 I am going to call the Board of Finance in order at 5.03 p.m. on August 7th, 2023, and sorry, September 5th, code flavoring, and the first item on the agenda is the agenda. We have Councillor Barlow and I here and we're on the third member of the board and Councillor McKee. So we have a quorum. I think we may be joined by Councillor Chang as well shortly, but let's get started and I welcome the motion on the agenda without the agenda. Second. Thank you. Any discussion on the agenda? Seeing none, we'll go to vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. That brings us to the public forum and we're going to look at Chief of Staff, Dr. Rinal, to advise if there's anyone member of the public that would like to speak to the quorum online. Sharon, I just enabled your microphone. You pressed star six times, but I'm not sure if you want to speak up on the quorum or not. I will. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay. So first off, I couldn't get in. I couldn't get in through the normal link. It sent me through CCTV and I didn't want to go that route. So I wasn't quite sure what was different, but I just wanted to alert you to that. So that's why I'm on the phone. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak. And I wanted to thank the counselors that have come forward with the agenda item that is offering, I think, $15,000 of council initiative funds for the community health center to study a facility that will deal with the parking that they now have a parking crisis. They now face with the elimination of some of the parking around their neighborhood. And so that leads me to my general comment, and this is to you, Mr. Mayor. And I say this in all sincerity, I truly respect and admire your housing agenda and applaud you for the prioritization of this. And one thing I think could be a little bit better is trying to figure out how to make those housing units more affordable. A lot that I have seen going up, certainly if it's large enough, they have to have 15 or 20 percent affordable units, inclusionary zoning, but a lot of the rest are just really priced so that working people can still hardly afford them. So that's still a problem for us. But I wanted to ask you, if you would dedicate some energy and time to look at how we balance the business community with the need for housing, I'm very worried that as we take parking away to create what some find are very good initiatives, I'm going to leave it that way. I feel that we leave like the Great Streets Initiative. A lot of comments came from the ski rack and other businesses about how it would impact them. These are long-standing businesses that provide great value, and I would hate to lose them or I'd hate to diminish their ability to thrive. And so with the Community Health Center, it's a health facility, but it's a business also, and it's located in the section of the city where people can walk and get to it. If we don't balance the needs of business, I don't feel we have someone dedicated looking at that balance carefully so that I feel that we are at risk of losing businesses or also at risk of not really encouraging businesses to come. So I'm asking you to really listen to what I have to say. I say it out of respect for your agenda, but out of concern for what I feel is something we're creating a vulnerability that really concerns me. So thank you very much for listening. Thank you Sharon. Appreciate your engagement and weighing in, and we, things later in the agenda, people talk a little bit more about the parking situation related to your comment. So is there anyone else online? So okay, there's no one, not seeing anyone in the room interested in offering public comment to the Board of Finance, so I'm going to close the public forum and we do now have a five item consent agenda in town to focus, give us time to have discussions on the more deliberate items and walk on motion regarding the consent agenda. I'd be happy to move that we adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated on Civic Clerk. Great. Thank you, Councilor Bees. So I can second it from Dr. Barlow. Any discussion of the consent agenda? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? And the motion carries unanimously. And welcome Councillor Jang. Hope you had a great, great trip. Looking forward to hearing more about it. With that, we will go to the deliberate agenda. The first item is at 4.1, an update on the initial receipt and obligation of nationwide settlement opioid money. I'll just, for any member of the public that's watching, we'll listen to clarifying for board members. This does really two important things that I want to call out and ask for the board and the council ultimately support for here. This, I urge people to take a look at the memo from Catherine Shatter, CAO, really details. So the two things it does basically is it will set up a really segregate the money that is starting to flow and is going to flow for the better part of 20 years to the city from these settlement, these opioid related national settlements. It's going to segregate that money and ensure that kind of give us additional level of assurance. Like we do with the tip districts to make sure this money is dedicated and preserved for the specific uses of addressing the overdose crisis, drug crisis. And