 So, just a little bit of logistics, so if you are joining us remotely, if you would change your name to your first and last name so I can call you, call on you appropriately. If you, when you start to speak, if you would say your name and where you live, that would be great. Try to keep your comments to two minutes or less if you can and Donna over here is going to help us out with timing so that you sort of know where you're at. And so if the item is on the agenda, then you'll have a chance to speak about that item either just before or just after or sometime during that particular topic. If you would wish to speak on a topic that is otherwise not on our agenda, then that can be for general business and appearances. So otherwise, if it's on one of the agenda items, try to keep your comments germane. And yeah, just make sure that if you have multiple questions, try to ask them all together because we don't really do like a back and forth in this setting. Okay, I think that is it. So, we're on to approving the agenda. I don't have any information to change the agenda. And have information to that effect. Okay, so with that, we'll consider the agenda approved. And so we're going to move on to general business and appearances. So this is an opportunity for any member of the public to address the council on any topic that is otherwise not on our agenda. And if you could say your name and where you live, try to keep your comments to two minutes. That would be great. We'll start with people who are with us in person, anyone with us in person wish to make a comment. Okay. All right. And folks with us virtually page. I see you've got your hand up. Go ahead. Hi, thank you. And I, this is Paige. I live in Montpelier. And there is an agenda item on the ballot on the agenda tonight that I just want to focus voice my support for since I can't stay for the whole meeting. But so the homelessness task force and Parker advisors. We'll be making a presentation later about a covered shelter for the homeless in town. And I just want to voice my support for that. Proposal whatever comes out of that. I think it's a necessary item. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Anyone else with us virtually wish to make a comment, you can. Turn your camera on and wave or you can unmute yourself. Let us know you wish to speak. Or you can use the raise hand icon, which is under reactions. Okay. I'm not seeing anyone. So we're going to keep going then. So we're on to the consent agenda. Is there a motion regarding the consent agenda? Okay, there's motion and a second. Further discussion. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay. Great. So we are. Actually, you know, I spoke a little bit too soon about it moving about the agenda. We're going to move the winter city council schedule to the end. So we're going to skip over that for now. And. I think we're actually also going to move the communications update until after all of the DPW items. Right. Okay. So that brings us to the historic preservation appointments, as well as the, the homelessness task force appointments. So we're going to do the introductions for those both together. And then I sort of imagine that we may go into executive session to discuss both of those. That's my anticipation, but I could be wrong. But I do know that we have some folks here who are. Interested in these appointments. So we'll start with historic preservation. Paul Karnahan, would you like to come up to the mic and introduce yourself? Tell us about your interest in the committee. Paul Karnahan, I live at 14 Saban street in Montpelier. And I'm interested in serving on the historic preservation commission. I think you have my form that I filled out online. Gives you a little bit of my background. I've done a lot with the history of Montpelier over the years and continue to maintenance, maintain a strong interest in the history of Montpelier. As far as the commission goes, it seems to me that it's got three roles, planning, advocacy and education. The existing commission has already done a lot of work in the planning area. It's my understanding that the rules have been adopted by the planning commission. And then I was able to review their guidelines online booklet, which they've just done and presented to the planning commission last night. Planning commission is in the process of giving some feedback and then it'll come to you eventually. It's a pretty impressive production that I think will help property owners in the city know a lot about how to preserve their buildings. As far as the other two things go, the commission has a great plan. I sat in on the meeting last night. They've got a very extensive plan with many more priorities than they can possibly achieve. But I went through that and pulled out all the high priorities. They've got eight high priorities, and I think that's one of the things that I would like to do. And I think that alone is going to take many years to do, but I would like to be involved with helping them achieve some of those priorities. There was also one there that I saw had a low priority that I'd like to talk to them more about, which was identifying historic. Structures that are perhaps in danger. I don't know if I'll preserve those before they get too far gone. I think if some sort of outreach had been in place when that Davis property out by Agway had been, the people noticed it was deteriorating. There might have been a different outcome to that. So I'd like to see a little pro action as far as reaching out to owners to help them maintain their properties in a historic way so that we can maintain the, the historic structure of our city, which we all love and appreciate. Thank you. Any questions for Paul? Oh yeah, go ahead. I don't have any questions, but I just want to express my appreciation for. You're giving us this overview of what the commission does, because it's not. We don't always get something like, like this and, you know, usually the appointments are pretty uncontroversial, but I appreciate it hearing it. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay, thanks. Yep. Okay. And I just want to check. I didn't think I saw Craig Durham here, but I want to check if Craig is here with us either in person or virtually. Okay. All right. So we're going to move on to the folks who are interested in the homelessness task force. And it's quite a crew there. So we're going to start with folks with us in person. And I know. Not frothing hammers here. Nat, would you like to come introduce yourself? Thank you for the invitation to say a few things. I think that homelessness as a fact. And as a growing reality. Does. Does shake us up a bit. I know it shakes me up a bit. And I'm surprised myself sometimes. I think, I think that I'm at least liberal. In the way I relate to the world. But then I see, I see people in the community. I haven't seen before. And I react with. I surprise myself or by reacting with. Some suspicion. And some apprehension. So. And then I read about. I read about people crossing our border. I read about. People taking. Homeless people and sending them on mass to other states. I remember. In my own life. I was spending the Christmas up. 1961. In a refugee camp. On the other side of Rwanda. And. That was a, that was a, that was a memorable experience. And. There have been a number of instances. Since then in which the notion of homelessness. Has entered my life. I know that some members of my family have been homeless. I know that. Because of the way things shook out of my life. I was once homeless and had to ask friends that they would put me up for winter. And then I came to work for the Vermont center for independent living. And they weren't dealing with people who were homeless. They were dealing with people. Who often found themselves disabled. And. You can as easily find yourself disabled. As you can find yourself homeless. And that was a. I worked with the Vermont center for independent living for a year. And our one of our target. Issues was homelessness. So I look forward. Both to being challenged and shaken up. Once again. And working with a group of people. Who I'm sure are ready to. Join hands and work on a problem that's complex. And try to get it done. And try to open our community. In very creative ways. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions for net. Okay. Great. Thank you. All right. So I think that is everyone who is with us. In person who is on this list. But I know we have other folks with us. Virtually. So I'm just going to go in the order that they are. Listed on the. On the agenda. So we'll go next to. Peter Kalman. Peter Kalman, go ahead. Thank you. I just have a clarifying question. I'd like to ask first. I see that. Diane Matthews. Name is on the list. She, as you know, is a police. Officer. And in the. In the former incarnation of the membership. There seemed to be a police position. It was either Diane. Or I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And so when in your deliberations, I hope you'll discuss whether or not. There should be. Such a position or whether people should be considered. Simply as individuals, regardless of where. They're from. And I don't know whether Diane thought she needed to apply. Based on bills. Note that former members. I don't know. I don't know. I'm here so I don't know what her thinking was, but. I'm a little confused by it. Anyway. As for myself. You all know me very well. I think. I mean, I've spoken a lot at city council meetings. And other committee meetings that I've sat in on. I've sat in on. Homelessness task force. I was a member of the. I was a member of the city council. I was a member of the city council. I was a member of the city council. I attend. Frequently. Occasionally a planning commission meeting. Dear B meetings and so forth. I consider myself to be a housing advocate primarily. But homelessness is. Is very important aspect. Of my concern. For housing. I would like you to ask me questions. If you have doubts. Or concerns about my membership. I was. Not surprised, but disappointed. When the housing committee. Appointed people and did not appoint me. Since I've been. One of the prime movers of creating that committee. So there must have been at least four people. For members of the city council who have concerns about me being on that committee. If people have concerns. I'm being on this committee. I think it would be appropriate for you to ask me questions. Now. Anything else you want to share, Peter? I just want to make sure that you're done before we. Jump. No, I. That's all I just would like. People who have concerns about me to ask me. Questions now. Okay. Any, any questions. Okay. All right. Thank you. All right. And we are going to go. Next to. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead. Oh, Carolyn. Rid path. I thought I saw on here. Yes. Carolyn. Go ahead. My computer gets confused. I was on the homelessness task force for a couple of years and then I took a break. And I would like to come back on it because. I see that we're going into more areas of change that may be because I have been homeless on several occasions. And I have interestingly housed. Homeless people in my home. On and off for the last 20 years with great success. So I think I'm in a position to actually empathize. With the people in this circumstance and. How effective housing is. And changing. The whole life of the person. I mean, it gives whole new meaning to be housed to be secure to have food. And so I'd like to see that available to everybody. And I'm not an idealist. I mean, I. Realize that there are certain. Problems in implementing that. So at any rate, I would like to rejoin the committee. And. Move forward. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your questions for Carolyn. Okay. I just want to know, I think I might have missed. Mary. So. This is Mary M. Is that Mary messier? Go ahead, Mary. Mary, it looks like you are unmuted now, but we can't hear you. Okay. Still, still can't hear you, Mary. So. Let us know. So we're going to go then to Don Little. Don, go ahead. Maybe Don. Oh, oh, oh. Yeah, I'm here. Sorry. Okay. Yeah. I thank you. I've been on the task force since it was formed a couple of years ago. I have. Over seven years experience locally dealing with. People who are literally. Living outside. I have been working with people that deal directly with homeless people. One good Samaritan Haven, the other one, another way who in fact has another mission. But I have been working with people in the areas, particularly with people who are considered hard, hard to hold house and have. And have multiple barriers toward housing. Who may be classified as chronically homeless. So I do have a lot of experience in the area. I have a lot of experience in the area. I have a lot of experience in my life. Not the way most of the people I work with are, but in very briefly. In Rhode Island in New Hampshire and longer, but mainly couch surfing in. Montpelier. I've been a resident for 13 years. I do. Have experience locally as both a provider and a consumer. I think the challenges are increasing. And I think particularly at this time with winter coming on. And with so many changes still dealing with the. The after effects of or ongoing effects of COVID. I think it's a really important time that we have. Some continuity and people with direct experience who are on the task force. And I feel that people who do. Street outreach are kind of uniquely positioned in that we deal directly with both providers with providers, planners, community, and people who are living outside. So I think that gives us a lot of. Opportunity to see what the gaps are and what the, what the landscape looks like. Thank you. Thank you. All right. And I think we will go next to Paul. Cap carer, go ahead. Hi. My name is Paul. I actually live right around the corner from town hall at 45 and I've been a Montpelier resident for about eight or nine years. We did buy that historic home there. And I would be interested in talking to the gentlemen about historic preservation at some point later. We're working on getting it fixed up and painted and wanted to do that. Right. So yeah, I am. I have spent all of my career working in nonprofits. I spent many years running the family homeless shelter and Brattleboro. And when I was in college, I worked with the inner city homeless with healthcare for the homeless in Baltimore. I'm a nurse. I have a public health background. And my interest in the committee is just helping Montpelier come up with solutions on how we can help support our fellow citizens who are unhoused and get creative with, you know, how we can get them back on the right path. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Any questions? I don't know that I ask if there are any questions for Don, any questions for Don or for Paul. Okay. Okay, great. That is it. Is there anyone I missed that is on our list for either the homelessness task force or the historic preservation committee. Okay. Is there a motion. Jack, go ahead. I move that we enter into executive session to discuss the appointment of a public officer or employee pursuant to one VSA. 313 a three. There a second. Okay. Second. Further discussion. All in favor, please say aye. And opposed. Okay. So we will be right back. Okay. Is there a motion to come out of executive session? Second. Further discussion. All in favor, please say aye. And opposed. Okay. Is there a motion regarding appointments? Go ahead. Okay. I'd like to move for the historic preservation committee. We appoint Paul Carnahan and Craig Durham. And for the homelessness task force. I had a good discussion there and we'll be breaking it down at the end of the session. I think we're going to go back to the terms. Two years and one year there. First of all, we're, I think we're very hardened by the response to this. And there's a lot of people who bring a lot to the table there. So we want to make this as inclusive as possible. Craig. If you're watching, we wish you best of luck on historic preservation. We'd love you to focus your work on that right now. And maybe branch on the future. Paul, I know you're at home. I know you're at home. I know you're at home. And then after that's completed, definitely consider you bring you on here. As far as non-voting members, we thought it's really important to have a police rep to this committee. So we'd like to put. Detective Diane Matthews on that as a non-voting member. That could potentially be self doubt with another officer. Maybe if she can't make it there. I would be a non-voting number as well as the council liaison. So. So that's the end of our discussion. And we'll move to a final discussion. So the next term. Would move to a point. Will ever Lee, Zach Hughes, Don Little Erica rail. Ken Russell. And Rick D. Angeles. And for a one year term point, Mary Messier, natural thing. Peter Kelman, Tory Rodin and Carolyn Redbeth. There's a second. Any further discussion? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. And opposed. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We look forward. We look forward to. Stay in touch with you all about. Historic preservation and homelessness. So thank you so much. Okay. I think we're ready to move on men. To the Kellogg Hubbard library's funding request. I know we have some folks here from the library. So come on up to the table. Or if you'd prefer the standing mic, that's okay too. It's your choice. Yeah, I'm going to have to read my chicken scratching here. This is a little bit earlier than I'm typically used to coming before the, the city council. So I appreciate you all having me. I am Carolyn Brennan. I'm one of two co-directors at the Kellogg Hubbard library. And I have with me tonight, Judy walk. Who is the city council nominee to our board of trustees. So I have a two part request to put before you all, but before I make that request, I would like to tell you that the library has had a banner year this year. We are back to pre pandemic circulation numbers. We circulated over, we had over 350,000 circulations this year, which is the highest I've seen the library circulation in the six years that I've been there. So we have our digital use. We expanded digital access to the library. Over the course of the pandemic, we put more services online through our website so that the library is virtually, virtually never closed. We have streaming video services now. We have downloadable digital, digital magazines. We have downloadable ebooks and audio books and that we've had for a number of years, but we've expanded the size of that collection. So we've had a number of years that have been closed. So we've had a number of years that have been closed. Those numbers increase exponentially every year. And this, this past for the fiscal year that just closed, digital circulation went up by about 9,000. So that is a sling in books is still the number one thing we do with the library. We, you know, we do, do hundreds of thousands of that, but we're seeing digital use rise and rise and rise and rise every single year. We've had a number of issues we've had a lot of, a lot of issues called oceans of possibilities, and we saw, we had most of our programs outdoors. I saw lots and lots and lots of wonderful happy kids cavorting on our lawn. We have outdoor seating now, that gets used every single day. We have out, where and, and visits wise, including we're seeing an increase again in our after school usage. We reopened our, we have an after school hangout space that we open five days a week downstairs in our East Montpelier room. And it is truly just a space for kids who have a gap between when school gets out and when their guardian can pick them up or their guardian is available at home. And so we see kids every single day just kind of crashing down there. We've got a rug and couches and it's supervised and we put out games and it's just a space. It's a space to be loud too. One of the most significant changes I've seen at the library since I've been there and that I've had a hand in for better or worse depending on who you are is converting the library into a conversational space. We really mean to be a community hub. We are a talking library, which is shocking to some. But other than our fiction room is still a silent space for people who are really looking for that kind of traditional library experience. But anywhere else in the library, you can have a conversation, you can have a cup of coffee, you can meet with your friends and neighbors and have civic discussion. And we see that use all the time. We're back to pre-pandemic use of our public computers. We are back to filling all of those little gaps that we see in other types of social services. So we're seeing the return of people who are experiencing homelessness coming into the library as a warm space or as a space with a public bathroom or as a space with a water fountain, as a space to ask a question or connect to a service. We're seeing, I am personally answering questions every day from people coming in who have questions about losing benefits that are maybe wrapping up because we're reaching the end of the pandemic or switching to endemic mode. I had someone in my office today who was concerned about reaching out to the Economic Services Division because there was a typo in their address and they were going to lose their fuel assistance because of one wrong number on their application form. And they have somebody that they work with for that service, but that person is overstretched and not available and their deadline is October 31st and they wouldn't be able to meet with the person that typically helps them until after that date and they were in crunch mode. And so we were able to get that sorted out which was wonderful. But we fill lots, that's just one example of something that we do all day every day between me and my librarians. What else do I wanna tell you? We just completed our strategic plan this year. You all received that as part of your packet. I'm very excited about that initiative. We haven't had a long range plan in a number of years and this one is for the period of 2023 through 2025. And one of the exciting things about it, it shows the library moving into that community hub mode and moving into really being, really like breaking down barriers. And there's an emphasis on outreach to all other community organizations which I'm really excited about. And we recrafted our mission statement, our mission and vision with a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. And diversity, equity and inclusion is something that is embedded in everything that a public library does every day but formalizing it in this way and making a commitment to equitable hiring practices and having a more diverse board of trustees. And oh gosh, and we're working on a diversity audit in our collections right now to further diversify our print collection. And so we're just really taking a hard look at some of the assumptions that we've made as like, oh, well, we're the public library. We do the stuff naturally and we do but we can do it better and we are doing it better which is incredibly exciting work to be moving towards. So that is, I think that's my bit in terms of pitching how I couldn't say enough about how exciting it is to be reframing the work that we do and for breaking down some of these silos in the public library. And there is more if you look at our strategic plan you're welcome to read that it's available on our website and our latest annual report which is also available on our website if anybody else wants to read it and we have print copies in the library. It looks like this and that goes over all of our how the library is funded and the things that we've been doing this year and some statistics with participation in programs and circulation and some of the things that I just told you. So to the asking portion, we are requesting to be added to the town meeting warning for March of 2023 in the amount of $411,774. That's an increase of $16,148 over last year. And I am very humbly requesting that we do not be required that we're not required to petition to be put on the warning. And that's for three reasons. The first reason is that collecting 10% of the voter registry is difficult. It's onerous, it's a lot of names. Our other member towns require 5% and so that's typically much more doable. And of course Montpelier is the largest community that we serve. The second part I have to remind myself of the second part is that we have extremely consistently high voter support in the city of Montpelier and by waiving the requirement for petitioning, you're not depriving the voters the chance to vote on the library budget. You're only getting us onto the warning itself. And I think that our high support shows that were we required to petition, we could do it. But it's going to be a lot of legwork. And that gets me to the third reason which is that we're still feeling the after effects of the pandemic. We're seeing numbers rising again across Vermont. There was a article on WCAX about it last week. We're starting to talk at the library about what our points would be where we do need to scale things back again. And I hope we don't get to that point but we are beginning to have those discussions just so that we're prepared should it happen. We're moving to online programming for the winter months. I know the Vermont Humanities Council is also moving to online programming and moving away from in-person programming for the winter months. And I have also already seen people self-selecting not to come out to events. And so typically we go to local events to collect signatures in addition to the signatures that we do get at the library. And I think that that is still going to be a really tall challenge this year. I think it's going to be more difficult than it would be in a typical year. And