 Why don't you just focus in on this? What caused you to get delayed though? What caused I have to make no long for? What's the DID? Do you see that? The other side of the bar, the other side of the DID. Maybe we should take up dance lessons with the sun. Where did they go? That's a good idea. You need a tune. That's a good idea. To weight balance it. Hello Amanda. Hey guys. Good evening. Good morning. You're welcome. How are you? I'm fine. You're back though, right? Yep. I'll come back soon. She wants to watch out for us. Let's try it. Let's try it. Go back. Let's see. That's the thing. I heard you say you're going to do a dance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No I did not. You're back though. I can't see. We're watching you. Maybe. So then particularly the things you said, what kind of challenge did you want to be? We live for who are the women behind this. We have a lot of that. We're just right. So where are we going to go? OK. We're going to West. There. We're going to do the same. I'll turn you back. We have this new valuable woman. No. Review the policy, see if it's bad, you know what I mean? I like the law. Check out those slides. Show the industry a little better. Why are you doing this? That's what we were talking about. That's what we were talking about. How are you? How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. We get paid by the sign-in. Hmm. Hey stranger. Okay. Yeah. All right? Yeah. Can we proceed? Hi everyone. Can I get your attention? everyone have a seat. Hello, neighbors. Let's get going here. We're starting a little bit late, but thanks everyone for coming out. My name is Alec Bauer. I'll be moderating the festivities this evening. I'm on the award five NPA steering committee. Along with myself here on the committee we have Bill Kehoe, Joanna Grossman, Joe Derry, Mohammed Jafar, and we have two, Andy Simon, thanks in the back, Ben Trappers, also on our steering committee, not here this evening. Maybe he's watching. Hi, Ben. We are presumably streaming live on Channel 17. Thank you, Channel 17. Much appreciated. We do have our open forum here in the beginning of the meeting. As I mentioned, we're starting a little bit late, but we should have time for everything on our agenda. If you haven't signed in yet, at some point please do on your way out or back in or out a second time, as you see fit. First thing on the agenda is open forum, an opportunity for community members to raise a question, voice a concern, make a compliment on ideally tonight, since we're primarily focused on election and candidate related issues, on non-election related issues, but by all means open forum. Do we have any takers on open forum? Andy Simon. I just want to remind you to avail yourself of the next gap anytime you're in the meeting. Anybody else? I just want to call it that. I saw like three reports in a C-click fix in like a week in our neighborhood, and they're all resolved within a week. Wow. And so I think it's a great tool. Nothing's perfect because we know so many people, but overwhelmingly I think it's a great tool. What kind of issues were they? And you're in the elderly neighborhood virtually. So what's the problem? Potholes and ice and ice. Anybody else see potholes lately? No. I don't know where you live, but where I live off the client street there's a few potholes. Anybody else on open forum issues otherwise? Okay, in the back here. Yeah. Welcome. I'm also on the board to remind people that there is a jazz brunch, Jenny Johnson's jazz brunch on March 31st. And this is the second annual one. And the first one was really great and well attended and in the way front. I don't know if there's anybody else? Yeah. And then there's also Simon auction items there. There's dinner for two women in the feast row and on Bargains Jewelry and trade wins and I'm on stage company and shoes. So I hope people will feel a sense of fundraiser. So tickets are $40 if you buy them or advance. So if you have any questions, you're welcome to ask me but I hope people will come over here. Welcome to the chat. Anybody else in the back yet? My name is from here. On behalf of zero, it's a new campaign. And I want to extend an invitation to everybody. We believe that restrictions on ballot petitions, voter initiatives and popular referendums concentrate political power and create an equitable policy that works on social inequalities and undermining the democracy initiatives and referendums are methods for regular people to have a direct say in our city's policymaking process. And the current election rules are set out in Burlington City Charter, deprived voters any legal power to influence ballot questions given city hall, exclusive control of the process and effectively removes the voting population's ability to hold its member members accountable. This stands in contrast to Vermont's time honored tradition of participatory democratic democracy reflected in both our state constitution and in the municipal charter of other communities, which grant voters, regardless of social or economic status, the power to propose repeal or change municipal rules to attract both ballot measures are fundamental to democracy. They function as part of the checks and balances necessary for collective self governance by providing a mechanism to hold public officials accountable. They are used to roll over to assert popular control over public resources to prevent concentration of power by economic elites and domination of public institutions by private interest. Mass participation enrich the political process by harnessing diversity of talent and perspective for creative solutions to address collective needs and concern. We believe it's time to update the rules of election in Burlington and bring them in line with other cities and county Vermont and beyond. We urge every eligible voter to sign and invite everyone else to sign our petition for city charter amendment granting full voters the power to propose change or ordinances during elections. Please consider donating, getting involved and other ways to support and let's take the first necessary step to affirm our universal human right to meaningful equitable political participation. If you are interested in getting involved, please read our website, propertiesinzero.org. We are also on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else in the comments? Okay. Next item on our agenda, Earl Weinberger, mayor. We have, we just talked about, we've got a few minutes here in the beginning of Mayor's time on the agenda for his commentary on ballot items and we'll open the floor questions. Great. Thank you, Alec. Thank you to the other members of the, of the steering committee. Maybe I'll, I can't tell if I should stand or sit here. I'll try standing. You know, appreciate statement free just made. And I would, you know, I think it's fitting that the next thing on the agenda night is about for my perspective how direct democracy is very much alive. And while here in the city of Burlington, in that four, you will have four items before you, when you, on town meeting day, where you, the voters have the full authority over whether or not these important changes to our tax policies and to our, really our form of government, our structure of government go through or not. And that is something that is very much given directly to the voters. And we have as we, I think, I always feel like we're doing our job as elected officials, if we're bringing forward a bunch of issues for consideration. And that's what's, what's happened here. I do, since it's been raised here, we'll just say briefly, do you think it's important that the city council retain the ability to occasionally do what it did this time and say that it is too late to take a certain advisory ballot item to the ballot. I think that's actually protecting the rest of our democracy and keeping our local democracy functioning. If the areas of the, where the city charter says it is the mayor and the city council's job to figure this out if that discretion is retained. But we can debate that more another time. It sounds like this will be an ongoing discussion. Here are, excuse me, there are, there are the four ballot items actually before I forget one other thing when you go to vote on these ballot items and your city council candidates and your school board candidates and referendum, you will as always have a chance to get a copy of the city's annual report. Today's just came in off the printers today. It's always an exciting day in city hall when the new annual report comes out. I only have one copy tonight, but there will be dozens and dozens of them at the ballot boxes, of course, hundreds of them. And this year we're doing something that we have not done before, which is we have a equity report as part of it'll be inserted inside the front cover. Something I committed the city to doing using its new VTV stat capability, which we've developed over the last couple of years, which is we have a city has a data analyst and a city function now where every department develops metrics and made a commitment, excuse me, last April as part of the state of the city that we would turn a significant part of the capacity of BTV stat towards examining, measuring equity issues within every city department. This is our first attempt at kind of collecting that all, putting it into one document. It's definitely not a perfect document. It's the first time we're doing this. Thank you, Andy. So we look forward to hearing any feedback you have on how it comes out this year. And my hope is that this becomes something that becomes kind of expected and part of the annual report process every year. This is also online in the city web page. It should be it's not on the homepage yet. And let me we got to make sure that we make sure it is you can get to it by putting equity into the search function and it comes right up. All right, so here's the the the four about items that I was going to speak to about number two is about maintaining city services. For just the second time since I've been mayor. So eight budget cycles now, we are coming forward and requesting a modest increase to the city's operating taxes. So the general city fund is is I think what it's precisely called. This is the fund that funds what I think we all in large part funds are a number of other splinter taxes. But basically, this is how we fund our police and our fire and our parks and in much of DPW. The library that the sort of general services that we think of as city services. And this is just again the second time in eight years that we've come forward with a request for an increase. That is a record that I and I think city counselors are proud of. We have a challenge every year with the budget in that generally speaking our expenses rise pretty much with the cost of inflation. Every year we pay employees a little bit more and we pay last year. Every year, you know, most expenses go up as you're familiar with in other parts of your life. Our revenues do not rise with inflation. At least most of them don't. The biggest one doesn't. Property tax revenues only rise with an increase like the one we're requesting now or with development and so and real growth. And so we are asking for a one and a half percent increase on the city municipal taxes that amounts to about $40 a year for the average Burlington home. And even if that goes through and you kind of we have a graph it's not on this piece. I do have these summaries leaving them on the table over here if you want to go home with something. If you go to the BTB future website, you can see a graph that we've developed which shows that over the eight years, even if this goes through, we will still be well under the rate of inflation increase for the municipal property tax over that time. That's about question number two. I'm going to get through these as quick as I can. I hope there's some time for questions. The ballot question number three is about implementing permit reform. This has been something that there, Brian Pine, old North End city council have been involved in city government for a long time. He like I think 11 of the 12 members of the city council, I believe, voted yes to put this on the ballot. He is excited about this as an attempt to cut what has been the Gordian knot of operational challenges within city government. We get more complaints about the city permitting system than just about everything else, anything else except maybe potholes. We do want you to