then secondly, we're asking for support to commit $75,000 of those funds. We'll see in here how we've committed a kind of summary of how we've committed this fund so far. Hopefully there's not new information for any councillors who talked about it a little bit during the budget process. With this board action and council's action next week, we would be committing an additional $75,000 of the $220,000 opioid settlement funds we've received so far to the $100,000 of the $100,000 for criminal justice reform. To my perspective, BCJR is a bright spot and a very dark place to be right now with respect to the overdose crisis that BCJR has succeeded in getting more than $100,000 into treatment over the last year since they were set up. Councilor's favorite call, we gave them some additional funding from, I believe, ARCO funds. A year ago, we've also advocated very significantly at the state level, succeeded in getting the legislature to allocate significant funds for BCJR. Inexplicably, shockingly, frankly, the Department of Health has been unwilling to submit any funds to BCJR at this point, to the point where $150,000 was in the budget two years ago, only small. I think 10% of that was ever spent and they don't seem to be making any further commitment out of that fund. So basically, until we get that corrected at the state level, I think the city, my perspective, the city's going to continue to be able to be funded to keep this program going. They're not the only ones that value this effort. There are numerous other funders, smaller funders, that have supported BCJR, including the University of Long Medical Center, very significantly, and the Ben and Jerry's Foundation. And also, you may recall, seven days today, a very positive feature on the contingency announcement efforts that are being kind of pioneered at BCJR. But right now, again, I have talked to Dr. Lumiere directly about this. I do not understand why, despite the broad support this group has, the state is not funding them yet. But I would ask for the board and the council's support in keeping this program going at this time. So with that, floor's open further for a first question to say. I just have a question. So we're creating, basically, a restrictive fund that will be used specifically to address the opioid crisis. Could it be used for other drug-related crises, like the methamphetamine crisis, or would it be narrowly used just for these things and secondly, I support the, you know, the commitment to BCJR, but would we be able to use that money operation only in the city or some of that, for instance, like with carers? We're keeping questions. It is certainly my understanding and what we have to say turns out to follow up on this and put it on next week that we both have the authority from the settlement funds and the way we are setting up this restricted fund to, you know, that is part of the state or other related. It certainly would be kind of an overly boss ourselves in, and if you think of drug prices, which continues to allow them to change between responses for the lean path and, you know, that I bring many of the active drug users in, like me right now are combining bath and opioid use. They're often found together. I don't know who's cutting into that. And we need a walking treatment methods given that. So it's certainly my intended goal to do better than that. We are using a fair amount of them. So as you see the memo, you know, with this commitment, we will be about $220,000 of committed funds of the funds we have received so far. $160,000 that would be for internal use for the opioid decision. I think it is, and there's quite a bit more and there's more coming. So I think it's an interesting question you're asking whether ultimately you might want to think about this as a future source for BTG CARES. And I think your point, I think it's an interesting point, and one of the things further about in the current year budget, we've, you know, for years allocated funds for the city share of BTG CARES and we have a sort of urgent need for BTG CARES to continue to operate. But this is a one in the near commitment. This is not an indication. In fact, it's not my goal that this would continue permanently. And I think this should be part of, state is the primary social service funder in Vermont. And I think they're not getting state support. So I hope that there can be support for this request and before making further amendments, we'll get further thought too, but I think the raise here, I believe that the CARES comes. Councillor McGee. Thank you, Mayor. I'd be happy to make the motion is recommended on Civic Clerk. And we just ask for the floor back after a second. Thank you, Councillor McGee. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Barlow. Go ahead, Councillor McGee. Thanks. I'm glad that the city is stepping up where the, the state is dropping the ball here. I think, you know, we've seen lots of positive work happening at VCJR. And I'm just glad that we're continuing to invest in that. And I'm curious and we don't have to talk about it more here, but would be interested in maybe getting a full council update on some of the areas where the city would like to invest, depending on how much money we get from these other settlements in the future and some of the things that we might be planning for as those funds come into the city. Thank you, Councillor McGee, for the support on the VCJR investment. As you'll see, like with this commitment, we will, I think we're doing a reasonably good job of like, I think we're in a hot crisis with what's going on with drugs right now. I am heartbroken by the reversals of the gains that we made in 2018 and 2019. And I am very concerned that this problem is out of control and continuing to grow and should be treated as a crisis. We've been trying to take that approach with these new resources as they come in and to get them deployed. And so with this commitment, essentially all the money and a little more that we currently have in hand will be committed. There is more coming soon and I would like to come back to you soon so that as soon as we have those funds, you know, so that we can continue to deploy this money rapidly. I think there's urgency to do it. So it's a little bit, it has been a little bit, I would support us doing having that conversation soon. It has, you know, one thing that we have been trying to kind of calibrate our investments a little bit to be high-impact and be investing in areas that are not being covered by state investments. The state of course has, as counselors may remember, about 70% of the settlement funds are flowing to the state. And that is now, it is adding up what the state has. And so I think when we come back and talk about it further, I think we can sort of frame what we're going to try to do in relation to that state funding. I would say I won't go too far down the tangent here. We got a lot of other items, but I am concerned that the state money is not being treated with urgency and is not getting out there. And I would welcome more counselors on that as well. Thank you. Okay. Any further discussion of this item? If not, we'll go to vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Please tell me, make sure you follow up on that. The next item is the Champlain Street Park Renovations to be our ready to move forward with the construction contract. This item. Welcome Cindy and Max. I think Max, he's pointing to you to help take this off. You can just give us a short summary. Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to give a short summary. So we actually sort of started outreach on this project prior to the pandemic. In 2019, holding a number of events in the park and some partner organizations for the community. And it's been sort of gathering feedback just on what people wanted to see happen in Champlain Street Park. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic and some budgeting shifts, we unfortunately had to sort of reprioritize things and weren't able to return to this project until 2020, 2021. And we were able to return to Champlain Street Park. We weren't able to return to this project until 2020, 2021. And we kind of had to pick back up with our outreach. But after a pretty comprehensive initial outreach process, including some additional meetings, tabling in the park, having a number of surveys put out, firing translators to translate surveys and hear from some other communities from around the park. We went into a period of design over the winter and came back with some additional surveys and public meetings in the spring. And essentially heard from our community that they wanted to see this park remain kind of as an open green space in our city's downtown with a simple playground. And mostly just get a lot of TLC, cleaning up a lot of the brush around it was a priority replacement of the fence, adding some lighting if we could, and to make the playground a bit bigger and more expensive. And I can do a quick share screen just to sort of share the final design we sort of came through out of that outreach process and give a quick run through. I just need somebody to enable stream sharing here. We're just doing that. We'll do it in a second. Thank you. Just a quick review in case anybody doesn't know Champlain Street Park is this little piece of green space mid block here on South Champlain Street between King and Maple streets in case anybody's not aware. It's one of our few pocket parks in the city. And so this brings us kind of to the concept we came up with based on what we heard back from the community. So we plan to put in a large concrete pad seating area with some picnic tables up here at the front of the park where it's most visible and having a curving walkway that is concrete to accessible surfacing pervious rubberized surfacing back here for the playground. Speckling in a couple of benches there and biker acts as well as new signage. If you've been by the park recently you'll see we've actually replaced this fencing and have been working with some neighbors to kind of try and keep the brush down as much as we can, which is a little bit tricky because we actually don't own most of the land surrounding the park. So this area here we kind of have to periodically ask and negotiate for that land odor to let us to go in and clear out all of the brush to keep the sight lines kind of visible into the park. And sort of moving on I can kind of give you a little bit of some renderings we came up with a while back to kind of show what we're picturing is the sort of the long-term vision here. So this is kind of