 We're at the Manuski City Council meeting and ask everybody please join us for the Pledge of Allegiance by Deputy Mayor Brian Corgan. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, first up tonight is agenda review. This is an opportunity for Council to look at rearranging the agenda, add an item, which we'll discuss in just a moment, or move anything around. I think the agenda has been pretty thoughtfully laid out for the purpose of accommodating some visitors this evening, but I also want to note that we do have a request for a supplemental agenda item. So we received an email asking that we include a supplemental agenda item entitled Spinner Parking Agreement, along with a subsequent document that can be provided online as well. And so that proposal came to us about five hours ago, but is an item of urgent need. Would there be any issue from Council in terms of adding this to tonight's agenda? No. Okay, so singing Hearing None, we'll add that to our list of regular items, and we will take that on as the new item D, excuse me, E. So that will become item E in the regular items. Again, that will be known as Spinner Parking Agreement. That's in relation to Spinner Place downtown. Any other comments on the agenda? Great, so singing Hearing None, we'll move on to public comment. This is an opportunity for the public to address Council on anything that is not on tonight's agenda. We do have a copy of the agenda in the back, and also ask the folks who visit, please be sure to sign in as well for a record meeting. Are there any items that anybody would like to address to Council that are not on tonight's agenda? So singing Hearing None, last chance? Okay. We'll move on to the consent agenda. We have two items on tonight's consent agenda. We have the City Council minutes from October 2nd, 2017. We also have the payroll warrants from 924-107-17. The accounts payable warrant is of 1013 and the subsequent payout for August. I think everybody can take the minutes for the second. Yeah. Okay. Second. So if I could ask, well, I'll tell you what, we'll just take it separate. So motion to approve the item A of the consent agenda. Any other discussion? Hearing Seeing None, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. May I also entertain a motion for approval of the payroll warrants item B for the consent agenda? So moved. Second. And a close second by Eric. Any further discussion? Hearing Seeing None, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Consent agenda is approved as presented. City update. Good evening. A couple updates tonight. Just a reminder that in November we only have one meeting on November 6th, and then we have to take a little break and get into budget season where we have lots of meetings. So it's looking right now like the November 6th agenda is going to be pretty significant. So just keep that in mind. We will also have a subsequent warrant that we will need signed between meetings. So just a heads up about that. I'll give you more information about that later. Two important updates on the airport that I wanted to bring to your attention tonight. One is the resolution that you all passed in August is before the Essex Select Board tonight actually. So the mayor and representatives from South Burlington sent a communication to them, and Paul Sarr and our communications manager is there tonight representing us. Obviously we're here. Tomorrow night what historically has been the sound mitigation committee is kind of morphing for the time being into the noise compatibility program update technical advisory committee, which is a FAA required group to advise the airport as they put together the next round of funding for the noise compatibility program. So we sit on that group. There's a representative from the school district that also sits on that group. The first meeting of that group will be tomorrow night at five. It's open to the public if anyone is interested in attending. The focus of that effort is to look at to put forth to the FAA a grant proposal for future potential sound mitigation opportunities. Last week we had a long discussion about Main Street and the pool. Just a quick follow up that we are working on both of those efforts to move them forward and lay out timelines to see how successful we'll be at actually hitting the targets the funders are looking for. It is likely that we will bring forward to you at the next meeting request for funding for preliminary engineering of both projects. We are hopeful that we will have a variety of different funding sources to bring to that effort as well as some local dollars. So just an update on that. Halloween's right around the corner next Saturday, October 28th. So not this coming, but the following is the big Halloween event. It's all focused on downtown this year. Family fun at VESAC, Jack lanterns, pumpkins in the rotary. The Haunted Mill is also Saturday night. They will also be doing the Haunted Mill on Friday, Saturday and actually Halloween. So it would be great to see lots of people out. And then finally Angela and I are in the middle of our, or not in the middle, we just kicked off today our annual audit. The auditors are here all week. Angela has done an enormous amount of work and deserves huge credit for putting together the details. The auditors walked into a complete audit binder today, probably three inches. Complete met every audit checklist items. So huge credit to her for pulling all that information together. I'm standing. Thank you. All I have to do. Thank you. We'll go to the council reports. We started this direction last time. We'll start down there this time. One add on to the Halloween celebration. This question is the pumpkin carving at the senior center this weekend. So it sounds sounded to me from last meeting that it's going to be quite an operation. So it's one of my favorite events of the year to spend some time at the senior center with your neighbors carving pumpkins. So I want to encourage folks to come down. And then I will be making another visit to the senior center on Tuesday. This week to chat with folks about all kinds of things. So hope to see a good crowd there for a lively discussion. Mr. Corrigan. I did not meet this month or this since last meeting. So I have nothing to report out. Just following up. We've pulled 800 and some pumpkins out of Wickham's pumpkin patch last weekend and went back and got more. So and I did not hear what they got in terms of more, but getting very close to a thousand. Just to follow up to on Jesse's comments in regards to the airport. So folks know we continue to we met with a couple members of the Burlington Airport Commission. And I also have proposed for Brillington's mayor, mayor's office, as well as the South Billington in an attempt to also directly engage communities, help them move conversations towards a productive platform. So just want to let folks know we continue to do a lot of work around that issue. Regardless of what you've seen terms of outcomes of other municipalities. I unfortunately was unable to attend the last planning commission meeting. But my understanding is full speed ahead on development of the plan. There's a lot of great conversations going on about structuring the chapters and filling in from the table of content from there. Am I missing anything? Other in terms of earthquake benchmarks from? Nothing. Yeah, but some great conversations have taken place about sort of the feel of the narrative around the plan to which has been really exciting. And I think really personalizing it towards delivering the message in a very community focused way. So it's a plan for the people who live here, not just city speak and technical speak. So excited about that. And the content chapters are lining up with what I think a lot of items here obviously have had in terms of priority, but also a number of rather ongoing conversations and public feedback sessions that we've had. So that's moving in a tremendously positive way. And then we've got housing commission coming up next week. So look forward to that. They've got a lot on the plate in the next three meetings. So hopefully some great outcomes to report on that as we move along. So really quickly in regards to the airport resolution, I did just want to thank the folks who put time and effort into drafting the letter that went to the Essex Select Board tonight. I think it really encapsulated the nature of the discussion that we had in improving the resolution. And I had reached out to some of the Essex Select Board members individually. It was really helpful to have those thoughts to be able to frame some of the messages that I was sending them. I missed the public safety commission meeting. So I've got this week touch base with the folks sitting to my right over here and the chair of the commission to get caught up to speed. So I'll come back next council meeting with a bit better of an update for you all there. I was actually down at Brattleboro for the Secretary of State's annual transparency tour. And I bring that up because we are actually going to be here on Wednesday. So from six to eight here in this room, we're going to be bringing the transparency tour. It's a great presentation on things like open meeting law, the Public Records Act, and transparency in government. So it's a really great opportunity for officials like us or municipal staff or members of the public who want to understand the tools that are at their disposal to access their government to come and have a really great discussion around what some of those tools are. So hope to see you all Wednesday night. I just want to add to the Wunuski Historical Society at 11 o'clock at the senior standard. Remember fifth is also having a talk that includes a historical catch up on historical architecture in town and a number of other items that I'm not totally clear on what the topics are going to be, but just a heads up that's taking place too. So maybe more news from them. There's a lot going on in town too, the tech item, the tech thing coming up. It's great because we used to be able to sit in here and really cover every event that was taking place in the community. You just can't do that anymore. So I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge to the great work of Paul, our communication staff, and everybody here to put events online and really encourage people watching at home if you're not tuned into the Facebook, Twitter, and all the great calendar work being done there to work people things going on. That's a wonderful place to go. Okay, on to our regular items. First up tonight we have approval of the Public Safety Commission for Katie Jennings. We had a good question. Sure, sure, sure. But you mentioned the pool. If I remember correctly I thought tonight was the night we were going to come forward after the money, so I was wondering what the pool is with the pool, and if there's any danger of not having