complain about potholes. We want you to seek fix them. We want to get out there and fill them. It's important that we do that. We're trying to make less of them. I hope people are aware we spend more money on our roads in the last couple years by historic standards. It's been a vast increase that you supported with the sustainable infrastructure bond back in 2016. Other than that, we get a lot of complaints about permit reform. We think we get those complaints even though we have outstanding, very committed city employees that are working on this system. The system itself, from our perspective, after grappling with this, we've had a bunch of people working on this for years. We have come to the conclusion that the system itself is broken. It is too fractured and it is too complicated and that fractured quality creates errors. It creates confusion among the public and it makes it a really unfriendly system to engage for far too many people, especially homeowners or small business owners that are not frequently coming forward to make this kind of improvement on their property. Contractors that are in there every week, they of course figure it out, but this is really geared at small businesses and homeowners who come in rarely. Our solution is a pretty straightforward solution. We are going to take the three different government functions, zoning office, out of planning and zoning, building inspection services out of the department of public works and code enforcement and we are going to consolidate all three of those functions into one new department called the permitting inspections department. That is going to be headed by one department head instead of three and that is going to be accountable to your elected officials and therefore to you. It will be a mayoral appointed department head with city council confirmation. All of this whole department is going to be located right here on Pine Street in the DPW building so you will not have to go to multiple locations within the city to get your permits. We are really hopeful that this is going to be a huge step in and of itself and lead to further reforms of this system. Bill Ward is the individual who will be the department head of this if this goes through and he is already doing continuous improvement meetings, he's already identified, he wants to get rid of instead of having multiple permits he wants there to be one building inspections permit. It may take additional votes or ordinance changes to get there but he's already thinking big about how we make this system better. I really feel passionately about this and I know many city councilors are excited about it too. I hope you'll seriously consider supporting it. I'll leave it there and there may be questions. It is a big charter change. It touches on a couple of other elements so if people have more questions about that we can come back to it but I think I heard a ding go off. I might be going over my time already if no we're doing all right. Okay number four is my sense is and I see my old colleague Gene Bergman who is assistant city attorney that I was proud and happy to reappoint six or seven times during during our and we got to work together a lot of things and a lot of respect for Gene. I think you may hear tonight or otherwise we disagree on this issue and and I know there are others who disagree on it. This is the creation of a downtown improvement just a broad question number four. Again maybe we can save some of the conversation for whatever questions you have and concerns you have. I will boil it down to this. We have had active management of Church Street for the last 30 years. That has been a huge success. The Church Street marketplace is the envy of much of the country in terms of its success is a pedestrian marketplace. The proposal here is to fulfill interestingly the original the founders intent and expand the active management to the entire downtown. We can say that with some confidence because the founders are still around. Bill Turex and Pat Robbins came to the city council recently to voice their support for this and say it was the mayor apparently way back then that got in the way of this being active management of the downtown from the beginning. There are many many other downtowns that have downtown improvement districts that cover the whole downtown. It's actually quite rare to have an improvement district that is as as narrow as the one that we have and we think in an age in which retail is changing dramatically and which through the rise of the internet many you know more and more sales every year are done on the internet. We have neighbors who are you know I think it's a good thing getting their act together and strengthening their downtowns. Burlington's downtown is great as it is is fragile and it's not as great as it could be and we see this expansion of the downtown improvement district as a key step in keeping downtown Burlington strong even as we go through these these social changes. That question number five last one I'll speak to directly is is is a phase out of a item that is confusingly called the business personal property tax. I say confusingly in that this is not personal property this is this is property of businesses that is non real estate property. As you know we we tax real estate in this community and most communities certainly throughout Vermont. What we do in Burlington that is becoming increasingly rare is we tax equipment that is owned by businesses as if it were real estate. So you know Burton down the road here when they buy a 3d printer and they put it here in the south end to improve their their their products they every year have to pay a tax on that is that if that it was real estate and they're not it sticks in their craw the brewery in the new north end that small business that is part of the Ethan Island shopping plaza when they put in a I'm not sure I know my brewing equipment as well as I should but those big bats where the fermentation takes place they pay a tax on that as if it was real estate and the problem with that tax is that because those things aren't real estate they can easily be moved someplace else and and that happens businesses have told us they move out of Burlington or they choose not to locate in Burlington because of this tax and cities and states around the country have identified that and less and less of them charge this tax there used to be um I think the majority many many Vermont communities used to charge this tax when we started looking at this a few years ago about 60 communities municipalities with a Vermont charge it's dropped to 30 just in the last couple years so we think it's important to move away from this tax it's not easy to do so because we take in a significant amount of revenue over a million dollars from this what we are proposing here is to phase this out over eight years and doing it that way most of the phase out takes place at the end and we have timed it so that the final phase out happens when the waterfront tiff district expires at which point the city will be getting the operating funds of the city will be getting a substantial increase in that year from the expiration of that tiff district so we think we found a way to get rid of a problematic tax that uh is uh that that is you know that that has really been lingering out there's a problem for a long time and do show it away that has a minimal impact on you other other taxpayers with that if we still have time for questions i'd love to take some perfect timing we we do have a good 10 or 15 minutes for open questions as i noted before we'd love to focus the questions primarily at least in the beginning on the valid items that we're here discussing if we get through all the questions from the assembled on valid items and have a few extra minutes we can take some more general general city-wide questions from there sound okay with you i we love you that yeah okay happy a lot of going on happy to talk about another question great um as i understand it you were elected with less than a majority of the votes in burlington bravado right and the two candidates that ran against you were both the left of you now you're saying that your example of putting putting initiatives on the ballot that privatized burlington is an example of direct participatory democracy from the bottom strikes me as utterly absurd i mean i i don't know how like how that is an example of sort of policy coming from the people and the people having an opportunity to sort of weigh in on the politics of the of the city when those politics aren't even in a lot of ways from a from a democratic the beginning in the in the first place well um i i guess um i appreciate the the point um i'm proud to have been elected by this community three times now and uh proud of our record over the last uh over the last seven years and um uh i have to say what i find to use your word absurd is the notion that ballot question number four somehow privatizing anything i know that is what opponents of it are suggesting but i challenge you to name a single public asset that is being privatized as a result of this passing uh or being implemented and i challenge you to name a single public authority that is being transferred um we are uh not privatizing anything about question number four and um to a unusual degree um we are ensuring that anything any authority that ultimately is approved and granted by future city councils um uh can be um uh the city council retains extraordinary oversight over the new nonprofit that will be uh created likely if this does pass so i sort of get how people when they look around and gene has an example in fort worth and uh you know there's some there's some of these there are hundreds of these downtown improvement districts these have been seen as an extraordinarily successful and positive uh public mechanism for improving our cities and downtowns and many hundred literally hundreds of them have been created and of course some of them have had some problems um and you know but i liken this argument that i've heard others advance to you know being like uh going out and finding the worst lawyers in the country that are ambulance chasers and the most unscrupulous lawyers and then saying see that lawyer over there see what he does you know that means that gene bergman is a bad man because of uh because they're all lawyers are the same i think we really should be debating the downtown improvement district that we've proposed here in burlington and the details of it which are uh uh huge and i think when you do that you will find that this notion that we're privatizing anything is simply false you think we should be debating in that what we want to do is uh debate you want to hear the reason pros and cons for this and it just seems like it's rushed i mean the first newspaper article came out in november and i didn't even see that then i just saw that most recently so i'm kind of new to the issue and yeah a lot of people have concerns so are we going to have a debate about the pros and cons of this in one month so i don't think a lot of people are totally opposed to the notion of expanding the district but there's concerns and there's uh worries and fears that should have a chance to be aired and to hear why it's a good idea i think we just haven't had enough to do that yet and so i would vote no on question for for that reason alone by a little more time so i don't totally understand about this but someone asked a question yes is it am i correct that the private non-profit that would manage the downtown will be just that private non-profit is that correct um it will be a private non-profit that has a majority of its board members appointed by the city council and it will be a non-profit that's bylaws will not come into existence until the city council passes them its budget will be approved by the city council every year and where that will sunset at the end of the 10 years if something doesn't if we don't like it so yes it will be a new non-profit that will be created i wouldn't say to manage the downtown but to play in that that it will be to take an active role in the downtown while the city continues to perform the great majority of what we think of as public services so who will police the downtown the city will police the downtown there we know police function to this vicinity it is possible sometimes people suggest otherwise because one thing some of these districts do and that this one we may agree to allow this to do is to hire