 Hello. Good evening, everyone. We're going to get started, so I'm going to call the meeting to order. The first thing is to review and approve the agenda. I don't think we have any changes that I'm aware of to the agenda. We did have one thing, at least added on the sheet, added to the consent agenda, but I think that is reflected online. So, without objection, we're going to consider the agenda approved. No one has any thoughts on that. So, we're going to move on to general business and appearances. So, this is an opportunity for anyone from the public to make comments on something that is not a part of our regular agenda for the evening. And if you would, try to keep your comments to about two minutes, and that's going to be true for all of the public comments for tonight. I'd like to request that the piece about the declaration of official intent for parking garage be pulled from the consent agenda and dealt with later when you deal with the garage, because of this concept called rebuttable presumption that infers that a deal is already done when it's not. We can pull that off. It's fine. Thank you. You don't need to wait. We can explain that quickly. Oh, we can. Okay. Fair enough. Maybe we'll deal with that through the consent agenda, but we can talk about it then. After. Sure. Yeah. Anyone else? I'm Hope Petrero, and I'm a junior at Montpelier High School, and I'm here to tell you all about the race against racism, which I founded a year ago and is happening for the second time this year at Montpelier High School. The 5k walk and run will hopefully be through the city of Montpelier and the rally will be at Montpelier High School. And it's a fundraiser, but also just a community event to bring people together in the fight for racial justice and our beneficiaries are migrant justice and youth for change. And the rally will include speaking performances and lots of great food and plenty of high school sports teams are running in the event as well. So I hope you all can make it. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Yeah. Anyone who explained this? Oh, yes. So Donna has this current system. So if, as you are talking, so we're hoping to keep people's comments to about two minutes. And so if you have one minute left, you're going to see the orange card. And then if you are two minutes, you're going to get the red cards and then you know to stop. So and I'll probably interrupt you at that point if that happens. All right. Thank you. Awesome. Right. So moving on to the consent agenda. I have a motion. Make a motion to approve. I'll second. With each pulled, right? Sure. Motion to approve with each pulled. Okay. Great. And you're still okay with that, Donna? Yes. Great. Any further discussion on any of those items? All in favor. Oh, yes, Donna. Sorry. Rosie. I apologize for discussing one item when we normally don't discuss these. I did note that one of these is a street closure application with a noise variance that ends at midnight. We did receive a constituent comment. I think Donna and I received it. I'm not sure if everyone received it from some folks who live in that neighborhood who are a little bit concerned about Langdon Street being closed. And specifically that the noise ordinance would be waived for so late at night frequently. So I'm going to go ahead and approve this in this instance. But I do want us to be a little bit more aware of being careful about downtown waiving the noise ordinance so frequently and thinking about are there ways to keep it at 10 a.m. Which I think is a little more reasonable. PM. 10 p.m. Yes. So just wanted to make that comment. Thank you. Any further discussion? All in favor. Please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Let's talk about each. So item H is a statement of intent to bond. It doesn't bind you to anything. And the advantage of adopting that now is that obviously we don't know if we will bond A whether you actually put it on a ballot and B if it passes. But if those things were to happen, if we should incur expenses, design costs, those kind of things, then they become eligible for the bond. If they're done in advance of the bond vote after this resolution as opposed to any only expenses after the bond. So it doesn't require you to bond. It doesn't require the voters to pass anything. It simply protects us for. I would recommend we do it. Donna. I'm sorry, Bill. Would you explain more how it protects us? I mean, It protects us so that we can start. I mean, we're not going to spend tons of money because we don't have the authority for money. But if we were to spend so-called soft costs, legal costs or design costs, those kinds of things in the anticipation of, you know, preparing for a bond voter. If we are putting together these things, then we can include those in the bond if we chose as part of the actual project cost. If we don't pass this resolution, then we can't. We just have to take them out of our general budget. We might choose to anyway, but it gives us that option. It doesn't require that we flow to bond for anything. Any further questions? I'll make a motion that we approve the non-binding declaration of official intent for the parking garage. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Nay. All right. And so moving on. So we recently talked about creating a social and economic justice advisory committee. So we have some appointments to that committee. I think I saw some people who have applied to that here. So if any of you would like to come introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your interest in serving on the social and economic justice committee. I'm Michael Sherman. I think probably the others think that it was later on the agenda, which is why some of you are not here. Anyway, I submitted an application. So I assume you've read it. And I'll just say that I guess the skills and the skills I bring are the skills of a historian. I've been a historian my whole professional life except for stint at baking at the Manges. And I just think that those are valuable and important skills in a situation like this where we have to gather information, assess it, evaluate it, and try to sort of use it in a way to go forward with the goals that the committee is charged with. I also want to say that as you saw in my resume, I spent a lot of time thinking, writing, and teaching about subjects either directly or indirectly related to this. And my feeling is that institutions reflect the values of the society that creates them. And I'd like to see what a committee like this can do to shore up those institutions, strengthen them, and correct the problems that we face. Great. Thank you, Michael. Anyone else here? Yeah. Get closer. I'm Sydney Collier. You have to get right up on top of it. Just get a little closer. Close. There you go. Okay. I'm Sydney Collier. I hope you all read my application. I'm an immigration attorney. I've been focused on diversity my entire life. Advocate for it and really believe in the power of diversity to strengthen a community. I think that there has been a lot of polarization in the country. And I want to try to prevent that both in the schools and in the community and bring people together. I wasn't really prepared to talk today, so I'm happy to answer questions. But I really look forward to hopefully serving on this committee. You have some great applicants, so whoever is on the committee, I think we'll do a fantastic job. Thank you. I didn't ask before about any questions. Anyone else here from that pool? Okay. So we have five applicants for up to seven seats. I think we said one or two of them could be council members. So one hypothesis is that we can, we maybe don't need to go into executive session. But that's just a hypothesis. What would you all like to do? I would happily appoint all five of our applicants to this committee. So the only point that I will raise, and I propose this, and so one of the things that a few folks have asked about are special seats reserved for particular groups across the state of Vermont. And I don't know that that needs to necessarily be discussed in executive session, but I really do want this to be the committee that brings in those voices as well from organizations who are also engaged in the work. So I don't know what that looks like or if that requires some fine tuning on the council piece to reserve those spots. So this is a committee that we've created, right? So we can have as many people on it as we want. So I mean, I guess my recommendation is we should see, actually maybe that crew can think through who's missing from the table and who they'd like to invite intentionally into that group. What do you think? I think that would work. I just, I would hope that it happens sooner rather than later. And I guess that also is a question about council members as well on the committee. So I don't know what that looks like either. I think we heard from somebody tonight who is young, interested in racial justice issues and very articulate. So I would like to ask hope to consider applying for this committee. We take this question on committees. It's true. So just something to think about, hope. I will. Not to put you on the spot. Donna, I think for sure, and it's one of my concerns that we make sure that we bring in resources from all the various groups that exist. But their commitment to the committee might not be the same as our residents. And that we can take the five that have applied tonight and we can add hope and others as we, you know, entertain them or they entertain our attention. So I hope it stays open and fluid. So I'd make a motion that we accept the five candidates that have applied to be the initial beginning of this committee of long name. Social justice. I don't have it in front of me. Social and economic justice, advisory. Economic justice. Social and economic justice advisory committee. That we point them for two years. Second. And appoint hope as a student rep. He says yes. That would be great. I just need more in for me. I'm actually just glad they would. I just need more in. Don't worry. There'll be time. Okay. I don't think we have time. I don't think we have time. We'll keep you on our mailing list so you'll know about the meetings. All right. Great. So we've had a motion and a second on favor. If you say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. that we are trying, you know, in terms of things, issues that we're trying to address. I want to bring in people who are directly impacted by, you know, a not living wage and all of those things. So I look forward to working with you. And I just, it's really important to me that we bring in those voices to city committees like this. I think we haven't yet, did we appoint you to the committee? I think we should do that. Since we're in that process. Connor. I have a question to approve Ashley Hill as the council representative to this committee. Second. Okay. Any further discussion? Hey, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. I didn't vote. I didn't think that would be appropriate. Thank you, Ashley. I could have voted knowing, yes, or I could have declined, but all right, great. So, and I guess we'll leave it to either you, Ashley, or Jamie to coordinate the meeting of that group. Perfect. Great. All right. The housing authority appointments. So here we have, I think two people who have applied for one seat. So either, I know Mary Alice Busby is here. I don't know Eric. Oh, great, great. All right. So if you'd both be willing to come up and introduce yourselves and tell us about your interest in this committee. Drink a little bit. My name is Eric Schulteis. I'm a staff attorney with the office of the health care advocate at Vermont Legal Aid. So I'm interested in serving on this committee. In the past, you know, I have a focus, a legal focus on housing, low income, subsidized housing, both in law school and then in my practice for three years in California. The subsequently of being engaged on a different side of the question from the housing authorities is my respect for my work with the Cambridge Housing Authority. And I think my real focus on social services generally in housing in particular is how to use data to create a responsive system. And a large part of that comes from a belief that social service agencies look at recording requirements and evidence-based methods as a real burden and to try to envision how it could be an opportunity it can be leveraged for their purpose to better serve their clients. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Mary Alice Bisbee. I know most of you and I hope you have read my application which somehow got lost for a while, but I think it did get in at the last minute. I have none of the qualifications of the other applicant. I am not a lawyer. I am an expert at downward mobility having had the lived experience of such. I live in subsidized housing under the Montpelier Housing Authority. I have some ideas of how some of the buildings could be made more energy efficient and ideas about housing for young families. I know there are a lot of ideas, but if you want the lived experience, I have been a social worker in the past. I have a master's degree in gerontology human service administration. I do not have a very long work history because people don't like to hire people when they're old and I was a long time homemaker back in the days. So thank you very much for considering me and if you want somebody other than Jack McCullough to lead the group, I think you've got a good person in the other candidate. Joshua. All right, thank you. All right, so for this one, because we do have two applicants for one seat, we probably should go into executive session. So do we have a motion to that effect? I'll move that we go into executive session for the consideration of an appointment to the Housing Authority Committee. Second. Okay, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right, we will be right back. I think we have to move to come out of executive session. So moved. I think we have to move to come out of executive session. Second. We're coming out of executive session, that's the motion. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Great. I move that we appoint Eric Schulteis to the Montpelier Housing Authority. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, and thank you, Mary Alice and to Eric and we know that there's another seat that's gonna be coming open soon. So I hope to keep you involved somehow. All right, thank you. All right, moving on. All right, we're just gonna get set up here for a second. Oh, okay. Sorry, I'm getting myself together here. So the next item, which I suspect lots of people are here for is the discussion on the parking garage. So we're gonna need a couple minutes, I assume, to. I think we're actually in pretty good shape. Are you presenting this from down there, Bill? Yeah, because it doesn't reach to my seat. I'm gonna move over there. Okay. First, I'd like to say that Stephanie Hainley from Whitenberg is on the conference call phone with us. Hi, Stephanie. Hi, everybody. So we can all hear Stephanie. I think she's gonna watch on the live stream. So be able to follow along. You wanna move your mic over, Bill? Sure. Let's kind of take down here. As close as I can get it. Just get started. Oh, there we go. Stereo. Is that better? Yeah. Okay, great. So this is a discussion about the proposed parking garage. I did send you all a memo when we posted it publicly last night. I wish we could have got it sooner, but some of the key terms weren't really settled or proposed to be settled until yesterday. So I apologize for that. I am not gonna wade through all of the detail from the memo, but certainly happy to answer any questions. I would like to hit the highlights. With any project, I think the key thing is what are the project goals? So our economic development strategic plans specifically calls for two things. As major initiative is one is new public parking and one is a new hotel. As well as affordable housing. So three of the major goals of our plan are all addressed to some extent with this project. The other project goal was to keep timing moving forward so that we could have a bond vote in November that worked with the timing of the hotel project. So those have been the guiding principles. This is the design of the area with the smaller garage that was approved through our design review process, not the larger one, but you get the general idea. The white building is the new hotel. Behind it is the one tailor development with the bike path. And then you can see the parking structure next to the new hotel. And behind the church is a layout of where the proposed church housing would go, which is probably two or three years away, but has been accommodated in the project planning. So this is the big picture, sort of I look at this part of town and what may happen with it. The project that we're specifically talking about is the city's role in the parking garage. It would be a 348 space parking garage. The garage plus the surface parking at Capital Plaza will lead to 160 net new parking spaces in the city versus what's on that area of ground now. Key emphasis for this is that there's no property tax increase required. It's funded through the fees and permit costs for the garage as well as Tiffer Avenue, which I'll talk about in a bit. The land is being donated by Capital Plaza. We do not have an appraisal on it. Probably the range of prices is somewhere between, or values, excuse me, somewhere between $350,000 and $700,000. The city will construct, own, operate and manage the facility, so that's key. So we'll own the land, we will have it all. So this is a drawing of the larger facility from behind. You can see it does eke out into the Heaney parking lot 60 State Street in order to get the extra 150 spaces. The rest is the same as the design you saw from the front. Again, this is conceptual. This is the external design is based on the design approved for the smaller garage, except that it expands the green walls further around. So that is something that can still be considered. So some financial assumptions were made in running the numbers on this project. And again, we had great assistance from Leidenbrook and Stephanie Heaney specifically, who are experts at this field. The assumption right now is the total project cost is 10 million, we feel like that is reasonable based on the construction quotes that we have, other costs that we've considered all rolled in. So as I said, that includes cost of construction, design, obtaining permits, environmental work, et cetera. The assumption is that obviously we're basing it on what we know about current bond rates. Anything can happen between now and a vote. And when bonds are actually issued in this project, probably not until February or March at the earliest. So obviously that's a variable. The pro forma is based on a 30 year bond with the first four years of interest only and then beginning to pay what we call declining principal. So your highest payment would be in year five and then declining thereafter. The assumption is that CPI would be 2.25, so all expenses as well as income has been adjusted by that throughout the assumption being that they would all be adjusted by whatever the real amount was, but that was the number used. We are only allowed to use TIF revenue for 20 years. So even though there's a 30 year bond, it only has TIF revenue for 20. One of the interesting pieces is in the Vepsi model of Vermont Economic Progress Council, which approves TIFs, they do not allow you to increase the TIF value in your calculations, but you do in real life. So this pro forma has assumed that the value and the tax bill to the hotel will remain the same for 20 years exactly, that we won't increase our tax rate, but there won't be any value change. Et cetera. So that we use that same conservative calculation in our assumption. So obviously one assumes that that will grow. We also have no other TIF increment. Now for those familiar with TIF, it is that within a certain district, any new property that's being developed, the value of the new addition can go into this tax increment financing fund. This assumes basically the increment only from the brand new hotel. It doesn't assume any other projects, any other increment from other things. Again, we're being conservative. Obviously other revenues in that district could be used for this. We'd prefer to save those for other infrastructure projects as necessary. But again, we sought to give it the most conservative look that we could. And we've built in what starts at 50,000 and goes up by CPI, capital reserve funds included annually, which of course be put into a reserve fund to be used when major maintenance and improvements and repairs are needed for the garage. So those are underlying financial assumptions. Bill, what was the amount per year that goes into that? 50,000 at the first year and then going up by CPI. So this is kind of everything all together. I'll try to break it all apart. This is a 20 year experience projection. Rosie correctly noted that we really should look at this 30, I just didn't do 30 because it didn't really fit on the page as well, but it does show up in a later graph. Basically the blue bars are the income. The red bars are the expenses. The gray line that goes across the bottom is the annual plus or minus and the yellow line is the cumulative balance. So with the, as you can see, the first four years have no interest only with the bond so that revenue greatly exceeds expenses and that is basically stored up because the next five years as the highest payments of the bond hit, we use that reserve to stay in a positive cash mode for the entire project. And you can see around 2030 it starts to even out and then slowly, at that point you're looking way out but at that point the garage is really covering its own costs. Where does the money come from? I'm gonna break this down further but basically about 19% of it is the TIF revenue. And again, we assume that 148 for all 20 years. This is, I took the year 10 average just because of all the dealing with the bond. How do you pick one typical year? So I said at the end of the first 10 years this is the average projected revenue on an annual basis and the average projected expenses. And similarly with the income, the 103 is not labeled, that's operating costs. So that would be the cost of annual maintenance, cleaning, electricity, that sort of thing. The capital reserve is the marked one and then the debt service of course is far and away the largest expense for the garage. So as you can see that's 10 years we're averaging about 730,000, taking in on average about 780,000. So here's the projected net income over 30 years at a five year increment. So again looking at the annual versus expenses. And these are the averages not because again there's no one typical year. So you can see at five years we're in great shape, 10 years it's, you know, now it's closer to the bone as we discussed and I don't know what just happened. Uh-oh, shocked the projector. Oh, come on, come on. All right, and then 15 and then you can see further out things. As the bond starts dropping off there is a, as the bond starts dropping off then the income starts showing stronger. So here's a third 30 year run where you can see the annual versus the cumulative. And again, once you get out beyond 20 years here, you know, it's pretty speculative. But the two areas I pointed out the first one in 2024, that is the first year of the full bond payment. So that's where you can see the dip in the annual cash flow. When you get back to 2030 that's when it starts hitting positive again. And then another dip is in 2039 when the TIF revenue ends. And then after that, you can see. So forgetting the cumulative line you can see in the out years it shows pretty steady that it's covering its costs. Where's the money coming from? So as I mentioned, the capital plaza is donating the land. They will also be paying market rate permits, permit fees. Once we negotiate everything looked at all the costs we settled on $125 per month. They will purchase 200 permits and pay for those for a 30 year lease. Again, their permits can increase by CPI if necessary. So that's a pretty substantial commitment to this project. They will not necessarily use all 200 of them on a given day. Conference days, wedding days might require the use of all of them but they will be paying for them regardless of their use. That's not unlike people that have permits in our parking lots right now. You might buy a monthly permit in one of our parking lots and you take a week's vacation. You still have the permit you just didn't use the parking spot and someone else is parking in your place and paying for it. We expect, we project to sell 80 other permits to other users at longer, so more permanent type users, probably not 30 years, but maybe five years type thing. And those would be at the same rate. Our goal is to keep all the commercial users at comparable rates. We will allocate in our spreadsheet, doesn't start this until year three or four because of that project but we've accommodated the possible need for 30 units for the affordable housing project at $50 a month. And that is factored in after year four. So that was the change from the regular commercial rates. 