whatever needs to be completed by the next meeting. So you're absolutely right. I had said that at the last meeting. We got the quote from an engineer to do the work, the engineer who's been working on the project so has some baseline knowledge already to do the environmental and preliminary engineering work, and it came back about twice as much as we thought it was going to. So our engineer is reviewing that spec and trying to see if there's room to negotiate, if we need to get other bidders into that process, add in a new engineering voice into that process, and do that due diligence so we know we're spending the money wisely. At this point, because we have a bid, I don't think it should be delayed anymore, but that's the reason why it's not on tonight's agenda. Good question. Thank you. Excellent question. Other questions? regards to city updates? Forget sometimes to take comments on that. Thank you. Okay. With that, we'll move on to regular items. First up tonight, we have approval appointment of Miss Katie Jennings for Public Safety Commission. Welcome. Hello. Thank you very much for joining us. So what we appreciate you taking the time to write out, write out a little summary of why you applied, et cetera, but we always like to ask people when they come, what got you interested, what made you decide to raise your hand to volunteer for this? Sure. So my husband and I have lived in Winooski for about four years, and we absolutely love it. It's a place that we can truly call home. So when this opportunity on the Public Safety Commission opened up, I thought it was a great opportunity to engage with my city, but also help have a voice, making sure that this is a welcoming and inclusive and safe place for everyone. Yeah. Mentoring experience is a cool thing to bring to the table too in terms of having those, I'm sure interactions with people who maybe have fed to work with public safety officials in a number of different capacities from an interaction standpoint as well. So that's great. Yeah. I'm excited. Awesome. Any questions for Katie? No. Thank you very much. Commitment to the city and your willingness to step up. It's fantastic. We love it too. We get where you're coming from. It's a great and engaged group with lots of interesting topics that I play right now. Yeah. I attended one meeting and that's how I felt the whole time. It's really interesting topics. Great. A quietly spoken group all the time. Right? It's a bit liaison. Very engaged. I love it. Great. So any questions or concerns to the public in regards to the appointment process for commission members? Okay. So seeing and hearing none, I entertain the motion for appointment for the Public Safety Commission from Ms. Katie Jennings. So moved. Motion by Nicole, second by Eric. Any further discussion? Hearing and seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now up to item B, Dr. Tysers, FY17 year in budget update. Is it already year in for FY17? Yes. Thank you. It doesn't feel like it should be, but time flies. We'll see you much faster. You're welcome. Welcome Dr. Tysers. As always, thank you for all your work. Well, thank you for having me sit tonight. It's been quite a while since I sat and addressed you. Yeah. Luckily, and in my favor, it seems every time I do sit to address you, it's always positive information. So it's always nice that it's if I come here, there's fron on my face. That's when you have to start to get worried. Very briefly, I just want to go over the highlights of the FY17 year, operating year. You have my memo, so I'm not going to try to elaborate too much on it, but as you can see from my memo, it was a very positive year. The city came out in a very strong financial position. Again, seems like we've done that for the last couple of years. And so it's always a nice feeling to know that we're in that positive financial position rather than a negative position, which is a little bit disheartening. As you can see, the general fund by itself generated a sizable amount of surplus for FY17. And as I've highlighted in my memo, the basic driver of that surplus was a massive increase in revenues and some decreases in expenses, which brought the expense section down below the 100% mark and brought the revenue section over the 100% mark. And I just want to make one mention, my very first item about property taxes, and in particular, delinquent property taxes. It seemed like the city clerk's office made a consorted effort this year to go and try and collect as many delinquent taxes as possible. And that's why you see a rather large amount of the revenue increase was attributable really to that delinquent tax collection. And in particular, Janet was, I guess, given the task of going out and writing her on the delinquent taxes. And she did a, I think personally, this is my own personal feeling, but I think she did a Yeoman's task, the city delinquent tax rolls as of June 30th were down below 35,000. And they're currently in the low teens and are anticipated to be below five figures by the end of the week. So for a grand list of over $5 million to have a very small, minute amount of delinquent taxes is absolutely remarkable. Excellent. And just to underline and echo, Janet really deserves a lot of the credit for this work. She, as Dr. Teiser said, really rode her on this poll, it's pretty much solely responsible for that. Outstanding. Yeah. So, you know, that, as I've said throughout my memo, a lot of this stuff is really attributable to how staff manages, how staff operates the city budget, and how they keep in mind that it is taxpayers' money that they are using. And I think we sort of made that point quite clear and it's nice. It's really heartening to know that people are really taking an interest. It's not their money. It belongs to the citizens, the residents. And so therefore they're using it wisely and not spending it just foolishly. So that's kind of heartening. Another large portion, of course, of the increase in revenue was $176,000. That was brought over with the FY16 surplus. As you remember, we had a rather large FY16 surplus. You approve expenditures to use up some of that surplus, but $176,000 came over and goes in to the revenue section as other revenue. And so that increases it. The rest of it, there was an increase in the amount of grant money that was brought in by the police department for special police details. That, of course, was offset a little bit. If you look at the expenses for the police department, one of the only two operational sections, that really went over the 100%. But that was attributable to these increased activities, which the money came in to pay for. So it's always nice to have the money come in and then spend the money for additional expenses and have them really kind of wash. And the rest of it is fairly self-explanatory. The only other area in the expense section of the general fund budget was the engineering department, and that was really a minute, a little over $3,000 before some professional engineering work that was done on ongoing projects that were there. But as a whole, if you look at all the rest of the operational departments, they were all below the 100% mark, which having been in this business an awful long time and having dealt with a lot of budgets, particularly municipal, it is really enlightening to see budgets come in at the 100% mark or below. And it's really nice. And again, to be very truthful, that's attributable to the people who manage them. The city manager is the overall whip in this, but the department heads who manage and have their budgets did an outstanding job of making sure that happens. So I feel really elated that the city is being managed, at least financially, being managed very, very properly. And that's a tribute to the staff and the management. The other sections, the enterprise funds, the water fund, the wastewater fund, the parking garage, as you saw from my memo, all came out with reasonably high surpluses. Again, additional revenues coming in, charges for services, parking meter fees, things of that nature, and a consideration of the expenses that need to occur within those particular funds. All three of them came out with very hefty surpluses, which is always a good sign, and again, attributable to good management. I did want to have one point of clarification. The water fund in the memo was attributed to a transfer in from reserves. The 74,000 was actually allocation fees that were paid for for the major projects that are going up on Main Street and East Allen. Thank you. Good point. The special revenue funds, basically the Community Justice Fund, Rental Registry, the TIF, and the O'Brien Community Center all did as well. So if you looked at those special funds in light of the enterprise funds and the general fund, everything went really well last year. So we're kind of keeping our fingers crossed. Again, my point to remind you that what you saw in my memo and as financial statements are really unaudited outcomes. As the city manager said, the auditors came in today to start their field audit. They should be done that in a week or so, or whatever the case may be, and I want to kind of support what Jesse said. Angela did a magnificent job. You have to understand, and I have to say this very seriously, you need to understand she did it alone. She's the only one that could do it. And it's just remarkable that this young lady can do those kinds of things. Even though she's got her head bowed, she's very proud of what she does, and she does an excellent job. She should be. She does a wonderful job. Very, very nice job. So the audit will take place. These are unauditive figures that I presented to you. We don't think they're going to change much if they do. It's going to be hardly noticeable. So you should end up with an audit that ends the year in a very strong financial position as we have over the last three or four years. And I think that the city should be very proud of who they hire, who does the management, and how they handle city taxpayer funds. I want to commend you too, Jim. I know that since this time, you have gone after getting work and progress towards a couple of the findings as well. For example, deposit backing out opportunities credit, which I left Greg a voicemail to be sure he follows up on. I was wondering if you were good. Yeah, but I know too, you've worked really hard on a number of items as well. So we're certainly very appreciative of your work. Thank you. Well, thank you. And last year, we had five items on the management letter. And I think without any doubt, we've cleared up four of them, probably to the auditor's satisfaction. And the one we didn't was something ongoing that we're going to take care of anyway. Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about the language used in the TIFT fund summary? And specifically, unbudgeted payment. So we make standard budgeted payment. So I was just getting that language. It was the PCOR payments. Yeah. And we were working from the old forecast in the TIFT budget that did not include the PCOR as a budgeted number. Okay. We're going to be doing a new forecast from now through the end of the TIFT that will include all the payments for all debt for the coming budget cycle. Great. So we'll review that come budget cycle time. But my understanding is because we met the one-to-one ratio, we could make that payment to the family, which we need to pay off before the end of the district. So we had the funds available and we could do it. We're very close to actually being able to start paying principal. Principal? Ooh. Well, that's something we obligated ourselves to. So regardless of how we budgeted it, now that we were there for them, how we obligated ourselves. Okay. That's very helpful. And just the other piece I wanted to ask about is given the realities in Montpelier and given, I think, what we learned as a result of our exercise around researching parking and the future of parking, I think that taxation right now is not something that's likely to move. I'm not going to hop on that pedestal. We've all heard that too many times. So just want to note that, though. And in the conversations I've had, there's no willing to move that anywhere at this legislative season. So a budgeted reality that appears for the near future. Other questions, concerns from Council in regards to the report? I just have a, I'm just trying to understand them, Meg. So the FY unaudited surplus is $621,000. And your memo indicates that a large majority of the surplus was due to vacancies. So I'm just wondering, just proportionally speaking, how much of that surplus can we, I think we've worked hard on budgeting around parking revenue because that has been a source of the surplus in prior years. So to try to be more accurately sort of predict, although that's difficult to do, it's also difficult to predict vacancies and whether or not how quickly we'll be able to fill vacancies. So I think it's just important when we're ending a year with the surplus this large that we're really clear with folks why that's happened. So can you give me a sense of the order of magnitude other than large majority? Well, these are Jim's numbers, but my interpretation is that the revenues, the increased revenues make up the majority of the surplus. So that's the 460,000 number. The difference between those two, the 160-ish number, is all of the underspending, essentially we did on the expense side in the city. A percentage of that is vacancy savings. My estimation is 40, 60? 60 is probably about right. We had one position that was vacant for most of the year. It was only filled for about two months of the year. The parking ticket revenue, which we've had discussions about, we had excess of about $54,000. We had budgeted $75,000. For the FY18 year, we budgeted $100,000. So we are slowly increasing that revenue line and trying to see what the changes we've been making to the parking enforcement and the meters will do for the amounts that we're collecting. But so on a percentage basis, even if you say 60,000, even if you say 100,000, that's still not the majority of the surplus. Right. Right. It's the majority of the expense surplus. Sort of the differential between the expenses is due to vacancy savings. For the most part? No. No. On the expense side? That's my interpretation of this. About half of the expense side savings were vacancies. Right. Okay. Whichever thing goes well, you won't have this year, but has been budgeted appropriately. Right. And you'll see an item later on about the use of those months, specifically. Thank you. Other questions, concerns from Council? It's a smaller pot of money, but under your bullet, charges for services indicates an additional $28,000 in unanticipated revenues. They're just a rough idea of if there was some specific services that account for most of that. All the charges for services within the general fund are permits. And so those were primarily building and public works permits that came out far in excess of what we had seen historically. We've gotten a lot more development than what we've had in the past. And so that's where a lot of this is coming in, and it's just going to be adjusting our thinking of budgeting revenue for that based on the new fee structure and the kind of development that we're going to be seeing. And was that captured in the FY18 project? We increased some of them. I believe that the public works one was increased slightly, but I don't think it was the magnitude that we're seeing for the excavation permits that people are doing underground work. And a lot of those are hitter, so you'll get a rash of them as people need to replace sewer lines, and then we'll get none for a year. And on the building permits side, we do want to be a little conservative with that projection. That's one where we often want to see our revenues exceeding our budgeted amount because we are, right now, we're building that number for FY19, so we're building so far ahead of the development community. We're building the budget so far ahead of the development community that that line will often be conservative. Well, I appreciate the memo. It's really helpful, especially for us, but for folks in the room who are people watching at home and they see big budget surpluses at year end to know the reasons behind that so that they can feel confident and we can feel confident that we're not over budgeting. So it's really, really helpful and I appreciate it a lot. Well, explanations are critical if you're trying to figure for the future in order to determine whether there's something you missed and you need to consider an upcoming yearly budget. It's always good to know where you've been. Whether it's a one-time, one-year shot or whether it seems to be an ongoing thing or a recurring thing, it's really, very helpful and we're very pleased to send them to you. I can say confidently we fell for maybe five years in a row in the space of between $90,000 and $170,000 of general fund surplus and it was like that like clockwork. Now we're seeing a little bit of emulation in the number and I think given what we're going through in terms of growth and different staff, different departments, I don't find the numbers to be surprising and I think the harder part is going to be that next year a lot of the same, I won't call them mistakes, but the same assumptions were maybe altered a little bit but maybe this is really information to inform next year's budget so we're always playing a year and a half behind really when it comes to this conversation too. There is a piece where when we have vacancies at the end of the year and we're budgeting for the next year, we're always budgeting full benefits and so that can be a savings when we hire somebody that's not taking full benefits and that we can't plan on those kinds of savings because it would be discriminatory during the hiring process. I will say that on November 6th, your next meeting I will give you the first quarter financial outcomes. Very difficult with the first quarter because you've only gone through three months, you haven't gone through the winter season but it'll give you some idea of what's happened at least in the first three months of a new fiscal year. You can compare with the outcomes of the old fiscal year and the thought about what's going to happen in the new fiscal year. So you've got some collective information that you can browse around in your mind and try to determine how you best you want the budget for FY19 to look. It's been a busier time so I understand people don't remember but this narrative has been consistent throughout the year during those quarterly check-ins from a fiscal year perspective. Sorry. I'm just wondering, this is a bit of an aside but you've raised a couple times wanting to disconnect this surplus conversation from the budget conversation and I'm just wondering what our process might be this year that would either deal with the surplus questions first or after, I mean, what your thoughts are because I think given all the demands The answer right now is undecided. There's a robust conversation taking place about what the best methodology might be where it most appropriate fits. What does that mean? To clarify what it means is we don't know yet. We have not come to an agreement on what that might look like but we will and we will bring something forward. But we should bring you into that conversation also in your role. And just to take people back, the question has always been what happens a lot of times to general funds surplus or fund balances, in the past it's just been set aside because it was, I don't want to say an inconsequential amount of money but it wasn't enough that it really just screamed you need to invest me right away. That's changed in the dollar figure amount and there was a lot of discussion last year about whether or not we should pair the fund balance conversation with the budgeting process. There's pros and cons to doing either way but what we recognize as disingenuous in general is to have them really, really separate without acknowledging each other because then we might make cuts or expenditures during the budgeting process that could have otherwise been addressed by fund balance. While also taking note that we cannot use fund balances as a consistent way to fund year-to-year needs because there's no promise it's going to be there and it should never be, we have historically said it should not be used towards operational work. So, you know, last year the philosophy in my brain, I think the way we handled a little bit was to separate the two conversations. I'm not so sure that that's going to be the final recommendation that's going to come back because I know even I with a little bit more time to think about it can see some of the benefits to having a coordinated conversation but I just, it's not ready for prime time yet. But do know that that's not something that's slid totally off the table and Jesse's right, we absolutely as administrative leaders should bring you into those conversations. Other questions, concerns from council? So we head into the budget season and as Angela and Jim and Jesse get to intimately know auditors for the next couple of weeks as they hang out here. Bring coffee and donuts, they're like this at the time. I will just make one more comment that I forgot to make at the very beginning. Remember that what we presented to you tonight with financial outcomes is really what I like to call cash and pocket kind of outcomes. When you get the audit, when the auditors come in they will infuse this thing called depreciation in there. So your bottom line that you'll see in the audit will be different than what you've seen tonight and that's simply because they introduced this non-cash item called depreciation and so it reduces your annual surplus. But remember one