 And I'm going to call into order the board finance for the special budget presentation on May 17th. And we have two members board here person and the two more online at least. And so the first item on the agenda is to approve an agenda. I'm going to move to the agenda. Thank you, Councilor Barlow. Second. Councilor McGee. A discussion agenda. Seeing none. Well, we've got a vote on this on those in favor of the agenda. We'll say hi. Hi. Because. All right, we have an agenda, which has first public forum and then we will have reports from. We have seven different areas of the city budgets. Some departments or funds. The, is there anyone who is here to speak to. I'm going to move to the agenda. And I'm going to move to the agenda. And I'm going to move to the board and the public forum. Not seeing any person. You see a hand up from former city council. So. You will enable your microphone. Yes. Can you hear me, Mr. Mayor? Yes, you can. Okay. Very good. So busy night and very appreciative of the presentations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Anything beyond that. I think that counselor Bergman made a comment about. About one budget. I don't think you were at the presentation that night, Mr. Mayor, but he asked a department. Like what were they not able to fund? And that's, that was a theme that I heard when I was part of this process. I think that's really important to give the public an idea of, of what is there that is sort of waiting to be done. And that it's still a priority. So I just wanted to say, I think it would be important to capture that in some way. So that's my first comment. The second comment really is going to focus on DPW and traffic within DPW. And it's going to overlap a little bit with other DPW stuff. I'm going to speak about. And I, about hoping that this budget. We'll consider replacing the kiosks that are present. Most of them don't work well. And I use the, the parking lot. That's on main street. And Winooski Avenue. And I just want to tell you, I'm embarrassed by that parking lot. The way it looks. And a lot of visitors use that parking lot. That's their first impression of Burlington. And they really kind of question. About how our city is falling into disrepair. Just from that parking lot. And it's dangerous for cars and for people. If you're trying to navigate it on foot, you could twist your ankle. I'm not sure why it hasn't been addressed. I know, Mr. Mayor, you remember, I dragged you out there when I was a city councilor and made you walk it with me. And it's only gotten worse. And I really think that a small investment. A small investment. Of paving that and dealing with some of the holes that now have. Parking cones. Around them. Really would be helpful. So I really want you to understand that I do use it in my. Job working for the government now. And I do interact with the public. And I try to give Burlington. A really good face. And let them know that we really care. And that hopefully these things will be addressed, but there are comments. And I don't think any of you probably use it to hear those comments. So I wanted to talk about that. I'm hoping that that can be addressed in the budget. And the last thing I wanted to speak about was the residential parking program that went to. Stickerless process. And I have concerns about it in my region of the city. Because of the university. The medical center and the baseball activities. I know that Jeff feels that there will be adequate enforcement, but I rarely see. Anybody out here in front of the city. And there's no way for us to help. With eyes and ears when there are violators, because there are no stickers anymore. So you don't know, you know, your neighbors, but you don't know violators. And I really question. The, if you're really trying to phase this out. And that would be to the detriment of some neighborhoods that really, really wouldn't survive without violators. And that would be to the detriment of some neighborhoods that really, really wouldn't survive without it, especially old neighborhoods that weren't developed with adequate off street parking. So I'd like to see all of those things addressed in the budget. As I said, this might spill over beyond parking. It might be, you know, in capital, it might be in other aspects of DPW, but thank you so much for listening to me. And I hope you have a good evening. Great. Thank you Sharon for the input. I don't see. I don't believe there's anyone else. On line. We seeking out for public comment. So, generally this is not a time to respond to the public comment, but I just, you know, I don't know if you have any questions or comments. If you want to quickly share the plans for the parking lots to do. Yes, the plan for the main, when it's parking lot parking lot will be utilized part of the main street, great streets project and likely is construction staging. And so our effort here and our theory is that the plan is to use it for construction staging and then be able to improve it on the backside of the project. So, I'm going to close the public forum. And we will move to our first presentation, which is from DPW. And so I'm going to work with you. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Okay. And then we'll move to our first presentation, which is from the DPW. And so thank you so much to the board of finance city councilors who are here. Thanks for giving DPW four out of the seven slots tonight. We will work to move expeditiously. I am here to kick it off tonight. We have a great team of public works folks here, division directors and the capital program director who will help out for these subsequent presentations. So counselors are aware that our mission is here. I am not going to read through the minutiae, but we have a number of different budgets that we will take in series tonight. It's important to kind of understand what is in the general fund for public works and those are the items in blue here, the DPW administration and then activities of three different divisions. The other items in black will be presented separately tonight. Our broader range of assets is indeed broad and you can see them here and have a good talk through any particular ones. As we looked at FY24, our high level budget goals and I think CAO Shad said they don't change much year to year for the general fund. Same is true for public works. We seek to maintain our services, continue the sustainable infrastructure plan which is such a key priority for the city and these other activities you're seeing here. I think this year, given the strain on the general fund, we've worked to find ways to maximize the general funds, our contribution to the general fund. You'll see here in historical comparison of our budget trends this year due to a couple of factors that we'll talk about on the next slide, proposing less revenue than was budgeted in the optimistic year of 23 and our expenses are budgeted to go up less than 1%. The drivers on the revenue side, we budgeted last year to have parking revenues come back fully from pre-pandemic levels so that did not occur and so we are ratcheting down the fine revenue of parking from the high and in the FY23 budget. We will also be using less one-time money for recycling carts thanks to your contribution last year. We were able to implement a policy to phase out the bins which has caused a lot of litter and also injuries of staff. We will have some of these carts still to sell in 24 but much less than we did in 23. Proposing to increase billable revenue for tech services, the effort team that Nora Baldwin runs and Lee Perry who's here division director for maintenance, we are planning to increase our shop rate and our CNG compressed national gas being used for the third party customers to the city. Lastly, we're proposing to increase the solid waste generation tax around 5.6%. They handle both the purchase of a new vehicle to pay lease payments and for the increase to fees to drop the recycling off of the etching and solid waste districts facility. On the expense side, you're seeing the same Delta for the carts as the first bullet. One hand it was reduced to one-time revenue benefit but it's also reduced expense on the expense side. We are also proposing to freeze to parking service agent positions as part of our effort to be lighter on the general fund. We have completed a significant reorganization with the parking services team and we can talk more about that but feel that we can provide the same level of service with these two positions frozen for the year. There's obviously increased fuel cost. We are proposing on this budget to replace what has been a contracted inspector for sidewalk and paving work and have that be done by an in-house staff person neutral to the general fund as it's paid by street capital. But we believe it will be a net savings given the high rate that we're paying consultants to do work that we could do less in-house. As I mentioned before, lease payment for one of the new recycling trucks increased over time for the street maintenance team. This is a relatively small increase but the trend over the last four years we've been far overshooting our overtime budget and we're trying to move the budget to be more in accordance with demand. We have been benefiting greatly from having a capital program director on staff this year proposing to shift that staffer over to CT around July one, which will be a net neutral impact to the general fund. And we have also allocated a modest sum of $50,000 for a number of potential reclassifications that have been in the worst but haven't progressed yet to view all. So trying to plan accordingly. There are a number of challenges we're all facing for us. There are many interrelated and large capital projects and right now given the constraints on the capital budget we don't have a chunk of funding to bring in consultants as work loads grow. And so we are that need to deal with that with all in-house staff. And so that at times allows projects or drives projects to slow down if we do not have the capacity at house to manage all the projects when they get hot. Also maintaining a production for revenue targets largely the Paris Group and maintenance that does the sidewalk production does water resource, catch basin work, stormwater and wastewater pipe maintenance. We often get pulled to focus on unbillable work and other priorities in the city which limits our ability to pull down the funds from revenue departments. Thanks to STT we're continuing to apply for grants to try to supplement the smaller $23.8 million bond that was approved by voters. But this year and next year will be a constrained capital year as you'll hear more later. And maintaining our fleet has become a challenge. The fleet is still growing in part due to enterprise and special revenue funds but we have the same number of fleet technicians each year. Given that we're not able to replace much of the fleet this year due to finances there'll be more repairs as the fleet ages. And then we're continuing to manage the total requirement. So I will just finish it up by saying one of the things I enjoy especially about this job is working with other departments for their success and I won't read through this but especially gratifying when we get to work as a city across departments to get the work done. So happy to answer any questions. That's fine. Thank you for that. Any questions about the pros and positions of those like unfilled positions? Correct. And so are they just they're empty because people left or they're empty because? Yeah. This is part of the, I really include the, I was not Jack, I was just talking about the traffic. So the three are, we did include the ambassadors from the garage into partner services that ended as 14 positions. But the time we had openings in the garage and so I think we're at 10 partner service agents right now except for openings. Do you have a couple applicants per squad? But we just, we don't have, the market is not supplying us workers and we are getting more efficient. We do 25 to 24 hour service at the moment, right? But I think 12, we get to that, you know, the infrastructure. So the two, reason the two we think is a good step for next year. Thank you. Mr. Terminology, this is the thing. Yes. I also had a question and maybe it is part of the capital discussion or maybe it applies here, but street maintenance is that include filling pop holes and the patching which is in full street reconstruction? Correct. And so, yeah, I've shared this with Director Spencer before I was like, I have a real concern going into this year that we have a lot of streets that need at minimum some patching, something beyond filling the holes. And like a good example is Santaford Road, which was recently addressed. Thank you for doing that. But there, Santaford Road is one of many examples that we have right now. And I'm wondering rather than, you know, do we have a plan for patching? I looked at the DPW street reconstruction page online today to see what was listed there. And many of the streets that need patching aren't, there's actually not patching. All the streets that are listed there are slated for full reconstruction. So I'm wondering if we're adding extra dollars to do more patching given that you don't have the budget for the capital budget for full reconstruction. And if we are, what's our, do we have a list and do we have a prioritization scheme other than people writing up inboxes and phone lines asking for other streets to be fixed? So, so, John Ball and the division director for the technical service team that manages the sidewalks and paving. And the answer to that is that we are still developing that list. As a matter of fact, I drove the streets Tuesday with one of our engineers to kind of have a feeling of the sense of where the problems are and how we can make money that we have allocated for patching to go as far as recently as possible. And what is a good investment versus what is already scheduled for a near-term pair. And where it came here, I shared with a senior person who engineered the team. They had done it in 2005 in terms of how to identify selected account accounts for every individual patch, the needs of patch and how we bought it down based on the funding they unveiled. So that method of a long list of where the problems are and then how we buy down that list as a priority is what we're working on. But with different 2005 experiences that we actually have unit item costs built into our bids and an award. So it's coming, but it's not, or needs to be as yet. And will that, once you complete that exercise, will that feed back into the budgeting process in terms of the dollars asked for or will we be trying to fit the number of dollars we have to probably only fitting the dollars we have, there may be, we're gonna be creating, trying to find other ways to find additional dollars that we can, but it's obviously looking at the strength of a few challenges. One of them is going ahead and cost is going up since acquiring the tax. Mayor's been great at trying to allocate a significant amount of the testing capital money towards this effort, but the erosion of increased costs, increased damage because of a change to all a channel to be as hard choices. And I have driven standard road looked at it along with many others. And I wouldn't disagree with the standard, so attention. So we'll keep you updated on our efforts one. Once we have a list for the patching, we'll get that to you. And two, we will keep searching for additional funds. That's an active conversation with CAO, Shad and the mayor. And I'll just say, we're also going to the word 478PA as a request, because I know others are concerned about this, so we're gonna get ready for that. I mean, I think the biggest pieces is really to get more, to get more robust investment in real comparison with the patching, but when the situation's more in it there, the patching is the solution. It's used by for a few years. Okay, thank you. Great. I see Councilman Kieh, go ahead. Thank you. Thanks, Chapin, for the presentation. I, my question is about the projects that might be delayed as the result of the shortage for funding consultants and the inflationary pressures that we're facing. I wonder if you have any projects in mind that might be delayed as a result of that? Yes, I can start with that. Paving is certainly one we have scheduled this year to only do 1.3 miles of municipal paving this year, fortunately the state's doing a large swath of paving in the city this year, but that won't be happening next year. So paving is constrained. North Champlain, we had a protected bike lane project that came in with bids of about a half million dollars. Given our constrained capital situation, we rejected all bids and are trying to secure grant funding for a large portion of that project because we can't dedicate