ambassadors that play a play a role on communicating with the public and potentially like our street outreach does today alerting first responders police two situations that require a response from a public personnel but there will no shape or form when they be policing the downtown so our street outreach workers are employed by Howard center correct that's a little different than what an ambassador would be right um in a sense it would be working for a different organization than Howard center yes one of the things required by the the discharter change would be that there be non-profit services represented on the board of this entity there needs to be a representative from a non-profit service entity and city officials will be ex-official members of this of this board as well so the public perspective will be very much pardoning public debates or you know board discussions although ex-official means non-voting correct um that's correct not intended to vote ex-official also means they are automatically part of the board and that they are entitled to show up at any meeting and be part of those discussions um but yes the the city council again will appoint the majority of the board members but the public official members won't also be voting members uh over here and then back to Joan and then back mayor thank you for appointing me all those times i would much rather have been able to stay at mad river today than have to come in to uh to ski here i wish you were able to as well there but but the problem is i as that i i can't um uh because i really offended by the the the process which i found to be rushed and i only found out about it with the seven days article by k.a. chiclin in november and attended that hearing um november 28 by the governance structure and by what i think is the lack of our care and concern and therefore putting into place safeguards related to um gentrification and displacement you asked though about you said cite me one thing that we are transferring what you are doing looks like throw off throw off my notes here on the the floor what you are doing is raising tax dollars and they are public taxing tax authority dollars that we are raising and we are giving them with the exception of the cost of collection to this private entity and one of the things that one of the things that you allow this public entity to do is own goods own assets benches light enhanced um uh the aesthetic things so the um so the first example is the transfer of public tax dollars to a private entity and i totally appreciate the efforts to try to um to soften the privatization but the fact of the matter is each and every one of those 11 board members owe a fiduciary duty to the private entity that they are a board member to not to the the appointing body and so we have this major contradiction you asked about the authority that we transfer world i've heard it said i think by you but maybe i'm wrong i know by adam roof on the channel 17 report that he did on on generate 10 that the current that the marketplace has no power but that's just not true what happened was that originally when we passed this the church street marketplace commission had all the authority to be regulating the uh the marketplace in 2000 in in october of 2000 we we passed the charter change that brought that power back to the city council and consequently the charter does talk about the city council having that authority but that very same within months we passed a resolution signed by the mayor at that time peter clavel which revested all the authority that had previously been with the commission to regulate church street marketplace back into the commission that is there you can see it doesn't happen at the time and so it existed if you look at the minutes of the marketplace you will see them actually engaging in governance and management downtown including the licensing of um of events and the licensing of cafes so i think that what you are doing and that authority explicitly is not being given to this new but that's not exactly back to the city it is not exactly true because you give them the authority to program and the argument that um that there's two masters now right is not solved by this as a result which goes to a point that i raised when i first spoke to the city council and pleaded to make specific changes and then to um uh to not rush this thing off the ballot which is that you should take some time i do have two questions i'm sorry but i but you asked that specific thing i i know the consultant gave the d id advisory committee three options and that included a public option and there are a lot of people who spoke up against privatization at the only public hearing that was held on this before it was placed on the ballot on december 17th supporters did not bring the options the all none of the three options to public hearings or the mpa's or to public meetings and the question that i have for you is why so that's one question number two the d id if it's successful is likely to raise rents in both commercial and residential um occupancies and the experience around the country is that gentrification and displacements intensified including in the three cities that are used as case studies in ithica in san amonica and boulder and yet the city is prohibited from using any of the taxes that are going to be raised to mitigate gentrification i believe that that's wrong i believe a lot of people think it's wrong and the question is why would you do that okay great so i will respond to those two questions i'd like to respond to a couple other things you raised as quick as i can too because i don't think they're fair um again with you know straightening the fine and example of some public authority that's being you're suggesting the taxing authority is being turned over and that's just not the case i mean the city council retains the ability to approve the budget um from a from a year to year basis and any change the tax increase that might flow from this so uh there is no ability of this entity unchecked by public power to to tax uh indiscriminately on the way it wants to i didn't say i basically it's the appropriation of those of those tax dollars is what i meant to say um so i mean this one mystifies me jean i gotta say like we are creating a uh basically the the business community is inviting us to tax commercial properties and commercial properties only there was a proposal early on to think about uh taxing residential properties and that was excluded and it's going to be policed even if you're if you're in a mixed use building you're not going to be able to to play games so that you'll only be out this special assessment will only be made on the commercial property businesses are basically saying we are inviting um additional taxes on commercial properties uh to be put to um spending that will beautify and improve our downtown and that there will be broad general benefit to and the only people who will be paying that will be these commercial property taxpayers which of course flows through to a certain degree to the users of those properties but uh these will be commercial uses um i can't flow to nonprofits that's explicitly included excluded won't be allowed to flow to the residential pieces again and uh you know this is this is i think if how this is not us finding a way to take get more revenues out of the business community and put it into general purposes that make our downtown better for all of us i just you're kind of somehow that is that is what this is and you somehow twisted that in some way that i just have a hard time following the logic of um the uh the two questions specifically that you asked um public option uh yes there were three options that were uh came back in the consultant report oh i also want to speak to this idea that this was rushed and i i have sympathy to the notion uh that members of the general public i can understand how the years of of process that went into leading up until now um may not have been uh you know not have been something they focused on the idea that you in your position as assistant city attorney where we your your office approved the contract that um resulted in the in the in the consultant being hired and that led to the creation of this that you know didac um this was a major effort within city government that uh certainly anyone in the city attorney's office would have been well aware of so this notion this came rushed now left field is just hard for me to digest gene i wish we could debate but you keep going okay um the public public option there was a consultant report done uh really respected consultant who has worked around the country uh i think they've they've engaged this as honest brokers they they clearly have an opinion on this but they've done their best to make us aware of what's going on elsewhere in their country they came back with these three options they did not recommend that we pursue the the option largely because um i mean i think it comes down to two things there there are hundreds and hundreds of these improvement districts across the country virtually none of them are organized in that way um virtually all of them are organized as these independent nonprofits again these not these have been seen as an innovation you study it in graduate school like i study in graduate school these are innovation that have worked and made downtown proven downtown stronger throughout the country and all of them virtually all of them are organized the way we are proposing except for the fact that we are layering on top of this far more public protections than almost any of the other ones have and that's a fundamentally why um and there would not have been support we would have if we had tried to move forward with the the the other option this a lot there is real discontent of over the way that the marketplace is currently organized in many ways has been for decades and if there was an attempt to expand that it just it would have you had a whole different uh it would not have the people who are being asked to sacrifice by putting in additional fees would have been very much against it and i think there is a desire uh we see it as legitimate that people who are going to be paying um uh paying the additional resources uh coming to play here have um some uh that that we let that they are voices that get to kind of weigh in and the way they have here and they would not have accepted the other way and wouldn't have worked um the uh final point about gentrification i find to be a very cynical argument gene and i'm disappointed your you and others are pushing it as hard as you are essentially here's what the people who are suggesting this is gen this is gentrification are saying these again it comes back to the fact that these um improvement districts work they make the cities that they are responsible for better they make them more appealing places to be they beautify them they uh make them more interesting they make them places that people um are attracted to and as a result i'm sure it is the case that many of these um rents have gone uh gone up to some measurable degree in those areas it's not the increase the costs aren't going up as a result of the direct fees but because these are because these work because they're so successful um i guess you can make the argument is essentially you guys are i guess that the way to keep that from happening is to make sure we don't make our downtown great i i don't accept that argument as as a good argument i think the way to avoid gentrification is to do what brolinton has done for generations and make sure we have permanently affordable housing uh available to the greatest degree we we can and adam roof and others have pointed out how within this district we will be fortunate to have hundreds and hundreds of permanently affordable essentially rent restricted units that will remain there um and the and the other way that what really is the root cause of gentrification which we need to debate more as a community and which progressive communities across the country are coming in terms with is what really causes gentrification is not improvement districts and it's certainly not uh development it is what happens when you don't build it's when you don't create new homes to meet the growing need and supply that has built up over decades and which the opposition groups in our community that come out and fight every effort to build new housing are responsible for frankly it is that is what causes gentrification