thing, it's a non-cash item. It's not going to cost you anything unless you replace the equipment. What doesn't impact the surplus and impacts the assets? It impacts the assets but it also impacts from an auditor's perspective it impacts the fund balance. Is it because it's a non-cash item that they infused in there? It'll impact the final net cash position overall. Other questions, concerns from council? Any questions, concerns from the public? And so again, when we come up to one time needs for various things, usually fund balance is a lot of times where those items are turned to so that's the type of conversations we end up having too. Okay, so seeing and hearing none, nothing to vote on here but Jim, always appreciate your time and work. Thank you very much. You know where I reside. Angela and Jesse, other part of the administrative team, thank you for all your work. Thank you. Department heads for all their work according to their budgets. Such a different place than it was many years or just a handful of years ago in terms of financial reports. Okay, item C, discussion of goal updates, safe, healthy and connected people. So this is our second monthly update to you on our shared goals. I'm going to do a very brief overview here and then I'm going to let Chief Hebert talk because he's trying to get out of here for a very important meeting tonight. So what you see in front of you is the same template we used before. So the boxes, I apologize, they're a little bigger on this one than the last one just because there's a lot of content here. You see the boxes on the second and third page. There's, as I say, there's a lot of work here. We did indicate that the top two are moving, are proceeding but more slowly than planned. Specifically, that was around those two required staff to define, identify and define the strategies that we're going to use to address your goal around our vulnerable community and around engaging more at the council and in the council employment sectors with all spheres of our population. So we have not done a great job yet defining what those are so we did indicate those as yellow but all of the other ones are proceeding as planned. I'm going to do this a little out of order and ask Chief Hebert to kind of give an overview of what he has shared in this memo and then we'll walk through the rest with the rest of the team. Good evening. Hi. Good evening. So the PD, as far as most vulnerable community members, as you know, we're participating in Burlington Police's opioid project. I don't think it's a secret to anybody that the majority of people who are using those drugs, their life hasn't exactly gone as planned and there's other underlying issues that maybe led to the drug abuse or the continued use of that. So it's been a really effective tool for us to try and identify people that are high risk in our community and try and do some intervention with them. So that's been really productive. I think some of the other things that the leadership team could tap into over the next year is reaching out to adult protective services, Howard Mental Health, First Call, all of those agencies as well and try and build some better relationships. The second thing that I have on here was the three-year strategic plan that's going very well. Michelle from the Public Safety Commission has been instrumental in developing a new community survey that we're about to go out in the next two weeks. So you'll be seeing that in a number of formats. We're struggling a little bit on how we can turn the electronic version into a workable paper version for people that don't have internet access. That's the only thing that's kind of slowing us down a little bit, but it's going really well. We're going to do another internal survey as well with the police department employees to try and figure out what our pinch points are and places that we can improve over the next couple of years. So hopefully my timeline that I think is very doable is sometime in early December you will have the beginnings of a strategic plan with at least the five pillars that we're going to place individual projects under. So we'll be about a third of the way there by December. You guys have done a lot of work on the strategic plan, too, right? We have. So we have done a lot of work behind the scenes prior to that then due to some staffing issues and just other stressors that we came along. It kind of got put on the back burner but it was a very easy project to pick back up. Excellent. And the connection with the opioid pilot feel like it's brought some additional resources to the table and with all those thinking just... It's bringing everybody to the table that literally touches any part of life of these people. So every other week it's police only from the neighboring communities and we meet bi-weekly discuss anybody who's had two or more police contacts. So it could be one in Winnieski, one in Brompton and now we're starting to connect those dots of what's going on with those people. They get at least put on the spreadsheet that they had two police contacts and it's up to us to decide whether it was anything to do with substances or other issues, mental health issues or if it was just wrong place at the wrong time kind of thing and we take them off the list. So that's been really, really good. And then like I said, the other thing is monthly we do the ComSTAT meetings where Department of Health, Howard all these people come to the table at the same time talk about the high risk people not only talk about successes but about failures if we happen to have an overdose fatal somebody that we're trying to identify and work with and how we can avoid that in the future. That's a great work, Chief. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Jesse, did you want me to touch on regional dispatch or are you going to? I can talk with that. Any questions for Chief Hebron? I was just wondering, in the report you talked about the meeting with the secretary of AHS, what do you expect will come out of that discussion in terms of... You want to take that? Sure. So this is actually a really exciting update so that it refers a bit to the bullet above that as well. So for the last three months Chief Hebron, myself and other chiefs and managers from around Shinton County outside of Burlington have been working on a plan with the Howard Center to stand up a partner program to Burlington Street Outreach Team program. So we're calling it the Community Outreach Program. And the idea is that the communities would partner with Howard Center. Howard would hire four street outreach workers, community outreach workers to work with our six communities. So the six communities being South Burlington, Winooski, Williston, Colchester, Shelburne and Essex. So four humans for six communities who would have an office at the police station and would be a primary point of contact for referrals, for law enforcement referrals and other community referrals for people who were experiencing some kind of mental health issue. With the idea being that we intervene as early as possible and at the lowest level of intervention instead of having the officers be kind of that first response to people who are in crisis. So as we've talked about this, UVM Medical Center and AHS have been at the table for this conversation. The meeting with the secretary was an opportunity to kind of brief him on this general issue of what our officers are seeing on the street and how we as municipal employees aren't able to provide an adequate level of intervention. And so we believe, and we're still in the final stages of kind of putting together the agreements, but we believe that AHS and specifically the Department of Mental Health will come up with half the funding to support this program and then the other half will be split between the six communities. So if all of that comes to fruition and of course I would need to come to you and get approval to enter into this contract and allocate these funds, but if all of this comes to fruition as we're currently envisioning, it would mean about a $25,000 or $30,000 cost for the city of Winooski to essentially have almost a full time mental health professional here in the city working directly with the police department and community services all the time. So we think it's exactly aligned with your goal of meeting the basic needs of our residents and freeing up our officers' time to work on more critical, more law enforcement related cases. Thank you. Anything else, Chief, from your involvement in those conversations? Yeah, this is a really essential project. This is a huge vacuum for the police in Chittenden County right now where we call it the corrections merry-go-round where we have people that haven't committed crimes, have mental health issues and end up committing crimes because there's nothing else, no other conduit to get them help. So it's a really exciting project. It's something that's desperately needed. Why did we decide on four humans instead of six humans for six communities? So that's a great question. We were actually trying to decide between three humans and four humans and decided in a first year to start with four. We think also it's going to be a bit of a ramp-up just staffing up and getting people acclimated. So Burlington has... I think it's four for Burlington. So when you think about, you know, the ratios there and the population that exists in the rest of the community and the need in Burlington versus the need in some of the other communities, you know, the need in Winooski and the need in Shelburne is potentially different. That Howard believed that at least in this initial phase four would be a good number to keep people busy, engaged, but not kind of overly involved with the communities. Thank you. The trick is having... It's not enough to have a person that you need to have services that you can refer these folks to. And I guess there was an announcement today about increasing or streamlining the licensure process for drug and alcohol abuse counselors which I think would be a really good thing, but I think one of the issues we run into as a state is there's no services for people or the services are overtaxed. I think this is a really important first step and I think we also need to continue to advocate for a mental health system that isn't patchwork, but is one that has a level of professional services that folks really need in order to confront some of the challenges that they face. So thank you for this work and keep up the pressure on the state. Are you concerned about continuing to back away from some of the needs that really need to be met at the state level? When you overlap an opiate epidemic with what is a very progressive model of mental health care, which is community-based mental health care, this is we enact in Vermont, which is... I don't think people realize how rare the way things are done here is. It can