all of our local match to this one project. I would also say that not having a pool of consultants with large projects hit to supplement our staff is also an impact. There's a number of projects on the capital committee's list that fell off the table this year. Great, thank you. Okay, I'm not seeing any more hands online or in the room. So yes, Mr. Mayor. Okay, Councilor Chen, go ahead. Thank you. And thank you so much, Chap and Spencer and team, this is a comment first. And I think I talked about it during the general public affair about towing cars and ticketing. I just wanted to say it again to you that we are very appreciative of the new plan that you brought forward and also for recognizing that, yes, we can do better and we will do better. I just want to say that. To the question also from Councillor Barlow about the patching, I just want to, I said that just yesterday, they were in my neighborhood patching the streets and doing amazing work. And now we no longer make the requests. And I think now you have a focus of just going around and doing what need to be done. I want to appreciate that as well. Thank you. Now my question is one, your department is one of the departments, 10 departments receiving general fund. And also you are one of them that receive at least 10% of the general fund. And I was just wondering, if there were carried over funds from this fiscal year to the next and how much is that, if any? The largest, thank you. Councillor Jang, I appreciate the comments on the patching. We'll pass that on to the teams. But as it relates to carry over, the largest carryover requested for our department is $170 or so thousand dollars from the one-time cart purchases from FY23. We've pushed the deadline back to the time to have to have recycling carts to July 1 due to the supply chain challenges of getting all the carts in. Can't require people to have them if we don't have all the carts in stock. So that's the major carry forward that we have. Is there any other substitute carry forward staff? Nothing's coming to mind. Okay, wonderful. Thank you. And also the other question is also your department is one of the few that have also received funding from ARPA, the ARPA fund that came into this. So this year we don't have it, right? And I was just wondering, basically, we did not lose revenue because you're not one of the revenue department. And how did you compensate that? How did you compensate that knowing, yeah, that we don't have ARPA anymore? Right, the ARPA funds were particularly to support the parking facilities fund and the traffic fund. And so they're not the part of the general fund operations that I just presented on, but they did fill a substantial hole in those budgets where revenue is still trending below 2019. And division director Jopadje will be up in a little bit and can certainly speak to both of those budgets. There is very limited, if any, fund balance in either of those funds after a really tough couple of years. And that is not where I wanted to be after working so hard in the first seven years of my career to build up those fund balances, but COVID has changed our operation dramatically. And we're gonna be struggling to rebuild the health of those two funds after COVID. Wonderful. Yes, and this is the last question and it is specific to the increase in terms of diesel that you have possessed for, let's say $25,000. And I wanted to understand the correlation with now having some fleet that are electrics, right? And I still see like an increase. And I just can't make a story of why, yeah. Yeah, division director Lee Perry overseas fleet. So a lot of our electric vehicles, our admin vehicles, some smaller equipment, most of our diesel is our plow trucks, our sidewalk tractors that we plow the sidewalks with. The majority of that is accumulated used during the winter time. So that's when a bulk of our diesel is used to be that November to March time period. Prices escalated from almost forecasted last fiscal year really jumped up, apparently to fall through the winter. So we had to compensate for that, unleaded fuel prices that trended normal. We don't have to increase that line, but depending on the winter severity, you may not use a lot of diesel. We use about 85,000 gallons a year, just diesel. I think the quick answer, Lee, is just the vehicles that the electric, that there are electric options are the smaller, more efficient vehicles, the heavy utility vehicles that we're still relying on for the bulk of our heavy duty work in the city. There aren't good electric options at this point. We haven't purchased electric plow trucks, sidewalk tractors, for example, recycling trucks. So that's why our diesel consumption is still relatively flat. We are noticing that gas utilization is starting to trend the right direction and I'm hoping that with the growth in electric vehicles, that will too. I mean, and I think that the city is purchasing diesel through like an RFP that are several organizations that supply it and we make a contract with one. So basically you're saying that last fiscal year, whatever we purchased, they had to be cost more funds because of the heavy duty equipments. Like, look at, wonderful, no further questions. And other than, you know, yeah, consider bringing back another budget with at least 10% cut and figure it out for us. Thank you. We love you for that. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Councillor Jang. Okay. I am gonna close the DPW, this first DPW presentation and next up is Wellington City Arts. I'm following what's up. I'm sorry. I don't know. Welcome. Are you all set? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be here tonight, also to experience other departments' presentations and continue to learn about our colleagues and collective work that we do together, tremendous appreciation for being part of such a devoted team of people in the city. People in the city, noble quest for always doing things smarter and better. We've really spent a lot of time in this last period to do our very best in level funding. And I think probably had conversations about level funding in and of itself is a cut. We won't be the first department to say that. We've also tried to be as realistic as we can in terms of what we can catch out really significantly impacting the services that we provide to people of Wellington and to our friends around the state. I think without going through, Sarah, without going through each part of this, you've had a chance to look at it. And I do not want to read things from here. I want to maybe pull out three or four important ideas. And these are questions that I remember both from a number of meetings this year from last year's budget concerns and questions that have arisen from city counselors. I really want to note it is certainly in our strategic goals, but just to pull it out the whole question of equity and the logging and sort of how we approach that within our department, what we have done is really layer throughout the entire department, each wing, each aspect of what we do, whether it is the specific kind of program that take the staffing, looking at the pay equity, all of those things are embedded in the discussions that happen throughout. So it is layered and it is the way that we measure the effectiveness of our work. Of course, we don't do this alone. We do it with the equity, inclusion, the logging, many of our board. We also do it working very closely with REIV. And it's a learning curve. It's process that will continue. I did say that we did our best at the level funding in our programming. We've identified a few savings. Another form of saving is the attrition, which is we have moved from 36,000 to 75,000. We'll see how this year goes and do our best working within budget constraints. And then I wanna make sure, because I know there's a piece in there that makes it look like we've made a significant cut in our budget this year of over 500,000. And I wanna make sure that that is something we'd love to return to the city, but this is actually something that hit our budget that was part of the capital budget. And it landed here. And so, yeah, just to point that out so that it's not supposed to be in operations. I also wanna bring to everybody's attention the importance of the growth in our scholarship fund. Part of this, I think it is a result of COVID, a return of many children and families to doing things together at home, making and creating community and being a part of things really has brought our services deeper into the community and returning to our facilities. And our scholarships have gone up significantly this year. One of the biggest increases that we've seen in addition to the children's scholarships for camps is, and we've identified this with some more research to do, but our people from the ages of 18 to 25. And some of that we understand it's great because we've expanded our programs there and the hardest group sometimes is to bring teams into your programming. But we've found that we're doing a good job at that. They like the programming that we've created. They like being with each other in those programs. And we also are seeing that we probably have some of the young college students from around the community, trying to identify exactly who these individuals are in different ways that we can work potentially with other institutions within the community to augment our scholarship fund or to find new revenue that might support it. Because the kind of increase that we're seeing this year is more significant than the developer team like to add to their targets. Also, I think what has impacted us significantly and it's also a post COVID is dealing with the downtown safety plan and how this impacts our department in a lot of our community programming in particular in second year of City Hall Park and working with the marketplace. And it's really, there's tremendous inflation in the cost of just about everything we do within that department. And at the same time, I think we're looking at a real uphill battle in the philanthropic world because everyone was back out fundraising. So while we enjoyed certainly, I wouldn't say an easier time during the pandemic, but there was a lot of attention because we were doing a lot of programming and a number of people shut their doors during that time, they just couldn't operate. Now everyone's back. And so the requests from a very, very large nonprofit world, thank you all noted from my test, one of the highest number of nonprofits. Any state in the nation, we're out there together. And there were many, many worthy organizations. So we're just trying to understand what that shift is going to mean. I think we have a very strong team and a very strong story, but don't wanna be unrealistic about how far we can push our ability to go to continue to raise more and more funds each year. Maybe I should stop there just to see if there's any questions. And Sarah, if you wanna add anything into sort of the... I think the only other thing that we talked about making sure it was clear was that, we know that there's a lot of interest in the April 8th Eclipse event that is going to be a big part of our parallel here in Burlington. And we don't have anything in our presented budget right now related to that eclipse. We know that we'll need to do some adjustments to make sure that our staffing can accommodate whatever VCA contributes, as well as other potential amendments, but we know that that's a conversation that is yet to come. So it's not in this presentation now. Yeah, I mean, I wanna say, I know there were questions from some of the city counselors about, well, what did you really cut? I mean, we looked very carefully of what we were presenting in City Hall Park. We did 140 events last year. We're doing 119 events this year. So there's some savings there. We have held back from bringing professional development to the organization back to pre-pandemic levels. I think you can only hold off on that for so long and the inventiveness and ingenuity of the team really depends on making sure you're getting out the best and the brightest and learning from those, from your colleagues that are not just local. And then I think you'll see a change, there's a change because some of the public art administrative cost will be managed inside of the capital. So it's not really a, it's not really a Bay Bay thing. It's like identified somewhere else. Yeah. To answer Sharon Busher's remark about like what you wish for. Well, we need a van and we know that that's not possible and that would support our artist services to community places for the programming that we do and also our event management. We do need additional staff in our event division on communications, communications and marketing. And we are hoping to do a feasibility study without preliminary conversations about what that cost would be to look at an event division. So that's just the big view, any questions? Pause. Yeah. Go ahead, Tessa Barlow. I just had a question about the scholarship. If you talk about how scholarships have increased, do you start out with a scholarship budget or do you see what, and how do you, what's your process for deciding on scholarships? Is that first come first serve or is it? No. Well, I mean it is, this is a big topic of conversation now for our board and our staff. We're gonna spend a whole session diving into this because everyone has questions like, if what we did this year is what we reserved, a whole piece of our scholarship fund for those with the greatest need in the community. So we worked with like just as an example of King Street, we made sure that those spaces held because our camps sold out in a few hours. And so obviously, you know, there's inequity built into that kind of, when that happens, it's like those parents who can be at home at 10 a.m. in the morning and they are savvy at how to get in there and beyond at 10 minutes at 10 and so forth. So like just the technology itself, then there's just the whole, like how do you do this? And so Americans coming into our community or those underserved just not knowing so how the system works. And so we're trying to figure out how to be a whole lot more equitable with the way that we approach it. And then maybe the final question that we're grappling with there is, is there something, should there be something built into this system or policies that speaks to Burlington residents? And this is a tough one because it sounds easy like, yeah, Burlington address. And yes, it's the taxpayers of Burlington and so on. But we also know that there are so many people who would love to live in Burlington, they work in Burlington, but they can't afford to live in Burlington. So now we're, you know, where's the equity there? So we're, yeah, we're- And I wanna say that in the, you know, traditionally we budgeted a certain amount of money for scholarships. And for a number of years, it was fairly steady. And I think this year we've really seen an increase and we've made a few budget amendments to accommodate it, increased our fundraising goal to accommodate it. And next year we've also expanded the places that we did intentionally increase. With some increased fundraising goal as well. It's the only place that we made intentional increases and we're not sure that it's enough. So we will have to play that out, but our policy so far has been to not turn people away. It is first come, first serve, but it's do not turn anyone away. And so now, now knowing that the need is really evolving and not sure we're not really 100% sure what to expect. That's why we need to really look at the policies not carefully and make sure that we can help as many people as possible. No, I don't know how it's gonna play out with we never turn anyone away. Yeah, further, further counselor questions. Yes, Mr. Mayor, thank you, Doreen and for being here both of you. And my question is specific to what I noticed in terms of increase of your requests in the general fund and also it seems fundraising and earned are also decreasing. Just wanted to understand why shouldn't we do it like differently? So there are some, we did budget more realistically on our revenue side this year. We have not significantly increased our fundraising goals anywhere except for with that targeted scholarship amount which is primarily major gifts fundraising. And one place that just had not returned to its pre-pandemic levels of earned income is art sales. And that's largely because I think part of our work in that area has been with the UVM Medical Center and it related to their capital projects and they just haven't had any plans and we don't currently see any plan for FY20. So that reduced our earned revenue for FY24 for everything else, more or less stay fairly level. I think that most of the increases on our expense side are related to staff cost increases