that's my piece. And I'm happy to answer questions. And Judy, I don't know if you have anything you wanted to add. Thank you. I'm going to jump in here and say, so we had a similar conversation, we've had our last meeting with Central Vermont Home Health and Hospice who we also waived their signature requirement last year and we waived their requirement again this year with the understanding that we are going to revisit our policy between now and the next vote, but not affecting this March, right? So I'm going to just guess team that we are probably, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I'm going to guess that we are probably also inclined to waive signatures for the library this year. And again, understanding that we are going to have this conversation about our process for next time. Now, if I'm speaking incorrectly, if folks would, if we want to have more of a discussion about this, that's certainly welcome. I'm just thinking, for the sake of expediency, Connor and then Donna. Yeah, I was on the losing end of the vote at last meeting we had there. And I don't think we need to have another discussion about petitioning if we're going to do it in the future. So for the sake of consistency and because this is a very modest increase and thank you for being on the front lines, as we talk about the homelessness issue, which we are, Carolyn's been coming to the meetings and doing some real heavy lifts in that regard. So I would move that we add the requested funding amount on the article, on the ballot. Carrie, and I'll just very quickly register that I also voted against the waiver for home health and hospice. And I think I'm going to vote against this as well, but purely on a technicality. And when we further discuss this and our policy about the library and about the ballot and everything, I'm a huge supporter of the library. My personal preference I think would be that the library is just part of our budget and that you don't have to go through this every single year. However, we do have this policy in place. And so I'm going to just be a real technical sticker and vote, stickler and vote no, but it's not any reflection on the library. Any, oh, Donna, yes. I guess you and I have a lot of contrast going on. I would rather guarantee that you go on the ballot as a separate item than put it in our budget because I feel it goes directly to the voters much more than any petition does. So I think you certainly have my support. Any comments over here? No, okay. All right, so there's any questions or library folks here? Okay. Okay, with any comments from the public, just want to make sure I'm checking. Okay. All right, so there's a motion in second. Any further discussion? Okay, all in favor please say aye. Aye. And opposed? No. Okay, great. So motion passes. Thank you very much and look forward to chatting again after we figure out our policy for next time around. Thank you guys so much. Yes. Yes, go ahead, Donna. I'd just like to thank you for all the material you sent us. It really was great. Getting it ahead was helpful. Yeah, thank you. So grateful for the library, especially during the pandemic. Oh my gosh. Side note. You used the word cavort and I don't know how to spell that. KBORT. Oh, oh, CA. Oh, that's it. Okay, all right, thank you. Okay. It's the spelling bee. All done. All right. So we are up to... Yes, I know. The library did that at one point, I think. I think so. All right, so we are up to a presentation from the homelessness task force on winter issues and the shelter or the parklets. So welcome, Dan. Yeah. Once again, I have an extra copy and handouts for you all. I think in honor of Anne, next time I'm gonna bring a pop quiz for you all. Awesome. So, well, thank you, council. My name is, of course, Dan Tol. I live right on first ad here in Montpelier and am the head of the consulting firm hired by the homelessness task force to do the homeless needs assessment and action plan. First of all, I'd like to acknowledge all the hard work and the good faith effort by the city council, by the city and the task force to address this homeless, this issue. What we are about to present is we know as a big ask and time is limited and we very much appreciate your consideration. So for our presentation and in addition to myself, my co-presenter on Zoom will be Dawn Little who, as you heard, is one of Montpelier's very dedicated outreach workers who has worked with the homeless and has her own lived experience. So for the presentation, I'll start with the recommendation right off the top. I'm gonna give some background information, talk about some of the key issues relating to this and finish off with a discussion of logistics and implementation. So background, as we're all well aware, the housing situation for vulnerable Vermonters, including the homelessness has worsened in the last month or so with the state's abrupt situation, abrupt cessation of housing supports and funding. As such, the need has heightened is heightened by a projected increase in the number of homeless who will be forced to leave their hotels as well as those who are evicted from subsidized housing. Locally here in Montpelier, the task force with the support of our firm, Parker Advisors, has been working with nonprofits, faith communities, state agencies to ensure that households, unhoused individuals and families have a safe place to be during the cold months of this winter. While right now the most urgent and critical issue is getting an emergency overnight shelter up and running, we still have another crucial gap in the safety net and that's the lack of a covered warming gathering space for the unhoused. Recommendation, what we'd like the council to consider is authorizing both the homelessness task force supported by my firm to prepare, we would prepare a plan for this covered gathering space and we'd work with the city on that to implement and at least some of the funding we were proposed to come from the 400,000-ish that's been earmarked for homelessness in the city budget. In addition, the task force would collaborate with the Montpelier Police Department and other first responders to work to try to mitigate some of the concerns that they've raised. Before I get into the issues, I just wanted to make the statement that, you know, as you all are probably well aware, the state is struggling right now with this housing issue across the board, top, you know, whether it's houses or rentals, homeless, subsidized, there's not much that we can do. We in this room can do to influence that. What we're proposing here today is something we have control over and that is within the budgetary constraints that we have. So I'd ask you to really think about this as something we can do and a step we can take forward because there's a lot of, I can tell you from being part of meetings with the state and nonprofits, there's a lot of hand-ringing going on right now. And getting even a small win, I think is crucial, not only for the people that we're trying to serve, but for the community to try to build some hope. So if you'll turn to page two, and by the way, this presentation, was it posted at the website, the city website, and where would people find it on the website? It's connected with the agenda. It's connected with agenda, great. So for those of you in Zoomland, if you go to the city website, you can find this presentation right there. So if council, if you could turn to the second page, the outline, what I like to do is start by hitting some of the key highlights of the key issues. So first, centralized accessibility. That's really key for the unhoused and the service providers, particularly those that have mobility issues, including obviously those that are disabled. Centralized location gives proximity to bathrooms and transportation. It gives ease of access for service providers and outreach workers. It also gives the ability of volunteers and the community to drop off water and food, clothes, and other items. Next, in terms of safety, first of all, there's safety in numbers. What the task force is hearing from the folks out in the community is the ability for them to be together to have a common gathering space, create safety as opposed to them spreading out into dangerous isolated places throughout the community. But, and as importantly, it's also safer for providers having a central semi-open, semi-accessible place for them as well. Shelter from the elephants, that's pretty straightforward, particularly obviously as we move into the winter months. In terms of services, it's a place, but having this centralized gathering space, it provides a location for people to seek and receive services, to get referrals, messages from service providers, emergency camping gear, and peer support, something some of you know is near and dear to my heart. Next, social connection, as we all know, connecting with other people is vital to our health and that's what this central gathering place does. It provides a space for community amongst those that are unhoused. The need for multiple options, particularly in these times of deep service cutbacks, this would provide another option for the times when there's no room in the shelters, no transportation to those sites, nor when the shelter or the warming spaces are open. In addition, in terms of multiple options, it's a place where a nearby place, people can go who are either not suited or don't want to use the indoor shelter alternatives and that could be for any number of reasons, whether it's mental health or trauma or personality issues. Lack of transportation, a centralized location would help mitigate this obstacle which has gotten particularly acute during the COVID during the COVID years and with our declining economy. And then something that kind of surprised me as I got involved in this homeless project is the central gathering space also, it provides an opportunity for the community to have positive interactions with the homelessness and maybe Don, can you give us an example of one of the many positive interactions that the community have had with the homeless? We actually had a lot of people who surprisingly, we had people who delivered food, we had people who in walking by fell into conversation with people and made some real connections. I do know that before, I do know that when we had originally, when we'd moved the original Gerton Park from the original site, just as a similar example of what a central gathering space can do, we did have, I did to my surprise, get a number of comments from local residents who were very disappointed that the park had been moved both out of a degree of empathy for the people who are using it and the lost opportunity to be able to connect with people in a casual, safe way. I also, I did wanna mention that this is, you may look at this and say, well, you're doing just fine without one now, why should you, why are you asking now? And I do wanna say that there are things that are different in the winter. We've been fine this summer because it's been warm out and people have been gathering around the tables at Confluence Park, but when those tables are moved, people will probably return to doorways and bus stops. And with the colder weather, it is much more important to reach people quickly. We don't have the luxury that we do in summer of, well, yes, this can wait a couple of days, because if they don't have adequate clothing, if they don't have a sleeping bag, if they don't have a way to keep dry, this can't really wait a couple of days when it's that cold. And it's also, I've also realized that this is a disability accessibility issue, that there are both provider, well, providers, volunteers and users of the structure who are homeless. A lot of them don't have the ability to go up into Hubbard Park or to go into little corners around town. And they definitely don't have the ability to go back and forth between there and the bathroom and the water and the services. So there are really a number of reasons that we have this need. And Dan will tell you in a minute about another primary reason for this that I wanted to revisit since there seemed to be a perception in the past that people did not receive services in gathering places that this is probably certainly a valid experience with some of the service providers, but I believe that all the street workers would agree and a lot of the people are out there that it's really a primary place for people to receive services from street outreach. And Dan can tell you in more detail what that involves. Great, thank you, Don. So moving along with issues, cost obviously is always one of the important things to consider with an initiative like this. In this case, there's now two categories. There's direct costs, which obviously would include the setup and instruction, as well as ongoing maintenance. In this case, we believe this is a relatively simple project and a relatively low cost option. At the same time, there are indirect costs in particular without this gathering shelter. These indirect costs include excessive time, expense, and the opportunity cost of service providers who don't have the central location to access the unhoused. However, more importantly, the cost of human suffering would be at least partially mitigated by a covered shelter. And finally, other considerations that would be addressed as part of the plan would be bathrooms and trash collection and removal. Don, anything else that I missed in terms of key issues before I move into the last section, logistics and implementation? To point out the obvious, but something that a lot of us overlook is that when you're outside in the winter, if you're outside and you're going shopping or whatever for a walk and your clothes get wet, you just go home and throw them in the dryer. And these people can't do that. So with the change of temperature, it becomes a lot more urgent that people have a covered spot to go into easily because they have no way to dry their clothes. And while we can't always offer them that, at least we can help prevent, you know, the situation in the first place because hypothermia is a real danger. The other thing is just to, for me anyway, is to sort of underline the need that people have when they're conducting their entire lives in private. Most of us, you know, if we want to be alone, we have somewhat over or we go to a, you know, we may go to a restaurant or something and these people don't have the money or the place to go to have any sort of personal interaction with other people. You know, you can stand in a parking lot or on a street corner, but this is really the only place they have to sit down and deal with whatever personal business they have or socialize. It's a major morale issue. And it's, even when we offer warming spaces, they're going into a place that's closely supervised for the most part, or a place where you can't really have a conversation. It may be, you know, it may be a quiet space, a library, a quiet study space, or, you know, something like that. And they really, it's a basic human need, you know, to have relationship. Many people live in motels where they're not allowed to have people visit them in their rooms. So there's a real, you know, or in shelters, they don't really encourage, you know, it's an issue when you're running it to have just a bunch of people wandering in and visiting. So they need a place to actually just sit and have a conversation, read the newspaper, sort out their differences or whatever. And they don't have that in a room in City Hall. You know, they don't have that at the library. They don't have the privacy, you know, which sounds kind of weird when you're talking about a space that's out in the open, but they don't have anywhere that's not closely scrutinized by members of the public. So just wanted to mention that. Great, great points, Don, thank you. So moving along then, first logistics, probably the first and most important threshold issue for this proposal is where to locate this gathering space. From the subcommittees or the task force perspective, as we've been saying, centrally located is critical, but also setback from the travel public spaces. The ideal place would be downtown for access to shelter spaces, the daytime shelter spaces, like such as the library in another way, getting to the buses, transportation range, also access to providers and of course, emergency services if they run in particularly medical issues. When it comes to location, we've looked at a number of different options and it's sort of in that order of priority of our recommendation. The first would be the grassy knoll that's in back of the parking lot behind the drawing board. I believe it's where the bank used to be. It's between the parking lot and the river. Right now it's just an empty grass space. It's central, it'd be safe for the unhoused and for the service providers, convenient. It would be visible while setback, it would still be visible to the emergency service providers. And by being setback, it would reduce the, the propensity or the situations where there are negative interactions between the public and the unhoused. So that's sort of, that's number one option. Number two, Confluence Park, which I think we're all aware right now is sort of de facto gathering space uncovered, but that is the gathering space. Confluence Park is more isolated. It is harder for providers to access by car and it is close to walkers and bikers who use the bike path. So creates that unfortunate opportunity for those negative interactions that there have been some experience within the past. And then lastly, you know, so other potential locations would include state owned land, NGO or non-government organization properties, parks, or even private property owners might be willing to step up. So that's location in terms of the structure itself. There's really two options. Build the structure, a new shelter that's designed, customized specifically for the needs of the unhoused. And again, we believe that can be done at a very reasonable cost. The second option would be to bring the Gertin Park structure in storage, which would be probably somewhat of a lower cost option, but does have the major drawback of being, it's a, as you all are well aware, it's a reconstituted parklet, not a gathering, a covered gathering space that was specifically designed for this type of population. And then the last issue is really the issue of costs and the task force really is proposing that working with my firm, and of course with Bill and the city, we'd prepare a budget for this project. And that would of course be a based in part on the selected location and obviously the construction option. So lastly, in terms of implementation, and again, the task force working with my consulting firm, we would flesh out the implementation plan and it would include clear communications to the community so that we can work towards building support amongst your constituents. So to conclude, just to reiterate, the ask here is for the city council to authorize the task force working with park advisors and the city to prepare a plan for this covered gathering space and consider using a portion of the $400,000 homeless set aside and again, collaborate and work with the police and other first responders on their concerns. So with that, I'll open the floor to any questions and comments. Thank you, Jennifer. Oh, Don, wait before you do that, Don. I'm sorry about the non-linear nature of this presentation, but I'm having some technical issues and I have to keep paging back and forth. So it's hard for me to follow the order in which this is occurring. So I'm sorry about the fragmented nature of it, but I did wanna say that there are a number of factors this year that are different from previous years that contribute to the need for such a structure. In addition, I don't know if people are aware that the overflow shelter that we've had for years is still a possibility, but it's not guaranteed. It's a little more tenuous this year than it has. So we may have more people outside, but if that question comes up, there are a lot of safety factors for the providers and for the potential users of such a structure. It used to be really safe to go out in the woods by yourself or to go alone. And it really hasn't been this year and maybe the end of last year, the landscape has really changed a lot. So that's another factor. And the other thing is we've had, I think increased interest in people from the community being interested in volunteering and working with this in terms of either maintenance or that sort of thing. So that's all I wanted to say, thanks. Yeah, that's great, Don. Yeah, the volunteer issue is one that will be part of, we'll be looking as part of the plan. There's a meeting next week with the faith community. The focus of that really is the overnight shelter, but one of the issues that I hope to discuss with them is no possibility of using volunteers as part of this, maybe for trash collection or whatever, explore alternatives for using folks in the community. And I guess the last thing I do wanna say as a follow on to what Don was just saying, I have the good fortune to know all, to one degree or another, all the new members that have been appointed. And I applaud the committee for not only bringing all these really great people onto the task force, but also structuring it with the non-voting and a way that we get, we have the stakeholders at the table, but we have a mix of providers, community members and people with lived experience. So my final point is I feel really good about the team we have on the task force and that we working with Paul, Paul who's my, Paul Capcaro who you heard earlier as my partner in the sec, that Paul and I can work with this group of people and make this happen. Super, thank you. Jennifer. Yeah, so my question, wow, this is hot mic, sorry. I did not mean to yell at you. My biggest question really is surrounding like who is gonna, I mean, if this is gonna be an unsupervised space, who's gonna take care of it? Who's gonna make sure that there isn't a bunch of people using in there or having interactions that maybe aren't safe and picking up trash, making sure that people aren't sleeping there, et cetera, et cetera. I think some of the things you mentioned are somewhat inevitable in that as long as we don't have adequate rehabilitation programs that are available to people and we don't have adequate support backing it up. And what we have is a lot of people with a lot of disadvantages who are under a huge amount of stress. I can't, I don't think that we're gonna completely, that we're gonna eliminate this behavior. I guess my feeling is that if it's going to happen, I would rather have it happen where people can get help. I would rather have it in a safe space. And it's unfortunate we would like, that's one reason we would like to not have something right on the sidewalk or where the bike path directs you right up to it like it did when we had the Gertin Park over by the river, so that there is no forced interaction or direct having to be right in hearing range of it. Yeah. I do think that, go on. No, go ahead, sorry. No, I do think that it's safer. I've seen a lot of interactions where people being at that structure were protected by other people there, which might not have happened if they had been in a more isolated spot. I do think, one of the issues that we had, and I know we talked to Bill about this before and I'm jumping from topic to topic, but the issue of the trash, I think having increased volunteers, there was as Bill knows, there was an issue with trying to get the trash pickup contractors to go more frequently. It's not just an issue. At the gathering spots, I think it's an issue everywhere, but particularly there where more garbage is being generated. We did have people picking up trash, but it's really hard to keep people motivated when the single trash can is always overflowing. One thing to look at would be maybe adding another trash barrel if we can't get anyone to pick up or maybe arranging for someone else to pick up the trash and drop it off. But we have honestly, I've seen an improvement at one point at least in people picking up the trash, but there's just nowhere to put it. Yeah, and the only reason why I asked this is because everybody knows I've been working with homeless populations for over 20 years in both Oregon and here in Vermont, and I feel like the problems that we're having or the issues that we're having here are beyond what our small communities can do and our state needs to listen and there needs to be more funding available for people to do this work and more mental health services, more drug and alcohol treatment services, more outreach workers. There's only like Dawn and Zach who I see out on the street and I did street outreach and it's hard work and it's depressing work and it burns you out and I just, I worry about the workers, I worry about the people that need these services and it feels like it's so much bigger than this and I know that this is important and it's something and it's better than nothing but I want us also to recognize that the state has a responsibility to all of its citizens and there's only so much that we can do and it's very frustrating because everybody has great ideas and everybody wants to help but there's either no funding or no people to do the work or people are burned out and tired and I just, my heart goes out to everybody on this situation and it just, it feels impossible at this level and I feel like the bigger people need to step in. I think, I mean, obviously there is a need for a lot of large long-term solutions and this is obviously not meant to be a substitute but again, the increased workload on street outreach that has occurred in the past year and a half, the increased danger to being outside has necessitated at times having two of