and that is what was happening in brolinton until the city council and this administration said we're not going to take that anymore we're going to work to build new homes in this community at a rate that's necessary and that is you know what gene that is working that is working you john callow here who worked on 194 st paul street project under about hundred new homes 300 new beds open there just this last spring we talked to landlords in town and they will tell you we have not had competition uh for um renters in this community anything like that in decades and you have had so many landlords come in and complain i love it when i hear this complain about how you know they're having trouble filling their homes they're having to offer discounts some units have dropped as much as 100 bucks a month others have dropped by more than that but they disguise it through discounting they can't seem like it's not happening this strategy is working and will continue to work and that's the way we fight gentrification not through saying no to about question number four you didn't answer my question but i don't want to monopolize yeah we got that's fine i'm just saying you didn't answer the question john do you want to advocate your time to put in during the canada form or do you have a direct question uh are we are we you know taxing are we giving tax dollars to our business community through this process no words or not right now the church street marketplace has a fee payer system so they decide how much fees they're going to pay and that comes before the city council and the city council waves it through every single time there's very little oversight over that they they decide how they want to spend the money and and we do get a vote on it but it's it is pretty much waved through this is an opportunity to kind of expand the marketplace and use those private funds for public benefit they will be using some of the funds for marketing purposes and there's a kind of an economy of scale and expanding that to the downtown but additionally there are public benefits just like we see all over church street it's the benches i'm actually okay with a business owning a bench in front of their property but privatization is is a concern as well and i think we i'm the chair of the charter change committee and we took uh we took a lot of time to try to make sure that we were not going to privatize um any of our downtown and there's a long list of authorities that the city council retains in this process including to control the use of the public rights of way including streets sidewalks and other publicly owned spaces within the downtown improvement district and there's actually i think the the list is like um 15 things and i have some extra copies of this if people want which is the actual um charter change language system just a piece of it to address that concern um rents downtown about a third of the rental units downtown are permanently affordable housing they're um uh people pay rent not based on market rents but they pay rent based on what they can afford to pay also the the city council remains maintains control over the board itself and that we appoint the majority of the board and there is much more diversity and representation on this board than there is on the current church street marketplace commission there are 11 members of this board four of them will be residents that they will also be part of the board non voting members will include uh uh four four city department representatives so there's still a lot of involvement from the city but i do think that we don't want to uh let our downtown decay and in the age of amazon we're really at risk it's very hard to sustain a downtown like what we have and our downtown i think is precious to all of us um i i you know i i don't think this is gentrification as much as it is trying to sustain um the wonderful downtown that we have and it's at risk briefly over here and then we get one back over here yeah i know this is the order we're going so i participated in this little thing with kuma and but really at the last moment they let some regular residents be in it was really mostly and the man that spoke with us um he told us that it was pretty predominantly business people that had participated in this study and he did say we got the poor rating like you know our it's church getting rid of traffic was you know brilliant stopping you know that but we are letting it get really shabby and i agree with him but i don't like this term and it's starting to be used a lot now that this was an extensive public process i went to that one meeting and there were twice as many people as we have here so maybe like 70 or so people and that was it and nobody i mean it it was like a formation they're trying to like figure out what to work and i still don't really know and even in your presentation i think you still a lot of things to work out so why are we voting on this now when people are just trying to learn about it and we got a beautiful little glossy postcard who's going to say no to this look at the flowers i mean this is winter and you know but i mean it's a sales pitch and i want more substance i want information i like that there's another card i can read that has some information but you know they've got a budget these folks don't so i mean we really need to look at these things and please stop saying it was an extensive public process because it was not and we don't you know most people don't even know what this is so that's it um so i um i've lived on churchy since 2005 and i just one thing i want to say is that you know many of the local businesses owners and staff are my friends and neighbors you know so i think we really want to support that i too feel this was right i'm one of the few people who went to that november meeting that adam had because i got a postcard in the mail and people asked why there were so few people here and he said we had a very small budget we can only send out about 100 postcards but that's better than we do for 90 percent of the public processes that we do so i thought that that wasn't great and i remember everybody there said you know um increasing the downtown district and supporting the businesses on the side streets it sounds like a great idea but we know but we think you should wait a year and so i get apparently nobody they were like five or six which were pretty much all of the business people who were there and so i also i don't think well so the other thing about the church street budget i know church street has had budgeting issues but one of the things as a resident that's an issue is that there used to be benches between bank and charity street which is my block and they've all gone away because they wanted to make extra space for carts and waste time playing chocolate so i love dearly you know has their has their their little bistro seating and in times pizza has their bistro seating and took over monels bistro seating so the benches went away from there so so even when it's a city department the residents are not very if you walk around periodically you know people buy a gelato from shy guy gelato and the kids have to sit on the ground where you know up against the tree where a dog is just peed and you know i feel that the poof all the time even the the church and marketplace staff is great but they're not there all the time and and you know and so i've been trying to get a bench back on the street between bank and charity for like eight years and since that they went away one winter and they never came back and i've been talking to jim and ron about that every cent so i do really worry about you know i think that it's one of the other things that as a resident and as a burlington tony and i think church street is kind of our main street and one of the things that they work really really hard on is snow removal so that deliveries can come early in the morning so unlike a beautiful sunday snow day they start removing snow at two o'clock in the morning so you have the lights going you have and you know the every time they back up they go beep beep beep outside your window and there are lots of local residents who would love to cross country ski or snowshoe down down but they don't do it because there's not a good balance between finding parking spaces for the trucks and the delivery trucks which we absolutely want to support and you know out towards your exchange to have you know to be able to have snowshoe come down and so i i guess i guess i want all the city council in there how you know yeah it doesn't sound like you're doing a great job of balancing you know making this a you know place where it will be a jamba juice and a gap and it it'll be a cookie-cuttered disneyland and like keeping it like a real place where real burlingtonians and local businesses can thrive up there comment yeah we're gonna yeah i'm sorry just one real quick to to both of us i think karen has a fair point um in that a lot of details remain to be determined here that is an intentional choice of the way this is being done you always have a choice about when any charge is being uh considered do you want to get all the detail into the charter and um if any adjustment needs to it needs to be made uh then you then have to go back to the voters for any uh any change or does it make more sense to kind of create the the authority give some breath to it and then leave it to your elected officials to be able to refine and make changes to over time and that is definitely the way the decision was made here is to keep this as a a fairly general authority makes it clear essentially that again that no public assets or or public authorities are being transferred fundamentally does lay out a number of things that this new downtown improvement district will be out to do and then leaves a lot of the details to be hashed out by future city councilors i understand how that might make some people if you're not happy with your city councilors in the administration i understand that may not be reassuring on the other hand i think fundamentally what is intended there is if something isn't going the way the public wants it to go there remains substantial ability to correct it quickly and then secondly to Amanda's point um i actually agree with you that uh that there should be more matches on church street and i'm glad you raised it with me in the room uh and um it's going to galvanize me i've been thinking about this for some time and i i next summer i think we do need to add back a few branches that were taken away a few years ago and you know what under the new system of the downtown improvement district past the mayor in the future and the city councilors in the future will be out having exact exact authority we are not going to give up the ability of the city your elected officials to determine what happens in the streetscape of the public right away we may let these businesses buy a few more flowers pay for some ambassadors we are not going to give up our fundamental rights which we couldn't even give up what we wanted to because the way public vermont law works in many ways we're not going to give that up there's no interest in giving that up and you can rest assured yeah yeah we haven't gotten it perfectly today um we will continue to have authority to try to improve it and continue to make it better even if this is created thank you very much hey thank you this is great and uh people do want to talk more i'm out at the big all every wednesday we've been doing a bunch of other coffees and there is still a couple weeks left before town meeting day i'll be going to other mpa's um if you if help me talking to me further is at all helpful in it and dropping these issues there's lots of ways to find me over the next week and a half so thank you thank you thank you thank you all so much for uh disagreeing so really so that's really what we love here at the uh the mpa our next agenda item we have two city council candidates here we have a late scratch from paco uh yeah so we a little more time on this one because i think we'll move smoothly here um how much far progressive candidate john chan and democrat of the city council so our format here we're gonna you're each going to get a couple minutes for an opening statement and then we have questions that we've called um uh in the last couple weeks um an online online forum online questionnaire we thank everybody here and uh out in uh channel 17 uh just to make questions uh we have modified