with the exception of our scholarships in a very few other areas. And staffing increases are someone out of our control they're related to the COLA increases that every one of us are incorporating into our budget. Okay, yeah, two more questions and one of them is basically more of a comment and to just say thank you so much for looking into the scholarship and also ensuring that there is equity into it. And I just ask that you please consider now keeping track in terms of the number of the people from different socioeconomic background accessing now you're contributing to our budget. And I'm glad that you brought that as part of your presentation, thank you. And I haven't heard anything here as part of this presentation specific to the increase of the 2% or 1% for public arts, for public arts around any development that we're doing in this city. Yes, can you speak a little bit on that? Yeah, so 1% for public art fund is part of the actually part of the capital budget and it remains in the capital budget. I think Ashley might speak to it briefly and it doesn't actually transfer to VCA as an income or expense line. It functions pretty directly out of that line. We do have a public art fund that was added last fiscal year and that's the primary, that's the way that we carry out the projects in the capital budget. The 1% for public art fund has not actually yielded an incredible amount of funding. We didn't really know what to expect. We didn't know when we started this project really what was going to be eligible to contribute to that fund. And we're finding right now where our public art manager is working primarily on projects that are not related to that 1% fund. There are really other sources like the main street public art project, the upcoming potential Shelburne Roundabout project and other street projects that are going to be other funding sources other than that 1%. The amount that we're currently looking at for FY24 I think is somewhere in the neighborhood of $17,000. So it's not really enough to do anything significant as a public standalone public art project. So we're seeing it as the kind of long-term game where we'll have to let it pool for a period of time to understand what other projects over the course of the year may continue to contribute depending on how capital projects go and then work with the administration to identify the priorities for the use of those funds. Wonderful. If you touch on it, I just wanted to ask about the capital, but it seems it's a separate issue. Thank you guys and thank you Doreen for the call this morning. It was good. Great. I see Councilor Grant and Henry's. Good. That's great. Hi, I just had a quick question. As a former police commissioner, I look at the Park from a public safety standpoint a lot of the time and I know that activities, positive activities are really important to help keep negative activities at bay to put it simply. And I'm just curious as to what type of activities you've had to cancel in order to think money. We canceled a series that was a new time event that was basically a dialogue a speaker series. And we've replaced that with a collaboration that we're working on with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra that's going to bring classical music into the park. And it's going to be on a day that we have discovered there's a lot of people out in our community and families are downtown and there isn't really anything happening in the park so we moved that to a Sunday. And we're hoping that that will bring a new audience. And we also, I mean, it's not just our programming that I think does what you what you are speaking to, but also the collaborations that we have with other organizations like for example daycares to encourage daycares to bring their young people to use the splash pad and picnic in the park, etc. So I think it's as much marketing to other groups who and encourage that encouraging their use of the park, because that also contributes I think to the sense of blogging and and expanding the community within the park. Okay, thank you. And just another quick question does BCA ever do any cross promotion with the downtown hotels. We do. Well, yes and no. So we do with our event division, but not really from a marketing perspective we have you know we have our brochures in the lobby. We see funding for our festivals from the hotels, but we, we don't really, if you're thinking about like, I've seen this a lot in other communities with like, and steels that are put together. And the problem with our downtown hotels is hey, they are full. And so they they're not really open to these ideas or or as needy as some communities are for kind of putting in these packages to encourage people to come in. Because we brought this idea forward and just hasn't taken off, but in the back of our mind. Any ideas you have we all ears. We'll let you know. Thank you very much. Thank you. Council member go ahead. Thank you thank you Dorian and Sarah it's very good presentation I am curious about the, the, the line items that would show the, the scholarships. We're having a hard time locating them and I think I'm echoing Councillor Jang, in terms of trying to get an understanding of the absolute numbers that we have there I see some of the I see some percentages but that would be really able to be able to identify the dollar amounts of scholarships and then to be able to identify the numbers of people. Yeah, so 7730 is the scholarship line item and it occurs in two programs within the budget. One is 175 and 176 both have scholarship lines in them. I'm sorry could you okay scholarships I see okay sort of that's regional programs 7730. Okay, I see that now. And the other one. And the other one is 176, which is page, the next page after the first one, they all say page one, I don't, I don't know how. I'm not going to tell you exactly which page but it is the next page after the $4,000 line item, there's a $67,500 line item so our scholars, our total scholarship number in both of those programs is 71571500. An increase over this year is 57,500. Okay. Thank you and the number of, of people. If you haven't, I looked for that but might have just missed that. Yeah, I think it's important also counselor that we talked to that there are both individual scholarships that are partial or full. And those are for our classes camps workshops studio use. Then there are scholarships that are provided to community groups and school groups, we're coming in to do workshops tours, see things do activities, etc. And then there are programs that bring groups of individuals and for working within a BCA studio that are also supplemented with the scholarship fund so we're developing a better system for tracking this all now because it used to just be the individual scholarships that we tracked. And I think we'll be able in a few months to be able to especially after this summer to be able to give a more accurate number of families impacted. I appreciate that. Okay. We got a long way to go tonight still so there are further further questions on the BCA budget. In other budgets, just do ask counselors consider email follow up and also create responses to the whole council. So thank you Sarah and Doreen. And now we will move to the next. This is the department for many inspections. And welcome to the award. And before I'm going to see Doreen just again that these very mystery little guys to see all part summer programming this summer, which is really nice. Nice to the last year. We did save money on that. Yeah, efficiency and action. And it's awesome to see that it is going to be such an active summer again. Well, and I get to have pictures of kids dancing. I'm just going to get your position up but you know, for inspections there's lots of critical duties too. So. All right, I'll start my song and dance now and Catherine, you know, who's the old fashioned way of letting you know when I'm ready to turn my page. I appreciate you having that up and ready. So thank you everyone. Let's start out. This is not the full group that you see in that picture and no one's dancing but that's a mix of some That was the photo that chose to put in there and Catherine, we can talk about our mission. Some of you do know but not everyone does that call or sometimes confuse that we do everything there. We don't, but the things that were required to do our mission is to inspect rental housing, which you probably know is more than 10,000 units in the city. There's a number of housing inspections that are inside of health inspections that go along with that include like the work with the Board of Health, which is things like pesticide enforcement and found needles. We have, you know, a couple thousand a year that my staff members and the ones that are picking them up when there are reports from citizens. I have some questions about that at City Council this past week so that is definitely a connection with my team and the housing division of the DPI staff. The zoning and development review is what people would know and love as zoning permits. They have been for the last few years part of the DPI team and used to be right here in City Hall. The fourth group that you see up there is the Trains Permit Review. Those were part of Norm Baldwin's team that PBW previously, but for the last few years, they are the team that's the Trains Team within DPI. They issue building electrical plumbing and mechanical permits and when there are appeals from those types of things they're appealed to the DPI commission, appeals to development review board when people have zoning issues. And if you flip to the next page, you'll see an addendum to some of that zoning work in the bottom left corner. We've added for the benefit so folks know that most of that is staffed by people from the Art Legal Inspections. We have the Conservation Board Development Review Board. Megan Tuttle has primary on the Planning Commission, but Scott Gustin, the division manager for zoning works really closely with Megan. We also staffed the Technical Review Committee, which is the team that works with the folks who are coming in with large projects to try to coordinate between all the different city departments, bring them into the conference room at DPIW. That technical review committee gives those applicants a chance to know what potential hurdles they could be up against before they actually apply for a permit. And the Design Advisory Board that's on here as well is another portion of what the zoning team helps to staff. The overall organization is there's a few staff members that are administrative within those other divisions, but that one lone person who started two weeks ago, Alex, is the frontline person who handles the permits as they come in the door. He's still in a training phase, but he's working with the first group, which is a team of the trades inspectors. The second group, sorry, the third group along is Scott Gustin's zoning team, planners and zoning enforcement team. And then the last group is the housing inspectors under housing manager Patty Weyman, also listed for the purposes of the supervision of that team. They typically report to me this people repeated removal that I'll wrap up with tonight, but Patty helps me with that effort. That's how the department is organized. And so what I've added is, I'm not sure if that would happen if you have the one that has the one with revenue and expenses. Maybe that didn't make it into that sense. That's where I, yeah, there was one and I'm not sure if the, I'll get it. Sure. The, the notable changes that we'll come back to have to do with the personnel expenses. It's not a surprise to you, I'm sure you've seen it with all the presentations so far, between, you know, personnel and benefits those increases are going up. The other thing for our department is, it's somewhat unique that this year, we're just now fully staffed, we've had some openings, one of them was open for almost nine months. So that's a really exciting transition for us that we have what I would consider full staffing for the first time in a while post pandemic, we should be rocking and rolling this year, better than ever. But that makes the some of the things that were resigned savings this year that we didn't use some of those some of that money in the budget or personnel and benefits that will be expected upcoming year. There's a small increase in the regular rental registration revenue. We haven't raised the fee, we are actually expecting there'll be additional units that will be coming online before we bill for next year's rental cycle so that's why that there is a small increase in that revenue line. And the other is that short term rentals there's a commensurate increase of about $20,000 is what we're expecting that we've seen part of that already and more to come. The last notable change was the rental jobs by the certificate of occupancy revenue decrease. That's for those that would look that deep into the budget I want to at least give you that heads up that I'm projected decrease this year because it's already starting to increase over the last few years, but it's in July of 2020. From that point forward, anyone who started getting a zoning permit, the entire fee is collected as part of the permit fee. The old practice practice I don't want to ever go back to is where we did a piece meal, and the people had the responsibility to got a zoning permit to come back and pay a fee later. People were confused by that and led to a lot of people not closing their zoning permits. Because of that change, we're collecting those fees up front, but we're going to see those CO fees we're still collecting them as people close those older permits, but that's going to continue to decrease over next year and years to come until that's completely gone. But the reason I asked Catherine to put that up because it was her terrific idea that it is noteworthy that we have a pretty substantial amount of revenue that we bring to the general fund and less in the way of expenses but for those keeping track at home. We don't have in our budget the fact that we have a great facility that we basically live in rent free. Those types of things are not counted for my budget so in reality, if we were to be paying for that type of space and trash collection that somebody's team does and all the other services that we get. So that's the part that I wanted to make sure explain why there's not just a big giant check that we write a month to Catherine and don't get ending back we get a lot of great service back to include things like legal fees it service from Scott really pleased with those types of things so it's a great wrap around service that we have with the other city departments. On our initiatives and priorities for the upcoming year. I think Council is well aware because you helped us to implement these things but we've got I wanted to mention in a way the rental weatherization which is the work that we're doing with Vermont gas brilliant electric to drive enforcement on the properties that are using the most energy and make sure that they are first in line to get weatherization. Those folks have already scheduled out into about a year from now. So the line is getting long for the waiting line, but we have an additional group of people that would need to come into compliance in 2024. So that line will get longer and the best hopefully it's short and if we get more weatherization workers out there but there's not a lot of workers and we're doing our best to get them lined up into that but that works and it continue throughout this year in the next few years. Short term rental enforcement that you know from my report in January will be coming back after June when the properties have to come into full compliance by the end of May. We'll have some additional details on that. We're going to continue our work with a partner brilliant electric on net the net serial energy coordination to meet cities goals. And I'm pretty sure it's on everyone's mind for feeder because the pandemic was terrible thing for us each year at wintertime. It's always a struggle, but we have job postings out for seasonal workers. We will be coordinating not only those workers that will work directly for me but also with some volunteers who have not to be named specifically but there are people out there in the community that we've supplied a pain to and want to be able to help by being a good neighbor. It's wonderful. I was at the former YMCA this morning and share a picture with mayor that the property manager was out there starting the process to eliminate along the college street side, the graffiti that's on that building so there's going to be a lot of work to get done over the next few months but I do expect between that and work that we'll be doing that overall auditorium that will be a notable change. But I feel like we needed to