38 open spaces, those are just unaccounted for even if all the permit holders are in there would be 38 open spaces, $80 a month estimate is based on really what we see for daily rates and usages at our other parking lots. So that was how that was modeled. We did a lot of work, particularly those in downtown. We had to discount out things like Stonecutter's Way in other areas, but the core downtown lots, that's about what we get per space. I call that red because one of the key aspects of the finances of this, and we should be clear about this, is what we call flex spaces. And so that's the space that's used basically twice or more. So Capital Plaza pays for permit, their hotel guest comes in in the evening, stays overnight, leaves in the morning. That leaves that space open for the day. And so someone in downtown Montpellier might park there for the day, perhaps even someone working there might park there for the day. Typically for these garages as we've looked into them 40 to 50% flex is considered the standard. We used 30 to be conservative until we had aspect of it. But an astute resident looked at my memo and sent me an email at seven o'clock this morning and said, you know, you've got 400 and some odd spaces in a 300 and some odd space garage. And so it was a good question and I wanted to be sure to call that out that they don't add up and we have to, so we are double counting spaces and that is intentional, it's not by accident. Additionally, the TIF revenue from the garage, which we've explained, again being held constant. This is all based on first year pricing. So that's the breakdown of where revenue would come from the garage, the expenses that I explained are operating costs, capital reserve and the debt. Additional benefits to this project in discussion with Capital Plaza, they are creating around 60, I think the number is maybe as many as 68 parking spaces, surface parking and did not have a specific plan. So in discussion we decided that we would continue, we currently lease about 50 spaces from them in their parking lot now. So the city would continue with lease using the same lease terms, 50 plus or minus number to be finalized, surface places for public parking. So these would also be additional public parking, probably short term parking that would be available in downtown in addition to the longer term parking in the garage. So that is a nice addition to town. The design also calls for an ADA compliant bike path connection and park area adjacent to the garage between the hotel that's accessible from the road. So it would be a really great place for people to connect with the bike path, obviously for hotel guests, but also people who park in the garage and residents who wish to use it, place to rest from your bikes. The design even includes having some bike repair tools in there and we, you know, perhaps we would talk to a local vendor about renting bicycles or something. So there's a lot of opportunity there. This is the site plan. It's very site planning, but what you can see all the in blue is the surface parking. You can see that the road comes in off of Taylor. So the white at the top is the current capital plaza in the back is the new hotel. And again, the smaller garage, we don't have all the plans with the larger garage but the layout is very similar. So you can see there's a roadway coming in from Taylor and then it makes a 90 degree turn left to go to State Street. That is also the direct access to the parking garage. So we would have, that would either become a city street or we would have a permanent right of usement and easement with the capital plaza to make sure there's always public access to our garage. The rest are the surface parking areas that we would be leasing for public use. Plaza would reserve a few for some of their tenants who need reserve spaces and otherwise but the rest would be leased by the city. If you look at the lower portion, you can see the bike path that is the easement the city's already purchased of where the bike path will be connecting. And then next to that, now I apologize, it's not that clear, but that is there. That whole green area is where the bike path connection would be made so that people can come in. And I think you go through the garage and come out and have that connection there. And there's also a pathway between the hotel and that. So access to the, and I could be wrong about that, but anyway, there's direct access so that is the site plan currently. Concerns and risk, one of the questions I hear a lot is you know, you're making, what is the garage gonna look like? As I said, presently we're working with the garage design that was approved already through the design process. Doesn't mean it can't change. I mean, there are certain probably have a price point where our performer stops working, but certainly we'd welcome input if people were interested in looking at the design as long as we do it in a timely and cost fashion. But we certainly wanna make it, it's gonna be a major structure in downtown. The selection of contractors, I put this in the memo, I'm not gonna go into detail, but we are recommending that we move forward with DEW as our contract construction manager. They are already our contractors for One Taylor. They are the contractors for the hotel. Their services for One Taylor were acquired through a federally mandated bid process and they've agreed to hold those terms for us on this project so that they were procured that way, I think given the logistics of working in the tight area and economies of scale with all these projects, I think we should move ahead with them rather than taking the time to perhaps get a competing contractor in there. One thing I will say about their process is they're a construction manager so they still bid out all the sub work and the contract calls for us to see all those bids and participate with them in selecting the individual concrete pourers and electrical contractors, those kind of things. What they're bidding is their fee on top of all of that which was very reasonable. So, and similarly the architect, Rabidu Associates from Waterbury, they have designed the garage and the hotel to date and have the work and knowledge in and we are negotiating with them now about continuing that. It seems to make more sense than going out hiring a whole new architect and engineering firm to design something that's three quarters designed already. One of the things that's come up is reduced car use in the future. What happens if people don't use as many cars and we're building a garage? And of course, none of us know the future but to the extent that there are cars at all and there are some cars, we have the opportunity to shift cars from other places into the garage and use so we can take on-street parking and make more parklets or flowers or public gathering places. We could take some of our surface parking, develop that into businesses or more green space. So, while reduced car use is certainly something we need to look for unless we assume it's going to go away and it's entirely, we see this is sort of the last place people would park. We would constantly put people in there so that there would be a use for it. The other concern of course, if you can't secure the additional parking permit holders, we do have some interest from some major employers in the community that we've talked with. We obviously haven't finalized any deals with them waiting to see whether we're going forward. But I would say that our budget calls for 80 permits to go in and we already issued 51 permits in our parking lots around town now. So there's certainly a demand for close to the full amount and given the level of interest we've had, we think we can get the 80 permits that we need. And the other risk is deflect spaces. We don't know how, you know, we've based the assumption conservatively. We think it works based on what we know. And one of the interesting pieces of this is that if the Capital Plaza and the Hampton Inn are as successful as we all hope they would be, they might be using their 200 spaces all the time, which would be great because that's the point of the project but then those flex spaces wouldn't be as available. But that isn't what usually happens with hotels and conference business. And so we think we have a reasonable projection here. Nonetheless, I wanted to call that out. Contingencies, these are things that obviously we can't go forward without. Obviously, I mentioned earlier the current financial assumptions. If there were a giant spike in interest rates, we'd have to rethink things. If there were giant changes in costs, obviously we'd have to rethink things. But as it lays out now, it works. That's the approval of the TIF district. Next Thursday is our meeting with them, our final hearing. We don't have any reason to believe we won't be approved. But as you can see, $150,000 a year in TIF money is critical to this project. So if our TIF district were not to be approved, then we would not be able to go forward with this project. Council approval of the project and going ahead and putting a bond vote on. If you don't say, let's go, and you don't vote to put a bond vote on the ballot, then it's not gonna happen. So that is a contingency. And then obviously, even if you do support it and put it on the ballot, it still has to pass the voters before it is done. And of course, like anything, although the current plan is permitted, the new garage is not. So we would be needing to amend our existing permits because it's going on to a neighboring lot. We need to deal with that. So those are all contingencies that could stop this from moving forward. Key next steps, securing the contractors. I just described those. The third contractor is Desmond. They are pretty much a sole source. People, they do the specialized parking management systems. I didn't talk a lot about that, but we're proposing to use what's called a smart garage system. That is what tracks people in. Knows how many spaces are in the garage. Knows how many have been used out of a certain allotment. So how many capital plaza spaces are left versus how many general spaces are left. Those types of things, how many other permit holders are in and assigned spaces and will indicate when the garage is full. If there are, it will know if someone's gonna be using it later. It's a very sophisticated system. It's being used in St. Albans, Brattleboro in either Rutland perhaps and is currently the state of the art in Vermont. Securing the additional parking commitments that I just talked about, the other permit holders. Completing the design. We have, as I said, we have a design for a smaller garage, but we still have to complete a design for which construction bids and things can be obtained. We have permit, aptly. I call myself as doing this just as an aside is that we're talking about permits as in terms of regulatory permits, but we'll also talk about parking permits. So hopefully that's not confusing everybody, but we have regulatory permit applications to complete and a process to go through. And of course, public outreach and information of which this is the first major step. Opportunities for public participation include our meeting tonight. Council meetings in September and October, we have to choose, the council has a window between October 27 and October 7, when they can warn a special election and choose what to put on the ballot. So there will certainly be one special meeting for that purpose. The council may choose to take this up at other meetings between now and then, but certainly people can participate. Once, if it is warned and we go forward, there will be a public information hearing in October, only for articles that are on the September ballot. So right now we're talking about as many as two bond votes and as many as two charter changes. There may be less of either. November ballot. I'm sorry, right. Public hearing will be the end of October. Thank you, Rosie. Yes, the November ballot. As I mentioned, this has to go through permitting. So the design review committee and development review board permit hearings that people can weigh in. We had good participation on these hearings when the original hotel concept was going through. And we will be regularly updating the web, Facebook, front porch forum, bridge, et cetera, for public to get information. And certainly welcome for any other suggestions for public participation. That would be helpful to people on certainly willing to do a special work, you know, staff workshop or something for people that want to learn more and or influence the decision or process. So the schedule, we have tonight's meeting. There is the council, we'll have to call a special meeting between those dates to decide on bond vote and any other special election vote. We must hold a public information meeting between the dates of October 27 and November 5 and then the bond vote on November 6 if this all goes forward. So that would be the sort of formal public council schedule. There's plenty on the to-do list for us, but willing to take any questions or comments. Stephanie could take questions to any of us. I think there's members of the Capitol Plaza that are here. And thanks for the opportunity. Thank you. I'll leave this up in case anyone wants to refer to a slide. Well, I guess I'll stay here then. So the way I pictured this part going is I'd love to start with council questions, comments, thoughts, ideas from you all and then open it up for a public comments and questions. John, can we turn the lights on? I'm gonna say it's possible. Yeah, it's fine. You can still sort of see it. All right, so council thoughts, questions. Oh, sure. I have many Mayor Watson. Do you want to go first? I would love to. So I'm a no on this and I think I've been very loud about that for quite some while now. I don't think that the public was sort of brought into this process early enough on. I also followed back in 2014 and a little bit before that the push to bring a second hotel to town, which was met with significant opposition from the Capitol Plaza, which I can appreciate and understand. They said that they didn't think there was enough business to sustain two hotels. Then when 2016 comes around, then apparently a feasibility study was done for a second hotel. And a direct quote that was given to the media was, and well, isn't it better for me to have it than somebody else? This I see is a project that is benefiting one entity in particular. And I realize that there is the argument for the public good of parking, but I significantly question what kind of public good parking actually is. We have made a commitment as a city to work on reducing our carbon footprint. And I think that this significantly increases it. Additionally, one thing that I'm really concerned about is the fact that raw sewer overflows into our river. And we have approved, is my understanding, a request to bond to provide significant revenue for upgrades to a water recovery facility here in town. And we need to make those upgrades. I mean, those are infrastructure upgrades that we have to spend money on in order to be able to build housing and to sustain all of the things that we are trying to do here, which, and my math is a little rough, but I'm pretty sure that puts us at about 26 and a half million dollars if we were to bond both projects fully. And I know that the water recovery plan is in two phases, so we may be able to bond separately for all of those. But my goal as a city council member is one to include our community in our development. And this was a plan, I read about it in the paper. And admittedly, I was new to the council. And to me, it sounded like a done deal when the press release came out and there was this big ribbon cutting with Phil Scott there. And it seemed like it was a done deal. And then it sort of came to light that all of these other things needed to happen. And then that, oh, city council is gonna need to approve this plan. And I have thoughtfully listened to arguments on both side. And I just, I cannot support a proposal that didn't include community input upfront. I appreciate that now that the proposal is put out there with sort of a very defined place and defined parameters that now the public is being asked for comment. But to me, that was a fundamental misstep. And the public should have been brought in on this procedure far, far sooner than they were. And I just, I cannot sit here as a council member and say that I support developing between 300 and 350 new spaces when we are trying to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and are trying to find alternatives to carbon. Thank you. I have lots of thoughts on that, but I'm... Okay, can I just offer one quick, I don't want to rebut council member Hill. I appreciate her opinion. I just want to be clear. One thing we have not committed to bonding for the wastewater plant yet. That's on the next meeting. And we don't, that may or may not be going forward. Secondly, just technically, it would not be the same money. So whether we, this is coming from parking revenue and TIF revenue, none of which would be eligible to be used for the wastewater plant. So that... But the city's on the hook either way. That's correct. So it could... I just want to be clear that we're not taking money from one to pay for the other. But we are asking, and I just want to make sure I'm clear on this then, but we are in essence asking taxpayers to assume the risk that if we are unable to generate sufficient revenue to cover those payments, and I would be derelecting my fiduciary obligation to the city to support both projects. And to me, infrastructure like a water recovery facility is far more critical than this particular plan. Thank you. Other thoughts? Donna? So we disagree. We do, it's fine. It's okay. It's where the most growth comes from. I guess for me, I remember when Tom was sitting over there, Tom Galanca, and he had to recluse himself because we were discussing capital plaza here in public two or more years ago. So I don't feel that I have, at least I have felt the discussion has been there, it's been open, and what you read in the papers and the paper, I guess I take more meat into what happens here. And I'm sorry that you feel like we snuck it up on the public, because that's not our intention, nor is how I feel it's been revealed. And particularly then within the TIF, again, we talked about it in detail, and we had some estimates of costs. And I do feel like the vision for me is coming back to the Main Street scoping study, the green of America capitals, the complete streets, and that if I wanna see less pavement, then I gotta get parked cars off the street. If I wanna have more bikes, more pedestrian room, and more trees, then I feel the vision is really important to get the parking cars collected. I'm not a parking garage fan, but I'm really a fan of getting them off the streets. And I agree with you there. So to me, this is why I support this project, and I do feel like the staff has been very conservative in revenue, and it is a risk, you're absolutely right. The wastewater treatment recovery, that's going in a huge different direction of trying to use our waste to create energy. And whether that goes forward or not, I see that in a different pot and venue. So it's just a different perspective, that's all right. No, and I wanna be clear that I agree that we need to sort of put parking in a place. I just, I question whether or not this is the place. And I do have a quick follow-up question. Sure, before you go, is there any other thoughts? I'll speak at some point, but I can go after Ashley, I'm not. I just have a question. How far from the river would the closest point be of this new structure? I'd have to go back. Can we find that there's, it's toward the beginning. It's the one that shows the rear view. Again, it's conceptual. So I'll answer it that way. Keep going. No, not that one. It's a drawing. It's like a 3D. Yeah. It's near the beginning. Yeah, it is near the beginning. Sorry guys. That one? That one, yep. Sorry guys. So this is the, this is the Keeney parking lot, 60 parking, so we can't really, North Branch comes down this way. Where it was meet down here. This is one Taylor over here. Totally, I can't tell you the number of feet, but that's the perspective. This is the Christ Church. Wasn't there another picture that showed the river also? Yeah, that's true. Well, it would be the site plan, but that was with the smaller garage. This is the only drawing we have with the perspective larger garage. This is Act 250 exempt because it's in a designated downtown area. I don't know the answer to that. You wanna speak in your mic? No, I apologize. I asked if this was Act 250 exempt because it's in a designated downtown area. I thought that would be. I believe that's the case, but I don't know for sure. So have we done any impact studies about what creating this much change to that area means in terms of like environmental impact? We have to do all of that for our own local permitting. And we have to do, you know, a lot of that was done for the initial proposal. Remember the 200 unit garage and all of the other, well, everything except for the Christ Church housing has already been through permitting, one Taylor and all those kind of things. So they've all taken that into account. So we would simply be updating information for going to the larger structure and finding, you know, again, that's a concept finding the exact best to mention, you know, locations for it. But we have, you know, you have to do that. It's obviously, we would want to, it's in city's best interest. Glenn. It's uncomfortable for me to be at all in favor of building a parking garage. That's not something that I ever thought that I would be in favor of. And I'm unsettled in my support, but I am in balance on Donna's side of this. My sense is that while I would love for there to be enormously fewer cars in the city to the point where we would not need any parking or completely minimal, I don't see that happening in the near future. And one potential good future would include a lot of electric cars, which will still need to be parked. I also hear the argument that Ashley made about the timing of this and the perception about Capital Plaza as the initiator in some ways. At the same time, I think that this is an opportunity that we have to solve a problem that has been a problem for the city for a long time and do it in partnership with two entities, Capital Plaza and the state through the TIF, that may not, that opportunity, that kind of opportunity may not arise again in the near future. It's certainly, I hear all the risks and I again, I'm