us go out, in order to be safe and it's not totally wasted money because we're often, if two of us approach, we will often have half a dozen people gathered around each person but there are times, I don't know if you, I don't remember what was in the written blurber, whether you read that but there was at least one time when we went out right after we lost the park last year when we ended up driving around for three hours and that's an expense and it's time when we could have been interacting with people directly so this is not nearly an issue of convenience, it's how to access more people more effectively and efficiently at a time when the weather makes it really crucial to do so and it also is safer, it's accessible and again, it's not, I guess nobody, understandably nobody wants to see this but it doesn't have to be in their face but I think it needs to be, it is a temporary solution, I mean, it's a temporary partial solution but I think this is the most effective and safest and most humane thing to do given that we don't really have any other good options right now. Yeah. I'm just voicing my frustration outwards. I appreciate the power of the bee and the newspaper nose. Yeah, thanks Don, that was great and thanks for the question, Jenner. Yeah, the behavior issues will not go away. There's nothing reasonable and humane that we can do to stop that but by creating a centralized space that's set back enough so it's not immediately in everybody's face as they're moving about. We have the opportunity to at least exercise some level of control because, you know, as we all know now, the single biggest evident gathering of homeless is at Confluence Park. So, you know, it's, what's the other thing about the site about the location is the thing that I liked about the lot by Shaw's is that the police, the police drive by there regularly, they would not have to detour out of their way. It's just something you can eyeball on the way by for providers. It's a way for us to on occasion monitor what's going on. You know, and again, the less time we spend wandering around looking for people, the more time we can concentrate on the people who, whether we have a solution or not, we can at least attempt to reach some of the people who may need help the most and may be, you know, may be attracting the most attention. Again, we don't have an easy solution for that, you know, but at least it gives us maybe the time to take a shot at it. Can I jump on that? Because it's bringing up a question that I feel like would come up in public conversations. Anyway, one hypothesis is that the existence of a gathering place means that more conflicts or, you know, difficult behaviors would happen because of the existence of that space. Another hypothesis is that those conflicts and difficult behaviors are happening elsewhere anyway. And so is it fair to say? I mean, my sense from you is that is the latter, right? Is that it's these difficult behaviors are happening elsewhere anyway right now? Exactly. So it's not necessarily... They will. I mean, one way, I'm sorry, one way to reduce it, one way to reduce it, I don't know how to do it at the least possible cost. You may have noticed that there have been people going to the bus stop lately and that's because that's the only covered place and it's the only place to sit down really. Some of them are doing this to get away from Confluence Park. And the reason people started going to Confluence Park in the first place was that some people wanted to sit down and separate themselves. So yes, I mean, in a way, these behaviors will happen. Conflicts will happen. You can dilute them to a degree by providing spaces where people can go to be more alone. And I don't expect the city to be able to invest the money to put up two or three covered shelters. I don't think that's realistic at this point. I would love it if it was. But yes, behaviors certainly are happening anyway. I think having them in a place where they can get help more easily is important. And again, maybe in the future, if there are... I try to point out to people in the summer when it's not such a health issue, where there isn't that cold, go sit on a picnic table here, go there, whatever, and people do. But yeah, I don't think we're causing bad behaviors. I think we're just causing them to happen in a place where it's safer. And again, if we had more places for people to sit down, there would be somewhat fewer conflicts, certainly. There might still be conflicts, but there would be fewer conflicts. But not having any place for people to go to sit down does not reduce the number of conflicts. It just makes people more frustrated and miserable and pissed off, I think. Other questions, Jack. And then Donna. Thanks, I have a bunch of questions, but the one that immediately came to me, because Don, you mentioned it a couple of times, is that you said that there's a increased level of danger this year. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that and why that is. Is there, are there more dangerous or violent people out there that you're encountering, or what is it that makes things more dangerous than they might've been even a year ago? It's hard to say exactly. There's probably a number of factors. I started to see it a little bit last year, but this year, part of it is we have more people coming in from outside that we don't know. We have an increased level of frustration from people who have been outside for a long time. In the past, there were actual motel rooms available for emergency shelter, at least during cold weather. As of last January, I believe it was, suddenly there are almost no motel rooms, so you have fewer people with that option. A number of people have been driven out of their camps by bears this year. There are a lot more bears around than there were. So I've seen more people that are clustered in the middle of town. They don't have the, when you have a camp outside of town, you have a relative peace and quiet, you can have possessions that aren't going to be stolen quite as quickly. You can actually cook, you don't have a constant flow of people. So I think part of it is the lack of as many settled camps. And I don't know, maybe I don't know what it is, honestly, I mean, I think there are a lot of people who are kind of right on the edge. I don't know what it is. I've just seen more frustration and more desperation and more people who are not normally around who are coming here. I don't know if, I don't know why there are more people coming here at this time. It may be just that there are fewer emergency accommodations everywhere and they're moving around, but there are more people that were not known to me. Some of the major incidents we've had or repeat incidents we've had have been people who weren't around a couple of years ago. That doesn't really answer your question. But so do you feel you're actually, when you're interacting with people, you're more likely to have somebody physically assault you or threaten you? Not in town. And I do have to say that with the people that you commonly see in town, I have no fear whatsoever of being assaulted. I have never been threatened by anyone. When I go into the woods now or when I go to camps, because it's not the same people in the same camps, it's unfamiliar. And there have been people passing through, there I am. I'm not comfortable going into the camps alone right now. It's partly the bears. It's partly that you don't know who's gonna be there from one month to the next. And there have been some people out there that I was not familiar with that I was very uncomfortable with. I would say right in town, I think there has been increased violence between the people who are there. I don't see that as any threat to the providers or the public in general at all. I mean, so far I've never seen that. It may be uncomfortable to watch if you're right close up to it, but I've never seen people, they get frustrated with each other, but I haven't seen people threatening me or anyone else. Okay, thanks. Thank you, Tom. Well, I have a bunch more, but you just go ahead. I don't wanna... Okay, well, I'll throw open a couple of big questions that I've thought of about this. One is that it really seems that this is a proposal to do something that is a temporary arrangement for this year or something. And when we appropriated the $400,000, I think we were thinking of creating something that was gonna be a permanent resource. And I'm sort of wondering, well, how do those two things interact? And any thousands or tens of thousands of dollars that we spend for something that's temporary is something that's not gonna be available out of that $400,000 for something permanent when we get to the point of designing and addressing that. And so I wonder if you could talk about that a bit. I think it... Tom, just a sec. Believe it or not, the discussions that are currently being held around the housing issue, the homeless issue right now because of the continued pools of federal money, there's other funding available right now to the extent of $400,000 isn't enough for the more permanent solutions. And I'm glad you asked that question because when Paul and I launched this project on October 1st, the winter shelter and this covered gather were not sort of on the agenda. There are things that have surfaced because of how fast things are moving and how things are deteriorating in terms of housing and the homelessness situation. We are committed, we're trying to address an immediate need with the winter cold months just weeks away. Paul and I are committed to not only putting forth other shorter-term solutions, but most importantly, what are the medium and longer-term permanent solutions? So, yes, this is a temporary step, but I can't emphasize enough the point that I made earlier about how little is being done right now to your point, Jennifer, at the state level and certainly at the federal level. This is something we can do. It's not huge, but... And then we have the issue the winter overflow shelter, as we've said. Right now, that's... We don't have firm commitments for all the different pieces to get that winter shelter up and running. So again, this would just be a small step, but at least it would be a step in the right direction. And then the last question I have for right now is that nobody on the council was happy at the vote we took that I think most of us felt we had to take to remove the Gertin-Parklet last year. And so, I'm sure we'll want to hear from the police and from other people going forward, but what can we do to ensure that we're not really... We're not gonna be in the same situation that we were in last year that led us to... The bad interactions with people, all the stuff that made people think that we could not go on with the way we were going. I'm gonna answer your question with a question. Can you be a little more specific, Jack, about... You said... I heard you say that nobody on the council was happy or satisfied with removing the Gertin-Park shelter. What were the two or three most critical issues that you believe that your colleagues here were not happy about? Well, I think nobody wanted to take away this resource, but on the other hand, people felt and were hearing that there were enough problems that it just wasn't working last year. And are we setting ourselves up for going back into the same circumstance that we were in last year? Because everybody wants to support this. Right, right. Well, Don, go ahead. No, I just... I don't know if there's a simple answer to that. I will say that one thing that absolutely guaranteed failure was to have it right on the sidewalk. I mean, that was not going to work for anyone. And I'm sorry that happened. I mean, I can't say that all the problems are going to go away, but I do know that setting it back away from the sidewalk where people are not forced to walk right by it. And it was not just... I understand the problem. Some of the issues that people had with it being there. I also understand that a lot of homeless people were harassed. I was harassed by people passing by. So it kind of went both ways. But yes, I see what your concern is, and I don't know if we can completely eliminate the chances of that happening. But I do know that putting it back, way back from the sidewalk would help a lot. Dan? Yeah. Yeah, there's no nice, neat package that we can put this in and say, oh yeah, we're not going to have any problems. And everything is going to be hunky-dory. But I believe we have a heightened, right now we have a heightened sense of urgency around this issue. We, as I mentioned towards the end of my presentation, with the new task force composition, we have a larger group and a more diverse group of people to do the problem solving the brainstorming and putting the plan in place. And also a larger group obviously benefits because the ripple effect of them being able to connect with people in their community within the city. So in terms of building awareness and trying to build support or at least minimize the objections. I feel like there are a number of reasons that we're positioned now to make it work better than it worked before. And Don's point, I think is one of the most key is if we get it in the right location, that will at least mitigate a big part of the behavioral, of the in-your-face behavioral issues that plagued the previous structure. Can I make a suggestion that addressing that question? I think to be called out and highlighted in your final recommendation. Yep. Great. Thanks. Great, thank you. Donna. I wanna thank you for this job and it does put everything together. But on the other hand, I am disappointed. I feel like we're not anywhere. I mean, we were sitting where you're feeling now last year that it was bad and getting worse. And hence we put the money aside, $425,000. Thinking about a structure. I invested time learning about the pallet shelters. And I really wanted a community room and showers and bathrooms, but they wouldn't sell it to us without the individual shelters. And they wouldn't sell that without staffing. So here we are in this loop again. So I was really hoping there would be more solid recommendation because we know location is what's keeping us from doing it. We don't have an easy location of own land. Even to do like a pallet community that is temporary, but really permanent because we were going to get really good insulated shelters. We still needed to know that that was then just a transitional place, a place people could go. They had individual rooms. They had showers. They had a community meeting room. They could have services there. And it was sort of matching the numbers we had then. But what I'm seeing here is like, we're looking at a potential community room, which is great, but back in a parking lot, there'll be lots of conflicts. That's a doorway that more housing. We have problems now with the transit center, having conflicts with the people living above the transit center. There are teenagers who live in that building who don't want to go by themselves anymore because they're accosted. They live in the transit center. Yeah, they live above the transit center because of all that. And I want you, for them, is the people that are now congregating Confluent Park. And if we can all agree on a location, not being Confluent Park. Well, with the location where this is offered, you're still back near the park, near the path, parking, major parking back there, major people going in and out of stores, and people in housing have entrance on that backside. You may or may not be aware of it. So location is number one. And I guess for just thinking of a community room that's not staffed. Well, first of all, it's not a room. It's a shelter. Yeah, I just want to make sure, yeah, that you're not thinking of it in terms of four walls and a roof and a floor. Right, so we have bathrooms here that you also want to have bathrooms. I want to have bathrooms. I want to have... We were talking about maybe a porta potty having found a potential way to mitigate the floodplain issue. I'll tell you, just to do the foundation looking on, I went back and Googled some of the information in the pallet shelters, give me. Just to do a foundation of concrete. I mean, we're going to invest $300,000, probably like nothing quick, putting a foundation there, putting it up. If it has any water to it, it even becomes more expensive. And yet I'd rather do something that will lead to something permanent. I mean, I would rather go and make a deal with Vermont College, really, to use those dorms. I mean, with the dorms, you have space, you have heat, you have bathrooms. You have potential for eating. Now that I can invest in. Right. But this is gonna, I mean, I just think that's a wrong location and I can't find one. I've called realtors, they can't find one that we can do that's accessible. There's some empty buildings I would love to negotiate with the owners open to it. You know, maybe public pressure would make them open to it that are located in a good location downtown. So I feel just frustrated that I don't feel any further than we were when we had this allocation. I feel stumped. I mean, do you have a number? And that's changing, but what number do you think are gonna flow through this shelter? This, there are three dozen people right now outside in Montpelier. Not all of them will be around this winter. Three dozen. Three dozen. In Montpelier, living outside, number of them will leave. Some of them will migrate south. Some of them will find couches to sleep on. Some of them will go to camps. I do think one of the differences we look at now is that we have consultants to help us, which I'm sincerely hoping they will be able to address some of the issues that we have not been able to address in the past. Like what is a viable site? What do we have to do to make this happen? So I think that's one way that we're ahead of where we were last year. I also don't think we had talked to Ward Joyce about the porta potty issue. And my impression, and I may be mistaken, is that it would not cost a whole lot for a foundation that it wouldn't have to be a permanent concrete thing. But you're right about the location, certainly. I don't know what the easy answer is that will be good for everyone. Yeah, well, first of all, Donna, great questions, great issues. Sorry, I mean, don't be negative at all. I'm just very frustrated. Yeah, no, I'm very frustrated too, for a whole lot of reasons. First of all, in terms of this shelter, the task force just in recent weeks raised this issue. And part of this is in response to everything that's been happening since the state announced they were defunding a lot of the housing initiatives. So we don't have a lot of the answers and that's why the proposal is to get, is to get you to, is to have the council approve us to put together that plan and come to you with a budget. And to me, yeah, I won't speculate what the dollar is, although I think 300 is probably way on the high side. But the other issue you raised about pallet shelters and more permanent spaces, as I said, that's all part of the original project that Paul and I were engaged to do. Look at those medium and long-term solutions, including pallets and pods. We all know that Burlington is implementing their putting pod space. St. Johnsbury is doing pallets and we're starting to, we have connections with the people in the Burlington community, in particular, as you all know, the other consultant that didn't get the job is working on the Burlington job and I've reached out to her and we're starting to communicate. So your frustration around when you talk about the more, you know, pallets and pods and work, that is the core, that's the core of what the original project was. This is a stop gap, a stop gap issue that surfaced in the last few weeks and the task force believed this is really important and particularly in light of what's going on right now. But it is just a temporary thing and it's only one step towards the medium and longer-term solution. Does that help at all? Okay. So are you saying that a longer-term plan is still in the works? Absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly what the contract was doing, do a needs assessment of services that are housed and the providers and put together medium, long-term, medium, short and long-term solutions. Okay, yeah. Thank you. Can I, nope. Sorry. Sorry, I want to get to Carrie and then to Connor. Okay, thank you. So thanks for all this clarification. I share other people's concerns about preserving that $400,000 for something longer-term and more permanent and I also hear that we need some kind of a stop-gap measure. So what I'm interested in is hearing more specifically about what the budget would be for different versions of what you're talking about, but in particular, if we take the Gertin structure and we pull it out and we put it down in this spot behind the drawing board, what the cost of that would be. That sort of seems like the bare minimum to provide that place and that's kind of what I want to hear about. And I know that you're continuing to work on longer-term and then I just want to say one more thing about I very, very much appreciate all the attention given to the fundamental human need for a place to go and socialize with other people that's not supervised, that's not monitored, where the kind of thing I do every day in my life, just have a conversation, have a relationship, just be. And so as we're thinking longer-term about things like pods and pallets and we're thinking about staffing that comes up all the time and about there are, I'm hoping that we will keep in mind this need for unsupervised, unstaffed indoor safe space where people can go and just have their lives in addition to places where they can also connect with professionals and get the services and the resources that they need. Yeah, great point. And that's definitely part of the options and alternatives that we're looking at as we develop the longer-range part of this project. I think there are two ways. I mean, there's a spectrum of ways that this could be approached. You could either do it incredibly, inexpensively. I mean, essentially what I'm looking for, what I see as the base need for this is a glorified, obviously not literal, although it would be fine with me, is a glorified set of two-by-fours with a tarp over it and some folding chairs. I mean, people just need to get out of the rain somewhere where they can get to Shaw's or someplace to use a bathroom, get a drink of water. You have that at one end of the spectrum which would be a temporary, very inexpensive response. If you put it toward the back of the lawn, I'm sure we could figure out something for a bathroom. And at the other end of the spectrum, you have something that we would spend money on that would fill this need, but would also be useful in the future as part of a longer-term resource for either unhoused or other community members or both. But it could be placed anywhere on that spectrum and still meet this need. Thank you. Conn. Yeah, so I think first off, probably important to acknowledge this is a difficult conversation to have. This was a fairly emotional and polarizing issue for our community when we had it last time, right? And we all received quite a bit of heat in both directions. And I think there are valid arguments in both directions for moving it or not moving it. I think bringing it back, I really appreciate Paul and Dan coming today. They didn't have to. It's not in the scope of their contract. They started October 1st and the deal was, okay, let's look for the long-term plan and how do we spend that 425,000 bucks? But what they're seeing is, okay, the bloody snow is about to fall in a few weeks here. We don't have a warming shelter. We are in crisis mode. And we got to do something. Is it a band-aid approach? It's definitely a band-aid approach, right? But it could be something that actually saves lives in the interim. And the homelessness task force, every media I bring to, this comes up time and time again. And the providers, they're unified on this. They say, this is something we need. So if we're to have a homeless task force, I think we have to listen to some of the folks on the ground on this and do something, even if it is just a total interim, three walls and a bench to sit on that's covered, that people can get some reprieve from the elements at a time. I spent a lot of time at Gordon Park. Walk my dog, sit there a bit at night and everything. And I'll be honest, I was pretty off-put by some of the behavior there. And yeah, there was some pretty ugly sides of human nature, you see. But you also saw people congregating in a time when folks were very isolated in a sense of community. And actually towards the end of it, when the complaints started flying, that's when we started seeing improvements. People mobilized, volunteers were picking up after themselves there. You heard cases of folks breaking out fights within their own community. But it was under the eye of the community. It was right on the sidewalk there. So of course we were going to get complaints. But what we did didn't solve any problem besides the level of complaints. It just pushed the problems into the shadows. And when you hear Don talking about going into Hubbard Park and dealing with some of these situations, I think like, are we better with somebody like ODing in the snow in December there or being in a place that's accessible where they can get help? And I think that's what goes through my mind there. It is a place where rather than spending a day trying to find somebody who has needs, you could go to this place and you could find them and get the help that they need. So I think, I really agree with Jennifer. Like I hear the frustration in your voice and I'm almost at the point where like the cavalry is not coming from the