say that can't be the only thing that we do because we need to make sure that we're doing something on the judicial side of things because there really hasn't been a lot of work to bring some of the folks to justice. And I do hope that at some point we can get the criminal justice system focused on that in a restorative manner but that clearly has not worked over the last few years because they're doing very few referrals and no prosecutions. Therefore, we clean it up. Someone goes right back out. Does it been personally frustrating for me to have that but I want to make sure folks know if you're frustrated about it. I have a phone in the mayor and I talk about this issue a lot. We'll do everything that we can to make the positive change that we can try to see that we will say defer some of the people from doing that again. It's a better way to put it. There were a couple of questions. I didn't give specific cuts in my budget. I really the areas in the budget line where I cut where I need reductions were to accommodate things that I really needed to increase. So we transferred some of some of our folks over from the different divisions, not all of the budget lines were lighting up we were spending more like last year for things like cell phones because some of those lines were not actually being appropriately budgeted to my department until towards the end of the year. So we were having produce I've tried to make some of those corrections. As a result, there aren't like cuts in any of the lines that I have that are matched by some commensurate increases. So I want to be very straightforward on that that the other thing is during the last few years we've been cutting to the bone. So I'm trying to put a little bit back into that because people who haven't traveled for a while will be traveling in the upcoming year and we've got a highly technical team of people that work between the people that issue the permits and the housing inspectors that it's important for folks to get out and go to specific locations where they're doing nationally accredited training. So hoping to do that in the upcoming year. So that's my question of wishes. I have to say a little sarcastically I'd like, I'd like to wish for a little less complicated work. That's my first, that's my first wish many things are complicated by decades of other decisions that were made that it's no fault of the administration or staff members or council but it's just a sort of a long history of things we continually unwind. So that every, every property is its own unique situation. But my biggest wish really is that we remain fully staffed because that helps us to not have to plug the holes with some of the work that needs to get done with having other people do that. So we plug a staff member 10 miles who, you know, he's out one of the people picking up needles doesn't have to it's not specifically in his job title, but he's also issuing, or he's, yeah he's doing inspections and closing the zoning permits, but when the staff member who left, who was doing the administrative he picked up the portion of her job. So he's doing all these different things. I'd like people to get back to their specialties and focus on them will do much better work and people can focus on what their specific job description is and not try to cross into filling gaps from other places so I think it might be simplistic but my main wish is that we remain fully staffed so that's why I'm trying to work on stability within my staffing the department keep everybody happy. Great. Thank you, Bill. Questions for for bill. Yeah, thank you. Is your budget I didn't see her feet and removal, called out specifically in your budget. It's, I think, you will be to its seasonal work. Yeah, so it's actually captured and I'm not sure if it's, I don't want to put Kara on the spot if she's already presented or not but Kara has funds that I'm my staff but it's coming through the funds that Kara is managing. So I'm not sure where the schedule she is but the short version is it's approximately $40,000 with 30,000 being remaining for staffing and 10,000 for supplies. So is that like a level funding basically from last year or is that a little bit more than last year and part of it was we with the last year we didn't have the staffing. We didn't have people apply. We just had one person and trust me I'd much rather one effective person than a team of half effective people. So the first year when we initially asked for 10 volunteer or not 10 budget 10 seasonals to give it gives right back sort of opening back the doors of city hall after you know being close to the pandemic. We only had three people, but they were three hard working UVM students who were on their break. I expect as that's happening now students are deciding what they're going to do now that schools getting out. So it's likely to happen that we'll get people are going to be here for the summer. They ended up last year the person that worked for me was in the same situation. Good workers and committed for a variety of reasons they care about Wellington, but also, yeah they need something to do for the summer and dad in those cases wanted them to be doing something productive and what got great for us. I think that's going to happen again, push the buttons to make sure that we, if we can't get that will press whatever, you know levers and buttons we need to do to get other people into that pipeline to get the jobs filled and get the work done. Thank you. Any other questions for. No. Okay. I'm not seeing any hands. So, so phone marks. We'll let them go and next up. Ashley with the CFP capital buttons. I'm actually still still with us for a while now but still feel like she's relatively remember the team has really transformed a lot of our capital work or tip work. I was going to start by saying that this is an officially a year old now. So, yeah, it's been a year. So, I'm very excited to be here tonight. To consent. Thank you. I provided a mental as well, where it has more information or more details. So, I'll try to just do a quick run through some of the highlights, but feel free to ask me about any of the information that I had given. I thought I would start this presentation off with a quick just overview of the capital budget, general capital budget. So what's included in this budget is public works tech tech services. We've got the parks and facilities teams included in this budget. And then the innovations and technology fire please capital assets and of course our two districts. Essentially, we have a city capital committee composed of internal representatives from the general fund departments. We're constantly reviewing request capital funds, talking about other things how we're prioritizing our projects and essentially recommending this annual budget to you all a year. I also want to just touch quickly on the concept of the carryover budget as a reminder in the capital world. Any on use funds within a project or, you know, it's a purchase any on use fund within a project budgets will roll over into the next fiscal year to be used by that same project. What you'll see in this proposal and future proposals for the capital budget is any new budgets for new projects or new needs, or any additional product need that is not currently in the capital budget. So this year, what we are looking at is a proposal that showing 43.4 million dollars approximately. I have, I want you to see the variety of funding sources that is composing this year's capital budget. We do have some remaining dollars from the first draw or 23.8 million dollar bonds by voters in March. So that's going towards some projects. We also have go bond premiums that came from that bond draw about 1.8, I believe. And I'm proposing a new bond draw from the 20.8 million of $5 million to help us support capital initiatives that are either ongoing to new ones and over our needs and FY 20. And then additionally, we are including our annual CIP, which is a $2 million annual bond. And then in addition to all of those are downtown and waterfront tip projects have grown financing instruments that you'll see including this year's budget. And we also have multiple grants across departments. And you'll see in my notes in my memo, grants make up about 56% of this budget so it's a pretty significant source of funding for for the capital program. So that's going to be a combination of federal and state grants. And then in addition to that the last one is the dedicated tax revenue sources that include paying for parks conservation legacy street capital and green felt. So those are the overall funding sources that make up our, our budgets. I am happy with this budget is a balanced budget. We are maintaining all the commitments that we made to the voters, the March asked. As I said before, it's proposing a $5 million additional draw. One of the things I have worked hard on this year as a new as a newbie was to really connect and engage with all of our teams that have projects and needs in the capital world to really understand their project budgets existing and new. And we've worked really hard to work to efficiently allocate all these dollars so that we can really stretch and maximize all of our capital dollars. So I hope you'll see in this proposal there is a diversity of products and needs that are being covered with a, it's a nice chunk of money but there's a lot more needs. And I hope you see that we worked really hard to do as much as we could with the money that we have. Another point that I just wanted to mention is this budget is proposing to really strengthen the capital contingency which lives within one of our funds in the capital and 809 to be specific. It's focusing on building our ability to meet any unknown emergencies that arise within the fiscal year. And this year, we're also looking to build this pot to allow us to maintain a bucket of money for our local funding or local matches. So we're going to apply for grant application just to make sure that we have that money so side we know where it is. So that's what something I want to just let you know. And then also the last point on this slide is, I was able to work to include other dental fund departments that didn't have any allocations within the $23.8 million bill bonds. We were able to provide some space within the annual CIP to give some departments need like it and fire and police there were some acid needs that we've needed for a long time and then deferred and we were able to find some space within this budget within the annual CIP to make it work. So I felt really, really good about that. So the next slide is just is it's a bunch of projects that we have listed within our overall capital budget. I, these are, I'm calling them the highlights. We have such a diversity of projects within the budget. And I think I just wanted to give that sense to you, everything that we touch on we literally touch on pretty much everything the city does. Everything from the Champlain Parkway project who is a huge is a huge project that will hopefully this is the last year, big year for them so that's a significant chunk of our budget this year. All the way down to some really important equity equity based upgrades in our fire stations two and three and a bedroom bathrooms to really help us make a comfortable space for for women in our fire stations. So, we're really touching on a lot. There's a lot of important projects and work and I'm happy to go into further detail on any of these. There is some detail in memo, but I wanted you to be aware of all the things that we are doing. And this is just a couple of additional projects that aren't exactly captured in this budget but we know they're coming. We know the libraries received several grant funding grant opportunities that they are working to finalize budgets and project descriptions. And I am aware of all of the needs and matches and so we are working to finalize those with them and that will be incorporated. There's also the cherry street church streets side, church streets side street project, which is a congressional directed spending project, and that money I believe is coming in. That's the next, like probably fall winter. I also wanted to give everybody a sense. The next two slides are covering all of the things. This is essentially carry over projects that are still ongoing behind the scenes projects that you aren't going to see called out in our budget, but they're ongoing and still very important efforts that our teams are doing that every day. And so you'll see that you'll see it basically from DPW facilities, parks, public safety. And parks, you know, I did it up into the work that they're doing both covered by bond funding and then also what they're doing with their pay for parks impact the endonation dollars that they receive. So I'll tell you all the good work that we recognize. Also, my presentation will focus on the future for capital and just raising awareness of some things that as I move forward through to get 3.24 budget season and start thinking ahead about how to fund all of our capital needs. And that will be at the very top on my, you know, on my list. So, now that we are into the year two of this $23.8 million bond, and what's the proposal to use $5 million that will leave us with $5.8 million from this bond to apply towards our needs and FY 25. After FY 25, it will only really have the $2 million annual CIP to apply towards any capital products or needs. And after that, we don't have an end of the capital reserve. And there's no other significant dedicated tax supporting general fund capital needs. The current dedicated taxes are for very specific projects and have their own base where they get used. And I just wanted to share based on the needs that have in the forecast right now. I have a pretty good idea from FY 24 27 you'll see that in the table here. These, these are the projections that we're seeing in terms of the capital projects and our capital assets that we, we know we have to cover the next four years so it's significant and I just wanted to make you aware. This next slide focus down more on a few more different areas of need where I know we're going to be to really work on identifying sources of funding to work. Our grant funding is huge, and we currently have an estimate $9 million of existing need projects that are funded with a grant that we normally have to provide some kind of match for. So there's, there's a need to find those dollars. Our facilities team is doing an amazing job working with their $4 million that they were a lot in within the 2028 million, but we have at least $15 million in deferred maintenance and repairs that need to be to be done in our buildings. We're going to do street paving. I know that you don't work here you really want me to touch on this one. Our goal is is the 45 miles a year. The go bond has provided them with two years worth of funding to do street paving. The last year of that allocation will be FY 24 and FY 25 there is no additional allocation in the 2028 million for street paving. He has projected three to four year or three to $4 million of need to get us what we need moving forward. And then parks. They have at least 27 and a half million dollar need for deferred maintenance projects across our parks facilities, and they only received $2 million allocation across this 528 million. So we know we have a significant need to get to me. And they're also doing an amazing job trying to implement a lot of different projects at many different facilities with that 2 million. And then to last but not least is the fleet. I know you guys have been introduced to this topic recently. We, this year have been focused on this issue and maybe I'll just pull off on this and I know I have a slide or two on this. But we have been focused on trying to figure out for FY 24 how to support the $1 million of lease payments that we, we have for vehicles that we purchased. So, and I will also add. From this go bond though we did get 2.2 million for fire trucks in FY 23 and that that has happened with their orders. So the general fund fleet funding needs. In my packet of information I also provide the fleet, you know, funding history just an overview of how we got to where we are today you saw a little bit of that in captain's presentation. It was last Monday. So our lease it is we have just a little business actually actually spent a fair amount of time on the last week so. I think there are more questions and then come back to it. Yeah, so this just shows you our plan for, for building that need. And we have additional plans we know we have a $2 million need for purchases. There's a series of recommendations I know the team is going to be reviewing a fleet, a fleet committee memo soon so you'll see you'll probably see that eventually. We're going to build a sustainable fleet plan to help us get back to