looking from the street into the park, what that walkway would look like, adding some landscaping on either side. I ignore the playground here. We'll get to some actual options that have been presented to us by the vendor we're hoping to work with. And we'll just be looking from the playground kind of back into the park leaving sort of an open green space here for people to kind of use for those informal uses and otherwise just kind of keeping things open, keeping that seating area right up at the front to create sort of a more welcoming entrance to this pocket park. There's just sort of an aerial view of that same image. So this is, I'll go through these pretty quickly because we really need to discuss this a little bit more with the vendor. It's going to be a sort of a design build process for the playground. But these are two kind of options that have been presented to us out of our bid process. So skipping into it here is sort of like a swing set, some basic play panels, seating, and one of the things we've asked for at this park in particular is a playground structure for ages two to five, knowing that several daycare centers come here to use the park and that is the primary age group that is coming to use the playground. And I'll go through these pretty quickly. So this was the first option that was presented to us. And this is the second option, sort of the climbing structure, another sort of small playground structure. And again, having sort of an inclusive element with the swings here and also prioritizing something we heard from the community, which is that they very much missed the swings that were removed from this park, I think about a decade ago. And this is just to give them a last brief overview of the outreach we did. This was everything we sort of went through and we collected a total of 89 surveys through that process. And these are kind of like the counts of different things that we heard from the community that they wanted to see as well as some of the sort of open-ended feedback we got about generally just wanting to see this park taken care of a bit more and improved. And so that I'm going to stop share and just jump back to our process, which was we put this project back out for bid finally in September and received quite a few competitive bids for it and are looking to move forward with our lowest cost bidder, who has also sort of given us the best playground options of what's available. So thank you for your time and if there's any questions, I'm happy to take those now. Thank you, Max. I would just like to acknowledge at the beginning of the discussion on this and of course, this part, which Max just described, which you've been in the process of attempting to renovate for some time, received some philanthropic support for going out early in the summer, later in the summer, this part of the force was to say, we believe to be this brutal, brutal murder of Kelly Cousin that took place there and just rob it. You know, the whole city seems to be very effective and saddened by this. And just want to acknowledge that as we talk about this part further, I think it is certainly that I don't think, I think if anything, the fact that that took place is a further reason for us to move forward with this investment by distinction like that acknowledgement. So with that, I think we have four years open for discussion. That's part of it. Thank you for that. I just had a small technical question on the funding, that any proposed restrictive fund balance. Is that money that was allocated in a broader budget year that was like sort of your mark for this project? That's why it's restricted. Where is there no use? Cindy, actually, I think you could probably do a better job of speaking to that question than I could and that specific funding source. Yeah, so we have with Penny for Parks, we've allocated out a certain amount of expenditure and we have about 30, 39,000 or something that we had not allocated yet. So the sense was when we were looking for it, we were working through with the Court Treasurer's Office the history with Penny for Parks and it took them a while to work through how much we had in each of the accounts. So once we got to the resolving what that was, there's about 30 something thousand in change left in there after what we were already planning to spend with current projects and the projects were at 0.24. And so that's what we're using. Of course, one of that, when we realized that we needed really good value engineer things out of this project, which, you know, it feels like it's already a pretty tight project. It felt like that was for the use to tap into those available funds to do it. Okay, I was just the idea of it restricted as being assigned, you know. Oh, yeah. So it's sort of like an assigned fund balance or any kind of other stuff. I think the sense was restricted just in that it's restricted for 20 minutes. Understood. Okay, thank you. Further questions for this guy? Motion on the sale. I'm not going to make the motion as indicated. That's exactly it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council. Barlow has made the motion. Can we have a second second by. Just Mickey. Discussion. Seeing none. We will go to a vote. All those in favor of the vote, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed. Motion