 All right, so good evening. Today is May 1st, 2023, happy month of May. Thank you so much for joining us, both in person and con toys, and online for the Burlington City Council meeting. The time is 5, 5.45. We're gonna begin our agenda this evening with item 1.01, which is a motion to adopt the agenda. Is there a motion to adopt the agenda? I don't believe we have any amendments. No, is there a motion to adopt the agenda? So moved. Thank you, Councillor McGee. Is there a second to that motion? Second. Seconded by Councillor Travers. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion to adopt the agenda, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. The motion passes. And I'll note that Councillor Shannon is joining us via Zoom. That will move us on to the second item, which is item 2.01, a communication and negotiation of an agreement with the University of Vermont and an expected executive session. Normally before we go to a motion regarding executive session, I would go to the administration for any update that can be provided to the community in open session, but seeing that we don't have the administration here with us, we will move on to a motion. So, Councillor King, if you could read the first motion under the recommended action. Move that the council find the premature general public knowledge of information concerning negotiations of an agreement with UVM would clearly place the city at substantial disadvantage with such negotiations. Thank you, Councillor King. Is there a second to that motion? Seconded by Councillor Carpenter. Any discussion on that motion? Councillor Hightower. It's a shame that the administration can't speak to this because I think that was part of what I wanna discuss, which is it's hard to find that the general public knowledge of information that we're about to receive is would place the city as a substantial disadvantage when we don't have a lot of information on what this is. I've not received any emails about a real estate agreement. If we're talking about Trinity campus, I also just wanna note, I think that too many of the communications that we get from the administration say confidential without really specifying what parts of it are confidential and what parts are not, which puts me as a Councillor in a very awkward position when then that meeting comes up in public with my constituents talking about it, and I technically can't give even as much information as they're talking about because I've been told that I can't speak to this because it's confidential. I think we need to be much more careful. It should not be confidential if we are speaking to another party. It should be confidential what we are speaking about. And so I want us to be better about what we say is confidential and what is not confidential and what we talk about in public and what we don't talk about in public. And if we are talking to UVM, that should not be confidential. The terms of the agreement should be. And again, it's hard as a Councillor to say whether or not we would be placed at a substantial disadvantage when I'm not privy to any information with not been sent communications on what we will be talking about. It doesn't even say Trinity campus if that is what we're talking about. A real estate agreement is too vague. Thank you. Well, you will actually get your answer in just a moment. Let's wait. Councillor Bergman. Mayor Weinberger, thank you. Thank you for joining us. The, there was a question we're now in the first motion to go into executive session as you know normally before we go into executive session or before we even make the motion. I usually look to the administration to share whatever can be shared in with the community in public before we do that. In the meantime, there has been a question about the relative, well, actually, maybe I shouldn't paraphrase. Councillor Hightower. I think you do a great job paraphrasing. I'm at a risk of just repeating exactly what I just said. There's two things, which is one, I have a hard time noting what will place the city at a substantial advantage and never have a hard time finding that premature general knowledge would put the city at a substantial disadvantage when I don't know what we're talking about. The negotiation of real estate agreement, I'm not aware of any real estate agreements that the city is discussing with UVM right now. I do know that we're discussing Trinity. The second part is the communications between the administration and the council. As I noted in an email a few weeks ago, it's really frustrating when we get a just general confidential email that says that everything is confidential. But then we go to our NPA meetings and our constituents are able to provide more information to each other than I can provide to them because they are allowed to share the confidential information that again I only got in a confidential email. It puts me in a really awkward position. It puts all of us in a really awkward position. So I want us one to be better about just as we get updates saying what is confidential and what is not. I don't think it should be confidential that we're talking to UVM. Maybe it should be confidential what those negotiations are. And then two, same thing with before we go into this executive sessions, being clear about what we will be discussing and why it is confidential and giving that to the council with as much advance as possible so that we can make those determinations because we're being asked to vote right now and whether or not it is premature public knowledge. Thank you. Thank you President Paul, Councillor Hightower. So to be clear, I think there was an earlier version of the agenda that, and I can see it's up there that suggests it was a real estate agreement but that was amended to, it's negotiation of an agreement with UVM is what we're gonna be talking about. It's a formal agreement. It's an agreement that will bind both parties if it were to go forward to certain outcomes. This is the, we are, we're, you know, definitely talking, I've been fine with that language included a negotiation of a housing agreement. It's certainly public knowledge that we, the city has been interested in the housing agreement for, to replace the 2009 agreement for some time. That's what we're gonna be talking about. It is, I think, advantageous to the city for us to go into executive discussion and talk about it so that I and the city team negotiating such an agreement can have the benefit of knowing where the council is on the variety of issues that we will be handled in that agreement so that I can, we can, the administration can successfully negotiate an agreement that will secure council approval. That's the nature here. And as far as, that's what we're gonna be talking about and that's what we'll be seeking your input into. As far as, I don't totally, I don't think it was anything the administration did that kind of resulted in the situation you're talking about with your NPA. So I'm not sure quite how to respond to that here but I'm happy to talk to you further about that another juncture. Thank you, Councillor Hightower. We're gonna go to Councillor Bergman. So just as a point of information, I'm looking at all the agendas that are printed over there for anybody who would come in and get them and it says a real estate agreement and I had kept my computer in my bag because I was gonna walk downstairs and why bring it out just to put it back in and walk downstairs with it. So when was it updated so that anybody would know? You know, there are people who would be interested in knowing that we are here gonna talk in executive session about housing agreement with UVM. We know there is tremendous interest in that and people would actually probably wanna come and comment on it or send us comments on it if we knew. I am feeling very uncomfortable about going into executive session tonight given the notice. I totally am in agreement with going into executive session to talk about a housing agreement with UVM. I didn't cause this. I don't like to, as many of you know, I don't really like to cast blame on people for mistakes but this is a mistake that I think has public import in it. So I am, somebody will have to convince me that this is an appropriate thing for us to do tonight and that we cannot rectify it in some way through some other action be it a special meeting of ours or to do it at the next meeting because time is so sensitive that we've got to go ahead and negotiate this and I've been one to be pushing UVM and I will continue to do that. So I appreciate time sensitivity although I don't think that anything that we do could not wait for either a special meeting or our next regularly scheduled meeting. So perhaps I can be enlightened about that but at this point I am not going to vote to go into executive session based on what we've got and for the reasons that I've stated I just think it's bad democracy. Mayor Weinberger, thank you, Councillor Bergman. Thank you President Paul. To be clear, the original posting said negotiation of a real estate agreement with UVM expected executive session. So it was clear that we were talking about UVM. It's now been clarified negotiation. Mayor? Yeah. If I may. So I'm gonna tell you what happened, okay? While we were downstairs at the Board of Finance I received an email that said the motion language was not complete and the city attorney wanted to use different motion language. That's why you'll see that it says no revised motion language because I put that on there. So I had very, I'll just let you know. So I had very little time, so I did it. But as just a point of information the timing that you did that was during the Board of Finance meeting today? Yes, it was a few minutes ago. Yeah, okay. That was when the email came to me. So that's when I did it. However, as much as I would like to think that I am pretty good with board docs and we can ask the clerk how good I am there is one thing that I don't know how to do and that is how to change a heading. So the heading says real estate. The language underneath it under item 3.01 does not because I did know how to make that change. And when I walked in here, I actually said to Lori you'll notice that there's a change but I didn't know how to make the other change. That's why the change, that's why the language is different because I didn't know how to do it. It is, I will leave it to the administration. I don't think it's really my role to speak to the, speak to something that we're gonna go into, hopefully we'll go into executive session on. I understand the misgiving. I will say that it would be incredibly valuable for us this evening to do this executive session. I'll let the mayor speak after or unless you, I guess you had the floor, you had the floor. There's just points of information just trying to understand the timeline and the date. So that the change that was made to not just the heading what about the other change for, when was that? Because. A few minutes ago. So it was also. Yes. Just a few minutes ago. So my information request has been answered. Thank you. Okay. My apologies for that. That was certainly, as you know, as you know, Councillor Bergman from both your current role and past roles that these things are done in, on Thursday. It was an assistant city attorney that gave me that language. That's why we posted it that way. The city attorney has now said that that is not accurate and wanted to change. So I immediately made that change. That's why it's slightly different. In fact, city attorney Sturt event is joining us on via Zoom if she wants to speak to this or I'll go to the mayor if you wish to speak to this. President ball, I just want to remind folks what we're talking about is having preliminary executive session. There's no, we council to be clear if it hasn't been clear no council action is going to be requested following this. And we will be meeting if, if this goes anywhere which there's no guarantee it'll be a subject of future future council action. And certainly if it gets to the point where it's an agreement that we're seeking approval of it will be worn well ahead of time. And there will be ample opportunity for future public comment on it. So as far as, you know, this is a, I think we're in a housing crisis and we want housing action to happen as quickly as we can. This has been a long discussed agreement that we have been at an impasse on very public impasse on for some months. There is the possibility of progress with it now. I think it would be unfortunate if we have the council assembled and because of what I think is a modest clerical error we just decide to not take this preliminary step. That would not be my recommendation but if that's the will of the council will the administration will carry on as best we can until we have the opportunity to talk to the council about it. Thank you, Mayor Weinberger. We'll go to Councilor Hightower. Great. Just again, I want to note we got a privileged communication from councillor President Paul April 12th and a privileged communication from you, Mr. Mayor on April 15th. The only thing that that I will, I think I can break the privilege now and say the only thing that's said is that a meeting is happening and that a meeting has happened. There is no reason that should have been, we shouldn't have been able to tell our constituents that especially given the invitation at the last council meeting before this where you invited UVM to come back to the table given how the meeting had gone. What should be a privileged communication is the details of what we should be discussing today which would allow us to say whether or not that is privileged information that we should go into executive session to discuss. So again, my request is that we differentiate between what is privileged and what is not privileged. The meeting happening is not privileged information. The contents of the meeting is privileged information and if we had even bullet points on what we were talking about today that would have been really helpful is my only point. I do feel comfortable voting on this given the Mayor's testimony but I just want to make clear what my issue had been which is a little different from Councillor Bergman's. Thank you. Thanks Councillor Hightower. Councillor Bergman. So maybe for future activities I look at the amended language and I don't find it to be sufficient. It doesn't mention housing. Just mentions an agreement. We could have agreements with them over all sorts of stuff. So again, it does not provide the public with any thing that they have the right to know. This is not a minor technical thing. This is about transparency in our government and I won't accept any blame or anything close to that that would have me have a delay on the basis of this be accused of somehow contributing or not trying to solve the housing crisis. There are ways that the administration could communicate with us confidentially and still have a meeting at the next regular meeting and if it was that important we could hold a special meeting. I know that it's difficult but that is our job and we have the capacity to do that. So a confidential communication that lays out the positions. We don't need to do it in a way that would have a serial meeting. In fact, you're not allowed to do that but people can comment to the administration and you can get feedback from people. So there are lots of ways that we can do this and still keep things moving forward. People will vote. I had a vote today that I thought was a really an idea I thought was really dumb and I got outvoted and I went along with that. So I know how to lose today. But at this point in time I think it is a mistake for us to go into executive session based on the information that we have been provided that has been provided to us. I think that it is an affront to transparency, good governance and dare I say fundamental democracy. So I will be voting no to go into executive session. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. Can I just simply ask, and this may be a silly question, if the motion was amended to include the fact of a housing agreement, would that be amenable to you as a way to earn your vote to go into executive session? I think it would be better. It will not but I do think it should be done because that's what it's about. So I do think if we're talking about a housing agreement, we're not talking about their parking management plan that is subject to certain discussions in certain bodies like the planning commission I think or the DRB. It's not about real estate, some other thing. Maybe they want to build a parking garage somewhere or what have you. So not about university, terrace or place. So I do think that that would be appropriate. Unfortunately for me, I think it is not sufficient to get my vote, but I would appreciate it. So are you making that motion? Sure. I would move that the motion be amended negotiations. So in the motion number one, going to the second line, negotiations have an agreement with UVM regarding housing. So adding the words regarding housing after the word UVM and before the word would on the second line of the revised motion language, motion number one. Okay, Lori, did you get that? Okay. Councillor King, Councillor Carpenter, is that friendly to you? Yes, I was. Yes. Okay. Did you also want, I know you would want, I saw your hand raised, did you want? I was just gonna suggest that we Okay, all right. Thank you, so we will make that amendment. So if there's no one else who wishes to speak to the motion, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion as made by Councillor King and amended by Councillor Berkman, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. No. Okay, so that motion passes 11. Yes, we're all here, 11 to one. With that, we'll go to the second motion based on that finding, Councillor King. Just point of information is Councillor Shannon here. Councillor King. Oh, you are correct. You are correct, my apologies. Yes, you are, you are, but there is a, this was not a unanimous vote. So we will go to a roll. Or actually, actually, I don't know that that's necessary. City Attorney Sturdivant, if I simply say that the vote was 11 to one with Councillor Berkman voting no, is that sufficient? I believe since it's electronic that you're required to do a roll call for that. Okay, so we're gonna go to a roll call. Thank you, Laurie. Councillor Barlow. Yes. Councillor Berkman. No. Councillor Carpenter. Yes. Councillor Jang. Yes. Councillor Doherty. Yes. Councillor Grant. Yes. Councillor Hightower. Yes. Councillor King. Yes. Councillor McGee. Yes. Councillor Shannon. Yes. Councillor Travers. Yes. City Council President Paul. Yes. 11 ayes, one nay. Okay, so that motion passes. With that, we'll go to the second motion. Councillor King. Based upon that finding, move that the council go into executive session to receive updates regarding agreement negotiations with UVM. And that is one VSA section 313A1A. Thank you, Councillor King. Is there a second to that? Seconded by Councillor Carpenter. Any discussion on that second motion? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously. So we are going into executive session. We had planned the executive session from 5.30 to about 6.15. It's now 10 after 6. So I would guess it'll probably be about quarter of seven by the time we leave executive session. And my understanding is we do need to go downstairs. Is that correct, CAO Schad? Yes. All right, so we will be downstairs. Anyone who's in con choice can remain and we will be back after the executive session. It is 7.20 or just almost 7.20. And our time certain on public forum was 7.15. A few words before we begin public forum. The table, the table, the system on our table in front of us, it has three lights. Green light will shine when you begin speaking. The second yellow light, when you have 30 seconds left and the last light is red and that will shine when your time is up. We ask that you please complete your comments. When the sound and the light indicate that your time is up so that everyone has the same amount of time and we can keep the public forum moving. We have a hybrid system for public forum. So if you wish to speak in person, there are forms to my right in the back of the room. Please bring them to the clerk who's sitting right over here at this table and she or she will hand them to me. If you wish to speak by Zoom, you can go on to a form at burlingtonvt.gov slash city council slash public forum and a form will come up. Please fill out the form and the answers that you give will be populated into a spreadsheet that I have in front of me and then I can call on you. During public forum, we just make one request and that is that you please use respectful language. Would like to remind everyone here and those that are joining us online that there are families who watch our council meeting as their connection with civic engagement and teaching their children about respectful public discourse. Please direct your comments to me as the chair and not to anyone else at this table and please do not personalize your comments. We really want to hear what you have to say and it's a lot easier for us to listen if you do so respectfully. With that, we will go to the list of, one thing I failed to mention is also the way that we do public forum is that we have this hybrid system so we go first to, has been our practice, has been our practice. We go to Burlington residents who are joining us in conchoice then we go to Burlington residents online then back to conchoice for those who are non-Burlington residents and then back we end up with non-Burlington residents that are joining us online. The first person who is joining us in person and is a Burlington resident is Amy Malinowski to be followed by Melissa Parr. Good evening, Amy. I'm Amy Malinowski. So here's a little bit of history. September 8th, 2020, the city council adopted a resolution that acknowledged, quote, the need to change current policies regarding the discipline oversight of our police. September 22nd of 2020, after months of protest, city council approves a separation agreement for Sergeant Jason Bellavance giving him a $300,000 payout. November 19th, 2020, and charter change committee counselor Freeman proposes draft of proposal language for a community control police. December 7th of 2020, 150 plus community members call on the city council to state support for a community control police. December 14th of 2020, city council votes seven to five to put proposed language for community control police on the March ballot. December 31st of 2020, the mayor issues a memo vetoing this vote. He writes, ultimately, we still need a charter change on police discipline and says work should begin as soon as possible and a consents proposal should be returned by mid 2021. Skip forward, it's October 18, 2021. City council passes a resolution that says the city council takes a task, the charter change committee, with the question of moving disciplinary authority from the chief of police to a body that's independent from the BPD and is hoping to have that be a timeline so they can get the charter change on the March 2022 ballot. But it doesn't make it on the ballot. Burntonians pick up an almost identical version of the community control police proposal and start talking to their neighbors. We spent over a year collecting over 2000 signatures in order to get it on the ballot for March 2023. February 2nd of 2023, city council adopts the resolution that urges voters to vote no on the ballot item. In return, there were promises to take action. March 2023, despite thousands of dollars spent to send out misleading mailers to everyone's door and despite an overreaching city council resolution, the ballot items still garnered significant support but not enough to pass. So here I am circling back to that resolution that put the following timeline. One, during the months of April and May, there would be a robust public input period by the Ordinance Committee and Charter Change Committee. And two, the committees are supposed to be holding joint committee meetings along for community and stakeholder input. And then referring back to the city council. Where does this stand? What precisely makes plans for public input robust? Thank you, thank you so much. The next, our next speaker is Melissa Parr to be followed by Rachel O'Sullivan. Sure, you can come up together. It's okay if you go first. So you're Rachel. Good evening. Thanks for coming. Can I go ahead? My name is Rachel O'Sullivan. I'm here to represent the parents and the community. I have two children in Burlington. On the week of April 20th, there were 15 used drug needles found in the dugouts at Callahan Park. The players were already there in the dugouts with their stuff when this was found. There was a used condom also found on the side of the baseball field while the kids were out on the field. Luckily, none of the children had touched any of the needles, but they were in the helmet holders where the kids put their stuff and easily could have touched the needles. On Saturday, I was there at Callahan Park for a baseball game. Drug needles were found under the announcer's booth. There were hundreds of people at Callahan on Saturday, or Sunday this Sunday. We are here to talk to you about finding a way to clean up the parks to make it feel safe for our children to go there on their own, ride their bikes to the park and feel comfortable that they can go in the woods, that they can play on the playground, that they can be at their little league field and not touch a drug needle. Melissa's kind of gonna follow up. Just give us a moment to just start the timer again. Go ahead. Hi, my name is Melissa Parr. I'm also a parent of two children in Burlington. We horrified by the amount of detritus and sort of biohazardous waste that we have been finding around the city. Walking, our kids are asking us what are these needles, condoms, tampons, other just detritus paraphernalia. And it's not the community that we as parents have been promised to have our children grow up in. And that is citywide. So we are able to have the idea of a small subset of this issue. We are both South End residents. Our kids both play baseball at Callahan. We walk in the five sisters, every house there now. I mean, that's exaggeration, it's not every house. Most people have put up security cameras. You look on front porch forum and every single day there is a car break in. Something rifled through, something broken, windows smashed. Like what is the city going to do to take action on this and make our parks safe for our kids to play in again? We should be able to go barefoot, run around, enjoy this beautiful short summer that we have here without worrying about a needle stick, without worrying about stepping in someone's like outdoor toileting, without worrying about going into the dugouts and finding people having sex in the dugouts as the kids are coming in. That was actually last year. So that's all. Thank you, thank you both. Our next speaker is Steve Levy to be followed by Chris Hassely. Good evening. Good evening, thanks for letting me speak. And coincidentally, I'm going to speak about Callaghan Park also, but my reason for coming is that I live on Locust Street across from Callaghan Park and I wanted to comment on the proposal to restore the vehicle gate at Oakledge Park. Even now across from Callaghan Park, there is a lot of activity at night. I've lived at the Southwind condo adjacent to Oakledge Park, so I'm sympathetic to the plight of residents there who said they're experiencing loud behavior and drag racing at night. So I don't have any objection to the reimposition of a gated entrance at Oakledge Park. The proposal will still allow pedestrians to continue to access the park. Some of the folks who arrived by car will simply park on adjacent streets and walk to the park. So the proposal might eliminate some drag racing in the park and might reduce some loud noises. However, my neighbors and I are concerned that most folks turned away from driving to the park, will seek the closest venue, and that's unfortunately Callaghan Park. Right now on Locust Street after 10 p.m., especially on weekends, we already experienced loud music, revving engines, and drag racing from ebulean crowds. Though we have been advised to contact the Burlington Police when these behaviors occurred during quiet hours, we're reluctant to co-op police resources for these minor transgressions. With the closure of Oakledge to vehicles we're concerned that Callaghan Park will be the next go-to spot. We're bringing this issue to the attention of the council in the hope that a request can be made to the Burlington Police for some attention to the area, perhaps an hourly drive by in the evening if and when staffing permits. While it is possible for us to personally confront the antisocial behavior, we realize that intervention by civilian residents can lead to unfortunate outcomes. Thank you very much. Thank you, thanks very much. So our last speaker joining us in conjoys is Chris Hesley. Chris, good evening. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to comment. You guys have a great little ice rink there over at Callaghan Park in the winter. We really like that. But I wasn't gonna comment about that, but regarding the issue of the drug paraphernalia, how about a 25% deposit like we have on bottles? We could turn the needles in and get 25 cents back. I'll clean up. Anyhow, I wanted to talk about an item curiously named the accountability list that I saw on the agenda tonight. And I was quite pleased to see that the issue regarding the renaming of the Chauvin Road Rotary to the Tony Redington Roundabout was on that list. And I subsequently followed up on the minutes of the Transportation Energy and Utilities Commission. Saw that there was robust discussion there and regarding it. But it was a bit surprised to see that there were some process questions regarding the need to perhaps have a policy in place regarding the naming of public infrastructure. And I'd like to point out that the city has named a number of different buildings and structures and infrastructure after people who have made an impact on the city over the years. For example, we have the Mayor Kane Outlook over here on Battery Street to honor Mayor Kane who oversaw the transformation of the little neighborhood into what we have today. We have named a number of schools after people in the community, Elihu Taff School, the Edmonds Middle School, the former Lawrence Barnes School, the former H.O. Wheeler School. We named the arena in Letty Park after former Mayor Gordon Park Hat. And on tonight's agenda, there is a resolution to name the airport after Senator Leahy. So not really sure what policies are governing those decisions, but I would hope that we could reconsider the matter regarding the naming of the roundabout. Mr. Reddington's honor, as I think he has deservedly made a number of contributions to our community. Thank you. Thanks very much. Our last speaker joining us in con choice is Todd LeCroy. I don't know how to do this all in two minutes, but I'm gonna try. One of the greatest human beings of the civil rights movement, Harry Bell Fontaine, has recently died. And recently that brought up thoughts that I had and memories that I had when I witnessed Richie Havens do one of his last performances ever. Some of you people probably don't know who Richie Havens was, but Richie Havens was the man who wrote the song Freedom and played it at Woodstock. Freedom. Freedom. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Oh, freedom for our children to not live in schools that are wasn't. And sometimes I feel. Those who are joining us online, the first person Burlington resident who has requested to speak is Sharon Busher. And Sharon, I found you and enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak. Thank you, President Paul. Good evening. I wasn't going to speak tonight, but I was motivated by the executive session posting and how it was posted versus what the topic was. I think that when something is posted and misleading, I'm not blaming anybody, but I do think that it does, it doesn't give the public an opportunity to potentially weigh in on something that they care very much about housing and UVM partnering with the city to meet that obligation. So I think that this is a real missed opportunity. I would not have made comments in two minutes or less, but I would have submitted a communication. A lot of people have spent a lot of time looking at the numbers of enrollment and looking at housing needs. And I think that that information could be helpful with the administration as they negotiate and helpful to the council. So I feel blindsided by what happened. I'm really concerned because what happens, although the mayor spoke to the fact that, once the negotiations are through, that the agreement will come forward and the public will have a chance. Yes and no, once an agreement is cemented in stone, yes, there is a public process in name only. It rarely moves the needle at all as far as changing the agreement. So I feel that what is being offered at the end is really, as we know, too little and too late. So I'm very disappointed with what happened tonight. And I'm hoping that the council rethinks if this happens again, how to handle it. Thank you. Thanks very much. And our last speaker joining us by Zoom is Ed Baker and Ed, I have enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak now. If you just unmute yourself. Okay. Hey, thank you, president. Paul, I appreciate your efforts and the council's continuing efforts. I wanna first recognize the tremendous grief and pressure, the tremendous responsibility that we all feel toward love for monitors with severe substance use disorder. I want to recognize Burlington, meaning the mayor, the city council, service providers, advocates, the recovering community for being leaders and responding to this overdose crisis. And I want to call on Burlington to step up our efforts to respond to what is an unprecedented healthcare emergency in Vermont. Mayor Weinberger, Scott Pavek and Grace Keller in testimonies last week really expressed our concern adequately. I wanna call on the city to advocate strongly that Governor Scott declare a state of public health emergency in Vermont. Burlington is the epicenter of overdose death with an accelerated progress and death noted in this first three or four months of 2021. It's unspeakable. If the governor hadn't vetoed age seven to eight, we would be ready at this point to implement quick measures to reverse what was happening in our state. But he vetoed seven to eight. And now we have a full blown healthcare emergency. And I think the governor is obligated to declare that clearly and release funds and resources to save the lives of loved for monitors at a dying and a rate of every one, every 33 hours. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I believe that concludes our public forum. So we will close the public forum at 740. And we need to backtrack a little bit on our agenda. That was item 4.01. We're gonna go to item three, which is a presentation on the neighborhood code. On the neighborhood code. This presentation is our first introduction to this zoning item. And we'll be led by Megan Tuttle, who's our director of planning. And I believe you have, do you have Sarah with you? I do have Sarah. Unfortunately, we just seem to have lost the wifi in Contways, which is how we were planning to share this presentation with you. So we're trying to get a backup going. So yes, it will be Sarah Morgan, who's a planner in our office will also be joining me. So I can go ahead and get started, if you'd like while we're... Sure, we are running, of course, a little bit behind. However, we allotted 20 minutes for this presentation and then we will go to questions from the council. So whatever you can provide for us until we get the screen up and running. That sounds great. Thank you, President Paul. So as President Paul mentioned, this is one of the first presentations that this full board, full body is receiving on one of the action items that was part of the 2021 housing action plan, regarding the goal to open new housing opportunities citywide through middle housing reforms. We're calling this work the neighborhood code. And that's what Sarah and I are going to share with you tonight. So the goal is to share with you a little bit more about what the neighborhood code is going to be looking at. Some of the initial studies that Sarah has been working on and wrap up with some direction to the council on next steps. And we in particular would like to hear questions or thoughts that you have as we move forward with this next phase of this work. As many of you know, we've been working on a number of zoning reforms for about the last decade, many of which have been focused on housing and helping us implement our future land use plans. What you would be seeing right now would be an image that shows the city and shows how the various parts of the city have been identified for future growth or conservation or more incremental development over time. The reason that we wanted to share that is because a lot of the work and a lot of the zoning amendments that you've seen over the years have really been focused on our areas like downtown and our mixed use parts of the city that are intended to support higher density growth and development and really accommodate the largest share of the city's future development. What we're talking about today though are the areas of the city that are really made up of our residential zoning districts. And our plan BTV, our comprehensive plan really anticipates these as places where more incremental change will happen. The plan recognizes that our neighborhoods are really important parts of the city's identity and have unique characteristics and are also an important part of how we can adapt to the needs of current households and future households through incremental changes over time. So we're talking about that 40% of the city's land area in those residential neighborhoods through the neighborhood code. We are going to be talking about through this work, what we call neighborhood scale housing. So this is really about the types of buildings that may accommodate one or more housing units but feel like their house scale. So the point of that is that they can help us accommodate new homes, but also blend in with the existing patterns of neighborhoods. The types of housing that we're normally talking about when we talk about middle housing are things like ADUs, duplexes, triplexes, sometimes even quads and small apartment buildings. What's important about and why these are called middle housing is that these were commonly built in walkable and historic neighborhoods in Burlington as well as many other places right alongside single family homes. So if you can skip to slide six, Sarah will show you some images of what we're talking about here. These are examples of middle housing types that we already see in Burlington. There are many types of middle housing that are studied widely and we see examples of middle housing ranging from some of our oldest core neighborhoods in Burlington to even along North Ave properties that have been built just in the last couple of years. So we've been evaluating the potential that middle housing types can offer in terms of helping us to meet the needs of both current and future households in Burlington. And much like the work that we did in collaboration with AARP several years ago around accessory dwelling units, we've been talking with AARP again about how middle housing types are an important part of our housing picture going forward. For many of the reasons that you can see listed here on the screen, both in terms of how they can help us meet our housing needs with a greater range of housing choices, how they can meet some of the needs of the households that are living in the city and how they can be a solution to provide additional housing in ways that can use less land and in some ways be more naturally occurring affordable housing. Looks like we're having a couple issues here with this lagging. But as noted at the beginning of my comments, when we talk about these housing types, we're really talking about how these housing types may be appropriate for existing neighborhoods. One of the things I think is really important to recognize is just how this housing can help us provide solutions that can help people have housing options across the sort of life cycle of housing needs. I think you've heard us talk about this in the context of ADUs in the past. You think about all the way from the first place that you're looking to live after you've moved out of your family's home through starting your own kind of household, whether that be a family or not, and then kind of culminating in where you'll live as you get older and after you've retired. So these middle housing types, these smaller housing types can offer a greater diversity of housing options in existing neighborhoods to help address that life cycle. We did have some information that we were gonna share in the presentation with you that just helped through a couple key data points share a little bit about the different ages and some of the demographics of who lives in the city and who has access to either renter or owner occupied homes in Burlington. So we'll make sure that you obviously get this presentation so you can see that. And I think the point about why we wanted to share some of this information is that when we look at the city's households, we know that about 60% of our households are renter households. So the majority of people in Burlington really are renters. And while we do have a large student population, not all of those renters are students. The majority of individuals that are renting are actually over the age of 25. So we know that at least half or more of almost every age group in Burlington is renting. Why this is important is that when we look at the city's land area that is actually zoned for residential development, we know that about 60% of that land area is zoned for the lowest density type of housing. So single families and ADUs essentially. But, and we know that almost 80% of those homes within those neighborhoods are then owner occupied. So this is important when we think about how housing types and housing choices and neighborhoods where those housing types exist overlap with different demographic factors that relate to things like renter and ownership, race, income, and what ultimately opportunities people have to find housing in different neighborhoods in the city. I'll skip ahead a little bit and just mention that we've also been looking at how these housing types relate to things like the current median single family sale price, the current rental rates, rental prices in the city. And ultimately, if you skip just a little bit ahead, how middle housing types are not necessarily a capital A affordable housing strategy in the sense that we think about our inclusionary zoning policies, but how middle housing types can be a solution that helps us create more housing along an income and affordability spectrum. Really to help us expand the potential for homes that are available without the need or with a much lesser need for any kind of subsidy in order to help them be accessible to people who are working and living in our community. So again, apologies for the tech issues and the timing. We'll make sure you get this so you can look through this more on your own. But I think one of the things that I wanted to share or one of the other things that we wanted to share is that the work we've been doing up to this point is really helping us evaluate some of the existing patterns in our residential neighborhoods in terms of what types of homes exist and also helping us to understand where our zoning policies actually may not help us facilitate these types of middle housing. We know that about 83% of the property that's within