where we need to be for the police, and going back to just our general fund capital planning strategies. What I hope to do this year is, I have almost a five year plan. It was a five year plan last year, but now I need to add a year. I need to provide at least a five year forecast for consideration this fall winter that will continue to help us fight tune and understand what our needs are moving forward. That was actually a big task for me this year because it took a lot of time with the teams to think about how to look forward into five years down the road. So my goal would be to take this into a 10 year plan that would be my idea, but I would like to share five years we can continue planning and prioritizing identify some of the other sources of revenue for general fund capital. And the prioritization again I heard you guys loud and clear in the Monday night meeting weeks ago. I've already started having conversations about prioritization of projects and needs departments and I'm hoping to refine that some more this year. And then the last thing I'll just note is we have been working hard to create some procedures that are more related to how teams track and monitor their project budgets, which will also help us better reconcile the final budget so that we know how much money may or may not be left within a project budget so that has been something that the higher in our priority list. That is my presentation. Great. Thank you actually or is open for questions. Thank you for that. On the looking at revenue challenges. You're saying for the four years fiscal 24 fiscal 27, we have 181 million dollars of capital needs, and we have 8 million of the annual CIP plus 5.8 or 13.8. So we have this correct. So we have the differences. And that's why the prioritization is really important. We have to give our funding levels going to remain like if we cannot find another source of revenue funding, we will have to do some have some serious conversations about what our priorities are and how we're going to fund all those priorities in the coming years. And hopefully, you know, I know funding is probably the biggest issue right now whether or not we can, you know, we're really likely not. So we just have to get creative and start thinking about what some other strategies might be and how best to enact those. Do we do we think there may be federal infrastructure money coming, eventually, that we can use to bust the bank down. Well, I think we're doing we're working really hard. The grants team has been a really great addition to the city team. And they have really gotten us a lot of opportunities. The one challenge that I'll just know is many of these opportunities also come with a local match requirement. And we have to find that somewhere so that's why I want to know the local match estimate. It's pretty significant and, you know, I think grant funding is great if we can, if we can get it, but we also have to figure out how we're going to come up with a match, generally speaking. Yeah. And we do this grant team has been working hard and I think we have asked out there and I think we should, for the budget passes give you some kind of data on what's going on with this grant. There's a problem. Thanks. And just know that. I think the comment that you've been made or so go about the need for the $2 million and CIP to be expanded. I agree with you. I think it's an outdated number. I agree with you. I think it's not even sure five million. So reasonable some, I think probably 10, so long reasonable some, but I do appreciate very much. This is, I am, I am not someone who likes to run from forecasts. But if there's a forecast and we know what it is, I think we're doing a disservice to ourselves and to the public, I know I'm saying what it is, even if it's not what anybody wants to hear. So, you know, I mean this is an astounding number, and not something that we can solve with annual borrowing. I'm not sure if we can solve it with, even if we had bonding capacity, how much to put solid with it. But that's neither here nor there because we don't have that. And I just think that I do agree with you that going forward, we're going to have to decide whether or not, you know, we care for the public, all the time about street painting, all the time. And maybe in fact that's really what people are doing mostly want. They just want to be able to have, you know, they want their streets paved. And that goes for people that have a rough car, or they ride a bike, in fact, if anything, or so if they ride a bike, because you really are taking your life with your own hands in some of these areas, they're just, they're just gruesome in some areas. So that's the end of here and we're there for this. I just wanted to thank you for the report. You know, and to, you know, and to say, I mean, listen, our general obligation, our geobonding is just is limited. I think it's important for us to know that going going in, and to make some and to accommodate some needs by increasing the NCI annual bonding, I don't know how long it's been to million probably forever, and forever, it's been a long time, and it doesn't need to be longer. It still would take time to change that, but I do agree that that number. It's to change without it affecting our bonding capacity. Thank you again. I didn't realize it's only been a year. It's funny when people are here for a while before getting along. That's actually a condo and business that we've come to really value your expertise. Thank you. Thank you so much. Go ahead. Thank you. And thanks actually for the presentation. I wonder if you could speak a little bit more about the second looking ahead slide that 9 million number for the local match. Is that 9 million in local matches that we haven't identified funding sources for. Yes. We've identified some of it, and I don't have that number for you, I can go back and look at my estimates, but it essentially looks at all of the projects that have receded funding that we know we were, I guess it's best that they were hoping would come out of this 22.8 million go bond local match. But the formula and that we had in the local match from tomato base was not going to cover everything that we were hoping to cover local match wise, and I think there are several reasons for that. There's a lot of need and there's so many opportunities for grant funding. And then, honestly, the every single apartment every single project purchase had experiencing and you guys know those significant inflation issues, and it has really affected the projects that are troubling the amount that we were expecting them to cost which affects, you know, it just has a spiraling effect on whatever we thought we were going to need in 20.8 and it's really affected all of that so I hope that's helpful. Yeah, I guess a request that I would have is we can get if there's if it's possible to get a breakdown of the projects because you know I, as far as I know the board of finance and the council approved. A lot of these projects with, you know, at least some understanding that the local match would be funded. So just to kind of get an update on where a lot of those projects are at and where the gaps are in relation to what the projects were proposed as when they came to the council initially, I think would be helpful. That's all I have. Thank you. We're on the room. We're online. Not seeing any more hands. So, I'm going to say thank you to Ashley. Congrats on the year with us. Really appreciate having your best year. We will now move to traffic department. In the meantime, I'm like a director for parking and traffic. And interesting division that I operate. You know, we're all unique. And my mind is very special. But I'm hoping tonight through this step that you'll see that there's a lot of optimism, a lot of innovation happening in our group, but there's also a lot of reality. Edge to what we're doing these days. So, well on this slide for a moment, and then hopefully see through the rest. I run basically a $7.3 million vision has broken up into three independent working groups working budgets. So each. So I have two special revenue funds, which are completely independent of each other. And then I have one fund that sits within the general fund. So she even alluded to the earlier his presentation and get a little more detail of what the parking services does. The traffic group to 64 does all the signs line signals the less stuff with brand new manager Tom Mashberry came down from the office in all this town's department, but works director. So he's pretty fast that to us. And the parking facilities group that's also special revenue and that factor has taken a great leadership role in really turning around the condition of the garages and Jackie Sparity is a brand new parking services manager who brought a real sense of customer service customer experience to parking to get the work done. So across these groups were really focused on safety equity. You know, some of the things we've done in that, that space of food plans for food program heard about a lot of coordinating directly with school districts, you know, they're building a outdoor car classroom on top of the parking garage and directly on the cherry street pickup drop off situation. Just a lot of interaction with the school district, which is a great working with the evening chargers garages for cars. And we're developing new creative parking products to hopefully satisfy the needs of our community. Particularly into 64 to 65 traffic and parking facilities we have serious revenue challenges, revenues are recovering much more slowly than we expected. We're still at like somewhere around 75% of free. COVID revenues. And no, in order to handle that we're looking at possibly a 15 year debt instrument to handle basically paid for the pain of COVID over the next 15 years. So this is what I'm talking about the reality that you have. Despite that we're bringing innovations around where we're all in on asset management. We're slowly building out our database. So we're going to get every sign in the city, every intersection in the traffic signal, every light in our garages, every stairwell, you know, all these bits and pieces are all slowly being built into asset management. Permit sales and ticketing. We have a brand new platform. It's called AMS. It's really great. It's allowed us to do a lot of new creative innovation, sell products. One of the things it's allowed us to do is fairly seamlessly expand and support BPRW parks with their retail operations for sales. And then we're also approving service to our customers through powering our employees, really getting our managers to work with our employees to take their ideas, take their initiative, take the good ideas from them. And that's resulted in things like department graduates being clean. We talked about graffiti earlier. I'm serious. If you see graffiti in the garage, it's probably because there isn't any. We're on it like crazy. And it's the same out of the streets. We're cleaning graffiti in the streets that we don't need to come. Things that we don't even. And it's got to bring out early paint and clean sweep ended on Friday. We were out painting on Monday. So we're painting like the bike pad facility. So anyway, so we're moving to that. We're changing our management structure so we can move quickly to address this. So anyway, so that's a big introduction. And now I'm going to blast through these slides as fast as I can as well. Thanks. But otherwise, don't fight. So this is the traffic room says that I matched our he manages all the signs, lines, signals, crossing guards, and the meat. All the revenue for this department comes from parking meter revenue impact. There's no tax dollars in this department. It's all retail, basically. We also bring in money from meterbacks. So if you ever see those orange or yellow. So program highlights. So, like I said before, our revenues continue to recover, but they're recovering slowly. Fun balance is fully depleted in this group. Park mobile is 70% of our revenue. This is a huge, that's usually adopted by early, early clients really like it a lot. Just one fact, last day is has a 4% adoption. We got 70. So it's pretty, it's like, that's a big deal. Part bubble loves us. Repeating stickers are ongoing distraction. We deal with graffiti every day. It's just constant stickers. It's just exhausting. Our seasonal painting crew were having staffing issues. We used to get nine people last year. This year, we've got one so far. And I don't know if we're going to get in. So understanding that we're looking at alternatives to painting, we're looking at thermal class approaches, tape approach, there's all kinds of alternative technology costs more front, but my last three or four years versus. And crossing guard hybrids approving. I think you've heard from me say crossing guard barely get 15 to 18. I think we're at 26 right now. So this is great news. We're excited to have crossing guards. Staff appropriately. My legs in the budget for next year. We held the expenses flat from last year. They're now shifting costs. So this is including a shifting costs from parking service. The parking services provides in ports for the on-street meters. So 20% of the cost of parking services. We're also including funding in here to support the main street, the grand streets outreach and mitigation planning around the parking. We're feeding those who continues to drive costs, hard costs and labor costs. But in the next few years, we're going to have to make sure that we have to make sure that we have to make sure that we have to make sure that we have to make sure that we have to make sure that we have to add more income to our costs and labor costs. But in this, that we're also bringing innovation and safer protection who are the state on that. We can impact these to fund that. But speaking of things that we've advanced faster we've had more money that's one of our, because we are laser focused on bringing our signal program up to date. Most of our signals in this city are about 25. are a few years in place. And I talked about the page. So it's trying to go about the same. So impact of COVID, like I said, it's ongoing. We're still about 90% of our revenues pre-COVID. So after three years of running it's between 75% and 90%. That's had a dramatic effect on our ability to plan the future, we just don't have the cash to lose to. The chart on the right, basically from bottom to top shows COVID at the bottom. And then moving up to the gray line is 21. Orange line is 22. And then you can see the little blue line there is 23. This is calendar year, by the way, it's just easier to see that way. So we are recovering, but it's not dramatic, but it is recovering. So hopefully that optimists. But we are talking now about great opportunities. How, you know, our balance as I had a relationship with CRDC before its previous role. So he knows the concept of grants. So it's not something that's been a big part of this room. So we're looking at it. He's can't rely on retail. So probably signal system, that's a little bit. So okay, so we go on to 265, their parking facilities. So part of the city's massive is Patrick, he runs the marketplace garage, downtown garage, Pearl Street Law, Union Street Law, Main Street Law, one-handed door, St. Paul Street, which is underneath Champaign College, the Lake Street extension and the waterfront north, which I forgot. And then all the revenue, all the expenses, all the revenues here come from parking fees and parking apartments. So again, no tax dollars, it's critical. So program highlights. We are focused on silly safety and the customer experience. That is our North Star. We're focused heavily on that. Last year, we made major investments in the parking structures to about $70,000 on structural issues to keep the marketplace going on to structure the safety, keep so the access for doors in the downtown garage safe. We've invested lighting, increased security controls, we've put in additional cameras and for now live streaming security footage down to monitors at the new garage. So if you come in, you can actually see, looking in the towers and see what's going on. Now we are supported, somebody asked about ARPA earlier, we were supported by a million dollar ARPA diffusion. So we have that, that's been pumped in just to keep us alive. And after that, we're still looking for a $3.5 million, 15-year consolidated debt instrument to cover some of our ongoing costs and to cover a loan that we already had that we bolted on because we didn't have any debt coverage for that loan because we were to work on this. So we have a complicated financial picture in our communities. So we expect our recovery to remain slow, we're exploring new pricing and products that will hopefully drive revenue by better more flexible services to our customers. We're carrying