carries. Okay. Thank you. Moving on and we just get started. Yeah. I like to go. So I would say it's just, you know, my, it's not a good sign up, which is the way they celebrate. Serious. Restoration. Stick. I'm going to get this up. Right. Sure. Very long. So. Hello, cemetery. There is a store. Home on the site, which is currently being used for a lot of purposes to City employee office, meeting area for the public to come in and do business as a cemetery. And it also acts as a secondary building to the Louisa Power Chapel, which is right next to it for backup, things like restaurants and meeting room and teaching and mixing that in there. It's a building that is used quite a bit and has had deferred maintenance on it. So what we would like to do is do a little bit of restoration to the outside of the building so that structurally it stays down and take care of roof leaks and water damage that are happening, take care of the porch, which is failing and just make sure that not only the building stays in as good shape as we can possibly make it because we need to use it for a long time for now, but it's also safe for the public and for the employees that are in there. The design work actually started with Cindy before I was even part of the facilities team with her. So it's been going on for quite a while and something that we spend a lot of head planning for. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. Floor is open for questions discussion for motion. I second. Thank you, Councillor Barlow and Chang. Any further discussion? Seeing none, we'll go to vote. All those in favor of motion please say aye. Aye. Thank you, post. Motion carries unanimously. Thank you. I think the board noted the role that Kim plays in making sure we take care of our city buildings and this is a pretty example of the work that's going on for us on May 1st. Thank you. Thank you. 4.4. This was referred to in the public forum. Northland is the only project in the community also in this parking lot. I think it would be helpful if you both sort of give a quick summary of exactly the action here, but maybe a little broader context to create your comfortable sharing thing about the early weeks. So we have a lot of changes on the earth. We're seeing that by looking at this program. Great. Thank you, Mayor. Chairman Spencer, Director of Public Works. We have been in coordinating with the state of Vermont for a repaving project of all last one time in the highways, which the public wanted to understand as kind of state highways through the city of Burlington, which includes a section of North Moonee's Avenue, which was repaved this year as part of that effort. We've been working with the community to work on the implementation of the Moonee's Avenue Board or Study, which was a project underway from 2018 to 2020. And then followed up with a parking management plan for all of North Moonee's seeking to achieve the city's multimodal goals while limiting impact on the public related to the reduction in on-street parking. There's been a long kind of concerted effort. We briefed the two frequently and the city council occasionally on the work there. And there's been a number of strategies put in place to minimize the impact of what recently was installing bike lanes on a key two block section of North Moonee's Avenue that allowed continuous bike lanes, really from the Moonee's Key Bridge in the city of Moonee's Key to downtown Burlington. So a number of initiatives have been undertaken. There was a $15,000 grant program offered to businesses along the board or DPW worked with area businesses to try to open up their off-street parking for more public parking. Well, that was not as impactful as I would have liked. We did get one property owner from Unlegal Aid to continue the use of their private parking for public use after hours. And there were some modest efforts to secure additional off-street spaces for the community health center. We reduced the parking fines for time-limited violations sitting wide in response to concerns along the corridor. And we've been working with community health center of Burlington to see more off-street parking with them. As the memo lays out, they've spent around $13,000 with a design engineering firm to explore whether off-street parking could be developed on adjacent parcels next to theirs. And they have asked us, the city, whether we would consider, after we showed some options to them that we believe would be lower costs and lower impact, whether we would consider funding a portion of this next phase of design work that they will need to undertake. And they have asked the city council's Transportation Energy Utilities Committee for a recommendation to the council, which the two provided its August 22 meeting. And I think we have looked in good faith with the community health center on other grant sources for such off-street parking. It is a challenge to find federal sources for private off-street parking. To date, we haven't found any promising leads, but we'll continue to look. So if the city council would consider this $15,000 contribution, it would be another good faith step in assisting a key partner in the city on their efforts to work with adjacent property owners on developing additional off-street parking. Happy to answer any