not thrilled to be in favor of a parking garage, but I am at this point. So I'm going to interrupt our process because I think one of the things that might be useful now is if there's any questions from counselors at this point and then let's go to the public for comments and then we can make sort of any further statements that we want to make after that. Does that sound okay, team? Yes, so any further questions from counselors? Yeah, so these are things that I think I'd heard from you earlier, Bill, but I didn't hear it tonight and I couldn't remember and I thought they'd be helpful. What's our projected lifetime of the garage, assuming that there's still need for it? Like, how long do we think a concrete parking garage lasts without needing major? I believe 40 years. Okay. And with the understanding that our parking situation and car situation may look very different in 40 years, but that's a good thing to hold in our heads. And then we- We're building structures that can handle the hovercraft. We had talked at one point about what our contingencies were in the case that construction costs were very different than they are right now. Given where we are with tariffs and steel prices and all kinds of construction prices going all over the place, I think it would be helpful for folks to know what our back out options are should our contractor go out to bid and find the numbers are totally different than we thought could be. Stephanie, do you want me to try to answer that? Yeah. The question is, are you concerned about the construction pricing? Well, let's just say we have to get those construction numbers firmed up at the time of entering construction and at that time they will bid the project. We're talking within the next three to five months to bid all of that work out. So we built in a couple of different contingencies. The contractor built in a contingency and we added a contingency. So I think we're okay in that respect. And I think we'll just, we will know a lot more before we actually take out the debt. So our ultimate back out option is that we just decide not to bond for this. Even if we have approval to bond, we can decide not to take out the bond if we decide that this is just not gonna happen. You don't have enough money, right? The other avenue, and I'm looking at capital plaza people, but we've talked openly about this. They're facing the same situation where they're hotel. They're working on projected costs and they're gonna have to make some key financial decisions that putting themselves on the hook for, I think it's 16 or 17 million dollars. And so we're in it together in that regard, but we can also look at the parking rates if we need to adjust, I mean, as long as we're, if that's what happens, that's another source of funding to help make the project work. So I mean, that is another contingency, but right at the end of the day, if it becomes 12 million instead of 10 million, then the parking rates aren't gonna work, the bond isn't gonna work, then I would suspect the hotel's not gonna work. So it doesn't happen. And what's our contingency should the hotel decide that their project doesn't work? I mean, I assume that they kind of move forward together, but there's, we don't, the TIF doesn't happen if the hotel doesn't happen. So it doesn't happen. That's correct. And obviously we would have a development agreement with them and in the contractor, you know, isn't gonna start our project unless they've got to go ahead to start their project. Another advantage of using the same contract. Ashley? And maybe I misunderstood what Stephanie said, but Stephanie, did I hear you say that we would need to go forward with putting together bids and getting contractors lined up in the next three to five months? Well, from now, we're talking about three months, I guess, until the bond, or until the vote happens. So I'm saying over the course of the next few months, we're not gonna be able to get the bids in until we get the actual, oh, we'll be prepping all of that, but we have to kind of wait for that November vote, so. Right. Okay, so in theory then, well, obviously nothing could happen before then, but I guess my sort of question is, is that the best use of city resources in that time when there are lots of other projects that are also ongoing, and I know that city staff is already sort of at capacity. And I just, it's just another thing, I think that we should be aware of that it's going to take significant resources to do those things. Okay, any other further questions from, oh yes, Jack. I had communications from a couple of constituents, sort of along the lines of what Ashley was saying, and not exactly saying, well, what's the rush? Why should the city be doing this kind of thing on the timetable of the developer? And so I'm just curious about what negative consequence could flow from saying, well, we're just gonna slow down and not proceed at this time because people have not had time to digest this. I think, capital plaza folks can answer for themselves. I understand they've got a contractual obligation to begin work in November, December, something like that, or they lose their franchise agreement. Obviously, they're not gonna start unless they have some assurance that a parking garage is coming in. Well, that's true. This is being driven somewhat by that schedule. It's also the opportunity, to answer the question earlier, a private developer came forward with a project that met several community priorities that had been previously identified, and it was an opportunity to address a bunch of needs at once. And sometimes when you're doing economic development projects, you have to move them when the opportunity presents itself. And then I think from just a logistic standpoint, even if the financing were all figured out, building the garage and then coming in, I mean, the hotel and then sort of coming in later with an open functioning hotel and building a new garage next to it with guests there and all that and wedging into that back corner behind, it just doesn't, I think it just makes a lot more sense to build them sequentially and at the same time. So I think there's that argument. But there's no question. I mean, we wouldn't be taking this on despite all the talk about the parking, but the TIF and an anchor tenant makes it possible. I mean, let's not forget, it's something like $300,000 a year in permit fees that the capital plaza is paying for parking rights in there, as well as donating the property and the TIF revenue. So that's another 150,000. So directly and indirectly, they're contributing $750,000 a year to the success of this project. So that's what makes this possible to address a larger community need. Thanks. Donna. I thought the hotel also made our TIF application stronger because they're looking for projects that are real. So to me, the TIF timing is also really a key element. Okay. Further questions? Okay, so we wanna open it up to the public. So again, if you would try to keep your comments to two minutes and Donna's gonna help us there to keep track of time. So if you have anything you'd like to say about this, I'll give it to you in a couple of minutes. I'll give it to you in a couple of minutes. I don't know if I can keep it to two minutes, but I will do my best. Well, thank you, Stephen. Stephen Whitaker, my pleasure. From a planning perspective, it's fundamentally wrong to be having this garage location driven by one beneficiary. The phrase, privatize the profits and socialize the costs comes to mind. How open a process we had to decide where a parking garage should go is fundamentally deficient. This should not be driven. And I note the irony of you also talking about a confluence park waterway on the same night, on the same agenda, and this runs, this project if approved going forward would hog tie the full purpose of the confluence park. I mean, I quote from the document linked in the agenda for the later item on the agenda. The river is now seen as a positive attraction where clean water and attractive riverbank is an essential element of the quality of life and future economy into a strong desire to transfer the character of the riverfront from the edge of a parking lot to gracious riverside promenade. Here you are threatening to put a four story albatross of concrete, of budding. Who's gonna wanna go and snake their way around behind this parking garage to go to our park? It's contradictory. It's fundamentally contradictory to the options that should be available to your waterfront park. There are, there is a need for parking. The logical place to put parking is in the pit from the pavilion all the way to the sheriff's office. That will take some logistics to organize among the federal building and Vermont Mutual. But that is the only sound place for a project of this scale. If you go to these other towns, I've got, I have in other states and in Brattleboro, these are 100,000 is grossly insufficient for maintenance. These garages become urinals and collect carbon, you know, they need steam cleaning regularly. This is not, this is not well thought out and it's being driven by one private interest and with inadequate planning by the city council. I would ask you to think about your legacy as counselors to have this on your conscience and on your reputation. Thank you, Stephen. I have two comments, just informational comments. One, the maintenance costs were taken from other garages. They're poorly maintained. That's a matter of opinion. Secondly, we did do several studies for parking garage locations over many, many years. Parking garage locations have been looked at for infinite and the actual for one Taylor and the capital district plan. The two most prime locations are identified. One was dislocation. The other was actually behind here at the Jacobs parking lot. And I remember having a back, I see Nancy Sherman here. We had many discussions over which one of those was preferable, but this was identified through a pretty extensive planning process as one of the prime parking garage locations in the city. Thank you. Paul. Hi, I'm Paul Carnahan. I live on Sabin Street. First, a comment and then a question. The comment is that I agree with Councillor Hill's summarization of the process. There was not the, or there was the impression that the hotel and the garage as approved were done deal and everyone was happy and it was gonna happen. So if it had been thought that this was a city project for a garage all along, someone should have come forward and said, hey, wait a minute. This is a city project, not a private project. So I think the process has been flawed. My question regards something that hasn't been brought up yet, which is traffic. I assume there was some sort of traffic study done for the smaller garage. I don't know if those are just automatically updated, but I was also just from a layman's perspective, I was wondering what the traffic flow was that's being proposed. If it's a one-way traffic flow going in one side and out the other, or if it's gonna be two-way, and what sort of traffic control devices you're looking at at those two major streets, because we are now putting a lot more cars in one place than had been originally proposed. So to your second question, there was a traffic study done for the smaller garage and it will have to be updated with the new information that's correct. The current thought is it would be two-way, but that will be looked at to see if that makes sense. We have the key issue, and I'm now, Tom McCartle's gonna come up and smack me here because I'm gonna mistake, but he gave me a quick primer this afternoon, that the key issue is that the timing of when people come and go, so it's not like 350 spaces cars are all gonna be leaving at the same time. You've got hotel guests that check in and leave at different times than workers and residents and those kind of things. So that's one of the, there's a science to estimating that. So that will all have to be looked at and I am not qualified to give you that answer, but that will be part of the permit process as amending this. I think just due to the criticism, which is a fair, I think, is the garage was initially proposed as a private garage and that is what went through permitting, but I also will say that I believe it was said pretty early on that it needs to happen with TIF and that it should really for it to be successful. It's going to have to be larger and I know that the council's had several conversations about that since spring and I think sometime this summer I tried to write an article for the bridge sort of laying out what we were talking about so people knew this was coming. So if people feel like we weren't open enough, I guess you can always be more open, but I know certainly the intent was to communicate that as clearly as possible. I also recall Paul out for being the sharp-eyed citizen that emailed me at seven o'clock this morning about the, I appreciate it. That was a great question, I will. So thank you. Further questions, comments from the public? John Snell, first off I want to thank Bill for the hard work that you put in clearly on this moving this along and I for one don't feel blindsided. The changes have been a bit abrupt at times but understandable. I also want to thank the Bashara family for working hard on this. I was a tenant of theirs for years and I know that they're in it to make money and they're part of the community and they couldn't be making money unless they were part of the community. This is a significant piece of infrastructure. It will require maintenance. I'm concerned about whether we can add another thing to the city that needs to be maintained and I guess we've woken up about other aspects of the infrastructure and I just hope that this one's on the radar so that it is maintained because it would be a disaster if it weren't. I'm not too concerned about traffic management for the same reason, Bill, you just mentioned. I am concerned that much of the parking will be warehouse, basically warehouse cars and I had always hoped that, that says nothing. You have one minute. Okay. I had always hoped that we could warehouse cars outside of town but quite honestly, that's the same sort of a problem just pushed outside of town. So we are gonna warehouse some cars there. I am thrilled at the possibility of freeing up street parking and replace putting it in this dam parking garage. I can imagine that part of the Confluence Park, for instance, that we get to grab those 30-some parking places that are associated with Taylor Street, put them in the parking garage and actually have a decent-sized park there. Two quick things. One is I'd like to investigate the possibility of going up one more floor versus wider and also to go flat versus angled so that in 40 years, we potentially have a building that could be renovated into housing. Thank you. Thank you, John. Yes. Dan Groberg, Executive Director of Montpelier Live. Montpelier Live and the Montpelier Business Association strongly support this parking garage and encourage the council to move forward with this project. It serves several community needs that have been identified over the course of many decades and we have a unique opportunity here. We have an opportunity to provide convenient parking for visitors to Montpelier while enabling creativity with existing parking spaces, including the possibility of developing other surface parking into new productive buildings. I think while I would love to envision a possibility where there are zero cars in Montpelier, I think that's an unrealistic vision and I think there will always be at least 350 cars coming into downtown Montpelier and if we could eliminate all the other parking in Montpelier and only have 350 cars, that would be amazing vision. I think this enables a hotel project that is gonna bring 30,000 meals a year to downtown Montpelier. The economic impact to downtown is significant in enabling this new hotel project. It's gonna enable affordable housing. It's gonna enable possibly future development in the area and it's just a tremendous, it will be a tremendous asset for downtown. We've been trying to increase tourism in terms of the carbon impact. We all know the impact of people driving around in circles trying to find a parking spot. So if there's a convenient garage that's well labeled and well marked, people will go to it with any wayfinding that we'll have, I promise. I think it's a really great opportunity to lay out a future for the economic development of this city and I strongly encourage in the Montpelier Live and the Business Association strongly encourage you to move forward with this project. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Hi, I'm Eve Jacobs-Carnahan and I live in Montpelier. So I- Closer. Closer. I'm Eve Jacobs-Carnahan. I definitely understand that, and have been around for many, many years and seen the city talk about the need to solve parking problems. There can be disagreement about what the extent of those problems are but what I'm concerned about is that this appears to be a situation where a project has been put forward by a private developer and everybody is saying, oh, that's it, that's the solution. Instead of an analysis and an examination of is this the best solution, is this the best way to put forward, put at risk $10 million of taxpayer bond money? And I don't, I'm not hearing an analysis of who this parking garage is for. Like, is it for commuters? Is it for shoppers? Is it for tourists? And the answer to those questions might suggest that you have a different type of parking garage or you have it in a different location because if it's for state workers who are commuting, maybe it shouldn't be in this location, maybe it should be more on the periphery like many of the plans have been put forward such as the winning bridges proposal for net zero. And then the other thing is we're talking, so it's, I'm understanding from the presentation and from just reading the one memo last night and seeing the newspaper is that the net gain to the city for public parking is 160 spaces. So I think we're talking about spending $10 million to get 160 spaces and is that the right way to look at this? Maybe we should be spending $10 million to get 400 spaces, none of which would be for a private hotel but all of which would be for the broader city interests or if the real goal is to do this to help state workers and it should be a project with the state and put the money in that place and put it in a different location and fund it and get more parking spaces out of it. So I just don't see that there's a clear analysis going on, it seems as if people are seeing a possible project come forward that is frankly put forward, it's here now because of a private hotel wanting to do it and everybody's saying, oh, I think that's gonna be the solution without an analysis and that's what I'm concerned about. Thank you, Eve. Hi, Deb Sacks. Excuse me. It's dry in here. Net Zero Vermont, executive director of Net Zero Vermont and we commissioned the design competition that gave the city a vision and hundreds, almost 1,000 people voted for that vision and it didn't include, as I recall, a parking garage. If we wanna get to Net Zero Energy, a parking garage, an investment in such infrastructure would be leaning into more of car-centric and enabling car-centric lifestyles and while I appreciate what retail needs and what your community needs, there are what Eve just said, I fully support is a broader look at this and I know that you're doing and working very hard and I just applaud your commitment to how hard you are working on this project for a parking garage. But illuminate and step out for a moment and look at what the options could be and what you could have moving forward. 40, 50 years from now as we try to get to Net Zero, which is Net Zero Energy, the amount of energy that we use is the amount of energy we're producing and having that renewable energy and electrifying our future transportation system could easily be met with a solution of a train. Imagine a community rail that's connecting the cities together in Vermont and that's met with good public transit and microtransit options and that is where we might look at that broader analysis and see where this city could actually go and what it could be and how proud it could be of what it has. I have 30 seconds. Okay. So Net Zero would like to help on that and help get behind that kind of thinking and bring whatever resources that we can and experiences that other communities have. If the bond vote doesn't go forward, what is the backup plan and how can we set the city going forward with maybe those auto capture lots that are out of town and thinking about what you're parking and I know that you've studied this and studied this and studied this and over the years and it's really hard, but working together we can get there. Thank you. All right, any further comments from the public? Okay. Oh, okay, all right. So my name is Laura Gephard and with the Montpelier Development Corporation. So many of the points that Dan raised from Montpelier Live, I totally agree with and all the comments that came out today, I do just want to address that the project was proposed by a private interest and that is the nature of a public-private partnership on projects like these and the garage is meeting a whole lot of needs. A new hotel, which was identified in the Economic Development Strategic Plan as a transformational project, which is huge for the city. There is a private interest, but it means it's bringing more people to the downtown to shop at our small businesses, to see the great city, to interact with the folks who live here and it also provides extra parking for residents, people coming in to work. So it has a lot of additional amenities, not just that private interest, but it wouldn't happen without that private interest who is also providing employment opportunities and is a very meaningful part of this community. So I do just want to recognize that and in addressing some of the concerns about making it a car-centric or promoting this car-centric mentality, this isn't excluding future visions of more sustainable transportation options. This is just meeting a need. We still have cars and we will for a few more years at least. So this is accommodating some of those uses and it does free up some surface slots for a potential redevelopment for a higher and better youth. So just wanted to make those comments. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. All right, so any further comments from the public? Okay, so other comments from counselors. I'm gonna go Connor and then we'll go from there. So I'm not in love with building a parking garage. I don't think anybody is, you know, it's monstrous. It's, you know, it doesn't check a lot of boxes for me. That said, I do think the city did its due diligence in this case and I believe we need this capacity to accomplish many of the things we want to do for the future of this city. One point I would address is I'm a labor guy. A project of this magnitude is pretty rare for us in Montpelier and I want us to be a socially responsible city and do it the right way. So I'm not sure if this is the appropriate time to raise it but I would bring up the idea of entering into a project labor agreement in this case which is a pre-hire collective bargaining agreement that sets the terms and conditions of employment that would determine the wage rates, the benefits of the employees actually working on the garage here. So I think there's more time to talk about in the future but you know, we should treat these employees like we, these contractors, like we treat our own employees in city government. So I will be bringing that up in the future. Thank you. Yeah, before you, that's totally fine. There's- You're gonna go? I will, but you can- Okay. Actually, do you wanna go? Go for it. So I echo what Connor said, that's, I mean, it seems like there is enough yay votes to approve this, which is what it is but I certainly think that that's a significant piece. I know one of the issues that the Social and Economic Justice Committee is going to explore was creating a city minimum wage and then with particular regard to contracts, potentially over a certain dollar amount that we ensure that workers are treated fairly in those situations. I would also raise the question because the city is investing in this and again, I don't know what this would look like. I'm not purporting to say that I would but the hotel will create jobs for the city and one of the things that we as a city look at continually is what kind of jobs are these entities bringing to our community and I think that warrants consideration if the city is going to be spending $10 million or 10 and a half million dollars of city money. Finally, I am struck between some of the interest in contrast between talking about parklets and using parking for public good versus creating a public good that creates a sort of direct private benefit and I understand that this is probably going to go to the ballot it seems as though there's enough support and I appreciate that but it just strikes me that as a member of our community who lives relatively close to the downtown area I want my downtown to be accessible and frankly I would rather have parklets than parking garages filling our city space and that's not to say we don't need parking because we do need parking but it's just an interesting juxtaposition that I felt like I needed to highlight for everyone. When we first had our presentation from the consultants for the TIF proposal one of the things that one of the paramount points they mentioned was that we should not be proceeding on the basis of if you build it they will come that we should only use TIF fundings for known projects with development partners and because otherwise we're heading down the road to financial disaster and I think that this project clearly meets that standard because we have a development partner in the hotel that is going hand in hand with this parking garage if the hotel doesn't go forward the parking garage doesn't go forward and vice versa. I think the hotel will increase a lot of downtown activity and business and will provide jobs for people downtown which are all things that we want. I think the Bashara family over many decades I think back to what they did in 1992 has shown a real commitment to improving the city of Montpelier. Two or three meetings ago we had a presentation from the complete streets project and one of the things that's attractive to this is that if we have, if it turns out that we have less vehicular traffic than we do now or less need for parking than we do now we can move that parking off the streets, move closer to the complete streets, model that we had presented to us, increase parklets and other public uses for the space on the roads. I think that's all a good thing. And finally, whether you agree with the complaints or not, one of the biggest complaints everybody has about Montpelier is that there's not enough parking. And the other thing we know from discussion of parking over many decades is that whenever there is a proposal for a parking garage for somehow it always seems to be the worst possible place for a parking garage. And I think that wherever a parking garage is proposed it will get opposition. I think one of the things we talk about in density and avoiding some crawl is to build up and not out. Parking garage enables us to do that. Steve, I take your point about maybe the pit would be a good place for a parking garage rather than where it is now. If we build this parking garage here, maybe we don't need the pit to be just a big parking lot. Maybe that opens that up for other development which I would like to see. So I'm supporting this at this point. Yeah, go ahead Rosie. So I'm really sympathetic to a lot of the points that counselor Hill made. And there are points that I initially held myself. When this came out initially as a private plan to do a development, I kind of said, well, it's a private piece of land and the developer within our parameters, within our zoning parameters, they can do what they want. But unless they're asking for the city's help we probably shouldn't get too involved in it. And then I felt really kind of, I felt bait and switched when the Bishara family came out after having announced this is a done deal and asked for the city's help and said that it couldn't move forward without the city's help. And I was honest with them and with the rest of the council at that point. I was really mad and I really pushed city staff to push really hard on this. If we are gonna be involved, we need to get a good deal for the citizens of Montpelier and we need to get everything we possibly can out of this deal. And so city staff have pushed and I'm really pleased with some of the concessions we've been able to get and some of the benefits we've been able to get for the public. I still had a lot of concerns. Is this kind of fell in our laps? Is this, have we done our due diligence here? And I've asked a lot of questions over the past. I can't even, it feels like at least a year that we've been talking about this perhaps more. I hope something like that. And I think that the project is better for those questions but I'm also really sympathetic to the notion that a lot of those conversations have happened in executive session because we were negotiating. So I would like to give the public the opportunity to feel like they fully understand this and to ask more questions because I know that I've asked questions that have made this project better and the rest of the counselors have as well. And even tonight, I appreciated John Snell's comment about the flat garage being able to be repurposed at some point in the future. And questions like that or other questions that haven't come up yet could make this project even better. And so I've asked, well, is there, this is the night we're kind of giving the presentation of the proposed deal to the public but what are the points in which we can take more public input and ask, have the public ask more of those questions and bring more of those points to the discussion. So it sounds like, we need to, if we wanna go forward with a bond vote in November, there is a timeline, but we don't necessarily have to commit to anything tonight. We could give some more time for folks to digest this over the next few weeks and take some more public comment at the next meeting before voting on September 12th. So that is an option. And again, the public does, we have to make a case for the public to support this in November. And if we don't make that case, then this doesn't go forward. But I do want people to feel like they understand this and that they've been able to contribute to it and ask those hard questions like we've had the opportunity to do. One further point I wanted to make is that as I was thinking about whether this was the right project for Montpelier, I started thinking about all the other things that would be nice is the, wouldn't it be cool if we could have more street festivals, if we could close Langdon Street and make a pedestrian street there, which I'm not proposing we do that tonight, but gosh, we can't even think about that right now because we need that parking. And there are so many possibilities that having that parking problem solved frees up for us, including the affordable housing at Christchurch possibility or some other projects that we've heard about where people said, oh, if I could get a few more spaces, I would do this. And we're not making this decision based on those things because they are not done deals. Those could happen, as Jack said, but they're not done. But as I've been weighing this, those certainly have, this is a way to get there. The final comment I wanna make is that I don't go near Burlington if I can help it. I hate Burlington. I think there's too much traffic, it's too much of a big city for me. I am a small town person at this point. The only reason I ever go to Burlington is because I know that I can park in their parking garage on Church Street and then I don't have to deal with driving around in parking. And so I started thinking about that, about Montpelier and there are people who don't come to Montpelier because parking is a pain. And if they had a garage where they could park, they would come to Montpelier. And so that's also played a role in my thinking about this project, is without those parking garages on Church Street, I would never go to Church Street. And I'm wondering how many folks are out there who feel the same way about Montpelier. So those are a few of my comments. Turn it over to Anne. Do you wanna talk a little bit about opportunities the public does have to weigh in or further opportunities? Well, so there's the, so let's talk first about the sort of legal steps that we have to follow. And then I think we can add more if that's important. I think it would be helpful if there's a signal to move forward, to allow us to start putting some of these agreements, to keep moving this ball forward as opposed to stalling for September 12th. But that said, and we were also planning to be talking about the wastewater plan on September 12th, which I suspect will be equally as long and complicated. But that is amazing. So the legal requirement is we have tonight's meeting and then we have to hold a special meeting to one the ballot vote. And I think that the thought would be that there would be nothing else on the agenda that night other than the one, two, three, or four ballot items being considered. So that would obviously be the last chance for people to weigh in to convince the council not to put it on the bond vote. I would be certainly willing to host a workshop meeting if people wanna come in. And I think certainly questions like the design of the garage, whether it's flat or tall, those aren't done deals. And we've gotta move that quickly, but they can certainly be looked at within certain timing and financial parameters. I don't know if the council wants to create a small group or have a design workshop or something like that where people can come in and weigh in on. One of the reasons we wanted to get, and I do know that this only came out last night, but knowing that the council had over a month before I had to make a decision to give people time to digest this and ask questions and answer ask, I'm happy to answer them at any time. And then of course, if you choose to put on the bond vote, there will be another public information hearing. And of course, people can, their ultimate citizen participation is when they check the yes or no box. But we can certainly add more if people want, but those are the things we have to do is to special meetings. Thank you. So I wanna thank all of those who offered comments tonight, whether they were for it or against it, I think all of those comments add important richness to this discussion and sort of like Rosie was saying, I mean, I think that it really does make this project better when we have lots of different minds on it. So I also wanna make a comment that I liked John's suggestion of the flat. Insofar as we can explore that, I'm also interested in that for potential future you know, opportunities. So I'm also very excited about this. I've been, we've been talking about parking since I've got on the council and it will just be such a delight to be moving forward on a project. And I am also excited to free up space potentially on street. So with all that in mind, you know, I'll just leave it at that because I don't wanna be redundant. People have been very articulate other thoughts and then I think we should do something or not. I just wanted to add that I do not wish to start a feud with the Burlington City Council. They have a very nice city. I just, I prefer not to spend a lot of time in the Baltimore City. You can give them praise when you go, you have a parking cross. Mr. Pro-man's won't tell you. I'm done. Under recommended action, there seems to be like three parts here. So I was going to start with the motion to approve the agreement terms with Capital Plaza, authorized city manager to complete and execute the final contract. So is that your motion? That's a motion. Is there a second? Second. For the discussion? So I would really prefer to wait until September 12th to do that just because they'll give a great presentation and I want folks to have the opportunity to watch it. I want folks to have the opportunity to read about it in the paper and make those further comments. And then if we did wanna make any changes to the contract with Capital Plaza or any further alterations that we haven't bound ourselves without hearing that further public comment. So there are three parts to this. Is there any one part in particular or just all of it? I just wanna be clear on what you're objecting to. Well, if the motion doesn't get a second, it doesn't. Oh, no, it didn't get a second. It did. Thank you, Jack. I seconded it so we could talk about it. I didn't hear that. Sorry, I'm just trying to pull it up and I got signed out. I'm sure it's probably easier for you to like look at it. Otherwise, I'd just tell you, but. May I ask a procedural question? Yes. Whatever happens with this motion, can we set a date for the public hearing on a possible November bond vote? Whether or not we vote yay or nay? We do have to set it in. Quite frankly, if we proceed with the wastewater bond and if we proceed with some of the charter changes that have been talking, you're gonna have to hold that hearing for that purpose as well. Because this is 17, it's a typo. It has to be the 27th to the 7th, somewhere in that window. And our normal meetings on the 26th. Yes, so I'm back to if we don't pass my motion, can we still set a date for the possible November bond vote tonight? Oh, you can do that, whether you set it or not. Okay, okay. I wasn't thinking. In fact, I hope you do. So I did find that. So I guess I would be fine with setting the date so people can plan around it. So that number three. And I think I would be okay with directing the city manager to complete. Then some of those next steps are just, and I'm not the one who gets to, we all make this decision together, so. You're letting people know how you're gonna vote, whether this motion passes or not. Bill, can you describe real quick what those next steps are because I'm not finding them right in front of me? Sure. Yeah, there's a whole list. The second page, midway. Yeah, so obviously the VEPC approval we're gonna do, I assume no matter what, the phase one we've got to move on, the finalizing with our contractors. Again, we're not gonna get too far down the road until we know we have money, but we need to do some of, if we're gonna look at design options, we're gonna have to spend some of that, we're working out the parking systems. I think getting stuff ready to go for permit, finalizing the use of 60 State Street, those that's not a big cost there. I think the main thing is we would, obviously we wouldn't secure any other parking tenants until the bond passed, but we certainly would start talking to people about that, and that would be helpful. I understand, and I'm certainly all for the, having the public have as much participation. I also note it's three weeks before our next meeting, so it'll be sort of three weeks where we might be in a little bit of a hold. I'm sure the chairs in the Capitol Plaza would like to know that we're on board with there, the general terms of the deal. You know, we could set the final approval of it because there will be a final contract, we could do that, but whatever people are comfortable moving forward with or not, I mean, it is your decision, not mine. Can you just give a little bit more how doing final approval might work? Well, I think, so the way this was, I had written it in that you would, you would approve the general terms and then we would just finalize the thing. We could always set it that you're approving these general terms, but the actual written contract comes back for council approval as opposed to authorizing me to just go ahead and finish it. How do other folks feel about that? I mean, if I'm just by myself here, then we can. I'd like to see my motion move forward as is. I'd like us to progress. Yeah, go ahead, Glenn. I feel as though it would be good to have some amount of delay, but it's hard for me to say, for sure one way or the other, I would vote for either a motion as or a delay, honestly. I think either would be a positive move for me. I don't know if you've noticed, but we've added a whiteboard off to the side here with our upcoming agenda items. So in case you're ever wondering, what are we gonna be working on? We have things projected out. I'm also feeling a little torn about this because I appreciate public input and I want the need of the public to have the opportunity to weigh in and keep our thinking sort of open-handed, but September 12th is looking pretty full. So I'm just worried about that. So I'm leaning towards also moving it forward tonight and then knowing that there will be still other opportunities for the public to comment and weigh in. We have two more public hearings. Can I just weigh one more thing into, this is just a technical point, that any contract or anything that is done is 100% contingent on a bond passing and that means it's contingent on whether you vote to put the bond onto a ballot. So we can't legally bind us too far down the road without anything, so it's really the signal that we're at least working in the same direction and we're moving forward, but even if we sign a contract and then the bond either doesn't pass or doesn't go in the ballot, then contract or the TIF doesn't pass. I mean, the whole thing could go out the window next Thursday if they don't pass our TIF, right? So, Glenn, do you need a minute? Are you okay? I'm fine. Okay. Yeah, I guess I'm just gonna sort of say what I've already said. I just feel like the public has to have an opportunity, a meaningful opportunity to weigh in on this and I just, I don't, I'd be happy to schedule a special meeting between so we can divide up that agenda, but this is a huge ask of taxpayers and residents and everyone who participates in our community and I just feel like people really need to, we need to get city buy-in on this, right? Because our city is the one responsible for this and I just, I don't wanna circumvent the public process in the name of getting this done for the sake of getting it done and I just, I'm really uncomfortable with having city staff go forward and negotiate, you know, figure out contract terms and all of that when there are other things that need attention right now as well and I just wanna make sure that we give city staff clear guidance. I think that's something the council's been working on over the years to be really clear about what we're asking and for me, I want to have one more opportunity for the public to weigh in and then have a vote on Donna's motion. I mean, everybody knows what my vote would be, but you know, I just, I think it's important that the public have an opportunity to watch this meeting and then to, oops, and then to be able to reach out to all of us council members so that if they have questions and can't be here, they can get those questions asked and answered next time. Connor? It's support a special meeting between now and the 12th. I think it's looking a little crowded on the 12th so I might be hesitant to edit there. Fine with me. Other thoughts? So if- No, then you don't know. Yes, Jack? I'm not sure if a special meeting is what we need. I think I value the idea of public input though and so at some point before we have a public hearing on the bond vote, I think it does make sense to, to tell Bill tonight, well, go forward, keep working on it, get everything developed, but come back to the council for contract approval. And I don't know if September 26th is too late for that or because that's, I think probably what I would suggest if we, if people want to go in that direction. You'd suggest putting it on September 26th? Yeah, what does it look like? Oh, yeah, that's short tonight, now it's short. We know what happens. Yeah. Yes, Donna? I know, Ashley, I just take a little bit back of such flat statements. I don't feel that I've neglected the public and I'm not open to more and we do have two official public hearings and we can have a workshop with the final material as the staff moves ahead between now. But we do have these clear deadlines and so my vote's not gonna change and indeed we have time to make changes to suggestions such as what John did with, oh, let's think about this, maybe it should be flat. I don't think any of that really affects the big picture of what they're moving forward with and what we're going to then be discussing for the bond vote is all the final details and really soliciting public support at that time. And so I feel very comfortable voting on it tonight. Sure, and I would like to call the question. Okay. So one possibility is, well, we can talk about what happens if it doesn't get voted up. I think we need a vote first. I think we gotta vote first. Yeah, Phil, go ahead. Well, I was just gonna offer that I'd be happy to host a workshop meeting on this next Wednesday, the 29th evening as a manager's staff workshop open to the public. People can come and ask. Great. Council can come if they want. It won't be a worn council meeting, nothing to vote. So people can have an opportunity to review it but it would be good. As I say, you're not voting officially on anything until you vote to put it on the ballot. That's when you're actually putting your hand up to say you're going forward. And Bill, is it a problem for you if the council doesn't vote to approve until the 12th or the 26th? It would be better if it was approved sooner. Yeah, I mean, I think just, I mean, there's gonna be uncertainty until the end. That's the nature of a public process. And, but on one hand, we're trying to have marshal forces to get in moving on something. And I think if there are sensing, we don't know if this is really gonna happen. Everyone's resources are gonna go on. Okay, thanks. Maybe there's something in between that can be worded a statement of support to move forward without a commitment or something like that. I think, you know, everyone, people are, you know, companies that are, you know, architects and those stuff, you know, they're not really getting paid until the bond passes and they're doing work. You know, the Decapito Plaza is certainly putting a lot of their money up to develop the project. So there are people that are waiting on where the city's at with this, or at least, you know, understanding that there's a bond vote coming or potentially coming. But I will commit to open public session next Wednesday if anybody wants it. And maybe not make that a special council meeting. Anyway, you've called the question. We should vote. A long time ago. Sorry. All right. It works, just for the record. How does it work, John? The previous question, and it's essentially a motion that needs to be seconded and it has to be passed by a two-thirds majority. It was seconded? Yes. No. No, not the question. Donna's motion. The previous question. Right, I mean, the calling the question, it's called the previous question, two-thirds majority. That's because she didn't realize she had to get a second. Oh, thank you. Good point. People got talking and I didn't interrupt them. I apologize. All right, well, let's, I think we should vote. I'm confused. Oh, okay. What are we voting on right now? Donna's motion. Okay. And did you say two-thirds have to? No. No. That's for calling the question. Okay. Nobody's seconded, so we're just done. Okay. I'm a real great pro-limiter. So just to be clear, this is about approving the agreement. It was the first part, right, Donna? Yes. The first sentence within our agenda. Approve agreement terms with Capil Pazza, authorized city manager to complete and execute the final contract. All right, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Nay. Nay. Okay, so I think that's four. So the motion passes. Do you want to do the second part? Sure. I take a motion to direct the city manager to complete the next steps required for this project as outlined in the attached memo. Is there a second? Second. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Nay. Okay, and the last part, do you want to? It would be a motion to set the date between September 17th and October 27th. It's 27th, sorry. 27th, sorry. September 27th. And October 7th for a public hearing on a possible November 6th bond vote on this project. Yes, so this would be the meeting when you actually approve a warning. Yes. And approve the ballot, the items that are on it. As I said, as many as four that you're talking about. So we need to set the date for that, which would be good just for planning purposes to know what our, even if we decide not to do any of them and we can always cancel the meeting. And that's with that October 2nd. Yeah, I had suggested October 2nd. Just had picked it, but it could be as early as, you know, I mean, you could move the September 26th meeting to September 27th. You could do anything you want. I just, if that's a Tuesday night, I, VLCT town fair is on Wednesday, so I'm gonna be out of town on Wednesday that night. So I can't, that's why I don't suggest a Tuesday, but you do it without me. So I apologize, Donna. I didn't know here if there was a second on that. I don't know either. Oh, Glenn, second, I'm sorry. We haven't picked a date yet. No, but it's vague. Well, you said, Well, I know, well, I mean, the hint was, pick the date. It has to be sometime, man. So, that's why the set a date, and then the between the two dates was in parentheses, like pick one. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I looked at everything. This actually, there has not been a second on this third one. No, no, because we haven't decided what it is. We don't know what the motion is yet. Do you want to, so, well, so do we want to talk about the second or some other time? I like the second. You like the second? It's a Tuesday, just so everyone knows. I won't be here. Probably out of the country until. That entire week. I leave right after the council meeting on the 26th. So even if we moved it to the 27th, it wouldn't do anything. So I get back on the 10th, the day before the next council meeting. So you're gone that entire, I took it between council meetings. I'm flying to Sweden. I have a conflict on the second, but that's probably the only night that week that I have a conflict. So the fourth, I can't do the fourth I teach on Thursday nights. I mean, we can do the third. How about the third? The third one? Third Wednesday. Bill, did you say you couldn't be here at all? Well, I'm supposed to not be here, but I'm supposed to be in South Burlington. I can come back. I mean, this is important. And there's also the 27th of September. I always do the next night, 27th. 27th? Which doesn't mean. You're still probably teaching. Yeah, I teach under this. Still no good for you, sorry, right? So I move that we set up a schedule of public hearing for a special meeting or whatever for October 3rd. Okay, is there a second? I'll second that. Any further discussion about that? If you don't have a quorum, I won't be here. If there works for everybody else, good. Thank you. Anybody else not be able to be here? Okay. All right, great. So no further discussion. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Nay. Thank you. But just because I'm looking at my calendar right now, 637. 637? And Jamie will send out a calendar invite. And can I just? Yes. I just wanted to clarify that my vote against proving the initial contract tonight is, or the terms of the agreement tonight is not opposition to the project. I would just have been more comfortable with more time for public comment before that. So I'm generally a supporter of the project. Thank you, Rosie. All right, and I, yeah, I think we should probably take a five minute break. I'm so off of my timing. Goodbye, Stephanie. 637. Stephanie reminded us that we actually have one other element that we need to get done in conjunction with the previous piece. So I'm going to turn it over to Bill to talk about this other. So just a minor thing that Stephanie did remind me that VEPC had wanted to make sure there was a motion in the record that the council approved amending the VEPC plan to reflect a larger garage. We talked about it last time, you knew the head nod, but they, so I was going to ask that be added. So if you just, again, it's only a plan. And this theoretically needs to happen before the VEPC meeting. Before next Thursday's meeting. On Thursday, so. I move to amend the VEPC plan to incorporate the larger parking garage design. Second. For the discussion. May I please say aye? Aye. Opposed? Nay. Okay, thank you. Okay, so moving on. So we are looking at a coordinates. Really regarding the parking and such around the elementary school. Yeah, do you want to come on up? See, Tom's going to old school. All right, my poster. It has this map in your packet. I know it's a little small, but a little bit more for the public benefit or if you want me to answer any questions specifically. So good evening. Good evening. I'm Tom McCartle, Director of Public Works, protected by Chief Ficus. The key word here on today. So City Council approved a closure of Park Avenue at the request of the school for a temporary use as a supplemental playground while they're undergoing their project. Was with the understanding that there would be some necessary parking impacts with that that would have to be addressed by ordinance. So returning tonight as expected to provide that those parking ordinance revisions. Have a memo from me dated August 7th and I don't see anybody from the school tonight, but I'm not sure if they were going to be here tonight, but really this is the city business as to how we address our parking needs and how we accommodate parking needs and impacts as a result of the closure. So with that, there were really five points that were part of that original plan. There was alternative on-street parking arrangements for staff and school visitors. And these are on the plans as A, B, C, D and E on the original list reserved on-street parking spaces for Park Avenue tenants. Two directional traffic flow on the section of Park Avenue that will remain open. I remember that is a one-way street. Parking restrictions at Loomis Liberty Intersection to accommodate these school buses that will be turning through a residential neighborhood and reserving sufficient space on the southerly side of Hubbard Street to allow for the school buses to load on Hubbard instead of on Loomis. So really creating a new ordinance, if you will, and it's all temporary. So it's a new temporary, or it's a new subsection under chapter 10, article seven. 10, seven to five is temporary, prohibited in limited parking. It would give the, with your approval, and this is the first of two public hearings that were required to do, but with your approval, you would authorize a city manager to effect these various parking ordinances, which shall expire and be of no further effect upon the reopening of Park Avenue, which shall approximately coincide with the completion of the new school project. There is one section in here that is considered permanent, something that we noticed, seems like every time we get in here, we find some housekeeping measure that we need to do. Nobody ever parks on the side of Hubbard Street between, it's a westerly side, between Liberty and Park Avenue, so it should be non-controversial to making that permanent, and it's certainly important for circulation. There's also one amendment to this memorandum, which came to my attention through one of the people who received our notices of this hearing when, I think, was speaking to, forget his name, at the corner of Liberty in Loomis. Dave Bellini. Yes, thank you. So I had to have a typo in there and appreciate that correction. So it did not affect their property and his concern specifically. So on Park Avenue, again, we have to technically make a one section of that street two-way, so that's 510. And that's no two on the plan, and interrupt me at any time if you'd like. I can go over to the board and answer questions if you'd like. Can I interrupt you about your last statement about Dave Bellini and his parents live there and they're quite elderly and I believe his mother needs a wheelchair for mobility. So their property is not impacted. They'll be able to park on either side of Liberty. That's correct. Okay, so they'll be able to get in and out from that side entrance. Right, so. Their home is here, in this corner, and the concern was being able to park around. Right, both sides. Yes. The restrictions proposed is this corner, and on this corner, the bus will be making this movement. So no impact on his side. Okay. Okay. I don't want to interrupt you if you have more things you want to share, Tom. Go ahead. Oh, did you have something to talk about? I just have one thing I just wanted to add. We had a meeting this afternoon. There was definitely the potential that part of this may have to be modified because we need to see how this flows. So part of that would be if we have to increase a restricted area for no parking. It would be for temporary order of police, but we would notify you if we had to. One of the concerns is that wintertime operations, this is for decades, this has been controversial in terms of the width of Liberty Street. So we need to monitor this very carefully because of the new regulatory impact of Catholic flow of the buses, and as well as how we're going to deal with a temporary street closure for the loading and unloading, which technically happens anyway once those red lights go on the buses. So that's my only piece there, that we're going to have to be fluid on this, monitor it closely, and making sure that everything can, it's going to be, there's going to be a lot of growing pains with this project, and I think a lot of tweaks here and there on the part of just people traveling through using any of those streets, like Liberty Street, for example, as an alternative to other cut-throughs, and also as much clarity as the school can have for parents in terms of where are the safe drop-off areas that might not be as convenient, and things like that to minimize impact. We're going to get a test of this starting, I'm sorry. No, no, go ahead. Starting next week, while this ordinance is still underway, we will have to implement this immediately, so in fact, signs are already in place, they should have had them bagged because some questions have already been raised, but the concern about the Liberty Street section between Loomis and Hubbard, with cars parked on both sides of the street, a lot of that is parking from elsewhere. Years ago, we did a license plate study and found that many people are not, that parked there are not residents of that particular neighborhood. So this is kind of overflow, overspill from the downtown area, or and school staff. And so that's essentially one way, will that be a problem, will that be something that we have to address immediately and have to return to seek a more formal approval of a parking restriction there. The parking of buses on Hubbard Street will, as Chief Fakus mentioned, they will activate their red lights. That will not necessarily be visible to somebody turning from Liberty onto Hubbard and then we'll encounter what could be up to 20 minutes of a stop bus essentially closing the street. That could be problematic and we know all the locals, all of us locals here know how to cut around downtown. If we'd like to avoid that in Liberty Hubbard and College Street, certainly part of that bypass route, if you will. So we're toying with the idea of possibly alert, putting up a sign, variable message type of sign, displaying that the street is essentially closed so that we don't have unknowing, unwitting motorists entering Liberty and then having to try to turn around or do something like what the school transportation folks are concerned about is forcing the issue and possibly going around the red lights, creating a dangerous situation. So this is fluid. This is something that we need the latitude to address. Go ahead Donna. I'm one of those that cut through there constantly and my little Honda Civic, it's narrow. There's cars on both sides, 90% of the time. Day time, evening time, it's just amazing. So I would definitely think you'd need to have some major signages to what's changing in the traffic. It's a very busy street. Before snow happens. If I can just add just two general points and a little bit of history. And Chief Gallant isn't here right now, but I'd be really, it's always been a concern. For example, the largest truck that they have is the Tower One. And can that in the wintertime, can it truly get through if you'll park both sides? There was a discussion many years ago about just having a prohibition of parking on one side of the street so we could safely accommodate. And also just interestingly, as far as how this conversation dovetails were the one you all just had regardless of your side of it. But this is also now we're dealing with the impact of our own strategy, if you will, of parking. And my sister lives on Liberty Street and there's times when she could really squeeze in and out of her driveway and it's all the time. I mean, it's not just faculty members from the school or workers. It's a real challenge and so we always, from a policing perspective, I'm always concerned about just the general quality of life in all of our neighborhoods here in Montpelier. So I just want to throw that out there and as we think about how all of this, that ebb and flow of one action here and so. Okay. So at this point, unless you have more, you wanna add? Well, I'm wondering if the council would like us to suggest an amendment to what we've proposed based on what Chief Fakus has stated about the other concern about that. The next council hearing for this would be on the 12th. Whether or not we should amend this now and get the word out to folks, particularly on Liberty Street, would impact if that's what we should do or possibly, and this may be certainly a little unorthodox, but would the council consider granting or authorizing the city manager, police chief, to take action as necessary to maintain and achieve two-way traffic flow on these streets based on what we find? So I have too many things going on in my head right now. So the thing that I'm feeling pressed on right now is that I did not technically open the public hearing. So I'm gonna officially do that. So opening the public hearing. And so along with that, Chief Fakus, you had some suggestions about like if things need to be sort of amended on the fly? Well, yeah, I mean, we can, so we, at any time, if the public safety is impacted, we can effectively get the buses or emergency vehicles through any street in Montpelier. We do this regularly with the snow banks, Langston Street, I think is the best known example of that. We'll put in signs, temporary order of police, snow parking, until we can, that situation can either be rectified such as snow removal or another, whatever is causing that impact. So the challenge that we have is this is an unusual traffic pattern, different types of traffic. So again, I'm simply fired and concerned if we had an impact or if we had to change something would be this side of the street between Loomis and Hubbard. So we can guarantee that the buses are gonna be able to make this turn. Because even if we have, as the order says, the prohibition of parking here, it can still be really tight, depending on something might be an illegally parked space, but that vehicle might be larger than others. So that would be an area of, I could see potentially having to implement an emergency order of prohibition of parking. So are you suggesting that we amend this ordinance to include prohibition of parking up there at this point, or do you wanna wait and see how it goes? Well, you're gonna have to react very quickly. Once a bus is impeded, it's kind of a domino effect until that vehicle is moved. So if it happens once, it's happened too much and there's a reason for police action, we can only foresee so much. So, or we could be proactive and act in ordinance under this, under the temporary, consider permanent down the road sometime, and then only implement what we deem necessary, scale it back, if that makes sense. Ashley, do you have something? I do, and so I'm not familiar with bus routes in my failure. Have there always been buses that have taken this turn or these turns? No. This is only because of the playground project. Used to be in front of the school. Yeah. Right, I just wasn't sure if they used to go that way for something else. It's one of the pieces that how historically it did operate. There were those jersey barriers that were painted in a proprietary protected corridor for dropping off and picking up off the kids. And they did not have to operate their lights, which worked great, so. We're not even, we still don't even know and this doesn't even take, we're just this part of the ordinance, the plan, we're talking about the school buses. There's gonna be a lot of other factors such as all the ten wheel dump trucks, traffic, that is gonna be taking out the concern soil. And what is that gonna look like? How often are they going to be up and down school street, onto Main Street? Or, so there's gonna be a lot of, that's why I'm here to talk about, we might have to tweak various traffic patterns and if so, we can certainly notify Council of our actions and if we see a longer term strategy. And we are working closely with the school, again, this is not a city project, but we're here to help facilitate the traffic management of it and also the safety of those working in that environment in our kids. So there's a lot of other things that are happening and this is a big project and we don't have a lot of traffic options and that's what's been so challenging for us. One of the advantages about amending the proposal tonight for first reading is that we can get notice to the neighbors so if they wanna come out and comment at second reading. The other advantage is we won't have winter conditions, I hope, between now and the next meeting, but we will have had a couple of weeks of school operation to see what might need to be changed. So the amendment that you would be suggesting would be to amend the ordinance to provide that parking is only on one side of the street of Liberty Street on that block. So the 40 foot length on the southerly side would extend to Hubbard under 10, 7, 1, 6. The heading on that is Liberty and Loomis and Liberty Intersection. So we would revise that. That makes sense to me, yeah. Do we need to vote on that? You just vote, it's the first reading, so you just vote to preliminary amend it. You can still change it next meeting when you adopt the final version, but this way we can send, we have three weeks to get notice out to people and say here's the final version. Because this did come up before and there was some pushback against it. Second your motion, Jack. Okay, before we vote on that, this is technically a public hearing, so if there's anyone from the public who would like to comment on that, certainly welcome, of course. Okay, so is your motion, this both this amendment and moving second? Moving it to second reading. To second reading for the next? Assume, yeah. Okay, just wanted to make sure I'm clear. And you're good with that? Yeah, well I want to change that. Okay, it's both this amendment and voting to move, or to pass first reading. Okay, so Connor. And Mayor, I'll just have to recuse myself on this one. I work for Vermont NEA, represent classroom teachers, support professionals, they're the affected parties, so. Okay. We send this one out. All right, sounds good. All right, yes, I guess I just want to make sure, do we know when we'll send notice out to impacted residents with this new proposal? Because I just, I received a few people, like a few inquiries, chiefly from Mr. Bolini, but he received it on Saturday for today's meeting and he was really concerned about not being able to make it and if we hadn't been able to connect. So I just want to make sure that we get notice out to all potentially impacted residents so that they can reach out to all of us and we can sort of field any questions that we might get and pass them on to Bill and Tom and chief. At the latest, it'll go out by next week. I will not be here on the 12th, so I want to get this done and move on, so another reason to do it. But yours is more valid. Good answer. Okay, I appreciate your candor friend. All right, all in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Great, thank you. Awesome, thank you. We work on this. All right, so I'm going to ask a question of the public. Is anyone here for the Parklet Ordnance Revision? Okay, oh, okay. So. I just want to make sure you don't take away the no smoking, that's all. Oh, okay, thank you. Just because I think there might be people here for other items, I'm going to shift that one later. I don't think the no smoking is an issue. I don't think the no smoking thing is an issue, Ginny. No one's going to change that. No, we all support it, I think. Okay, just so you know. So I'm going to move up the, I'm going to move the Parklet to after the Ashbor conversation. So we're going to move now to the creation of Confluence Park and then we'll talk about the Ashbor recommendations. So. Ricarda and VRC crew, if you are in Parks Commission, if you want to come on up, now is a good time. Jeff, you want to come up? So I feel like I should probably introduce this one a little bit since I was the submitting party on this. So just a little background. We have the opportunity to create a park as part of like an official city park. Now that one Taylor Street is finally under construction, which is very exciting. And so even though Confluence Park is not done yet, my hope in this item is that we can ask city staff to create, well to note it on the city website, that it's at least coming soon. And I know VRC has some thoughts about a process of working together with city committees to make that, well to get public input as to what it should look like. So I want to give you the opportunity Ricarda and Steve, right? Yes, to come in and tell us what you're thinking for this space. Thank you. So I'm Ricarda Erickson of the Vermont River Conservancy and Steve Libby. Steve Libby, Executive Director. And I guess we prepared a statement for the council and didn't prepare anything to read, but I guess we're really excited for this opportunity to look at the design opportunities for this Confluence Park. We feel it in our research and looking into it, we found historical documents, some of which Anne included with the agenda today, that date back 23 years ago, people have been discussing this in the city, this need for a Confluence Park. And Vermont River Conservancy is very much focused on public access to our rivers as well as protecting the land alongside our rivers. So for those reasons we're drawn to this project and also interestingly as after talking about the parking garage, I also want to emphasize that this Confluence Park could be a tremendous opportunity for economic growth in our city. Imagine driving across the bridge by Shahs and Sarducci and seeing a beautiful park and seeing people in the water down there. Imagine that and a place to have your lunch, a place to go listen to music. So this park could bring a lot to the city in general. Steve, if you have anything to add or if there are any questions that we could answer. I also want to make sure if Jeff or Dan, if you have any comments on this, I want to certainly give you an opportunity to talk about this as well. Dan