 Hi friends, Janae would be procure with some exciting news. Town meeting day elections for Mayor, City Council, and more will be using Ranked Choice Voting and all Burlington voters get to participate. Unfamiliar with Ranked Choice Voting? Keep watching or visit the link below. Ranked Choice Voting is a simple way to let voters rank candidates in order of preference. First, second, third, and so on. If your vote can't help your first choice win, it counts to your second choice instead. Here's how it works. If one candidate gets over 50% of everyone's first choice votes, they win and the election is over. However, if no candidate reaches a majority, the candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated and their supporters' votes will count towards their second choice. This process continues until one candidate reaches over 50% of the vote. Ranked Choice Voting is an easy way to give voters more voice, more choice, and makes for a stronger democracy. Learn more about Ranked Choice or try it out for yourself at BetterBallotVermont.org slash BTV 2024. Hello and welcome to TownMeeting's TV's coverage of TownMeeting Day 2024. This program is a part of a series of forums we will be bringing to you in advance of TownMeeting Day on Tuesday, March 5. TownMeeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers the questions you will see on your ballot, introducing you to the community decision makers, connecting you with issues that shape your local community. You can find all our forums at cctv.org slash 2024 or on our TownMeeting TV YouTube channel where auto-generated captions will be available. On tonight's program, we will be hearing from two candidates running for the position of City Council Ward 5 and those candidates are Ben Travers and Laina Greenberg. Thank you for joining us. We have prepared a list of questions for each of you and you will have 90 seconds to answer each question. If you're tuning in live, we also welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. If you call in, we will do our best to prioritize your question, though we will screen calls to ensure questions are not repeated. We do ask that you share your name, the town that you live in, and that your question be directed to all of our candidates, not just one in particular. We're going to get started with one minute opening statements and we will start with Ben. Thank you Yamuna. Thank you very much TownMeeting TV. Thank you Laina for being here as well. My name is Ben Travers and I am the City Councilor for Ward 5. My wife and I moved to the south end in Burlington more than 10 years ago. We started off as renters in the Five Sisters neighborhood and then decided to start a family. We were lucky enough to purchase our first home in the south end in Ward 5 and that's where we've now started to raise our family. We have three young kids, two elementary school students at Champlain and another here at preschool right here in Burlington. By day I work as an attorney here in Burlington and I've always found time for public service. When we first moved here I served on the housing board a review. I was chair of our parks commission for some time and then two years ago I decided to run for city council. When I ran for city council I committed to voters that I would work to cut through political divides and to collaborate with folks across the political spectrum to make progress on issues like public safety, housing and affordability. I think we've started to make really important progress on those issues. I'm looking forward to discussing them this evening. Thank you. Thank you and we will now move on to Lena. Thank you. Glad to be here this evening. My name is Lena Greenberg. I use they them pronouns. I live in the King Maple neighborhood. The part that is in Ward 5 I promise I have looked at the map extensively. I love Burlington. I love our commitment to each other and to this place. I see that we can get together and make beautiful things happen and also that my neighbors are struggling when I think about paying my property taxes or potentially starting a family. I have real concerns about the affordability crisis in our city and I know that we'll need to make some big changes if we want young folks like myself and our future generations to feel like this is a place where we can put down roots. I offer transparency and a commitment to real responsiveness. I've spent a lot of time working in direct service with folks who are struggling to meet basic needs. It's incredibly important to me that everyone does not matter if you are a renter or a homeowner. If you've just arrived or you've lived here for your whole life feels like they're being listened to and that your opinions are not just being heard but reflected in the decisions we make as a city council. I offer that creativity and problem-solving skill that we need in our council. We have so many crises that are intersecting. If we work together, I know that we can build a Burlington that we all deserve and I look forward to doing that. Thank you so much. We're going to go into questions now. So our first question is related to housing. So in April, the Motel Housing Program is set to expire and more people may be without housing in Burlington. What is your understanding of the impending end of that program and how can the city better support folks without homes? We're going to begin with Lena. Thanks. The Motel program has been such an essential stopgap in the last four years. I'm so glad that we've been able to use our existing Motel infrastructure to provide housing for folks in an incredibly challenging time. That said, the program said to end just before our coordinated entry program will be able to re-home everyone in permanent housing. We need the state to step up and say, we'll give you a few more months so that we can really get folks from that temporary housing into a more permanent solution. Kicking people back onto the streets is a huge step backwards. We also need more low barrier shelters that we can open sooner rather than later. I know Sarah Russell, Assistant on Homelessness has worked on this and been met with barriers at the state level. That's a real shame. We also need transitional housing. We need to be building housing. We need to keep converting motels to housing and we certainly don't need any more hotels. We are 50 years in the hole of not building enough housing for Burlington and it is not just constraining our growth economically but also making it difficult for us to make sure there are homes for everyone who's a part of our community already. Thank you and we'll move on to Ben next. Yeah, thanks very much. I think on this issue, among many others, we need to make empathy-driven decisions. Decisions that are