States. They do not prioritize this. They don't. They don't. They're very content to let municipal government handle these issues knowing full well that we don't have the resources or the expertise in many cases to do this job here. So I'm losing sleep at night. I'm sure all of you guys are too. I know everybody in the homelessness task forces. I hope they're losing the same level of sleep that we are. You know, and I'd love to get them maybe at the next city council meeting or something, somebody from AHS to say, okay, what's the plan here, right? What's the plan? Tell us because we'd love to be a part of the solution here because right now we're having a discussion about building a bloody bench with a covering on it there and look at the time we're spending on it. And okay, like it could serve a very real and immediate need there, but it's not fixing the problem here. So I think like tonight, what would be good is to send a message to the homelessness task force and say, we're hearing you, right? Like, okay, the elephant in the room, location is down Vegas here, right? We're not going to fix that tonight. We don't have an answer to it. We don't know where the thing's going. But could we send a signal to Dan, to Paul, to city staff, to police and say, okay, this is something we'd like you to work on in artists before like the next meeting there and come with some solutions as far as like cost and location and voted up or down then. But as far as a direction to take, I think it's a modest direction and a really important one. And I worry we're putting people in danger by sending them into the shadows at night to deal with these clients, you know, when they could be right there. We got to find a good spot. We got to figure out a way to pay for it. So I'll go off the spoke soapbox there. Just curious if you were making those. I'd like them, yeah, sure. I'd like to make a motion to explore options for a covered shelter for the winter. For the winter that would be temporary in nature and direct city staff to work with Paul and Dan, police and other interested parties like Don to come in with a more concrete proposal. But endorse the direction that we're taking. I'm sorry, that's a horrific motion. I don't know, I like it, Donner. That's a horrific motion. I'm not happy with it. You know what? I'm going to have to take the tape on this one. It could just be endorsing the direction of the proposed plan. I'd like to make a motion to endorse the direction of Paul and Dan work with city staff. They will impact their future meeting with some solutions. Okay. If there is second. I second it. I want to say that I think that I'm speculating that part of the reason the task force came to the council asking for permission to do this instead of just starting to work on it is that the idea is that you want us to authorize the consultant to spend some of the money out of the contract to do this plan. And I don't know if you think. Yeah, go ahead. Several things to offer this and I will do them as quickly as I possibly can. One, just want to for everyone's benefit council and everyone else review how we got here. So we issued a contract for the consultants to work on the long-term proposal. That's that's Dan and Paul. We hired them started October 1st. So here we are October 26th. I don't think they're, you know, they're not ready to prepare a long term plan yet. At every they've been attending all the homelessness task force meetings. At the very last meeting last week or today, the homeless task force made a motion have this be added to this week's agenda, which means they had to have it in by Friday. So this was turned around between Wednesday's you know meeting and Friday. And then I think we sent out some additional stuff on Monday. So this is very much a work in progress. You know, as as the staff to the task force, I think it's important that we we explore what they'd like them to do as the city manager and knowing the issue. You know, we have not consulted with our public safety staff and they had a lot of issues. So I think we need to vet all that and get the data on what's happening and all those things. And so that what they're asking is give us a chance to do this and we'll come back and report back what we found to your question. I think one of the reasons in addition to authorizing thing and to be all fair, I had to leave the meeting early, so I wasn't here when this motion was made. But in prior meetings, the question was, you know, the city council voted to remove the structure. So before we spend a lot of time on bringing a structure back, we want to see that you're at least open to it. If the answer was no structure, no way, then we'll do something else. Last thing I will say, and you've heard it already, but I want to make sure everyone gets this in, you know, last year and the year before we had an overflow shelter at Christ Church. They're willing to host it. There's no one to run it. And it's not a money issue. There's just no people. And it's a terrible job. And, you know, good Sam opened a new shelter. That's great. They're maxed. They're very clear. We can't run this without putting our other three shelters at risk. Another way is trying to figure out how to do it, but it would require a consortium of people that are trained and know what they're doing. We may not have an overnight shelter and overflow shelter this year. So there would be no place for people to go. So, yeah, so this isn't great, but it might be literally better than nothing. So I think we owe it to the community, at least look at it. And like I said, as City Manager, I'm going to reserve my judgment until we've actually talked about it, but certainly represent homeless task force, give them a shot to solve it. One point, Claire, thanks for all of that, Bill. That was really helpful that, you know, put it in context. But I just want to add Washington County Mental Health is also, you know, there's a number of players. Washington County also, Mary Malton and her team are trying to see how they can contribute to staffing and managing this winter overflow shelter. Yeah. No, no, no. I just need to clear that there's just no one to do it, and it's not for lack of interest. Yeah. Thanks, Bill. Lauren, go ahead. Yeah, thanks. And I appreciate the quick work and, you know, share the frustration everyone is expressing of the state and federal abdication and all of that. And, you know, knowing we need the long term and medium term solutions. I guess I would hope that what we can see next time would be kind of a spectrum of options, as people have talked about from, like, the very cheap, I mean, if it was the Gertin structure, I would hope it could at least be retrofitted because it's not a closed shelter. You know, I think we'd be better off building something really on the cheap that is actually fitting the need. You know, but then, you know, I mean, I could see this, you know, being something that if we could pull off, and you know, I know we need to get it built really quickly, but like either if it's, we actually realize, oh, this location is working well, like that either could be, you know, enhanced in the future. Like if it's something that's an investment that's just not lost, that there's opportunity to do it better now if we see it as like a long-term asset for the community. So I guess I would want to kind of see that spectrum of options potentially so that, you know, either super cheap that we know is like one winter or something that could be an asset for the community. And, you know, and I'm just with this winter shelter, I mean, structured in a way, like if we need to try to retrofit it or something to provide warmth there, I don't know. I mean, it's a horrifying reality. But like, yeah, I guess I just want to see some like options of how we can structure something that could be, could meet multiple needs given just where we are, which is really atrocious. Yeah, which is exactly what we intend to do. And as you were talking, Lauren, and this was not discussed, this just popped into my head, but as we start working on the plan for this, we'll do it in the context, you know, as I think you're alluding to, of the medium and longer-term solutions. So the thought bubble that popped into my head is, the first step, we identify the location. We build a congress center, the covered gathering shelter for this winter. And potentially that location could be the location where we build pallets or pods. So it's, you know, it becomes a new, you know, step one, we have the covered shelter. Step two is a more permanent solution. And it could be the same, sorry, could be the same location. And again, that's just top of my head, but that's the kind of dialogue, particularly now that we have the enhanced task force with the new members. We'll be able to roll up our sleeves and come back to you with those kinds of ideas and recommendations. Yeah, go ahead. Just one other, I would just second the idea of inviting the state in. I mean, maybe they could help us pay for this so we could do a better structure in the short-term and not be eating into our longer-term funding. To that point, the winter shelter, Rick, Rick DeAngeles, of course, who runs Good Samaritan, most of it, most of his funding, as I understand, comes from the state. And his primary contact is a woman, Sarah Phillips, from the Office of Economic Opportunity. And Rick, I don't know if Rick's on the call here, I guess he's not, but Rick has said funding is not the issue this year, if in terms of the winter shelter, there are funds available. So, yeah. Running some of them from the state, we're starting to digress from the core thing here. So I don't want to blame it, so I think funding to run a shelter is not a problem, whether there's funding to construct a shelter might be something different. So we need to do that. And I just want to keep in mind that we've got a motion on the table. Yes, go ahead. The question about the motion and maybe the direction is that at one point, Don was talking about people coming in and getting warm and drying their clothes. So I'm thinking four walls, people. And the community room you can buy from the pilot people. Actually, that's the one thing. It's basically an empty room with heat or AC. That's all it has, but it does have heat. It does have AC, which to me, if you're going to have a shelter, you'd like to have some warmth or reliefs from the heat. So I want to send you those numbers anyway. Yeah, that would be great, Donna. So I just want to be sure I get mixed messages. Is it coming in from the cold and the wet, or is it just stepping out of the rain over a roof? So come back with letting me and others maybe see a clearer vision of... I just want to give people a sense. Literally, this started with saying, and I think it was Don, just saying, we need to put the Gertin Park structure back. That was it. I understand that, but I'm just saying that that's where this came from. So how far we want to expand it will be up to us when we get the proposal. But when we took Gruten Park, we talked about putting a temporary shelter that was more appropriately seated, but we wanted to hear back from the task force. So that was, to me, has already been out there. Thank you. All right, I just want to check with the public. Any comments from the public? Feel free to come make a comment up here. As I listen carefully, I'm not hearing... It doesn't seem to me that in the real world, we're going to get a plan. We're going to cost it out. We're going to deal with the various parties, the business, the police, the mental health. I don't see... It strikes me that we need a plan A for December 15th, when for sure winter strikes in all of its fury here. And then we need a much more deliberate set of dates that would take us to something that's constructed. I don't see construction happening that quickly. I've never seen it in my life happening that quickly. The offer from Christ's Church strikes me as plan A. It's much easier to find a talented person to be in charge of a space that's already created than to cost out and get the contractors and get the agreement from this council, the task force, the players in town. So I think we need an emergency plan A, and Bill has described it. All we need is a great person. And a plan B is probably something that can be constructed. So I think, again, we're now getting into the details of our recommendation. And we would certainly take this up at the task force. I think the initial plan for this was to put up something that was literally a cover, something to keep people out of cover while we looked at the emergency shelter. And if there's some inexpensive way to put up something, that is a shelter. The problem with the shelter at Christ's Church, and I don't want to speak for Christ's Church, but I don't believe that they would permit an unsupervised shelter. And so there needs to be a responsible party. And if they're going to be funded by the state, there's certain standards they need. And that requires 24-hour supervision, not just a responsible person, but a whole team of them. And that means dealing with someone who's ODing, that means dealing with someone who's fighting, that means dealing with someone who's misbehaving and being trained for that. It's not a volunteer operation. And so it isn't just as easy to say, put everybody in Christ's Church and get one person. We've been trying to do this for months, and that group is not emerging. And on Monday we had Capstone, Washington Mental Health, another way, Good Sam, Dan, City, others, trying to figure out who can do this. I'm not sure that Christ's Church is plan A, unless we can find a qualified provider. But you're right, we won't be, I think to your point, the more permanent solution that won't happen in three weeks is what Dan's working on for the longer term. Mary, go ahead. Yes. Yeah, I think one thing that helps too, which I know people don't think of it as benefit probably, sorry, is that this did happen the other year, and there were a lot of good and bad. And the fact that there were all those problems gives people a chance to reflect on those problems and find the solutions that help mitigate those issues. When you see problems, it got thrown up, things happened, but now you can say, okay, there's those things that happen, what can we do? So that's something. I see what the, I'm not sure I heard Donna quite correctly on something about a lot of money for, was it foundation under a porta potty or something? A foundation for a structure. Or you have to put concrete down, you have to put something down. Yeah, it may not have to be concrete. Yeah, I have some building experience, but I don't think it needs to be concrete. And you got a piece of ground and you put a building on it, you can block it up, you can level up and put the building on it. I don't see that as a big deal. And same thing with the porta potties. I don't always see that you have to do a concrete base. Just from my knowledge. So I think there's possibilities of that not being a huge expense. And I'm also in a further view too, well, a simpler view, but one thing I'd like to see with a structure is even Gertin Park. You could make it a little bit longer, but I think having some plexiglass windows in there, plexi isn't that expensive probably and making it a little light, correcting the bench situations. There's a lot to be said for how a building is built and how people feel in that building and how people act. And it's really important. I think the structure itself could be improved pretty easily. And I think we could recruit people to help do that. I think we could recruit community members to work on it. I would work on it. I got a saw. I'll do it. Just don't make me pick up the heavy lumber. I will measure and cut. No problem. I'm even, for just an interesting thing, I was thinking about, and this is just a bigger thing, but I just want to say that I was thinking, as far as warmth goes, I was thinking about something. I was talking to my son who has a degree in mechanical, electrical engineering, thinking about heat sources. And those oil-filled heaters, if one was enclosed so nobody could mess with it and on a timer at a lower temperature, that could really help people too. I mean, I think there's a lot of things that could play into this and make it something good. And if we could work together and on the homeless task force and with Dan's help, and I pull it together a little tighter on what we're thinking on the actual thoughts of it, that would help. And I think people are really enthused about doing that and creating something. So I just wanted to throw that out. Thank you, Mary. Thank you. Great. All right. I'm going to go to Peter Kilman. Go ahead. I would just like to try to clarify some points. We're talking about three different things. Dan is proposing a band-aid that needs to be done before December 15th. Period. Let Bill and my housing task force work on that and come back very quickly, maybe not even come back for approval. Bill authorizes it. Very quickly, we need that band-aid. Number two, on the other extreme, Dan and Paul are working on a long-range plan which will be to spend that $400,000 on a more permanent solution. They need to have the time to work on that and not be distracted by this. Let them work on that plan and don't expect that Don is bringing up with pallet shelters. Of course, some of the rest of us brought up for pallet shelters about a year and a half ago, but that might be part of Dan and Paul's overall plan. That is not going to address the issue for this winter. So let's, and the third one is, and that got confused, the Christ Church is an overnight shelter. Christ Church is not offering a 24-7 shelter. They're offering an overnight. And that's all it is. It's an overnight for 10 to 12 beds, three different things that are getting confused. So I think that Connor made a completely reasonable motion, which is to turn it to Bill and the Housing Task Force to figure out how to deal with getting something in place no later than December 15th, whether it's de-minimous, de-minimous, just the Gorton Shelter fixed up a little bit. But the real key, as Dan said, is the location to figure out whether the grassy knoll would be the best place to put it. And if so, how can we mitigate things like the people wanting to go into their apartment, over overshadowed, et cetera. But that should not be being discussed here. That is just way down. Please, can we move on? Thank you. Okay, thank you. Anyone else from the public wish to make a comment? Okay, just checking in with the council. Oh, David Delcourt. Go ahead. Yeah, I just had a question. More as a time saver. I don't know where the task force will go with it, but I suspect that there are probably some places it might go that would require permitting. And that obviously pushes you past December 15th or potentially pushes you past December 15th. So it's up to come back with a proposal that you can't do. I'm just throwing that out there. Yeah, fair enough. Thank you. We'll put that into consideration. Yeah. Mark, you have to evaluate. It's part of the whole picture. Okay. Any other comments from council? Okay. There's been a motion and a second is to basically approve the proposed plan that you all becoming the plan. Anyways, for you all to come back to us with some recommendations. Any further discussion? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay. Thank you so much. And thank you. It is particularly impressive knowing that you were able to turn this around between Friday, like Wednesday and a Friday. And it's above and beyond really what we were asking. So thank you. It was really a subcommittee task force that included some non-members, including Mary and others. So yeah, it was a team effort. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. City council. Jack, take a break. Yes. Well, we're going to take a break. It is 844. We'll be back at 854. Okay. Good evening. My name is Kurt Modica, interim director of Public Works. Tonight, I'm going to give you an update of where we're at with the phase two water resource recovery facility project. That project involves solids drying and odor control as well as a secondary clarifier upgrade. And also on the topic of wastewater treatment, we'll also give you an update on leachate receiving where we're at with that. Seemed like a good time to update councils. We just finished our order sampling in summer months and been a lot of movement on the leachate front. And we're about to execute the final design contract with our engineer for this project. So I mentioned the topics covered tonight is the biosolids dryer, the work we've done on odor control at the facility, where we're looking at with funding for the phase two project. What's up next? And then sort of separate from the project is the leachate receiving update. So now just to recap, we started the phase two project at the plant to utilize the methane generated from food waste that we're now receiving. That was going to be a combined heat and power project back at the start, which is essentially power generation. After doing that evaluation, we decided that that was not the best path forward. So then we moved to looking at a biosolids dryer. So I think when the last presentation or maybe the one before, we talked about doing just a straight dryer. It was called the belt dryer is what we're leaning towards. Since that time, we've done the analysis with our consultant engineer Brown and Caldwell to really take a deeper dive into what the options were for solid drying and management. And what we landed on after the conclusion of the report is that really the better option for a variety of reasons is to combine a dryer unit, in this case a drum dryer, with gasification, which is really high temperature drying. It's like a secondary drying process at very high temperatures of the solids. Some of the advantages with this process is that you don't have to use the methane for the drying process. It actually uses the energy within the solids to power the unit. You need methane or another source of energy to start the process, but once it's fueled up and cooking, you can actually turn off the methane and use that for other purposes. A relatively low maintenance equipment. One thing we need to consider is the staffing levels at the plant. We're actually understaffed at the moment according to the state guidelines for the existing facilities we have. This is really adding really another whole process. And so we do have initial staff budgeted in this current fiscal year starting in April. We're still determining when exactly we'll go through. We're actually advertised for that position, but we do anticipate the need for right now we only have four operators to go to five operators at the plant. Another major advantage of this process is of the gasification is that it actually has the ability to break apart the carbon chains that make up the PFAS, the PFOA. And so you can get to levels below two parts per billion, which is really the industry standard for non-detection. There's a lot of studies currently in the works with air emissions. One thing that's one possibility is to put carbon filtration in the stack from the emissions of this to capture those particles and then you can put it back through the gasification process. The other major benefit is that after drying, running it through the gasification really really reduces the amount of solids that will need to be managed. And currently we're somewhere around two 40-yard dumpsters a week that we're disposing that go to Coventry. After if this process, once this process is in place, we will be down to two of those a year. So major, major reduction in solids is fossil management. And just a side note that I'll also just to note the the byproduct, the small amount of byproduct that we would produce would be renewable products. So you take care of the PFAS, we take care of the pharmaceuticals and the biosolids so that you have a true renewable, renewable product. So a note on order control, this unit would come with a prepackaged order control unit. So it would be self-contained. 