our, in these blue areas, the kind of residentially zoned areas of the city, 80% of that is zoned for the lowest density development today. So while you may be thinking about a duplex or a triplex that may be next door to you or in your neighborhood around the corner, one of the things that we've been looking at is how our zoning policies have evolved over time to start to preclude those housing types. And ultimately what we're thinking about is how we can identify some targeted and context-sensitive zoning changes that can help us facilitate those types of homes in the future. So Sarah's gonna really quickly share some abbreviated history of how we got here and where we see this going. Awesome, thanks, Megan. The abbreviated history of how we got here starts when the city first adopted zoning in 1947 and at this time we only had one residential zoning district which allowed a range of housing types to be built in it and our code tailored some of the typical zoning standards to regulate development of housing types themselves rather than across all development across the district. At the time the code first went into full effect, nearly half of the residential properties in our low density neighborhood had already been built but of those properties, 80% did not meet the new zoning standards for lot size or width. And despite this, but despite this, these early standards for this one residential district provided flexibility for the mix of housing types that could be built on those lots that were yet to be developed. It wasn't until the 1970s and 1990s that we started changing our zoning in ways that made missing middle harder to build or even illegal in some cases. The 1970s brought residential zoning districts that made distinctions in what types of homes were allowed in different neighborhoods and really limiting the most residential areas to just single family and duplexes and only the darkest blue encompassing that western half of the old North end and the area immediately surrounding downtown allowed for multiple units. And the 1970s also introduced the concept of density which limited the number of homes on a lot based on the lots overall size and started to require parking spaces for every home. And in the 1990s we down zoned our neighborhoods particularly like chipping away at the areas of high and medium density and required very large lots in order to build a new home. We also introduced at this time we've introduced standards that incentivized building on very low and high ends of spectrum focusing on single family homes and the apartment complex and thus ordinance made it harder to build those middle types. I think we share this just for a little bit of perspective about how our zoning has changed so significantly over time and why we see such a great mix of housing types in some of our oldest neighborhoods. And I'll say here that this history of what Sarah mentioned is certainly not unique to Burlington. And I think for many of you who have been in Burlington for a while you understand that there were both national policies that were affecting some of these changes. There were regional development trends that were affecting some of these changes and there were obviously things that were happening right here in Burlington such as seeing some of the unintended consequences of previous zoning ordinances that were not very specific in terms of what types of housing we actually wanted to allow in certain neighborhoods. So there are a lot of reasons that we have made these changes over time and I think one of the important notes is to say that we have revisited some of these policies over time. In 2008 in particular we changed some of our zoning standards for residential areas back. So today in Burlington as Sarah has mentioned every zoning district in the city allows for at least a single family, a duplex and an ADU to be built as long as certain baseline zoning standards can be met. And as Megan mentioned a lot of our work has been about understanding what's currently precluding most of these missing middle types and how we approach context sensitive zoning changes that enable them. And when it comes to enabling this diversity of housing choices we hear this work described as an effort to make what's old new again. And one common barrier to this is the miszoning of neighborhoods in a way that doesn't reflect what's actually been built and resulting in homes and housing types that we love gradually being outlawed. And in our work we've evaluated the residential zones of areas of the city based on some of the basic zoning standards such as lot size, width, lot width and density. And as we dive into the neighborhood code we're looking at other reasons why these properties don't conform to our current zoning standards and how we can remove barriers that are preventing us from realizing more missing middle options. And you can see how this impacts entire neighborhoods and especially clusters of historic development patterns flagging them all as illegal. You'll be able to see that when you can see it on a bigger screen. There are a lot of maps in this presentation. There are, I'm sorry. When I go to full screen it lies behind. So another aspect is the layers of zoning that have unintentionally or sometimes intentionally prohibited the housing types that we think that we allow. And this is where that asterisk with the ADUs and duplexes becomes more relevant while in theory we allow ADUs and duplexes on every residential lot. We know that building a new duplex is unachievable for nearly half of the lots in our neighborhoods. With the vast majority of these neighborhoods being about a median of 8,000 square feet and they have to be 10,000 square feet or greater to accommodate a duplex. And while we talk about the benefits of having homes closer to schools, stores, downtown, public transportation, you can really see that the majority of lots in the city that are big enough to have a duplex are the furthest ends of the city. And the intent of this is not just about how well a new home matches what's on the ground already but also how those different factors within existing areas can inform context sensitive approaches to zoning changes in the future. For example, even looking beyond the oldest neighborhoods where missing middle may historically have been, it can be a tool to help us use available land for more housing in parts of the city that are considered to be that are low density by support infill that helps add more housing units but keeps the primarily single family home character. However, zoning is often not calibrated to allow this range of housing types, especially with flexible lot configurations. And this is a model of how a one acre single family home lot could accommodate five freestanding cottages with off street parking, ample green space as well as community amenities. But the key barriers to achieving this are density limits prohibiting multiple freestanding units as well as requiring that each lot has frontage on a street and parking requirements. And the final barrier I'll talk about tonight is the difficulty of allowing multiple units on multiple smaller buildings on larger lots. This is especially important where we have areas of low density zoning along some of our major roadways in the city such as Shelburne Road, Colchester Avenue and as you can see here, North Avenue. These are high frequency transit routes and connect major streets and areas of neighborhood commercial uses with our neighborhoods. And this is a model of how a surface parking lot within steps of a bus stop, Hannaford Plaza could be repurposed into a two story four unit building that is ADA accessible and has off street parking and is also next to a senior care facility. And the key barriers for this are the density limits as well as having multiple multifamily units on the same lot as well as the parking requirements. So we share some of this as a way to provide some examples of what we have been looking at in our existing built patterns as well as understanding what our zoning allows today and what it doesn't. So the purpose of this information is to help inform us on the next phase of this work. And this is why we wanna share this with you tonight. The next phase of this work will actually be looking at what those context sensitive zoning changes might be in order to help us realize more of these middle housing types. We ultimately want to move away from some of the standards that we've used to date that have been proxies for things like the scale and type of homes that we really want. And we wanna get to something that may provide more a higher level of prescription in terms of what types of buildings fit in different parts of the city. So we'll be looking at specifically some of these context sensitive zoning tools that as they relate to different zoning districts and parts of the city. And also specifically, as Sarah mentioned, look at the areas of RL zoning as it runs along corridors like Shelburne Road and North Avenue. Ultimately, the next slide shows just kind of a quick idea of what we think will happen where we want a zoning ordinance that will help us identify the types of middle housing that we think would be appropriate and desirable in different parts of the city and match that with different parts of our zoning code to enable them. So what we're not saying here is that every neighborhood should have a three-story apartment building in it, but what we're saying is that we want to identify the right types of housing that could fit in different neighborhoods and then figure out how we could help our zoning facilitate that. So over the next phase, we will be working with a consultant who's going to be a technical advisor to us about as we start to identify which of these housing types we support, how we could actually write those into a zoning amendment that we could bring forward for your consideration. We'll also be working over the summer to gain input about these housing types and about different parts of the city and how we think that these should match. We will be working in a number of forums on this engagement work, starting after Memorial Day and extending through the end of the year. And then ultimately, we anticipate that kind of in an iterative way over the course of the fall and into the winter, we will be bringing both to the planning commission and ultimately to the council recommendations for what these zoning changes could look like in order to help us meet these goals. I should say here also that even as we have started this discussion, we've presented similar material to the planning commission a couple of times and a lot of very in the weeds standards in our zoning ordinance have come up as discussion topics. So we have also been collecting a lot of these comments and thoughts about parts of the zoning ordinance we may want to look at more closely. And what is likely to happen is that we will bring forward kind of one set of recommendations initially and then need to follow that up with another set of potential changes afterwards. So we'll be working to parse those as we move forward as well. So that I think is all we wanted to share with you tonight but happy to hear comments and questions that you have particularly as we start to move forward with thinking about strategies for zoning changes. Great, thank you both so much. Understanding that this is our first go around and we're sort of absorbing this for the first time but if there are questions from the council to be asked at this point, now would be that time. Yes, Councilor Hightower. I assume comments are fine in addition to questions. You know, I have a lot of opinions on this so I won't go too too into it. Although I look forward to working on this in the months ahead and I would just say and I feel like an echoing chip used to be a counselor but just I think in addition to thinking about like the missing metal, the more that we can go towards simplicity, I think this is also a great time to accommodate for that. And then the second thing is actually just something that you said at the end, which is I think actually every neighborhood could accommodate a three-story apartment building, maybe not an eight-story apartment building. So I think airing on the side of really allowing true mixed use in all the neighborhoods is something I'd love to see. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Hightower. Councilor Carpenter. Thanks. This is really very exciting and something we should have been doing a long time ago. I just would ask and maybe in your department on a parallel track, that we also look at some of the building code issues and how does that make an impediment, particularly in the building of a two to four unit building because I think there are some, I would love to see more three-story buildings as well and some of that's dictated by a building code because those beautiful old Victorians that I grew up in were all three stories. So we should be doing more of that. One other item which is not entirely related to this and maybe you have it in your data, I'm just curious if you have statistics on how many single, what I'm gonna call single family homes are actually rentals, do we? Yeah, when we look at the assessor's data for properties that are listed as a single family home, we know that about, I think it's 23% of them are not showing up as a homestead property in that data. Thanks. Thank you, Councilor Carpenter. We'll go to Councilor Bergman. I just wanna say how excited I am that we're starting to look at the upzoning of the low residential neighborhoods because I think it's been long overdue. In fact, the Planning Commission in the middle late 1970s voted to eliminate low resident, low density districts in the New North End and it didn't go anywhere. And that was chaired by one of my colleagues, Bill Aswad, I'm sorry, who was not a flaming radical as Director Pine knows. I think that engagement needs to include not just for the building code issues but for financial issues as well, the building, the builder community as well. Now, whether that's done in tandem with CEDAW and its work, because that goes beyond and also the role that a housing trust fund could, that our housing trust fund could maybe play in facilitating folks. You know, you've got a lot, with single family homeowners out there, they're not real rich, you know, for the most part in the New North End, for example, or down in the South End where most of the expansion could be done. And you know, their options are to sell to a developer or make, you know, generally or try to take out some giant loan. So I believe in development without displacement to the extent possible. And so I think we need to be looking at ways to do that and it's exciting to think of this in relationship to the not heavily subsidized but definitely community supported development that we could engage in. So the last point is it would be helpful for us to, even at the very beginning with ballpark figures, get an understanding of how much increased density is really possible, how many more units could be added with the nature of that looks like. Just so we can start to say, you know, I remember the legacy program, we talked about a city of 66,000 people freaked out. But the truth is that, you know, numbers provide people with the context. And so it's part of the transparency that we need to know. It's part of the engagement that we need to do. I'm willing to sell this. The reason that the down zoning happened in the old North End in the 1990s and I was on the council up until 1992 from 86 to 92 was that we were and are intensely dense in the old North End. And to have seen the infill development in our neighborhoods was pretty dramatic. And it was not easy in relationship to a housing stock which was not necessarily getting improved greatly. So, you know, this to me is about equity in a lot of ways and sharing that housing burden and not being a suburban city anymore. Being a real city, we masquerade as a cosmopolitan area. I'd like to us to actually be the small thriving city that we could be. So thanks a lot. I look forward to working with you all on this. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. We'll go to Councillor Travers. Thank you, President Paul. That was a really great presentation. I want to echo the comments from some of my colleagues here about being really excited about what's to come. I understand the interest and agree with you in looking at this in a really comprehensive way that has significant robust engagement from the community that looks at some of these high level questions but also gets into the weeds. I'm also mindful of the fact, as I know you are, that we are currently in a housing crisis and so, you know, more time means more time. And as you go through this, if you identify some areas that really do have broad support that are common sense type of steps that we can take, I would be open to our considering taking some additional items on a piecemeal basis. One of the things that immediately comes to mind for me is you're referencing up zoning along the city's major corridors. My mindful of Shelburne Road, for example. There's a few blocks that have already been up zoned to being residential medium. And then on the next block, it goes back to residential single family that we've already identified those corridors as being part of the multimodal parking district, for example. So, at least to me, at first blush, that seems like one of those areas where maybe it is something we could move sooner in a way that we'll still need community engagement and dialogue, but perhaps may not have sort of as much concern and discussion around it as some of the other items that you're discussing here. So, that's one other piece. I want to use items that's a bit more into the weeds. I'm thinking back to our discussion from last year on short term rentals and would just be mindful about the fact that we have allowed for homeowners to identify a short term rental within their building if there's five or fewer or less than five dwelling units. And so just something to keep in the back of your mind that as we allow for the additional development of three unit, four unit buildings to be mindful of the fact that those are going to address the housing crisis and how that intersects with the regulations that were put into effect last year on short term rentals. Thanks. Thank you, Councillor Travers. Don't see anyone else in the queue. This is again, oh, I'm sorry, Mayor Weinberger. Thank you, President Paul. I just wanted to share the enthusiasm that a number of Councillors voiced that this project is getting to this point. This was part of the announcement, the 10 point housing action plan that my administration released at the end of 2021. This is one of the three major zoning efforts and I'm very appreciative for all of the work that's already taken place to get to this point, the partnership with AARP and the commitment to make as much progress, really to make great progress on this over the course of 2023. I am excited to hear that the Councillors who have spoken so far are enthusiastic for these changes. In fact, maybe even, I hear basically the message so far being be as aggressive as you can about this or maybe even more aggressive than you might have previously been thinking. That is helpful to have in this kind of work session a sense of where the Council is and I know there's a lot of details to be sorted out here still, but I do hope that Councillors, this is important that Councillors who have concerns or have questions also be communicating them to us at this early stage so that those can be taken into account and that we, as we come back here some months from now that we, you know, we're headed in a direction that there's gonna be Council support for him. So thank you for the candid feedback so far and look forward to hearing more of it. Thank you Mayor Weinberger. There are, there's no action needed on this item. This was just a presentation which we trust that you will post quickly so that we can take a look at it. It's hard to necessarily relate to something on a big screen and our apologies for the technological snafu at the beginning. Thank you. I don't think you have to apologize for that. We can find Scott Barker and ask him about that. Thank you very much for the time. Thank you. Thanks Megan and Sarah. With that, we will move on to item number five on our agenda which is climate emergency reports. Are there any Councillors or the administration who wish to offer a climate emergency report? Seeing none, we will close out that item and continue with item number six which is our consent agenda. Is there a motion to move our consent agenda and take the actions indicated? Thank you, Councillor Jang. Seconded by Councillor Shannon. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. We have moved and approved our consent agenda. Before we get to our deliberative agenda, we have three meetings I believe to attend to. The first is the local control commission and then two other meetings which the mayor will preside over. So we will recess the council meeting at 815 and go to our local control commission meeting. And the first item on that agenda is item 1.01 which is a motion to adopt the agenda. Motion to adopt the agenda. Move to adopt the agenda. Thank you, Commissioner Shannon. Seconded by Commissioner Travers. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. We then have our agenda. The second item is item number two which is our consent agenda. Commissioner Shannon, is there a motion to adopt the consent agenda? Take the actions indicated. So moved. Thank you so much. Seconded by Councillor Travers. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. We have our, the motion passes and we have approved our consent agenda. And that moves us to the deliberative agenda. We do have one item which is 3.01, a first and third class liquor license application for A and E enterprises doing business as Mr. Mike's Pizza. Commissioner Shannon. Move to approve the 2023, 2024, first and third class liquor license applications for A and E enterprises. DBA Mr. Mike's Pizza at 206 Main Street with all standard conditions. Thank you, Councillor, that Commissioner Shannon. Seconded by Commissioner Travers. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously and with no other business on this agenda and seeing no objection, we'll adjourn the local control commission meeting at 17 with our thanks as always to the license committee. And again, before we return to the adjourn, the recess council meeting, there are two other meetings to attend to, those being the Board of Tax Abatement and the City Council with Mayor presiding. I will turn the floor over to Mayor Weinberger for those meetings. Thank you, President Paul. I would like to call in to order the City Council with Mayor presiding at 816 p.m. And would welcome a motion to adopt the agenda. Thank you, President Paul. Seconded by Councillor Shannon. Any discussion of the agenda? We'll go to a vote on it. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. And that brings us to the consent agenda and I would welcome a motion for that as well. Motion to adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated. Thank you, President Paul. Thank you, Councillor Shannon for seconding it. Any discussion of the consent agenda? Seeing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion, the consent agenda is adopted unanimously. Okay, this brings us to our deliberative agenda where we have three Board and Commission appointments. The first 3.01 is a Parks and Recreation Commission appointment for the term ending June 30th, 2024. The floor is open for nominations. Councillor Shannon. I nominate Robert Edder. Thank you. Are there any additional nominations? Are there any additional nominations? Okay, seeing none, I'm going to close the floor and I'm wondering if Mr. Edder is with us tonight or online and would like to speak to the council. He is not online. Does not appear that Mr. Edder is with us. So is there any further discussion of the nominee? Seeing none, I'll have a voice vote. All those in favor of appointing Mr. Edder to the Parks and Recreation, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? No. Okay, we will do a roll call. Yes. Councillor Bergman. No. Councillor Carpenter. Yes. Councillor Jang. Yes. Councillor Doherty. Yes. Councillor Grant. No. Councillor Hightower. Yes. Councillor King. Yes. Councillor McGee. No. Councillor Shannon. Yes. Councillor Travers. Yes. City Council President Paul. Yes. Mayor Muck Weinberger. Yes. NIs three days. Thank you. And congratulations Mr. Edder. Thank you for your interest in serving and we wish you good luck with the appointment. 3.02 is a police commission appointment for a term expiring June 30th, 2023. Which is of course just a couple months from now. This is serving out the remainder of a term and then there will be a reappointment. Councillor Shannon. Thank you Mr. Mayor. I will nominate Mary Cox. I think we have four really outstanding candidates for police commission this round and thank you to all who applied. I'm nominating Mary because she had a few things that I thought really put her above the other applicants including really a combination of skills including data analysis, former attorney and a lot of experience actually working with the Burlington Police Department on mental health issues, serving on the board of directors of NAMI and I think she will make an outstanding police commissioner. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Are there any additional nominations? Councillor Grant. Thank you. I'd like to nominate C.D. Madison. I think that she would have the skills and the fortitude required for this position as well as bringing balance in terms of representation to this commission which is also important given the diversity in the city. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Grant. Are there any additional nominations? Councillor Hightower. I'd like to nominate Romeo von Ermann. Thank you. Sorry, and just to speak quickly, I think that especially his position with Green Management Transit, which of course is a hub in our city would be a valuable experience on the police commission. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any additional nominations? Are there any additional nominations? Seeing none, we will close the four two nominations and now I'd like to give the opportunity to any applicants that are in the room or online with us to speak to the council with Mayor presiding. So we'll go in the order nominated is Mary Cox, present. Welcome, Mary. And if you share your thoughts in two or three minutes, that'd be great. Yes, there's a button, the green light should go on. There you go. Just try to pull the microphone towards you so you're speaking straight into it. Good evening. So my name is Mary Cox. I, the reason that I got involved in working with the police is that I have a young adult son who has a diagnosed mental health condition. And it's been going on for more than 10 years. And we've had multiple police interactions over the last 10 years. And my main concern has been what happens if he's doing something while in a crisis that people don't understand or can't understand and the police get involved. And I've seen so many videos of people in mental health crisis being shot by the police or being tased by the police because there just isn't enough training and understanding of people while they're in a crisis. And so I was on the board of NAMI and in a subcommittee having to do with mental health and policing. And as part of that, we went to go meet with then chief Delpozzo to discuss what steps could be taken to ensure better outcomes. And he suggested that we start by going to the Burlington Police Community Academy so that we get a perspective on what the police think about and why they do things they do. So I went to the police, the community academy and then I was invited to a working group at the police department about mental health outreach. And so we came up with a plan for collaboration around mental health outreach with the police collaborating with the community, the mental health community, both peers and providers so that we could improve outcomes in the community. And so my interest has been long and strong. And I'd really like to be part of change, not only about mental health but also other issues that our community faces. They're all important to me. I live here. I see things every day the same as you and a lot of the people that came to speak at the public, at the open forum. And I just would really value the chance to be a commissioner. Thank you. Thank you. Do you have any questions? Typically we don't open this up for questions but if there's an interest we'll come back to you but if you could, why don't we, I don't see CD Madison here or online if Catherine can double check but Romeo von Herman is here. So, Romeo, welcome. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and thank you Madam President. I wasn't planning on speaking today. However, now that my name has been mentioned for something that I consider dear and close to my heart which is building trust between the members of law enforcement and the community at large is one of the key reasons why I applied for this post. As Councillor Hightower mentioned and thank you very much indeed is that I do have an extensive experience in working directly with the public and also when it comes to the department responding to it. And one of the key reason that I realized is that there's a broken of trust and that one of the key ways to rebuild that is have somebody who is both diplomatic in terms of interacting with our department members but also with the public at large but also has some level of compassion at what our members of the communities are going through with respect to the issues that are happening every day such as mental health, drug abuse and so on and so forth. So being a member of the BIPOC community and myself first generation migrant, somebody who had a direct experience with the police department, not from the perspective of being on the wrong side of law but just on an interaction day to day basis not only here in America but in Europe and in Africa as well. I've noticed that the importance of being able to bring department members and the community together and have a robust conversation about how to rebuild the community goes a long way and having members who are directly, the minority community members who are directly affected by these issues is one of the key reasons why I applied the sites. Just wanted to serve my community. So thank you for regardless whoever is chosen I think it is important that we all serve at one point another and I'm just grateful and I look forward to serving in any capacity that I can for the foreseeable future. Thank you. Great, thank you Romeo. Okay, the floor is open for discussion of the nominations if there are any counselors who wish to speak. Okay, seeing no interest, we will go to a vote and typically we vote in the order of nominees and so we will start with a show of hands for Mary Cox. Lord, do you agree? I think there's eight votes. Okay. People raise their hand higher. Okay, so with eight votes, Mary's nomination is confirmed and I wanna say congratulations Mary. Thank you for your interest in serving and thank you for your long time interest in the department and good luck with your service and I wanna say to Romeo and Madison, thank you for your interest and very frequently people who really serving the city in important capacities are not successful in their first attempt and we encourage you to stay engaged and consider reapplying for another opportunity. Thank you for your interest. There is one more appointment we're gonna do tonight and that is for the Board of Registration of Voters for term expiring on June 30th, 2025 and the floor is open for nominations. Councillor King. I'd like to nominate Lauren Ebersol. Thank you, are there any additional nominations? Are there any additional nominations? Okay, seeing none, I'm going to close the nominations and inquire if Lauren Ebersol is with us or online and would like to address the Board. Does not appear so. So back to the council, is there any discussion of this nomination? Seeing none, let's go to a vote. We'll try this as a voice vote. All those in favor of the nominee, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The appointment carries unanimously. Congratulations, Lauren. Thank you for your interest in serving on this critical board and if there's no objection, we have completed the business on the agenda and I will close the adjourn the City Council Mayor presiding at 831 p.m. and move to the board, the full board of abatement of taxes and call that board into order also at 831 p.m. and invite a motion regarding the agenda. We'd move the adoption of the agenda as stated. Thank you. Second. Councillor Berman, thank you. Councillor Shannon for the second. Any discussion of the agenda? We will go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. We have an agenda which is really entirely the consent agenda and I would welcome a motion to adopt it and take the actions indicated. I'd move the adoption of the consent agenda and take all of the actions indicated. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. Do we have a second? Seconded by Councillor Barlow. Any discussion of the consent agenda? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The consent agenda passes unanimously and that concludes the work of the full board of abatement of taxes and if there's no objection, that meeting is adjourned at 832 p.m. and I will hand the microphone back to you. President Paul. Thank you, Mayor Weinberger. So we will return to our recess council meeting at 834, which brings us to our deliberative agenda. We have 10 items on our deliberative agenda and there are time limits attached to several of them which we have agreed to by approving our agenda. We'll do the best we can to keep to those time limits. There, the first item on our deliberative agenda is 7.01, which is the appointment of a fence viewer for a term expiring June 30th of 2023. Again, a very short tenure, but hopefully we'll reapply at the end of their term. Are there any nominations for this position? Councillor Shannon. I nominate Paul Schmidt. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Are there any other nominations? Any other nominations? Seeing none. We will close the Florida nominations and I'm not sure if Paul Schmidt is here or I don't believe is online. CAO Shad, do you see? You could probably check quicker than I can. Okay. So and we don't see Paul Schmidt here in person. So with that, we'll go to a voice vote. All those in favor of appointing Paul Schmidt to the position of fence viewer, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously and congratulations to Paul Schmidt and thanks for your service on this committee. The next two items on our agenda are permits. The first is item 7.02, which is an indoor entertainment permit for A&E Enterprises doing business as Mr. Mike's. Councillor Shannon. Move to approve the 2023-2024 indoor entertainment permit application for A&E Enterprises doing business as Mr. Mike's. Pizza, 206 Main Street with all standard conditions. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Is there a second to that motion? Seconded by Councillor Travers. Motion has been made to approve the 2023-2024 indoor entertainment permit for Mr. Mike's. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously, which brings us to item 7.03, which is an outdoor entertainment permit for Hotel Vermont. I will go to Councillor Shannon for a motion. Move to approve the 2023-2024 outdoor entertainment permit application for Hotel Vermont with all standard conditions. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Seconded by Councillor Travers. All those in favor, any discussion? All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously, which brings us to our tobacco applications. That will, the first is item 7.04, which is tobacco license application for Euphoria Cannabis, LLC. Councillor Shannon. Move to approve the 2023-2024 tobacco license application for Euphoria Cannabis, LLC. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Seconded by Councillor Travers. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion to approve this tobacco license application, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously. The last application is 7.05, which is a tobacco substitute endorsement application for DJ Hazen. Councillor Shannon. Move to approve the 2023-2024 tobacco substitute endorsement license application for DJ Hazen Incorporated, doing businesses 802BWS. Great, thank you so much, Councillor Shannon. Seconded by Councillor Travers. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. The motion passes unanimously. So that brings us to the five items, five remaining items on our agenda. The first is 7.06, which is a resolution dedicating the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport. And for this resolution, I will go to Councillor Carpenter for a motion. Thank you, I'd like to move the dedication of the airport to Senator Patrick Leahy and move, adopt the resolution as written, waive the reading and adopt the resolution. Thank you, thank you, Councillor Carpenter. Seconded by Councillor Travers. Councillor Carpenter, did you want the floor back or should I go to others? I'll just say a couple of comments. I've worked many years in this city, many years in government, many years with the federal government. And I do not think we can underestimate how much Patrick Leahy's brought to this city. Not just the airport, it's seen every day and every way. And I really think it is important to recognize him. If you've worked the 40 some odd years I've had and seen the depth of his reach. I just think it's important to understand this. And he did not, some people said, oh, that was his job. His job is to serve us well and he has served us well. And I think recognizing him in particular for the work he did for the airport over the many years is a modest thing to provide. Thanks. Thank you, Councillor Carpenter. Are there other Councillors who wish to speak to this resolution? We'll go to Councillor Hightower. I have to admit I was surprised when I got the call from the mayor letting me know this announcement. I will be voting no on this. I have to admit to me this feels like a celebration of a status quo for the way this country and the state have done politics for a very long time. I know a lot of people have strong feelings about Leahy either way. I really don't want to talk about that. I do want to talk about that. I think we named too many things after politicians, period. I want to talk about the hundreds of people who have done a lot for this state who will never be recognized in this way. And that really bothers me. Leahy has done a lot for Vermont, but anyone who spends 48 years in the Senate can do a lot for Vermont. That's kind of the minimum. And also I just want to talk about who's the ability to accumulate that much political power. Leahy was senator for 48 years. That's 15 years longer than I was alive. That's 21 years more than the average life expectancy of a black man living in America. That's a long time to accumulate power. And to some extent in that position also keep it from the women of the state, the other gender minorities of the state, the queer people of the state, the native indigenous and black people of the state, the other people of color, the millennials, the Gen X, Gen Y, and the working people of the state. I just want to remind folks that white men represent 30% of the population, but 62% of office holders across the country, boomers hold more political power than any other generation in this country. And this country, and that's not identity politics, that's just systemic lack of access. Vermont and the US have a long history of keeping people who don't look like and don't have the education and wealth of our longtime senators, also known as the majority of our current country and state out of political power. With this vote, I feel like we're celebrating that history, creating a metaphorical monument to it really. Alongside the other monuments, Lehi Wei just steps from City Hall that we already have. And I feel like this is missing the moment in time that I hope we find ourselves in. It's not representative of the future that I want for Vermont, nor the future of Vermont politics that I want for Vermont. So I will be voting now. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Hightower. We'll go to Councilor Berkman. Did you want the floor? Yeah, go ahead. And then we'll follow by Councilor Grant. We've heard, at least in writing, and we've just heard a number of criticisms of this and I agree actually with many of the concerns that are raised in an opposition to this naming. That said, I've got a lot of respect for Senator Lehi. I've been doing politics like Sarah for a really long time and it was especially important that he opposed the US support of South African apartheid troops into Angola in 1976 and was actually critically important in the opposition to the US wars on El Salvador and Nicaragua and Honduras, of which we feel the blowback today and have felt the blowback for the last 40 years, 40 plus years and he was critically important in fighting those imperial ventures. And I worked in opposition on all of that, including the stuff in Angola and I am greatly appreciative of his work on that as well as on all the things that he's brought to the city and to the state. It's ironic that we're naming the airport considering his role in bringing the F-35s, which I believe were brought here for him, you know, due to him. I don't think that the delegation would have pushed that on their own and they were not, I believe, interested in opposing him on that and we feel and hear the impact, the negative impact of those fighter bombers, that's what they are, every day. And it is not a good impact in my estimation. Perhaps with an airport named after him, perhaps with a being retired, he might lend his voice to a reconsideration of that basing and help us to remove them and find a different mission for the air guard, which I think is really important for many of the climate change and housing goals and needs that we need. On balance, despite my feelings about the F-35s, despite my agreement with the many of the criticisms, I will vote yes on this naming. Thank you, Councilor Bergen. We'll go to Councilor Grant. Hi, I just wanted to say that I strongly agree with Councilor Hightower's comments and I won't spend any more time repeating them, but I do agree with them with all due respect to his service to the state, thank you. Thank you, Councilor Grant. Are there any other Councilors who wish to speak to this resolution before we go to a vote? Seeing no others in the queue, we will go to a vote. This is a motion to waive the reading and adopt the resolution. All those in favor of that motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. No. The vote is 10 to two with Councilor's grant and Hightower voting no. Am I correct? Yes. Thank you, and with that, the motion passes. We will move on to the next item on our agenda. Which is 7.07, the Burlington Ad Hoc Reassessment Committee, final report, James Unsworth Chair. When they asked me what time this would come up on the agenda, I say between 7.30 and 8.30, and I'm a little bit off, but I have a terrible track record of estimating what time things are. So I appreciate your patience and thank you so much for joining us. I know you are here with other members of your committee if you could introduce yourselves and we're anxious to hear your report. Well, terrific. We're not gonna sing, just FYI. Well, we good. We good. So good evening, my name's James Unsworth. I'm a fourth generation commercial property owner here in Burlington, and I chaired the Ad Hoc