provide for a perfect storm if the resources aren't really carefully balanced. What I think we've seen is a lot of pressure put on first responders across all departments in terms of the things that you're dealing with that are mental health and somebody should have gone to school for sociology to deal with or epidemiology or medicine. Not something you would expect somebody to walk in the door from a law enforcement perspective and be prepared to deal with. Absolutely. I also really appreciate the focus on intervention, the lowest level intervention that's necessary. I think that's really important how people are actually getting services at the ground level that will have the greatest impact for them. One other thing I just want to highlight about this model that I think is special and in line with some of our other conversations is the regional approach. It's something that individually our communities could have stood up. We could hire a social worker to work with the police department. But when you think of how residents are moving between our communities and how you provide services outside of geographic boundaries and how you provide services in a regional way to enable people to back each other up, I think this is a much preferable model. Again, an example of how our communities are coming together to have regional conversations about how to provide the best services to all of our residents. Senator Robinson is smiling. I was going to say a historical context on this is that we've had a social worker on the atlas tier for four years at least and I think at the end of the day the decision from my perspective watching those conversations was always less about the money and more about the fact that a single person alone is going to be such a drop in the bucket and there were a lot of questions about management and where to land it. So I think this really does give the program a good landing spot and some good depth that we were sort of, I think, all hungry for. So it's really nice to see it move to this spot. We would also be, I know you got to go to a meeting. We really missed an opportunity to compliment you on your awesome patches. Thank you. Love them. Still plenty for sale. At the front window of the police department and all proceeds go to send kids to come to us. Awesome. Thank you very much. Any other questions for Chief Ebert? Thank you. Just before I go, I want to say one last thing is a lot of credit goes. I've never seen an issue as big as this move at such a high pace. The city and town managers deserve a huge round of applause to stand this up in literally three months' worth of conversations and hopefully have a working model within a very short time. So it's huge help to all Chittenden County law enforcement. That's great. Pushing those regional conversations, it's hard to do because we've got everything that's right in front of us to see that bigger picture as a real testament to all of you and your ability to work outside of those lines to benefit our community in the end on the ground. So it's awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Good luck. I'm on next. I'm on next. All the Chiefs. Right where you buy a new title for a commiser. Action Chief. Action Chief. So good evening. I admittedly am a little bit behind on plugging fire and code into this evolution just I find myself getting my feet under me with a new appointment and certainly have a different lens on if you will looking at this. I've always been involved at certain pieces of this but to now look at it under one lens certainly is changing my perspective in a good way allowing me to bear more resources. So under the most vulnerable community members I did go to the Senior Center. It's a great conversation. A lot of conversation on the code enforcement piece for some residents that are struggling with some of the properties around them. Great conversations about how they take great care of their property and how they may have different feelings about those beside them and what that means with the city role. So it was a great conversation. I didn't put in here St. Mike's also has done some outreach. Again under this lens sometimes we forget about St. Mike's is our EMS provider but they did go to Barlow and a lot of their members. The students went and had lunch and did some interaction with the folks. So again under that one lens is including them because they're a great partner and certainly want to help us with our missions and be a part of our community. In the private sector employment this fits in a little odd for me but we are going to pilot a fire prevention safety day in the industrial park for the businesses. So we've invited a resource out of the state which is a fire extinguisher sprinkler trailer and our fire prevention and fire staff some other partners will be there. My hope is to meet the employers create more of a relationship with them but more so meet the employees the residents that work there and try to make that connection with them and I hope that if we're successful which I'm certain it will be at this point we have 50 plus people signed up to do the initial event. I hope to be able to get there again but hopefully move it around the city throughout the year. I think it's a great it's a great way to stay connected with our folks and I'm the easiest one but at the end the access assess the delivery of the fire model again getting my feet under me I've now met with Colchester Mallets Bay in the Air Guard V-Tank and their fire departments and just I think part of our own assessment is understanding what's around us and developing a strategic vision of what the fire delivery system here and how we respond as a fire department can be connected to our neighbors. We're not alone. We're not on the island. We are part of a very close-knit mutual aid system that I hope and intend to fully leverage both ways. Provide them the help that they need but also want to leverage the resources that we can. That's kind of my quick summary. So and we should say too this is I think the first time you've come forward with a presentation since formally taking that chief in front of your name so I want to say congratulations, well-deserved you couldn't have been more pleased to see that appointment being made and we know the department's in great hands and somehow you'll manage to do that and still do an amazing job at all the other stuff that you do. Some of it is slowly moving away. But too I mean going back to the safe, healthy community I know in some capacity this is just kind of what we do now but want to acknowledge the work that's been done over the years on housing by your department and the work done to clean up properties that have been long-term issues you know and I wrote with confidence to a resident who had some concerns about a couple properties saying that we know more about the conditions that the people living in this community are living in than at any point in our community's history because you guys are doing that work and making sure there's a system for tracking it and getting feedback on the quality the quality of the housing that's available and ensuring that you know absentee landlords become a less impactful thing in our community, never eradicate that but have done the best we can to invest in controlling that so thank you for all your work on that too. That goes to the staff for sure on many levels so in the support of you folks it's a daily challenge that we just need to face and it's not a problem, it's a challenge and we will continue to forge forward. So chief also points of some very specific things, are there any questions or follow-ups for him on those items? Council? Any questions or follow-ups from public? Yes. We're able to track the conditions of various dwellings in the city. Is that public knowledge? Are there there's an amazing presentation from well you can watch the Firehouse budget presentation where you actually see it but they invested in a system called Firehouse and maybe I'll let you explain that. Historically it's been all on paper and has depending on time constraints we haven't been able to rely on that data we go and do hundreds of inspections but at the end of the year I've never been able to tell you what those inspections meant. What our number one violation was is it the same property without going through hundreds and hundreds of pieces of paper. So we now have a software program which is called Firehouse. All of our inspections are electronic or we're moving to that. So any property, we're starting with rental properties but as property complaints come in on the private side we enter them in so I can now run a monthly report on property complaints and I can tell you if it was trash or mold or those types of specific data points what's nice about that is we can move towards grading some of the properties if you will we talk about absentee landlords it's not fair to the taxpayers if I'm going back to the same property or the people live in there even more so if we're going back to the same property for the same violations over and over and over and again this system is going to be able to really allow us to pinpoint some of those data points. So it's not public yet. It's more of an internal tool but I would say that in the future I believe the city will move towards public access to permitting and certainly when we start to, when I mentioned starting to grade some of the properties that would absolutely be public in my mind I don't have the button to push yet but that would certainly be the intent. I think it's a great thing to be public about not to shame anyone but it's we gain more allies if I communicate to the public what the struggles are and have that understanding and no one wants to be in that and that light just makes it a lot shorter road. And frankly the amount of time spent cleaning up properties is I don't mean to make this sound insulting anybody but people don't know a fraction of the effort and time that it takes. People point to a couple properties on Mallets Bay they got cleaned up. That took years of enforcement. We live in a wonderful state that does a great job of protecting people's rights with that being said people's rights are very protected to really do enforcement action on them is expensive and is a long winding legal path and they spend a lot of time in court working on getting those properties addressed not an excuse it's just usually when people think something's not moving quickly enough there's usually more there so I always encourage you before getting frustrated to reach out and get whatever story you can from folks in City Hall. Great question. Other questions, concerns for Chief Audit? I promised Ray I would stay and support him tonight. That's about to say something nice. So I promise there's no punchline at the end of this but I think one thing I do want to point out before I dive into some details Police Chief of