a few questions uh a little bit to maintain uh to maintain what we felt on the impartial uh substituent committee uh who uh pulled through the questions uh to make sure we were getting at the kernel of the question while uh making a little more broadly applicable to uh to both candidates who are here today um so let's see so uh paco what's gonna go first but uh so john i bet you for a couple minutes on an opening statement and then Muhammad and they flip it up on the uh on the talent okay by the way uh we don't have an official timer it's just me i'll be i'll be jenny okay trust you out yeah um i'm jome shannon i know most of you because i show up here every month uh to talk to you i um don't really have anything particular prepared for an opening statement i think you probably want to get to your questions questions but you know i believe that city government is intended to work for the people and should be responsive to the people and you should get what you want from city government now um we don't always agree on what that is and so it's my job to kind of parse through the details of of every situation that comes before the city council to get your input and do the best that i can to come to a well-reasoned position and then come back to you and tell you why i voted the way i did and we won't always agree but i hope to at least gain your respect in my decision-making process um i think that uh you know my values are the the values that are shared by by burlington i value the environment i value the lake i value air quality um i was the uh author of the um plastics the uh banning or um or reducing the single-use plastics ballot question um and i care about people i care about all of the people in our community and try to be responsive to all of the people in our community we all want affordable housing um we all you know we we all care about our city and that's what's hard sometimes we have we have difficult discussions but um for as long as i've been here since the 1980s that is what makes burlington great is the political engagement and the more engagement that we can have and keep it respectful i think that um it's a great thing i'll leave it at that hello everyone i'm mohammed jafar and i know most of you because i grew up with your children um i am getting involved to address some concerns that have been around for forever um and i i'm really involved because there's a lot that just i don't think we're moving on um housing is one of the biggest concerns for me um having a big family and having lived here in the south district and right up on pine street for 15 years a lot of the concerns that my parents have made throughout the years of me growing up has been the same um child care is another issue that i really really think that we should be able to figure out um and then homelessness is another one that's personal to me because i do know a couple friends that are currently homeless um i think it's really really concerning that we have a city with the amount of resources that it has and we still have an abundance of people that sleep outside in the cold i think that's really really incredibly concerning um and for me i feel that the city council right now is not representing all the people i don't think everyone's voice is there and i'm getting involved because i find it very important to have everyone's voice there we miss a lot of perspectives when we we miss the the entirety of voices in so i'm putting myself forth to uh say let's have a wholesome city council that does address the needs of everyone and not only a select few and you know specifically talking about new american communities we have a wealth of culture and we have a wealth of diversity in our culture that i feel oftentimes we don't take advantage of and and there's both economic weight there that we could we could take advantage of and and just cultural cultural prosperity that we could definitely take advantage of and i want to present myself as a representative of all the people and everyone and as someone who has grown up here and you know played soccer with much of many of your children um and watching a lot of you know those same friends of mine kind of leave the city of burlington and leave the state of Vermont is also very concerning um i mean i think we all know this but there just aren't opportunities for young folks um and it's awful because we have state legislation that pays folks from out of state to come in here um to try to robust uh make a robust our economy in our city and we invest thousands and thousands of dollars just we we just did um on our high school and all those kids grow up become intelligent and they leave they go to boston to find opportunities uh because our city is simply not effective in finding a lot of those resources that you know that we need in order for young folks to feel like they can be a part of this so i'm here to fight for new americans i'm here to fight for americans that have been here forever i'm here to fight for the the artists the young the young professionals that are coming up i'm here to fight for everyone and again as someone who has grown up with all of your children and as someone who comes from you know community that is oftentimes left behind um i'm here to bring that voice to the table and i'm here to make sure that that voice is for everyone so again i'm mohammed jafar first question uh joan take this one first and then mohammed we're going to switch back a little bit um in viewing the role of furlington's npa's how do you feel we can make the npa more relevant accessible for the future of our district um i think that's something the npa's have have been eternally asking uh i think npa's are great at providing a forum to share information with the community and kind of exchange ideas um it's not easy for a lot of people to get to meetings which we hear regularly when we're trying to engage in public process in the city we're often faulted for only doing it through through meetings but i think one of the things that we have done to make npa's more relevant is we now require large development projects to come before the npa um and so i think things along that line to make sure that the npa is bringing the issues that the community cares about into the forum is probably the best thing that that we can do maybe taking more um reaching out and soliciting more input from the public i know you like i do have access to front porch forum and i know i've had a lot of success when i reach out to the community and pose a question it's always really interesting the feedback i i get back and uh so that would be a suggestion but i think you guys do a great job and it's it's not an easy job so thank you mom could you repeat the question sure and considering the role of the npa here in burlington how do we make them more relevant and accessible to more residents um i think first and foremost defining the operational definition or providing an operational definition of what the npa is and also the mode that we use to reach out to folks i'm certain that not everyone uses front porch forum my parents don't use facebook they don't know what twitter is um and again that's a kind of my thing is because that you know that communication just has been missing and many in a great way i mean young folks should be involved in npa i think it's really concerning that the first time i heard about what an npa was was when i graduated in may and i came back here to try to get in the community um and i think what we could do is reach out to people and reaching out to people means you know creating and fostering relationships with certain communities with people that are already in those communities that have positions in which they're able to influence and communicate um and having those people you know get the information about what an npa is i i now know what an npa so i told my mom and then i'm sure she was at lunch with her friends saying hey do you know what an npa is and that in itself is really really great but that's not something that you know my family has had and that i feel that many families don't have that so i can make the npa is a lot better by simply reaching out to everyone and i think that's the biggest issues that we don't reach out to everyone and and of course we're limited in resources i'm on the steering committee for the award five npa so i know i know what you know what um what it's like and one of the first questions i pose when i when uh during one of our first meetings was how do we reach out to people what exactly do we do to get this message out to folks and i'm happy to say that since i've joined i've had several of my friends come to a lot of these npa's npa meetings some that weren't even in this ward and again just going back to that idea of getting people involved i mean i really feel like more young folks should be involved in this more new americans more uh you know different communities low income you know wealthy everyone everyone should be here every single should every single person should be here and i think that oftentimes it's actually just getting out that message that we lose you know a lot because we don't get out the message to everyone next question on a similar topic um and mohammed takes from first uh participation of burlington municipal elections is uh is concernedly low and has been for uh years we do get up takes when there are larger larger federal issues to play outside the local elections but in your opinion what's the reason for this and what we do about it again going back to that idea of outreach and you know when we think of these meetings what do we imagine you know do we imagine uh an array of demographics or do we do we imagine you know a certain image um so to i mean to answer your question i think uh you know people sorry ask the question one more time i apologize what do you think is the reason for low participation in elections and what can uh what does the city care for in particular you're doing about it so in terms of elections that outreach again um so myself and a couple friends of mine put together a town hall meeting with senator bernie sanders actually counselor ali dang was there as well and the purpose of that was to get those folks to know what the voting process is to know what voting even is but to also get to know their legislators you know the very people that help and you know dictate some of the the laws that they they they live around um so i think we have very low voter turnout for the simple fact that we people don't have the information people don't know people have been coming here to the united states and to vermont system 1980s well to vermont in itself says before the 1980s and a lot of a lot of these communities have been you know united states citizens with it or united states citizens within five years of coming to the us and they still don't know how to vote they don't and a lot of people don't feel that their voice matters at all so i think it starts at this local level where we you know tell people come to the npa where you're able to make your concerns be heard knowing that the npa's function is to you know assist in getting the communication between the community and the city council so if people don't have that information people aren't out voting people aren't you know involved because they don't feel that their voices matter and i think that's a concern as well john um well i just note that it's it's not only immigrants that don't vote it's everybody across all sections of life we have low voter turnout in this country and i think it's reflective of voter apathy and i would note that the november elections did actually uh we did see a substantial uptick in um voter participation maybe because on november i forget what it was november eight 2016 or november ninth 2016 people woke up literally and were very surprised and it's unfortunate that that would be the motivating factor to get people out to vote but i think it has been a motivating factor to get people out to vote um i also as i'm going door to door i i do register voters i think uh democrats have always been active in trying to um register voters i believe uh my friend andrew champagne has registered more voters than anybody in the state of vermont he told me yesterday and i believe that because i have registered voters with andrew champagne the man is a machine but registering is only you know only half the battle you have to uh actually get people to turn out and um and i i think we've done