99% remover. So on the topic of odor. So again, we just completed the engineering report this summer in June. We did some initial sampling, odor sampling in conjunction with that report. But really what we wanted to do is take sampling during peak loadings at the plant. So in the summer months is when we get the most septage, the most high strength organic waste. And in order to write size equipment, we really needed to do almost a supplemental report and study to get a handle on what those peak loadings were. We also had a violation from the state of Vermont, the air quality division. So we're actually the city is under mandate to address the odors at the plant. That's one of the many drivers of this project. And so that technical memo that I mentioned that included the additional sampling that was received just this month, which also tied in as a good time to provide the update. And I'll get into what the results of that study included. And then one note that we learned from this study is that one of the or the largest contributor to odors is what's called the blend tank. And that's where the first tank where waste is received and mixed. This is the high strength organic waste, which the city never took before the phase one project. You know, high, high magnitudes of increased odor from this location compared to other locations at the facility. And ESG was the consultant we worked with on the phase one project, continue to be a partner with us. They have engaged their engineering team to look at solutions for the specifically for that blend tank. You know, and there's a good indication that they are going to contribute to the cost of resolving that issue. So we're kind of taking this from a couple different angles with a couple different engineering teams. This is a summary of the odor analysis. It took a lot of different types of samples. There, there were continuous monitoring samples that were left in place and stored for download, you know, for weeks at a time. And then there were bag samples taken when anticipated peak odors were occurring. So the breakdown, you know, it's pretty clear that the blend tank I mentioned is, you know, an order of magnitude of 10 times the loadings at peak compared to all the other facilities or all the other locations within the plant. But at the same time, we're taking a holistic approach. So we're going to address, you know, all the areas that are contributing, you know, the primary contributors to odor at the facility. Excuse me, Kurt, while you're talking about this, I don't think any of us are used to thinking about odor in terms of 155 or 580,000 or any number like that. How does this transfer into add odor? Yeah, so it's measured. Well, the units they have here are parts per million, which is equivalent to milligrams per liter per volume. You know, odor is, it's difficult to quantify because, you know, it is dependent on the person experiencing them. But, but like we hire Brown and Caldwell to really do the full, you know, full gamut of testing, the D over T is detection limits. That's the furthest column to the right. You know, I'm not, other than the parts per million per volume. And then that's actually a concentration based measurement. So how concentrated other particulates of this particular gas within a certain volume? So is there a way to say most people will start to smell it when it hits this number, and most people will find it to be intolerable when it hits this number? Yeah, I don't have all those answers at the moment. You know, I certainly can get some of that. I'm not an odor expert for today, but thanks. Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm happy to get those answers and bring them back to council. Thanks. All right. So, um, light layout, just a kind of an overview of where these odor control units would be placed. We're looking at two odor control units. The first area one is basically what we call the headworks, all the receiving areas. And so that will be the septage and leachate tanks, the headworks where the high strength waste and septages discharge from the trucks. And the blend tank, that's really high like I mentioned. And all those will be piped together and then run into, you know, the area in red there by the settling tanks, and all treated in that one single location. The area two is basically where the dewatering takes place. All the dewatering equipment in the garage building will be handled by a second treatment unit. So we're proposing two units to address the odors. So area one, which is, you know, really handling the bulk of the odor issues at the facility. That'll, like I mentioned, include the headworks, leachate, septage, the grit chamber, and the blend tank. This unit will be a two-stage filtration process. So on the bottom will be what we call a biofilter. So organic media, bark mulch, and soil, and incorporated in with an irrigation system and actually a biological filtration. So they'll actually be bacteria living within the media that will eat the constituents of the particles within the odors to break them down. That's the stage one process. And then air will flow up through the unit and go through a second what they call a polishing stage of carbon filtration. So this will result in 99% removal of all the odors. Very robust system. The equipment only costs is about 500,000, but of course you'll have electrical and site work associated with that. And then just a second area, which is really the dewatering garage building area. That will be strictly carbon, which is really good for low levels of hydrogen sulfide, which is what the testing showed in that area. Generally average loadings of two parts per million is what we found at the dewatering building. Less maintenance and lower costs. This is about 150,000 for equipment only. We did anticipate or plan for potential odors within the dewatering building. And so all of the equipment we installed in the phase one project has manifolds. So basically you can just bolt on a pipe and then run it to this unit and be all set up for odor control. Some good news on the funding front. So the original, the bond for the project is 16.4 million. We do anticipate some increases with the high inflation we've been experiencing. However, we do, we did recently receive a confirmation that the city was awarded the USDA grant of a little over 3.5 million. That's for both the east state and this water resource recovery facility project. That also means that we get the low interest loan rate for the remainder of the project. Again, that's the combined number. Well, that's the additional funding number after the other grant anticipated grants come in. That 5.15.9. And we're also expecting potential additional grant funding for this project through the state's intended use plan and their pollution control grant. So when USDA sort of gave us their anticipated funding breakdown, they were estimating another 1.5 million of grants through the state on this project. So potentially up to about 5 million dollars in grant funding. It's pretty significant project. The city, I've been working with our communications coordinator Evelyn Prim on pressure release. Hope to get that out tomorrow. So good news on the funding front. We're pretty excited about that. And then next steps on this project and the schedule. So as I mentioned, we're very nearly ready to execute the final design contract that will be coming back to council, likely on consent for approval. It does need to go through review from USDA and DEC. So hopefully, and within the next month, we'll be able to get that on the consent agenda. I also wanted to talk a little bit about the heating opportunities with this project. So the city passed a bond for appellate boiler at the DPW garage. And I've been sort of advising that we work on this final design before moving ahead with that project. So I think there's a really good opportunity potentially for utilizing heat from this phase two project along with the methane generated under the phase one project to heat one or both of the buildings at the garage. So because this this biosolids dryer uses energy from the solids to run it and not the methane will be freeing up the methane we have been using for heating at the wastewater plant. And additionally being able to capture heat recovery off the gasification unit to all put in a hot water loop that we could potentially run all the way to the garage and heat those buildings. We also will be able to reduce the load at the plant in the in the dewatering building, the garage building, because by piping or connecting the equipment in that building and running it the control system, we can reduce the number of times we have to exchange the air inside the building. And so that's going to reduce the heating load as well. So a lot of opportunities for efficiencies and heating existing buildings and opportunities for heating other city facilities through this project. So all that will be really evaluated as part of the final design to see exactly how much capacity we're going to have. One other point is we're going to try to pre-purchase some of the equipment. There's long lead times on just about everything these days, these days. So we've been in, I've had some talks with USDA about this and they generally on board as long as we have a selection matrix set up for approving equipment purchases. So that will hopefully speed up the timeline to construction. So over on the schedule, you know, November, we hope to have the final design contract and get going on that. In April, we're hoping to have the equipment RFP or request for proposals out. Wrap up design towards the end of January 2024 and then bid the project in the spring of 24 and then basically start construction in the summer of 2024. So it is, it is a little ways out still this project. It's a very complicated design that is going to take about a year to get through that process. There's a lot of work that's going to have to go into making sure we get it right. So I could stop there and take questions on the plant project if you'd like or get into the leachate. I'll pause there, open up questions. Okay, want me to keep going? Okay. I'll just very quickly go through where we're at with leachate receiving. So just a reminder, refresher. Council set a deadline of July 1st, 2023 for PFAS treatment in order for, of the leachate and if the city is going to start receiving or let me rephrase that. Council has set a deadline until July 1st that the leachate has to be treated in order for the city to receive leachate after that date. So I did reach out to Casella, asked them for an update where they're at. They feel they can hit that deadline if the permitting process goes, you know, smoothly and they, but they do have concerns that there may be some delays related to permitting. They would like to come in the spring and, and, you know, talk to council about where they're at and just kind of provide an update directly from them. Also, the city has not, we've, we stopped receiving leachate this April, not related to the PFAS issue, but related to E. Coli, a violation we had on our state discharge permit because our ultraviolet disinfection system was getting, you know, partially blocked from something in the leachate. I believe it's an acid. So as we've been working through, we have not taken leachate at all from April this year. We are expecting an ammonia limit in our next discharge permit, which will be in the middle of 2023. And ammonia is influenced by leachate. So it's just another factor we're looking at a lot of different things happening in the, in the world of leachate and how it pertains to treatment and meeting our, our permits. And then, and I'm taking all these things into account. We really need to look at what it costs us once these new limits are put in place, once we have to do, you know, some sort of treatment for the, for the UV system to work properly. So those are some of the challenges, challenges we're looking at. And then this is the, some of the progress we've made. So we did it with the city DPW with approval from council, co-applied for a treatment grant with news of remunerations council for up to 1 million in funding. We'll find out in December if they get that. They have a, like I said, they have a technology system, but it's just dependent on permits if they're going to hit that July 1st deadline. The city has engaged Brown and Caldwell to do a full study on the ammonia and, you know, how meeting our permit levels will be impacted with leachate receiving and what sort of upgrades would be required if we were to continually receiving leachate. And we have submitted to the state a plan on how to mitigate the impacts leachates been having on the ultraviolet disinfection system. It's under currently under review of the state. It involves mixing in the septage tank and flow pacing leachate dosing into the influence or the pipe coming in to how much volume is entering the plant that time, as well as some programming to give us sort of an early warning noticed if there are impacts on how much light can transmit through to the liquid. And then lastly, just sort of an update, you know, a lot of a few of the things we talked about pertain to PFAS and just thought it would be helpful to have an overview of where we're heading on a regulatory basis for PFAS. So back in 21, you know, EPA recommended some monitoring the city partnered with the state. We got those monitoring that monitoring done got sort of a baseline of how much PFAS is in our solids and then our liquid stream. In 2022, they've been developing some guidelines on various categories of industry and and then they've started basically studies on levels of PFAS and fish tissue. So that's sort of the standard they use in an acceptable levels for discharges in the waterways is how those impact fish and then how would that fish impact the health on humans if they were consumed. So next year we expect those advisory advisories to be issued, you know, and then in 2024 final recommended health criteria for PFAS. So that's really when we'll get our discharge limits. So we don't know right now there is no limit on what how much PFAS is discharged from the wastewater plant that we're looking at 2024. So it's coming relatively soon. And then we'll really sort of help guide us on, you know, what is the best treatment practice, what is our limit, we can so we have something to sort of design do. All that I'll answer to open up to questions. I have a few questions. Lauren has questions. Lauren, do you want to go first? Thank you, Kurt. I don't actually have many questions on leachate, which is but thanks for the update and it's good to see the progress. I mean, I think the decision to continue working with Cassella and the pretreatment being relatively on schedules encouraging. So that's great, great to hear. And I think, you know, just continuing to assess if it seems worth all the work that it seems like is involved to actually continue accepting leachate. So I just hope it's an open question of is it worth not just trying to find solutions to every problem it raises, but like keeping in mind, do we want to do it? And I understand that some community somewhere has to take it. And so I don't, you know, if there are solutions and we don't feel like it's creating, you know, serious contamination issues for our community, you know, I think that's fine. But just hope that question is also on the table and not just kind of technological solutions to the issues. My question, though, is more on the gasification and just like a couple of thoughts. I'll just like put it all out. So could you just speak to like, is this and one of the slides, it's kind of implied this is like an emerging technology. And could you just speak to like, I mean, how much do we know? Like to me, the fact that the air emissions is kind of an unknown seems like a big red flag before committing to moving forward. I mean, especially with PFAS, which we know are mobile, like, are we going to create even with the destruction that we think could happen? But again, it's unproven. And like, there's a lot of issues with other technologies that have not borne out as much destruction of PFAS as we thought, like, we're not going to create some contamination zone around our plant, you know, air emissions have been a huge source of kind of contaminated sites around the country. So I just committing to something before having those answers seems really challenging. So I just curious kind of like timing of when we would know about the air emissions in particular, and just, you know, committing to this type of project with big, if there are unknowns around the PFAS, just like with that last slide you had of all the like, upcoming regulations, and I could see, you know, the state going above and beyond what the EPA is doing on some of that. And so, you know, are we going to have a technology that we spend a lot of money on that then is it going to become, you know, hard to actually comply with state and federal regulations over the long term? So I just don't want us to commit to something like if there's flags in its ability to keep us, you know, safe from these chemicals. And I think just on the like biochar and, you know, again, like I think we're moving towards like limiting or banning land application of things and stuff. So I don't know what the biochar could be used for. But hopefully the plan, if we move forward would have like the disposal costs. And like maybe if we do realize like it's actually like a beneficial use opportunity, but that we're not planning on being able to use it as a product necessarily in case there are contamination issues. That was a lot. I know you expect nothing. All right. I should have been taking notes. So first on the air emissions. So, well, first emerging technology. So this is a relatively new technology. There was a pilot done in Pennsylvania. They ran for about a year, did lots and lots of air testing. And it was, you know, permitted in Pennsylvania as the pilot project. So there's a lot of data already and it looks good as far as and, you know, what they'll be putting out from this equipment. There are two other communities ahead of us using this technology. There's a permanent installation going in Pennsylvania. And they're actually purchasing the pilot equipment. And then there's a one out to bed in Washington state. But there's really just two in the country like it's, you know, it isn't hasn't been around a long time. But it really looks to us and to our engineers that this is where the future is in solid management. And I recognize your concerns. And, you know, that'll be one of the first things that we really look at closely is what it would mean, what would it take to permit the air? Because we will need an air permit as part of the project, just based on how much BTUs are being combusted. So we're going to be crossing that threshold for permitting. We don't currently have an air permit at the plant. We also would have needed one for CHP and we actually got that permit and then revoked it. But anyway, so yeah, we're looking at that closely, we're looking at that early in the design process before we get too far down. As far as biochar, you know, I do think biochar will be available for beneficial use. I will be likely exempt from the land application restrictions. That's primarily for unclassified sludge or class A, which is basically dried, but not superheated through this process. So that is what we've been hearing is land app will go away for any lower level of solids that it's not brought to this biochar level. If it's brought to the biochar level, like I said, the pharmaceuticals PFAS is destroyed out of it and you could, you know, put it in topsoil, mix it in as like a fertilizer. Or you can even, the nice thing about this equipment too is that you can adjust the settings so that you could basically just straight carbon with this. But we did not anticipate any revenue from this material. So we're not banking on that to help fund the project. We're just looking at the reduction in disposal. Did I miss one? Was there more? I want to say I'm ridiculously excited about that, about the gasification and recognizing that I have a little bit more research to do myself about that. But I am very excited about the possibility of locking carbon into biochar in breaking down PFAS in breaking down pharmaceuticals like there's just so many really exciting outcomes from that. And so as far as you can tell right now, I just want to clarify some of the it's looking financially viable to do both the drying and the gasification. Yeah, so that's close to what the original dryer price is, what that we're looking at, the belt dryer standalone. This is like a pre-packaged unit, kind of all from the same potentially the same vendor. So yes, it does look economically viable that the solids disposal savings anticipated because the market price is going to go up with the ending of land application. So the volume of sludge going to the landfills is going to go up exponentially because there's going to be nowhere else to put it. So yeah, looking at the long-term projections, it's essentially break even on doing this project, the solids component of the project. The debt service is essentially the same as what we'll pay for disposal if we don't do it. I have a couple other questions. Just on the odor sampling piece that we were talking about previously. I don't know what an HSOW blend tank is, but I assume that is not something that people actually go into. No, but so that was the component that was installed in the phase one project. So HSOW is high strength organic waste. So that's the food waste. It comes into that tank and gets mixed. The problem is it's not connected to any gas stream, it just vents right outside. And of course, that's bringing odor every time it vents. Well, that's where really what we've identified as the biggest culprit for the odors of the plant. Okay. And so that's what's going to be addressed in the area one and the area two. That'll be an area one. Area one. Okay. Great. And so I just want to make sure that I am clear. So huge congratulations on the grants and the USDA loan. Very exciting. And potentially we'll get some additional money. Is it too early to say that we'll need to bond additionally for this phase two? No, I don't anticipate any additional money. We have a buffer now with the grant money. So we think that'll between all of this and the money that we have that that will cover it. Yes. Okay. Wow. That is amazing. Okay. And you're not asking us to approve anything tonight. This is just an update. So I sort of assumed that at some point you're going to come back to ask us. Yeah. The next ask will be for approval of the final design contract, which will that'll be a significant expenditure. Yeah. And that won't be for a while and November hopefully. Probably won't do discussion unless you want to. I was going to put it on consent. Okay. Fair enough. Wow. November. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I may have questions at, you know, as a part of that, but I will wait to see it, I suppose. And as far as the PFAS rules coming down from the EPA, having a gasification plant, I assume will help us. Well, I guess this is kind of to Lauren's question like, I mean, this is a big commitment to do this. And I would guess that building a gasification plant would give us some insulation because we'd be breaking down the PFAS. Would you say that that is more or less accurate? What's the risk in that? Yeah. Yeah. So I think it puts us the city in a very good position for the solid stream component of the treatment process. So there's, you know, we separate the solids and the liquids at the plant. And they're disposed of completely different. So it really doesn't address, which is really the larger issue of the liquid stream PFAS discharge. But it does, you know, really set us up well for solids management as it relates to PFAS and just market rate. Okay. I also just want to flag in a good way that if we are generating a lot of biochar that there is, because biochar doesn't decompose in the same way that regular organics do, that there may be some, I'm not sure what to call it, some kind of carbon benefit there. And I think that's worth talking about. But I guess that's really only true as long as we're in some way committing to not burning it because it's effectively charcoal. Right. And so if we, I would not want us to turn around and become sellers of charcoal that people could just then burn, like let's recognize the advantage of like, we've just locked in this, this carbon in a form that doesn't, doesn't aerate, you know, it doesn't decompose back into the atmosphere. And so spreading it on fields, shore, as long as, you know, there's nothing that we're worried about in it. But if there's any kind of commitment that, you know, we're not going to, we're, we don't anticipate that it will be burned most production. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's right. We would, you know, I wouldn't anticipate that would be a use for it. Right now we're, we're planning on all landfill disposal. But, you know, certainly it is in, in the works to explore options for renewable use. And so that will be vetted out, you know, sort of further down the road for a couple years out from having a product. Okay. Great. Thank you. Wow. I, yeah, I'm very excited about this. Yeah. Thank you. Any other questions? Cool. Well, we'll look for that update in November. Cool. I think we're ready to move on. Yeah. More GBW. Okay. Oh, actually I have one more question for her. Sorry, you mentioned that there are places in Pennsylvania that are already doing this. There's one going up in Washington state. I just want to put out there that I am, if there's any studies that they have available, like I would be interested in checking out those studies about the air quality and the chemical composition of the byproducts. Because I haven't heard, I like that kind of thing. Yep. There is an air study available. Certainly happy to pass it on. That'd be great. Thank you so much. Sure. I'll send all of us. I'm sure we'll all digest it. It would be fair for just the mayor. Yeah, that's fair. I might move again. Good evening. My name is Zach Blodgett, and I am here tonight to talk about winter operations and for this upcoming winter. I will give you a little bit of an overview of last winter, our successes and some issues that we encountered. We'll give you the preparation work that we've done for the 2022-23 season, and then we will talk about the upcoming challenges that we may be facing. Then we'll open it up for any open discussion that you all may have. So first of all, I wanted to start out with last winter was a very moderate severity winter. We received about 37 inches of snow, 16 inches of wet precipitation during the winter months, the average temperature last winter was around 11 degrees Fahrenheit. That equated to us using about 2700 tons of salt, which is a pretty normal amount of usage. In the last 10 years, we've gone as low as about 2000 on a really less severe winter and upwards to 32 to 3500 on some of our worst winters. Last year, we did have some staffing vacancies. We were three to four people short between streets and water sewer, who all helped with different components of winter operations. Additionally, we had a really heavily heavy reliance on the police department and the parking division to help support the ticketing alternate side ban, the no parking in the downtown in the evening. We had some minor issues towards the very end of the winter, mostly with enforcement. We had no dedicated single individual last year for enforcement. And when we had there were some injuries and people were out and that caused less enforcement to be occurring throughout the tail end of the winter. And staff noticed that there was more cars staying on the side and started to have more difficulties actually clearing the road, clearing the snow as compared to the previous winter. The first year we had a dedicated DPW staff specifically for ticketing. So they were in every day, 7am to noon, and that's the only task that they did. We also continued to have localized areas of noncompliance. Monsignor Crosby is one example where the street is very narrow. There's just not really a good alternate side swapping solution for them. So it remains that staff goes back frequently to have to clear that road. It is one of the areas that we have very few exemption areas. So it's not too difficult to manage, but it is, it remains to be an issue. It's never going to be as clear as some of our other streets because there's consistently cars parked on the side where there's housing throughout the whole winter. And lastly, we had quite a bit of equipment issues. We had three safety recalls with trucks that ended up having to go back to McGee Ford to get repaired. We had one total truck and then with the delay in receiving our sidewalk plows, we've had a lot of, we had some mechanical issues with actually keeping the sidewalk plows out on the streets for the entire winter when we needed to. For the 2022-23 season, we have been working with Evelyn to, we developed a fire that is going out in the water sewer bills that are being distributed this week. So you all will be getting a reminder about the alternate side parking van as long as some other DPW related specific information. In addition, we all met as a group, fire, PD, city manager's office, DPW staff, and kind of brainstorm about some potential solutions for the upcoming season. One solution that PD has offered is that they may have some two potential candidates to assist with overnight and alternate side parking enforcement, specifically starting at 4am and going through about noon, which is really big for us because as we all know, PD is, they're having staffing issues as well. So having that dedicated person that we can rely on to make sure that people are moving and obeying the rules is very big because when we don't enforce, that's when we start to see way more non-compliance issues. Additionally, we talked with the fire department, they've agreed to help with clearing of hydrants, which is something that DPW has done in the past. But in the last year or two, I'm sure you've all noticed that they don't get cleared nearly as frequent, if at all. So we were really happy to see them willing to help with that. They've also, we've also talked to them about eyes for us with additional columns for street columns if they're experiencing icy or winter-related issues. We are working to finalize our salt contracts right now. So for those of you who don't know, the salt contracts are typically done through the State of Vermont. They're done by districts. Each of the districts gets bid out and then the towns usually piggyback off that contract as an additional buyer. This year, there's been some just nuances that have changed with selling of DuBois construction. There's just not the same, we don't have the same rental trucks that we've had in the past. So we're trying to find other solutions to provide trucking for when we do snow removal. And we're also reaching out to find some seasonal help for DPW. And then lastly, because this year we are anticipating relying so heavily on the water sewer division, we are working on a retainer contract for water leaks so that as we're using a little bit more water sewer staff to help keep the roads clean, we have that backup option in case we have water leak. Well, when we have water leaks that we have another area to go back on just to provide staff with some additional support. Some challenges and upcoming issues for this season. So right now we still have seven vacant positions that's pretty impactful to us. I will say that all of the divisions within DPW have all been willing to help along with most of the other departments within the city. It feels really good to know that everybody else is willing to help out and to pull their weight, especially this year. We are in the process of interviewing people and candidates and hopefully that seven unfilled vacant positions is starting to go down. But right now we feel like we have some good if we're to snow tomorrow, we feel like we have a good plan in place that we can still manage. We are, we also, one of the, this is a really big issue for us is this year there is a huge increase in salt pricing, $88 a ton from $71 a ton. If we're using typical values of salt, then that could range anywhere from like a $50,000 overage to anywhere to the $80,000 to $90,000 depending on how severe the winter is. On top of that is we just got notification from VLCT that there may be a potential railroad strike, which would impact salt coming into the state. So if the salt isn't coming in, then it can't be distributed out to the towns, at which it's going to make winter ops for everybody way more difficult. It may mean that we're going back to using more sand in the interim if there is a temporary strike or having to rely a little bit more on liquids. We do use liquids, but we're just really in our, I would say in our infancy, like we're just, we're just getting used to how to use them, the science behind them, the temperature, the moisture content and really understanding. It's been, this is going on within the industry that people are trying to transition from salt to more liquids, brines and other solutions, partly because environmental quality issues. So it could be that this year we have to, we're forced to look at other options if we're not able to get the salt readily available. Lastly, we have some other equipment, we just have some old equipment. So we've ordered a sidewalk plow. We're not anticipating the plow that we ordered in 2021 to be here in the year of 2022. So from the manufacturer, we're hearing at best January of 23, but not even a commitment. So that just means that there's a higher potential for more breakdowns, which means that we may be providing a lower level of service. If we only have two plows to get around, it may just take an extra hour to get those sidewalks clear. We do have three units. And so that's not an issue as long as we can keep them on the street. Lastly, I just wanted to say that DPW is considering a future request to move to year round alternate parking, partly because we can see the benefits of that you can use for street sweeping and other issues. And I think with in hindsight now that we've completed this Main Street project, some of the areas that we were always concerned with having parking on both sides, I feel much more comfortable about making that transition maybe in the future. We're certainly not ready to make that recommendation, but it's something that we're starting to consider for future because we feel that the alternate side thing, it does work and it will make it easier that there's not like a date for six months of the year you're doing one thing, six months of the year you're doing another thing. It would be a consistent and uniform alternate side ban. And then also we are looking at and planning to starting to incorporate some other technologies. We've been doing some research about root optimization, laser guided systems, and like temperature sensors and cameras. Some of these are cost effective solutions that can be deployed that are really a tool for staff to help evaluate what is going on in the street and how to better prepare for a storm. So with that, I will open it up to any questions that you may have. Lots, questions. Donna, go ahead. Gordon, thank the crew, which is really amazing. As far as a number of tickets, it's usually one of the things we had used, looked at before the data of how many tickets were issued, how many cars were towed. Because you didn't have the assigned reinforcement person, were there less tickets but more cars left? Actually, last year there, what towing was basically a wash. We'd had, I don't know, five toes total for the whole entire year. But there was an increase in ticketing and actual cost received from ticketing. The first year, I would say we were a lot more lenient on appeals. We were just a lot more generous. And moving forward, we started to realize that you're getting some of the same repeat offenders. I actually had people tell me, I don't care, ticket me. I just need to park here. Can I just pay out for the year? Ticket me every night. I don't care. I just need a place. So when you hear something like that, then you start thinking about, okay, well, how can we help accommodate you? And what do we need? Because obviously, if they're willing to just pay those fees, then they really, that spot to them is very important. I would say that we probably had, without going back and looking at the data, probably twice the number of tickets last year, even though there wasn't a dedicated person for it. Some of that was because we had both employees within the parking division were doing it as with and also PD at night, but then at the tail end of the season, when they were unable to perform that action, that's when we really started to have the non-compliant issues. But for the first part of the season, it was it was working well. And then when we didn't have that reliable dedicated staff, that's when we really saw the change. Yeah, kind of seems like that seven vacant positions is like the biggest highlight of this, right? So just any update on how are we getting applications for these jobs? Yeah, we had an interview yesterday, we had an interview today, and we have more lined up. It's just getting the right people in the right positions. And I'm pretty confident that we're going to start to fill those vacant spots. The one benefit with DPW is that yes, they need training when they get here, but it's not like they're getting enrolled in an academy where they're then sent out for six months. Your new hires can come in and be a little bit more impactful on a pretty immediate basis. With that being said, I want to just tell the public and everybody to just be patient, because even though we get an employee that doesn't mean they know where to put the snow, how to do the route, where to back up, where to turn around. And so I think a lot of times the complaints that I get and receive from the public is like, why are they doing this? Or why are they doing that? Why did they put the snow here? We've done it for 20 years. They always put it in this corner, right? And so Montpelier is just, we're very small, we're very tight, and everybody has their, you know, their opinion on where things should go. So I just think that as we move forward in the winter, just be mindful that when new employees, we're going to have a little bit of that learning curve and adjustment for at least the next couple of years, but especially this winter. I just want to add thank you for all of this and thank you for your work on this. And it's encouraging to me anyway to hear that it's successful enough that you're considering it for a year round. I'll be interested to hear how that conversation goes. I wonder how that, you know, I'm already like, how do you roll that out? I don't know. But I also just want to note on the winter parking man thing, even like last winter, I was still getting comments from folks about the signage for it being confusing. And I don't know if there's an easy way to fix that. Yeah. Fortunately, with the signage, in order to be able to enforce, it has to be in the negative, right? So you can't have park here from one to five, right? Or then you can force it because you're not telling them it's prohibited. Right. Okay. So that's why you have some of the no parking from when to when. And we staff really looked at the best way to message that. And this is kind of where we landed. If we were looking at some digital signs and the technology just kind of keeps changing. I was really hopeful that we would be into more of a like a dynamic parking sign at some point where we would be able to say no parking, you know, on this day from 12 to five. But there was, as we were reaching out to vendors and having that discussion, they switched their format. So they used to be able to put it in a text on an app, right? And it would load up on the message board over the internet. And then they realized that that was there were some issues with that. And they kind of reverted and went backwards. And so now it's just a no parking illuminated flashing with the hour sign underneath. So we'll keep evaluating the better signage options. I will say that as a group, we discussed whether or not this was the year to go back to the no ban period. And we personally, I felt that one, the old ban, like before we went into the on call ban, that is not really conducive for this community. We have a lot of areas that need parking and that don't have a space readily available. So it didn't, I personally didn't really think that that was a feasible option. And then going back to the old way, which was only when we need it, that system just really doesn't work for staff. I mean, even being understaffed and not having the bodies, yes, we still have to deal with the post thing on front porch forum and the VT alerts and then the manual signage. And then on top of that, there is this expectation here that when we say we were going to clear these streets, that everybody expects that you will do that and nothing else diverges, right? So when you have the snowblower breakdown in the middle of the night and you don't get to a certain area, everybody's mad. And then you have to call it, then you put it on for another day and it just has this ripple effect for managing where the alternate side ban just allows a lot more flexibility for staff to do what they need. We know it's not perfect all the time and it does take us a while to clear, but it's just a benefit of, we feel that if we went back to the old way, we would never be able to go back to an alternate side ban. So with that, I think we decided to just try it even though we may be understaffed and we'll figure that out. We're confident because we have a lot of help from others that we'll be able to manage. Yeah. Thanks. I'm a believer in my great presentation. I am a believer in the alternate side system. I do hear people complaining, but one of the big things is a trade-off between how many people get tickets and nobody likes getting a ticket versus how many people get towed and getting towed is just so much worse than getting a ticket that it's really a benefit. It's absolutely right. I mean, a tow cost is five, six times the cost of the ticket and not the also where they get towed is on the other end of the city. So then they have to find a ride and go get it and then pay the vendor and then it causes a lot of other issues. Yeah. I think it's a good strategy. I know that it's so not everybody gets it or agrees with it, but I think it's a balance and I think it works here for us. Carrie. I don't have a question. I just want to thank you for this presentation and also for keeping the streets clear and all the work that you're doing. It's an unbelievably huge job and I can't even imagine how you do it full staffed. And I just wanted to say thank you. You're welcome. Sure. Okay. Any other questions? Great. Thank you both. Awesome. Very much appreciate all that you all do. And Chris too. I know most of you know Chris, but Chris is our new Chris Lombra, our former building inspector is our sustainability and facilities coordinator. I think he's just here for education purposes tonight. He's already jumping in with a lot of good ideas. More to come. I think he's coming in to see you in November I think to give an update and stuff, right? And thank you all doing the presentation on stormwater. Our consultant is actually going to pick the lead on the presentation and there's Andrew Wilberg with Brown and Faldwell and I'll let Kurt do the introductions and then pick it off to them. Before we do that, I just want to check in with the council. It's 10. And I hate to say this, but I think we should do all of it. I think we need to do all of it. It's all, are you okay with sticking around? I anticipate we'll be done by 11. That's my estimate right now. My hope and my goal. Okay. We're going to keep stormwater briefings a high level overview and we will get right through it. All right. So, yes, tonight we're going to talk about status of the stormwater utility development. We have hired Brown and Faldwell to assist the city in developing utility. I've done a lot of work. We have the coordinating with the stormwater utility committee as well as individual meetings with staff with Zach and myself and Brown and Faldwell. So tonight we'll have with us Andrew from Brown and Faldwell as well as Matt Davis with Brown and Faldwell. They're going to be leading up the presentation at the end. Zach and I can help answer questions if there are any. So for that, turn it over to Andrew and Matt. Thank you very much, Kurt. We really appreciate the opportunity to share information about the stormwater utility implementation process. We recognize too that some of you are sitting on the stormwater utility advisory committee and really appreciate your input so far, but also want to acknowledge that there's probably a wide range of understanding about what a utility is today. So as Kurt mentioned, the goal for today is to provide that overview of what is a stormwater utility and inform the public that the city is interested in implementing this utility. Talk a little bit about the drivers for that implementation process and go through some of those steps and then provide a little bit of context about what is happening in the state and the region with other communities that have implemented a stormwater utility and some of the considerations that they've incorporated that that we think would be meaningful for Montpelier as well, particularly with regards to rate structure. So I want to be conscientious of time so I will be moving through these slides pretty quickly so that we have some time at the end for some discussion. So what is a stormwater utility? This is a term that is used interchangeably between a government entity and a fee, but the idea is that it provides a dedicated fund through the city stormwater management program and we know that the city already pays for stormwater management. It's generally funded through property taxes so property owners are already contributing to the budget that pays for stormwater management activities, but the utility is really meaningful because it provides that transparency for what the utility is paying for. Where are those budget dollars going? It aligns the way in which the fees are collected with the contributions that property owners are making to runoff and to pollutant loadings and it makes sure that the budget is adaptable as program costs change over time. So there are concepts of equitability and alignment between runoff and pollutant loading and the rate structure that we're going to go into today. A stormwater utility fee also provides the city with an opportunity to address both short-term and long-term management needs. We know that you have aging stormwater infrastructure as the city has developed over time. This utility will be set up such that the revenues aligned with the costs that are needed to be put back into repairing, replacing that stormwater infrastructure that's already in the ground. It also provides an opportunity to be more proactive with operation and maintenance and hire staff to do that work and to comply with changing regulatory requirements. We talked a little bit about the fact that the city is already doing stormwater management. The utility would continue to pay for these activities that are listed on the stream, capital improvements, street sweeping, cash basin cleaning, and it also provides an opportunity to think about some of the forward-looking requirements that the city will have with regards to water quality under permits, as well as think about whether or not the utility should be set up to mitigate flooding, whether there's chronic nuisance flooding or bigger picture flooding issues that we want to plan for as a community, this utility could also pay for that. So why does this matter? The reason why we're coming here today is we think that it's really important that the public understands that the utility may go into place soon and that billing may commence as soon as summer of next calendar year. So property owners will and should expect to receive a bill starting next year if this utility is implemented. And we know that you're interested in having some of the details about what funding needs are and how much bill amounts will be. We're not ready to provide those answers. We were just getting started in this process, but we wanted to commit today to come back to this group and to share information as we find that information out. We also wanted to share that there are opportunities for the public to provide input and also opportunities for the public to receive a credit for actions that they're taking on their property to reduce stormwater runoff through stormwater best management practices, whether that's through getting water into the ground to infiltrate and be captured through groundwater or to be treated on site so that it's not entering the city's drainage system. So there's both an opportunity to provide input and also an opportunity to provide a credit to property owners or to receive a credit if they're already stewarding the environment in this manner. A little bit of detail on this slide about the implementation process. We were just getting started as I mentioned and we are already in the third of a series of six workshops with the stormwater advisory committee. We are currently doing a revenue needs analysis and having discussions about levels of service and we're going to continue to talk about great structures and credit policies and staff training and the legal process for creating this utility over the coming months. In the spring, we'll get a little bit more information out to the public about what they should expect and we're also going to be providing the city staff with information about how to administer the utility as the committee provides guidance about policies. And then as I mentioned a slide ago, in summer the public should expect if this utility is implemented for the utility bills to be sent out. We really want the public to be able to provide input and for this City Council to provide input multiple points throughout this process. So we're coming to you early in the implementation process to get some input and get a sense of how frequently we should be coming back. We have a suggestion at the end of this presentation about when we think it would be timely but we would like to put on that at the end of the presentation. And on a similar idea, the public education involvement process will be really important for a number of reasons. Obviously we want to educate the public about the utility so that they understand where the stormwater utility budget is going and the activities and the benefits that they're going to receive from it. But we also want to make sure that the budget is set at an appropriate level so that property owners are not receiving a bill that is untenable. So we'll be getting input from the advisory committee about the right level of investment for the employer and the kinds of activities that you want to be incentivizing that environmental stewardship that's on the screen. That can really be achieved through the credit policy and programs that will be developed in the spring and after the first round of bills are sent out. We anticipate providing many different mechanisms for reaching different target audiences. So we'd like to come back and present more information to this group over the coming months. We have a few topics picked out already and we'd also like to educate the public in different stakeholder groups or target audiences through other mechanisms as well. I know one thing that we talked about with the advisory committee is highlighting the web-based dashboard as an opportunity to provide the public information about what they should expect for their bill and to get more information about how the bill was developed and how their individual fee was calculated. So we're looking forward to developing that for the city and making it available to either city staff to provide information to the public or to provide it to the public directly. One of the last topics that I have today is related to the calculation of those bills and coming up with the rate structure that will dictate that. There are a few key concepts that I wanted to share with you. The rate structure ought to be defensible, equitable and implementable. There's a lot of precedent for this that differentiates a tax from a fee that the utility sends out. I wanted to talk through each of these concepts today so that you have an understanding of some of the considerations that the committee and our team is working through. So defensible. Typically, fees are proportionate not to the value of the home, the size of the home, but to the amount of stormwater runoff that a property contributes to the drainage system with the amount of water leaving a property. And that's really difficult to measure. We don't have tools to do that else effectively property by property, but what we can do is measure the amount of impervious area that properties have. And that's something that's