Fire Chief and Community Services Director but come up to the Council table and I think for the three of us to do that the three of us work together weekly if not daily on this stuff and I think it's very easy and I think in a lot of communities you do see siloing of this type of work that's not happening here when John's got an issue with a property he's coming over and picking my brain about what services are available when I've got a family in crisis I'm checking with John on housing and Rick on support services that's happening really organically right now and naturally here within the city and not you know from as a human service guy that feels really good that's where we want to be and so I just think for people at home too to understand that it's easy to look at the Chief jobs as sort of more punitive maybe in some ways and I think it's just to be really clear that is in no way how our folks here approach that work and honestly it makes my job as a human service guy tremendously easier and more more successful so with that said I think a lot of the safe healthy connected people stuff does fall into our shop I think one thing I do want to preface there's a lot here there's a lot not here too priorities below these highest priorities that we are continuing to move and work on so I think that's worth mentioning that this is sort of the tip of the iceberg for us as a department Jesse mentioned early on just the first section about setting up some strategies around meeting the basic needs of the most vulnerable I think I've shared with this group that led to like three nights of me not sleeping quite honestly that's a huge lift and a huge ask it tells me that I'm in the right community this is where I want to be and for the council to unanimously put a finger on that is what they want us spending time on that's huge that's also a huge ask and so I think we are trying to really take our time to mirror the process that council went through downstream and look at the work that we're doing identify our highest priority areas and then I think importantly too and this is one of the things that slowed us down set up some metrics and some outcome measurements to know that we're actually accomplishing something it's really easy human services to do something that feels good and not have any idea that you're actually making a difference for anyone so I expect when we come back next quarter you'll see not only kind of a mirrored process with those priorities but the ways that we're checking on ourselves to make sure that we're moving the needle on these so again but that's a slow process and again when you're dealing with mental health substance abuse homelessness you know child care et cetera there's a lot there yeah yeah so one of the conversations we've had around that definition of how to meet the the community's basic needs is what is the role of local government in doing that work and what are the role of our partners and so I think what Ray is really specifically talking about is how do we push out on the edge of that role to municipal government and not just you know honestly my initial instinct was to come to you and say well providing clean water and providing paved streets and providing sidewalks and providing 24-7 police coverage that is that's what municipal government does to meet our residents basic needs and we're really proud of the quality at which we provide that we will continue to do that and continue to talk about that is providing basic needs but I think what Ray and his team are really pushing beyond that basic baseline assumption of what the city is going to do but I think it is important to acknowledge that there are many many ways in which through our normal course of business we are providing for basic needs and we did have a great department retreat back in early September where we started this process as a department so I think the other thing for all of us as we're kind of learning through this new approach passing this downstream is taking some time getting everybody up to speed down the line is a process a couple pieces that I want to highlight within the next section which is sort of working towards a more representative community and sort of more equitable access to decision making a couple really exciting meetings that happened during this quarter that I think are starting to already lead to some development of some recommendations but really great meeting with staff from Association of Africans living in Vermont so it was I see Rick myself and Heather had a lunch with them and it was just a really wonderful opportunity to sit down share a meal, talk about challenges talk about opportunities and I think really establish a relationship in a way that hadn't been done before I think we did a very transactional business type relationship and I think this really broke down some walls there and allowed us to develop some partnerships which have already started to bear fruit we've had several job opportunities that we've been able to send to Staff at ALV, we're getting applications starting to come in which is really exciting so I think we're starting to see the benefits there and then another really fascinating conversation with folks from Parents and Youth for Change Infinite Collclayser who's the director there just talking about equitable access to decision making processes in ways that I think he was clear to say you guys are doing really well, you're asking the right questions, you're pushing in the right areas but I think it's still fair to say that I think everybody around this room would like to do better there so some really interesting observations on his part and I think some recommendations and some things we're going to start to develop moving forward so just exciting to know that that's out there and that Staff are thinking about that equitable access piece I'm going to jump down to the mental health support piece, just quickly touch on so we're working right now with a school rewrite of the 21C grant which is a grant that funds out of school time services for school aged kids we have run that grant in partnership, the school runs it and we are a sub grantee of it for the last five years so looking though as we move into this next grant cycle, next five year grant cycle some more formal ways to tie Thrive and the 21C after school programs together and provide a better opportunity for more services for kids and families so really exciting work there possibly looking at mirroring the working bridges model which United Way has put in play to some success idea there being your bringing services directly to an employer who is actively committed to employing folks in lower socioeconomic status categories of higher need so instead of making people run around for services try to bring the services to where they are going to be and if you could do that at a place where there are kids in care, all the better some really exciting preliminary conversations there and I think that grant is due February 5th so you will definitely be seeing more detail on that over the coming months open space planning, lots of work kind of burgeoning there Alicia and I spent a couple days at the Vermont Rec and Park conference last week poor Jesse I came back with a lot of ideas and ways that I left to spend money but you know I think some really great opportunities to connect with partners, colleagues and other opportunities and to see in particular some of the ways that they are planning around open space and recreational programming so again stay tuned but I think some really interesting things coming there, just really nice. Rec is not an area where I have a lot of formal background, I did a lot of work with youth but not specifically through a Rec vein so really great for me to do some learning and connecting with partners and then childcare capacity we continue to work on this initiative I think it's worth mention we did have a closure of the RFP on Friday, we ended up with only one applicant and the committee met today to review and is going to be exploring kind of next steps I think obviously when you get an RFP back with one applicant that's not quite where you want to be, you want to have some ability to look at some comparatives so you know I think it's interesting we've had a couple statewide partners at the table who were very complimentary of the process and I think there's some general concern that it may be more reflective of a systemic issue within early childhood where a lot of the partners that we expect might be ready to expand are struggling with quality staff being able to make the business model work based on subsidy rates and so I think we are in an interesting environment there but we left the meeting today with some good next steps and again I expect we'll be back to you all with some updates at the next meeting disappointing, I think globally not where we want it to be but we'll forge on from there I'm trying to think other grants, sub-grants within the Promise communities are moving along, we're promoting those and some exciting work around professional development actually that again I think is a little bit premature for prime time but looking at doing some community-wide trainings that mirror some things the school has been doing with their staff so some exciting pieces on the horizon there and I think those are the big ones that I wanted to highlight I don't know if there are specifics or things that I missed, Jesse I just want to take a moment to art and nature but I mean that type of programming is really cool to see pop up so it goes for engaging a broad audience and a broad scale but that's awesome in the the Wynuszki Wednesdays I think it's been a great example not that it's a necessarily low budget, low input packed event from a staff perspective I recognize a lot of work that goes into that but it creates exactly the kind of environment for people to get together and build relationships which is really, I mean do you think about what city government can do we can't force people to become friends but you can create settings and environment to allow for those types of relationships to foster and grow and that's what makes a strong community so thank you for all the work that you did to make that happen so the only other thing let's do on here that we haven't directly touched on is the regional dispatch discussion which we've heard about several times in the last couple of months so I won't go into details just as a quick update the Union Municipal District Agreement which is the document that would essentially become the organizations charter is at the Attorney General's office for review which is the step before bringing it back to council for consideration in advance of time they're not going to create a commission are they they have 30 days by statute to review it good to hear and then the last section of this memo is what you can expect to see coming up for