questions. And before we get to questions, I just want to say thank you to Inver, just a huge effort you put in to try to ensure that this change is a successful one and then countless hours to be spent with the health center and other stakeholders to have these responses possible to marking concerns as we're making this really important change to the active transportation allowance. Thanks for your attention. With that, is there any kind of more likely to proceed with my phone's comments? Can you make the motion? Thank you, Councillor Jing. Seconded by Councillor McGee. Discussion? Councillor Morse. I just want to also thank Director Spencer for all the leads down the corridor. I know it's a really sort of challenging problem we have there. We also know that the community health center puts major pressure on that first few blocks, just beyond groups that haven't. So if we could find off-street parking and go one way during the rest, and someone is the short-term parking needs of other organizations, residents, businesses, so the tune has been focused on this issue and we're fully supportive of this. Sorry, I didn't mean to say this already, but the health center is now working with the housing authority of five or six few spaces. Yes, there were six spaces that the BHA had offered for off-street parking for staff of the community health center. The last I understood from the health center is that they were finalizing those kind of agreement details to unlock those spaces. And my understanding is that that has been done, but I have not confirmed this. Okay. I think we have a motion on the side here. Any further discussion? Seeing none, we'll go to the vote. All those if there's a motion please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries to the other side. That brings us into the consult point five. Seeing none, if you could have your item. Welcome. You're a long line of items from us this evening. Great. Next is the acceptance of V-Trans Highway Class-Q roadway program grant for north Avenue Road and Strip-Same. Thank you for letting me share your board of finance. So we are looking for acceptance of the V-Trans town highway grant to conduct the aiming project on our avenue from Plansford to Stanford. So if you've driven down that stretch road, it's in a pretty poor shape. It's delaminating at several locations. As an interim process, as part of our enhanced patching this year, we're going into some patching in the southbound lane. It's starting to delaminate there. So we think that there's some imminent failure given winter conditions coming up, but we're all looking at this will be part of the CY-24 Navy project. And it's a $200,000 grant that we'll be paying up front and seeking the investments. And then we've already budgeted for the additional costs and a local match to finish on the project. Got it. So, you know, are there any comments here? Any questions, comments? Motion? No. Just don't want to debate. All right. You can't debate. It's not a debate. Thank you, Councillor Arlowe. Do we have a second? Seconded by Councillor McGee. Further discussion? Okay. Seeing none, we'll go to you. A vote. All those in favor, motion please act. Are there any opposed? Motion carries in the answer. Thank you. Uh, 4.6 budget amendment for 79 Kind Street, sales tax, real allocation funds for PTC public improvements projects. Welcome, Laura. Thank you for the amount on this. But I think you'll have to just sit with me. So, right. Yeah, certainly. This is a two part city place kind of item tonight. The first one is to basically amend the budget to accept grant funding in. It's a common thing for us tonight, which is a good problem to have. And essentially, CEDO pursued this in collaboration with the city and approval of the city council back in 2021. It's a sales tax reallocation for just large development projects to use a percent of their sales tax above and beyond a certain amount. So this is coming from the state of Vermont as an opportunity to reinvest in public improvements in front of these development projects. So as we have just barely recently started into the city place project from previous council approvals back in spring, we are now looking to properly amend the budget so that we have a way to expend and then also receive these funds back from the state of Vermont. So that is the summation of the sales tax reallocation item. It does go very closely with the next item as it relates to the acceptance of congressional direct spending for the kind of the overall budget is what's going to be called the DC public improvements project. So this is one component of it. It's the public improvements that's being done by city place partners. And I will speak to you about the other item next agenda. Okay, great. Questions, comments for the board? That's what we need. I'm happy to make the motion as recommended on civic clerk. Thank you. Do we have a second? First I'm going to make Councilor Chang. We're going to discuss the motion. Councilor Brown. I just I had a question again as I read the budget event request and the little block it talked about, you know, the sentence was stood out to me was for the $300,000 of the Gio 23 bond funds to the local match that have been approved under F-24 and originally allocated to the annual sidewalk contract