very easily done using the state provided data. And it's well correlated with runoff, so it's often used as a proxy. So that's the defensibility concept. Equitability corrects for the fact that the current way of funding the stormwater management program is based on property taxes. Equitability differentiates that because it connects more to the concept of runoff and also provides opportunities for the public to receive that credit that we discussed earlier. So the city is interested in setting up that credit system that recognizes efforts to reduce runoff from individual properties. The policies, the programs have not yet been established yet, but we understand that that's a priority. And then finally, and this was a really lively discussion that we had during our second workshop. Implementability is really critical. We'd love to, like I mentioned, measure every individual property down to the square foot, but is that practical? Is that a good use of the city's energy if a question comes up or if a property has redevelopment and changes the amount of impervious area on the property? That might not be the case. So we want to find that happy medium for what is easy to measure and maintain and explain both to city staff and to the public that will be receiving their bill. And I recognized I used a jargon term, impervious area, so I wanted to define that really quickly. Impervious area refers to hard surface typically, like roadways, driveways, parking lots, roof lines, that sort of thing. And I believe the last concept that I want to cover is what other communities in Vermont and across the country are using in terms of rates. A very common way of establishing billing amounts is through this concept of an equivalent residential unit where we're comparing individual properties to the average amount of impervious area on a single family home or a residential property. And that average value is charged one equivalent residential unit. And the amount of revenue or the budget amount on an annual basis is divided by the number of equivalent residential units to determine how much that will cost a property owner. So I know we're treading into math, but I did want to introduce that term so that next time we come to you, you have a little bit of background about what I'm talking about and can see in a little bit more detail when I pull up a couple of comparable examples. Sometimes the rate structures are considering land use type, like I mentioned, single family residential versus not. So this is St. Albans. And another example of South Burlington where they've actually gone a little bit further and subdivided property types on the residential side and then have a completely separate way of billing for non-residential. And that matters because the level of investment that you make in calculating these values will be dictated by the rate structure that's selected. So right now we're in the process of picking out a few different rate structures to evaluate and present back to the committee so that the city will have a good option that works for Montpelier. And just wanted to kind of close with the summary side of example rate structures and give you a status update of where we are in this process. So as I mentioned, we are definitely thinking about all different types of this implementation process right now but we are in the phase where we are talking about the different rate options, the right size of the budget, and getting feedback from the steering committee, the advisory committee about how to pursue the next workshop that we have with that group. We'll be talking about the different rate structures that were evaluated and also coming up with an estimated annual budget in the short term and in the long term to meet those water quality and infrastructure goals. So we're really excited about the progress that we've made in just a short couple months and looking forward to getting back in front of this group to share our progress. And I'll just close by asking if there's a timely way to come back to the committee to receive additional input. We know that there'll be opportunities to get the public involved through public hearings especially when we talk about the legal updates that will be needed to implement this utility but we're really pleased with the progress so far and appreciate your time today and look forward to any questions that you might have. Super. Well, thank you. I have a couple quick questions. For the legal authority to do this, do you anticipate that we will need to have a charter amendment? We are expecting that. We are expecting that. Okay. Second question, just looking at some of the structures for like St. Albans South Burlington where it is costing a single family resident residential unit like let's say $50 a year. Do we anticipate that this is in addition to their regular water bills or can they anticipate that their water bills will be less? Well, maybe that's not a fair question to ask right now. So it's not. We don't anticipate it's going to affect the water flow per se but there are two cents on the tax rate called the, you know, sewer benefit charge that we do fund operational stormwater activities with. In addition to that, we actually have the CSO benefit charge which is actually I think we're going to put in more of our stormwater funding and that's like nine cents on that. So it's not water, it's sewer. So hopefully we can take funding we're already doing, make it clearer and then redistribute that funding on a more equitable basis. Okay. I bring that up because I imagine that that will be a really strong selling point right? Like if between the two, you know, the average homeowner sees a reduction like that will be important. So I do want to point out that with Brown and Caldwell and through another consultant, we are looking at a water sewer rate study as well to make sure that we're being equitable across all fees that are being assigned to or assessed to all property owners to make sure that we're being fair from all different enterprise funds, which we're just starting that process as well. We're in the kind of discovery mode at this point of providing information to them. So that's getting revamped potentially as well. Okay. That's good to know. Thank you. Other questions? Jack. I really like this. As someone who's done a bunch of utility litigation, the concept that cost-based rates and cost-causers pay is a very attractive one to me. One of the questions that occurred to me, like the mayor was, can we offer people a trade-off in charges? Obviously, it's not always going to be dollar-for-dollar. The other question that occurred to me is that if this is a fee for utility rather than a tax, does this mean that this is something that we could assess on the state government for all of their impermeable surface, which is kind of a lot? Yes, absolutely. Are the Arbor South Burlington and St. Albans doing that? Yes. So it's just like the water bill or sewer bill. State properties are not exempt. It may not get us more money out of this than maybe it would because right now it's just based on that. Yeah, as opposed to the area. You have to also remember that a lot of the state buildings have very large impervious areas that are contributing to the amount of runoff that they're providing. One other thought that I think that is a really attractive part of this is the speed by which we're hoping to implement this. I was at one of those discussion meetings for the Country Club road property the other night, and someone was talking about, well, what happens to all these other things where you come to the people and you ask us for our views about plans and then we never hear anything about it? And I typed in the text, well, you know, actually four years ago we had all this discussion about the downtown master plan and that's exactly what we use to develop the plan for the very intersection improvement, but that's years later and people just don't remember that. And here having this introduced to people and rolled out in a year or so I think is a good aspect of this. Just so that everyone is aware in that fire that we just sent out with winter parking information, there's just a little blurb on storm water utility that we're creating it so that we can start to engage the public that it's there, getting it in front of people. And then we've been working with Evelyn to create a website on our city website so that people can be directed towards there. We can upload all the information so that they have a place to go to understand the process, keep them involved throughout. Lauren. Yeah, I'm excited about this. I think you know the ability to have the transparency, the equity that you can incorporate into the structures. There was a study that Treasurer Beth Pierce did I don't know maybe five years ago looking at the best ways to fund water initiatives and this was exactly the approach that came out of an extremely intensive detailed statewide process of assessing different ways of funding it. And I think it also just seems very forward looking knowing with impending new regulations that we know are coming online, climate changing, being able to ensure that we're building climate resilient infrastructure for the community. It's great and the consultants and the staff have been really great. Like Jack said moving this forward quickly but really thoughtfully and methodically. So just kudos to the team working on this. Thank you. Other thoughts? Donna go ahead. I just want to comment again the city staff and their RFP was wonderful and then Brown and Caldwell response was even more detailed. I've been very impressed with the consultants and they gave us nine I think it was nine different ways of looking at it and what I thought I wanted turned out differently because they put it through the robics about equity and implementation. That was huge and so we ended up with like a cluster of four or five and we chose three. So they have their homework but I've learned a lot. It's been just really good. It's great. Awesome. Well thank you to to you all to the committee. So grateful. I just had one more point. So very quickly. Sorry. One of the questions was how many updates Council wants. That's one sort of takeaway we're looking for in this meeting. So they had four total proposed and one at great structure, one at legal and one at basically when the bills are going out. So we just wanted to gauge if that's sufficient for Council too much. So my gut is that that's probably about right. It's particularly because this is new. We are setting this up. We want to keep people engaged having multiple opportunities and focusing on different aspects of it I think makes sense. Okay. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Awesome. All right. We're going to transition out to our communications update. Evelyn, thank you and I'm sorry that we pushed you back here. Awesome. Okay. I'm going to turn it over. What's that? I know. I know. Well, so we do still have the budget. We need to do the budget. Just while you're getting set up Evelyn, my anticipation with the budget is that we're going to hear from Kelly and I think if we have some initial thoughts that are easy, quick feedback things like that's great, but we're going to have more opportunity to discuss it. I think it's okay to not say all the things that you have in your brain for the buildings. And as I've done in years past, we'll send out a survey to get a little bit more in-depth feedback from the Council as to your priorities and your input reactions to that. So there won't be so much of a need for a discussion for that. Is that okay team? Okay. Just making sure. Is that okay with you Kelly? Great. We were expecting really a full in-depth discussion with guidance and votes. I don't know what you're saying. Yeah. Speed process. It's good to go. And you're going to share it with Zoom? Yeah. Okay. Once again, I'm going to move. Yes. It's from underneath. Evelyn's turning things upside down here in the office and this is just one example of it. Let me get this going here. Can folks look at us since you did. After I saw this presentation, I told her she's going to be doing all our PowerPoints from now on and we're going to be sending them to her. No idea that you could do these things and that we had someone that could do them. Well, screen mode. There we go. Okay. Can everybody hear me okay on this one? Are my clothes enough? No. Might need to turn her up a little. All right. How's that? That better? Okay. All right. Wow. Hi, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to squeeze me in here and to hang around. So my name is Evelyn Primm. And before I get started, since this is the first time that I am publicly addressing the council, I just wanted to take a few minutes to share a little bit about myself and express just how fortunate I feel to be here with you all today. I am a Vermonter. I grew up in Burlington and my first career was in the culinary arts. I changed direction after 10 years in the industry and I decided I wanted to do more to help people. And so I went back to college as an adult and I found my calling in communications. And I'll be graduating in May with a bachelor's degree in public communication from the University of Vermont. And I am also currently an accelerated graduate student in the public administration program, also at UVM as well. I interned for Mayor Watsy back in the spring of this year. And that is how I got to know Bill. And I sat in on a few committee meetings. And so I also just wanted to say that my role as communications coordinator here with the City of Montpelier is my dream job. And I pinch myself every day I walk in the steps to City Hall. And I say that at 10.30 at night so you know I'm telling the truth. Okay, so I wanted to start off by sharing a quote from William Willoughby to kind of set the context here and illustrate some of my guiding philosophy that I carry with me. So William Willoughby is a notable figure in American government from the late 1800s and 1900s and is a prominent contributor to the field of public administration. I wanted to begin with this quote specifically because I felt like it captured the essence of my work in this role fairly well. And this quote also speaks to the important connection between the administration of local government and good communication, which is the reason that I am here today. So just for posterity's sake, I will read the quote. So it says, it is hardly necessary to point out that the popular will cannot be intelligently formulated nor expressed unless the public has adequate means for knowing currently how government governmental affairs have been conducted in the past. What are the present conditions and what program for work in the future are under consideration. And then so with that I will bring us into where we are today. So when Bill first approached me back in June to discuss how a communications position in the city administration could help Montpelier progress towards many initiatives outlined in the strategic plan, particularly the strategic goals under the initiatives to provide responsible and engaged government. And so when Bill and I discussed what the plan and vision for this role would be, we mapped out duties and responsibilities that were directly linked to these strategic goals that I have illustrated here. And I will explain a little bit about the work I've done in each of these categories and the plan for the future very briefly. And if I am going too fast and you have questions, please interrupt me. I don't mind at all. So why am I here? All right. So I talked a little bit about how this role aligns with the strategic goals that you all have laid out in the strategic plan. And I see this role as putting action behind those goals. I'm also here to listen to the community and to respond to their needs. And this is why I say that it's not actually about me. The most important part of being a good communicator is listening. So if I'm going to be communicating on behalf of the city, a major part of my job is going to be listening to the people of Montpelier and using that information and knowledge to inform my work. So my audience, meaning the community of Montpelier, is always my number one focus. And I want people to know that this position is not about, not just about pushing information out. It's about having a conversation and fostering a relationship with the community where the outcome is, where we're both better off for having it. And so the community learns the community learns something of value, and so does the city administration in the process. And so part of the way I'm working to do that is by improving systems and not just about pushing out more communication. So my hope for this position is that it will facilitate more public engagement between the city and the community as well as to get out important information that is efficient and effective way. And the presentations before me all spoke to some really critical needs coming up. So I'm really excited to dive into those as we get, as we get moving. So I wanted to take a brief moment just to go over some of the professional standards and codes of ethics that apply to me as a communications professional. So just like anyone in a specialized field, government communicators have a set of ethical guidelines that we honor as well. And these are two I've highlighted here. These are two of the largest and most professionally respected associations in the communications field. And I included on the on the right side here the six tenants of ethics from the Public Relations Society of America, also known as the PRSA. And the one below that is the National Association of Government Communicators. And so these are important to this role for a number of reasons that I believe, one being that I believe this position is more than just like I've said before, just being a spokesperson for the city. It's about providing a level of professional expertise to all the levels of the communication that the city is working towards. And so, and also to provide a level of professional counsel to the city administration to be able to do their jobs as best as they can in the best possible way. And since I caucus with the leadership team, I'm here to provide as much support to them as I as I can in this role. And they are, it's also important for the public to know this about me because my ability to do my job well depends on the public's confidence in me. And so I directly relate that to why I wanted to to bring this up today. Since again, this is the first time I am getting to talk to all of you. So that brings us to the my strategic planning process and communication scholarship theory and practice. So on the right here, I have the ropes process. And so communication is as much of a science as it is an art. And so as a scholar of communication theory, I follow the set of principles that are similar to the scientific method when I'm engaging in a project. And so the ropes process is the acronym that PRSA uses for their most highly it's our most highly regarded strategic planning process used in communications initiatives. And so this is what I use when I first accepted this job to get oriented. And I continue to use it every day because as you can see, it's a it's a cycle that begins and ends with research. And so I will walk through that in a in an example that I I'll illustrate here in a second. So research is exactly where I started out back in June. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the city, the departments, all the staff, what their needs were and how I could help. So as I went on a department listening tour, I asked pretty much the same questions to to everyone. And that is basically what what are your communication needs? What are some current current communication challenges? What do you wish you could do better? And how can I help? And so the whole process took just over a month. And while I was meeting with department leaders, I also hit the ground running and worked very closely with Cameron and Bill doing doing various communications tasks, such as writing press releases and managing the city's Facebook page. And then after I met with everyone, I analyzed the results of all my interviews and identified key themes and put this all together into an informal communications report that I shared with Bill and Cameron as sort of my guiding vision forward. And this is just the cover page of that. And so my vision statement up at the top is the communications coordinator for the city of Montpelier strives to ensure the city provides responsible and engaged government. The communications coordinator works to strategically advance the initiative to communicate effectively as outlined in the fiscal year 2022-2023 strategic plan through innovative and efficient communications practices and procedures. And then I broke that all down into some actionable steps, a summary of each goal, and then the next steps that I would take to work to achieve them. And so the results of my leadership listening tour helped me identify key areas that needed the most immediate attention and helped highlight opportunities for growth. So some common themes I heard from all departments were a desire for more proactive communication that anticipates rather than reacts to community questions, which take a lot of time in the moment. So the staff that I talked with shared with me that they spend a considerable amount of time answering questions that could have been addressed in a proactive manner had they had the time to be able to engage with that type of strategic communication and more long term planning. And another desire was for more cohesion between city departments in communication efforts. And so the people I spoke with shared a desire for communication that felt more planned and coordinated between departments. And we spoke about how this would not only help staff feel more confident and prepared to answer questions about what's going on in the city, but it would also help the community by having more consistent information coming out. And then so if you're following along in the ropes process, we're at P for programming. So it's building off of what I learned from my listening tour. And so these are the areas of focus and the initiatives and engagements that I laid out in my communications report. So just to quickly round down the list, I am part of a team that is working on the web redesign and upgrade of the city's website. And I will go into more detail on that in a bit. Since that's a really big one. And as Bill has mentioned a few times before, I'm involved in the city's use of the poll co survey platform, which I'll also speak about more in a few minutes. I manage the city's Facebook page, I create content, I schedule posts and respond to community's comments. I've also created a LinkedIn profile for the city that I use primarily to communicate hiring information and that that's a whole separate category in and of itself. But it falls into the fell into the social media bucket, which is why I mentioned it there. And then in my capacity, as time has allowed, I'm also functioning as an informal public information officer. So my office being right where it is right off the main hallway at the entrance to the assistant city manager's office. It's very conducive to interacting with people who come into city hall. And I love being able to provide that immediate support to people when they need it. I've also devoted a significant amount of my time to creating and distributing hiring communication as DPW highlighted earlier. That is a major threat affecting the ability of the city to carry out services. And a big part of communications work in general is making connections and building networks and nurturing relationships. In communications, it's very much who you know. And so every time a new position opens up it after it's been internally posted. I've created a process for where it will get posted and circulated in a series of job and career channels. I won't go into detail further on that, but I can provide more information on that process if you would all like. And then I'm also working on a strategic communications plan with Matt Wilson today with the communications coordinator for the community services department that will contain a written form of all these initiatives in an easy how-to format so that no matter who occupies this role or who is fulfilling the tasks, this knowledge won't exclusively live inside my head, but will be transferable in the future. So I'll take you through a day in the life of a recent communications scenario. So just to give you a quick insight, a little bit of insight into something that I would handle on a day-to-day basis. This is regarding the water main replacement on Town Hill Road. And so as always, I began with research and a situation analysis, which I did with Zach Blodgett, where we mapped out the who, what, when, where, why of what was happening in this particular instance. It was a road closure and the water main replacement. And then so these turn into our key messages, which I then distribute via all our communications channels. And then because, like I mentioned earlier, communication is just as much of a science as it is an art. I am also looking at the results and learning from every experience. So when Zach and I met a few days later, he shared with me that DPW did not receive any inquiries or concerns from the public regarding this particular road closure. So we felt that was a major success. And so these are just some examples of some hiring communication images that I've been posting on Facebook and LinkedIn. And these two are particularly LinkedIn hiring posts. And this is the headline of the DPW weekly newsletter that came out last week. And then so on to the website update. So Kelly and I have been working really diligently on this