a couple hundred thousand dollars to cover debt service in 24 and four of those initial payments to that $3.5 million debt instrument. And we're carrying funding to start the planning process for the future of the marketplace garage site, whatever that may look like, because that one's 50 years old. And we again increased our security budget to $190,000 a month, 65 years ago, it was 40. So this is a massive increase in security and financial security. So in that COVID, we're still running at 75%. The charts on the right are the occupancy of downtown garage, marketplace garage, you can see pre-COVID, if you look at the marketplace garage, it's right up at that 85% line. And I remember this, I was here then and we were full two or three days a week, two or three times a day, we were shutting the thing down. And boom, we dropped down and now we're running sub 15, 60, maybe peak out a couple of times, but we're still running half to three quarters of what we should do or what we were pre-COVID. So we got a ways to go, but again, we are recovering just slow. So next. All right, Parking Services, this is what you see Parking Enforcement moved into W, we've got Jack Sparity. They run, they basically do enforcement for parking safety and parking equity. It's all the on-street and off-street parking facilities. They run the appeal process, they run residential permit sales. They manage the garage, the permits for the garages, 265. That's another reason for that cost shift that I mentioned earlier, staffing. And now recently, we've just picked up running the permitting program for the parks. All of the revenue for this group comes from parking tickets and residential parking permits. Yeah, no tax dollars in here. And this is actually that contributor of somewhere around $600,000. Good job. All right, next. So Hype are focused on the customer experience, Jackie Sparant and Kate are working at Enterprise with my car. She was a branch manager, so she don't understand what it's like to run a retail operation that she's running. Let's see, this is the second year for appliance reboot, which was again, very successful. I'm pleased to donate $40,000 to the shipment. And I've mentioned the cost shifts a couple of times and this one reiterated that because we've shipped the cost off to these other groups, it's created a lower expense threshold for this general revenue department. So as our revenues increase, hopefully we can increase the contribution to the general fund. So anyway, so we've held expense for fiscal 24, we've held the expenses, even we expect to make the typical 600K contribution 24. We are actively engaged in creating our partner service agents to enforce in increasingly consistent fashion. We have some that write more tickets than others, put that way. So we want to write more tickets, we are goal is to write less tickets, but we need to keep it out. We can all of our agents to write similar amount of tickets so that we get the same performance out of our group. And I think what's gonna happen is that it's gonna be an increase. So the year, which eventually over time, we want to lower, but I think the short game is looking at it. But it's highly dependent on community behavior. And one of the things that we recognize, we have the Whoops program, I think we've probably talked about this before, and we're modifying how we're rolling out Whoops. Because we have this contribution to general fund, we're concerned about how it looks like impact out that contribution. So what we've basically done is we, it's had a slow rollout for a couple of technical reasons and just some logistical reasons. And now we've got those resolved and ready to roll, but now we're concerned about general health of the general fund. So basically we're gonna do, think it very methodical approach, solve the 10 problem, we're solving the marketing problem right now. And we're gonna start rolling it out, but as it rolls out, if we see that it has an adverse impact of more than about 10%, what we think our contribution to general fund is, we will pause it, we assess it, and understand what's going on. So we don't get through a whole year and go, oh boy, it's gonna be 600,000 solids, general fund, whoops, it's gonna be 20 grand. So we wanna have it measured and controlled. So we're taking, it's just a little bit of a step back. We have all of the authorizations we need to run this, we're just taking a little breather on how it will stand. It will roll out in earnest over the summer, but it's just a step of what I'm gonna mention, because it is this threat, whoops, it's a threat to big contribution to general. That's it, sorry, I went fast, but there's a lot to what I know. I know people are very interested in talking about parking, and it was hard to do it, but I was already nice, we're in kind of different strengths. So you all know how to find me, call me, great. All right, thank you, Denny. Okay, go ahead, Casagrette. Thanks, I'll be calling you about whoops. So I'm just going through my emails yesterday, and I have an outstanding issue. I will just say for now that I think it's a great program. The rollout has been very rough, and the messaging's been very inconsistent with regards to what our residents can access and what they can't access. So I'll forge you the specific concern that I previously emailed. I think the city really has to look at this deeply. While I think it's a good program, I don't think that public relations-wise, it's a good idea to say, yeah, we're gonna do this, and then go ahead and try and roll it out again, and then say, no, we're letting too much money go, we're gonna stop it. So I really think we need to make a decision, a firm yes or no decision, because from a public relations standpoint, and this one issue that I'm working on, I'm like, oh, we've got this whoops program, you're under 30 days, so you can appeal this and apply it toward whoops. Well, none of that information was available, and then the appeals denied, et cetera. I just think it leaves a very bad taste in people's mouths, so I would just recommend considering how we want to do this program at this time. If we're gonna commit to it, we need to commit to it and go with the risk, or we need to say, given what's happened with COVID and we're still not at the numbers that we had before pre-COVID, then maybe it's not a program to continue to try to roll out, and I'll leave it there, thank you. Okay, thanks. Thank you, Pastor Grant. Are there any other parking questions for the council? Okay, I'm not seeing any more hands in the room or online, so I'll say thank you, Jeff, for going into that presentation. Appreciate it, thank you. And I appreciate the challenging times of parking when we play workouts with my friends. We are getting there. We have two presentations left. The Burlington Electric Department is up next. As a sizable addition here to the event plan. And well-branded. Always. And again, if that's what you've been on, I think that's something to watch out for. One of these things, I'll thank you all very much. Good evening. I think we have a couple of colleagues who are online, possibly as well, Cheryl Mitchell and James Gibbons. On Zoom, Darren Sparger, general manager for the Burlington Electric Department, joined by my colleagues, Emily Stevens-Wheelach, we're here at Cassie, Mike Annerich, Paula Xander here in the room. We're going to cover the FY24 budget as well as our proposed FY24 rate change. Just from the process standpoint, we'll be bringing the rate change forward for consideration to the board on the 30th of May and then the council on the 5th of June, because we need to file it by mid June in order for it to take effect as planned on bills rendered September 1st. And obviously the budget will travel separately with the city budget. We have unique context for the FY24 budget, which really starts with the FY23 actuals, which is that we faced a severely challenging winter in terms of power supply for Burlington Electric relative to our budget. We're actually more than 100% renewable and we're able to sell excess renewable energy to benefit our customers during the winter when the price is typically more expensive. What happened this winter was there was volatility related to Ukraine, expected that they asked a lot of the costs that drove the prices higher during the point of time when we were budgeting and that did not materialize at the time when we actually were selling power. So it created a negative approximate $4 million variance in our budget for FY23. And that obviously carries forward into FY24 in terms of having less cash on hand as we begin the FY24 process and have some other challenges that it presents as well. Overall, I'm deeply appreciative of the BEV team for the work that's gone into this budget. It's maybe been our most challenging even in counting the pandemic budgets that we've got together. Emily's gonna cover some of these initial budget slides and then I'm gonna cover the great slides and we'll be live answering questions. So over down. Thanks, Jeremy. So as Jeremy just started to preview, they're starting, started building this budget in a weak cash position due to those low energy prices that we saw for our excess energy this winter. Like the rest of you were in the high, very high, as opposed to firemen for the second year in a row. We're happy to negotiate a four-year contract with IEW last year. That contract contains a 12% full-up over the four-year contract. So that's something we have the budget for. So importantly, even as we're seeing strategic electrification take off and more lethal and vast needies and heat pumps, our sales to customers are still pretty flat. We are only about 20% of revenues comes from the 80% of our customers who are residential. The other 80% comes from commercial customers, right? So the reduced commercial square footage in the city and the increase in efficiency, which is great, have offset the gains that we're seeing in the residential side. So you'll see in the next slide, our sales are not yet growing at the pace they need to grow or to keep up with the growth in expenditures. The energy markets in New England continue to be uncertain. The natural gas reliant in New England as a grid and natural gas continues to be a constrained fuel. So we're seeing not as high energy forwards as we saw last year, which were truly unprecedented, but they're still quite high at a level that's only occurred once before since IEW was created. The 2022 zero revenue bond continues to be a critical source of capital financing in this budget. I also want to point out, Darren said, we're going to be requesting a 5.5% rate increase this year for liminarily. We're not completely done our analysis of our true cost of service, but where we are right now indicates that we could justify up to a 14% increase given the increases that we've seen in the cost. So we're asking for far less than you believe that we will be able to justify the need. That would be the third year in a row we've done that. That's why 22, we asked for seven and a half. We could have justified this to 12. And then last year, we asked for 3.95. We could have just about all this 2% more than that. So really with this budget, what we're trying to do is just keep our Moody's rating metrics at our current levels while minimizing their requested rate increase. We're not in a position this year to improve our revenue factors, unfortunately. This is the slide you alluded to on sales to customers. So you can just see over the past 20 years or so. The high point there is right after a hospital expansion project that happened. You can see some dips for recessions in 2008. You can see the impacts of federal efficiency standards for lighting and appliances starting in 2010. And then you can see 2017, Blodgett who got down in 2019, going to town center, started to close down. And of course, 2020, we had severe impacts from the pandemic. We have bounced back from where we were prior to COVID, but the bounce back level of course is 2019, which was our lowest point in that 20 year period. So we're not yet bouncing back to kind of an early 2000s level. And just to linger on the slide just for a second, obviously our system costs are increased and our unit sales have decreased, partly for good reason with efficiency, partly because of other reasons that I mentioned. We went back and looked, and if we were selling as much electricity as we were in 2015 in this budget year, we would have about 3.6 million more revenue this budget year than we have in the budget. So obviously with strategic electrification, we're hoping to bend this curve back upward for good reason because we're helping people use less fossil fuel, but that just is a key economic driver in terms of rate pressure, something that we're keeping close eye on. So given that that was our revenue picture, really in order to balance the budget, we had to do a lot of work on expenditures. The VED team cut over $6 million of expense from our budget, from our initial starting point to get to the budget that you see tonight. Looking at operations and maintenance expenses that are not power supply, are not transmission, are not our required renewable energy standard to three compliance, are not AMG chart, unexpense things that we could actually do something about. The trend line and those expenses is 1.5%, sorry, the trend line is 3.9% on average since FY 16. If we kept going on that pace, that we were on between 07 and 16, that would be a 5.84%. That those same expenses are 1.5% less than our budget last year in our current fiscal year. So the budget that we've developed contains operating revenues of 65.1 million. That includes the requested 5.5% rate increase effective September 1st. It also includes sales revenue from the sale of our certain renewable energy credits. Those sales are relatively flat. There's a modest decrease, less than 2%. Operating expenses are $67 million in this budget, 4% higher than current fiscal year. We have made more conservative assumptions around the price we will receive for the sale of excess energy next winter. That's about a million and a half dollars less than we assumed last year. However, those assumptions are still higher than the actual prices we saw this winter, which was quite mild. So there is still some downside risk in this budget in another mild winter. We could see a revenue shortfall from those sales. We're also dealing with a new three-quarter billion dollar expense for, this is complicated, but there is a plant in Mystic, Massachusetts that ISO New England has entered a very confidential contract with for reasons of reliability. Entire region of New England is being asked to pay for this. We have very limited details about the contract. We didn't budget for this last year and got hit with it by surprise. This year we have budgeted for it doing the best we can to estimate what we believe it will cost. We know that the contract continues at least through May of next year. We are going to be seeking approval from the Vermont Public Utility Commission to amortize that shortfall that Darren and I spoke of related to those soft energy prices this winter. That will improve our reported net income for FY23 and improve our debt service coverage ratio. It will, however, add expense through the annual amortization of that for a million dollar shortfall over the next few years. So we've assumed that $530,000 expense in this budget assuming that the accounting treatment will be approved. If it is not, that wouldn't be an expensive record but we would have different results for FY23. And this is just worth noting certain utilities in Vermont that have alternative regulation by green mount power or by gas, if they see a commodity costs, they're able to pass that through with a fuel adjuster essentially for a limited period of time they adjust rates upward to a commodity cost spike and then they can adjust the downwards. We don't have that in our regulatory framework. I would actually take likely a vote or a charter change or approval otherwise by voters as well as some legislative authority for us to be able to have access to that. So this accounting treatment is essentially a much cruder version of being able to use the fuel adjuster. It's not in real time. It doesn't recapture the cash but it allows us to recover at rates over a period of years, what we lost during that period of time. So taking aside just to give you a sense of our power supply costs, they are only up 2% and you don't include that special expense for the mystic plant and our excess energy sales. So underlying, and power supply is 28% of our expense budgets, the single biggest item. And that cost is increasing but in the scheme of things these days, very reasonably and very modestly. We have a new cash out way this year to repay the city for our family that we entered to repay our environmental liability payments associated with the program. And we have an increase in our indirect allocation from the city as well. On the plus side interest rates are up. So we are bushing for the additional $400,000 compared to our fiscal year, doing better rates. And our net income for the year will be budgeted at $283,000. That's pretty lean. It's almost a million dollars less than income than the F-223 budget has passed. It's income, exactly, exactly. So, and then I'll cover quickly capital, robust capital budget this year. The revenue bond is the primary reason for that. 9.2 million of this $10.9 million capital budget is being funded by the revenue bond. You can see the pie chart shows you the different areas of our fiscal plan that are going to be invested in through this budget. Production in the upper right is our generation plants. Other includes EV charging and fleet vehicles. Distribution is the biggest piece of the pie there in the green. And then general includes things like buildings and grounds and IT services. The credit rating factors that we're projecting with this budget, our revenue bond covenant requires that we maintain at least 1.25 debt service coverage ratio. We're budgeting all above that at 3.68. Moody's likes our adjusted debt service coverage ratio to be around one and a half or greater. This budget we're at 1.11. 