a lot in vermont to make it easier to vote which is which is great and i support that i think it's probably more a function of political candidates than the council itself but i'm i'm open to ideas on things we could do as a council to increase voter participation it's important okay next question gentleman showing you first by way of example briefly how will the lessons of your personal life experience help you confront the changes ahead for the city how will my personal life experience well i think we all we all bring different things to the table and i think uh when i first got on the city council i thought it'd be great if everybody voted like me but i know that i learn a lot from everybody at the table uh and it's all part of the discussion so uh like like everybody else i've had my own personal challenges um certainly my health has been a challenge as many of you know uh for a couple years and when you spend a year or so on crutches um actually it wasn't on crutches the whole time because i couldn't use crutches because i had two frozen shoulders uh but you certainly look at how a handicap person would experience um the city when you can't get around the way other people can get around when it's um almost impossible to walk a block it gives gives you a very very different perspective and during that time i also reflected a lot on my great fortune of having a place to live when i felt so awful and at times i was not sure i was going to continue to live but even if i were to die at least i was in a comfortable place and so many in our community don't have that and um to suffer through so there are some new people in the room but you know i suffered with Lyme disease um pretty severely for a while and to have to go through something like that without a home is something that i really reflect on a lot um but everybody uh i think the thing to remember is that when we encounter everybody in in our daily lives people have all kinds of pain that you never really hear about and it's just good to to remember that we don't we don't all wear it on our sleeve but it's it's something we all all carry with us and i try to appreciate that about about other people um so for me my experience and my personal experiences are why i'm involved in the first place um uh the other day i was complaining about something to my mom i think it was she asked me to call some insurance company for some reason and i was like mom do you have any idea how much work i have to do i'm stressed all the time i really can you just ask one of my sisters to do it and she says she just looks at me she says so i flood bullets slept in caves ran away from lions and you think making an insurance a call to insurance is going to be the biggest concern that you have to deal with and i and i sat there and it really you know provided me a moment to just realize the magnitude of what my parents and a lot of families like myself have come through so for me personal experiences drive the very character that i put forth today the very character that i am because those things have shaped how i see the world and the perspective i have in terms of my understanding of the need for us to protect everyone and for us to take care of everyone um my personal experiences are everything to me and my personal experiences are me so okay uh changing gears but staying in uh along lines with something you said john regarding housing uh how will how will you address berlington's affordability crisis specifically with respect to housing but writ large across the city in other areas you feel is important to talk about so um in terms of housing i'd say let's invest in our housing infrastructure um in general and then our housing trust um i i know it's easy to say let's build but we can't build our way out of everything and i certainly do agree that there is some building that needs to happen but we need to figure out a way to pay people enough to be able to live in the homes that they live in and we need to be able to figure out how housing can actually be affordable and you know housing is considered affordable in some capacities and it's not even when we say it's affordable it's not because a lot of people don't understand what exactly people are dealing with when you have 11 children and a single pay or a single job a single person in the family is working it's impossible to to see how much you're paying even if it's affordable to someone else it's impossible to think that paying for your house is actually affordable when you literally have absolutely nothing left after every month um so uh we try to say it's affordable but i really think we should recalculate uh recalculate what we see as affordable and so yeah um there are a lot of different things that are that are driving our affordability crisis one um we could make housing cheaper in Burlington if Burlington were not such a popular place if everybody didn't want to live here uh there are more people who want to live here uh than we have housing excuse me housing available so that's kind of a baseline problem so we don't want to make Burlington less desirable and just make it cheaper we want to make Burlington affordable which means increasing our housing supply and as a community we've been rather resistant to doing that there is um you know we we don't want large apartment buildings going up next door to us in the south end it wouldn't feel right to us i actually think you know my own neighborhood does have a mix of of housing styles and and some large apartment buildings and it works quite well but we have to find those opportunities where we can build housing and it's one of the reasons why i did support the um city place project because the more housing that we can build the more we're going to be bringing um market rents down and the other thing that affects our affordability are our taxes and two-thirds of our taxes are are now on the education side of our taxes and i think we have to really look um you know education is not uh under the purview of the city council but i really think we have to look statewide on how we are funding education and what are the cost drivers in education because certainly it's not that our kids are getting too much it's not that our teachers are paying too much yet our system is an unaffordable system um so i do think it's it's helpful to have the income sensitivity that we have um but it continues to be uh it continues to be you know a major concern for our state okay next decision and jump or not decision question jump to you first how do you feel about the downtown improvement district valid item we had some lively discussion on that uh earlier but what do you think are the benefits as well as the risks of its passage or failure thank you for the question i was really uh hoping to to talk more about that i think um the issues that amanda raised were were good ones about um residents not really having a lot of participation in the way the church street marketplace is structured now and that is one of the issues um that is you know i don't know if it's solved we haven't gotten there yet but we certainly tried to solve that problem because out of the 11 um voting members in the new downtown improvement district four of them would be residents um so there aren't there isn't resident representation in the existing church street marketplace uh structure and i think that you might have a better chance of getting some benches with this downtown improvement district um but i i do think that i absolutely support the downtown improvement district i think that as i said it's an opportunity to use uh private money for public benefit and i think we see that in the church street marketplace how how private money is used there and how we can all enjoy the benefits of it when we're um on church street i think making our downtown a nicer place is not a bad thing and it won't cause the residential taxpayers of burlington anything to get there um uh also i wanted to point out that on the board there are i think three non-profit positions on the board and that the downtown improvement district actually has a social mission so when you know when we talk about businesses in burlington we're not talking about enron we're talking about uncommon grounds um and sherpa kitchen and uh you know small small businesses that are really struggling and we want them to thrive uh it was the downtown businesses that really brought us the street outreach outreach program and we do that while we just have uh four blocks of businesses participating um i have participated in uh several trips that were sponsored by the business association and church street marketplace to look at how other communities are handling the same problems that we have in burlington and i went to boulder colorado denver colorado ithica and portland um and uh none of them could believe that we somehow sustained sustained our business district with just 40 properties paying into that business district you don't have the economy of scale to make it work long term and there were a lot of federal dollars that went into creating the church street marketplace but it's now an aging marketplace and we need to reinvest in that and we need the economy of scale of bringing in you know the rest of the downtown and the businesses wanted as as well you know the businesses want to pool their money to try and improve the downtown um so i don't have uh the view that this is um you know that there's a privatization scheme here there's a long list and for anybody who's interested what i have here is just uh well two sides of you know two pages of the maybe nine page charter change that explains all the things that remain under city control which is really most of it and in some ways more city control because the city council is actually going to approve the bylaws we're going to approve the management plan we're going to approve the budget we're going to appoint the majority of the voting members of this new entity and i think that it will be a great enhancement in our downtown downtown improvement district um i absolutely and completely disagree uh the downtown improvement district is incredibly privatized um and in terms of accessibility it again negates to address the issue of homelessness what do we do with these communities that we already literally speak almost in a derogatory form about when we say well you know the community we don't want to talk about it we know exactly what we're talking about the downtown improvement district does not again doesn't involve everyone um and what indicates that is a lack of transparency in the entire process the fact that no one in here knows what the downtown improvement district is i still don't know what the downtown improvement district is i've sat down with several people to try to get an understanding of what it is and it's just quite clear that the process of it all was not transparent and when a government decides that it knows what's best for the people we get bright ideas like building walls so that people can't come in fleeing fleeing things like you know violence so um i think it's really really important to understand that our city council is a body that's elected to represent exactly us so if everyone out there is suggesting that the process was not transparent i think it's incredibly wrong for us to be told that it is transparent um who you elect should be representing you not nest not telling you you know you are you're wrong about your your your um your assessment of things uh so again going back to the downtown improvement district the accessibility that expansion what does it mean for low-income families what does it mean for my family that lives right up on pine street uh when when we make that expansion uh you know to subliminally just suggest oh run rent might go up a little bit and pretend like that's all it is is also incredibly it's disencouraging um and i think it's really important that we understand again there was no transparency in this process and it just doesn't it's we're not holding our city council is accountable for the lack of transparency in a lot of these in a lot of these developments and that's going to hurt us in the long run those that are that are renters homeowners taxpayers we you know what's we have to take on the burden of these these developments that don't include any of us and it's quite clear that it didn't include any of us because again none of us still know what it is yeah thank you um to be clear the downtown improvement