Committee looking at this most recent city-wide reassessment. I am joined by a handful of the members of the committee. I'll just read the names real quick and if you can maybe raise your hand if you're here. David Edwards, Jonathan Chappell Sokol, Dan Kirk, Councillor Shannon, Alan Bjerke who's not here, Chris Haussly. You still here? Still here, and Kevin Stapleton. In late 2021, following the reassessment process, the council tasked an Ad Hoc Committee with looking at the issues surrounding the most recent reassessment, analyzing testimony and making recommendations. Over the course of a year, this committee spoke with the tax assessor, members of various appeals boards, and took testimony from the public. The committee consisted both of property owners and of renters. The process of reassessing real estate in Vermont is required by Vermont law. Anytime the common level of appraisal drops below 85% or above 115% of fair market value. A couple of things, fair market value is derived from looking at sales tax data and anytime the what the fair market value of a municipality's grand list is below 85% or above 115%, John, in our case, gets a nice letter from the state saying it's time to do a reassessment. In a market like ours, obviously, where the market is booming, we're looking at that 85% CLA threshold. And in July of 2018, that's exactly what happened. The city was ordered to do a city-wide reassessment with very little wiggle room on the timeframe for that happening. As the planning moved forward and the process began once in a generation pandemic hit, you guys might remember that, making an already burdensome task that much more difficult. Through our review of the process, listening to testimony from experts and residents, we've assembled a set of recommendations we believe will make the process smoother, more transparent and easier to understand in the future. There is a massive caveat that goes along with this and that is the week after the ink had dried on our final report, the Vermont legislature's house, Ways and Means Committee started moving forward legislation to completely overhaul the entire process. It has passed the house and I believe at this point is waiting on the Senate. So we don't know exactly what's gonna happen, but we're gonna pretend like nothing's happening as we give some of our recommendations here because we really can't comment on what the legislature's gonna do. So with that, we're gonna tag team this a little bit with various people, these two guys flanking me, on parts that they helped draft. So with that, David? Hey, thank you. My name is David Edwards and my task was to address the first section of the resolution, which are lines 86 to 88, being the identification of timelines and practices during the assessment process that were impediment to citizens participating and getting a fair shake at their valuations being reviewed and any recommendations around those processes. And secondly, a review of the appeals process itself and recommendations, so they're two different hands of it. We heard testimony over two different sessions and had a handful of people appear in person and some in writing. Essentially the public concerns boiled down to the fact that we just mentioned that the reappraisal was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was inherently bad timing and I'll say taxing for all the pun was intended there, and that the methods and standards that were used to reevaluate assessments were not publicly available until what the public felt were after the deadlines to file appeals had passed. This was often a misconception, but anyway, that's a number of the takeaways that we heard. And thirdly that reappraisal should be conducted more frequently to avoid big bump ups in assessments and that will be addressed later on by Jonathan Sokol. What we found also to be very sort of inherently unfair but was not raised by the public were a couple of very discreet issues that we think can be easily resolved by the council because they're so pointed. One was, this is very specific again, but where homeowners received housing, covenant subsidies through land trusts and then moved out of properties and they retained the ability to have artificially low assessments and we think that there's a solution to that secondarily, an issue that arose where the city assessor was barred from border tax appeal site visits. So those were not raised by the public but things that we determined on our own. What we found with respect to the timing of the procedure was that it was largely dictated by statute and there wasn't a whole lot we could do with the actual timing of the procedure itself but that we could tweak how information flowed. The process is very complicated and there are materials out there largely through the Vermont Secretary of State and the Division of Property Review, Evaluation and Review that publish a handbook but most of the public didn't know how to access it and how to digest that material. So one major problem that arose during the reappraisal process was that historically informal reviews had been conducted through the city assessor's office and it got rid of sort of a big clog in the system that would be alleviated when the city assessor could rectify very basic problems in people's reports in their assessment cards. Those were not done in 2021 due to the pandemic and resultingly there was essentially a clog in the system that crippled everything. Contractors were hired, the Tyler Technologies, we all have heard about them and they were found to be routinely ill-equipped to handle the task and some very unprepared at the hearings and the city assessor even heard a tale of people being overruled by someone who didn't even attend meetings so we figured that was another pointed issue that we could rectify. So some of the recommendations as to these points are that obviously to require informal hearings be made available, whether by under the contract with an outsourcer or through the assessor's office and in any contract with outsourcers to really set clear expectations as to the level of preparedness that the contractors are held to and thirdly, overrule the right of any board of assessor who is not at the hearing to overrule the decision of those who are present. So those are very simple solutions. Then other more general approaches that we thought we would recommend are that we get the free flow of information out there and have the assessor provide materials as to the standards and methods that they use in evaluating sort of nothing nitty gritty formulas but how to read the cards basically and how to inform the public as to a way to be more prepared when they went to appeals hearings that the city should reexamine the ability of the homeowners to bar the city assessor coming to site visits is sort of a clear solution that we think would help level the playing field if anyone should pull that rabbit out of hat again, I think it only happened once or twice but it seemed inherently unfair. So we're looking at that from both point of views, the point of view of the homeowner and the point of view of maybe what is hamstringing the assessor's office as well and we figured the assessor should be able to attend any site visit that's held by the Board of Tax Appeals and thirdly, just another odd scenario that comes up is when a land trust puts a subsidy on a house and that house has an artificially low tax assessment, we think that that should be dependent on the filing of a homestead declaration under the NHS 122 homestead declarations file of tax return. Therefore, the tax assessment would mirror whether or not they actually lived there. There'd be a change in the law, in fact, we don't even know where that came from but it was pulled out and we think it should be eliminated. So that's my section, I hope I was briefing up and I'll turn it over to Jonathan. Thank you. The next section is Resolutions Lines 89 and 90 which are develop a best practice around education and participation of citizens in the assessment process and how their properties are valued, provide recommendations on how that support will be offered. We focused really on education, participation can't really happen if people don't really know what the problems are. So we really focused on trying to improve the understanding of the population of the city about this whole process. We heard from in the public hearings that there were some very specific elements of, these are tools or elements of the process that were hard to understand and I think all, I gotta believe that all of us would agree if you went and looked at it. Residents said that the property record card which is the fundamental document describing a parcel of land in the city is opaque. Residents said that the assessors calculated impacts on land size and property location and how the impact on market value was confusing. Just as a simple example is if you grow one piece of property just a little bit, the incremental increase in the valuation isn't linear. It gets, as the property gets larger and larger, you add a little bit less onto the valuation and that's the formula. Residents really had difficulty in understanding the qualitative assessments. There's two of them. There's something called quality and there's something called condition and these are grades, these are ratings. They're good, fair, average, average minus, they're plus and there really, there's no clarity in how one, there is some clarity but it's not clear to the public how that, how those have come about. Property valuation is done through something called a calculator which is in the middle of the second page of the property record card and it's a simplification of the formula that's used to set the valuation on the property. There's also two basic approaches to valuation. There's a cost approach and there's a sales comparison approach and this is confusing because it's used, each is used in different places at different times. So all in all, the public perception was that the city-wide reappraisal was not understood, as might be expected. There are certainly a lot of tools that the state offers and there are even tools on our websites to understand it but the truth is, you know, the old saw is that if the student hasn't learned them, the teacher hasn't taught. We haven't done a good job as a city in explaining to people how the process works if people don't understand how the process works. And it's certainly understandable that they find the resources complex and overwhelming. The city has a significant role to play in helping residents understand the process. People learn in different ways and so community needs a variety of pathways to information at their disposal for important issues like reappraisal. There's very little that the city does that affects homeowners and renters alike as a reappraisal, as the valuation of their property as a taxation. So based on the foregoing, the committee made a set of recommendations and this is really a tool set that the city could create in order to help the residents understand the process. Starting with a one-page flyer directing property owners to a comprehensive set of resources, just a very simple sheet. Could have QR code on it, put it in the library, put it at City Hall, pass it out at NPA meetings that would be a list of where the resources are. Create online prerecorded seminars specifically focused on the Burlington Evaluation Appeals Process. By the way, even if the state takes this over, many, we owe the population of the city many of these things regardless of what the state offers because it's our city. There would be possibly two prerecorded seminars. One would be a general overview of valuation and appeals processes and then the other would be very specifically how to read and interpret a property record card so that everybody can learn how to do this. They could be seminars, they could be public, they could be at the library, if you could check them out, they could be online on our website. Next would be to create a cost approach report. So this would be every property, as every property has a property record card, a cost approach report would be all the salient information you need to calculate your valuation without all the extras that the property record card has. Next is a possibly a digest, an easily accessible digest of the opinions of the Board of Assessors and the Board of Tax Appeals. This would just be a repository. So people could go and look at the way the appeals boards have handled their issues in the past. Next, the city may want to consider designing some kind of an online tool for property owners to compare the actual sales data for properties in Burlington with their own. What became very clear shortly after the reappraisal was people were selling their houses for pretty much what the appraisals said that they were birthed. So it's very important to try to align the real valuation with the apparent valuation. And then when there are problems with that, that's a very good starting off point to try to find. Try to find a solution. Evaluation of quality and condition were particularly difficult for people to understand in a set of explanatory guidelines or a catalog or something would be very useful. The city should consider bringing a public information specialist for the assessor's office during the time of any reappraisal. So there would be somebody whose job it would be to keep public informed as to where we are in the process and what needs to be done. And also answer specific questions about one's own particular piece of property. And finally, if all this work gets done, we'd like to invite the city to come and look at these tools and these elements of the process that we wanna try to explain better before they're finalized so that we can see whether any of these tools that we'd be building actually work, actually help educate. We made a rough estimate of time it would take to do this work. That's in the little table on page nine. And roughly speaking, we anticipate that the work of building the tools would be about 200 hours of assessor's office time and 200 hours of programming the analyst time. And then we'd add 1,000 hours for the public information specialist, which may be divided between two years of a quarter time for somebody over the course of two years. And it's yours. Great, thank you. Lines 91 and 92 of the resolution said develop recommendations for the frequency of city-wide reappraisals, including funding, criteria for selection of consultants and consideration of a rolling appraisal process. And kind of all of these ideas play into one another. In terms of frequency, as I talked about in the intro, once we reach either the 85% threshold or 115% threshold of this common level of assessment, which is looking at the difference between fair market value and what you guys actually have on the grand list, we have to do it. According to projections, this might be due again by 2024, which is a very short time period to then go ahead and look at all of the properties in the city once again. In terms of the cost of this, it cost the city about a million bucks to do this last time. The state of Vermont pitches in approximately $100,000 per year to the city. That's earmarked specifically for the reassessment process. So that's fine if we're talking about doing this every 10 years and the cost of doing the city-wide reassessment doesn't change. What it looks like is gonna happen is something like 70% of municipalities in the state are going to trigger this reassessment within the next few years. Thus, kind of being the catalyst for the legislature looking at what would be a complete disaster. Our recommendation is to look at doing a rolling assessment process and having in-house staff doing it. If the legislature doesn't do anything, it's gonna be incredibly difficult to even hire one of these companies to come in and do this. By having in-house, you don't have to retool for every different consultant you come in. You've got an in-house set of procedures for looking at this. And you've got people with local knowledge of neighborhoods and the nuances of that. I think one of the big things we heard from testimony was people upset with having somebody from Tyler Technologies who has probably never even been to Burlington. They did a lot of this through Google Earth, telling them what different neighborhoods' values are. We just think that having somebody local would be much more palatable and better for the entire process. Other things here. If it does end up being that an outside company comes in to do these reassessments, having some language in the contract for force majeure, if something were to happen, unfortunately, everyone's hands were tied here. It was mandated by statute to do this. There was no emergency, get out of this. Oh my gosh, we're in the middle of a pandemic, we gotta stop. When the process was started, it really had to be finished. So yeah, broad strokes here. These reassessments, if the legislature does nothing, are gonna be happening on a more frequent basis. We'd rather see somebody in-house doing this. Now, the other thing is with the rolling assessment by taking various groups of properties and doing them on a two or a three-year schedule, we're kind of kicking that threshold of 85% down the road. People won't get the sticker shock. I've seen this every 10 or 15 years and it'll keep the grand list value more in line with true market value. So those were our thoughts on that part of the charge here. Great, thank you. Very thorough report and thank you all so much for being here. We'll go to the council if you have any questions or comments and our thanks also to Councillor Shannon who sat on the committee as well. Councillor Shannon. Thank you, President Paul. I want to thank my colleagues on this committee. This was a really hard working committee that did a lot of writing, that did really all the writing of the report themselves which is not generally our expectation but there was a recognition that we are short staffed and that that was needed in order to move this forward. I will also say you can ask former President Tracy, this wasn't an easy committee to recruit for. So really thank you so much to this team for stepping up and digging in. I'll also just add that if you kind of look at why we ended up where we did with having this massive reassessment, part of it was we did our last reassessment in 2005 and then post-2008, we went through this period of kind of stagnation. Also the threshold at that time, the 85% threshold is a new threshold. It had been 80% and that's averaged over three years. So because of this period of stagnation, because this is averaged over three years, our assessment wasn't triggered for quite a period. Then we're in the middle of the assessment. Now we have a three-year period where we've never seen this much price increase in a three-year, in any three-year period and they now have lowered the bar where we need reassessments sooner. So there is a compound effect which is causing a trigger all over the state of Vermont. The rolling assessments are only possible, I mean, doing it in-house is only possible with the rolling assessments. You cannot do a city-wide reassessment and do it locally or in-house and Tyler certainly has done an awful lot of the reappraisals in New England and all over their big company. But thank you all so much for the work that you have done here. I can make a motion, we can continue the discussion after the motion but I will move to waive the reading and accept the report and place it on file. Thank you, Councillor Shannon, seconded by Councillor McGee. Did you want the floor back? Okay, all right, so we will go to Councillor Carpenter to be followed by Councillor McGee, Councillor Carpenter. Thanks, I too wanna thank everybody on the committee. I was very supportive of this resolution. I spent a stint on the Tax Review Committee and I've followed all of these tax issues for a number of years. I just have, I guess, a couple of requests, not so much of the committee, but maybe you thought you were gonna get rid of this. And I'd like to ask, perhaps more the administration and the assessor's office, I just became aware about the changes at the state level, unpredictable, don't know what that'll mean, but I would hope that after the session ends that the assessor's office could analyze that and perhaps reconvene you for a second meeting to see how does that change any of your recommendations so that we can have maybe a little bit of a follow-up if any of the legislative work agrees with you or really disagrees with you, we could get that kind of factored in with a postmortem. I also'd like to ask strongly that the assessor's office and the administration do the work necessary, particularly to analyze the finances around the rolling assessment, the in-house, that we just don't let that sit. It's gonna change how we do business big time and we need to understand the finances. Two, actually, from what I know, I'm a supporter of that, but we need to understand that. So I don't wanna let that just drop to a year from now, particularly if we have to do one of these in 24, 25. And again, I think more requested administration that we start identifying and picking away at some of the things that we could do now that are easier than some of the other things. For instance, just getting sales data online would be, and that's, in the state of Vermont, that's actually really easy to do, and so that's something we could do, and that would perhaps help some people who don't quite understand the value of their home to see other values in them. So I think there's a bunch of your recommendations we could start picking away right now. I certainly think there's some low-hanging fruit, especially as it comes to the education and the fees and making sure that people know what the process looks like and where to go. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Councillor Carpenter. We'll go to Councillor McGee to be followed by Councillor Berkman. Thank you, President Powell. And thank you all for the report tonight. This is really extensive, and I really appreciate the work that the committee's put in over the last several months to put this together to hear the concerns of the community members. This is the first resolution that I worked on as a councilor when I got elected in 2021. Before that, I was on the Board of Tax Appeals, and then after I got elected, I served as a council representative to the board when we were hearing the overwhelming number of appeals that the board received after the reappraisal. So at the center of the concerns that we heard from folks were really the confusion around what the process meant, what the appeals process looked like, what information was used, and so I'm glad that that has all made it into the report and that you all have made recommendations for us to start to remedy those concerns that we heard from folks. And I do hope that, like Councillor Carpenter said, that we can really move forward on implementing some of these things, especially if we're gonna be phased with another city-wide reappraisal so soon, even as the state is considering larger change to this statewide. So I just briefly wanted to say thank you and look forward to continuing this conversation. Thank you, Councillor McGee. We'll go to Councillor Bergman to be followed by Councillor Grant. So I wanna echo people's praise, thanks, and support for so much of what you've done here. I think that the recommendations on education are critically important. I was the attorney for John Vickery for many years, so I took these cases to court and I took them to the board. And it's a complicated process that takes a lot of time to understand. I really like the idea of the public information specialist. I think of it like the ombudsman idea, so I'm happy because people need at least, if not an advocate who's being paid by the city, which creates certain conflicts, at least somebody who can guide them in a way that they can trust. And the whole concept of an ombudsman puts that person in a more neutral role. I appreciate your comments around this is gonna cost us something, but it's the price of good government that our people know why they're being charged what they're charged. It's sort of like fairness and advertising. So I think it is well worth us putting the money and the time in and that it has always struck me. Once I read the case in the eastern part of the state, I think it is in Lindenville that allowed for rolling reappraisals. I'm really not sure why we haven't really embraced that, except that our staffing is pretty tight. So it's just one of those things that makes a lot of sense to just lessen the shocks that occur. I was disappointed by only one area in the report, and that is what I consider to be the short shrift given to the timing of the notices of appeal vis-a-vis the tax bill. And I saw right, it's on page three of the report where you talk about that this is a statutory requirement that you need to set the grand list and then you set the tax bills. And that's why people can't know what the impact is going to be. But that state statute actually is our own charter. Our charter sets out in section 89, the timing framework. And even within that, you've got a period of time between May 5th when the grand list has to be set and the dates of appeal. And I'm wondering who or if you consulted with anybody in the CAO's office in terms of sort of maybe tweaks to the timing in that section of our charter to allow for at least if not an actual tax bill to get sent out, then some sort of estimates, we are starting to look at budgets right now. So obviously a mass appraisal, the whole citywide appraisal creates big problems for lots of people. So it compounds the problems. If you have a rolling appraisal, then it's not quite as big a deal. You got individual things happening all the time. So I'm just wondering whether you got some sort of communication and it was like you were told, this is just not a possibility from a practical standpoint. What I will say is not unlike the assessor's department, the city attorney's office was also incredibly short staffed. And so we, this is something we discussed in the committee we talked about and I don't think it made it into the report, but a tool based on hypotheticals, right? Like, okay, let's say your property went up this much in value with a hypothetical budget of this, what does that mean for your tax dollars? So it is something we had talked about, of course. Yeah, I mean, what a reappraisal does or change, what it really does is it changes your little piece of the grand list. And that's the point that you don't necessarily know what the city's gonna spend, but you know what your little piece of the grand list is. So you could, in theory, there could be a calculator that would tell you how your piece of the grand list has changed with respect to the rest. And what happened this past time is that the residential versus commercial properties got skewed and that's what caused the residential properties to be valued, to have higher taxes. But you could definitely build a tool that would say, well, you used to pay this much of the grand list now you're gonna pay this much of the grand list, which is effectively what we're talking about. We just don't know what the final tax amount is until it's set. I appreciate, at least that you had some conversation about it. I think there are some areas that we can explore. There's work involved in everything, but to do this right requires us to do the work that needs to be done. So I'll continue to look to us to think about whether there are more tools that we can provide to our taxpayers so that they know what is going on in a real sense, like what their dollars are gonna be. And it's really important if the state education credits that people get don't kick in until a year later. So we got a hard-pressed taxpayers, everybody knows that. And we wanna do the best that we can for them. So if there's any way that we can do this within the budgeting process, there may be tweaks. They would require charter changes, but they are not necessarily so substantive. And they are in our charter. We don't need to get general legislation through Title 32. Section 89 of our charter is where all of this process gets laid out, and we could, we can look at that if there is an appetite to do that. As the Charter Change Committee, I look forward to a resolution that would get us looking at that at an appropriate time. Thank you, that is all. Thanks again for your work. Thank you so much, Councillor Bergman. We'll go to Councillor Grant. Thank you, I'd like to thank you for your work as well. I live in the Old North End, and we were hit hard. It was devastating for a lot of people. It was devastating for me. I went through the appeals process. I am still to this day very bitter. I like the idea of educating people about the appeals process, and what the expectation is of the homeowner. But what is the expectation of the appraiser in terms of what they have to be willing to provide in order for a homeowner to feel like it's a fair process. So in my examples, I love the recommendation that we need to do this in-house. Talking to people who don't know the community, didn't look at the house, looked at a picture, looked at a description, that was really inadequate. And it led to the feeling, not only myself, but many people I talked to went through the appeals process and just didn't think it was fair. So the first time I went, because I went through two, talked to someone on the phone, and don't even think this person was in Burlington, and they told me that everybody was raised by 25%. So I said, great, I'll take it, you know, I'll take 25%. And then of course that was denied with like no information, you're just denied. Now the property card that you referred to, my property card did not have any comparable sales. So when I went through the second, and none were offered to me, so I went around looking at the size of my house and in my immediate neighborhood, what was comparable to the size and also the amount of land, et cetera. So I came with my own comparables. And then when I came to the second appeal, I was just told like, yeah, your comparables are pretty much ridiculous. And it's because you chose houses that had parts of the property having to do with the housing trust. And I had no idea, I had no idea. So you don't give me any comparables. After the first denial, you don't give me any information. And then I scrounged some up myself, which what I felt was very valid. And then I'm told like, no. And then I'm told that I shouldn't be obsessing over the assessed value. And I'm like, well, that's ridiculous because that's how you're gonna raise my property taxes. What are you talking about? So I'm glad to see that there's gonna be some recommendations for improvements that I do hope we follow through on. I'm not naive, we're gonna have to do this again. But I think there's, as you have demonstrated, a lot of room for improvement. But I think there has to be a piece about when they go through, when people go through appeals, what does the assessor's office have to provide? Should we be looking at property cards that have no comparable sales? Like even now, there are no comparable sales listed on my property card. Is that okay? Because if you leave people to their own devices and they don't fully understand, and then you're just gonna say, no, this isn't valid without knowing in advance. So I just wanted to offer up that feedback and I am trying to be less bitter. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Grant. We'll go first to Councilor Barlow and then Councilor Chang. Oh, thank you, President Powell. I just want to say thank you for this really excellent report. I too served on the Board of Tax Appeals when I first got out of the council and heard maybe, I don't know, 120 of these things on the panel I was on. And a lot of the concerns that you raised were the ones that we heard from a lot of the people who were petitioning for appeal. So thank you for noting those. And some of the educational ideas you had, I think are really good ones. And I think they are relatively inexpensive to implement, especially around just the one pager that you referenced, Education on Property Record Cards and the Public Information Officer, if we do do another reassessment. And the only other thing I'll punch up other of my colleagues have already done so, but the rolling, the idea of doing rolling reappraisals is a really, I think, a good one and one that we should look at. But I also recognize that there are a lot of barriers to doing that essentially around staffing and we'd have to figure out how to fund it because of the nature of the way the state funding comes to us and that trickle that you described. So once again, thank you for that excellent work you did. Thank you, Councillor Barlow. We'll go to Councillor Jang and then hopefully for a vote on the motion. Thank you. I echo the sentiments from all of my colleagues about the great work that you have done. And it is just unfortunate that we did not see any female representation in the board. I think it's important for us. No, let me come. Let me come. Any female representation from the board, right? But we are glad that at least my colleague, Councillor Shannon, did mix it up a little bit. But we can do better next time, right? I'm, you know, it is important because sometimes some boards are only represented by female only. The DOC tax force was here last week. Exactly same thing, female alone. But I do appreciate every single and one of you for your work. And, you know, what Councillor Maggy talked about, this also came from an extensive amount of public input from the concerns to the resolution to right here in front of us. But I was surprised to hear that basically your work, your hard work may not be recognized here by the city. We may not see the fruits of your work, meaning that the city is trying to do something else. And the motion we have in front of us is to accept and place it on file. And I was just wondering what would be the step to change the motion in also sending it to the state for us to accept the report, to send it to the state, to send it actually to the state that will be doing the assessment that will be reviewing such measure. And this is a question for any of our lawyers here or the president, can we amend a motion in order to add that element of sending it to the state? You may do that. And we do friendly amendments to motions and friendly amendments. So, Councillor Shannon, I'm trying to remember, Councillor McGee, would that be friendly to both of you? Yes, I think we need to specify kind of where at the state, but yes. Yes. And I think whoever's doing the, it was through a resolution, what was it exactly if we have to send it here, who exactly would it be? Like, is it a department or? I'd be happy to speak to that. It's currently in the Senate Finance Committee. They had a walkthrough of it on Friday. So, I believe, it's not on the committee's agenda this week. I don't know if they could add that at any point this week. So, I think the Senate Finance Committee is probably a fine place to send that. And potentially also the House Ways and Means Committee. Should any amendments be made in the Senate, it would go back to House Ways and Means. Would that be amenable to you? I think so. Yeah. So it would be, and the end of the motion would be and to refer the report to the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees. Great. Okay, so we will amend that. Thank you. Yeah, I think people said it all. Great work. Thank you all so much. And one aspect that was not very clear for me is we need to do this assessment re-appraisal often. But how often do you recommend? So we didn't make any on the rolling assessment, you mean? Yeah. We didn't make any specific recommendations on timing, certainly more than the 15 years that it took for this past one. I feel like reassessing every property and anyone can speak up, at least every eight to 10 years would keep kicking that 85% threshold down. Really, whatever is able to reduce, whatever time period is able to mitigate hitting that threshold, that's the number. So. Wonderful. All right. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Councillor Chang, for that addition to the motion. Seeing no others in the queue, we'll go to a vote on the motion that has been seconded and amended. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously with our thanks so much for your work on the committee, to Councillor Shannon, for your work on the committee, and to Councillor McGee, which is where it all began with the resolution that you did back in 2021. Thank you again for being here. We will move on to item 7.08, which is the creation of one new position, an assistant director of CAPE, which is within the police department. Before we get into a discussion and comments from the council and as well, we have the acting chief here as well. We'll go to Councillor Barlow for a motion. Thank you, President Paul. I move that we approve the creation of an assistant director of CAPE, a regular full-time exempt non-union grade 24 position within the Burlington Police Department. Thank you, Councillor Barlow. I need a second for that. Seconded by Councillor Shannon. Councillor Barlow, did you want the floor back or we have, I don't know if the mayor would like to speak to this or the acting chief or, but first, if you would like the floor back. No, I don't need the floor back. Okay, thanks so much. Mayor Weinberger, did you want to speak to this or how did you want to this? Sure, President Paul. I'd be happy to say a few opening comments and the chief may want to supplement them. I see this new position that's before you night as the culmination or the next step and a number of the actions that we have taken together over the last several years. We have made a very significant commitment to additional public safety resources that were not part of the police department prior, in a substantial way prior to 2020. And we have, this is a very positive trend and it's really changing the way in which the city responds to numerous types of incidents. Most notably something that council, if I may pass discussions of, we've added the CSL program, which now has authorized six employees. We have expanded from two to 12, the number of CSOs that we have. We have added, we are in the process of standing up a new crisis response team, which will be a substantial additional resource. And we've also done things outside of the police department with respect to the addition of new urban park rangers. We have seen the expansion of the street outreach team from over the last couple of years. We've added a new low barrier emergency shelter on Elmwood Avenue as well as one on Shelburne Road in just the last few years. There, and that's probably not quite comprehensive. In short, there's been a large addition of new resources that are part of the way the city responds to a whole range of calls that we receive. And the bulk of these resources have been added in the police department through sometimes often after consideration of other alternatives and then decisions by this body and others that the police department was our best tool for bringing about the change that we wanna see quickly and effectively. And the feedback that I've gotten from the public and others has been quite positive on the addition of these resources. The team at the police department that has been spearheading a lot of this work has been very effective and energized. And my sense is this work is headed in a very positive direction. At the same time, it's been my sense for much of the past year that as good as the work from these resources that is being done, as good as it is that there is a higher level of coordination and really coordination is the key word for it, I think, that is necessary to make, to really get the fullest public value for our constituents, for the people that we are engaging with for the staff, for the people doing this work. We need some greater ability to greater administration and coordination of these efforts. And that's what this job will do. And I think it's going to have an immediate and very significant impact and really leverage these investments that we've already made so that we get even more out of them. I'm also, I welcome the addition of a senior level, assistant director level civilian at the police department. It's really not something that we've had on a permanent basis before and I think it is going to strengthen the department to have that kind of ongoing civilian presence. So this position has my full support and as it is one of the things that I thought we need to get done in the near term in January and I'm appreciative that Chief Mirad, Lacey Smith and others have worked hard to develop this job description and put it in front of you. I appreciate that the police commission did deliberate on this position after a presentation and with the assistance of President Karen Paul. And my understanding is that the commission endorses this position creation as well. I hope it's something that we will act on tonight so that we can move this work forward expeditiously. Thank you, Mayor Weinberger. Chief, was there anything that you wanted to add before we go to questions from the council? No, I would like to mention very quickly that the work that we've done inside the police department with regard to building up new kinds of response has been something of which I'm very proud. The development of the CSL program, the work that they are doing, the ways in which they integrate with the officers, the ways in which we have an essentially seamless interaction between both groups. The CSLs go and speak with officers, the officers go and speak to the CSLs and yet there's a high degree of autonomy for what we call CAPE and the services that are in there, both the victims advocate, the domestic violence victims advocate, the domestic violence prevention officer, the only sworn officer who is assigned to CAPE, the CSLs and Lacey Smith, the CSS. All of those are on their own. They do, generally they work on their own. Lacey does report to me, but she works routinely with the OICs, generally a lieutenant who is the officer in charge. That kind of integration is really important to the success that the program is having. We are an agency that once upon a time was essentially two thirds sworn police officers and about a third of professional staff, most of whom were behind the scenes and that included parking. So once parking was out of there, that ratio changed, but then of course, at the same time as parking was removed, we had the change in our headcount. We're currently about 50-50 with regard to the number that we have versus the number that we, excuse me, the sworn number we have versus the professional number that we have. Now that's because we are still significantly understaffed with regard to the current headcount allotment of 87 and therefore it wouldn't be 50-50 if we were fully staffed in officers, but we are a changed agency with those ratios and because of that change, we really do need to have a difference in structure and the introduction of this position is one that allows us to be able to have strategy and oversight and direct guidance of our professional staff in a way that we have not always had from a sworn officer perspective. I'm really excited about this position. I'm excited about the work that we're already doing in that unit and excited to have that increase and be something that we really are able to work on even with more forethought, that is, and more ideas about where we go next. We're going places that no other agency in this state is going. We're doing things that very few agencies of any of our size are doing and I think this is indeed the next step towards continuing that progress. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for those comments. We'll go to questions from the council, beginning with Councillor McGee. Thank you, President Paul. I don't have any questions, just some comments. I won't be supporting the creation of this new position this evening. As I've shared in the past, I've long thought that the non-police responses that we've invested in should be housed in their own department, not within the police department. And I shared this with the mayor late last year before he announced the Comprehensive Public Safety Plan and told me about this position for the first time. I was also concerned to learn early last week that the city's considering operating the crisis response team within the police department. I understand that we're not being asked to decide the future of the crisis response team here tonight, but I don't think we can really separate the two items as we've seen in the job description that this new position will be responsible for overseeing that team. From the beginning, the intent of the crisis response team was to model it after the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon, where the police department manages the contract, but is not responsible for the day-to-day operations of the program. For me, this decision before the council tonight is indicative of a problem with decision-making in the city that leaves out those who should be at the table until it's too late to make changes, functionally treating our governing bodies as a rubber stamp for these actions rather than collaborative partners in imagining what community safety will look like in Burlington. Along this line, I don't feel like I can do the job I was sent here to do to advocate for the needs of my constituents who have told me time and again that they want the crisis response team to be a separate entity from the police department. Should this pass tonight, as I imagine it will, I'm glad that we're taking the step to ensure that civilian employees of BPD are overseen by a civilian assistant director, and I wanna be sure that my vote tonight is not a reflection of my views of the civilians working hard to support our community members struggling with substance use disorder and houselessness. I'll be working on a resolution in the next couple of weeks to ask the administration to begin the process of examining what it would look like to remove our non-police responders from the police department and creating a new department centered on the functions of crisis, advocacy, and intervention programs. In proposing this new department, it's not my intention that they would be entirely siloed from the police department, just like the fire department is a separate department filling an essential safety function while working in collaboration with the police department, I believe this new department could do the same thing. For decades, we've allocated resources to the police department with the hope that they will adequately address so many of the social issues we face. We know now that that doesn't work and it requires us to recommit ourselves to transforming our community safety apparatus to address the safety needs of our community in a holistic way. And so for that reason, I won't be supporting this tonight. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor McGee. Councillor Hightower. Be followed by Councillor Grant. Great. First, I'm just gonna get on my soapbox, which I already did at the HR committee, but folks in the HR committee are gonna hear it again, which I just look forward to in the next year of working on updating our job description so they're not just long bullets, but actually give folks an indicator of how much time they'll be spending on different things. That is nothing to this job description. That's just how the city is doing job descriptions. More relevant to this job description is I feel much like Councillor McGee does. I also feel like the vision for 2020 was that we had, as modeled by the CAHOOTS model, a separate department that works really hand in hand with the police department, but can also, we don't like, but can offer a different response. I think that this kind of positions it as a lesser alternative, as opposed to as a part and parcel of our comprehensive community response. And I think that that's been a trend that we've kind of seen ongoing, and I just wanna make sure that we stick to the commitment of having this be part, a truly a holistic part of our community response. And I think I just wanna remind ourselves that in 2020, there was a basically director position created to do some of this work, maybe not with any useful outcomes as far as at least I can see, but I don't see why we're not taking the same route for this position to report directly to the mayor and work closely with the acting chief. Thank you. Thanks, Councillor Hitchower. We'll go to Councillor Grant. I have some comments, but I have one quick question. I printed out the job description this afternoon. At the bottom it says draft. So does this mean that this job description is not yet finalized? Responding for our HR department, that is just our standard practice because when it goes to you, it could change. Okay, thank you for that. So I am very torn. I have worked very hard as a resident of the city and on the special committee to review policing policies and then on the police commission to bring about change and how we view our community response system. And we're making progress, but at some times it's felt the stress around the fight dragging, kicking and screaming, getting people to come together to think differently. So I am glad that there is some progress I do believe that the civilian employees that are going to be assisting here do need to have a civilian supervisor. I also would have preferred this not to be within the police department. I would have preferred this position to of course they have to be working with the police department, Howard Center and other stakeholders in our community response team, but either to be a separate department or actually to be under the fire department because they are also dealing with a lot with regards to the number of drug overdoses and sometimes mental health issues that they respond to. But I was also told that there might be an issue with the union with regards to the training that paramedics are expected to have and how would that affect this new team, our CAHOOTS model that we are now calling CARES. But that hasn't been vetted out. So I guess I will say that I appreciate that some input is being listened to. There have been these long periods where nothing happened and then something happens quickly and then nothing happens for more long periods and then something happens quickly and then nothing happens. We're in this kind of cycle. And sometimes when things start to move very, very quickly we forget to notify and include important stakeholders. And I do appreciate after I expressed some concern about the communication around something so important, I felt really left out to know that the Howard Center had pulled out and I didn't know that and that had been a week. So I do greatly appreciate Council President Paul going to the police commission attending that meeting last week and saying we need to make sure that the commission gets a full voice. That was very, very important. I was not comfortable with Chair Seguino having to feel she needed to apologize for slowing things down. I didn't think that she needed to do that because what she was asking and what I was asking was that as opposed to a quick email forcing people to conform to an extremely short timeline because we all know with open meeting you can't email everybody that that was really the best option that you were willing to go to that meeting and allow the commission to have a voice. And I think that meeting brought up a lot of really valid points. I appreciate the change in the title. I really do. I thought using alternative, we got to get away from alternative because this is what we're doing now as part of our community response. It's not an alternative. It is part of our community response. I appreciate the name, the change of our Kahootz model because what was originally submitted was Merck. And that just terrified me. I'm like, what are we doing? What are we thinking? You come up with something like that when you have a lack of input, right? We're gonna use Merck, a very common abbreviation for mercenary. I mean, CARES is, can we all agree that that's a significantly better name that is really showing what we're trying to do here? So to have that input has led to positive changes. I am concerned that the CARES unit would be, at least here, limited to four people. I think we have to consider possibly in the future, depending how the labor market is, we would want to have more people in this unit because we need to cover more hours in the day. That's a big issue we have right now. We are not covering enough hours in the day with these positions. So having said that, I am loath to delay the implementation of this CARES unit, our CAHOOTS model. I want to encourage further vetting. I do still think we need a point person for communication so we don't have what happened last week happen again so that whoever is that point person, okay, we've got this change. This is who needs to know right now. I'm gonna vote for this position, although I don't like where it's placed because I believe social work and police work is very different. I think I'm probably convinced by the words of Lacey Smith who as a CSL, her team works very independently but I do sometimes still hear rhetoric coming from the police department where there's a lack of understanding of the root causes of the issues. And that gives me pause because if you don't still fully understand the root causes of the issues, how can you properly manage a team that is being tasked with harm reduction? So I think that's something we really need to think about and I think there's still a lot of education that needs to occur and I'm happy that there is more acceptance but there still needs to be more education so that we know that these people are really going to be truly supported in their non-sworn positions. And I will end it there, thank you. Thank you so much, Councilor Grant. We'll go to Councilor Carpenter and then to Councilor Bergman. Thanks, I mean I am really very supportive of this and very happy we changed the name. We need this position at this point in time. We've got a number and a growing number of civilian employees carrying out the missions we want. We don't have another department to place them in. I think we need to look at that. I think we need public safety with a big P and how does that relate to police response, fire response? I agree sometimes fire is almost always the first one on a scene. We've got the whole coordination with dispatch. You're only gonna call 911s. You're not gonna call 911 and 211 and 411 or whatever the options are and so I think we've still got a lot of work cut out to figure out how that would work more smoothly. But I think we've gotta carry this process through and having a senior position to help that is just gonna be critical and I hope the Council itself, as we move along, we'll look at some of these broader issues of how do we do that comprehensively and with a lens that in fact the city of Burlington itself is not ever gonna be a social service agency. How do we bring in our partners that are out there? We're not gonna be the designated mental health agency. That's just not how the system works but I think we've gotta do that and I'm hopeful in this next year that we can kind of take that to task and really spend some good quality time figuring that out. Thank you, Councilor Carpenter. We'll go to Councilor Bergman and then perhaps go to a vote at that point. Thank you. I'm curious as to why the CSOs are not included. Thanks for the question. The CSOs are operational components. Their role is essentially that of a police officer without certain police authorities. So they're underneath the chain of command that goes with sworn officers. That's the kind of work they respond to. They respond to noise complaints. They respond, they do non-investigatory crashes. They go to animal complaints, particularly those that involve physical risk but they are not doing what this work is and therefore when we talk about CAPE and about crisis assessment and intervention programs, that's not what CSOs are. So I appreciate that. I would ask us in this iterative process to be looking at that. We have equivalents of CSOs down at permitting and inspections. They're civil enforcement officers. In fact, they can investigate housing violations that are criminal offenses and yet they're not sworn officers. They can go to court and get search warrants. So I think that the idea of moving things away from sworn officer responses is something that we need to continually look at and I would appreciate us doing that with an open mind. And we've had chief this conversation about the use of CSOs for things like doing drive-bys around parks to just to show the flag and be present not necessarily to be issuing tickets but to be out there in the world to stop stuff before it gets stupid, which is often the way that things work when you've got people with sort of official cars and signeas showing up as opposed to residents who go to the neighbor and ask them to stop shooting their AR for 15 so that their baby can sleep and all hell breaks loose. So I mean, I think that there is a danger for us relying on community people to be doing things but enforcement people are different even if they're civil. And so with regard to them and the Urban Park Rangers I'd ask us to be looking at that more openly, open-mindedly and I'm appreciative of the concerns related to the placement of this. However, I see this as an iterative process just like I'm asking for some open-mindedness on the CSOs. I'm looking for us and I hear that particularly from Councillor Carpenter's comments of this being an iterative process. And so I'll support this because I see it as a step for us to continue to move forward and we can do that together. We've made a lot of steps together over the last year plus that I've been on this council. And I know that people were doing that before that in at least the year. So there's been some real rethinking and we'll begin to do that on other areas of public safety and that this is why I agree with the Councillor Grant. I'll be supporting this for those reasons and she said many of the things as well. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. Seeing no others in the queue, we'll go to a vote. Oh, I'm my apologies. Councillor Chang. No, thank you. I mean, I think what I have to say I already talked about it at Board of Finance but I wanted to be appreciative of Chief, Acting Chief Mirad for the development of this job description and the job description of all the non-sworn officers position. We do not say it enough but also we know that you do alternative policing and all of this. I know that personally that you have developed these job descriptions, right? I am particularly concerned of housing disposition at the BPD. It's a concern of mine, especially when the care model will be housed under the BPD. I ask to divide the question. I just want to vote in support of this tonight. But if we are, I'm going to be very clear here and looking forward to the resolution that Councillor Maggie just talked about. I believe that in this city I have been the most consistent Councillor about public safety in here. Let's not defend the police. It was very clear we defended. Let's not raise the cap of the police until the CNA report. It seems that we want to do all in peace misapproaches and with this position, with the CAHOOTS model, I think there is another better alternative of providing public safety here. Taking into account the fire department, the park rangers, CSL, CSOs, this is a different position that can look into the CAHOOTS and leaving BPD alone to do their job and to do it right. And maybe that resolution you're talking about, we can bring something that would make the most sense. Yeah, I will be supporting this tonight, but with strong reservation, if we are going to house the CAHOOTS model at the BPD. Thank you. Thank you so much, Councillor Jang. I believe now we can go to a vote. So all those in favor of the motion to approve this position, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. No. So that passes 10 to two. Thank you so much and thank you for being here. Thank you for, and as well as at this late hour. That will bring us to our next deliberative item, which is 7.09, a summary of current and proposed camping on municipal lands ordinance and operational policy. We have Haley McClanahan, the assistant city attorney, joining us via Zoom. She is the city attorney who authored this communication and just by way of background, this memo came as a request from the council to develop a public document that summarized our camping on municipal lands ordinance and operational policy. Attorney McClanahan, I don't know if you wanted to make any comments and then we'll just go to, if there's any comments from the council, it's, we're really just voting to advance a communication, but if you had anything you wanted to mention or highlight, the floor is yours. Thank you, President Paul. I think that this will mostly be a refresher for a majority of the council and given the late hour, I won't go into too much detail given the memo. What I will say is that the memo primarily highlights several differences, as well as a few similarities between the proposal that was floated by Councillor McGee and others back in late winter, early spring of 2022, as compared to our current framework, which includes our camping and parks ordinance located in Chapter 22 of the Burlington City Ordinances, as well as our working policy around the public sheltering on our public lands. So I'm happy to take any questions from the council at this time or if there are specific areas that the council would like me to elaborate on further, but otherwise again, just in the interest of not being repetitive for the council, I will leave it there to begin. Great, thank you, Attorney McLenahan. Are there councillors who wanted to speak to this and we also can go to a motion if you'd like to, Councillor McGee? Sure, I'm happy to make a motion. I would move that we leave the reading except the report and place it on file and ask for the floor back briefly after a second. Great, thanks, Councillor McGee and that would be seconded by Councillor Travers. Councillor McGee, the floor is yours. Thank you, President Paul. I don't have many comments on the memo itself. We've been having this conversation for a number of months in the CDNR committee with extensive feedback from the public. I just wanna note for the public that with some of the reporting that happened on this today, that this ordinance proposal is still being discussed but it is also being discussed alongside a number of other supports for our unhoused community members and whether we decide to adopt this ordinance or not, it's very clear that with the state ending the Motel Voucher program that provided housing for thousands of people throughout the pandemic, that is coming to an end at the end of June and the state as well as the city are going to have to take a serious look at how we are going to support folks who are housing insecure through the summer and especially once we get back to the fall and the winter, I remain deeply concerned about where we're heading in terms of losing those supports. And so while it might not be the ordinance that I proposed, I do hope that we can move forward with other supports for folks who are experiencing houselessness. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor McGee. Are there any other Councillors who wish to speak to the policy or have any questions about the Council Grant? I just wanna agree with everything that Councillor McGee said and I just think that while it looks good on paper, the reality of the situation once these funds are gone, we have the potential to have encampments very quickly develop and I just don't think we're prepared. Thank you. Thank you very much. Seeing no one out, Councillor Jang. Yes. Thank you, Councillor Grant for that question. It's really important and let me ask this to the attorney and also to McGee. Is this communication saying that tomorrow anyone can camp at a park from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.? Is it what it's saying? This is the proposed ordinance that I'm reading right here. Is it accurate? Go ahead. Go ahead, Councillor. Go ahead, Attorney McLenahan. Thank you. So Councillor Jang, I would say under our current framework, camping in parks is currently prohibited and camping is defined as sleeping in parks during the overnight hours. Under the proposal, there would not be a blanket prohibition on camping in parks. It would really have to do more so with the activity that was occurring at a particular campsite. So currently under our ordinance, camping in parks with very few exceptions that are outlined in Appendix D, which is the parks, rules and regs, sanctioned campgrounds, sites at North Beach, things of that nature, camping in our parks is currently prohibited. So basically what I'm saying is yes. Starting tomorrow, people can come and sleep at the park. No, no, this is a memo, purely comparing what we currently have to the ordinance that I proposed last February. This does not, voting on this tonight is not adopting that ordinance proposal. This is a summary of the current and proposed camping. Yeah, read the summary. I have read the proposed amendment. I have read what we have in the past as policy, as ordinance, right? So then what has changed? It's actually, if you go to Reddit, people are talking about this in a very not constructive way, right? There are people who are really concerned that the city council is allowing people to park starting tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Anyone can come and park, sleep at the park. You're telling me that this is not it. We're not allowing that, right? So those who are listening, then this is not the case. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Chang. Council, Mayor Weinberger. So I guess I would like to say a few more things just in case Councillor Chang's not the only person kind of confused about what's happening here. The CDNR committee has been working on this issue for a very long time. I believe the resolution that authorized some exploration and it never, and I think it's important to understand the council never endorsed this direction. The council said the CDNR committee can look at our current ordinance and look at this new ordinance that have been drafted by, as I recall, Councillor Bergman and McGee and staff time is gonna be put into looking at this and we're gonna explore this. That resolution was passed not by this council, not by the last council, but by two councils ago. And if you recall, Councillor, I wanna make sure that there wasn't confusion about this. I said at the time that I thought the proposed ordinance was very problematic, but I wasn't opposed to there being some policy work at the committee level and that there has been some of that work and that work has, unfortunately, it was slowed down by the departure of Dan Richardson after doing some preliminary work on this. Quite a bit of time has now passed since this first was undertaken. Some of the facts on the ground have changed. We have added two low barrier shelters over the course of the time since this, I believe since the first resolution was passed as possible, the new place shelter was set up shortly before the resolution. To me, that is low barrier, public health oriented emergency shelters are a far better solution than the kind of designated camping or opening up of public lands to sheltering that the ordinance envisions. If we tonight were considering adopting the proposed ordinance, we would be having a very different debate you can be sure tonight. I do not, I didn't support it then and I definitely don't support now the direction signaled by the original ordinance. What is happening tonight is simply that this analysis from the assistant city attorney from the city attorney's office is being shared in a public way. It's been shared in a confidential way with the council in the past. This is now being made a public document and the council I believe is about to vote to accept the report and put it on file. From my perspective, there has been quite a bit of staff time that has been put into this initiative up until now over the last two years and the facts on the ground have changed and I believe the people of Burlington are clear they do not want us to move in this direction before any additional staff time is put into exploring the McGee and Bergman resolution. I think it's important there to be another vote by this full council that would signal that direction but I'm hopeful that won't happen. Thank you, Mayor Weinberger. Did you want the floor back? Okay. Councilor Hightower, then we'll go to a vote. Great and just because I realized I think the last time I made these comments may have been when we were discussing this in an executive session. So I will share these publicly as well because I think they're valid for the public. So as the mayor just gave the overview so this was sent to CDNR in February of 2022 and so in the direction and the resolution asked for a comparison of the proposed policy to what we currently have previous city attorney Dan Richardson started to work on a memo but then departed so it was incomplete that memo was held by the mayor's office. It took a while for CDNR for the mayor's office to release that to CDNR. Once they did, the CDNR committee at the time decided that that wasn't the full, that didn't meet the resolution that the city council had passed and asked for the analysis. By the time we got the analysis we basically already decided we weren't gonna move forward with the policy as a committee which is the reason we're not talking about implementing the policy based on what CDNR did meet with, went to three committee meetings or not committee meetings, went to three meetings. One meeting of city staff, one meeting of city staff and kind of folks who are supporting on the ground as well as then one kind of higher level meeting at the Chinn County level to talk through the proposal but also just what folks wanted to see and didn't wanna see that especially was what made us move away from the general policy as proposed by Councillor McGee. I don't think Councillor Bergman was on the council at the time. That's great. And I lost my train of thought. Right and so, but CDNR is still interested in having some kind of more comprehensive solution and we did pass a resolution that we're hoping to bring to the council at the next meeting to try to address some of these same issues but in a way that's more aligned with what we think city staff and some of the other folks would like to see. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Hightower. We have a motion that was seconded. Seeing no others in the queue, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion to waive the reading except the report in place and on file, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much, Attorney McClanahan, for joining us this evening and for your work on this report. Thank you. With that, we'll go to our final deliberative item which is 7.10, a resolution request for $2 million of ARPA funds to build or improve community infrastructure, community gathering spaces. As the council and community will recall, we had a presentation from Cara Al-Nazwari, the director of business and workforce development and Samantha Dunn, assistant director for community works at CEDO at our last meeting. This plan was unanimously supported by the Board of Finance and tonight we are here to vote on the resolution to allow the request to move forward. Do either of you, did either of you, thank you so much for being here. Did either of you wish to make some comments or did you want to simply take any questions or comments from the council and since we have well vetted this, hopefully well vetted this proposal, but if there's anything you wanted to add, please do. No, I was going to be repetitive so I'm happy to open it to questions. Okay, thank you. Are there any questions, comments from the council? Councilor Grant. Thank you. The Roosevelt Park Pavilion, I love the idea. I think that's great that community feedback is bringing this to fruition. Just want to make sure that when you get to the point where starting to look at the project, I understand that this is just kind of a general design to get people starting to think about the concept. There's a lot of sensitivity in the area where some members of the community feel like they're not included in some of the conversations and I've already heard some negativity about this plan and at the time I didn't know anything about it so I was like, hmm, I'll find out, I'll ask. So I just want to make sure that we are really, I want to avoid what happened with the art that's going into Dewey Park, that turned into a really big thing because there was just a complete lapse with conversations within the communities and the first thing anybody saw was this unfortunate likeness that was way out of scale and scared people and that took us down a road that I don't think we needed to be down. So we'd love to be part of that process and hopefully, Councils McGee and Bergman be part of that process too, just to make sure that people understand what we're bringing to our area. We deserve nice things and I think this is great because so many other parks have these type of opportunities to have gathering spaces under a shelter, protection from sun or if it starts to rain or just to be more supportive of gatherings and there's a lot of things that go on there with regards to sharing food and things like this. So I think this is a great idea. I just want to make sure the communication is on point. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that Council Grant and I do know so the imagery of the pavilion is definitely not right sized for the park. So yes, as you said, that was an image sort of to get the juices flowing. And in addition, the pavilion, as we had answered Council Bergman's question last time, will be part of an overall assessment of Roosevelt Park that Director White is taking with her Parks and Rec Department to see all the different pieces of infrastructure that are in Roosevelt Park and making sure that they fit well together and serve the purposes that the community wants. But in addition, I definitely heard you that you want more communication and community involvement. Thank you so much and thank you Council Grant for that question. There's no one else then I will actually go to Councilor Carpenter for a motion. And wave your reading in the dust. Thank you, Councilor Carpenter, seconded by Councilor Grant. Is there any further discussion on this item? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously with many thanks to both of you for all of your work and all others for their work on this effort. Thank you. That completes our deliberative agenda. We do have a couple of other items. The first is item number eight, committee reports. Any committee chairs with committee reports? Councilor Barlow. Thanks, President Paul. The Transportation Energy and Utility Committee will be meeting on Wednesday, May 3rd at 6.45 p.m. And on our agenda, we'll be talking about, well, it'll be our first meeting with our newly formed committee. And so we'll be talking about priorities, but we'll also be talking about the North Inuski Avenue referral to the committee, the roundabout naming and an update on the McNeil symposium. So it'll be an action-packed meeting. And I invite everybody to turn them. Thank you, Councilor Barlow. Any other, any others? Councilor Trappers. Couldn't tell if that was a look to not. No, that was a look. Committee report or a look to maybe you should. Yeah, I thought that might be what it was. Yeah, okay. So the Ordinance Committee will be meeting a number of times this month, as I believe I mentioned at our last meeting as well. On May 8th, we will continue the discussion that we started a couple weeks ago with respect to the South End Innovation District, hoping to make some good headway if not wrap up our review of that zoning proposal. And then Councilor Bergman and I are co-chairing with the Ordinance and Charter Change Committees, the process to really dive into police oversight and accountability. We heard public comment earlier sort of questioning where we were in that process. Well, it's taken some time to find a schedule that works for everyone, but we will be meeting for the first time to begin the discussion on that issue on May 4th. We have additional meetings scheduled for May 23rd and May 30th. An invitation in addition to the Councilors gone out to a pretty broad group of stakeholders, including leadership at the police department within the city, including union leadership, both within the police department and other municipal unions. It's gone out to advocates behind question seven, among other folks, so we're looking forward to a really good discussion there and getting the process started. Thank you. Great, thanks. Any other committee chairs? If there isn't, I have a committee report. So the Public Safety Committee is gonna be meeting on May 9th at 6.30. The meeting is gonna be entirely remote. We couldn't get a room, so we're gonna be meeting remotely. On the agenda will be a work update on the CNA recommendations and update on recruitment and retention, CSL and CSO hiring, as well as an update on commercial downtown plans for the summer and then an update on drug crisis and enforcement. And the meeting was posted to the city calendar today, so should be up there. We're gonna go slightly out of order and go to item number 11, updates from the mayor and then we will come back to general city affairs and the President Council updates. Mayor Weinberger. Thank you, President Paul. I appreciate the chance to just jump the line here just to share a brief report, because I do have to, I don't think I've ever done this before, but I have to leave the happy family things about to happen that I'd like to catch. So I just wanted to share that I have with the council that I've received a annual report from Burlington Telecom, and since it's been some time since they've given a report directly to the council, I and President Paul have encouraged them to come and give the report in person. I think they'll be doing so at the May 15th meeting and the council will get their report in advance of that meeting. Thank you. Thank you, President Paul. Great, thanks very much. So we'll go on to item number nine, which is city council general city affairs. Any councilers wish to offer comments on general city affairs? Councilor McGee. Thank you, President Paul. I just wanna speak briefly to the concerns shared by parents at public forum this evening about finding discarded needles in Callahan Park and just acknowledge that we've heard these concerns quite a lot from community members throughout the city finding. Discarded syringes in our public spaces. We see it in the substantial increase in C-click fix reports that we've seen over the last few years and it's a constant reminder of the crisis that we face with overdoses in our community and in the state of Vermont and across the country right now. I have tremendous sympathy for families faced with finding these syringes in our parks. I have sympathy for the city staff we're tasked with taking additional trainings to be able to clean these up as safely as possible. And I have deep sympathy for people who use drugs in our community don't have a safe place to do that and to ensure that they're gonna make it through the night. We lost for the third year in a row a record number of Vermonters to overdose in 2022. When we passed our resolution in March, that number was 237. The number has gone up to 239 since then and we'll likely go up again in the coming months. And as we've seen from police data so far this year we have had a very sharp increase in reported overdoses in the city. On par with at this point this year we're on track with where we were in June of last year. And those aren't overdose fatalities those are just reported overdoses. And so I wanted to speak to this tonight because I am appreciative of this body's support the previous council support for establishing an overdose prevention center in Burlington. I would like to report that the house committee on human services has taken testimony on age 72 a bill that would enable the establishment of overdose prevention centers in the state of Vermont. I'm grateful to the mayor and Scott Pavek for providing testimony on that. And just really want to underscore for anyone who's watching how essential this support is it will dramatically reduce the number of discarded syringes we see on the streets. It will dramatically reduce overdose fatalities. And I think at a time when we are seeing an increasingly dangerous drug supply and record number of overdose fatalities year over year now is the time for us to take this important step. So thank you. Thank you very much Councilor McGee. Councilor Hightower. I'll be brief because we're three minutes over but I just want to acknowledge that I think a few disability advocacy groups send us emails and Instagram messages about what they're calling an anti-masking event that's happening in City Hall and just want to acknowledge the mayor's response that the city has an obligation to not discriminate and who they are renting the space to but that we don't necessarily condone those events. So just want to, by not necessarily I would say that we don't condone those events. So just want to give a shout out to folks who've reached out to us and just remind folks that we are still in a pandemic and there's folks who have compromised immune systems and that the more we can mask up and definitely the more that we can support folks who choose to mask up, the better off we will be as a community. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Hightower. Councilor Barlow. I'll be brief as well but I wanted to acknowledge the anxiety that I've heard in emails and phone calls over the most recent shooting on Saturday and I've heard it from the business community and I've heard it from residents and I just want to appreciate the work that the detective unit at the Burlington Police Department is undoubtedly doing to try to solve and address that. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Barlow. If there's no others, oh, Councilor Grant. Thank you. I wasn't going to mention that shooting but code enforcement needs to do something. They need to be up there and they need to be dealing with those apartments. The apartments are trash. They're according to people that are familiar with what's going on up there. There are people who've come in from outside of town and there could be possibly dealing but there's a whole situation there. Like there is in other places in the city where we know things are happening but we don't seem to address them. I wanted to acknowledge a very wonderful family event, the YMCA Kids Fest. It was really beautiful. It was really, there were hundreds and hundreds of people there. I think their count was 700 coming through. I'm not sure but every family of every background in this city was there and it was great. I had the honor of being the DJ and the only thing that made me sad in the beginning was that there was an issue with getting me to the power supply because the area where they keep all the garbage and they're composting, they've had to close. And they're like, oh, we didn't think to get the key. We got to find the key and we had to lock it because there were unsavory things happening and I was like, oh my God, unsavory things but it was really sad to hear when someone else came by, oh, are you all set? I'm like, don't, we're waiting for the key to get to the power source. And she told me that their composting program, one day they brought the kids out to do the composting education, opened it up, needles everywhere. So we need, it was asked on Comstat, when is the state going to declare a drug state of emergency? I don't think we need to wait for the state. I think the city of Burlington, we need to do it ourselves and I would like us to consider talking about that because we're in deep. I hope everyone has an opportunity, if you haven't already done so, please review the chief's report. Last year, year to date, according to the recent report, the overdoses were in the low 30s. This year at the same time, 104. We're in trouble, we're in trouble and the overdoses indicate the increase in use and we still have the larcenies and we still have the card thefts. The card thefts are not related to criminal masterminds who are shipping these vehicles out of state. These are people leaving their cars running and it is not victim-shaming. People have to understand, they cannot do that. Please do not leave your car running with the keys in it. They are literally being driven away and when they are found later, they very often have all kinds of drug paraphernalia and other evidence that people were using them for shelter and for use. Just those reminders. In the last thing is a happy reminder at the Sustainability Academy, we'll be having their annual pancake breakfast this Saturday morning from 8.30 to 11.30. See you guys there? Yeah, yeah? All right, please come by, support the SA, the PTO. Thanks. Thank you, Councilor Grant. I've been to that many times and it is quite an event. Seeing no others, we'll move on to item 10, which is Council President Updates. I have a few, I know we're running over, but I do have a few and I don't wanna let it go. First is the presentation on the neighborhood code is now been posted, so you can take a look at that. Other thing, just wanted to note that we did approve on our consent agenda the council meetings for the remainder of 2023 and the first couple of months of 24 leading up to organization day, so you can put those on your calendar. Other updates, please, if you are available, June 4th, Sunday, June 4th, that is the day that we will be out at 8 a.m. on Main Street repainting the Black Lives Matter street mural. So if you're able to be there, we're happy to have you come and if you wanna get the word out to, particularly to constituents who may have missed it the last couple of times and would like to be able to participate. Won't be starting at 8 o'clock, that will be when the architectural team will be out there doing all of the lining and then we will start the painting shortly after. Then also, we are gonna have a fairly packed meeting for May 15th, the Parks and Rec Commission and the Board of Health will be here to present their annual report in addition to what the mayor had mentioned about Burlington Telecom. And last item is that another mark your date, mark your calendar, May 31st. May 31st will be the deadline for the annual submission at anyone who wants to apply for a commission or board that is expiring on June 30th. It will not give us a ton of time because it will take a couple of days, that's a Wednesday. We will then have them all collated and organized and then I will be reaching out to any and all of you looking for four people to serve on the selection committee for boards and commissions and it will be in seven days this week with the deadline of May 31st. That is all, that brings us to the end of our agenda and I would be very happy to have a motion to adjourn. Seconded, made by Councilor Hightower seconded by Councilor McGee. Any discussion on that motion? I would imagine not. We are adjourned without any objection. It is 10, yes, it is 1040. Our next meeting is May 15th. We will look forward to seeing you then. Have a good evening.