90 surveys cash on hand. We aim to achieve at least 90. This budget is 90 exactly. So it's a mean budget for the terms of that income and the excess cash it generates just to say it doesn't generate very much. And then finally, a bit of a preview of coming events potentially as we look at our forecast and outlook for net income and cash on hand and financing capital investments. Darren spoke about the fuel adjuster clause. That's kind of a more, that's the most baby of the things on this list. Our line of credit counts toward our needs cash on hand on our new scorecard. It was set at $5 million in 1999 where our expenditures were half of what they are today. To increase that line of credit refers to other change. We hope and would like to request a valid item next town meeting day to increase that line at least to be aligned with our current level of expenditures and perhaps to provide a little headline for us to grow. We've never in recent memory drawn down that line of credit. We use it primarily to boost the days cash on hand metric and it's just not providing us as much of a boost as we need as each day if we catch becomes more expensive. And then finally, we also expect to request approval for our second revenue bond as part of the FY25 budget with a slight meeting at no time for our 2024 on our next day. The original revenue bond of 20 million was actually half of what we had identified in terms of upgrades and investments. What we do, we had a three year period of spending that we didn't want to ask for more than thought we could move forward in a three year period but there is a second tranche that we had identified that we would like to bring forward as part of that. Any questions on sort of that aspect before we switch to the great increase proposal? I was forgetting to slide. Oh yeah, well this is an important slide. We are, amidst all of that challenge, we are investing, continuing to invest in our net serial initiatives. Obviously we'll continue to be over a hundred percent renewable. We have successfully secured a bill on S137 in conjunction with the Fish and Sea Vermont that has been passed in the House and Senate weights the governor's signature that will support even further enhancing our incentive programs, which we're excited about. We're continuing to fund our electrification rebates our efficiency programs over three million in total for FY24. We very much are hoping to bring a district energy go-no-go decision to you in the next few months. We're working very hard to complete that work. Importantly, I think the Revenue Bond is providing us matching funds coincidentally in terms of timing for a number of federal grants that we're looking to secure for great infrastructure, for recharging, and in some cases for batteries as well. Working with our colleagues at Parks and Rec, at DPW, and elsewhere, looking at charging infrastructure around the city, working with the state of Ramona grant programs that they have, we're very excited to be welcoming, and long last, our new electric bucket truck in FY24. You all approved this, I think, a year plus ago, and it took us a little while to bring it in, but it's coming as well as a few F-150 lightings that will replace gas trucks that are due for replacement. And we are actually, I think we have a meeting on this tomorrow, we're working on converting our gas turbine, which is the only fossil fuel plant in our inventory, and it's not for sales customers. It's basically a peaker plant that provides capacity. But nonetheless, it uses oil and we're working to convert it to bio-diesels. So we have an effort underway to do that as well. So we'll go ahead into the rain slides, 5.5%. Here you can see the timeline in terms of prior increases. Obviously, we went for a 12-year period without an increase, which was an incredible run. Now we've been in a period of time where we are trying to keep the increases in the single digits, and hopefully the loads of middle single digits, not the high single digits, which is where we are middle single digits. This year, on the next slide, you can see DED's rate at the bottom in dark green relative to a variety of other commodities. I think this is helpful, but actually the next slide is more illustrative. This is new for this year. This looks at inflation 2020. So essentially during this period where we've raised rates. And you can see even with the, this would be our third rate change. We're still below the rate of inflation during this period of time. So while we don't enjoy raising rates and it's always the last resort, we try to keep the increase as low as possible, it's at least helpful to be able to gauge it against some of the cost increases that we're seeing in the economy. And certainly other utilities in the region are seeing double and even triple digit rate changes. Residential rates, you can see we continue to be, even with the proposed increase in dark green, well below the state and New England averages for residential, and the light blue bar there represents the rate that would be effective for our income eligible customers who are part of our energy assistance program. So you can see they have even further Delta relative to other utilities in Vermont and New England. On the commercial industrial side, this rate change moves us slightly above the Vermont average, but we continue to be below the New England average in terms of commercial industrial rates. And then we have total rates, we continue to be below the Vermont average, well below the New England average. Vermont tends to be about second in the region in terms of rates on the low side, usually made as a head and has lower rates than Vermont, but otherwise we tend to be lower than all the other states. This is just another representation of that. You can see the current and proposed rates for residential, for commercial, and then across all customer classes. Bill impacts, this is the real impact as opposed to looking at the rate percentage for residential customer. This would be an on average $4.39 set increase on the average monthly bill for small general, which represents around two thirds or most of our commercial customers, $5.10 set increase on the average monthly bill. And then for our income eligible participants, they are getting a 12 and a half percent discount. So that has a proportionate benefit that's a little bit higher actually as the overall rate goes up. So they would be saving on average the $11 to 23 cents off of their bill as part of this. Now the program originally started with ARPA funding and has been supported by ARPA funding. It's a pilot program. Appreciate to see Council President Paul's work with us to really kind of help us think this through when we were developing it. We're looking to make this a permanent program coming in fiscal 24. The PUC had given us an 18 month pilot. We've signed up a little less than 150 customers. We think we can help between 800 and 1500 once we fully get going. So we just had a meeting with CDOEPO for example on how we can do even more outreach to help more folks access this program. And then just a couple more slides. We continue even with the proposed rate change to have the best electric vehicle rate in the state of Vermont. And it's not even close. And this is for our customers who are charging off peak using the level two charger at home getting what's been roughly a 70 cent per gallon rate relative to gas paint. So we'll continue to have that favorable advantage when it comes to EVs. And then lastly, maybe we have that last one. It's just a slide. Oh, okay. We had one more slide that I can just mention which basically shows that in addition to our rates our customer charge is quite low relative to other utilities. So it is that one. Yeah. So when it shows as we pull it up is the lower electric use you are the more essential advantage you have relative to other utilities because of our low customer charge. So it just speaks further to the relative progressivity of our rates compared to the utilities. You can see us in the bottom the BED rate and the proposed rate. And you can see the Delta lower kilowatt hours being much greater. And then as you use more the relative advantage compared to the utilities declines. So the more you use the less advantage you have essentially relative to the utilities because the customer charge being low is essentially progressive structure. And that was our slides. Appreciate the time and obviously have the answer to questions. Great. Thank you for the representation. So we're open for questions. Councillor Jang, go ahead and set it up. I think that's just the cursor. Sorry. All right. I'm not, I don't believe I'm seeing any hands. Very good. Thank you all for the presentation. Thank you. Okay. And this brings us now to the next one. Last presentation of the night, which is water resource utilities. Megan. I see. Go on. Okay. I'm sorry. Everybody leave. I was not going to say. I think that's Megan. I think that's Megan. Don't worry. There's plenty. We're back here for you, Megan. That's right. I'm definitely getting recorded. At plenty of great attendees still are my councillors Jang, Bergman, King, Grant, shout out. All right. Also shout out to attendees, Sharon, Boucher and a colleague who I don't know who it is. Thank you for explaining to us. Sorry. There was just. All right. I will. Yeah. Great. Thank you. But that's still great. No. We're waiting for. No. Please proceed. Okay. Well, thank you all for letting me go last. I had a soccer team of young women to coach. So I wanted me to get here a little later. So my name is Megan Moyer. I'm the division director for water resources. I oversee the other enterprise funds for the city, BED being one of them. And then water, wastewater and storm water being the other enterprise funds. That means that there is no tax dollars support. And in fact, our budgets contribute in a couple of different ways to the general fund via pilot, via franchise fees, so on and so forth. But when we're talking about this, we are uniquely talking about the charges that people see on their water resources bill. As I mentioned to Council President Paul, we're going to post a revised presentation. The end of the story, the rate increased, nothing changed. I did double, triple check my model, but I did wrap the wrong sort of summary number. I just wanted to make sure that that's clear here and I'll point it out when we get to that slide. So we've got a lot of resiliency principles in water. So the VIN diagram, the interplay of keeping things healthy financially, keeping our infrastructure healthy through our stewardship. And then the third and very important of all of which is the staff resources. On the financial side, we've been working really hard to make sure we're fully recovering the costs of providing our 365, 24 hours a day, seven days a week service. We implemented a rate paper affordability program two years ago and I'll talk to you a little bit about what the stats are on that. We finally have started to contribute to a capital reserve when it's possible. We maintain healthy daily cash, operating cash on hand. And then like PED, we always have to meet our debt coverage ratios for the loans that we have that are still outstanding. On the infrastructure side, we're really working hard and it is a battle every day to work on our operation and maintenance and move away from reactive maintenance and more to preventative maintenance. As many of you who are on streets that we are doing projects on, we have uptick our capital renewal replacement. And then we're also working on putting a new infrastructure to make new regulations, whether it is the tertiary phosphoration removal technology that we piloted at Main Plants end of last year or the rain gardens that you've seen on St. Paul and we'll see in Main Street. There's lots of new stuff as well as fixing the old stuff that we're constantly trying to balance. And then as many of you are aware, we have been really taking a deep dive look at whether or not we really have sufficient staff resources to meet minimum staffing requirements for safe operations and also to keep up with all this preventative maintenance. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in this presentation, but in more detail at the Tube, hopefully in the May Tube, which is coming up I think next week, and if not then in the June Tube. So overall, at the end of the day, the major expense drivers, we are looking at a substantial increase in overall expenses across the three funds. This is the number that I think the wrong number. Don't worry, the rate increase is not 8.79. It is less than that, but that is the overall increase in expenses. And this is driven by a number of things. There's of course all of the existing personnel related increases that we have to deal with. Everybody in the city has to deal with the colas and whatnot. Those are things that are not controllable. And we also have the other non-controllable side and the orange is the, what I would consider the external inflationary increases. And I call those out on the right hand side. There's some pretty big numbers, particularly wastewater biosolids. We, it's one of the biggest numbers in our wastewater budget. This is the processing of the solid components that come out when we do the water recovery. And those are processed with the help of CWD and that contract, which we will be bringing to the council, I think the next round. We're looking at a substantial about 25% increase. The good news is that that's a less of an increase than what they're seeing across the region. But the bad news is that this is something that we're really gonna have to keep an eye on because it's not something that we can reduce. We can't control it. And so we have to dispose of it. And the landscape of how easy it is to dispose of these biosolids is getting harder and harder across the country and particularly in New England. We also saw a really hefty increase in our treatment chemicals. While we watch our chemical usage and dial it in and optimize it as tight as we can, these are chemicals that we need to disinfect water, both in the wastewater side and on the water side. And so again, it's not something that we can really control. There's a couple of other things that I think BED mentioned it indirect allocations. There's different parts of the city that support water resources. And that's in the light tan. And then we also saw an increase in the liability insurance. Is it actually talked with Paul Plunkett about that. He's saying that's a trend that they're seeing across the country that the insurancees are having to go up because if there is a replacement, everything is more costly to replace and therefore the premiums are higher. So to take a little bit of a deeper dive, so the staffing proposal, that's obviously been the blue, a significant chunk. 