district does not raise rents um and it's not uh there are no fees on uh residential properties and as far as uh the accusation that the city council hasn't been transparent i really don't know what an example of that is all of our meetings are public meetings are publicly warned all of our discussions have been in public um and you know i have reported here at the npa about it so i'm not sure what um you know what is not transparent if you know there can be an argument that we should have had um more public engagement which i think is different than not being transparent um but i also think that that the focus of the engagement was was more the people that were living right downtown um and it probably wasn't engaging a lot of people out in the in the south end but um and particularly because it is uh it is kind of it's going to tax the businesses they were definitely more a focus of the engagement because they're the ones who are going to have to be footing the bill so that is where a lot of the of the focus was but it's a charter change so we are having the discussion now you all get to vote on it and i do think that that is a transparent process we might not all agree on which way we want to go but i don't think it's fair to say it's not transparent uh just a clarifying question maybe i've misheard the mayor earlier but did he not suggest that rent would go up a little bit i believe i heard that no no the no i mean the only way that rent goes up is if in in the sense that the neighborhood gets nicer through this process which could potentially um increase rents but there are i'll tell you i'm also a realtor there are other factors that affect rent and when city place comes online with all of the new rental units that that they're bringing in um that could definitely put some downward pressure on rent so it's not happening in isolation and it does not in and of itself increase rents but to revisit that idea of gentrification isn't that exactly what it is if it it just becomes a little bit nicer that means certain people aren't going to be able to afford living there anymore that means those people have to leave and find elsewhere to live well the alternative is it could become less nice and it could decay and it could become a downtown with a lot of vacant space and rents would be low but i don't think that that is what we want either i think we need to um try to build more housing because building more housing in the downtown does decrease rents and i think that that's the alternative to high rents not to let our downtown decay so that rents will be low here in lies the debate on gentrification how to how to avoid it and still maintain our quality services for the entire community uh not on that time here to cover an entire debate on gentrification so i'm going to move on from that topic next one again these are these are comments questions that came in through uh online solicitation around the community uh citizen initiatives uh do you believe that all citizen initiatives phrased in appropriate language receiving a required number of signatures should be automatically included on the ballot do you have issues with that process yes um i do think that it should automatically on the ballot again just going back to that idea that we're elected to represent the people um so if 3,500 people come up with the petition with the signatures i really think that it's really really concerning that we would just kind of swat it down and say it doesn't matter um it says a lot when 3,500 people actively sign something to say we are against this that's not a small percentage of people folks that's way above the threshold that's necessary and so going back to that idea of transparency and going back to that idea that we elect our officials we elect our officials and it's important that they represent us 3,500 votes 3,500 signatures excuse me that's ridiculous thank you um i think that this is a representative democracy and that we do represent all of you and we try and represent you uh we try and our job is to look at all of the details of everything that comes before us um in ways that you probably do not want to on on all of these different issues and i had posted on front porch forum um asking people do you want this question on the ballot or have we gone through there there is a lot of public process that happens other than a vote and uh should we respect the public process that's gone before and it was really interesting to get the feedback that i received on front on um from porch forum which had over 150 responses to that inquiry and um more than two thirds said no we don't want that question on the ballot but there were also a lot of signatures on the petition which i acknowledge um a lot of people who contacted me also said that they had signed the petition and they said they still didn't want the question on the ballot so i had to take that into consideration as well um but my biggest problem with put you know i really think that this uh this relates to the city hall park question and the problem that i have with putting it on the ballot was that we would not be getting i i think that i don't think that people would have gotten what they expected or hoped for out of the process because if you put a question on the ballot and say well a project can be better better is interpreted differently by every single voter and we can always make it better but we may not ever get a project that can actually um win a majority of the vote because um you know john votes no because he doesn't like um the splash pad and susie votes no because she doesn't like that the farmers market is out of the park for a year and sally votes no because she doesn't think the farmers market should be in the park at all and another person votes no because they're upset about the trees um another person votes no because they think we're spending too much money and another person votes no because we're not spending enough money and we're not putting enough um elements into the park so you can see how we could put it on the ballot but if you only ask a yes no question it's really not very informative and in this case it would have stopped a process that was there was a lot i mean we could argue about the d id public process but the public engagement on city hall park was extensive and even donna i know you have come to us several times and said i want to more than 40 meetings i forget exactly what the number is but there was a lot of public process and um unfortunately our community doesn't uh doesn't speak with one voice and we have to take in all of the different information we get and create community priorities and i think that the process that we went through there was fair and it was very extensive and it came to this npa many times so i don't think that we can universally say and what i have heard from voters knocking on doors is that they do not universally want um all of these questions put on the ballot and i respect what i hear from my constituents uh staying on the theme of public process and because it's the word five npa this one is to you first john do you support the completion of the champlain parkway in its car design um i have personally never been a fan of the champlain parkway and before i was elected living in lakeside there aren't a lot of people in lakeside that are um you know have great feelings about the champlain parkway the champlain parkway is going to bring all of the traffic into lakeside avenue which is our only access out of the neighborhood but um in my first election i actually thought well if i don't get elected fine i'm going to spend my time fighting the champlain parkway because that's in my personal interest if i do get elected i have to represent both the people that love the champlain parkway and the people that hate the champlain parkway and many of those on either side feel that their basic livelihood depends on either getting built or not getting built and so i my approach has been to try to make this project better and back in 2006 i think we had a real opportunity to make substantial changes to this project and i went to mayor kiss and i he was new in office and i tried to get him to understand um some of the problems with the project and how we could make changes and he was uninterested i went to steve goodkind many times who is now one of the you know primary promoters of the idea that we can make all kinds of changes and steve told me time and time and time again no we can and i will tell you in 2006 we could have made some of those changes but there wasn't a willingness there wasn't a political will and today the project is permitted and we have um through there is a a little opening there that says we can make um safety improvements and through that the city i'd really give chape and spencer a lot of credit um we have made improvements to the project um and made it a road that's going to integrate better with our neighborhood streets um but we have gone through we have done everything that we can do at this point i think the project has definitely improved over the last eight or so years um and i somewhat reluctantly i do support the project going forward now um so my understanding is that the proposal for the project in itself was initiated a while back um and it did not account for a lot of obviously the changes that have happened since um i think that much like anything else it's important that we understand who has access to or i may not access but what the accessibility of this this project is i mean it doesn't account for pedestrians it doesn't account for you know bikers so i think it's really important that if we are going to move forward with this which it sounds like we are moving forward with it um i think every step of the way it's important that we understand that we we do make it an inclusive project that actually does see to it that there is safe um walk and bike paths um and that's all i'm going to say about it i don't support it right now in its current form of course because again i don't think it's accessible to everyone but if we are able to make those changes as jones uh jones shannon suggests i think it's absolutely something that that would be viable and that would that would be good for our community but in its current form no chance i'll just make a couple points um the project definitely takes into consideration pedestrian and uh bikes and it has been supported by local motion i believe and i think that one of the really critical things that i have been fighting for and i believe i have confirmation that we will get is that uh you know the that it is a little absurd that the this champlain parkway is supposed to improve access to downtown i don't believe it will do that but i do believe it's going to um better manage the the traffic in the south end and particularly the truck traffic in the south end which is on neighborhood streets now and it's going to get that off of the neighborhood streets and that's important for people in the south end but to bring potentially to bring more traffic into the king street neighborhood i am very concerned about that and the way that that's expected to be managed is uh by putting a traffic light uh putting traffic lights at king street and maple street i am not confident that that's going to work and so i have asked that the first phase of the project start at that and let's put the traffic lights in and let's uh see how we're able to manage the traffic with the traffic lights and if we can get the improvements um there and it might uh i don't think it's a yes no answer i think it might take some um working with the traffic lights to figure things out down there and i don't want to do that after adding more traffic i want to make sure we're managing the existing traffic that's there now before adding more traffic and i would also advocate for dead ending one of the other elements of the project is to dead end the the side streets here like morse place and um Ferguson and Lyman because having this facility really impacts that neighborhood but dead ending those streets is part of the project and we weren't allowed to do it in advance of the project so if we can do that as a next step dead end those streets then we could pave Briggs street which a lot of people complain about but that was actually a concession to the neighbors when this you know city market was built here um it was to deter cut through traffic so we should start dead ending those streets and then we can play pave pave