoom Jake Brown. Just a quick note, I'm sure of the cemetery Commission, some of you may know, and just wanted to put it out there we have a seat available to fulfill a two year remaining term on the Commission. So, getting the word out and anybody in the assembled group can pass the word out to to their friends and family relatives, whoever. We're a good group and we meet once a month, and you can find information you can just probably the best thing to do is just to contact me or Patrick Healy. I'm at Jake Brown 2301 at gmail.com Patrick Healy the cemetery director cemetery at Montpelier hyphen vt.org for information about about running. So just wanted to get that out there thank you very much appreciate it. Thank you. Sorry, Justin, I realized that you were first in line Justin Dreschler. Good evening everybody. How you doing. So I want to talk about something that is related to the budget in ancillary way. So a lot of you know that the that Vermont is resettling a number of Afghan families who have either refugee or humanitarian parolee status. And it appears for either the first time or maybe for the most aggressive time, some of them are being resettled in Montpelier. And we actually already have four families that have resettled in Montpelier not all of them have full time housing. And this is a very exciting time for me it's very exciting time for the families I think it should be a very exciting time for the city. One thing that I want to make sure doesn't get lost is the city oftentimes talks about diversity and equity and really caring for communities and caring for our community and caring for others and really being welcoming. But oftentimes it is just talking we don't really have an opportunity to act on it. So in this instance with these families we do have an opportunity to act by creating some sort of humanitarian earmark in our budget. My understanding is that the budget is somewhat fungible. So it's not as if we have to say, X is going to go to this family and X is going to go to why family etc. But it's also that these families are going to have access to a number of different resources, for example, the Vermont emergency rent assistance program which just started, they should have access to we don't know for certain yet. There are a number of other programs and financial assistance that they're going to have access to, but it is likely, in fact, probably inevitable that they're going to be need to be gaps, their gaps that are going to need to be filled in. And I think that it should be the city's responsibility to fill in those gaps. For many years, we have asked for for more diversity in our town. We have attempted to bring more diversity into our town. We have finally been successful and I really think we need to welcome these families with open arms. I also don't think these will be the last families that are resettled in Montpelier. I think it's everyone's hope to eventually build an entire community here where people can feel welcome. And so I would just ask that during your budget discussions, you would just be mindful of this, that there might be these gaps. And I know there are many things in Montpelier that are imperfect. It's a wonderful time to live in. We have an unhoused problem that you are all constantly dealing with. When you're talking about uprooting a family that's been displaced because of the actions of the United States directly. I do think that we all have a responsibility to those individuals, particularly those who are the most vulnerable and have challenges reading, writing, etc. So I will just, I will end with this, which is that I, I had intended initially to introduce some of the family members on this at this meeting or to even bring them to the city council meeting. But there's still a number of privacy and safety concerns related to all of them. And so that's not something that we're going to do right now. And I just think you should be mindful in general about humanitarian aid about some sort of humanitarian fund in Montpelier because you really do need to walk the walk and not just talk to talk. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Justin. I think it's great that we're doing this. Okay. Anyone else who'd like to be heard who's not been heard and not seeing any. Just just briefly for the record, the city never did never received a proposal from axon at any time. So there was no record. It was in a presentation that axon made to the city council that was on a screen. If you may recall, they came in remotely. So it was never transmitted to us. There were some brochures that were turned over. And for clarity sake, we have money in the budget for body cameras, but we have not made any selection when assuming the budget is proposed is approved. There will be a process by which we put them out to bed and review them and make a purchase or no decisions about the types of cameras have been made. Thank you. Okay. On to the consent agenda. Is there anyone wants to move anything off the consent agenda case or emotion. I'll make a motion to accept the consent agenda. There's been moved and seconded. Any discussion. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. Okay. Now we have a long series of appointments for the ADA committee complete streets committee. We have the recommendation commission and the design review committee. So I suggest we take all those up give everyone the who's applied the opportunity to to address the council and then we may have the motion to go into executive session. So is there anyone here in the room was applied to be on any of these committees. I don't think so. I'm not seeing on zoom who has applied who would like to be heard on any of the committee appointments. And just raise your hand on the on the zoom map if you are. I'm not seeing any hands raised and I'm not seeing any names that match with the. Applications. So I think we can move forward. Yes. I did have a question about one application that maybe staff could tell me on the one for the conservation commission rose. Within her application, the answers don't match the questions. So I believe perhaps she's a resident of playing field. She says yes to being a resident to Montpelier but then the next which should be a no yes question is the word playing field. Do you know by chance. Does anybody know Rose. Don't know and just looking. Yeah, I see what you mean I that struck me too. I'm sorry I don't know how to raise my hand. Oh, is that you. Phyllis Rubinstein. Hi. So I am a little bit familiar with this issue since I am on the Montpelier conservation commission and I was aware that rose was applying and that she's a resident of playing field when this came up. We did. One of our members asked someone from city hall, and we were told that you don't that member of the commission does not have to be a resident of Montpelier. So I'm going to respond to that there is no. And I believe I either answered it directly or gave the answer to someone else to answer. So there's no law or requirement that members of these commissions be city residents. Typically the council has given preference to city reference residents and for some commissions or committees with more. DRB the DRC with real decision making or they've really insisted on that they've held the line on that on others. For example, design review and others over the years. There have been some non residents usually somebody who has a connection to the community somehow or a specific expertise or whatever. So it's completely at the council's discretion who you appoint but there is not a hard and fast rule on that. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I know from, I think we've had people on the ADA committee is not the numbers to in my experience. I see Amelia Seaman. Hi there. I'm, I'm rosesator so I'm the one that you guys are talking about I'm just watching it from Amelia's phone. She's my fiance. I am currently living in Plainfield but I'm buying a house and going to be a resident of Montpelier beginning February 1. So I was told that that was okay so that's the situation I guess just to clarify. Great, thank you. Does anyone have any other questions for Rose. I just want Rose and fellas who answered that I had no question about her being able to serve if she was from playing field it was just where that playing field ended in her form was not the right line so I wanted to make sure that's what it meant. That's all. So thank you for clarifying. We welcome your offer. Okay. Is there a motion is the motion that I would typically make to go into executives. Spoon feet up to his jack. Make a motion that we go into it. Does someone want to make a motion to go into executive session. There you go. I move we enter executive session to discuss an appointment. There are a series of appointments. Two city committees pursuant to one VSA 313 a. Or three three. Thank you. Is there a second. Second. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Opposed. Okay, we'll go into executive session with back shortly. Second. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. Okay, now we're back in public section session. Is there a motion. Yes, I'd like to make a motion that we approve the following people to the committees that we discussed in executive session. The number five of the ADA committee appointment. Deanna James. Margaret. Kate Streets committee appointment. David Ori. Conservation commission rose. Luzon and Benjamin block and the design. Review board appointment Martha. Sommersky and says, pretty good. Was with Pitchett. Thank you. Sorry. Second second. Okay. Any discussion. Just just clarifying it's the design review committee, not the design report. Thank you. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. Okay, congratulations and thank you to everyone who has volunteered to apply. I'm always impressed by the high quality of the people who come out and and volunteer their time for the various boards and commissions we have. Next up we have item nine. The community fund awards. Mr chair. Well, well, Amy is getting ready for her presentation. I just note that the projected awards are actually $3,000 over the budget. So we had 131,000 and they're at 134,000. I don't think it's a huge problem, but so your choices of course, or we can either increase the budget, you can ask us to find it, or you can ask them to go back and cut. 3,000 recommendations. Just so everyone's aware of the circumstance going in. Otherwise, they're pretty close. Okay, thanks. And now any counting him your are on. I thank you for that. I was not aware of aware of that discrepancy discrepancy so I really appreciate it. Is it possible I just have a few short slides. And I see I'm not able to share screen. What's the best way to do that. You should be able to do it now. We just got a thumbs up from the assistant city manager. Awesome. Thank you. Great. You all able to see that. Great. Thank you. So thanks for your time. This is our annual presentation to the city council with our recommendations for funding support through the Montpelier community fund. This is my fourth or fifth year serving on the community fund board. This is my first year as chair, and really pleased to be joined. I believe all of my fellow of fund board members are here tonight. Maread Harris, Shayna Casper Christopher Kaufman ill strip, and Michael Sherman so shout out to them for all of the work and wisdom they've provided through this process. This is a very image but this is the best visual representation for why the Montpelier community fund is was created. This is a ballot picture of the ballot from 2009. And many of you may remember many different items on the ballot that were difficult for voters to assess and we're challenging for the particular organizations requesting support to make their case. So the city council created the Montpelier community fund in 2012 where five member board pointed by you. The criteria for decisions as outlined by city council are the extent to which the grant will benefit Montpelier its residents and the public good by effectively addressing basic human needs or enhancing the quality vitality and sustainability of life in Montpelier. The genius of the system you all set up with the community fund is that nonprofits have two choices they may they're prohibited from petitioning to be on the ballot, if they apply to the Montpelier community fund. And so our application is is easier in many ways than the the gathering the signatures required to be on the ballot. And so we have you've established the Montpelier community fund to read 35 or 45, 35 to 45 applications instead of there being 35 to 45 articles on the ballot consisting of funding requests. Just briefly our review process this year very similar to past years we gather together to review and revise application and guidelines making changes based on what we learned from the previous years process with an eye towards keeping things as simple and clear as possible for our applicants. We release and do outreach to potential applicants. This year, we added a public open house for applicants. We created a direct email account for applicants to reach out to us for questions and created an FAQs document. All of that is available on the Montpelier community fund web page on that shout out to Mary for all of her help in getting those those materials up for folks to review. So, so we read board members come together every board member reads every application with applications ranging from 10 to 20 pages, and we take a half day meeting in December to assess and make the final decisions and so we report to you tonight with this final slate of recommendations. And in a nutshell, we're requesting $134,090 in funding represents 36 grants. We've done a rough breakout here of the different categories as you probably well know many of these nonprofit organizations overlap in their mission. So some of these these categories overlap a bit but in general, the bulk of the funding goes to human services, followed by arts and humanities cultural organizations and environmental organizations. Again it's 36 grants this year. You can see the full list in the meeting packet as compared to last year very similar. Last year we recommended 34 grants this year there are 36 requests and we are recommending funding for each of those requests, but you'll see we're recommending about $40,000 less in funding which means there's partial grants we're recommending to some of these 36 grantees. So that in a nutshell is what we're proposing it like I said in your in the packet is the full list of the applicants and we'll be very happy to answer any questions you may have. Okay, thank you. Any questions for any members of the council. Thank you, not only for your good work would you always do a great presentation. I'm looking at these larger ones 10,000 15,000 and some of them are more statewide, and I know you look at the data so you know how much they're impacting directly indirectly Montpelier, but if we were to ask you to go back. I guess, I'm feeling the need to reduce some of those higher ones. That would be your inclination or would you have another way of sorting out if we ask for reduction. That's a great question so speaking for myself and obviously I want to get the input of the full board. I think we certainly could approach some of those larger grants I would say, as you pointed out we do really pay close attention and ask them a lot of specific questions about their impact and their services in Montpelier, in particular. And so I would, those larger grants are impart a reflection of the scale of work and impact that we see that they're having for the city. So I, I couldn't say for sure, if that's where we would recommend the cuts but we'd certainly take your recommendation into consideration if we need to go back and reconsider. I guess that all but one of the ones you've increased are over 10,000. So that's where I'm coming from. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from the council. And again, are there. Oh, no. Okay, Lauren. I think we're good to where bill started. I mean is finding $3,000 or what was the discrepancy. Could you describe that and I mean is that something you think is, feasible or should be doing the budget for next year, which this would be in. So I think it's, I don't believe it's necessary to ask them to go reduce, you know, some of the amounts to these awards. I just, we should be aware that if by approving this, our budget has 131,000 in it. So, and this is 134 so we can, right, we can make an adjustment somewhere in the budget as we finalize it the next couple weeks or we can just add 3000 to this line. But you need either either case it's not a huge change in the scheme I think so just wanted to be clear that I'm not recommending you ask them to cut. Hey, just any idea why Washington county of service bureau didn't apply. I'm just thinking like they provide such an important function, you know, especially during covert with like after school programs that type of thing. So just that seems like a big gap there. Yes, you're absolutely right that was the biggest previous applicant that we didn't see come back to the, to the table this year so I, I don't know the answer to that question but I have the same question. Any other council members. Okay members of the public Vicki Lane I see you've got your hand up. Yes, I do. I, I don't think that any cuts to these should be entertained until or unless you're willing to entertain other cuts in other places in the budget. I'm concerned about the Washington County use services bureau not being there I would hope that maybe we could find out why they're not there and maybe they don't. Maybe they have other funding they can use. So, anyway, I can't entertain cuts to these particular organizations. Thank you. Thanks. I wanted to say that and the use service bureau is no longer in Montpelier I think they may be in Berlin right now. They moved their offices so I don't know if that would have anything to do with it but they are no longer on Elm Street but the basement center obviously is still here. Okay. Okay. So there we are any any other discussion on the Steve. I want to point out that I made an effort to download the packet today they're the city council meeting is in the website counter three different times. You can't download an agenda from one of them you can't get to the documents it's a real. I need to have reviewed this stuff ahead of time, not that they're not all worthy causes, but I also want to reiterate when when you delegate $131,000 of public money to these organizations. In this case it's twice removed it goes to the found that you know that this group and then approved by the council and the accountability the recourse the transparency is missing. You know that's that's why it affects these are government functions to some degree that we're using public money for but we're forfeiting the transparency of the accountability that comes with public records law, and that we really need to give some serious thought to how we inform or re engage in these contracts in these grant agreements. But we also need to fix the website because it's a real impediment. Okay, so what's your pleasure at this point. Is there emotion. With regard to this item. At this point we could have emotion to add this to the, to the budget proves the recommendation. Yeah. You deal with the budget number when we get to the budget. Yep. I move we approve the budget recommendation from the Vermont Community Foundation. Is there any, any discussion beyond what we've already have. Well, I'm, I'm still feeling uneasy with all of the, these large ones that got the increases were the largest to begin with, and then they all got increases. So, I would rather they go back and go back to what we budgeted and maybe we weren't clear with them what we budgeted. I don't support it as it is. Okay. And I think you're right that it wasn't communicated what we budgeted because I don't think I don't think the timelines line up so I don't think that the draft budget is with the committee when they, when they get to take the applications in. Was our number the same as we had last year. I would have to