your work towards these efforts so obviously a lot of those are around thinking about funding for these efforts grant applications you can see the bullets there bringing the federal district agreement back to you funding for the pool preliminary engineering and then of course the welcoming cities policy as well questions for the entirety of the document you just first of all I just think this is thank you for putting the thought into this you know you don't want to say it like this but the reality is it demonstrates I think the thinking that we knew was taking place anyway but shows it a really coordinated way right so it's not to say that this inspired you guys to suddenly get together because I know that you already were in coordinating at that level which is really cool and that's the first thing I thought when the three of you said at the table too it's how great to see that type of thinking but I did find this to be a helpful and useful format and to see it fleshed out like this was great and I think really points to the work being done so I just want to add though that you know one thing that gets lost is just the baseline work that we're doing I mean this is more special projects somebody could read this and think is this all that's going on and just remind folks that there's also sort of a baseline of services taking place these are specific initiatives to address issues that have been identified so I wanted to point that out I mean to the point about basic needs being met and what role city government can play in that I think you know Jesse makes some really good points about we cannot provide all things to all people you dilute your effectiveness that way I am very encouraged by the work that you've done to bring other voices to the table to really think through how do we leverage the assets in the community and in the region to ensure that needs are being met or there are ways for people to start to think differently about the relationships that exist between organizations both governmental and non-governmental but I don't want anybody to be losing more sleep about the fact that we're not you know this is a broad goal and I think it's important that council is highlighting that's important and that's not on you right that's on all of us as a society that's on all of us I can't drop the metaphor we provide the canvas that people do the painting and that's not just the people who live there it's the agencies that you're enabling them to do work that they need to do which is efficient use of municipal time because you're right we are not going to be good at doing the things that they do from a service delivery perspective let's let Mitchell figure out I'm not setting up a sound yeah yeah questions comments from council for ask the public yes say that I feel there are community services that there's a lack of programs for low income kids right now and that when programs are created for instance my husband brought all back to Noosky this fall and there were a number of kids who were not willing to sign up and their parents couldn't afford the $50 fee so I think when programs for kids are operated we need to have some flexibility in terms of payments so that nobody gets left out because they can't afford to sign up yep I think to speak to that one of the things for me that was a really good takeaway from the conference last week is to really as we develop programs start operating around some cost recovery goals so looking at programs across a continuum cost recovery goals zero when Noosky Wednesdays we're not trying to make any of that money back we're putting that money out our goal is zero percent cost recovery that's a great community event it pays dividends in the back end for a program that's a more specialized individual program I'm trying to think of a good example and I'm blanking on one but something that's more of a fee based sailing is a great one where there's a particular cost that's one where we might have a pretty high cost recovery goal maybe it's 100% so that we're trying to make sure that we're subsidizing some programs and being clear about the fact that we can't subsidize all programs so I think that is work that we need to do and I think that's an area where in particular through the commission I'd love to be gaining some community feedback on how we chunk those programs up again I think in an ideal world there's 100% cost recovery and free for everybody in Hurah but I think the reality of our budget is that that's not feasible so I think we are going to have to have some different ways of approaching that but again I think through the commission we're going to be trying to have that conversation around some goal setting in the near future which definitely welcome community input on so thank you it's been very skewed towards things that you need to recover the cost of these that aren't really accessible to the low income population yep that was a discussion we did have in setting future when we had the fee schedule discussion and I know it's something we all said was a really big priority of ours in making sure that program there is programming that's accessible for people of all income levels and also that that program isn't segregated and if you can afford a certain level of cost to go that this is your program for this income bracket and this is the income program for this separate income bracket so there was some thought we went into changing some of the fee schedules that went into how our programs are structured and I think two scholarships would be part of that cost recovery percentage so if you were able to run a program with the percentage of students being scholarship for a percentage of income or program fees being scholarship then we would bake that into the plan and try to be really clear about that up front I really appreciate your thought though too because that's a big priority of mine for a lot of folks here as well thank you very much awesome any other comments, questions, concerns thank you very much for this thank you for all of your work thank you okay up next is approval of $12,487 and not $1 more FY17 surplus to funding Winter Plow and school parking lots I just gave her numbers I'm appreciative of what it's not just a random number so what you have in front of you is the cover sheet, a memo from me and the RFP for these services as discussed so the context here is as you heard earlier through the budget surplus we have significant vacancies in public works we've had them since last fiscal year we are actively recruiting actually tomorrow all day we have interviews for equipment operators so we have, there's kind of an end in sight but the reality going into the winter is that we only have four people who have commercial driver's licenses on staff and to deal with winter operations in a city, even a small city like as we are four operators is not enough for the storm that can last 8 hours, 12 hours, 16 hours, 24 hours so huge amount of appreciation to our crew so we kind of saw this coming in the beginning at the end of August our public works leadership and staff sat down and did some creative thinking about how to manage with this even if we brought on a CDL driver tomorrow they would need some time training with our equipment training on our plow routes etc to get up to speed and get up with the proposal to on a limited basis this year only contract out the plowing of the municipally controlled parking lots so specifically the lots at the school here at city hall, the OCC senior center, fire department and public works obviously and lock D in the downtown so they made this recommendation we put an RFPO onto the street we got five respondents and we are recommending going forward with hiring two different contractors one specifically dedicated to the schools and then one dedicated to all the other lots those two contractors will focus on that work while our employees focus on the streets and the sidewalks and we believe with that coverage we can get the work done this summer or this winter we made a very specific decision to hire two different contractors because we believe it's important to give the school their own dedicated service here so this obviously was an unbudgeted contract but because it is very much connected to not having people on staff to do this work we can reallocate the vacancy savings this year to pay off this contract we can also get a bit of TIF recovery funds for the lot deep plowing and so the balance there between the costs and what we have available in this year's budget that we'll under spend is the $12,487 so we're asking for that proactively and again this gets back to kind of surplus conversation those dollars in FY17 were allocated to staff such as this that we never are filled so we believe there's a good argument to be made to take those dollars proactively and allocate them here so that's the actual vote we need from you tonight and just to be clear this is intended at this juncture obviously if there's you know there's a strong feeling about the way this goes or doesn't go is it is intended as a short term gap filler for this year if you have interviews I don't know if the interviews would fill the or you would be able to hire people that have the CDL license if I'm not exactly clear who the interviews are for but if for some reason we find ourselves fully staffed what does that mean with respect to this agreement so is that not a risk so two answers to that one even if we find ourselves fully staffed the numbers that are in front of you only take into consideration vacancies through this pay period so we will have enough money to fully staff and execute these contracts in addition what we are seeing right now is we are seeing applicants for an equipment operator one which is an employee without a CDL we are seeing far fewer applicants for EO2s with CDLs therefore our real best case scenario here is to bring in an EO1 support them in getting their CDL and then promoting them to an EO2 which hopefully the new contract will allow us to do even if hypothetically we get 3 CDLs walking in off the street next week which I do not anticipate happening the likelihood that they would be fully trained on our plow routes so they could operate alone overnight on a shift is pretty unlikely we don't feel real confident that they could do that they certainly could go out with another operator do plow routes that require the smaller trucks etc but we still feel like this is really needed for this year I think from a functional standpoint we'd rather see this in place and have that be a a windfall especially given the way the finances of it are structured with the payment already being addressed through current vacancies to date versus expected vacancies where we are motivated in some ways perhaps not to fill a position in this case let's get the people on board to follow back on makes sense and for CDL operators is also still a pretty