driven through empathy for those who unfortunately our community do not have a home. I think a disaster when the state ended the Hotel Motel program last season, we've stood back up adverse weather conditions and have folks back in a Hotel Motel program, thankfully. But I agree that if that ends in April without our having options in place for these folks, it's going to be a crisis again in our community. I think Burlington has done everything it can and I'm proud of the steps that we've taken here as a community for those who are without a home. We have been creative and innovative in standing up the Elmwood Shelter Village. We stood up the first ever during the winter city-operated warming shelter and thankfully we were actually able to save some lives there from some folks who were unfortunately suffering from an overdose that we were able to reverse because they came to that shelter. We now have new beds open at the old VFW location at Main Street in South Winooski. We have many more beds opening in Ward 5 and what's the Champlain Inn there on Shelburne Road. Just recently, the city council I voted in favor of our putting $2 million in federal ARPA funds that we still have towards long-term housing at that location as well as additional affordable housing at Cambrian Rise in the new North End. These are the additional innovative creative solutions that Burlington needs to take on but we also need partners at the state level. This is not something Burlington can do alone. We need statewide and regional partners to fix this big problem. Thank you very much. We'll be moving on to our next question which is about city finances. Do you support the proposed income tax increase for the city budget? Yes or no? Wait, I'm sorry, I'm gonna rephrase my question, sorry. Do you support the proposed tax increase for the city budget? Yes or no? And what experience do you bring to the overall financial management of the city? We will begin with Ben. Thanks. I think our city team has worked very hard to keep any municipal tax increase as low as we possibly can do it. And I'm proud of the fact that it's focused on public safety. I think we clearly have some public safety issues here in Burlington and because the proposed budget increase is focused on improving the state of public safety, I do support the proposed budget increase. I was proud to support a new contract for our police department that has addressed new recruitment and retention issues. That new police contract brought in vital new wages for our first responders that have been very important and it's time for us to live up to those promises. That said, we can't be in this endless cycle of ever-increasing tax increases. I agree with Lena that there's an affordability issue here in Burlington. Having served on the city council for one term now, I can tell you that there's a learning curve in joining the city council. I think with one term now behind me, I've gained a great understanding of the city budget process as to how our taxes work. I know that many homeowners around the city, particularly in the south end, are still reeling from the city-wide reappraisal from a couple years ago. I have a great understanding as to how that appraisal process works and think that we can do more to rebalance that in the coming council year. There's nothing I would love more. The next town meeting day or the town meeting day after that to be able to go to voters with a tax decrease if we can find efficiencies in how we operate our city. And I'm looking forward to doing that work if reelected to the council. Thank you very much. And we'll move on to Lena. Thanks. I support putting the tax on the ballot. If we don't do that and we do need to vote on it, then we'll have to have a special election. That's one good financial decision we can just make right now. It seems that we don't quite have enough information about the rest of the city budget to make an informed decision, which makes me have questions about the transparency with which we're managing our city's finances. It needs to be easy for folks to understand the implications of this decision so that we can make good choices at the ballot box. And I had the pleasure of speaking with Chief LaChance this morning of our fire department, learning about how this tax would support necessary budgets for first responders. This money will go to CSOs and CSLs. We need to keep diversifying our responses to public safety disasters. And this tax will help us do that. And we need a tax system that is connected to income instead of property value. Again, this affordability issue is not gonna go away unless we change our tax system. And I would love to see us say, oh, we're gonna not make Burlingtonians choose between funding necessary city services and being able to afford to live here. That's an unfair choice. As a future city counselor, I hope I bring program and grant management experiences in situations where we have to do a lot with a little. And I was providing food for folks last year when we were dealing with the wake of cuts to three squares benefits, as well as catastrophic flooding across the state that meant we had a lot of people who needed food and very little food. And we were still able to feed everyone we needed to feed. I hope to bring that creativity and intention to deliver on what we offer and need to need to provide to the city budget. Thank you very much. So our next question is related to connecting with constituents. So as a candidate and an elected official, how do you gather input and balance differing perspectives from your constituents? How do you ensure you're hearing a wide range of perspectives? So we're going to begin with Lena. Thanks. Connecting with my neighbors is what moved me to run. Folks have so many incredible ideas and proposals and also qualms with our city. I've been going door to door getting to meet folks. It's a real treat to know who lives behind all of these doors and to have spoken with y'all. I have heard so many differing opinions on what we need to do to make our city better. I haven't had a bad conversation yet. I am so much more committed to doing things well than being right. And this commitment and capacity to listen, I think will make me a great counselor. I have heard from folks that they are not feeling heard. That means we need real systems of transparency and accountability in how our city functions. If you have to go to 19 meetings in the evenings and that go on for hours and hours to understand what a question is that the city council is trying to answer, that's not good enough. It needs to be really accessible for folks, whether you're putting kids to bed at those meeting times or you're working two jobs or you simply don't wanna sit and stare