check I mean I think that's general there is communication between us and them and we usually you know I think we told them plan on the same numbers last year. The total that Amy has Amy, maybe I can ask you your total here for FY 22 was 135,000. Is that also with them what we gave last year to the FY 22 budget that we're in now was 1301050 and that's what we have in FY 23. Obviously the council approved 135,000 last year. Yeah. So perhaps, you know I could understand confusion if we'd said same amount as last year and they believe 35 was the amount. Okay. We'll work on that. No, I can put this number in better context, having looked at the total of FY 22. Again, wonderful data. Amy, thank you very much. Yes, sir. Thomas more. Is this committee now bill. All the stuff that were lined items like the library to the bus company. Is it. Is this what this is all about. So it doesn't include the library. The library. It does not include the library. The library will still be on the ballot. The bus transit is in the city budget. So it's not. So but yes, all this other social service agencies that used to be on the ballot, the right for the blind and so health and wellness and those sorts of things. So when we used to vote separately, yes or no for this organization or that one. So now, is it going to be either yes or no. And then if it's a yes, and there's a few. We won't be voting on this at all. So a number of years. This isn't new. We've probably been doing this now for eight years or so more or more where the city council puts a certain amount of money in the budget. And we appoint this community fund board to take applications and recommend grant awards and then the council approves those grant awards so that we don't have to do all that voting. So this is this is not this is actually been around for quite a while now. Right, but what if there was something I approve and then there was other things I don't feel, you know, I understand what I'm trying to say is, you know, if I'm saying no to some, they're going to get it. If it's a yes, but you won't be voting on this at all other than the whole city budget. They're part of the whole city budget. And that's and that has that is not I'm just trying to tell you Tom this isn't but this isn't a new practice. This has happened for probably at least eight years. All right. You know, there are some things on the items I approve of. Now, you know, and then there was a few I didn't care for. Yep. It's like the whole it's like that for the whole budget to you could, you could like the roads like the fire department like the police. You know, I could vote yes for an increase for Bob and then no the streets but you know I thought it was all combined into one. Right. It is. It is all everything's in one. Okay, so if it's including this, if it passes and you want money to the roads, it's going to it. Yeah. And that's been so I don't get to every voter doesn't get to vote on every single item. Correct. We never have. I thought that. Yeah, when you go down, it would be saying, do you approve for the library? Do you approve for the senior center? Do you approve this much for. Yeah. So the library is still a separate ballot item. And there's a couple separate ballot items, but the teen center and all those things have not been separate ballot items for a long time. It's been a long time ago. Okay. Donna, I want to reassure you, Tom, one of the ways one of the benefits of having them go through this committee is that rather than have all these nonprofits go out and get signatures and they just land on the ballot. This committee actually does research and ask them for data, both financial service. They do a lot of more scrutiny than just a number on the ballot. So I feel more satisfied that somebody has looked deeply into these requests. And we've tried to keep it around a similar number of supporting entities in our community that make our life better. Okay. I see we have another comment from the public breads iPhone breads iPhone are you there. Okay, and Vicki is your hand still up from before. Did you already you have one. Yeah, I have a clarification for Steve Whitaker. You can get the agendas, the minutes, the packet online. I have it up right now. It's not hard to find it's on the it's under Orca media and you just go down and it said agendas and minutes and you click on that and you get it for every single meeting there is. So it's not hard and it's easily available and you can have it up on the screen at the same time. You're looking or looking at the city meeting so it's not hidden. Thank you. Fred's iPhone will give you one more chance. If there's someone on Fred's iPhone if you could do star six to unmute yourself. Okay. Well, we've had you've had the chance. We've had a motion and a second to approve the list as proposed. Are you ready for the vote. Connor, I serve on the board of mosaic I should probably recuse myself right. I don't think you're required to because it doesn't create any financial benefit to you but it's up to you. Okay, I'm good. Okay, all those in favor signify by saying hi. Hi. Okay, thank you. Moving on to item 10 discussion of mail in voting for the city of Montpelier. And I believe the city clerk is online to talk about this. Here we are. Actually, I am. I had a close COVID contact for an extended time. So I'm in self quarantine for a couple days until I can test. So I ain't leaving my room in my house. So there you go. Yeah, so you got three. I don't know if you got the amended article one because what went out was kind of goofy. If not, it'll go up for the next meeting. But regardless, you got three possible warnings depending on how you went. And since then the rocks, the rocks feel here, the Roxbury select board met and they did not authorize the school board to proceed with a mail in election. So that ain't happening. So I'm going to send out postcards to folks encouraging them to make absentee vote absentee, which is something some folks do. But so right now, that's where it's at. I would say if you wanted just to. I mean, I hate to say this because I'm such a fan of the mail in voting, but my advice would be to not go that route because people will be too confused. I think there's a balance there and I might be wrong. I mean, your mileage may vary, but so if you all do nothing but go on through the normal procedure of, you know, reviewing and approving the voting, then the election would be a traditional kind of election. So you'd have to, you know, make a decision to make it a mail in election and then the city ballot will be mailed out only. And the CV PSA, the career center and the school ballots, which would all be separate would only be available at the polls, or by specific absentee request for one or all of them. Obviously, if you wanted to go that route, we'd put a big bright purple piece of paper and something into the ballots that do go out from the city saying hey if you want to vote on these things, then you have to order absentee or just come in. So it's a real shame because if we do it the traditional way, I think we'll go from the all time highest turnout, probably to the all time lowest because it's on the ground. But anyways, I'm, and I also think it's a shame, honestly, that the Roxbury select board has this kind of power over us. And I think there are those of us working are, you know, trying to lobby the legislature to change that, but it would not be a change that would affect this time around. So now we've got the whole story. So how this will work if somebody wanted to not come into city hall at all and vote completely by mail. They would need to submit for different absentee ballot applications or, or would there be one form that you could create that would that people would use for all of them. Yeah, we would use the one form for all of them. I mean that's the assumption with the form that we've used in the past. So we would just we would just do the same as the past if somebody made an absentee request we'd send them those three. It's, I mean, I would imagine we would be flooded with absentee requests but you know we we'd make whatever you all wanted to work work. The public safety authority is going to be in person anyway because the other town is not allowing that to be by absentee. Is that right? That's correct. I mean it hasn't even been brought up as far as I know the career center as well. Yeah, thanks John that is definitely disappointing but this is the route. I mean, I agree I think we shouldn't move ahead with just sending out the city ballot I think that's too confusing for voters. Are you thinking about like a proactive postcard or something reminding people they can request. I mean I'm a little concerned such a tight window and with the mail being so slow and stuff like I you know I think it's not a given that that's a great idea just curious what you were thinking about that. We could totally do that. The Secretary of State did it for the primary last time around. So long ago we've been in this for so long. But they did it for the primary rather than send everything out. There are other communities that are doing that I think very city is. To be honest with you it's money that I don't really have to spend but I'm sure we can find it somewhere as you say things are fungible and we can dig around and figure it out if you all wanted to do that. We can judging by front porch forum I think we probably want to have federal express make all the deliveries those notifications. No I'm with Lauren I never thought I'd be voting against like a all mail in ballot because I think it's so beneficial generally but in a way Roxbury sort of made the decision easy for us and it's too unwieldy and it has the potential to actually suppress turnout in some races. But I don't think we can go with that so I would echo Lauren and follow the clerks recommendation on this one pains me to make that recommendation. Now we're not voting yet just get a nod to the rest of you all agree with that. Okay. I see we have comment from Peter Kellman. Yeah Peter Kellman I live in Montpelier. I'm going to I'm just going to speak for myself as a as a voter. I would much prefer to vote. The primary reason I vote, which is the Montpelier budget and the second second most the second most likely that I want to vote on as a school budget, but it would not confuse me at all. But I think it would be a shame to receive Montpelier budget with a purple piece of paper saying if you want to vote in these others. You know you can either require you can request an absent team will send it out to you, or you can come in I don't think that's confusing. The main one would go out to all of us. And I think that it would really be a shame if our city council and mayor of votes were, you know, seriously depressed by, I think it would be even more confusing to say, you got to go and, you know, to do each of these separately. So I disagree with the recommendation that john's making that you guys all seem to want to fall into think about it a little bit. Thank you. Well, I just I would throw in that that's a real legit, you know, legitimate opinion to have and it's certainly a way we could go I don't say I don't make the recommendation I do with, I do it with a heavy heart, but I also, you know, I'm feeling like you got to do it this way, you know, you ask a clarifying question just for myself and for people that might be watching to the clerk. The way we're recommending doing it is outside of last year is the way we voted forever everything would be on one ballot. People could either have absentee or come in to vote on voting day. So that in and of itself would not be confusing and that the school ballot and election school board and city officials will all be on the same ballot. So in that regard, everything would be together. I think I heard Mr Kalman say there would be more separate ballots for all of those things and I just want to be clear that that's not the case. That's true except for the career center. Regardless, the career center will be on its own ballot and I should mention that regardless of how we set this up any non citizen voters would receive a ballot that only has the city questions I just want to make sure that's always out there. Thank you. And I'm going to go back to this iPhone. Yeah see your hand up again so if you can unmute yourself and speak we'd love to hear you have to say. Okay. Fred, we're going to skip you and go to Vicki Lane. And I think that it would seem to me as though having it just simply revert back to the way we've always done it would be the most simple thing. Because if we have two different ones and people have to actually come in to vote on the school budgets and those other budgets, they're still going to have come in so, you know, it's not going to be of any benefit to mail in one and have to go in for another. Assuming that we can always early vote and I can come down there and fill it out right. I think it's just as easy to go back to the way we've always done it. And, you know, if somebody needs to or wants to do the whole thing through the mail, I think it's relatively simple to ask for an absentee ballot. I mean, basically, that's what I'm getting when I go down early to vote and say I want to vote early and I think it's an absentee ballot that you hand me. Isn't that correct? Yeah, so I think that would be the simplest and best way to do it. I guess I would think so. Just from my standpoint. Thank you. Donna, I'm sorry. One thought is, so if we move in this direction, I'm wondering about like, if there's shaking the couch cushions for like a little ad campaign, like letting people know, you know, thinking of some ways that we're getting the word out that people can request their absentee ballot, you know, maybe maybe the mail mailing everyone a postcard is maybe we could like spend that same money and through other ways of trying to reach people. I'm just, I mean, I'm a huge fan of mail and mail and voting so I think this just makes sense for this particular election, unfortunately, but everything we can do to encourage people to get their absentee ballot and get that one clear ballot where they're voting on everything seems to me, you know, one way we could approach it. I know doing mailings can be very complicated, but is there a, is there another water bill coming out between now and then it's so that's that's I'll just throw that out as an idea. Okay. I think in many member of the public in the room who wants to be heard on this. Okay. I don't think we need to take, take a vote because we're just all, we're not voting to do a change to what we would have done without it. So thank you john. Next item on the agenda. Well, yeah. Thanks. Next item on the agenda is the report from the auditor. Now I think Kelly is coming up. Yep. Looking to see if auditor is on. Yes. Oh, perfect. So as you can see on the screen here, we've got Miranda with us, who is with our HR Smith and company. I'm not sure if Ron is also here or not yet. I can't see the full screen. Yeah, absolutely. Is that better. Okay. And then I think we've also got Heather on the line to who is our senior staff accountant. I thought I would do just to touch this off is just go sort of a brief overview based on the memo that I submitted to council, and then turn it over to the auditors to introduce themselves maybe once more. You've met them before they were in last year on this time. I'm just kind of go over some discussion points from there. So, but further ado, I'll get started. I don't have a presentation. I'm just going to kind of hit the highlights from the memo and then we'll have them take it away. So for those following along online, the memo is also posted there under the agenda items. I think long story short, with this audit, you know, we have a clean audit, which is very positive. Also just considering, you know what we've been dealing with with the pandemic and deficit mitigation. We've been able to hold the line and also, at least gain a little bit of ground on the general fund side of things, but that's also with caveats so I'll go over those as well just so you have an understanding of what that means. So we've got some work to do, but I think we're in pretty good shape. So without further ado, I'm just going to get into some of the numbers within the memo. Please stop me if you have questions or we can save those for the auditors to either way. So starting right off the bat, looking at, you know, sort of the net position of the city for governmental activities we increased our net position by about $1.15 million for business related activities we increased that by just over $3 million. Very positive, especially given these times. The general fund total fund balance increased by approximately $315,000. Half of that is due to some unanticipated revenue and then the other half is associated with expenditure reductions. I will also say that due to the deficit mitigation plan we were able to make the parking fund whole and move forward there. There is a slight net position downgrade that still exists but I think we'll make that up as the revenues return. And then just coming down the line here for other major funds, the capital fund also has a little bit of a fund balance there that we do also intend to use during this budget development cycle to restore funding for projects but that was created because we held funding aside to deal with the revenue shortfalls that we were experiencing and we were very conservative and so now we have this pocket of money that we're going to be able to use going forward and likely will not happen again but you can see it highlighted here within the memo. It's about $435,000. And so just moving on to our enterprise funds. My first year doing this, we were in a little bit of a different situation with the enterprise funds right now, two are positive two are negative. So the two that are positive are the water and sewer funds, the sewer fund in large part because of phase two of the waste, phase one, excuse me, phase one of the wastewater treatment facility and moving that forward in the grant funding that's been flowing through. You can see that pretty clearly here. The parking fund decreased by about $100,000 which we that that we did account for that with some of the transfer from the general fund and the deficit mitigation plan but I anticipate that the rest of that net position will be made up with funding that comes in so we opted to keep a little bit of the general fund and you'll see further on in the memo so that we can work towards the unrestricted fund balance policy. And so you'll see that there. And so just kind of moving through here. The other thing that I'll note is the district heat utility ended up down about $146,000 and so it's just something to consider especially as we discussed district heat, how it is performing year over year. And then moving on into debt, you can see that we increased debt service by about $10 million. Again, that's associated with phase one of the wastewater treatment facility and so we will also see increases in debt in future years just based on what we're trying to do and investing in our infrastructure and the like and so we'll be monitoring the policy balance pretty closely and then seeing what's available right now there are a lot of opportunities out there with federal funding that I don't know that we'll see again so we're trying to position ourselves there and then just in terms of some of the budgetary highlights. I'm just going to get down to sort of the last paragraph of the memo. I think that the unrestricted fund balance and the general fund increased by about $185,000, which is a pretty good place to be, but we've got to weigh that against some items like Tiff, for example, and district heat. Tiff we're working to finance that and so the liability will be off of the general fund which will be great. We also need to keep an eye on district heat and so if you were to look at page 21, you'll see that that is in deficit to about 382,000 so that would also need to be taken into consideration if we were to factor that in. So, I just want to highlight the unrestricted fund balance policy and where we would really ideally want to be. We would want to see in the general fund from an unrestricted position about $2.2 million. We're not there. We're working towards it. I think, you know, we've made at least a little bit of progress in that way. But we also have some other pressures that we just need to consider as we move forward. And so I realize that's kind of a fast summary of what happened in 21. But I think because of the tough decisions that you all made, we were able to sort of stay on track and will be well positioned in 22 and beyond. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Miranda and see what she has to add unless there are questions here in the room. Okay, good. Jack's giving me to go ahead so Miranda, take it away. Kelly, thank you I think that was a great synopsis of FY 21. I am Miranda McDonald and I just received word that Ron might be joining us. I don't know if he's been able to log on yet. I don't know if he's been here. Miranda's the brains of the outfit though, folks. You know, in the big one is in our opinion, the financial, the financials are presented fairly. I know everybody's eager for that. Kelly touched on the high points. I'm not going to, I'm not going to repeat that. I'm not going to repeat that in your memo. You know, COVID happened in FY 21 and that was huge, but I think y'all were proactive in making decisions to mitigate some of the, you know, one of the things was you didn't charge for parking. I know that. But you also reduced expenditures to help mitigate some of that fund balance. You were proactive in your decisions and I know Kelly and Heather have been active in looking at some federal funds and state funding coming in as well to help. Kelly did mention that there's some opportunity for grants to help with some of the projects that that in during this time period. And that's, that's what they're looking into with that. And then she mentioned some other talking points with the long term debt. Montpelier has your ceiling, a point two and the 15%, which you're looking at. But you also have like phase two of your sewer funds and some other projects that you're going to do, you know, and I know they're actively looking at some other options. And then the TIF fund capitalizing what's there and looking at some financing options to since unfortunately with the parking garage did not go through. It was, it was a very eventful year. But I think Kelly and Heather did a great job. And their finances and managing it and being informative and making decisions for the year. Thanks, Miranda. Do we have any questions from members of the council. So we would typically vote to accept the audit report. I know that we got the report. Fairly late and I want to make sure that people, Peter, I see you have your hand up by, I want to make sure people are comfortable and satisfied that they've had an adequate time so we could not not act on that. So we'll vote put it on the agenda for next time to accept it if anyone wanted to do that. So, why do you think it pondered that while I call on Peter Kalman. Hi, Peter Kalman. I don't know about anybody else but I, I couldn't see what she was showing. It wasn't coming. It wasn't showing up on any screen. She didn't have a presentation shared on screen. How did we know page 21 and she kept going through these we didn't. I even went to the agenda and tried to find, I mean, you know the agenda packet but recording stopped. I hope you guys recording in progress. I hope you guys were there and can see could see it but we couldn't at home. Peter and Jack, may I suggest that you know maybe we wanted to put it in your hands and I believe it was all part of your package. And it sounds like you guys haven't had enough time to review it. How about we consider this another conversation for another day. You know as you guys get a chance to like give Kelly some feedback and we'd be more than happy to have me know hop on so everybody's comfortable, you know before, you know before anything is, you know, put the rest for lack of a better word when it comes to page 21. Well, the packet was sent to us direct as council members have came out after our packet. So it would be good to allow the public access and us more time so I would move that we put table it to the next meeting. I would say also went when you discuss it next. It's very hard in zoom land to follow what somebody saying that you can't just keep saying the memo the memo the memo, we need to really let the people at home, find where it is, because we got to do two pages on the screen. We're looking at zoom, and then we've got to look at the agenda packet piece so we really need to know what that piece is, and what page you're on when you say things. Okay, thanks. Peter would it be help would it be helpful if we prepared like a PowerPoint presentation and you know kind of like the highlights and talking points and shared our screen with everybody including the public. You're muted Peter. It would be great. I really think it's very important for the public to understand the budgets and understand some of the large items that had to be compensated for because otherwise people say oh look they're raising our taxes, and they don't understand why. And I think the more we can understand the way these very large budgets work, especially in a year that was impacted by so many different variables, the more supportive the public will be of the budgets going forward. So Peter we agree, we agree we're all in on that and certainly we don't want you guys to, you know to move forward and make any business decisions until you guys are comfortable with that so so maybe, you know again you know the next meeting Kelly, you know we we sit down, pull out some excerpts of that thing that you wanted to put in your hands and, and Peter just just know and Jack just know city council know, you know that Kelly want to put this in your hands sooner than later to let you know, you know that that you know that that this process was at an end, you know, and ended to have these conversations and if we need to have another conversation until we're all comfortable we'll prepare that presentation with Kelly and Heather. Thanks, Ron. We'll figure on seeing you next week. Stephen and then Linda Berger. I want to, whether it's an error mission or whatever. So Julia and Barry City are the two members of Central Vermont Public Safety Authority. Bev Hill is the treasurer and handling in her treasurer role. The finances for CV PSA the CV PSA charter, which you all are members of and sworn to uphold requires an annual audit and yet that audit is not included here. Provisions or plans or discussion or budget for another audit. So I'm saying that this is the place where that CV PSA audit should happen. I don't know if there's still time to get it done by the time this is delivered and accepted, but it can't. We can't just ignore the charter of a municipality that we're a member of. Go ahead. Point of clarification. First of all, there's no reason in the world to be bringing up the treasurer because she has nothing to do with the CV PSA audit if you read the statute. Statute clearly says that the board of directors of CV PSA shall cause an annual audit. If the board of directors of CB say were to request that we include their funds in our audit, we would do so. So I would suggest that you read the statute and raise your concerns with the appropriate board. I'm raising them. My failure is a member of that municipality and this it is being mismanaged, and it needs to be audited in order to be in compliance with the charter, which this body is also responsible for you may be having to cover for one of your members, but that's whatever it takes. I don't need to read the statute to know that you don't just ignore an annual audit requirement and Bev Hill as a treasurer was involved in our audit presumably. Okay, it's actually clear in the chart in the statute that the treasurer is not involved in the audit. And that's a separate and it is a palady. And it is a separate municipality. Any more than this board demands audits or has anything to do with the audit for say the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District any of those other independent agencies of which we are members. Those boards of directors are responsible for those audits or not as the case or not as the case may be not the city of my pillow. Well, I'm raising it as a concern because this is probably the audit that should include CV PSA if if it's going to get done. Well noted. Linda Berger. Thank you. I just had a question from the brief presentation from the auditor. I got anxious because somehow the Waste Water Treatment Facility debt and the parking garage debt were starting to get intermingled in her presentation. And about future funding. So I, I'm a neophyte and understanding this and just kind of leaving that dangling. I, you may need to clarify that a bit more when you're talking about the bonds in the next section. Is that question directed towards us or to Kelly, I'm sorry. It's directed to the council. I think that's. So there's a couple of things done back there, Linda. There are the proposed bonds for this coming year, which we will be addressing during the public hearings. And then there are the bonds for phase one, which have already been issued. And the parking garage bond, which is already issued in which there were expenditures made against, which were part of the audit report. So the, so the auditors were talking about that, which has already happened. And so I do think if there's questions about how they were referred to it probably should come from. I don't believe they were commingled. I think they're, they're from separate funds. I think they were just talking about how they've affected our outstanding indebtedness and how they will be managed in the future. Right. And other options for phase two was a quote. And so that's why my question. I'm afraid of the auditors. My took my take was that they were simply saying, you've increased your debt by a certain amount and you've got additional debt coming other options with that too. So it was more of a be mindful of your debt load. It wasn't that there was an audience, but I don't want to put words in Ron or Miranda or Kelly. And Bill, I concur with phase one and Kelly, you're going to have to hop in here because it's kind of it's not a blur to me. You know, I know that there was some, some new different nuances with phase one and phase two phase two Kelly is what we've been talking about as far as the taxability or not the taxability, you know, with a new with a new issue of that bond Kelly. Well, that's Tiff Ron. I think, I think we're confusing Tiff and the wastewater plant. Okay. Bill, you're correct on phase one. You're correct on phase one though. Do you have an answer to that now Kelly or do you think it'd be better to. Yeah, absolutely. So apologies for any confusion. So I did mention, you know, Tiff, along with the general fund just because as it stood, if we were to not finance that tip that it would be a liability on the general fund, which would then impact our unrestricted fund balance, which is sort of the, you know, kind of sort of health if you will. And so I was just wanting to identify that what looks really good on the bottom line for unrestricted fund balance in terms of what we have there. We also need to consider some of the other factors that are at play. And I said just I was trying to full disclosure kind of share what some of those things were. So my apologies if that was a bit confusing. I can see where that might be confusing. So thank you very much for asking. And then, you know, additionally with phase one. You know, we are highlighting that that has sort of hit the books in full this fiscal year. And there are future implications for the wastewater treatment facility as we move forward. And so it's just trying to kind of provide the continuum of you know what that might look like. So I hope that helps. And I'm happy to provide any detail that's needed to clarify. Maybe now the next presentation would be a good time where we just address all of the phases, including the tip. So we're all clear on, you know, the details of all of those. How does that sound? Absolutely. Okay, thank you. Just to the extent there's any confusion tonight, I'd like to, I'd like to say that I really pushed Kelly to push the auditors to have a report for tonight feeling that it was important for the city council to hear about the financial condition of the city before we have our final two budget meetings. As a result, we only got the draft report last night in the full report today. And I did advise the chair that it might be, it might make sense to actually not accept the report until people have had a time to digest it but I really felt you needed to hear this. So if it feels rushed, that's on me. And I'm sorry, but they did push to get that out so that you could at least begin to have this conversation and we're happy to continue it next week. Great. Thanks. Okay. I think we can move on to the next item on the agenda, which is, are you all set with us bill. Listen, everybody be well. Thanks, you too. Jack, there's a motion on the floor. Oh, this has there been a second. Yes. Okay, the motion is to lay this on the table until our next meeting. That's correct. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. All right, we've laid it on the table for our next meeting. Okay. Item number 12 is the first public hearing for the annual meeting. Who's going to be kicking this off. This is really, and before we, before you start, I will open the public hearing. And we'll be proud. Next week's version of this probably isn't that meaty. This is the, the first draft of the, the ballot, the warning, which would simply contain the articles that would be voted on next week. Obviously, you have to take your final vote for what the ballot would be. Earlier there were, there were three options based on the way you've chosen to, you wanted to go with voting and I think you've made that decision now so that will bring us to the one warning that way. Things that you'd want to consider. So to typically the warning has the budget, the ballot items that you've already chosen to put on the candidates. And the final versions of those kinds of things will be going through those ballot items shortly. And you'd want to be thinking about the order and the final versions and of course the final numbers will be determined when you set the final budget. So you wouldn't do it. So typically this is, this is a pretty pro forma one. I think. So that's really the, the budget and the bonds are the. All for what this is. One. Okay. Anyone want to start, start this out from, from council. Yeah. I had a question for John. I, you asked for, and I sent you the center from our public safety authority to elect and at large. It's not on this list. Okay, this, that's something that didn't quite make it on this iteration, it'll be on next week's iteration, as well as, and I didn't communicate with Kelly about this, but there's going to be a. I don't really ask, I think is what you told me from the CV PSA. So that'll be reflected on the final two. I don't believe it's on this one. No, you actually have it on here. You don't know about things. It's okay. Together we'll get there, John. I think for the money is what I submitted was as of the last public safety authority board meeting would be stated with the 30,000 and then in parenthesis shows the berry and Montpelier share, but I'll, I'll resend you that. We send you the at large section. I should have that but go ahead and resend it anyways might as well. And was there anything else related to the CV PSA that we wanted to be taking up tonight. I'd heard some conversation about a proposal to discuss whether we should be discussed the future of Montpelier in the central around public safety authority and is this been appropriate time to talk about that. Yes, I've also heard talked about that and what it is is that voters actually voted to put Montpelier on to the central Vermont Public Safety Authority membership, and to withdraw the voters would have to vote to take Montpelier out same with Barry. And there is some consideration to whether or not how committed the council is being a member, and whether you want to put it to the voters to see if there is community support. Sure. And I think maybe I would recommend in the next couple of weeks, you know just throwing that out there as a possibility, maybe to hear from some members of the committee to see if there's this is a direction we want to continue going with regionalization I know there's been quite a few bumps in the road. Sometimes it does feel like meetings are adversarial it's, you know, a lot of people putting a lot of hard work into this and are we getting the results we want. So I think as we as we look at the future. It's a legitimate question to ask. And maybe in the next couple of weeks if we want to hear from folks and see if that's something that the community and members of the committee would like to put on the ballot here. Well I think you have your two appointees are actually logged in tonight they may not be prepared to talk but they might want to be invited to come back to talk. And just procedurally note that if if you were to consider that for a ballot item. This year, it would need to be done at next week's meeting because that's what we would be setting the ballot would have to be done at next week's meeting. Because that's when you would be setting the ballot so that would if you were going to do that you would warn that people would have time to prepare and come in if you don't want to do it in March, or if you don't want to do it at all then you've got this much time as you want. Any comments on the council I know this is kind of sprung on you so you may not have fully developed positions on this yet. But I'll just say that we can anticipate further discussion about this. Next meeting Steve is that we are rising to speak on. Okay. All I asked that this get added to the agenda at the last meeting, because it is in a crisis management dysfunction. But I've also called numerous times the fact that, especially in the context of the budget discussion, the city has a conflict of interest the city as an entity relies on revenue 400 close to $400,000 in revenue that would go away if the central Vermont Public Safety Authority launches a regional dispatch facility or or PSAP or combined PSAP a dispatch facility. And could you say what PSAP stands for for people public safety answering point. It's where the 911 calls are first answered. And that's the most time efficient and safest way to to handle emergency calls is to not have them answered in Williston and transferred via telephone with delay and then have to repeat the same information to another dispatcher in Montpelier. So, my point is that it's a very challenging discussion to have because of that conflict of interest. And in effect, we don't agree of not having to have the ethical dimension of the discussion because the city mismanager through on the consent agenda, the approval of the CFM as contract, which is the capital fire mutual aid. They are the group of fire chiefs that run a really slip shot organization. They don't. And recently, after many, many years of requests started keeping minutes and it's the for the first time they opened a minute me that opened the meeting of the communications committee. It's run by, but they don't respond to public records requests. I've asked for CB PSA has been wanting to meet with the other regional towns to get more members to join. It's not sustainable with just Barry and Montpelier, both with different conflicts of interest. Barry wants to stay an island unto itself and fund its own radio system Barry town is doing the same thing. It's the least cost efficient and least safe. But Montpelier in order to get that $400,000 revenue requires a regional radio system. And the question is, are we going to attempt to spend public money in Montpelier, or secure grant money to monopolize the ownership of that radio system and have all these towns be captive customers, because we're addicted to that money, or really