with the bond. That's the part that sort of stuck with me. So we're not, we're not, but yes. Okay, but we're not, we're not going to do sidewalk. So that was like, and I think I understood that from the rest of the item, but I wanted to be explicit in my question. For this one and what basically we're adding a pure $480,000 to the project and we didn't have to have a local match for this person. And then yes, I hope you're happy to answer your sidewalk question. Do now we're in the next day. Why are you going to answer that? Just keep on running on this. So as we pursued the congressionally directed spending, there is one block of Cherry Street. We also have our other project manager, Julia Ursocki, here with me, who was the primary crafter of the memo, but we can talk about the budget. There is one block that is not eligible for Waterfront TIF as our local match and so we have to use other city funds to be able to accept the fullness of this $12 million grant. We have to come up with $3 million ourselves. The one block, one fifth of the $3 million, $600,000 needs to come up with something else. The sidewalks on Cherry Street are not in the best condition. They were already on our list of sidewalks that needed to be replaced. And so the value of the sidewalks to replace them on the whole of Cherry Street is $600,000. So we are taking our GEO bond money that was going to go towards replacing those sidewalks and using it and leveraging it as our local match to do more streetscape efforts. So it's slated as sidewalk money, but it's leveraging it to be more based on the fact that it already needed to be done. Thank you. That's fine. That's very helpful. I read the memo a couple of times and it still was like... No, it's not. It's not as clearly outlined. Thank you very much. Yeah, I think we've got a motion on the second already for... I did it as before as we should support one-sixth. Any further discussion on part one-sixth? Seeing none, we'll go to vote. All those in favor of that motion, please say aye. Any opposed? Which carries unanimously. And that brings us to the related item, which we've already talked a little bit about, the 4.7, the Acceptance of Brand Agreement for the Congratulatory Directed Spending for Tripp Street side, Cherry Street Association of EDC Public Improvements. And, you know, we've had some... A little bit of a public announcement discussing this already, but let me just reiterate to this, City Stanks for the hard work that they've done to secure this. It's pretty remarkable, one of the largest... One of the things that I've been talking about, I haven't had any congratulation in the past spending, it wasn't a thing, but it is two largest, maybe nine or four minutes. So, you know, in the end, so congrats, the Stanks are one of them on that. Anything else we have in the seven or eight? Happy to answer any questions, but just do want to highlight that this is part two, and what will be part three is the upcoming acceptance for the raise grant. We are working with Federal Highway on that agreement, and anticipate that October, November timeframe to be able to bring in front of the City Council, which will complete the picture of funding for the entirety of Bank Street, Cherry Street, and the two new Pine St. Paul Street. So, you know, there's still some places, ongoing projects, there's still some two miles south of the threshold, with the TIF, and it's relatively low, the plan exactly how much that invests, and we can make the Council remember, we found this mechanism to use some additional indebtedness by the ultimate amount, the ultimate size of the TIF is still to be determined based on the speed and the private improvements. That said, I think we have with these two remarkable grants and the progress for the project today, we have a very good chance that we will be able to complete at least the eight blocks that were initially talked about, we'll vote it back in 2016 of new public infrastructure, and a real possibility that we might actually be able to expand that to 10 blocks went all the way to the New Ski Avenue. You think about, you know, to kind of count up all the different blocks that are downtown, it's not that big blocks, 10 blocks is a really substantial portion that's going to get rebuilt, and in a very profound way on this result of all these grants, as long as it works. So thanks again to the table. But that floor is open for promotion or discussion. Councilor McGee. Thank you, and thank you all for the work on this. I only have one question. It's related to the cities paying for these improvements, at least with this grant upfront, $12 million upfront seems like a lot. So I'm just curious, you know, as we look at pretty tight budget lines, where that money is going to come from and how we're going to make that work, it's a pretty technical question. So if there's not an answer for it tonight, I'd be happy to discuss it over email. We're happy to answer that one. Councilor McGee, the department and also other departments that receive these grants can stay mostly on the opportunity to seek reimbursement on a monthly basis. So after we've incurred an expense, we're able to build our funding source so that they get reimbursed. The city is really only out of the cash, usually about an average of about three