website redesign to fast track it as much as possible. And I am happy to share that we received a final design concept this week. And if we keep up the steady pace that we're on track to having a soft launch by the beginning of next year and fingers crossed, possibly even sooner than that. So we've also approved a content consulting and operations training for a group of city staff that we will actually so that we'll actually know how to use the new website, which will be wonderful. And I will readily admit I am a communications professional, not a tech expert. So this training is going to be very much appreciated by me. And it will be a great investment in knowledge that we can then pass on to other city staff. So the initial group can then go out and train others as necessary. So the image here is what the new homepage will look like, the new design concept that we just approved this week. So the circular buttons that are at the center of the screen there will feature slightly different links than what's there. This is just a draft before we put in the final where the links actually go. But this is just what it would look like. And so the redesign layout will be a much more intuitive and logical approach to finding information. And then so below the circles will be a set of nine popular links, which you can see here, this is just a scroll down from that same screen, which will bring you to the most popular pages on our site. And we will be deciding where those go in our next couple of meetings on the books. And then below that will be a news carousel that'll have the most recent announcements and other functions. And to the right of that will be a social media feed, which will automatically pull from the city's Facebook page. So all city communications will come back to this central location, which is what we want in the city's website. We want that to be the central place. So if you envision the hub and spoke model where all the other diffuse areas of communication branch out, you can always trace back the breadcrumbs and everything will exist in one place here. And then onto our poll co update. So again, just to keep this really brief bill gave a great summary from the a few council meetings back on when we just just got the initial findings. So for the sake of time, I'm not going to go into a detailed breakdown of that. But I did want to draw some attention to the governance section of the national community survey. And why I found this area particularly relevant to the work that I'm doing. So some anecdotal trends that I noticed in the result was, number one, how the city shares information and number two, communication around infrastructure items, which I highlighted there on the screen. So these caught my attention because they echoed the same concerns that I had heard from department leaders during my listening tour. And so this is why I think I will be able to learn a lot from the community using this poll co platform as a tool to gauge how we're performing in the future. After we have implemented many of these communications initiatives that we're working on right now, we'll be able to go back and compare the results from this first survey, which is really exciting. And then one of the ways that we had thought about using poll co in the in the near future is during this budget build process as a way to measure the community's support for various budget proposals and help us navigate that. And then so this graph, this pie chart shows how respondents rated their overall confidence in the Montpelier City government. And as you can see, 11% rated it as excellent and just under half rated it as good. Just over a quarter rated it as fair and 15% as poor. So these results were similar to our benchmark, which is good. But what this tells me is that there's room for improvement, as there usually always is. And the next slide breaks it down into areas that can help show us specifically where we can improve. So as a professional communicator, when I see results like this, I think about how this is indicative of a problem that communication can solve. So for instance, when I look at the bottom metric that illustrates 44% of respondents rated the value of services for the taxes to Montpelier, I think about the person who gave us a fair or poor rating and think, well, we probably didn't do a very good job of communicating to that person the value of the services that they do receive as a resident. And so when if we think about that as we're doing our jobs as public administrators, we can learn how we might get a better reading in the future if we keep that in mind as we're communicating out with the public. And so for instance, as I'm putting together the DPW newsletter, I'm constantly thinking about how we can demonstrate that how we can demonstrate in that communication the value Montpelier residents receive as a member in this community. And so this is what I mean when I say that is a problem that communication can solve. In my experience as a scholar and in as a professional, when we're defining the problem, we're not thinking about the enormous role. Typically, we're not thinking about the enormous role communication can play in an issue at in an issue in the issue at hand. So it is my job to bring that skill set to the table here. And that is exactly what I plan to keep doing. And then so for evaluation, you're following along in a ropes process, we're almost there a second letter and at last. So as any social scientists will tell you, it's the hardest part of any communication or of any processes measuring your impact. Because we're dealing with people's emotions and feelings and not just their actions. And if you're following along, we're almost done. So some of the ways I'm measuring the impact of the work that I've done so far is I've listed here. The research never stops. I am always listening and learning as I go, I'm paying attention to the engagements and views on our social media posts. I'm watching the number of subscribers grow on our email lists. And I am just starting to keep track of where our job applicants are coming from. So as we mentioned earlier, since hiring is a really big priority, I want to know where we're getting the most return on air on our investment. So amongst the various different networks that I am getting the hiring communication out there, I want to know where we're getting that return on our investment and so how I can best use my time efficiently and effectively to do that. And of course, I'm always learning from feedback directly from the community. I pretty much when I'm in the office, my door is always open and I always advocate that folks can reach out to me and I'm happy to answer any questions or pass them on to the the right person who can. And so the last letter in our ropes model is stewardship. So we made it. So how do we keep the momentum going forward? So in addition to everything I'm doing now, should this position become full time? These are some additional long term projects that I would be advocating for and I would love to work on. These are these are all ideas that came up in meetings with different departments during my listening tour. So for instance, the first two in the list came up in my meeting with the assessor's office. I found quite a few examples of a welcome packet and in other cities and towns throughout New England. And I believe this would be a really good addition to our communications materials as we're building a portfolio, so to speak, that we could make accessible in a number of ways. So for instance, we can have a live PDF that people can click on actual hyperlinks that would take you two pages. And then we can also have a hard copy and we can translate that into languages fairly fairly simply with the software that we have. So lots of lots of opportunities there. And the same goes for the reappraisal flyer and info graphic. This could be something that we send out in a water bill mailer for instance. And also in my conversations with the assessor's office, this was one of the areas that generates the most confusion and comments from the public. So it would be a great opportunity to kind of get some concrete messages out there that would be less tax jargon and more accessible to to the community. And I also really think there's real potential for the DPW newsletter to grow. We've already seen a ton of success with it so far. So I'd love to expand the reach and scope of that to make sure we're accurately addressing the needs of the community and looking to them for input on what they would like to they would like to see in there. And then to close. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here with you guys and thanks for sticking it out this long. I'm happy to answer any questions you have now. And if you have any in the future, I would love to share those with you as well. So thank you. Yeah, thank you everyone. So grateful for all that you're doing. Oh my gosh, it makes me wonder like how did we? Yeah, right. Oh my gosh. How did we manage without you? Um, yeah, thank you. Other questions or thoughts? Okay. Thank you. Happy to be here. We want to acknowledge Matt Wilson, who does the communications for the community services department and works very closely with Evelyn and is hanging in here tonight. So two of them have been good partners. Yeah, we've been it's been great. I feel you know, I know we have more stuff to get to so I won't believe with us, but I feel that as where we are right now and where we're going in the future that our communications position is as important as a DPW director in today's world. And it's just where we're heading. And it's the kind of thing that people expect. You know, think of how many things we've had that have been miscommunication or misunderstood or didn't get out timely. And so we're excited. There's some presence there and you know, I think that that's great for the city. So thanks so much. Thank you all. Thank you. Okay. Team, how are you doing? It's okay. Oh gosh. Okay. I'm working from home. There you go. Our team meetings are until 1030 the day after Cal to me. All right. Good evening, everyone. Kelly Murphy, finance director, assistant city manager. I am going to get this. I will be brief. Sit here. Skip to my presentation. Just a minute. Sorry. So for the purposes of tonight's discussion, it's really to give guidance to finance and city staff on, you know, where some of the targets will be for thresholds for building the budget. There's a memo that's been provided and that's online with the agenda packet. So this is just a brief summary of that. So just kind of getting into some of the assumptions that we're tying the budget to as we get underway here. We are looking to grow revenues by 8.2%, which is CPI currently. We are not anticipating any growth in the grand list. And then it's, you know, series of things, no use of the unrestricted fund balance, salary and benefit projections, which this year are a little bit heavy, just given the staffing increases that we needed to put in place for recruitment and retention. Hopefully those will come in within this range. And then we're also seeing an increase in health insurance of 8.9%. We are recalibrating the CIP and equipment plans to kind of right size things based on the resource profile that we currently have. Last year, we did a lot with debt service. And so we're a little bit limited this year and what we can do in future years, we'll be able to do more. So we started those discussions. We're also looking to the equity assessment to make sure that we are treating the budget and that lens as well. And then we are looking to really focus on the strategic plan and projects that we've initiated to date. And then I just want to note that as it stands right now, we're starting with level funding for community enhancements. I just want to sort of go over last year. So based on property taxes, we were up 6.8%. Overall on the budget, it was 9.7%. So just thinking about in the range of things where we might end up in this budget development cycle, it has been task practice that we've tied the budget to CPI. So hopefully you'll agree and we can keep moving forward, if not, let me know and we'll adjust accordingly. And so just moving forward, the other thing I want to note is a penny raises just over $88,000. And so as we assess what we're looking at here, it's pretty impactful in terms of what we're dealing with. And I'll get into that pretty quickly here. So my sticky note list of dates here for you is just basically how we've outlined the budget development process going all the way through to town meeting day and meeting the requirements that we need to meet to get things done. So I'm not going to go into any depth here, just that instructions are out and that we are opening the budget development system hopefully on Friday. And then we'll be getting submissions from departments on the 8th. So those are some key dates really coming up. And then as Evelyn mentioned, we're going to be using Polko this year for our community survey for the budget. So just a quick estimate of revenue projections with the pandemic. We really were hit pretty hard on the revenue side of things where we were anticipating we would be we didn't actually end up with a loss as significant as we thought we would. So we were able to weather the storm pretty well. This projection is just 23 over 24. And as a very conservative estimate, and I wanted to kind of keep that way to kind of cast a large net as we get underway. But as you can see here, this identifies revenue sources within the general fund and then also the parking fund. And those are kind of the primary sources for sort of the implications of, you know, impact on the property tax rate. So you can see that we've grown property taxes by the 8.2% of CPI. And then we also have a little bit of growth and parking based on trend right now, but we are coming kind of back into focus there. So there's not just much growth. So that's where we are projecting revenue at this point, we'll continue to scrub as we get underway. So hopefully we'll come up with some sources that are maybe a little bit more than this. And I think we will. But just wanted to give you sort of a quick overview of where we're at right now. This is a little ugly to look at, I admit. So sorry about that. But I'm just identifying sort of key areas within the budget. The capital plan, we're setting a goal to start off at 2.4 in 24, which was initially where we wanted to be to be sort of steady state. And then the capital fund, as you can see here, debt service is a huge chunk of this funding of about 1.1 million. And then the rest is for project and equipment. I will say that just in initial conversations with public works, to do paving, for example, to be sort of on target, we need just under a million dollars a year. So that really leaves a pretty challenge to deal with as we look at capital planning. And so to meet target, we would need to bring the budget up from last year about $250,000. So that's just a pressure point to note. And then you can see the personnel increases based on the annualized impact of COLA adjustments and contracts. We're also seeing a little bit of a spike in overtime just due to vacancies. So I wanted to highlight that here. This might be an area that could be scrubbed, depending on what we actually see for experience and what we see with hiring. That will come back. Okay. A scrub, it's a data scrub. So really looking into trend and really tying it back to what we've seen historically, and then also getting into the nitty gritty details with departments. Thank you for the question. And so then just going on down the line here, there's the wage based impacts. So the Beamer's sort of security and the like. And then we've got the Blue Cross Blue Shield Health Insurance Impact. And then we have other pressures, too. We are still calibrating IT investment. There's been sort of a lot that we're covering. And so I hope to stabilize that this year. And then there are operational increases due to either delayed equipment or increases in supply costs. And so that's roughly 200K. And then the debt service implications on the general fund. This is right now where we have it based on known assumptions and based on our current payments. So getting into the slide that I think really kind of shows where we're at and what this means for us. So if we use the revenue projections of just over a million dollars based on our expenditures and where the pressures are, we're about $1.8 million short over last year if we increase revenues by about just over $1 million or so. Then that leaves us with a baseline gap of about $800,000. And you can kind of see down here in the note what that means. It would be a $0.9 increase on the tax rate. But for looking at everything and evaluating that, but this is also before we've really gotten into any department level requests or additional capital needs beyond the threshold. So it's going to be a pretty tight budget cycle because a lot of our costs are already fixed based on actions we've taken previously. And so this is just sort of next steps in the process. And this is the last slide. So scrubbing or just really analyzing the detail is the next step here, locking it in the other rates. Thankfully we already have health insurance. So that's really the biggest one. So that should be pretty minimal. And then we'll be finalizing departmental position changes and updating fund allocations, which may have an impact on the general fund. We'll see what that looks like. And that's based on how those positions are spending their time. And then going into the development period, we'll be looking at time period detail and decision items for you so that as we come forward, you'll be able to see those items. And then we'll develop and finalize the FY24 proposal and we'll present it to you on the 14th of December. And that is what I have. So the key policy piece of that, I'm sure most of you picked it up, but just to say it out loud is that that was all based on the assumption that we would propose a tax rate increase of 8.2 percent matching inflation. And so I think that's if we don't hear anything from the city council, that's what we would probably present to you. If you wish it to be lower than that or higher or different, then that's something that the mayor survey, you know, put as soon as you as a group can communicate that, then that's how we will build the budget. So I, you know, obviously what's in it and priorities are always helpful, but really the budget target that we will set out to accomplish absent any other feedback would be to try to bring it in at inflation, which is where it currently is. So you don't have to decide that now, but that that's your sort of first big question, policy question. And then obviously what goes into all that. Let me know if you have a projection for what the vacancy savings would be for this fiscal year. We don't, but that will definitely be accounted for as we move forward and maybe one of the components. And, and some of that, that was that overtime money that Kelly referenced is that, you know, in some cases we're spending more on overtime because we don't have, you know, we're filling in shifts. So we're trying to get a handle. And as you know, we did calculate some of that when we did some of the wage adjustments was using some of that savings in this year to help pay for that, but knowing that it was going to have a budget impact next year. So now we're seeing. In a similar vein, I was curious about with like the lack of contractors and stuff, like, is there anything that we're anticipating not getting to this year that would be like carryover of projects that like money we'd allocated like the bathroom that we still haven't built or things like that. Just, I assume that will be built and was one thought. And then I just at one point for the change in, you know, knowing for Montpelier property taxpayers, it's the city and the schools. And like, there's huge changes happening to the school formulas. Is that going to affect this year? Or is it going to be the next year? Okay. Last year, the school went down a little, which helped ours, but we don't know. But the new adjustment, it sounded like Montpelier was going to get hurt by it. So just trying to understand the whole picture. Absolutely. That's right. Those are all challenges that are ahead of us this year. So, you know, with regard to projects, you know, we've already budgeted for them, even if we don't do them, we would just hold those in reserve until we got to them, unless we chose to cancel them and use the funds for something else. But the other side of this is obviously now there's also other federal money, so can we pay for some of these projects with other sources and free up that money? And we also know, for example, even with paving, we want to keep up. We did a good job this year. I think we did a lot of catch-up this year. But we also know that the state is planning to do Route 2 and 302, so there'll be a huge piece of paving work done next year. So even if we do a little less next year, the city as a whole between the two years, we'll see a giant investment. So, you know, we've got to weigh all those pieces of information. But most of you get to deliver the services. We've got to have people that come and work for us. Also, we'll have a lot of vacancy savings. Any other questions at this point? Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I also thank you for that outline of the timeline between now and December 14th. It's helpful. Yeah, right. Yeah, fair enough. I mean, do you need anything? You don't need anything at this point. Well, we did have an agenda item to approve. So basically, it's just a formality to the winter schedule, which is... Oh, the winter schedule. I totally forgot the winter schedule. That's okay. That's why I just reminded you. Thank you. Because that was in that calendar that you just saw. It's, you know, I don't even know why we put this on. But we always have because we're moving really two meetings. There's the fourth Wednesdays. One is the night before Thanksgiving and one always falls between Christmas and New Year. So we've always moved them up. So we end up with second and third. And then that means there's some extra meetings in January, depending on, you know, I assume we might need as many as possible in January with this budget, maybe not. But it's better to have contingency. So we outlined a potential schedule and can always change it. Jack. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay. Super. Thank you. Okay. Council reports. Donna. I'm going to wish you and and Connor and myself luck on November 8th. Thank you very much. Uh-huh. Carrie. Rick Bank, Antje, Donna and Mayor. It's also quick. I read a short play that got picked up by a theater in Colorado. It was written last weekend and this weekend. It's called the first virtual meeting of the Banjo-Hollow Select Board. And I just want to, I just want to thank you all for the inspiration on that. You might see some familiar characters. It's the only way that we can like, I saw you posted that. Okay. Okay. You don't want to see your character? Jennifer. Jack. There's been some discussion in the public about the new handicap accessible path up at Hubbard Park. Now, and it's been a big project, you know, for, for several years I was on the city's ADA committee. And our charge was really to develop a plan to make every facility of city government accessible for people with disabilities. And, uh, and, and the the handicap accessible trail is a, is a big thing. And, and I, you know, we're, we've done everything in buildings, done things in buildings. We've done things at the rec field all over the city. People in coming years will see these improvements. And the fact that people with the mobility needs will not be excluded from enjoying the, the park that all the rest of us can take advantage of all the time is great. And so I encourage everybody to get out there and, and use it. Great. Thank you. Lauren. And I will similarly wish Donna and Connor good luck on November 8th. Uh, and, uh, yeah, pass it on to John. Uh, really quick. We've got 1679 votes counted. Um, I am anticipating a turnout of around 4,500 and we should have about 50% of those counted. So probably run through about between 22 and 2,300 folks on election day. How does that compare? Um, this is, we're at a rate to basically be the same rate that we were the last, um, you know, off presidential midterm election, excuse me. So that'd be a smidge more. Okay. Uh, just a couple of things here. Um, the river was cleaned up on Monday, the trash and all that did happen. Um, so hopefully we can keep it that way. Montpelier alive is would like to have wanted to know if there was interest in somebody serving on their board. You may recall our last rep was Jay Erickson, who was going to continue even as our non council council rep, but he is stepping down from that board. So if any of you are interested, you don't have to decide at 1114, but I'll just throw that out there. Um, and lastly, we have scheduled for our, uh, one of our early December me actually is the November 16 meeting to, to discuss our legislative priorities, um, of which, you know, three of you may be getting lectured on. And, um, the question was, should we gather our lobbying committee, um, before then if so, and should we have candidates on the lobbying committee? Yeah. So. Oh yes. Go ahead. I just wanted to, um, wish everybody a happy Halloween because that's coming up and trick or treating is happening on Monday on Halloween. So don't be confused. And the downtown merchants are having their thing on Halloween on Monday. Or it's usually, it's usually the fire station. Okay. Thank you team. Um, with that, without objection, we'll consider this meeting adjourned. Thank you so much.