do what's right and engage and co govern a regional authority that's going to be accountable. Our current dispatch system is not accountable or transparent. The deadly incidents happened the Mark Johnson shooting happened because the dispatcher did not make the officers aware that this record from a few weeks prior indicated this person wants to jump off a bridge is off his meds and his suicidal. That could have saved his life. And this is a real incident ambulance calls getting delayed for half an hour wide because somebody went on break and forgot to dispatch those the management committee of which some members are here. Of that man has never met has never warned the meeting has never kept notes or minutes. And so all of these errors get swept under the rug, a regional authority with transparent governance and accountability is the way to go. To get over the fact that we're going to lose our little unaccountable little radio shop. But this is why this needed to be on the agenda because currently, the leadership, if you can call it that of CV PSA is trying to run it into the ditch for this to be for this first discussion of potentially pulling out of it. I mean, last, at the last meeting you heard me take issue with it and in question the fact that the police chief is putting in an email to the city miss manager that we're going to dissolve CV PSA. I'm going to interrupt you for just a minute. I've, I've heard you say this a couple of times. I'm going to ask you to speak and refer to people with respect. That's respect. That's an actor. No, it is a first amendment protected right. So you it is a protected right. I'm asking you to conduct. I respect that he's mismanaging the town. And I will continue to reference it that way. But my point is that this then you saw the mayor say, I support what bill is doing as if the mayor were the queen here. It's like this is a council decision. You all have an obligation to learn your due diligence and to be informed and be voting a majority on this thing. This is not something that the mayor could just say I support bill. Okay. You're well beyond two minutes. We'll be taking this up again next week. Just briefly for the record for folks that are listening city does take in over $400,000 and dispatch revenue. We also spend over $860,000. So any revenue that we get only offsets expenditures. So to the extent that are so-called addicted to the money, presumably if there were a regional dispatch, all of the expenses would go away as well. So the city would actually benefit by about $400,000, although we would then be contributing to the regional entity. So they're really, you know, from a financial perspective, the revenue is simply a revenue for doing the business that we have. And we are a regional entity. We have spent a lot of time trying to figure out a different way to do it. I think more importantly, there were some assertions made. And I just want to be clear that everyone understands those were opinions that were expressed and not factual about certain incidents as the speaker's opinions. They don't have factual basis. Thank you. Peter Kelvin. Yeah, can I just ask once again, that if you're discussing something you let us know out here in zoom land where to find it. I gather you were starting to discuss the document called city meeting warning from March 1 2021. Is that correct. Yes, and it's, it's in the. I have it, I have it, but I didn't, you know, you just left into it. Nobody, you just started talking about it without telling us what it was you were talking about, or what article you started talking about this thing that Steve Whitaker just finished talking about. Can we refer to the document by name. Can we refer to the article that we're talking about, please. Okay, thank you. Anyone else looking to be heard on this item tonight. Okay, I'm going to close the public hearing on article number 12. We're now up to article number 13 1st public public hearing for the FY 23 budget. And I just had a question. Is this when we set the 2nd, do we have to set the 2nd public hearing. It's already scheduled. This isn't this isn't like a an ordinance or a great. It's already being worn that way. I also want to clear the law doesn't require a public hearing on the warning. It requires that you approve it. We do this for the, you know, they're going above and beyond here so that people can be engaged in these conversations. So you don't have to vote on any of those things. Okay, next up. It's the 1st public hearing for the fiscal 23 budget, the. Okay. Okay, great. Okay, you want to do that. Okay. We ordinarily would take a break at 830 it's 808 so we'll take our 10, 10 minute break now be back here at. We can start up again. We are on item 13, the 1st public hearing for the fiscal year 2023 budget. The document is in the, in the packet. And we have a presentation by the city manager. I would also note that the full detail of the budget book is available online. It's quite lengthy, but if anybody wants to go into any of the detail. I will not be referring to any of the pages in that budget book, at least during the presentation, if there are questions. I do need to public hearing schedule for the budget and the bonds. This presentation will include both the material for both public hearings and we can still break them out as you see fit, but it all flows together. So all that information will be here together. So I'm going to do the overview of the budget and the bonds. And then at the end we will have a time for questions from obviously the council, the public, and we do have all the departments who I believe are hopefully all of them. There are specific questions about department operations department budgets and obviously any general questions are happy to answer that. Okay, so we'll call the public hearing of the budget to order and you're good to go. Okay, thank you. So this is the first of two public hearings of the budget. This is a budget that has been proposed to the voters by the city council. The way the process works is the manager and staff recommend a budget to the city council. You held workshops on that budget in December and this is now the city council's budget. I'm your employee presenting it on your behalf. So the council's blocking our great graphics here. Oh, it's not up there. Okay. Okay. So the budget rules, but I couldn't read it. The budget goals that the council set out were to implement the strategic plan to rebuild from the covered cuts, which you just heard us talking about during the auditors report the impact on some of the finances in the decisions that were made in order to keep our finances solvent to deliver responsible services to address challenges with revenues and to stay with our goal annually to stay within the inflation rate which as of the end of December with seven point zero percent, which is actually just released today for December moving forward here. What's my doing? Oh, there we go. So revenues. We actually had some good news and revenues in the past year, which was helpful to us. We received full pilot funding of 1.254 million and we've budgeted for that same amount for next year. We are rooms and meals and budgeted rooms, meals and alcohol tax are improving. We've budgeted 253,000 for next year based on the trends that we're seeing. That's still about, you know, it was about 275,000 two years ago in the budget, but we had also budgeted about 200,000 last year so it's improving it's not all the way back. Last year, in the current fiscal year, the state did increase the highway aid by about $80,000 to 300,000 and we're anticipating that to continue for next year. Our building permits, we had been budgeting 100,000 they had dropped to about 50,000 we're back up to budgeting 75,000 but it's still not up to the full 100,000. But still would you have these all together, the net increase from our last year's budget to this year's budget was $488,000 so that was obviously very helpful in trying to put our budget together. So we look at our strategic plan, and I'm going to include items that show up in all sorts of different places in the budget but just showing how they, how we got to where we wanted to be. The end of the item of improved community prosperity we've included $50,000 for economic development. The childcare facility feasibility excuse me is being included in studies and about the recreation future recreation center. We have on issue that would address additional outdoor recreation and just as an aside we've recently purchased some more land for outdoor recreation. This year, we've included $45,000 for the homelessness task force. We've got the 131,000 050 for the community fund that we just awarded 134,000 for. We've maintained the 32,600 for monthly or alive and we restored $10,000 for the arts fund so the economic development prior to coven had been 100,000 the arts fund prior to coven of in 20,000 so those two are restored to 50% of where they were all the others. Or at 100%. Under our goal of provide responsible and engage government, we have fully staffed city governments so our proposed budget has every every position full with due agreements and pay scales in. We've got $25,000 for the red website upgrade. We have $10,000 for the capital area neighborhoods. That is also a reduction from 20,000. However, because we're not we didn't actually start the work with them until halfway through the year this year. We're going to use 10,000 of this year's for the first six months and then this 10 and that for the next full 12 months. So we should be whole on that until next year's budget. Our capital plan includes 230,000 $30,000 for buildings and grounds for our transition plan projects including the elevator here in city hall. We've got $75,000 for communications data public outreach. $30,000 for committee support committee outreach and equity and $15,000 for advocacy. In our goal to create more housing. We have the full funding of $110,000 in the new funding for this upcoming budget for housing trust fund we're also restoring 60,000 using small but for money that we had cut last year for cove it. Under our practice good environmental stewardship, we've included $100,000 to implement the net zero plan. We've included $250,000 for the first net zero project that TPW pellet service. We've got 34,000 for dam removal seed money. We've continued to fund my ride for 400 for $40,000 excuse me. And we've got $600,000 to develop the confidence part. Under our build maintain sustainable infrastructure. We've got a CIP capital improvement plan equipment plan funding about 2.15 million. Under our funding capital reserve funding about 2.5 million I'm going to go into all of this in more detail later but there it's funding under public health and safety. We've expanded the social worker for the mobiliar police department social worker or contract for that for another half. We have funding for body one cameras as discussed earlier that technology and vendor has not yet been selected. And we've been able to catch consoles last year so that money has been carried forward or personally funded. And we are looking to proceed with that in conjunction with the city of barriers possible. The police review committee recommendations are included in the police operating budget for the most part, including the CIT. So I'm going to get that wrong. But the CIT program crisis intervention. Thank you. That's what I thought it was. Crisis intervention team program so that and in fact, our team recently was selected to present at a national conference because of the work they're doing in their qualities. We also have 425,000 for housing services hub and bathrooms allocated to a put toward crisis situations. So our capital improvement plan. This is the money we allocate each year. In our budget. As you can see, we've increased the total funding that includes projects. Capital equipment and our and our debt service. As you can see, we've improved. We've increased the funding. $223,000 from last year. And as you can look, we're still about $223,000 below where we are pre coded target events. So when we do next year's budget. We're looking to add that up is, is well onto that to get back to our funding level that was at 2.375 million and eventually probably even higher. But first we'll get there. So again, all the details in the budget, but very briefly, you know, in our CIP budget, we have about 590,000 for streets and roads 230,000 for buildings and grounds. We have about 680,000 for parks and trees, 63,000 for sidewalks, 27,500 for bridges, 20,000 for transportation, 75,000 help manage all of these projects. And when people ask us about that, that is when we occasionally need a design or survey or those kinds of extra costs to help prepare projects that don't necessarily fall. We need to keep that in the CIP. And I'm going to go through this in detail in part because not in huge detail, but because we hear a lot about the infrastructure needs and people's desire for us to fund infrastructure in the city council meet a huge commitment is proposing a huge commitment to infrastructure this year I'm sure that we go through that. Equipment we have 108,000 almost 109,000 for fire EMS 95,000 for police for DPW excuse me 76,000 for police $50,000 for information technology infrastructure and 26,000 for parks. Again, the detail of all of that is in the budget but particular pieces of equipment. But there's more to capital than just our CIP this year. So we have our part one American. I'm gonna blank on this. Anyway, the restoration act. American Recovery Plan. Thank you, Bill. So the first part was allocated. That was to restore revenues and we have a lot of flexibility with that. So we have a lot of individual projects in there but essentially they, they split out into $620,000 for delayed roads, bridges and retaining walls that have been improved for had been delayed from prior years and 420,000 for deferred equipment purchases. And this is where the 60,000 to restore the housing trust fund is coming from so in addition to what we just saw in this year's capital fund. We have ARPA to what we call this was the is the second portion of our funding, which had been allocated, which had some restrictions on it now we have some good news, we may we're just there was a new release last week, it appears that there may be a lot more flexibility with this funding than we originally thought. And because it is tied to the budget vote we could still consider that for now, we're keeping the allocations the way we had them. $75,000 for community outreach and data information. The 425,000 is for homelessness issues, including the public bathroom $50,000 for an EV charging stations for city vehicles and $450,000 for water and sewer improvements. Keep an eye on that we may get we may want to keep this list, but we also may have more flexibility. Just a quick real quick question just in terms of timing of of the ARPA round two relative to FY 23 budget like what's the expect when we expect the first round to come in the second round and how that fits in just so I understand it. The first round received in the bank, we've got it we can expend it whenever we need to the second is expected to come in I think late August early September. You know, I think it's a policy decision in our part, whether we have to have the cash and he ended spending or we have a plan and we want to front the money. You know, we'll have to look at the eligibility but I mean, we'll have that money is pretty consistent system with the fiscal year. We have a restoration reserve, and that is monies that we had a CIP restoration reserve that is money is that we had previously raised for capital plans and then held, because we were concerned about cash and concerned about the fiscal mitigation plan that Kelly and the auditor is described. And it turned out that because of some of these revenues that came in strong and we expected, we are able to now release those monies. We're putting an additional $180,000 and in paving funds if you add that to the 590 that's in there that brings us to the total the annual total that we need to reach and maintain what we call the 70 70 PCI the pavement condition index doesn't mean we're going to reach that this year, but that's the funding level that we need to have each year so this be the first year we've actually funded it fully. And, you know, and I think it strategically as you look at this and we say well we need to add 223,000 to next year's capital plan you know there's 180,000 that's reached that level and stay at it. We also funded another 221,000 in delayed equipment so we're catching up on these deferred expenses and then we have $34,000 and seed money for DM removal. None of these capital plans anticipate any spending from the federal infrastructure bill, which is another huge source of money we just don't know the rules and regulations of that so that there may be even greater opportunities to invest in our infrastructure. Based on what we know this is what we have. So if you look at this total. Before you even get to the bonds, we're putting about 2.35 million into projects infrastructure projects another slot over a million into equipment and 560,000 to sort of community related funding project. So, a total of over 4 million dollars being invested in our various forms of infrastructure so I think, you know, from my perspective and council's perspective that's very exciting to get caught up with where we need to be. So we also have four proposed bonds. I'm going to go into the region detail but in general we have one for East State Street for 7.2 million. 4 million of that from the general fund 3.2 million of that from water sewer funds purchase of land for a future rec center for 1.5 million. Although we'll probably discuss this a little bit later at the end of the meeting but I'm going to recommend that we bump that up to $2 million from 1.5 but for now it's been in the budget at 1.5. We have a group of infrastructure projects at 1.8 million. And then of course the big water resource recovery facility phase two for 16.4 million which you heard about in detail a week or two ago. And you can see the totals at the bottom of what those all come to looking at them each individually and these are the bonds that this is the public hearing and the bond portion of this presentation. East Street 7.2 million 4 million from the general fund and 3.2 million from water and sewer funds. This would be a complete reconstruction of East State Street from Maine to college. We'll be putting new water and sewer lines underneath, including a and then a rebuilt road basis and all those kinds of things as well as a new surface on the top and a combined sewer overflow will be corrected by installation of a new stormwater outfalls. So all of these have been longstanding problems. While we're at it the blader parking lot behind the fire station will be approved since we're doing paving work anyway. Well, that there has been a periodic over problem at the state main that will be corrected as part of this project and we are getting an additional 1.4 million in our above beyond our amounts to help fund this project. It's a very comprehensive project. You'll probably take a couple of years to complete given its complexity and its size. But it certainly is one we've been prepping now for a bunch of years and so on addresses a lot of key issues. Rec center land. This is essentially proposed to you again it's currently 1.5 million and we may. I think we should raise it to 2 million. The general fund it's supplemented by recreation reserve. It would purchase the entire current Oaks Club property. All the buildings and land there could be in conjunction with private investment. You're not sure or certainly a future project could be clear that it will require future capital investment for anything new that goes there. This would simply be acquiring property. Not building anything. And however the size of the parcel is significant will provide for facilities parking trails fields and a lot of opportunity there for many different things. We have looked at other locations for the recreation for a recreation center. The center on Berry Street has significant problems as best as size parking. No, no footprint and renovation there was going to cost six plus a million dollars and not giving you real space or. We looked at what possible rec center the Elm Street. Where the pool and courts and. The fields are and. That was possible, but again, it also had a smaller footprint and again, no expansion opportunity because it's competing with those existing facilities for space. And again, parking, those, anyone who's been to the pool in the summer knows that it's already pretty limited to create more of a demand there. So it really wasn't an ideal situation. This is an opportunity that could really provide change outside recreation. In the city for a long time and all a whole variety of different. The facility is infrastructure grouping also from the general fund. This is a series of different projects. And the council is opting to group them together because it makes sense. 