low number when you think of plowing 1.4 miles of city in a long storm so we're still going to be tight well I really appreciate highlighting for the folks here and the folks at home that this is a short term solution because I think by and large we do want to when at all possible provide privatization of municipal services I do also know the reality that if we don't arrive at this intelligent short term solution then we will not be able to plow our streets so I really appreciate the thought that also went into figuring out us being in the challenging situation that we are a solution that can get us through the winter just to underline that you know again our union employees were at the table to come up with this solution and really quite frankly was their idea on a short term basis only and I think that a lot of credit goes to them to be willing to think creatively it's amazing any questions, concerns from council questions or concerns from the public okay so hearing and seeing that I entertain a motion for approval of $12,487 from FY17 surplus fund balance to fund the winter plow municipal and school parking lots second hearing and seeing none all those in favor please say aye aye and those opposed motion carries we now have what is item E which is discussion around parking in conjunction with spinner place spinner parking agreement so again apologies for the addition of this item this was this is a pretty mission critical thing for spinner and was just the negotiation of it was just finalized this morning basically in the currently under the agreements and for the last year the students who reside at spinner have used up to 100 of the parking spaces that the VSAC parking agreement allows so VSAC and the city have contracted with for a certain number of parking spaces in the garage VSAC has said we're not using our full allotment will give 100 of our parking spaces to spinner for their use this amendment continues that agreement for another 12 months for a total for to expire in December 2018 they will be paying the market rate for CCB which is the other educational tenant in the garage stop here and note that this is a contract between the city and outside entities and if there's a desire to get into terms that could involve asking for any sort of negotiation steps or instruction for any additional steps outside of what's being proposed here that that should be done in executive session in order not to put the city at a significant disadvantage of the contract negotiation standpoint however given timing if there are no material concerns with that certainly feel free to just ask questions about the content of the contract if there are no material changes being proposed or push back on that item then fully fine to handle an open session and do approval how's that it's essentially the continuation of the existing agreement which is a public record therefore any details about describing it are only what would change is if somebody went I really want you to push for this number yes that would be better that would be where we would be ourselves in so are you meeting the meeting law section of your transparency tour I think you got it down does anybody have any concerns with what's been presented outside of details or questions I think it's awesome and we're doing it this year without without visitors so that's good in other words it's being addressed before the issue has impacted people negatively so just this was we had some sort of a temporary agreement but at the start of the school year so the current agreement in place only continues through this December so this is a year extension and what you see before you is both the amendment to the parking agreement between the city and VSAC were essentially continuing to allow VSAC to provide these spaces and then the limited waiver of rights a first offer from my webgrocer who signs off on allowing these spaces to be allocated that's important that when people talk to or about colleges is to understand that our relationships are with the property owners and the entities that lease them spaces not with the colleges themselves that's important other questions or concerns in regards to the agreement as proposed thank you for getting that done any questions or concerns from the public seeing and hearing none we have an opportunity to make some students very happy for this year I would entertain a motion for approval of the amendment to the parking agreement for the VSAC or Vermont Student Services Corporation and the related waiver of first offer with my webgrocer Mila LLC to accommodate Spinner Place parking rights motion my full second by Eric any further discussion here you can see an analysis and please say aye and those opposed motion carries agreement for the amendment okay tonight on the agenda we also have two items that are scheduled for executive session both are related to real estate purchasing and release options the first is for the negotiation real estate purchase release options related to the O'Brien Community Center as a reminder to folks we had a conversation regarding two potential tenets for O'Brien Community Center and the instruction as we came out of those two conversations via memo that was introduced in public was basically for those people to go back and work together and try to come to a solution that involved both entities one being University of Vermont and the other one Medical Center not University of Vermont Medical Center and also a gym called SNAP Fitness and requested that those entities work together so this is a follow up to that item that will or could involve check negotiation discussions around real estate purchase release which to discuss in public of course it would be put the city at significant disadvantage council will take no action on that item we actually may come out of the executive don't worry I won't mess it up won't take any action on that item in executive session council could reconvene as a result of the conversation to take action that would happen in open session so as opposed to a lot of executive sessions where we say there's going to be a conversation no action will be taken and we say the cameras can shut down we will only be coming back to adjourn in this meeting we'll actually potentially come back out and hold a vote on a potential action that action is well explained so you have an understanding of what is going on and generally what was discussed we also have negotiation of real estate purchase and release options really in the strand development project and this is again an update to items that are unfolding in regards to proposals around the property next to city hall or key bank and whether the city has any additional possible commitments to that property that includes contract proposed negotiations so not a lot to update there other than what folks I think are pretty familiar of we've been working for quite some time on the potential facility that would include commercial space and a music venue sitting in and into a development agreement some time ago on that property has continued to work on all the details around it which has included quite a bit of contract negotiations so this is a continuation of that conversation that the hold in public would be put the city at significant disadvantage there is no probable potential for any kind of approval action on that item so there won't be any action taken related to that later this evening but it will be discussed as part of the executive session is there anybody besides the city manager that you would like to bring in okay so the motion is to enter the executive excuse me the proposed motion would be to enter the executive session taking Jesse Baker and also Ray Coffey and for item A but for the city to discuss both those items potentially coming back out of executive session to take action potentially on item A again both related to contract negotiations that would do so in public would put the city at significant disadvantage any questions or concerns from the public okay so singing here motion by Brian Corgan second by Eric any further discussion hearing seen none all those favorably say aye aye those opposed motion carries council under the executive session we will potentially return to take action on item A I mean I think it would be do you rehearse that I don't know how the hell are you you seldom miss it so that's pretty impressive fine over the 16th and remind folks that we just entered in the executive session for two items one of which was a conversation around appropriating the next door for the strand property which requires no additional in relation to potential contract negotiations and no additional actions required on that item there is a proposed action on the first item which was discussed around the O'Brien community center and potential DC's as a reminder the city previously received a memo and outlined the interest of two entities and potentially leasing space at what we would call the former YMCA space of the O'Brien community center the two parties were UVM medical center for an aquatic health facility which is currently already operational there has been there for a while and would expand a little bit in terms of footprint and operations and also SNAP fitness which is an entity that operates a gym council expressed in the last meeting where this was taken up that there really both are great benefits to the community while there were some interest and potentially having only one tenant we asked both bodies to continue to work together and are continuing to reaffirm what is being proposed is that the city have the opportunity to authorize staff to enter into a letter of an intent to lease which would then set the city to enter into formal lease negotiations with both parties to occupy portions of the space so the potential terms of that was discussed in executive session and now that action is up for consideration for the city to potentially utilize the city manager and or community services director to sign a letter of intent to lease with one or both of those entities again being UV and medical center for aquatic facility and SNAP fitness for a gym Miss anything? Jesse Ray Any questions or concerns from council? Any questions or concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing none I entertain a motion to authorize the city manager and or community services director to enter into a letter of intent to lease for UV and medical center and or SNAP fitness in regards to the space at the O'Brien community center formally occupied by the YMCA So moved Motion by Brian, second by Eric Any further discussion? Hearing and seeing none, all those in favor please and those opposed? Motion carries That concludes tonight's agenda and I would entertain a motion for adjournment So moved Motion by Brian, second by Nicole Hearing and seeing none, all those in favor please and those opposed? Motion carries Thank you very much