27% of this $1.7 million increase is constituted by some staff that we're planning on with your support adding. And then there's also about 30% are what I'm calling sort of intentional investments, things that we are actively doing either on capital or on the contractual side to be able to provide better services and to better security infrastructure. So I'm sure everybody has questions about the staffing proposal. We did bring in Raftellus, a third party financial and utility advisory organization. They were the ones who did the 2019 study to make sure that some of the staff and some of our own internal observation were validated. And when they came in, they came up with a number of different observations. Basically we've got aging infrastructure and we have a previous history. So in the recent years, 2016 and on with the support of the mayor and the council, we have increased our rate of capital renewal and replacement, but there was a really long time where we weren't doing that and we are in catch-up mode. We simply don't have the staff capacity to conduct needed tasks. And so things like preventative maintenance do fall by the wayside. We're mostly in reaction mode and fixing things that have already broken versus proactively taking care of things before they break. Another concept which you guys have talked about certainly on the sort of public safety side is in some areas when you fully account for labor yield, basically that one FTE doesn't mean you have one person there all of the time. And so if you have a crew of four people, you need a crew of four people who often have to look at having more staff in order to ensure that you have that crew of four people. And so when you look at wastewater and distribution, they found that there were insufficient positions in those areas to meet those minimum staffing. And then the last thing is really high rate of labor in this. Since 2016, when I took over, maybe it wasn't the best ITL, but since 2016, there've been a number of new laws, acts, regulations that have been passed. And so overall, while we're dealing with the past, we're also having to deal with the future and with all these new things. And it's a lot to keep up with. So again, if you're interested more, have questions. We did attach the report to the packet, encourage you to review that. We also encourage you to come to the two meeting in which we can answer additional questions. But basically I've broken down the five different position types, six people overall, and sort of checked off which of the four areas that they were at their meeting. So we're looking at, we'd like to be able to add two additional water distribution technicians. These are the people who in the water mains break in the middle of the night, on the coldest day of the year, they're out there fixing that. They're also hopefully with additional staff working on things like valve exercising, operating the many hundreds of valves, which are necessary when we do have a break to isolate the break to a smaller area instead of it extending many, many streets beyond. There's also a stormwater field specialist to help with the regulatory challenges that we have there and ensure that strong ordinances that we have are actually being followed and that we can take credit for a lot of the practices that private properties have had to implement. And that'll help us meet some of our larger state and federal obligations. We're looking to add a water resources project manager, not an engineer, but somebody who will make sure that we're doing better on our project delivery. We've got a ton of projects and having somebody who's handling the paperwork and the pieces that really you don't necessarily want your engineers to be diverted and doing, we think, and Ractel is validated would be a good value add. We're also looking to add another wastewater operator and then lastly, a water resources utilities coordinator. There's so much work going on in the city, the right-of-way subsurface is highly congested and more and more we're finding when we go to dig up something that there's been a water main break that there's a Comcast line or a gas line or any number of lines or trees or anything that are right on top of our infrastructure and make our already challenging job even more challenging. So I said the rate increase is not as bad as eight. How do we get there? We went line by line and made sure we looked at the actual expense trends from the last few years and anywhere we could find where the actual expenses hadn't been reaching the budgeted levels, we cut those and brought those down to what more in line with what the actual expenses are. We carried forward, we had some personnel vacancy savings from FY23, which we were able to carry forward as well as a credit from the overcharge on pilot. And then we also went through a line by line projection of what our FY23 vinyl expenses will be for some of our more significant expense lines and then budgeted appropriately in FY24 with the intention that we're gonna carry forward that money. On the revenue side, our overall revenues are, and this is a lot of where the offset comes. We had some additional revenue because there's been an increasing volume of sludge production, sorry, slug processing from other communities so that goes to offset some of the increase in biosolids contract a little bit. One of the bigger things is that we have been continuing to phase in the private fire protection fee. In FY22, this was part of our new rate structure. It's something that is very typical for communities that properties which have a dedicated or have a much larger line coming into their building to support a sprinkler system. That's bigger pipes, bigger pumps, bigger everything that we need in order to support that. And that wasn't a cost that we were recovering previously. When we looked at what the cost or the cost recovery was of that, the amount we would have had to charge people right off the bat in FY22 was too big. I think for our commercial, mostly our commercial customers to swallow. It was also COVID. And so we had agreed with the council to phase that in over a five year period. So the last year I think it'll be fully phased in by FY26. We also went through and looked at our available usage based on FY22 data. And we're seeing a slight increase. Generally things are flat, but a slight increase in water usage, largely due to the wholesale water that we sell to Colchester fire district two, which supports a lot of farms. So it's something you have to keep an eye on because if we have a really wet here, then the farms don't necessarily need as much water, but we've been seeing an increasing trend if they're going their farm fields or what, but we've been seeing that they've been asking for more water. And then we storm, this farm water fund has a very healthy days of cash on hand, fund balance. And so as part of this, we are using a hundred thousand of that in that budget. So that overall budget has a $100,000 deficit to balance things out. So where does that leave us? That leaves us with a proposed typical bill increase. So this is a typical single family customer using 400 cubic feet a month of 6.5%. That comes out to a customer bill of $55 and 11 cents, still less than DET and you're getting three things, not just one, say that. And a reminder that we also have a affordability program, a discount program, if you will, it's called RAP, Water Resources Assistance Program. And a customer who is on that program will only have a bill of $46 and 12 cents. So I think that's a 16% that's count over what somebody else would see. We have the last five years of rate increases. We did have a rate increase of almost 5%, well, 4.5% in FY20. We were able in COVID to not require a rate increase FY21, FY22 when we phased in the affordability program, we actually were able to generate a basically a slight decrease with a typical customer bill. We did have one in FY23 and then this is where we're at with FY24. When we look at the overall rate increase since FY21, we're looking at about a 12.1% increase. And this is lower than the CPI or the inflationary change since that time. I'm not going to go through all of this, but this is the full rate table. How we charge people is that everybody gets a fixed fee, the meter-based charge every month. And then depending on how much water you use, it is multiplied by the volumetric rate, which is on the lower half. When you use less than or up to the typical amount of water for under cubic feet, you are getting a significant discount in the water rate in particular. And if you use more than that, then you are putting more of a burden in the system in the charge higher. Just would be remiss if I didn't remind everybody of the very significant capital investment that is going to be needed for FY25 and beyond. We too are looking at putting together bond proposals for town meeting day. I believe I've broadcast that enough to folks. We need a full comprehensive upgrade of all three plants. We're trying to implement the tertiary phosphorus removal, which will bring us fully into compliance with the Lake Shimkling cleanup plan. We've got combined sewer overflow reductions, outside repair, that's all on the clean water side, on the drinking water side, we need to rebuild the picture of the 1867 pump house that is responsible for feeding the tanks, which ultimately feeds the UVM medical center, very, very, very important. The water treatment plan itself has not had significant upgrades since it was built in 1984. And so we are looking at all of that and trying to put together a package that will be as palatable as possible to the work to the customers. I also need to say that the bipartisan infrastructure law, it's going to provide some funding, but it's not significant. What we're seeing coming out of the feds, there's a lot of money for new things like lead service lines and for PFAS, but the amount of money that Vermont is getting, I think is a total 350 million, about 150 of that can actually go towards these aged infrastructure type things. And the estimated need in Vermont alone is about $2 billion. So it's great, I'm not gonna say no, but it is not going to save us from the money that we need to spend. Right here, affordability, I hope that people are aware of this and can share this with their constituents. When there are rate increases, it's very important to me that we have this program so that if somebody who does have a hard time paying their bill, I don't ever want somebody having to choose between being on time at their water bill and paying for things like medication or food, we have these affordability programs where if somebody already qualifies or some other income-based program, they can show us proof of that and then we give them a discount on their water bill. We try to make it as easy as possible. We also have a senior discount and a discount for nonprofit housing organizations. But we don't have a lot of enrollees. We're not spending all of the money that we've set aside for that. I think in total we have, since the program started, only 46 enrollees and the VISTA bill discount program, 21, were qualified as low income and 25 as a senior hardship. Our rebate program, particularly the sewer ladle rebate program where we've been paying for people to be able to inspect and video their own sewer lateral so they're aware of what investment they may need to make. That has been very successful. We've processed over 132 lateral inspection rebates. And I think we've been able to get about $33,000 away on that. We're not done with affordability. We're still not able to reach the renters who may be getting impacts passed down from their landlords. I'm really excited. I've had some initial conversations with BED who do have lists of renters who qualify for their programs. And there could be some unique, cool synergy where we're able to partner with them to get money to those customers directly. We also, we wanna look at any number of things to make sure that we are really making it as easy as possible for people to access water. Because it is a human right. I think that, oh, I guess the only other thing I was gonna say on the affordability stuff is that my staff has been working really hard on the capital projects. We have already pulled in in the past three years, $4.3 million in grants to cover projects that we would otherwise have to bond for. And even with the loan program, the state revolving loan program, we have accessed about $2 million in loan forgiveness. So that loan program has more paperwork than anything I could ever imagine. But it is turning out to be worth it because that's $2 million that we can either repurpose into new projects or not have on our debt service. And with that, just a reminder that water is worth it. None of us can live without it. Please consider that as you consider this proposal. Great, thank you, Megan, for putting it all out in the proactive thinking on this major challenge and really restructuring of water that you've been leading for years now. Last presentation today, I know people are getting a little tired, but go ahead, Councilor Craver. Just wanting to question a little bit here, but one of the difficulties with water rates in the renders is there's no way of meter. And I just, I'm just talking that out because I think such a high render population is something we just need to think more about. Because I think the whole bill, the whole one bill for the building, it's passed on to the occupants, the tenants, and the ones conserving of one is not, they all get penalized. And this is the dilemma, I've heard the conversations, but I really think such high render population we have a more proactive way to submeter would be useful. I think maybe it's something we can have rough let's see if there have been any other programs in other cities. I suspect it has to do with the plumbing because once there has to be a dedicated line into an apartment to be able to do the submarine. I'm not saying it's not possible. Just to get a little bit into the detail of what we think we could maybe do with the renders and what camera which community, but basically by partnering with BED, if they have somebody who already qualifies for their program because BED, they do meter individual units. Right. Figuring out a credit that we would basically have BED give to somebody on their electric bill, but that is for the water, which is different than the time we're in right now, but just to know that I'm totally on board. So I have to get somebody to meet at the main meter and then add something in between and then something. You have to have a separate dedicated line and every building's a little different. But it's a good idea that I want to look and see if there's been any successful programs and how it's been administered. I think it's largely a plumbing engineering challenge. I guess somebody's building a new building. It's easy to address, but let me look into that. Thank you. And also possibly if you could work on the conservation side, like having a water conservation program, it's Philly where they have contractors, plumbers who go into these rental buildings that at least make sure that somebody's not having an excessively high bill because it will leak toilets. That's one of your most common issues. One apartment's got a leaking toilet and they're not reporting it and they could be raising the bill for everybody. Yeah. Oh, no, see, go ahead, Councillor Jenkins. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Megan, for the presentation. But before I start, I wanted to say, I don't know what Losi CLD used for the presentation, but it's beautiful. It's interactive. I like it. I want to know the name, but I don't know the time. Yes, and I think something that I noticed compared to the BED is basically their rate increases. They went back all the way to over a decade ago to paint a picture about, okay, we have not done it for over a decade, but now we're doing it. And I noticed they have already dated by over 11% just from the past two years. But for your, I did not understand really well the history behind the rate increases at this place on the presentation, but I'll follow up in an email to better understand it. Also, I wanted to tell you, I mean, we invested $30 million to fix the problem of sewage overflow, but I also have noticed that you are starting to think about it like from looking forward before we have to fix this problem again. I wanted to say I'm really appreciative and I completely agree with you about the capital and bounds for the capital improvement of your facilities. I completely agree. And I also feel that it's timely, right? I just wanted to say, no, no specific question, but thank you for all that you do, the leadership that you bring into this. And I appreciate that. Thank you. Great, thank you, Councillor Chang. And we can, the rate increase history is interesting and we got more about it. They're part of the challenge we face now as we went a very long period with very, basically, no rate increase, just a little longer. About 10 years. All right. I'm not seeing any further hands online. I'm not seeing any further in the room. So before that changes, I'm going to say thank you to everyone for sticking it out this long. Thank you very much for participating. Thanks to the full team that has tonight to really give presentations. And I will be back again for Monday. Yes. Thanks, everyone. We are adjourned at 7.55.