months, which is a time that we pay the expense and seek our reimbursement and they pay us back. Sometimes it's a little longer, sometimes it's a little less inside of DPW, but we are able to turn that over. We also do work with the CT office as we hit construction to understand the cash flow that happens because that is pretty substantial. We've been working with the CT office closely on the Parkway project and would anticipate doing the same thing at school. This congressional directed spending and the race grants will be comparable to that project's finances. Great, thank you. Thank you for having me, it's been a great time, Laura. And something that we have available to us and sometimes it's prudent to do is, if you think cash flow is going to be an issue, which it is not, but it is a place to grant, it's a patient note, which is designed for this type. We know the money is coming from the federal government, but need it sooner in the time, so it's not a big place to have investment, but not sure what that will be necessary. Further discussion and questions? Motion on this item. Happy to make the motion, Mr. Mayor. Okay, thank you, Councillor Jang. I'm seconded by Councillor Parlow. Further discussion? Seeing none, we'll go to vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. And this brings us to the final item of the night, 4.8, authorization to amend project budget and execute a construction contract to the East Avenue traffic calming. Another DPW item, I don't know if Councillor Booker is still, Councillor Booker still wants one. Interested in the East Avenue improvements that this is going to be nice because we've been involved. Got it there, right? Yeah. That's a prize. ESAB, New York Central, nice improvements. Going to tee it up a little bit. Yes, absolutely. So this traffic calming request came from the neighborhood a couple of years ago. We've got this project for our traffic calming program. So we did that in the collection. We got that change, we're above the 25 miles per hour that it's posted at. So we developed this project to install two raised crosswalks and three of these median chicains to reduce the traffic that. I must say I had to go Google chicains when this came through. I don't want to strike the slow down, but it's a journey to go back to the 1600s. Wow. So it's basically a jog in the road. So it's like this horizontal displacement where you have to slow down to kind of maneuver. It's a median chicane because of the bike lane. So we're keeping the bike lanes on the west side, but it kind of acts as the two sides of the chicane that help jog people around. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Questions? That was a part of that. Thank you. I'm just, I'm interested in the different traffic calming features we use throughout the city. Like the one that I'm still like sort of wondering about is the one we put on North Nath to be by ASC out, whether or not that actually slows anybody. Depending on the kind of car you're driving, drive over that, you're barely able to see. But the chicane is something that's new. We haven't tried that in other areas of the city that way. So we have a parking chicane on Bright Street where we just basically created that jog by flipping the parking from the others to the other side of the street in the middle. And we just completed our post evaluation of that project and found like a mile per hour speed reduction from like 26 to 20 or something like that. So a little bit different in that the park car has created the chicane, not at her median, but it's a much lower bike street. I think we also have one on Brooks Ave. A chicane, but that was well before I went to go. The piece I'd add is that we have a number of tools in our toolbox in each street is different. And the challenge with this street was that given a number of attributes along this street, it really did fit some of the other methodologies. So given its proximity in a predominant emergency response route to the hospital, given the average traffic on the route given the change of use along the corridor being predominantly residential, having some commercial, it really took us a number of times. And this was the tool in the toolbox at the end where we actually only had one alternative that we were showing the neighborhood, which led to some good robust community conversation around whether it was the right alternative. And I think in the end with some modifications adjusting in scope, it's got robust community support there. Great. Deconstruction. And I appreciate the respect for each of them using different tools for the different applications. Certainly in many places, I want to consider the narrowing of the roadway and intersection and something that has a major impact on drive streets. Okay. Questions? Are we ready for motion? We have a motion to add. I'm happy to make the motion. I just recommend another clerk. Great. Thank you, Councillor McGee. Seconded by Councillor Jang. Discussion? Seeing none, we'll go to vote. All those in favour of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Everybody opposed? The motion carries unanimously. And we are, if there is no objection, given that we have completed the work of the board for tonight, we will adjourn at exactly this spot on the dash. Let's see how about that.