Dickerson from the Parks Commission. I will just say briefly that we discussed this park idea last night at our meeting. We're all very enthusiastic about it. We want to be partners with the Vermont River Conservancy in any way we can. And we took an official vote and the motion passed 402 to support the creation of the park and to be partners in the creation and the ongoing maintenance of the park. And we're definitely, we're really psyched about it. So I think it'll be great and that's all I'll say. Great, thank you. Jeff, if you want to add something you certainly can, you don't have to. That's sure it's new, but it's exciting. Possibility of a downtown park that has a relationship with the river and gets people in a short walking distance to really feel the resource that we have and to take advantage of it and probably the biggest way yet. So I'm excited about the prospect. Great, so any questions? Ashley and then Rosie and then Donna. So I'm curious in terms of like city maintenance, I'm assuming that this would fall to you. And I've read John's email also in response to Bill's piece about staffing. And I think it's become pretty clear that the city is over capacity already in terms of staff, you know, just staff capacity. And with the Emerald Ashbor, coupled with this really exciting park, I feel like yes, I can say yes to something tonight. Okay. I just, I want to make sure that as a city, we do our part in supporting this, which I think is going to translate into more staff resources to make sure that we are meeting current plus new demands. Any comments on that? I'll just say that, yes, we do have staffing issues. We do have resource issues. And we're going to do, as a parks commission, we're going to do our due diligence to present you with a budget that tries to sort of capture, you know, some of these existing responsibilities that may be fallen by the wayside or have been sort of, you know, not addressed as much as they should as well as, you know, these new responsibilities. You know, I think taking care of Emerald Ashbor is vitally important. I think the establishment of this park in this key area of the city is vitally important. Otherwise, you know, we might have more concerns about creating the park, but, you know, we can't pass this up. And so, you know, we're going to work with the city council to give you a budget that, you know, hopefully doesn't explode, but also, you know, acknowledges these, the new responsibility. And hopefully the city council is ready to work with us on finding the middle ground and doing what we need to do. All right, thank you. So I'm a little bit confused about where exactly this is, and I should have asked for a map earlier. I'm wondering if we can pull something up so we can have a better sense. I see the attachments, but the attachments are, I think, covering some land covered by one tailor. So I'm, right, and those pictures don't necessarily include the Taylor Street design. So I actually have here somewhere an image of the Taylor Street design. I mean, and my understanding is we're just accepting the stand behind shawls and look across North Branch. Yeah, it's the corner. Oh, they're probably just like, text you this picture. I'd like to have the public view of it too. It's just the very end of... And we own this land already? We do. It's just between basically the edge, I mean, the vision, this point anyway, is just between the edge of the parking lot all the way to the bank. Okay. Yeah. Does that help? And we're basically just agreeing tonight to have this help in designing this, right? Okay, great. And to list it on the city website, with just like a coming soon, you know, it's not done and that's okay. With a big request for a budget that actually meets all of the needs for this, because I don't wanna build it and then not be able to do what needs to be done to keep it a place where people can be and have fun and do stuff. So we'll... Connor, you were next. I think... No, Donna. I'm there. Great. Well, I'm just a little confused on process because I was around when Taylor Street started and the first design brought up this and removing the dam. But there's been no official motion by this council that I know of to establish this park. So I would think we need to do that, that we at least wanna move forward on it. And that's fine if we also wanna put it on the website. But I was reading your wonderful letter and it says you have a grant to contract for a design study which you'll present to the city at the end of the year. You'll have a conceptual design with cost, budgets, and drawings with three different options. Now, that's including getting rid of the dam? No. Okay, because that's a big component. The dam along with also our flooding issue. Remember, part of the things they wanted to do which Ann and I have seen on the council. Bill, you maybe helped me out here. But we were presented with a storm water flooding option. The ice jam. Ice jam, that's it, thank you. And we really didn't like it very well because it didn't move forward with really using the river for things like this to happen. So I just feel like we need to have a really holistic look at it. And it's wonderful that you're gonna do this piece but I don't know how we can do this piece without dealing with the dam. So in my vision of the future, if we're gonna move forward with any kind of thinking about removing the dams, I think we need to specifically have some engineering studies done of that because those dams might be holding up the bank. And that's probably not necessarily even within the scope of what they can do at this point. So I'm into having that conversation but we should probably have the question about the dam separately. Well, other than the initial one Taylor Street proposal to do this park, so that had to be done in order to make this park viable for kayakers, et cetera. So chicken and the egg, if you do, anyway. Yeah. Well, so I think there's might be a difference and I don't know, I'm speaking of out of ignorance here but one of the parks we heard about was the actual act of Whitewater Park. Mm-hmm, yep. And it is, and I think. That was one. I think designing an area where people could access the river but the Whitewater did require moving the dam and creating the Whitewater. And I don't know if that's exactly what they're talking about here versus just a more different type of recreation. Go ahead, Steve, again. Yeah, so we're very aware of all the opportunities at the Confluence for different recreational systems including the Whitewater Park. We know that, as the mayor said, that removing the dam or altering the dam is a much larger scope of inquiry and a worthy one but a much larger one than the small grant that we received to look at the Confluence area itself. But we're very aware of that and I think we would, in our discussions with the city committees and the public, talk about how this Confluence park can be part of a larger picture, for sure. But it's just outside the scope of what we've been funded for this initial space. But we are very aware of that and I think it's very exciting that there are these recreational opportunities right in downtown Montego on the water. It's just standing down there with Jeff and Riccardo a couple of days ago and it's really amazing to stand down kind of below the railroad bridge and get the feel of what it's like to be down at the river level. It's really a whole different experience. Ashley, I guess the only other concern that I have is I want this park to happen but we also have been kind of talking about what to do with the dam and all of those issues. And so I'm a bit of a lay person in this arena but if we were to remove the dam we talked about how that would change significantly the sort of lay of the land in their banks which could and probably would in some way impact this park, right? I think if the dam that you're talking about is on the main stem of the Winooski Upstream from the main street bridge. So that's quite a distance from this Confluence Park area. No, it's the one right by Shaw's. So a small dam across the North Branch? No, no, no. Cross Winooski. No, but so the one... If you're in Shaw's parking lot, you're looking right at it. Shaw's parking lot, dam. Okay, so the dam is not abutting this property that we're looking at for the Confluence Park so I don't know that there would be a structural issue. It would probably, it's far enough a way that it would probably be fine. Let me give another crack at answering that. So my understanding of the whitewater concept means removing the dam and then channelizing the river so that the water would move through that area in a more natural thing and then boulders would be placed. Yes, yes. So you create a flow that would prevent ice dams but you'd still have the shells that would have the same capacity of the river but you'd just change the nature of the river that would make it much more river, natural river and more kayak and boating friendly. So that channelization would go up the stream so that dam is not a tall dam. So we're, and you can't put, whether it's an amphitheater or not is possible. You can't really lower that too low anyway so I think the engineering difference is not gonna be significant and I'm thinking with the little consult that they configure a couple different heights on what that would mean with or without the dam. Okay. Any further things there? No, because in your letter you do talk about being flood resistant so you obviously are looking at different high water marks. Right, and additionally I just wanted to add that with our point of having three options, three options is obviously the opportunities, if we had presented a blank canvas to designers the opportunities could be endless but we want to have some different options within different budget ranges and within different ecological impacts levels as well. So hence we understand that there could be a number of different opportunities depending on how deep we want to get into the options for recreation. So that's why we'd like to have the study focus on the actual physical land there that small parcel, very small parcel but then also to focus on in the river, how can people get to the river and those I think are going to present, we will be presented with multiple opportunities that we'll have to weigh feasibility, financially, ecologically. Yeah, good. Clint. I just want to briefly say that I am not concerned about potential downstream effects of supporting this study at the moment, I think it's going to be great and I also want to recommend that everyone take a look down in that direction whenever you have the opportunity, I walk over the main street bridge several times every day and I have seen otters and mink and beavers both upstream and downstream of that spot, along with tons of waterfowl all the time. So it's already surprisingly rich and I think it's going to be really exciting to see the changes. We should vote. Oh yeah, do you have comments? Yes, of course. John Snell again. We did talk extensively about this during the Taylor Street committee days and one of the problems that I am now seeing is that the Taylor Street building was designed by somebody and the shared pathway, if I may, was designed by somebody else and that shared pathway design was never really locked in because of the many uncertainties that there were. That we're moving closer to where that's exactly gonna be and what it might look like but to my knowledge it's still not permanently designed. I think it is. Yeah it is, it's got an overview and... Well, let's say from the north branch, from the north branch east. All right, that's a bit wishy-washy as far as I know from the north branch going toward Main Street. Over the bridge? Yeah, you'll see a new bridge. New bridge and then it's coming straight out to Main Street. I've seen the drawings. What I'm concerned about is that there's all of a sudden a lot of parking in there and I've communicated with Bill about this that doesn't fit very nicely with the Consolence Park as far as I'm concerned. There's two-way streets in there where I'd love to see options for one-way streets. We in fact had a, I think, a fairly sophisticated design by the engineers for access to the river. The Consolence Park's on the other side, right? They would go under the new pedestrian bridge and under the existing railroad bridge and would be fully handicapped accessible, big enough that you could get a canoe carried down and put in the water into the north branch, right at the Confluence. That survived. Yeah. That design, I thought. That's not in the design right now. And so those things were discussed and kind of lost in the mix. Well, there were Army Corps issues too and water access issues. I mean, it wasn't just, let's put this in. I want to certainly want you to be able to finish your thought there. Yeah, and then the kayakers too, that I'd love to meld that back into the discussion. Yeah. Well, I certainly hope that by the end of this we have some options for access to the river and whether it's on the Shod side or on the Confluence Park side of the river that we figure something out. So, and your points will take in that the other side of the river is a lot of parking and it is what it is for now. And let's keep talking about it. So, thank you. Parking for the park. Yeah. All right. I hope it's clear what my, so in light of Donna's suggestion here. I'm still confused about what we need as a motion. I would move that we move ahead with the design and plans, right? And the river conservatory? Right. So we're doing the study on our behalf. Do we need to commit to anything? We need to do that. You're gonna provide us with some options and we'll decide if we like them, right? Well, we have to direct the city staff to include Confluence Park. Website. On the website. And then Donna suggested that we actually just create Confluence Park or something. We've never made an official motion to support Confluence Park existing. So it seemed to me we'd need to make a motion that we wanna have that as our vision. And that will direct staff to have a placeholder on our website? Yeah. Okay, so I would move then that we designate the portion on the map on page. I think it's page 18 of the Capital District Master Plan. I would move that we designate that space. I believe it's marked as number, is it number five? Four. Four. I would move then that we designate that area marked as number four on page 18 of the Capital District Master Plan as Confluence Park. I would further direct city staff to add that to our website as a coming attraction. We have a... Well done. I'll second if everybody can get behind. You have that image. I am looking at it. Can you just like just turn your laptop around just so we can see like to you or to Rob? I wanna see. I see what she's talking about. Although this is... Oh, you're talking about from the... Right. Okay. This is called the Capital District Master Plan. From 2000. Does that work for you that designation? Okay. Guys, you're stealing the phone. Okay, so there was a second. Make it work. Yes. It'll be what they decide. John, do it. Great. Any further discussion? Great. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Great. Thank you. I'm so excited about this. All right. Let's move on to talking about recommendations regarding the Emerald Ash borer. So, how should we start this? I guess I'll start before the Ash borer's all come out. At the last meeting we received a presentation from the Tree Board and folks about the Ash borer and its status in the city and requesting short and long-term funding and it was left for the city manager to make a recommendation to the council for this meeting. So, I did speak a bit with Jeff and tried to get an understanding of the current status of Ash borer versus what work is needed for that specifically versus what work is sort of backlog work that just we're behind on and would need to get done in order to deal with the Ash borer and that kind of thing. And so my recommendation was that I was reluctant and I'm reluctant to support a new position. We rarely, if ever, add new positions sort of out of budget because we don't, we just talked about adding positions for this. We know that there's the police want new people. We, I think any department could come in at any time and make the case why they need a new person at this particular point in time. And so my view is that this is a very serious problem. We need to take it seriously. We've been put on notice for this. So I don't mean to diminish it, but we need to weigh the priority for this along with all the other city priorities when we're setting our budget. So for this year that we're in, we did set a service level for trees and parks. And I'd be the first to say it's probably under staff, but they're getting the work done that we set out to do with the resources that we allocated. But we also had the foresight over the last two years to set 4,000 a year aside for the ash borer knowing it was coming. And as I, which is nowhere near adequate, I get that. But there was a request to treat some trees and request to cut some trees. And it seems to me that that could be done with that amount of funding, certainly with what was presented. But it's hard to say we're gonna hire a new staff person that we might then be cutting in a couple of months when we do the budget. And so that is my position. It's not to say that it's not necessary. It's not to say that it's not an important problem. But I think we laid out our resources last year. The voters passed them. And so that's where I'm at. Obviously, I'm very clear that the tree board and the tree warden don't agree with me. And that's why we're here having this conversation. Rosie, and then I'm gonna have some comments. Sure, it occurs to me that tree removal is a pretty specialized skill. And I'm wondering if we can at least in the interim contract out to deal with some of the backlog of tree removal to a private contractor and that potentially that would get us into a better position for the spring to bring on a full-time staff member or whatever we decide to do in the budget process. But that might be a temporary solution that would move us forward using some of that $8,000. I know that won't go a long way towards contracting out, but certainly we have companies that do this work. And I would assume we already do that sometimes. Yeah, I wouldn't. I mean, they do contract. And I know it's pretty expensive for a tree. I don't know how many trees you'd get done, depending on the type of work. I mean, I wouldn't attempt to dictate how the $8,000 was used. I would assume they would use it as much as they can. But, I mean, I've said, I don't want to, you know. So I'm also hesitant to add a staff person midstream here. It certainly is something that I would be up for talking about in the context of our budget conversation. But again, in the context of all the other positions that we might be adding. Having said that, if there is a way, like I appreciate Rosie's comments about what can be done now. I mean, if this is something that we can contract out. So one of the things that I'm not totally clear on is if we were going to try to work on some of the backlog, just how much that specifically would cost so that we can be better positioned to deal with it in the spring. And then, in the meanwhile, what needs to be done between now and the spring in terms of communicating with National Life or talking with- Maybe communities or spraying trees. What actually needs to be done logistically right now. And if we can take care of some of that backlog, how much is that that we're talking about to contract that out? Yeah, Donna, then Connor. And you may want to go to them first, but I guess I would like to frame the problem having lived here with the big flood in 1992. When we didn't have a clue how to really deal with it and we came out of that and started having plans, strategies. And so I see this bore, this little bore as the leak in the dike. And we got to do more than just put our thumb in it. And maybe it's not a staff person, but it's got to be some personnel that can really lead the way because trees need to be constantly inventory and they have to be taken away and dealt with. And they've got some ideas. They call it in their, the packet they gave us. They call it, I think a marshaling area. Jeff can correct me. But even just doing the marshaling area is a major capital expense. And you got to go from the first tree you cut down that's infected, you got to deal with it right away. And they have a way to peel out so then you take away the bore and then you have some wood that you can use and then sell and make some revenue. But as soon as we have that first tree, we're behind the game. So I don't want to wait till we're flooding and have our boats are in the street. I want to do it now. And I know you supported, that's why we got the 8,000. We had to push really hard with the other council to just get 4,000 each year. And it is a very small thumb in the dike. And I know it's out of sequence, but even if you're not dealing with the backlog, just reading this plan as far as monitoring trees. And there's a state grant that's going to be out and they say they're going to award it to that community that is the most innovative of how they're going to deal with the ash bore. Because from my reading, the states and feds haven't decided how to do it. And so we could spend part of our personnel time that we'd be buying, not only inventorying the trees, but really working on a really clever, innovative way to make, as Jeff would say, lemonade out of this sour, sour lemon situation. And then get the support of the state grant, maximize our dollars and save our trees. Public outreach is huge. We have a lot of trees with private property. National life is huge. They haven't come to the table yet. So Donna, this is a grant through the state, is that right? Well, the state is, they'll tell you about it. The state, I believe, is setting up a grant. And we don't know what the deadline is for that. No, we don't. No, but it's coming up because they're behind the A-ball too. Right, sure. So I don't want us to take the backseat. I'm sorry. I want us to just really push out and look to where we could find some money for staff. Because I also know when you hire a contractor for a tree, I mean, Jeff will have the numbers. You're talking five, six times what we pay our staff. So I just really want us to take this serious. I don't want to have a flood of dying trees. Okay, thank you. Connor, did you? Yeah, not just a rookie question. So we go through the budget process. We approve a position. What's realistically, what's the earliest possible? This position is on the ground. We can move it. Once town meeting approves the vote, I mean, technically the budget doesn't take place till July one, but we can usually move stuff quicker. We can start moving after that, after town meeting time. Okay, thanks. Ashley. So I would echo a lot of what Donna said. I think these are the very things that city government is supposed to be focusing on. And I totally appreciate that we need lots of city staff, which is sort of one of the reasons that I was a bit reticent, quite reticent, about expending more city staff resources on putting together these parking garage contracts because I know that all of our city departments are already sort of tapped out as it is. I just, I'm wondering, I mean, to me, this is the kind of thing where I think we have the capacity to be innovative in these solutions. And I think it would make sense to bring someone in, I know $8,000 I don't think is nearly enough to do this, but to bring somebody in to, or maybe to have the tree board identify, like what are the most critical things that we can get done? What do we need to get that done? And I would support and ask to come out of some other fund to do that work because I think that we have a committed group of folks here who I get lots of emails and