600,000 for Confluence Park. That's approximately half the price of that kind of project. Most of the other half has been raised or committed in one way or another. So with match grant and private funding to complete that project. $50,000 for Confluence Park for those that aren't aware is as you cross the bike path. It's to the left of the space to the left near the Confluence of. River in the North Branch River and right now it's just an open lot. This would be to redevelop it. There's a crude design. We'll have access down to the river. Recreational activities as well as sitting in recreation perhaps performances and those kinds of things. $550,000 for the Main Street and Berry Street intersection. This is phase 1 of the Main Street corridor plan. This will provide some physical improvements to that intersection as well as a new light system and put in a light system where none exists. And that light system will be coordinate with the Northfield in Maine and the Maine and state lights to create a better traffic flow through downtown. We also have $250,000 for street lighting upgrades. This would convert downtown street lights to LED lighting. We would has the benefit of saving us costs. It will pay for itself in about 19 years as well as providing more steady lighting. It won't necessarily be brighter. We're having some issues with sort of lighting outages that we have all lights and all circuits. And so this will just improve our lighting system downtown. We commissioned a net zero plan to look at city facilities and city vehicles. It recommended three in three building projects, heating projects. And the first or the highest priority for the city was replacing the pellet replacing the heating system at the DPW garage with a with a pellet heating system. So this proposes to do that project again more efficient heat less not taking us off of fossil fuels and providing renewable energy. And then finally we have a slope failure on Marvin Street, which is potentially undermining the road. So this would allow us to do a slope stabilization of the soil and and save that street. So those are the miscellaneous infrastructure grouping. And then lastly, the biggest one, which I'm probably least capable of explaining, but fortunately, you've heard about this a lot in detail, but we have a 16.4 million for the water resource recovery fund upgrade. This would come from the sewer plant. This is phase two of the overhaul project phase one modernize the plan to accept and process commercial food waste. And this resulted in increased methane production and significantly reduced energy costs and a much more modernized plan. There are still some more upgrades to the plant left to become, but we also have issues, including increased order to the point where the state has cited us to address it. And also we have created methane and now we need to use it in a good way. So our order control technologies included in this proposal as is and the key to this really is to dry the residuals known as biosolids or sludge. And this is a major cost to us to dispose of this at the landfill. So it's by weight. So this will reduce the weight significantly reduce those costs and also because of its size it will require a lot less trucking up to Coventry. And saving those trips. So there's both a financial and environmental benefit to offset the costs of the bond. And there's a lot more to it than that. And I will defer that to those that are more expert if it comes to that. Bill, could I add a comment here? Sure. Some input from people who live on State Street out by the cemetery who are very concerned about the health issue and that the community at large may not realize it's more than just a violation. It actually is the odors are a health issue what's in them. And so they really, really want this bond to go through and they want people to understand it's really, really important. Yes, thank you. And in addition to the city's budget in these proposals there are three ballot items right now that we're aware of that are sort of independent of the city budget. The Kellogg Library this year ballot item is 295,696 that's an increase of 45,225 from last year. safety authority is $14,100 for the city's share. That is up $14,000 from last year. Central Vermont Home Health and Hospice is $23.5, which is the same as last year. All of those are already figured into our tax rate calculations, even though they're not ours. Where does that leave us? The city's municipal tax rate would go from 1.18 cents to 1.26 cents, about 8.1 cents or 6.8 percent. It will not increase 9.7 percent, as has been incorrectly reported at the Front Porch Forum. So it says 7.4 cents from the city and 0.7 cents from the ballot items. Last year's budget, our budget only increased the tax rate by 0.6 percent. So our 7.4 cents, the average of 8.1 and 0.6, excuse me, it's 8.4, not 7.4. So it's 4.2 percent over two years. I'll straighten that number up. I think I made a mistake there, so I'll get that correct. There's no change estimated for the residential education tax rate. In fact, we've heard it may drop, but until I hear that for sure, I'm not assuming that, but I'm assuming that it's going to stay the same. So if it stays the same, the overall residential tax bill for everyone would increase 8.1 cents, and that's about 2.8 percent from last year for the total tax bill. So that's the real impact on a taxpayer, and that doesn't count any income sensitivity payments or circuit breaker and those kinds of things. So here's the time. If there's any questions about the overview, if there are specific questions, actually we'll do this afterwards. And then just to wrap up, we have the public hearing this week, a public hearing next week, and then we'll start the normal early voting process as soon as ballots are ready and with everything voted on by March 1st and Tuesday. With that, we'll. Thank you. I'll do two things. First, I will also open the public hearing on the bond proposals. I think that that it's probably easier to have them running concurrently than to try to separate people and commenting about the budget and commenting about the bond. So now we have two public hearings running at the same time. Do we have any? I may go back up there because it might be easier for me addressing people. Okay. Do we have any questions from the council? Just a quick one in that bill. You're going to explain the change for the country club lot from 1.5 to 2 million. Yeah, we need to talk about that a little bit later tonight. But I will say generally when we estimated, if you recall, the number we put in was an initial estimate of what we thought it might be. We've since had more. We've had, we've gotten appraisal going and we've had conversations with the property owner and we've looked at the other available resources and we think that's a more accurate number. One question I had was, I really appreciated Justin Dreschler's idea earlier about looking at ways to help support the Afghan families moving to our community. Based on the new guidance from Treasury about the American Rescue Plan Act funding, does it seem like there would be some flexibility in there to think creatively about how we might be able to do that? I do. Great. Okay, I'm going to go ahead. I just had one question. I got confused on your next, the last slide we were talking about percentages, Bill. You have a correction is that 0.6% last year and then you have 7.4%. Yeah, so I forgot to correct that. That was before that was done with our proposed budget and I didn't correct it with the council. So it's going to get a little bit higher. Okay, okay. Okay, we'll open it up to comments from the public and we'll go to people who are online. First, I see Jody Pederson. You have your hand up. Yes, thank you. Hi, Jody Pederson from Colonial Drive. So my first question is just do the voters get to vote on the bonds separately from the budget? Yes, there will be a city budget, the city budget, the school budget, those three valid items, you know, the library and those things and then four bond votes, each of which are separate, each of separate bonds. So yeah, each bond will have a separate vote. And second comment is about the $2 million for the Elks Club. Seems like an awful lot of money for the residents of Montpelier to be putting forth for more recreation area. And I would really love to see that area end up getting developed, put a couple other developments of nice housing or medium priced housing to find places for people to be able to move to our city and and join us and add to our tax base. So I would much rather see a lot of that land go to a good developer to develop. Anyway, thank you. Okay, thank you, Joey. At the moment, I do not see any other hands up online. Dede Brush and then Peter Kalman and Dede, you appear to be muted. Excuse me, I'm sorry. I was trying to read through the budget that's on the website and just you know, and your your presentation just now, Bill answered a few of the questions. But when I looked at the line items and sort of the percentages of increases in some of the city operations, I was struck by one, it's called the total finance number. And it appears that it's gone up 20%. And I wondered if you could explain why is that a software expense? Why is it so high? I'll let the finance director can let if she if I get it wrong. She's here. I can't hear you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I will let the finance directors here and if I get this wrong, I will let her answer it. However, that is one of those areas where we held two positions vacant in last year's budget to in order to meet our needs. And as in as we're restoring positions on some of that as an increase with new people. And I would not new people, but just filling positions that had been zeroed out last year because of COVID. That's the biggest thing. And then I think there is some technology in there as well. She's nodding her head. There's anything else. But those are the big things. Okay. And the question I had in a previous meeting a couple of weeks ago was, I think it might be the. I'm trying to see where it might have come in on your presentation. The net zero plan. Is that $100,000? Is that the consultant that you would like to hire? Well, so the city council's. Yes, I guess, ultimately. You know, the council has raised the issue of having a. Energy coordinator. I think ultimately, you know, how those policies get determined. I think as I've thought about it, at least there could be a lot of different ways to look at that. So we've, we've sort of put in a hundred. We've allocated $100,000 to do when that zero could be a full time position, could be consultant work, could be actual improvements. But it would likely be that coordinator position in the, but in the same way as we have $50,000 for economic development. But we don't have it specifically assigned yet where it's going to go. It's saying this is a priority. That's a priority. And obviously we won't spend that money until the council approves a plan. So some of those numbers are projections. Because you don't have a solid number or a person in place necessarily. Correct. And so we have, I mean, we have a, so I don't mean to interrupt you, I'm sorry. We do have a pretty good idea of what things cost for professional people in certain fields. I'm sorry, I'm sort of nitpicking here, but that's partly because I haven't done this, my homework in previous years very well. You have 30,000 for committee support. How does that compare to last year? Do you know? That, that is new. That is, and again, I think council members could explain this, the social and economic justice committee had recommended that we provide potential stipends for people who serve on committee in the city. So we do broaden to maybe get people with lower income or different backgrounds to help offset daycare costs and those kinds of things to, to allow us to have a broader group of people serving on city committees. And so the council set aside some of money or has proposing to set aside some of money to try a pilot program this year to see if that's, and if you find that it does not result in greater participation, is your intent to reexamine that and maybe drop it from next year's budget or the following year's budget? I think I'll leave that to the city council to answer. I think that's, I think that is what the plan is. Yes. I guess the question is how are you going to measure that? So before, so before we put the plan in place, we have had discussions about this. And we would put in some parameters about how we, what we are, what the goals are and what we were looking at. And again, this money isn't available till July 1st. So if this stays in the budget and the budget passes, we have between March and July to establish the program before we roll it out. So speaking solely for myself and not for the city council who would ultimately approve it, my thought is it would be something like comparing number of applications, you know, if we're looking at the diversity of applications, looking at how we're seeing if we're not seeing any different people and we're not seeing any increased numbers, then my take would be it didn't work. If we're suddenly seeing a whole bunch of new applicants and people representing different communities than we've seen before, then it is work. But obviously we need to, we need to articulate that a little clearer than that. And the council may 100% disagree with me on that. That's just my own opinion. So I'm going to move on to the next slide. And then I'll stop so others can speak. How, where do you suppose the number came from that was reported that we were going to perhaps experience a 9.7. Increase in our taxes. And you just reported that it's only going to be 2.8. How, how is it so widely different? So the overall budget cities budget is increased by 9.7%. But it's also offset by revenue increases. So there's, so there's the city's portion of the budget. And which is about 40% of the total tax rate. So the city's budget is going up 9.7%. The tax portion of the city's budget is only going up 6.8%. The school's budget. The city's budget is only going up 9.7%. Right now we're calculating it's not going to change at all. The tax. They're taking it saying it might actually go down, which means that too. So when you put it all together, the total tax bill would be about 2.8%. The city's portion of the tax bill would be 6.8%. Okay. So I know that's a lot of numbers, but I know. There is a basis for 9.7%. But it's not a tax number. All right. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thanks. Bill, I just want to compliment you in two ways. One is I thought that having a PowerPoint. Was very, very helpful. To citizens who are listening and watching. And I think that that PowerPoint was very well done. And I appreciate your attempt to tell us what the initials mean. And I think that, you know, I don't know if you've heard of the acronyms. That's always bewildering to many of us. And too many times in city council meetings, I hear initials go whizzing by. I think that one of the things that you did or began to do, it's important is to put the large items and the large. And I think that's very important for taxpayers. I think we, there's still a communication. Gap. If you drill down. Didi's questions, I think. Are an example of that. You know, and you may say, well, that's just a $30,000 item, but it is important for us to understand what some of these line items mean. And I, so. I know that's a challenge because there's a lot of detail, but saying it's all on the website, the whole book is there. That doesn't quite do it for me. I think there, I think we need to have a figure out a way. That people can say, I don't understand what is this. I mean, what is this 100,000? What is this $30,000 for that's for. For the website. What, what, what are we talking about? What are you actually going to do for that? I'm not sure, I don't know the answer of how to do it, but I think it is, is important to try to figure out ways, especially to explain new things. I think, for example, the way you explained these, these state street project was really good. I think everybody could envision that they could picture, you know, replacing the pipes and, you know, doing the pavement over and so on and so forth. But we need, there's some, there's some black boxes in here. So a black box is where you see what goes in, you see what goes out, but you have no idea what's in the middle. And for voters, it's, it's important to know what goes on in the middle. That's just a suggestion. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. In fact, could respond to that. Just for your, to your question, but also anybody else who's listening is, I do try to call out anything that's new and different. Obviously there's a lot and you could spend a long time on each item. The bridge articles that I do, this, the one that's coming out next week, or maybe this week we'll have the, a full write up on all the bonds. The one that comes out the following week, we'll have all the numbers on the budget, including issue, you know, itemization of all those items you talked about. So some of the things are, you know, you can provide a more detail, you know, in a more written form than you can just in an overview. It's sometimes just easier to answer the questions when, when people have. I appreciate it. It is a challenge and we do try to get it out particularly for something that's, that's new and different. So, and, and one last thing to the, actually two last things, one to the black box question. Projects like specific projects that are well-defined are easy to describe. East state street services and policy goals sometimes aren't. So as we're putting, you know, money to this because we're trying to accomplish a certain. We're trying to deliver a certain service and we don't know exactly how it's going to come out until we spend a little bit more time. But what the council is saying is this is a high priority policy area for us. We're going to put resources to it and we are going to, to develop something. So I can understand why some seems fuzzier than others. I would just like to make one suggestion that those smaller items that are policy goals of the city council. I would suggest that city councilors make an effort to explain it to the people in their district. And that's the way you can begin to open up the black box. At the, at the district level, have some district town meetings and let the people in your district ask you questions, especially for things that are, you know, council babies. Thanks, Peter. I appreciate that. Next up we have Holly. Yes, Holly Fowler. Hi there. Thank you council. Thank you city manager for taking these questions. I'm here wearing my hat as a representative of the complete streets committee. And in studying the parking fund portion of the budget, it may be there. I may not have seen it. Whether or not there was restored funding for this standing committee of the municipality and it may not be there. I think I heard something earlier in the audit conversation about potentially level setting that. And I think our committee is just curious to know if there is a plan for restoring funding that previously flowed. Thanks to parking funds, or if we should be looking for it for some place else, or if we need to take action basically. So thank you. So to answer that question specifically, it's not in the parking fund. That's not because the parking fund, you know, really under performed last couple of years. And we think we have the parking fund more stable. And as we go forward this year, if we can, if it starts showing a positive income, you know, we can set some aside, obviously with the council's approval. So we're keeping our eye on that. And I think in terms of, in general, having, you know, the committee, we have processes you heard, we outlined a whole bunch of projects that we're putting money towards and specific projects probably ought to get into that queue as well as that sum of money. Is there, is there special instruction for how a special project gets into the queue? Is there a process? Yes. Typically when we put out a call for those sorts of things, and we've actually spent spending, we've been talking, this is more of an internal conversation, not for the council so much, but making sure we're clearly communicating with all the committees to know those deadlines when to get projects submitted and through themselves and through their, their committee staff and those kinds of things just to make sure nothing gets missed. We've had a, you know, a couple of committees asking this question and we want to make sure everyone has a chance to, to get their things into the mix. Okay. We will be listening and waiting. So thank you very much. Thanks Holly. Phyllis Rubinstein. Thank you Phyllis Rubinstein from college street. I am very impressed by the complex and detailed budget that's been presented. I do have a few comments and perhaps some of them at least will, well, I have a few comments and maybe a question. I do support the purchase of the property. I do support the purchase of the property. I do support the purchase of the property. Owned by formerly owned by the Elks Club. Or known as the Elks Club for the purpose of promoting recreation and Montpelier. I think that that's a laudable goal. And I hope that it does go forward. I have been a member of the Montpelier conservation commission for two years. He has been tanking boards and committees and nonprofits. During my adult career. And a volunteer does not expect to get paid. So I'd listened to the budget discussions about from the last A meeting stipends to members of city commissions. That's one of the things. Well, perhaps my word is stipend. And that wasn't the word that was used, but what I heard was that if you attended a meeting, you would get $50 per meeting. And I would like to see city monies. Used for the benefit of. All city residents. And I'm concerned that. Even though it's a. A positive goal to increase diversity on city. Committees and commissions. I'm concerned about. Who will make the decision is to. I don't think it's a fair process. Whether a member of a committee or a commission is going to get paid $50. And I just, I don't think that it's. A fair process. Yeah, I for one would not request any money. And on the Montpelier conservation commission, there are a couple of people who have young children and they do a lot of work. And I understand that the goal is to increase diversity. But I just question whether this is the right way to do it. The other. Budget. Item that I had questions about, which has been discussed. But the $100,000 for the. For an energy consultant. And it seems like a lot of money when. Although someone, perhaps it was Bill said that. That's the salary that someone in that position would require. But if there's never been anyone in that position, it seems like it's a big jump to go from no position to paying someone $100,000. Especially when the. The average income of Montpelier residents is nowhere close to that. So these are very small items. And I do appreciate your considering my opinions. And if anyone has any responses, I. Enjoy hearing them. Before any response to your policy issues, Phyllis, just for your benefit and everyone else, when we talk about $100,000, that's all in for an employee that includes benefit costs and. That's all in for a full-time professional position. All in. Okay. And that does make sense. Thank you. Okay. Do you want to cover the first part? The policy part. No, the. No, the. Those kind of things that wouldn't necessarily, you know, so the actual salary would probably be more like 70, some odd thousand with everything else on top of it. So it's a total package for an employee. I just want to be clear. I think some. So when we say 100,000, that's about what it costs us for a full-time professional position. So, you know, I don't know. The stipend piece. So, so Phyllis, that was part of our early, our conversation at our last meeting about what this pilot project would look like. And exactly to your point that this would be a. Would be, would be voluntary. Sort of no questions asked process where folks could, would request the funds. It would not just be a blanket. Everybody who shows up for a meeting gets paid that stipend. And, you know, I raised this point with Kelly and, and, and, you know, and Bill at the same time. And, you know, the city does not want to be in the business of trying to verify income or, or, you know, trying to justify this type of expenditure. The idea is that it's a easy process that some, that it would open up the doors and make more accessible. We have so many committees in this city and we, we engage with folks and we want to continue to, and expand the engagement we have with, with our community here and the broader base of, and the more people that have access to be able to be involved in decision-making the city will only benefit us. So going into it sort of with a, you know, what's the term I'm looking for here just with a, like with a sense of trust that, that we would no questions asked that if, if you need that support that you, it's available for you, but if someone like you would not need it, that you wouldn't necessarily get it, but that it would be available to folks who would need it, that would make that, that would make all of the, all of the work of the city and volunteers that are participating in our processes more accessible. So that's sort of a long-winded way of saying that we would not be making people fill out forms and like justify their income to be able to get the stipend, but that it would be available to them if they needed it. I'd also like to add that it's lower barriers for people that wouldn't necessarily think coming to a meeting or being on a committee would be possible for them because of finances. And just, I mean, it came up a few minutes ago. The way we've been talking about it is as a pilot project where we would want to be assessing, is it working? I think you're raising really good questions about, you know, how is this going to play out? And is it actually increasing, you know, access and diversity? And those are questions we very much want to structure the program to assess. And so I, you know, I don't think it's something that we would plan to do in perpetuity if it's not proving successful. But it was the, a major recommendation of the city's equity assessment. It sounds like you, you watched the last meeting, which I thank you for doing that. So you probably got a lot of this context, but this was one of the top recommendations that our professional equity consultants had made. So, but I think they're great questions and they're part of the shaping of how do we roll this out and try it and see if it's really benefiting the city and if it's something that we want to continue. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Phyllis. Now, Vicki Lane. Yes. I have to say that I do agree with Phyllis in that volunteering for a community assignment or whatever is volunteering. And I think for those of us that do tremendous amounts of volunteer work. Don't do it without expectation of, of any kind of remuneration, even for, you know, gas that we spend going to and from. Even those of us like me who don't have much money at all. So, and, and I also. I really am. I really have trouble with the $100,000 as well as the $30,000. I also have a question. About the positions, which maybe I'm not following correctly. Those positions, I think you said Bill in the finance department. That were there but are not and you're putting them back. I mean, I mean, I'm not sure if those positions positions that are currently held by someone or would those be new hires? They're now held. They're now filled. So the people have been working without pay for the last. No, in last year's budget, they were, we, we froze them. And as revenues came in, we, we need, we've hired people based on our current situation. So we had six positions based on our revenue situation. But if you froze the positions and the people were still working. So at the time they were frozen, they weren't people working. We had six positions that we froze city wide. And then over the course of the year, based on our financial position and based on specific needs, we've been able to bring some of them back. Cause I was going to say, do we really, if they're not being, if they're not filled, do we really need them? But if they're filled, I guess we do need to feel that we do need them. Yes. We were definitely need to pay the people if they're working. And they're doing work that's necessary. Okay. I also support the. I can't believe I'm saying this that I'm supporting a $2 million potential. But they're the, the Alks club thing. I don't think we can do that. I don't think we can. I kind of would rather see the city do something with it. And have it remain somewhat wild. As a rec type field or recreation area. Then have a developer come in and. Put expensive houses or condos or whatever. Up there. And I don't think we can. Demand. I don't think we can. We can tell a developer that purchases the land, what they can and can't build there. As far as houses. So I just, I would like to see some of that land stay. Natural. As natural as it can. I know that we would be giving up tax revenues for. That would be a good idea. Anyway, thank you. Thanks, Vicki. Jean Leon. Hi, good evening. Jean Leon Berlin streets. So this just. The first time I've heard of this. I was a member at the Alks club. And I know it changed. Is this something the city is looking into. Purchasing. Or is this on the table already? Maybe I missed, I've been out of the loop for, for a couple of years considering the situation. With the pandemic and. So I, I just had, I have some comments, but I just, because this just came up, I just had that question on the Alks club. I mean, because there'd be a significant amount of maintenance. For the city. If that was the case. So Jean, thanks for that question. The city would be purchasing the property. We've been looking for a location to develop a new recreation center. We wouldn't. I'm sure we wouldn't operate it as a golf course and in its current. State. And I think it creates a whole lot of opportunities for future fields. There's a lot of people that are interested in doing various recreational things there. And we would be. Planning all the potential uses there. And I think it would be maintenance, but any recreational facility would have those costs and maintenance, but those are, those are decisions to be made in the future. The land's available now. And it's an opportunity for the city to control a major piece. And in direct its future. But we don't have a recreation crisis. We have a housing crisis. We have a. Affordable housing crisis. Anyway, I look, I don't know. I just can't emphasize enough. The importance of, of. Responsible budgeting and. And especially with a social and economic consideration. And the effort to reduce. Rather than increase our taxes. However. Necessary in the most creative ways that you could come up with. I know. I like this idea of this pilot program because I mean, you know, it is voluntary, though the compensation is minimal, but it's, it's like having two full-time jobs on top of the other jobs that you guys uphold. So, I mean, just from the feedback that I get as not only a can member. You know, running for office two years ago and just being involved in my neighborhood and other neighborhoods and community and just being out there. And I think that's a really important thing. And I think that the residents get fed up and, and they're frustrated with. The, the systemic. Way of governing things in the city of Mount Pylir. Especially with tax increase. And so people do feel misrepresented or misguided. And I know things are out there and things are posted and things. But the communication. And I think that's really important. Yes, the website is difficult to navigate. It took me a minute just to get on here. And it took me another minute, you know, To, to find the whole budget thing. And it's outdated. It's completely out there. The hours are off. It's, it's hard to navigate through there. And so. There has to be efforts to improve public engagement and dialogue. Super essential. And so, And so, More information comes out. The bridges out, you know, get it's outdated. It's every two weeks. So it's not a. It's not per se a. City. Newsletter. That gets updated. And that's friendly and easy to navigate. Anyway. I wish you all the best. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I don't think we need to. Add onto the budget. Another. An energy consultant in my opinion. We have many. Energy professionals in the city. That would be more than happy to advise. Anyway, have a good night. I, I. I look forward to this. Conversation further. Thank you. Hi, I'll just jump in right on that comment. My name is Kate Stevenson. I'm a member of the Montpelier energy advisory committee. And you're right, Jean, that there are lots of talented. Energy professionals in Montpelier that can help out. That's what the energy advisory committee is for. And we are. Have been asking for, for multiple years for a staff position. Within the city to support. The city's net zero goal because there is just the point where. Volunteers. Can't do it all. And to the level that we really need to accomplish the goals. That's what we need to do. So, um, this position, you know, a position was approved by the council in 2018. Um, it was not filled. Um, here we are. We're doing FY 23 budget. And, um, You know, I think. My personal hope is that we can fill a create a staff position. Um, that's what we need to do. Um, to be able to do that. Um, We need a ongoing presence to support these projects. It's, you know, I've sent to bill and the other council members, you know, a list of the types of things that this could support, but it's basically, you know, project management in a lot of places. It's tracking all of our energy metrics for the city, which is something I've been doing as a volunteer for five years. And, you know, We need some additional support to really be able to do that. And then we'll move on to the next slide. Um, so, um, We're going to be talking about, um, you know, the city's net zero revolving loan fund. Um, you know, there, there is a long list of. Of things that are. Not necessarily happening or happening only just a little bit with, with volunteer support. So, um, that's what, you know, so I definitely support the $100,000 being in the budget this year and on an ongoing basis. Um, so that the city can really reach its net zero goal. I would point out that, uh, Counselor Hurl engage in a conversation with Kate Stevenson about. The kinds of things that the, uh, energy, uh, Specialists could do and that's, that's an email, which of course is a public document. Uh, maybe we could put that on the web city's webpage so people can. See in more detail the kinds of things we're talking about. Okay. Thanks, Kate. Did he brush again? Um, thank you very much. Um, I would like to second the, um, concept or the idea that was proposed tonight. I think it by Peter. Count claimant. Uh, I don't feel that the council members. Have done quite enough to inform us. As a district. Uh, or members of a district. About the priorities of the city and what they. Believe is important in this budget or in any other budget. I think it would be a terrific idea if we could. Um, Encourage some community, um, gatherings. And I realize that that's difficult during the pandemic, but it can be, I mean, we're all pretty used to zoom by now. So perhaps on zoom. Um, I think it's important to be aware of what's going on between now and when we're supposed to be voting for these items. And. Even though many of these things are. You know, 30,000 here, 100,000 there, 25, et cetera. They do add up. And Montpelier doesn't ever seem to vote a budget down. And I think it's partly because we don't get enough information. Um, to, um, Burrow our way through many of the documents that you all have access to and, and discuss and debate. On a weekly base or bi-weekly basis. So I would encourage more of that. If possible between now and our, the vote. And, um, I also just wanted to say, I hope you're listening to these comments and that you don't have to go through them and assume that. You can move forward with, um, But you've already proposed without careful thought. Um, that's my hope. And that's why I decided to try to participate because I, I hope it makes a difference. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, Peter Kalman. Um, yeah. I would like to comment on, um, uh, this, uh, Unfortunate dichotomy. Recreation versus housing. This is not a zero sum game. It's not a zero sum game at the health club. It's not a zero sum game in Montpelier. We can have both. And I think that there needs to be some creative thinking. As the health club prep purchase becomes more likely about the possibility of having some mixed income housing. Up there as well as. Uh, recreation as well as natural of space. Um, I don't know how many of you had an opportunity to hear the habitat for humanity idea for the former gold farm. It's a, it's a 50, 60 acre parcel up off of Northfield street. And that would be a combination of trails and affordable housing. And maybe even some, some expensive housing. Um, uh, but we just have to not be. Uh, sort of saying it's either this or that. So I really, I, and I hope we do that more. Um, I, I admit, I was a little dismayed about talking about adding on to Hubbard Park. Um, I understand people who like to walk their dogs and so forth, but Hubbard Park is a pretty big place. And it seems to be a place where. Those very same people don't want homeless people to be camping. Well, that kind of disturbs me. We're going to spend more money. We're going to spend more money on getting more. Hubbard Park space, but we're not going to be doing stuff for home. Homeless people. It's not either or let's think about these things together. If the parks commission wants to expand Hubbard Park, maybe the parks commission should be a little more generous. About people camping in the woods. As an example, I'm not, I don't want to get off on that. But let's get away from this either or thinking, please. Thanks, Peter. He's very involved. I'm not seeing anyone else's hand up on zoom for now is. I'll see if there's anyone member of the public who is in the room who would like to be heard. So I didn't take the time to spend several hours going through the budget book. I'm concerned that. The. With the best of intentions. This budget is a product of a dysfunctional. Relationship between the council and the management. The management has rolled this thing. We're going through the motions of public engagement. By, we shouldn't have canceled the February 5th meeting. You should have had this presentation as a way to inform and engage the public. To then come to the public hearings. So instead it's like 930. And we're everybody's tired. And ready to go. And we're going through the motions of public engagement. By. We shouldn't have canceled the February 5th meeting. And we're going through the motions of public engagement. And we're going through the motions of public engagement. Everybody's tired and ready to go home. And now that you've got a lot of detail to have to deal with. Or. Ignore as you see fit. The put the. Access to the information. Other people have made that point is, is miserably deficient. It wasn't in my case because I. Came to city hall and knew how to, who to ask to get access to the website. It's a website ad nauseam that needs to be replaced with a new, you know, the home homepage of the website now has a survey, new survey on the budget. And you click on it. It's like, Oh, that survey goes to survey monkey. That survey is closed expired. Like who's maintaining this website? It's just another egregious example. I don't know where the tiff that I heard tonight. They're. You're trying to. To grow the money to pay the million dollars. Of the garage fiasco. Is that what I heard? The city approved a bond. To pay for the garage for up to 10 and a half million dollars. We're going to let 1.1 million of that bond to pay. That's always been the plan that was. Made very clear to people that that was going to be what happened. But you, you, you can't use the bond money to pay for. Boondoggle architect debt. You can. Yes. You can't use it. You can't use it. You can't use it. Oh, God. It's worse than I thought. That was what was very clearly communicated in advance. What would happen? Well, so we'll. Basically I, as much as that looks like a conflict of interest, I'd like to support the commenter before me saying, you need to inform the people with enough detail to where they could start voting down these budgets. You know, and that's not what's going on right now. The vision statement. I have to say that we're not living up to it. You know what? We're environmental protection for years. I keep telling you that all the trash along the river bank and all the clothes and all the homelessness garbage and. And the mattresses and, and we don't clean it up. We, we let it wash down when the high water comes. So we can't pretend that we're doing this environmental protection while we fail to do this. Every time I get it, go to Donna Barlow. It's like, there's no staff. There's no money. There's no water. There's no water. There's no water. There's no care of any of this stuff. You know, it, it's really atrocious. The salt, I've mentioned forever that we don't sweep the sidewalks. We don't sweep the streets properly. We make a half ass effort at it. And then all that blows across into people's food and into the farmer's market. You know, we. That's toxic stuff. That's, that's antifreeze and oil and water. We don't sweep the streets properly. So I've suggested we get a vacuum cleaner. That would have been a perfect use of ARPA funds and pay somebody, pay one of these homeless folks to wander, drive around, walk around town with a vacuum cleaner and keep the city clean. But it didn't even make it into the budget discussion. So there's a state statute that requires the finance management department to engage with the public in the budget development process. And the city should be able to do that. And they should be able to do that. Or take it apart in the last stages. I think the city should give some thought to that. Ensuring strong municipal services. Like the website and, and, uh, picking up the garbage. I pointed out and I said videos to Donna of. Eight inches of water and Elm Street, because we don't bother to clean our drains. For four years now, we've had a lot of, you know, a lot of the storm drains are not set to the crosswalks. The crosswalks are filling with water and freezing. And now we're even still planting new trees and building new sidewalks that puddle in the middle of the sidewalk. It's the, the, you get the, you get the myth. Can you spell mismanagement? Um, Dignity for all is recognized and respected. The city is transparent and accountable. I mean, this is fluff. This is fluff. This is not what we're doing. And this amount of money, this bloated budget is not going to. You know, implement these, these high ideals. So a shit cake dryer for $16 million. We've got, we've got methane. We're trying to get rid of it. We're going to buy a pellet stove. It doesn't seem to add up. You know, and yet. I mean, our entire engineering team seems to be consumed by this. Treatment plant rather than actually fixing the sidewalks. The people are tripping over the hazards. They're breaking their cars with the curves that are, you know, 14 inches above the pavement. You know, we're not, and there's no plan. I've asked, I've made public records, but there's no plan to get these, these infrastructure issues addressed. You know, there's a little, we're going to chip away at it. And we're going to do a little window dressing over here. But, you know, 60,000 for sidewalks, that's a couple hundred feet. You know, it's, it's just, it's outrageous. You know, we're, we're doing a lot of feel good projects that we can brag about and say we're so modern and progressive, but you're spending like a drunken sailor and you're reckless like a, you know, teenager spending people's money that you're not accountable for. The police consoles, $350,000, $400,000. Those, I've talked to some experts in this radio technology and the Motorola consoles that have been proposed to be bought should not be bought. They are not the least expensive and most cost effective until we get a complete design done. Televate was supposed to be the needs assessment. It was supposed to be followed by an engineer design. That engineer design has not been done. The current leadership doesn't want to do an engineer design. So the, the radios, there's hundreds. There's thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars in those deferred equipment expenses that have been put in unbeknownst to most of you in prior years, police radios, police vehicle radios, et cetera. There's, there's a proposal to switch to first net with no analysis or measuring of where the coverage is better or worse than, than horizons. We know that AT&T lied to the state about where they had coverage. They also lied to the police chief about how priority and preemption works on an LTE network, but there's no expertise or due diligence there to, to untable that, you know? So the, the body cam should move forward, but you need the oversight. You need the police review commission or its next iteration with authority to make sure that these decisions are made. I've told you, I've given you the example that finding a way to turn on a smartphone to make recording. I just learned, I heard tonight. I'm not sure I believe it that the cruiser cam from the Mark Johnson shooting showed the drive down the street. The rate, the cruiser cam from the greater hitting a car on Elm Street that I told you about last week, does not show anything of the arrival. Could we focus on the budget, please? This is about budget. This is about, you've got hidden in the budget technology purchases for the police that have not been properly designed or vetted. The police radios, the consoles and others and cameras. So that's why it relates to the budget. You're proposing to spend money without having done the due diligence of planning. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on consoles that aren't the best thing because the plans that they are designed to integrate into have not been done. You know, and to get to hear you on the bandwagon of like, pull Montpelier out of the public safety authority. That's just so typical, you know. Long presentation. Yeah. Way over time. No, I haven't got any overtime to many of the people who spoke tonight. I think, I think you have, but I'd like to hear if you could bring this to a conclusion. Could you please pull your mask up over your nose? Thank you. Mr. Wetterkirk. Replacement of failing meters. Are we replacing them with meters that. That are only available to people with smartphones. You can put coins in and who's overseeing that process. Right now they're sticking labels and tape over phones and saying, you can't use these meters anymore unless you're a smartphone customer. You know. And who's responsible for that level of planning and accessibility and equal opportunity. That's all in our vision statement. Right. A redemption center, the folks that, that are now living at the. Dirt and park in its new location, brilliant piece of work. Point out that what capital city in the country doesn't have a place where the people who deserve the dignity and the equal protection don't have a place to go cash in a few nickels. You know, was that intentional to just, just ban the M&M and not make provisions for supplementing it with some. Alternate. I mentioned the no oversight of the deadly mistakes and that life threatening mistakes in the dispatch. The housing. Housing task force gets a hundred and $10,000 homelessness task boards get 45,000. That's the housing trust fund. Oh, it said no. Yeah. No, no money is appropriated to the housing task force. So that's an error in the budget document. That's okay. Okay. That's, that's better. That's, that's first good news I've heard. I aimed to please. Sure you do. Okay. We will be digging out of this infrastructure and maintenance deficit for decades. Once the current management is let go. So we need to, you need to start this process of really investigating the chronic history of failures before you renew the manager's contract in March. Well, I just encourage you to think about the, the inconsistency of what you've said tonight. And I'm not going to ask you to respond tonight, but you've been referring to this as a bloated budget and you're not spending enough money on it. And yet almost every substantive comment you've made about the budget has been things that you think we're not spending enough money on. Well, I can tell you where we're spending too much. 138,000, 139,000 for a city manager, plus dental, plus medical, plus retirement, plus telephone, plus parking, plus 10,000 for conferences. This guy is costing us $200,000 a year. Okay. Thank you. Vicki Lane, you've already spoken twice. So can you keep it brief? Yes. I really would appreciate it if statements did not single out people. And I really think that all of our employees and volunteers, and that includes the council because you basically volunteer, have the best interests of the city of Montpelier and its residents at heart. I don't always agree with them. And, you know, I don't always agree with everything that's done, but I don't think anybody has. In their hearts. I don't think anybody has the desire to screw this city over. And I, I really. Would appreciate less comments about. How horrible somebody thinks somebody is. Thanks, Becky. I appreciate that. I, I think, I think this, if the last two years have proved nothing. It's proven that we can be really nasty to each other. And we need to really work on that. And we need to really work on that. Thanks. Thank you. Anyone on the council have anything to say at this point? I would like to say, and I was really glad to hear many people comment about housing. And I'm sorry that they missed some of our initial discussion about purchasing the Elks Club land. And looking at that as having the city to control it. I mean, it's not just housing, making it not only just the rec center and outdoor recreation, but really being holistic about it. But we can't do that without owning it when we own it. Then we can turn it into something that gives us tax revenue, as well as a lot of quality out time. Recreation and buildings that will give us inside recreation, because here was here is where we live and not everybody can deal with the winters or the hot, hot weather. We need to go inside sometimes to recreate. So I was really glad to see those kind of comments because we are thinking that way about this land. Thank you. I think that's a great point. And another thing to keep in mind is if we develop a new recreation center somewhere other than Barry street, there's another building that potentially could be put to other uses. So I guess at this point, oh, Jean Leon, you have your hand up now. Again, if we could make it, make it fairly brief. Sorry, just a brief quick comment. So based on Donna's comment, I mean, I agree. The potential is phenomenal and the mixed use idea would be fabulous. But how about where the M&M Redemption Center was? Well, how about the use of that space? That's ours. Or partially states, partially city, now abandoned, now with the shed, now with issues. Thank you. Thanks. At this point. I just want to take a minute and thank everybody for the comments tonight and just to let folks at home know we, you know, we don't make these decisions lightly. And we, you know, we understand as can folks that contribute a bit more, you know, it takes a toll on everybody. But, you know, I sort of regret the idea that we can't have a more progressive form of taxation or limited municipal government. But I think, you know, as we noted, we see a lot of our neighbors falling through the cracks here, especially during the pandemic, you know, when the homeless this camping policy came up, we had 50 people here saying we got to do more, you know, we got to do more and we hope, you know, between the $425,000 investment in ARPA for a future hub there and dedicating resources to, you know, to the public sector, pure outreach, where at least beginning to like scratch the surface here of trying to help people get the help they need, you know, we hear a lot about roads, there's substantial investments into our infrastructure here to make sure, you know, there's less flat tires on the roads and the people that are tripping on the sidewalks investments in ADA, these things are so important. And it's been said, you know, the wreck center, we had three options. It's, we could have gone to the wreck fields out in the Elm Street there. We didn't think there was the room and didn't want to sacrifice the space for some of the other fields. We could have invested in the existing building, but, you know, it's past its expiration date, and it would take substantial investment to bring it up to speed and it's better to have options, better to take a fresh look at this. So again, I think a lot of these increases did come as a result of a robust public input from the town here. As Kate said with the energy advisory committee, we rely on our committee so much these volunteers. And, you know, all these years of saying we'll get to, you know, net zero, we need to put some investment behind that that actually make it work. Otherwise we're just having a conversation with ourselves. So reasonable people can disagree on this. I appreciate it. Vicki's comments about being civil to each other. We're all neighbors here, you know, we're paying the taxes as well. But I really appreciate just the thoughtful comments tonight from everybody in the audience. Thanks very much. So now I think it's time to close the public hearing and then for the council to take action on, on these valid or budget agenda items. So. You may take action there. If you choose to direct us to change anything before next week's meeting for the second public hearing, then this would be the time to do that. Also, we'll have the opportunity to make changes after the second public hearing. And. So, okay, so both the budget and the bond public hearings are now closed. Folks, what do we want to do? I. I apologize for my not breathing while everybody. Beyond your control, I would say. Do we need a motion to. Move what was proposed this evening on to the next public hearing is that. You don't need any motion if nothing's going to change. Like it's one question, I think for bill and then have it just share my overall thoughts and just echo the appreciation, really thoughtful comments and input tonight and from the hearing from the community in the last month or so. My question. So. Just tied to the ARPA money, which because that would not be increasing the tax rate, like did anything jump out? At you with the new guidance as something that could be a natural fit to. Move. We have looked at that. So. You know, it's still one time money. So we wouldn't want to put program ongoing expenses into it. So it would be moving. They probably capital or equipment. You know, from our capital improvement budget into the ARPA program, which just reduces. So that means next year, that's got a bigger jump as well, which, you know, that that's a choice. But that would really be the only way. That would really be the only place to take it from, or any other, you know, any sort of one time. Kind of expenses. So it's, it's not, it's not. It's not. You know, we could, and we've been thinking about it. And since we heard that there was going to be a change in the ARPA requirements. The first question that Kelly was, what could we, what could we do to reduce the taxes? And we kicked it around with our team, but it's just, you know, moving one thing around. So, you know, maybe it's an opportunity to have more flexibility to do some of the things we'd like to do. So, you know, put it toward some of these things. Thanks. Thanks for that. Yeah. Yeah. And if, you know, any epiphanies come up before next week, we still have another chance. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I guess just to share my thoughts for a minute. You know, I mean, I, I really have. So, you know, maybe it's an opportunity to have more flexibility to do some of the things we'd like to do in the future, but I really have struggled with this some. I mean, I really hear and appreciate and feel the concerns about increasing taxes at a time when costs for everything are going up. And I know that all of us on council have wrestled with that. And at the same time, knowing that, you know, week after week in here, we hear about these increasing needs. We've had to put so much on the back burner and on hold. We've had to, you know, and we've seen the impacts from our roads and just the human crises that are happening right now and the urgency of needs that are coming in and where the state is not stepping up to address human needs the way that I think they should. So more and more is falling on the city. So, you know, I think it's, there's so many obligations and so much kind of backfill from a couple of years of a pandemic that, you know, to me. You know, I've wrestled with it and I think this is a kind of investment that we need to make. We need to catch up. And I think this is really looking at some of these systemic issues. So instead of being in crisis mode year after year, let's actually try to address housing. Let's, you know, so that we're not just trying to do band-aids for unhoused people in our community. Like let's actually, you know, invest a little in an energy position and then we can save money for the community over the longterm by having a more efficient and clean energy. You know, so there's all these opportunities where if we can make strategic investments, it costs something now, but I really see it as a long-term investment that's going to set us up where the people in our community and our overall city government is going to be more effective and helping all of us thrive. I think also at this particular moment with so much federal money at the state level, us being as well positioned as possible to take what could be some really transformative investments. We need to be ready. We need to have the staff that can actually jump on those opportunities, identify them and take full advantage. And I think, you know, having full staffing and these kinds of investments right now are, you know, how can we look at this as a moment to make generational investments in our community? And so I think, you know, I understand and I really feel the concerns that I've heard about increasing taxes right now. And, you know, I, this is where I'm landing for now. We've gotten one more week, but this I really think it's responsible to try to actually look at the systemic issues and make investments instead of just continuing to put band-aids and underfund things and keep operating in crisis mode. I agree. I agree. I think that this has been a very transparent and very open public process. We've had this as one of the first two public hearings. We've had the budget workshops we've heard the last month we've heard from a lot of residents. And we have tremendous needs in the city and we made responsible decisions at the beginning of the pandemic. And it's been, those are decisions that involved cutting back on services that were important services at the time and people paid for it. Every one of us has heard from people say, well, the roads are falling apart. They're bad for our cars. And we know what it takes to fix the roads. It's devoting the money to fix it. And we're putting money in that. We've heard complaints about the city's webpage and how it's not what anyone wants to see. We've got money in here for that. We've got money in this budget for a lot of things that are really important needs, not only keeping the baseline operations of the city running, but also as, as you said, keeping and making some really big generational investments at a time when we have the ability to do that. So I'm not inclined to change this between now and the next public hearing. We'll see what we hear at the next public hearing, but I'm satisfied with where we are for right now. It occurred to me that you don't have to do this tonight. I don't know where to change the amount of the bond for the rec center that would require, you know, you've approved the 1.5 million. If you want to hear more about that before you do that, that's, that's fine. But don't want to lose track of that. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about because we've got that discussion later. I can wait till next week as well. Yeah. Okay. So that takes care of items 13 and 14 on the agenda. We're putting item 15 right to the item 16 right to the end. So that brings us to item 15. COVID-19 response and open meeting requirements. Is that, is that bill? I think that's Donna. You asked to have this put on. I did. I was wondering, I would feel more comfortable if the council decided that we all were remote. And that indeed with the guidelines now, we still would have to have staff in person. And, and I really want to protect the staff who has to be here. So I suggested the staff be in this room and the public be in that room and they can see the screen so that we're really trying to take full space of this very, very contagious virus. It's now going. So that's why I asked it to be put on the agenda because it's, to me, the council as a group works better if we're all remote or we're all here. And that's where I'm at. And so when you say this room and that room, are you thinking we would close off the? No, no, it'd be open. Just increase the space. You know, just less chance to travel. I mean, if I'm, I don't want to be here because of it. I don't want the staff who has to be here to be any more exposed than they have to be. Gotcha. Cameron, you were raising your hand. You don't want to be here at all. Hi, everyone. I'm Cameron. The assistant city manager. I just wanted to make sure we, you knew that we were watching the bill. I think it's two, two, two that just went out. I think both the house and the Senate have voted on it at this point, but that is that bill is proposing to bring us back to where we were at the beginning of the pandemic where it doesn't require a physical location and everything can be purely on zoom again. So I think that we all can decide to go fully remote at any time. We'll be here, but that we're hoping, I may well, I'll speak for myself on that one. I am hoping, you know, I've had COVID before and I'm really not interested in getting it again. So that might be a requirement. That might change really soon. And just so, you know, we are watching that and we'll let you know as soon as that. If that passes. Thanks. Right. This would be something in the interim. I guess I'll take comments from everyone else. I guess where I'm, what I'm coming from is with regard to going full remote with nobody physical, physically present, you know, that really concerns me because there are people who don't have the ability to participate remotely. And I, I want to keep the building open for those who can only participate by coming in person. And for my personal view, I also want to be here in person because I think the quality of the interaction is, is better in person than, than remotely. I think Donna's right that all remote or all in person is better than hybrid. And I just still feel pretty strongly that we should be in person, but that's my own opinion. Anyone else have anything to say about this? I have very bad asthma as you've noticed tonight and I am really not interested in getting sick. And I had posed this question to Donna because I was sick and under quarantine last week. So I didn't think I thought I had COVID. So I would feel more comfortable and safer being remote, but that's being super, super selfish right now. Anyone else have any thoughts? I just can't hear people. I would have to be telling Bill and, and Jeff all the time, speak up, speak up. I just give up. I can't hear things with the mask. It makes a huge difference. If I stay, you're going to hear me say that a lot. That's fine. It's really true. I hate Zoom so much. I see the bloody squares of my sleep. And I do kind of agree with Jack. I don't think it's as conducive to a good discussion as being in person. And said, you know, if there are colleagues and staff who, you know, do feel vulnerable and I do not want people coming to these meetings in fear and I would go to the flow and go back to the Brady bunch. Yeah. I mean, I'm fine with being here, but if we all consented to not be here, I would be really excited. And it is true that anybody could decide to be home and participate remotely, but you're either you're right. It's not, it's not as good. Yeah, I mean, I kind of agree with everyone on different aspects. I mean, part of me is like, we should do. I feel like, like the budget discussion next week, like maybe do one more in person because that's just such an important meeting and getting every detail right and being able to have as good a conversation. And then maybe after that we, you know, you know, assuming if we're still at like record breaking cases and that we could do, you know, try a zoom meeting. And if we're like, oh, it's horrible. We could always come back. But I mean, I think if people are feeling at some risk and that it's, I'm comfortable going back to zoom, I would just think maybe just next week one more, even though it's like right in the worst. This is what I'm struggling with. Okay, so why don't we revisit it after our meeting at our meeting next week and see how things look. Are you are you actually making a formal proposal to say go all remote once the budget's done. I think that's where I'll be inclined even though I also passionately hate zoom and spend all day on it and don't think about it. But, but I do think for, you know, our February meetings, we could probably do it. And if we're still at this and could reassess if, you know, cases are starting to dip and the circumstances seem to change, but that would be my, I guess what I would be supporting next week, unless something changes. And I'm open to doing next week remote to if other people feel really strongly just knowing the importance of getting the budget done. I think that's a good point. I don't know if there's some benefit to one more. Yeah, I would agree. Let's, I think that we, let's have this conversation again at the, at the end of our next meeting and look at those. Finish up the budget and then look at going remote from there. I share a hatred of zoom, but at the same time, if, if, yeah, at the same time, though, if, if anybody is not comfortable, then I am all for, I will, I will deal and we'll go remote and we'll, we'll do our best. I do agree 100% that it's sort of all in or all out. Like if we're half up here and half, like that's just going to not going to be conducive to any type of communication. So let's at our next meeting then decide and if that's the decision, then, then we can go back to, to the Brady bunch. Okay. Yeah. Stephen, do you have a quick comment? Yeah. The air cleaners. The air cleaners are very effective and they. Make it possible for this higher quality interaction. Our system here leaves a lot to be desired. And. And I've talked to Orca. I've talked to the council about it. I've talked to the council about it. And I think it's such that such an interaction such as Donna proposed, having the public further away and having the staff up here. Even that's going to require improvements to the microphones. Bill's microphone, especially is Bumi, Bumi, Bumi and others. You know, hers is working perfectly. Lawrence. Mike can be heard audibly. So I think we need to put some, some, some of this, some of this. Some of this is for the company towards improving the interaction, a screen on the back of this poll. So that it can be what's seen here. Cannot be seen for back there. So there's, there's some minor improvements. Feedback electronics, feedback, canceling electronics. These are things that Orca can pull a technician in and a designer and improve this council chamber for this. I'm just suggesting that it's not, it's not good to compromise. He's a very important in time sensitive discussions with who can, who can get noticed or voice only is even worse, which is what I'm limited to. Okay. Thanks, Steve. Vicki. Yes, I would like to reiterate what Jack said. I think it's really important and I think that that's where I'm hearing that you're going is that at least next week's meeting because next week is the final budget public hearing correct. Yes, is held in the city council chambers because there are people who can't. Can't access the zoom stuff. So anyway, unless all hell breaks loose in this coming week, which help doesn't. I think that's good. I agree with Jack. Okay, thanks. We'll move on to. We'll discuss that tape that up again. Next. That brings us to number 17 other business. Do we have any other business. Number 18 then council reports. How will we start with Lauren this time. My mind is blown. I know. Alternate but so yeah so. Okay. All that I have is. We'll have more time for it, but grateful to Jay for a service and he'll be missed and we can do more of that but what if we're in zoom. So just thank you Jay and really grateful that. My other colleagues are stepping up for reelection. This is very hard work and putting yourself out there really appreciate working with all of you so grateful for that. And then the only other thing, and I don't know if somebody else has better position to talk about it but Connor, Jack and bill and I were able to have a conversation about getting a basically request out to some of the these lobbying firms to try to line someone up so they can be representing my failures interests in the state house, particularly with all of the federal dollars flowing and some big needs that we have in a big legislative agenda. So we had come up with a process I don't know Bill if you want to describe it briefly but just wanted to make sure that everyone was good with where we have landed. The council had put in money for next year but also had talked about needing to do something for this current session. So the lobbying committee and I met and simply said how, you know, let's see if the council's on board we've got a draft. It's not really an RFP it's just give us a letter of interest and with some basic questions in it. We've got a list of all the peculiar lobbying firms so it's all it's all drafted. We've got the list it's ready to go. We would issue it tonight or tomorrow morning and asked them to give it to us in time for next week's meeting to go by Wednesday so we can have a recommendation for Thursday night and choose somebody and get going. You know, and obviously if it's more complicated we'll have to wait till the February meeting but then the session is almost half over so we wanted to move. But we figured we'd at least see if people were on board with that process. Committing anything yet until we actually make an agreement with somebody. And did that go to all the members of the council hasn't yet. Okay, because we want. It's good to me. Great. That's it for me. I don't have anything but Jay, I just wanted to say appreciate your help in my entry to this world of district three on the city council, and I'm going to miss our emails. And I don't have anything else. I've had some constituents email me with some concerns about the structure over in the empty lot where the, what is that place that was the curtain park. And so I would like to talk about that at some point, moving forward. Jay, I guess the cat's out of the bag. I'll have more say this late to this later but by obviously by process of elimination and not stepping to the mic earlier tonight. I'm not planning on running for reelection. I'll leave it at that. I will have plenty more to say, I did send a note to folks who have been really supportive of, of me and my time here these last couple years and I'm really appreciative of the work we've done but I'll just leave it at that for now. I'm actually quite angry at Jay so I'm going to see the tribute for another time though. Plenty of time to sing his praises in the future when the burning rage dies down. Just a couple of things that Lauren brought up today. I think it would be kind of we could just have a discussion of how we can welcome our new Afghani neighbors here. It was great to see so many of them up at the sledding hill and Hubbard park this weekend to look like they were in a great time but it'd be nice if we could have an introduction and just just put some faces to names and do a proper welcome somehow. And otherwise personal privilege I just took a new job as director of gun sense for month, working on gun violence legislation up at the State House so put me out of the mix of any gun stuff we discussed here but I'd like to look forward to getting into that. That's it for me. Thanks. Never take on the easy topics. I have nothing. Thank you all. He has three more meetings. I can arrest him and thank you. Yeah, and I don't have much to say other than I also appreciate greatly appreciate the work that Jay's done and the expertise that he's brought to the council. You know, one of the things that we learn is that everyone who comes onto the council has the things that there are some areas of real expertise that they bring to the council and we kind of hope that are our gaps at our strengths kind of mesh so that we can do a good job on everything that comes before us and I think that Jay has been really great to know about stuff that I don't know. I don't know anything about city clerks report city clerks still awake and does he have anything to report. Not nothing really to report I'm not going to vouch for being awake but yeah so I'm going to be away just so you all know for a couple days. There's a pretty. Okay, so my tattoo artist yesterday after a two hour appointment, you know close contact with masks is now incredibly sick. So, yeah, I'm probably not so good. But there was no exposure in the office just brief exposure well before I would have been contagious. So I just want to, since I mentioned that I want to make sure everybody feels completely comfortable going into the office it's all good. I'll do as much work and be as responsive as I can to members of the public from home and but yeah, come on in it's all good. It just occurred to me before I pass this over to build it. Actually, do have one other thing I want to mention we don't. I try not to mix the party politics with city business but we're the Democratic Committee for Montpelier is collecting winter clothes for homeless veterans and I'm collecting clothes up until this weekend at my house so if you have something. Feel free to reach out to me and fill up my kitchen even more than it's already full. Just a couple things reminder to all of the folks that just announced they're running for reelection and also anybody out there who is interested in running for election that the petition, your deadline to get your petitions in is next Thursday, and any other petitions that are coming. And so be aware of that. Just a quick correction there petitions for running or do the 24th. I am sorry thank you Mr city clerk. I thought they were all do the same day. Nope. No, okay so petitions for running or do the 24th. Thank you. But any if there are petitions for items to be considered on the ballot those are due by next Thursday. That's the only real announcement I have I just wanted to offer a couple of comments on. You know, several people mentioned communications tonight and I certainly agree with that that, you know, public communications is really important and the ability for people to participate. You know, we don't have to debate it now, although it might be good to have for future conversation. We're certainly open to any suggestions that people have and are interested in people's ideas. I don't, you know, we, we don't have to have these two public hearings and we do when we actually had people engaging in a public conversation so it's I find it interesting when people are in a public conversation saying we ought to have a public conversation I mean this is the public conversation. And we have had for many years. We held a pre budget meeting. We would have all the school staff all the city staff at the senior center, opened it up, advertised it did and you know, five to eight people would come. And so, you know, we want to be effective in our public communications we want to hold this in, you know, perhaps remote is now the way to go we could hold a public hearing we will be having a public information hearing on the budget and the bonds that in the last meeting in February before the vote, so people can get information we were right in the in the bridge article in great detail the report has a lot of detail. We post on front porch forum in those places pointing people to these hearings to come. I'm not trying to be defensive I'm saying that we are, you know, we're trying to do outreach, you know, I, we recognize the flaws with the, with the website and we're hoping to help them. And, but we still try to post these things so additional ideas for how we can do outreach that are actually going to be effective and get to people and that people will participate are welcome because we would we would love to have more more participation in the process and to provide information and things like the budget you know it's a lot. It's a lot of information and it is a weighty budget book and you know there was a time when we would go line by line through the budget. And people complain that we're in attendance that it was boring and didn't get anything out of it so I don't know what the right answers it seems like whatever we do is sufficient but we want it to be sufficient and I know public communication is a high goal of the city councils and of the community and of our staff so anyone with suggestions, please share them. Thanks. On to item number 16 discussion of real estate negotiations. I would entertain two motions. Really testing me tonight. All right. I move that we enter executive session. No, is that that's the first one is the other one. That's the second one. I move to find that premature general public knowledge of real estate matter. Well clearly place the city at a substantial disadvantage by disclosing our intentions, our intentions. Is there a second. All those in favor signify by saying I, I opposed. I move that we enter executive session to discuss. A real estate matter under the provisions of title one section 313 a one. To a to a two of the Vermont statutes. All those in favor signify by saying I, I was opposed. The executive session should include the city manager anyone else. Okay. Okay. We don't expect to, but we will come up. We will reconvene and come out after the session. Okay, we're going into executive session. All those in favor. I opposed. Okay. Jay. And I'd like to make a motion that we authorize the city manager to proceed with the purchase process of the. We, yeah, purchase process of the country club property based on the parameters we discussed in the executive session. Is there a second second. Any further discussion. All those in favor signify by saying I, I opposed. No objection. We will be in adjournment at 1034 p.m. Thank you.