Briggs and there are some uh positive elements of this project um i'm concerned about additional traffic on the in the king street neighborhood as well i live there um so that's very concerning for me especially because i have a lot of young siblings that uh do run around often too much energy um another uh you just reminded me actually with the dead ends another aspect of the project is that it dead ends pine street over there which is troublesome because when traffic is or if something happens on Shelburne road people don't have anywhere else to go once we dead end that pine street space there's nowhere else for anything for for traffic to go so traffic is stalled there um i don't know i'm not sure if people are familiar with with you know exactly what i'm talking about but that right right after south meadow uh the south meadow neighborhood if you dead end that where does everyone go when traffic is backed up well the alternative is the parkway right switching gears here um by some assessment the rights of the transgender community are under attack in america do you see a role for the city council in working to affirm the rights of people across the gender spectrum sorry i asked that i didn't i missed it sorry by some assessment the rights of the transgender community are under attack in america do you see a role for the city council in working to affirm the rights of people across the gender spectrum here in the community absolutely and i think that the city council in itself should play a pivotal role in making sure that you know there is equality for everyone um and to be honest i think the city should be involved in a lot more um so uh one of something that i've been recently working on is uh addressing the issue of misogyny and sexism um something that i've struggled with in my past as a young kid um i came from kenya as a seven-year-old uh coming from a culture that was explicit and clear in its sexism and misogyny and then coming here to a society that was a little bit more hidden about it and it was more insidious you know it took me a long time to figure out how to navigate that space and figure out you know who i am first and foremost but also how to how to you know figure out who i should be and um so i think that the city in itself could probably play a role in creating some sort of uh some sort of i don't know if you would call it a committee or something that reaches out to communities that already feel very very very you know marginalized in a lot of ways so i think the city plays a pivotal role in all of that we should protect everybody's rights including transgender people and um yes everybody okay um next question um john this one's to you first how is your opinion about on the basing of the f-35 at the btv airport um i'm not exactly sure what that means i think that uh i'm you know not i'm actually not a fan of airplanes at all i don't like when they fly over my house i don't like flying in them um and i don't like fighter jets um but what i have become aware of is that the um every contract the city has signed with the federal government since at least since the 1950s has allowed them access to our air it's a condition of those contracts that um uh that we give the federal government and the military access to uh to our airport and i've often wondered why do we have this fabulous airport in burlington vermont and it turns out a lot of the reason is because of the um federal funds that we get because we allow the federal government to use it as their um i don't know if you call it a military base but essentially military base uh so uh i know that there has been a lot of uh of concern about the f-35s carrying nuclear weapons um i certainly would be as concerned as anybody uh that we would have nuclear weapons in in burlington um i contacted senator sander senator lehi's office first and i was assured that that is not the case um i then contacted uh senator sanders office and um had several back and forths before finally getting some official uh confirmation that that is not the case in burlington uh so i don't think that it's not our decision actually whether or not we get f-35s here um personally i'd prefer we did not it's the decision of the federal government and they have made that decision so um that's that's where i am um i don't support basing those things here at all um i haven't spoken to a single person who supported it and for that reason i don't support it either next question uh Muhammad to you first what should burlington be doing or continue doing to counteract the inevitable effects of climate change and to reduce our environmental footprint as a city? I think a better transportation system a more wholesome and cohesive transportation system um right now a couple big concerns with our busing system in particular even though we do have a system itself is that it's not really effective um i mean buses are running late if you have a doctor's appointment or an and you're an elder and you need to get to the grocery store i mean buses that aren't effective is is problematic having to take several buses to get to your doctor's appointment or to your to the grocery store is also problematic and um the role that can play in uh impacting our our our uh our environment is that we're if we get about our better busing system we're able to take a lot more vehicles off of the road um if people are walking biking and using uh transportation that is provided by the city and the state again we just have a lot less vehicles on the road which means a lot less carbon going out into the air and going into our earth um so i think transportation is going to be a big step that we should and need to take in order to address climate change and that's something that we could do quickly um of course with it's complex it's very complex but it's definitely something that we do have the resources for so that's where i would go first thank you um i also i certainly uh support more bus transportation but um we actually need more buy-in from the uh the regional area i think one of the problems is that when you a lot of people who live in burlington while they might like to have a job in burlington oftentimes they end up with the job in williston and they need to get to that job and our uh our bus system often doesn't work or if you live in the south and you work at the hospital uh but the buses don't run at the same time that your your job shift does so you can get to your job but you can't get back from your job um but all of that is you know i would really like to see at the state level uh better commitment to regional bus systems because it's not something that can really be solved just inside of burlington we need these other communities to actually pay into the system so that you can get to a job in williston um and not be limited uh to to the jobs in burlington that being said we need also need to attract more jobs to burlington so the people who live in burlington can also work in burlington and that's something i think we all highly value is having having work opportunities within the city but in addition to transportation there's also um i think we often forget that our all of our homes are being heated uh mostly with fossil fuels and there's uh uh an initiative called the 2030 challenge trying to get um buildings to to be upgraded and um become more energy efficient and working towards net zero buildings but the um the other thing that i have done as a city counselor is improve the uh the standards by which new buildings are are built so that they're meeting higher energy efficiency standards and higher environmental standards and that has been uh very important to me and i've pushed very hard developers don't always want to do that but i think that that's the i think it is a privilege to build in the city of burlington and with that privilege there's certain expectations our community have has and one of them is certainly energy efficiency and um green building practices generally so we agree on the buses anybody who's ridden the buses would agree we need a better bus system and i have ridden the buses actually they used to go through my neighborhood and now they don't anymore and you know why they don't go through my neighborhood because they didn't have time because of the traffic there we go we agree last question and then a quick closing statement uh this one is to uh john personally uh would you consider supporting a requirement that city council candidates sit on a board commission or nba as a prerequisite prior to running um i don't think you should have a prerequisite to running people come to this position in a variety of ways i i hadn't served i don't think i had served on non-profit boards but i hadn't served on a city board prior to running but i was very active in my community um it was actually uh before we had front porch forum and i actually used to run around my neighborhood um printing newsletters about what was going on and i had been the um i was the uh president of preservation burlington um had been on the board of the lake sampling committee and so through that work i there's a lot of different ways you can be engaged in the in the community other than the you know such a specific prerequisite but i think voters have whatever prerequisites they want for who should be a city counselor and we should leave it to them uh so i serve on the board for the registration of voters i serve on the united states committee for refugees and immigrants which used to be the refugee or settlement program i serve on the sidenese foundation uh and i serve on the youth advisory board as well as a uh youth another youth advisory uh group that i started with my friends it's a peer mentorship group um with that said i am agreeing again with councillor shannon i don't think there should be any prerequisites um i really think people should be able to vote for who they feel is a viable candidate whom they feel is someone that is going to respect their needs and attend to the the things that are concerning to them so i agree with you i absolutely think that there shouldn't be any prerequisites run if you like okay thank you uh quick closing comment comment your first thank you all for being out here tonight um i'm incredibly you know glad to have this opportunity to be you know the opportunity to potentially represent all of you um i just want to say that we really really do have a very very very very rich city um in terms of culture diversity our economy burlington in itself in this lake is the economy of vermont um i just want to remind everyone that with an inclusive society we really are able to tackle every single thing that comes our way so let's be inclusive let's move forward and let's let's bring our community together um thank you mohammed and i you know i share mohammed's uh goals for having an inclusive community and in fact i had met with mohammed before he was running when i heard he was interested in politics and we uh had coffee together a couple times and i really enjoyed that and through that process we put together an event at the king street neighborhood i'm sorry king street youth center that was uh really trying to um bring immigrants to the table which i had suggested when mohammed had mentioned that his parents were not comfortable coming to city meetings which i completely respect and understand so i suggested we have a meeting at the king street center which is a place where they would be comfortable and it was a huge success i really enjoyed meeting that community and i will acknowledge that prior to that i did not have a you know i knock on the doors in the king street neighborhood but there are some neighborhoods that are literally you know the doors are locked you can't get into the buildings um and it's hard to access and the more that we can bring through people to the table through a variety of means the better we are lucky to have a rich culturally diverse community and uh i i want to represent all of our community from you know from queen city park road all the way to main street and i look forward to continuing to engage with all of you and maybe people who are watching on tv and uh maybe people who are behind some locked doors who want to reach out to me uh i would love to hear from you great thank you both so much for taking the time includes our our meeting see y'all next month oh i have some information if you wanted to know my position on valid questions and i also got this information on the charter language so