volunteer opportunities and I'm gonna make it to one, I'm just terrified of ticks because I have Lyme disease. So I think this is the kind of thing that city government should be supporting and should really be finding ways to make this work. And I don't see a way around adding a position for already hearing from parks that we can't even keep up with what we need to be keeping up with and now we're adding more to that with a new park and all these other new things that are really exciting and happening here. I think I would push pretty hard to find the funds if we can identify sort of the most critical, if we can't get a staff person right now, if you could give us like your top five things and come back to us as soon as you possibly can, which I feel bad even asking because you do all of the things. If you could get us that list, I would be more than willing to sort of make that push to get those funds because I think this is the very thing that we are here to do. Sure. Sure. Yeah, come up and introduce yourself. And I don't think I need a microphone. Yes, ma'am. Well, you do for the people at home. You're being recorded. Yes, you do. Please. All right. And what's your name? It's my understanding. Would you tell us your name first? I'm sorry. My name is Wanda Burrill and I think some of you know about me already because I got an award a while ago. And it's my understanding that there is another group of individuals working on this problem. And I've given them some information tonight to contact this group, which is called the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission. And they meet, I think, every other week, not week, but every other month. And they would like to invite us to maybe go to one of their meetings and to talk with them about our issues and see what they're trying to do because they are meeting and talking about this very same thing. So I'm not in any position to lead the troops, but I think I could set up a meeting for somebody, maybe you two, to go and talk with them and find out, okay, what are they doing? If it's money they need, then are they getting money? Where is it coming from? There's a lot of questions there, I think, that haven't been answered yet. And we might be able to kind of come back with a report saying, well, this group is doing this and maybe that would solve some of the problem. I'm not sure. Sure, so maybe we can have you coordinate with the Central Mod Regional Planning Commission and... And their office is upstairs over Rite Aid so you can walk to at the time. Okay, very convenient. Thank you. And we have a rep on that board, so we can certainly facilitate. We have a member on that board. Okay, so I would get him to or her to connect with you and see if we can't move forward with that. That's a great idea, thank you. And by the way, I'm living in Montilier now. Oh, well, you're not in Berlin anymore. Oh, well, something. Glenn and Rosie, and then I would love to invite Tree Board John, Jeff to come back up and chat. Other John. Rosie first, I think. Oh, whatever. So I confess when I was thinking about budgeting process, I was thinking November. I was forgetting the fact that then we go, you know, the whole timeline. So I would like to have more of a holistic conversation about how this fits into our budget in November, but I wanna be ready to move forward at that point before hanging around, waiting around for the new budget year. So I don't know how best to work that. Just timeline. Are you thinking of like trying to separate out some things for now and other things for that conversation or just leaving it all till the conversation of November? I mean, I really like us being able to sit down and figure out, okay, staff positions, what are our priorities, and have that whole conversation together. But I am realizing that that means putting this off much further than I was thinking. And this is urgent. And if we're really, you know, if we're not able to get a new person on till late in the spring, even if we jump the gun a little bit, that worries me. So I don't know. I don't know. Fair enough. Glen. I don't wanna be reckless with this, but I think I'm in favor of adding staff now. As far as I can tell, everything, including, for example, making a list of the priorities and so on depends on more staff hours, and there are not staff hours now. The letter that we got from John Snell earlier this week, and also the recent letter, I think, from Dan Dickerson use words like exponential. And to me, that means the same kind of thing as a stitch in time, save nine. If we do it now, then we will have less to do later. And I think that that is an accurate description of this problem as I see it. So Donna's finger in the dyke analogy is the same to me. If you don't, you know, that dyke will continue cracking. You're gonna need a lot more fingers. So I would be in favor of more staff now. Do you wanna come and share any thoughts or Jeff? Whoever? Yeah. You can sit at the table. Thank you, and I'm glad I'm out here instead of sitting here, so I gotta tell ya. It's hard enough dealing with the darn ash war, but to deal with the issues you are is even probably more problematic. So I just drove back from Michigan and I got to see what this thing looks like, and it's horrendous. And if we don't hop on it and deal with it right now, according to the plan that John drew up, that's a brilliant plan, by the way, and a lot of the other towns in central Vermont and elsewhere are stealing our plan and using it, it's that good. Then we're gonna see results like I saw in the way home. Which is literally, I passed tens of thousands of trees along the road sides that were dead. Many of them were so dead they were coming down, including into the Interstate Highway, in some cases. I saw other places where it had just started. I did a lot of investigation and it's very clear that that's what's ahead of us. And I hadn't seen it with quite so shocking results as I saw in the last couple of weeks. I appreciate being able to send that note to you. It was a little awkward to do that and thank you for just accepting it. Clearly one of the big issues is that the park's people are essential to making this happen. And I wouldn't say that Jeff's been lying to you over the past couple of years, but we all know Jeff is enthusiastic. Where is he? He's right back there. He's an enthusiastic guy who always emphasized the positivity in things. And honestly, I think that when I look at what's available to us as a tree board from Parks Resources, I'm counting one person and maybe another quarter person. It's not two people anymore. And it's some volunteers that we can roust up, but it's not what we need to deal with this problem. The 8,000 bucks is a wonderful offer. I would point out that when we came to you in 2013, we suggested setting aside $20,000 a year, in which case we'd be looking at a hundred grand and that would be a whole different kettle of fish. But I think that given the limitations of parks right now and I'm not privy to all of it. So if I'm wrong, forgive me, but that it's just not, we don't have the availability of what we need. And what we need is somebody that come early March, late February, is able to just go right in and do the work that needs to be done. We're not treating trees now. We're gonna have to wait until spring to do that so we can't spend the $8,000 on treatment of downtown trees now to hire an outside arborist to come in and cut. I think sometimes you have to do it. There's a couple of trees now that I think are beyond the capabilities of parks as good as they are. And that's where you do hire somebody that has bigger equipment and more experience, but the $8,000 would go like that to bring it in. It's just not sufficient to what we need. To do work now is what we're aiming for is to get caught up on some of the dangerous tree work, the hazard tree work, so that come spring, parks people are available to work on the ash borer. And I'm gonna let John talk about some of what those needs will be in the spring, but they're gonna require somebody who knows what they're doing. And I see that person coming on now or very soon and being fully trained and capable by spring to be able to just go for it. Can I ask you a question? Sorry to interrupt. Do you have a sense or Jeff, do you have a sense of how much it would cost to contract out the backlog? I would guess about twice as much as if we did it ourselves. So there's a couple of types of backlogs and one is hazardous trees. And we're close to catching up to the hazardous trees identified in inventory about four years ago. But the other thing that we're behind on and it could be neglected further, it's been neglected for a lot of years, but the longer you neglect pruning trees and doing the prophylactic care, the more expense you have in the back end. You have bad forks that get older and split and then at a certain point, they can't be pruned out of it. And we've been wanting to get to a neighborhood pruning program to prevent a number of those kinds of problems. And we haven't been doing that because we've been working on hazardous trees. So, and the other thing to put into the mix is if we wait too long so that we're in a busy time, then we have to hire someone with skills. We can't start them and train someone at a lower rate, which is what we'd like to do is start someone who's part-time, get them trained and then be ready to jump into action next year when things heat up. But you don't have a number for, if we contracted it out just right now? I don't think I could give you a responsible number now, but I could get that to you in the next meeting. That would be helpful, thank you. Yeah, probably $20,000 would be my rough guess, but I'll give you something more accurate. Great, thank you. Before Jeff disappears. Yeah, Donna. Would you explain, because when I was at the parks commission last evening and heard you talk about what percentage of the park staff applies to trees, it's like the staff is split between the tree board and the parks commission. Is that one fifth? It's, no, well, it's, Al and I each doing one day a week, so it's two-fifths. For trees, yeah. Two-fifths. For trees. For the year, we have two-fifths of a position to take care of two-and-a-half thousand, three thousand wealth. You include the bike path and the public lands is probably three thousand street trees, yeah. Thank you. And I know John, we had interrupted you, so if you wanna jump back in. We'll share it. The thing that's really crucial in this is the idea of exponential, and that it's not just a linear thing that's gonna get worse and worse and worse, it's gonna explode in the spring. The small infestation that we saw, probably less than a dozen trees up at National Life, and by the way, those have now been ground up and burned in their boiler, that's gonna explode. That dozen trees could easily end up being a hundred or more trees next year. It could jump from there to four or five other locations. But so we don't know how bad it's gonna be. Here's my question. We know that it's gonna be exponential. So what's gonna happen, and I hear that, and I heard that before and I get it, and I've factored that into my thinking, but what's gonna happen between now and then that's gonna prevent that? What's our new person gonna do between now and then to stop that from happening between now and spring? Thank you. We're gonna take steps to understand where the spread happens. So we'll be setting out traps that will allow us to identify if there's, in various areas around the city, if there are insects, are they there? We'll be able to do more branch sampling, which requires a bucket truck going up in the tree and actually sampling branches of suspect trees. There'd be a number of steps, but the idea is that if we know where it is, then we can get these trees when they're first infected, excuse me, infested. And if we don't, then it becomes a much more costly issue because the tree becomes brittle and it's more costly to take down. Kit. I have a question. So, yeah, Jack and then Rosie and then back to Donna. It seems to me that the only real concrete proposal we have before us tonight is the manager's proposal to authorize the expenditure of this $8,000 and I would like to invite you working with Jeff or whoever to come back with a real fleshed out proposal for how many staff, what staff and what they would do before we're into the, before it just goes on the city budget in on town meeting day. The question I have is, with regard to the manager's proposal now, if we do what he recommends and authorize the use of this $8,000, could that be used usefully before some more comprehensive plan is adopted? From my point of view, and I'll let these two other guys talk to that as well, the thing that's needed right now is to hire somebody that's not gonna be a full-fledged licensed arborist that we can train up on safety, chainsaw, all the EAB stuff and have them ready to go in the spring. In the meantime, there's a lot of inventory work that can be done. I just, for Yahoo's added up my hours, I'm pretty rigorous about keeping track of that and since the first of the year, I put 250 hours into this tree board and I'm gonna be 70 years old in a month and I can't keep it up and it's exponential. You know, I can't do 2,000 hours next year. I can't. Can you inventory in the winter? Yes, absolutely. So you can still be assessing where it's at. We've inventoryed all that we have. Chances are good that it's not gonna spread a lot over the winter that we'll see, but there are things that we can do over the winter. So would it make sense to use this $8,000 not for treatment and or removal of asteries, but to begin with inventory and potential staff training? To get somebody on board and get them trained up. I see. I think that's what makes the most sense. But I'll let these guys talk. A little bit more of a picture of what I have, but I could get you even more detail. So what I have in mind is that they would do the inventory and a matter of fact, in October is the best time to do branch sampling. Right now we've tried to do it, but the larvae is in the tree and it's trees and working around and the research from other states that have done this has shown that late September, early October, you go to the distressed trees and you take branches and you look for the galleries underneath and that gives you an idea where it is. So then you can act on that over the winter or you know where to marshal your resources in the next spring. So that would be a key thing. And the other thing I would want to do with that person is get them in a neighborhood program starting to prune some trees and get that experience in the bucket truck on the ground and get going with that. So it would be a two pronged. So I hate to be a little, you know, dollars and cents-ish about this, but there's part of me that's dubious that hiring somebody now and paying them through till March of next year would end up being cheaper than just paying someone who was a professional arborist in March. We wouldn't have the capacity to do the branch sampling in October and have a picture in a plan by then that would limit that and we wouldn't be able to do the neighborhood pruning program until March either. So we could jump into action with a professional in spring but we wouldn't have taken care of any of the backlog. Yep. So we would need to pay the higher-paid person. Yeah. That's the dilemma. Rosie? So I'm just trying to think of all our potential options here and so I was interested to hear that you and Alec are each spending one day a week on trees and I'm wondering if we could use some of our money instead to contract out some of your other responsibilities to free up more of your time. You know, as you're already trained and presumably able to do all this, that maybe that would be a way of in the interim dedicating more time to it and then we can have the conversation about whether we need an additional position, which we likely will, but then we can find the money in a more comprehensive. Yeah, we're fighting to jump back in, maybe even finding things that are occupying Jeff's time now or Alec's time that could be done either by DPW or recreation, I don't know. Sure. I think that's all part of the good part of the conversation. I wanted John Akuloshik, I had an idea, I'm not sure we'll fly here. I worked for the state for over 30 years and as new administrations came in, they often gave us new jobs to do and when you're faced with new tasks, you have an option. One is to stop doing something that you're doing that never happens. Option two was basically to take personnel from another area and at least assign them temporarily to help you accomplish the goal. So it's called, you know, other duties as assigned is how they put it and that gets you over the hump of the work and again, I don't know if that would fly here but instead of putting out the money to hire another person, which is what they really need, if you could transfer, possibly transfer a willing and able person from DPW into Jeff's group to work on this problem, probably for quite a few years here. That's just a thought. That seems interesting to me. Of course we'd need to have lots of conversation about that. We're heading into winter from DPW. Yeah, we'll pick up some of this slack room. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so yeah. I just wanted to get back to your thought of paying somebody over the winter. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what the cost difference is gonna be but I'm envisioning that the kind of person we have in mind hiring now or soon and training up so that they're fully ready in the spring compared to a fully qualified arborist, you're talking about two or three to one, price difference. So we can invest in somebody and really have that pay off for a long time to hire an arborist in the spring if one's available because these guys are all flat out busy already dealing with this insect. I just don't see it as a viable option. So at this point, team, what is your pleasure? What do you wanna do? Well, I'd like to hear Bill's reaction to some of the ideas about shifting other personnel or shifting responsibilities of tree staff in the short term. I think those are all fine ideas and we'd have to talk about them. I mean, I think what we'll find is the situation that is being described in this department isn't that different across the board. DPW is way over booked right now and they're running at max. Who are they gonna give up? But we can certainly have that conversation and talk about it and see whether it might even be that we could find someone for a short period of time until we do budget. Again, I wanna reiterate, I'm not unsympathetic to the situation that they need more staff, but there will be, we're gonna have some number when we do our budget, some limit. Maybe a different limit that it's been the last few years but there's gonna be a limit and we're gonna want to include this position in these kind of things. We're gonna want to include, I suspect, a lot more money from the Housing Trust Fund. We're gonna want to include positions for MIAC and energy and facilities. We're gonna want to include an additional police person. We have a long list of people. Some of those will make it and some of them won't. And I don't know right now which ones I would recommend because I haven't seen the whole and we haven't had that conversation. So hiring a person now that may, either we've prejudged our priorities without giving other folks a chance to make their case or we're putting someone in a position to get laid off. And Dr. I think if you wanna identify a sum of money and no question, you'll get more done with your own employee than with a contract but you can get some done and maybe there's, you know, whether it's trees being cut or I don't know if people can be hired on contract basis. My reluctance isn't against getting the work done. My reluctance is against making a commitment to a person that we hire and provide benefits and now as a job that we may or may not be able to make that commitment to them over the long run once we set our full priorities. There's an interim need while that's being discussed and, you know, 8,000 just said 20, maybe we could allocate 12 and we could figure out where we could get that from and do something like that. I think then you're, but I don't wanna just say we gave him money if it's not useful to them either. So I mean, that's where I'm stuck is that, you know, there's, you know, I don't mean to be hysterical but we could bring Tony in and he could talk about opiates and how they've been running short of a police officer for a year. And, you know, he could, I'm sure we have an immediate need for another police officer. So on and on. So at this point, I would love to just, I guess, invite you all if you were able to, you know, come back with a more concrete number about if we were gonna contract out the, take care of the backlog, you know, I guess I would invite knowing what that is and then having a conversation about that in the meanwhile. So that at least in that way we can be more ready. That's just information. So, you know, that's hopefully an easy thing to ask for. But yeah, Jack. I'm especially interested in here seeing a number for bringing someone in not to hire someone as a permanent employee to start training them to fill this job. But what it would cost to hire a temporary employee to come in and do the inventory in October, which seems like that's a critical time. And that gives us a database for the rest of the budget season and for what the work is gonna be needed for next year. Yeah, go ahead and then, Tonner. Sorry, there's a little confusion here. We did the inventory, the volunteers did the inventory. We spent a couple of hundred hours probably walking the street. So the inventory is done. Just talking about the branch sampling. The branch sampling is a different matter. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. So basically, I heard the phrase earlier, the status of the ash borer. The status of the ash borer is unknown at this time. We know that we had an infestation that national life and bugs have left there. That's all we know. Next spring, we will know exactly how bad it is. John indicated that it could be hundreds of trees. We don't know right now. So the branch sampling was done on trees that we identified this year as being suspect trees. You're not just gonna go out and do a lot of branch sampling on other trees. That's just not gonna happen because there's 450 of them out there on the street alone and look for this bug. What you need to do is you need to set up a system in the spring and somebody to run the system where you're monitoring with green traps, which are these sticky traps. You've seen the purple ones probably. These are green ones now that have a pheromone that attract the males and you set them up in areas that you have suspected infestation. You'll know about these suspected infestation in the spring when the leaves come out because a lot of your trees will have missing leaves in the canopy. That's where you set up your traps. That's also where you start talking about where you're gonna set up your trap trees to remove some of the bugs. It's also gonna be where you decide which trees need to come out now because they're infested and they need to be removed from the population before the adults emerge in May and June because if they get out, you've got a bigger problem. So it is exponential in that you have to be able to identify those trees in the spring. You need someone that's geared towards being able to do that, making the decisions to say, we need to cut this tree, this tree, this tree, get them to the marshaling area which was mentioned earlier because you don't want to leave those trees where they are. The bugs will continue to grow and emerge. Get them to the marshaling area, process them, sawmill, chipper, whatever. Remove those guys from the population. That's how you slow the spread of this critter. If you don't do these things, if you don't have somebody on top of this, the critter gets the upper hand and you're behind the eight ball and it's gonna be all over. That's just the pattern. It's been done before in the country. We know it. We don't need to fall into the same mistakes, that's all. And the adults emerge in May so we need to have someone move the trees before that. Before May. Chipped them, get that outer bark done, processed, destroyed, burn it up, process the rest of the wood as far away, give it to the low income folks that they need it, whatever. There's all sorts of stuff you can do with the wood. But unless you start acting on these ideas. Because this is something that can be shared with neighboring communities? Is this something that can be done regionally? The marshaling area? Or the person staffers? They don't even have a marshaling area right now. No, no, the staffing. The person just. We're gonna have a full, there's gonna be full-time need in this position here. For this person to keep track of the 450 trees that are out on the streets, plus the 170 or so that are along the trails in Hubbard Park, plus the fact that North Branch Park hasn't been inventoried. Blanchard Park hasn't been inventoried. You don't know the, there's more trees out there that haven't even looked at. You need somebody to take charge and do that. And they have to be, they have to be on staff. They have to be trained. They have to be able to do that. That's my two cents. Yeah, Connor, go ahead. So I really appreciate what Bill's saying about some difficult decisions ahead. At the same time, this body has spent hours and hours on this issue. So almost by default, I think we've identified it as a priority. You know, I'm convinced it's a real and immediate threat. I have a tough time looking at these guys who have spent so many hours in a volunteer capacity. They're almost employees as it is, not giving them more resources. So I think I'm with Jack. I'd like to see some more numbers at the next meeting to see some options that we could review there. I'm not ready to shut the door in a position. Also, I mean, just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if this kind of a service is something that could even be put out to bid to Arborus. Like if we can hire someone on a contract to do this for us for the year or to however many. Anyway, I'm just thinking of that. Okay, so for now. We squeeze them into the next agenda. Yeah, I think so. It's a straight forward sort of report of this kind of detail, task and cost. Let's keep it. Rosie? It's actually just scheduling-wise. Well, I have some thoughts about the next agenda. Okay. This is not the right time to. No, fair enough. Speaking of the agenda, actually, I mean, if we're, well, did anybody wanna make a motion or do you, or should we just move on for now? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, so looking forward to more numbers. And about then the next item. So theoretically, we would be taking up the parklets at this point, but it is 10, 15. And I would love to push, I don't think that's an urgent issue. So if we can make the 12th, the first reading and then push the second reading to September 26th, that I think would be useful. Yes, Rosie? I was gonna even suggest pushing it further because this is something, I mean, we need to know this win or what we're doing, but yeah, figure it out in October. 26th for first, yeah. Yeah, 26th in October 10th. I think that, you mean for the parklet? Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And the Ashborers can take the place of the parklet on the 12th. Isn't it great that we have that here? Yeah, very good. That is actually incredibly helpful. That's great. Thank you, ma'am. But there's, I'm sorry, where are you moving parklets? Yeah, we're gonna move parklets to the 26th and then the 10th. Or the second, there's a fancy box of markers. Yeah, these are the markers. Oh, wow. Do you wanna, do you wanna, why don't you move to October 10th? Is that a, what is that a dry erase, make sure. Is that a dry erase marker? You should. No, you gotta use us. You gotta use. I was gonna talk about the Ashborer for. You almost did it. Woo, Jack. Let's go. You can even erase the permanent ones, but. So I, You're getting, you're gonna be messing with Jamie here, so. Just so you know. Let the record reflect it was Jack that almost wrote permanent marker. October 2nd. So that's, that's now the third, by the way. Oh yeah. It's October. But the October 10th would be the. September 26th and then October 10th. Okay. October 3rd is a special meeting. We'll make the, I'm writing all consistent later. Yeah, we'll, right. Jamie, well, she's. Then we can. Great, thank you. Awesome. That's really great, that's awesome. All right, so, kicking the parklet for now. I think the only thing we'll have to do is the point the VLCT voting rep. Are you all aware of what the VLCT is? Well, I feel like we should probably do like 20 seconds on that. For my league of cities and towns is the member association of all the municipalities in the state. It does, it provides insurances, legal advice, technical advice on all sorts of issues. But one of the other things is also represents towns and cities of the legislature and they adopt a municipal policy each year. Full disclosure, I remember board of directors of the league. So it's, you know, and I was chair of one of the policy committees, the water resources committee this year. And the, so the membership votes to adopt this policy then, just not unlike what we do here. And then the staff represents that interest at the legislature. So each community is given one official voting rep, anyone can attend, but only one, you know, you have the card that you raise and the city council designates that voting rep. It's great if it's a council member has been on several occasions in the past. I will be there, although it is on October 3rd, that's why I wasn't going to be at the night meeting because it's a two day event. Now I was going to stay over with because the league board is a thing at night, but be that as it may. So I can do it and I have done it. So you're covered, but if one of you would like to do it, it's an interesting thing. And then there's training sessions the next day. So if I've done it, it's pretty fun. I would like to do it. So it is a daytime thing. I'm curious how, how do we as a city council decide what positions to take on the platform proposals? As I assume that we don't just pick someone and say, go do whatever you want. I distributed what they sent me to everybody. No one has sent me any confidence. I was the voter, but I sent it to everybody. Yeah. Did we send it? I've gone every year, but one. It's attached to the agenda item. So the draft policy is there. So in year, we've done it a million different ways. We have in fact sent people with a do what you think is right. We have some years said, go and support the league policy as drafted. Other years, we've actually had it on the agenda and gone through it and taken in because, you know, not, not, not a certain every line, but if there were issues that people said, no, we want it, you know, we direct our staff to seek an amendment. There is a process where towns and cities can send in proposed amendments and those get voted on. And it's clear that some select boards do go through them with fine tooth comb. So you can do it however you want. You have till October. You can go and not be the rep. Yeah, you can go and not be the rep and discuss. You just can't vote. Right. Yeah, I've even just gone to the, to the conference. Right. That's valuable as well. And that's changed though. The one thing that's different this year is that there, the Wednesday, the third is the voting day. And there's just a couple of things there. And then there's like board stuff and a dinner and stuff at night. And then the next day is the sort of the conference thing that used to cram them all together. So if you go on the third, that's great, but you don't go on the fourth. And the city of course covers the registration cost for anybody who wants to go, including staying over if you want to. Where is it this year? I want to say South Burlington at the. Is it, because it alternates. It was down a road. Is it the Double Tree Hilton, which used to be the Sheraton. So the one out by the interstate. I believe that's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's got it right here. It's really, there's so many good workshops and good discussions. It's really worth. It really looks very interesting. So just the one day. I've heard that Ashley wants to be the voting rep. Does anybody else have any interest in being the voting rep? I'll be gone. So I'm not going to fight you for it. No, no one else. Okay. I think we do need to vote on that. Yeah. I have a little bit, but I'm not going to just get in your way. So do it. Oh. I do have a request though. There are some things in here that I find particularly problematic surrounding mental health, substance use and abuse and department of corrections that I would like to raise with the council. So I'm wondering if we could just put it on the agenda. Not necessarily go through it line by line, but if people could just raise their issues with it, because there were some things that kind of really stood out to me and a couple of things that have come up that I've been following over the years. It's a fairly conservative group. Can I just say I got in a fight with the ED at the time a few years ago, because they were against the Equal Pay Bill. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh no. Better to go. Okay. I nominate Ashley Hill to be the voting representative for the city of Montpelier to this year's VLCT convention. Second. For the discussion. Vote your conscience. All in favor please say aye. It's never a problem. Aye. Great. Yeah. What is this happening? It's an October. October 3rd. It's a Wednesday and Thursday. That's why. You want to put something on the. The third is now the date of our special election. Oh that's right. Honestly I guess it's just more of the kind of thing. Next one. If there's. 26th to talk about it. Right. Oh I see yes. Yeah. Sure. It doesn't need to be like anything in depth. Like I just, I have some things that I would like to. Yeah. We can stick it on the end. Find out if everyone's on the way. Right. Sure. Okay great. Thank you for doing that. All right. So I think we are up to. We'll take care of it. Council reports. Rosie would you like to start? Yeah. So I was approached by. Dan Jones of the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition about being part of a group that they are putting together of land owners around the rivers and downtown to start to talk about what are some things that they can do to work together or kind of having more of a at least talking to your neighbor understanding of what other people are doing so that might influence your own decision. And so I was approached about kind of attending some of those meetings and I'm interested but I also wanted to come back to the council and see if this is something that you would like me to attend as a council representative or with just kind of a private citizen hat on. And I want to be really clear in understanding what my role is. Yeah. Are you interested in, I mean as a baseline, you're interested in participating in some way or no? Yes. So my understanding is there's a few meetings in September. Generally I'm really conservative about my ability to commit to stuff outside of work and family in this but I think that I can make the time to attend of several meetings. So and it's a topic I'm really interested in and I think that one of my skills is sort of thinking about all this, how do things interact with each other and it interests me. So I would be happy to do it but I also, if someone else is really interested, I wanted to give other folks the opportunity as well. I think you should go and say that you're representing the council. Okay. Yeah. Great, great. I was gonna say if you would prefer to represent yourself, if that's somehow easier, then that's fine with me too but I think I might have been effectively outvoted just now. I trust your judgment. I think we all said do, I mean I think it's the same thing is that we're comfortable either way. But sometimes if you have your personal hat on, it can be very useful insight. Well, I won't make any commitments on the part of the city but I just wanna have a better sense of whether I'm, who I'm representing, so that's helpful. But I'd love to hear a report about it. Sure, of course. Cool, thank you, Rosie. The only thing I have to say in case that she's not, doesn't wanna put herself forward too much, I want to recommend my friend and seedmates, Ashley's op-ed piece in the Times Argus today on domestic violence. I thought it was great. Anyone out there who hasn't read it should. Thanks, Jack. I wanna thank everybody who came out to vote in our election. I saw the email come out from John Odom that we needed more people because we had so many folks show up to vote and that's how democracy works. So I appreciate everyone's efforts in making that happen and I particularly really appreciate city staff and all of their efforts to make it go as smoothly as possible and those lines were impressive. Yes, it was great, it was really good to see. Donna, are you starting over here? Sure. I was gonna hunt for the, one of the groups that I've just joined on my own is the Water Basin, a clean water act and we're dealing with the Holmanuski area. Berlin Pond is in there under some very interesting ways and already has some red marks about vulnerability and risk, this is good, but the Department of DEC, Department of Employment. Environmental Conservation. There you go. The water people, they have actually decided that they should start identifying pristine water areas, whether it's a pond, a river and label them and protect them. What? Now, they didn't do that for Berlin Pond, that doesn't mean we can't keep nurturing and get Berlin Pond up there. It's an incredible table of just how much trouble we're having, not just with runoff from farmers, but things are showing up in the water antibodies. I mean, it's just amazing in the water, in the sampling of the soil around the water and it's very, very interesting and the report is like, yay, but I could email, and drafts keep changing, but it's really been very interesting. The other thing, I mentioned it before, but I will be gone, I'll leave the day after I'm sure our late 26th Council meeting. I leave on the 27th for Sweden and I come back on the 9th, the day before. So I hope I'm not late flying in. Have a good time on the third. May seem silly, but I just really want to thank Sue and Bill and everybody who was involved in that goat story. It's, you know, if you think about the thousands and thousands of dollars, people would pump into like marketing to get such exposure for like a city our size. I've had countless people from all over the country, even in Ireland reach out and say, what a fantastic like city that is to live in. So I say it with all sincerity, like great job on that one. And the names, what could be better? There's Bader and Ginsburg. I'm not eating enough. You're not eating enough? Yeah, well that's, we may have to stop because they're not actually, we just legalized the substance in my loaf of bread. Get more goats. As usual, join me tomorrow morning, Thursday at Baguitos, 830 to 930 to talk about whatever you like. That's been going really well and I continue to enjoy it. And I want to tell a very brief story about a whiteboard. Here in my earlier, early when I was here, I signed up to be a substitute teacher at the high school and the first day I walked into the classroom, it was empty. I took a marker and wrote Mr. Hutchison on the smart whiteboard and then looked at the marker. And after that bone headed move, I was really proud of myself that I thought hard and looked around the room and found the alcohol based hand sanitizer and wiped it right off. So no one knew until right now. So in light of that, it's just might be wise for us to maybe take that down. So it's not necessarily here in the off season. I mean, we have hand sanitizer somewhere. It's okay. Maybe we just eliminate the permanent marker. Can we just eliminate the permanent marker? Or just turn it around or, do you know what I mean? Are you afraid we'll get extra comments? Yeah, maybe. Right? Well, then we don't necessarily have to leave the... Or anything. Any other markers, you know, around. Yeah, okay. I'll talk to you soon. Yeah, we should figure something out. Put it on the city's webpage. Yeah. Put a picture of it on the city's webpage and take it out of the room between meetings. Oh, it could be a Facebook post every time. That would be a great Facebook post. Okay. All right, team. I have a few updates. So bear with me. First of all, yesterday, I got to talk to you about what you were doing. First of all, yesterday, I got to hang out with the trash tramps. Yes. And that was just delightful, fun. I would encourage you all to, if you can, find a Tuesday afternoon at two o'clock, meet up with the trash tramps at the senior center, and then they walk around town picking up garbage, and it was a great time. So shout out to them. That's thing number one, thing number two. I just want to relay that I had some comments from people about the recertification of the Marshfield Dam that we might be looking into being a party to the certificate of public good for that because it's potentially affected, you know, as to the health of that dam. So just a heads up about that. Third thing, one of the things that came up in our discussions with the new hotel proposal was the capital plaza, Peshara's, et cetera, wanted us to check in with you all about the possibility of doing some kind of a deal on water rates. And so I just want to ask, is there any interest on giving them a water rates deal? And you can tell me now or you can tell me later or not. I know what Ashley's response is. Is anybody interested in talking about water rates? I think that would be really not good. Okay, I'm just doing my due diligence. She's just honored a commitment. I had to thank you. Our answer was we don't think so, but we'll ask. But we'll ask. That's what we said. So I'm asking. So she kept her word. That's it. That's all I needed to do. Thank you. Okay, great. And that's another thing. So now there's a couple other things that I wanted, I'm really excited about that. I want to talk about super briefly. I think I've sent you all a copy of the potential language for a charter change. So I'm very interested in your feedback on that. I mean, we have some opportunity to talk about that more formally. I don't see it on the September 12. Oh, wait. No, it's September 12. Right. So next time. Next time. So I have some ideas of ordinances that I would like to have conversations about. Charter change or ordinance. I'm sorry. There's some ordinance. There's some ordinances that I think if the charter change were successful, then we should have a language. No, one. Just to put it very briefly. My interpretation of the proposed charter change language is that it's just an exploration of what it means for a public welfare. So I just want you to know that there are three things that I'm thinking about for potential ordinances. And I want to invite you, if you have ideas of what ordinances might be enabled by that charter change language, I would love to get your feedback about that potentially before the 12th so that we can try to call it that. I'd just like us to be really aware of public meeting law and maybe we should post what you shared in terms of the potential charter changes or something. If we're all going to be providing you feedback, I just don't want to do that outside of a public. We'll put it in the weekly model. Sure. Great. Thank you. So first thing, I mean, is the plastic bag either ban or tax? I mean, that's sort of what spawned this. But I also want to explore the possibility of a citywide contract for compost. And that could potentially go through the central Vermont solid waste district with an agreement with them. So they would explore putting out an RFP, et cetera. So if you're interested in having more conversation about that, that's something that I would love to put on an upcoming agenda more specifically. Is there interest in talking about that? Yes. I'm not interested in taking up more staff time particularly. But I don't think this would take up that much. Or at least right now. Right. Yeah. But we can talk about that. So I'm seeing general interest in talking about citywide compost. So that's another thing. And then there are some energy code ordinances that I'm really interested in. I'll tell you more about that later. So that is it for me. Thank you for bearing with me through all of those points. That's why you ended meeting at 10. 15. I understand. I'm sorry, Ann. I didn't get it. Did you send it with your city email or your personal email? With the city email. And I think you even wrote back thanks. But I can send it to you again. Because I'm searching for it here. He said it was August 15th. If I'm thinking of the right thing. It should be about then. I can tell you. Well, I've been having trouble. And Seth tried to work on it. But now he's jammed me out of Google Drive. Oh no. All right, John. I think you're up. I just say thank you, Ashley, for the kind words about the election. However, long lines of the polling place are a sign in fact that democracy is not working. Well, it was unexpectedly long. And so does the desperate call for help there at the day. So all of which is to say, this is the second primary in a row where the crowds have been much bigger than expected. So I think for the first time maybe in our forever, Montpelier voters have discovered the primary. And I think it's here to stay, which means I think that's going to be the last time we follow the tradition and have it down here. Lost Nation isn't going to be happy. But I think that's the last election of any kind we're going to have in this room. At least with the current administration issues. And machines didn't work either. It's like wow. We had machines jam up. There was a particular reason for that. And I know how to fix them next time. Yes, at one point I called out that we were moving the hand count, which was something I never thought I'd hear myself say. But we got past it. And Donate is August 15th that I sent it. Okay, I see you. If you need it again. I'm finding it. I just have one minor thing. It was going to pass. But Donate reminded me of something, which is some of you, especially those who were on last year, remember that we had long, prolonged discussions with the state about Berlin Pond. And whether we should sue them, et cetera. And ultimately we ended up agreeing that we were going to have this containment area on the pond and they were going to put rules in for that. And not too long ago we got a letter from the state basically saying you don't really need any rules. You can put floaters or whatever you want in the pond to mark the area. Well, that's great. It doesn't provide any enforcement. It's just so what? What happens if someone violates it? So we are pushing back and saying no. We went through a process. We agreed. But we also may say, hey, listen, we're going to reconsider legal action. And I know there wasn't a lot of stomach for that, but we might have to have a stiff upper lip on this. We caved a lot and got little, and they're not even giving us the little. So I think we need to push on them. I think ultimately we won't have to bring legal action. But for some reason they just don't seem to want to promulgate these rules. So anyway, that's happening. So that's it. Pass. That's it. I'm done after that. Got to get the shaws by 11. All right. I think that is it. So move to adjourn without objection.