at a computer screen, it needs to be possible for folks to know what's going on and I'm committed to implementing those systems. Thank you very much. We'll move on to Ben. Thank you. I've heard Lana speak to voters who have felt unheard or that there hasn't been transparency and I can tell you to those folks who feel unheard or that there's a lack of transparency in the city, I believe these things are important too and in my work through my first term in the city council I've worked very hard to be transparent about where I stand on the issues, to talk to voters about where I stand on the issues, to hear their viewpoints. I regularly communicate via front porch forum before every meeting to let voters know about what's coming up on our agendas and to hear from them. I'm regularly getting emails and talking to folks with constituents all the time. My phone number is out there for anyone to call me whenever they'd like to and I agree, I love to have communications with our constituents and to hear where they're coming from. But in addition to all the public meetings we do and the posts that we do and so on, it's also important that we go to voters to where they are as opposed to always expecting for voters to come to us to where we are. I was very proud to serve on the Charter Change Committee when we worked on the All-Resident Voting Charter Change that is now going to allow all legal residents in our community to register to vote and I think that served as a great example as to how we go to voters to where they are as we were going through that process. We worked with our CEDO office to translate easy to understand information into commonly spoken languages here in the community. We went out into those communities to let them know about what we were doing. We put up lawn signs around the community. We solicited feedback along those lines. I'm proud that on our city website right now where you can register to vote that we now have voter registration forms here in Burlington translated into multiple different languages. That's the kind of work that I think we can do where we can meet voters where they are and engage constituents in an important way. Thank you very much. Moving on to our next question. It regards policing. What does effective policing look like in Burlington and should the council have the authority to discipline police officers? We're going to begin with Ben. Well, I mean, to your first question should the city council as elected politicians have the authority to discipline police officers? No, I don't think so. But what should policing look like in our community? First and foremost, I think when a neighbor is in an emergency, they should know that they're going to get a response from our police department. And unfortunately, because of the staffing difficulties we've been dealing with in the last few years because of our recruitment and retention challenges. I all too often hear from constituents saying I had a problem, I called the police department and I didn't get the response I deserved. That's unacceptable to me. So we need to stay on a path to address these recruitment and retention challenges. I think we've done a good job of it by standing up a new police contract. I think that we've stood up a new position within the department focused specifically on recruitment and retention challenges just at the end of last year. We graduated one of the largest police academy classes in recent memory. What's also important is not just receiving a response but receiving a response that's tailored to your emergency. So traditional policing is not always the right response to an emergency. I'm proud of the work that we've done to stand up community service officer positions, to stand up community support liaisons. We now have a critical response team within our fire department and our standing up a cares team with our police department to address behavioral health and substance use issues for those folks who are suffering from that in our community. I was proud to support our new Urban Park Ranger program in our parks as well. These are the kinds of tailored responses that I think are necessary such that folks receive the public safety response they need and deserve. Thank you very much. Moving on to Lena. Effective policing is policing that keeps people safe. Unfortunately, pre and post 2020, we've seen too many instances in which officers are needlessly escalating situations. This causes trauma, it does not keep us safe and it also yields lawsuits which cost taxpayers money. In every other high stakes profession, whether that's healthcare or education or construction beyond there is oversight and oversight is how we keep people safe. Our community has said loud and clear that we need oversight. This will raise the standard of policing that we're seeing in our community and it will do a better job of keeping us safe. We asked for it on the ballot last year and the city council said, oh, we need more public input and then has thus far failed to deliver a charter change to the ballot. That's a huge disappointment. Beyond this, we need to keep offering diverse responses to diverse crises. The CSOs, the CSLs, the community response team from the fire department are all tremendous resources. We also, we can't have cops at every unlocked door or every package that's sitting on your porch. It's unfortunate that we can't leave our doors unlocked anymore and also we have too many people in crisis in our community. Please help the cops out and lock your door. I hope that when we continue to invest in these resources whether that's CSOs and CSLs or just making sure that all of our support systems are in better networked so we can better serve people and address these crises. We're gonna start to see a shift and that's gonna make a huge difference in petty crime. Thank you very much. So our next question will be regarding transportation. Sometimes there is a trade-off between accommodating car traffic and making the city safer for bikes and walkers. North Winooski Avenue is one example. Do you think the city needs more bike, bus and walk friendly infrastructure? How would you change Burlington's transportation infrastructure and systems? So we're going to begin with Lena. When we invest in active transportation whether that's walking or biking or rolling or taking the bus we have a safer and healthier Burlington. This is good for all of us. I want to live in a Burlington where all kids are safe to walk to school. They don't have to worry about cars busting through intersections. I want older folks to feel safe crossing the street and not worry about the light changing too quick. I want everyone in Burlington to be able to step outside of your house and get on a bus either to downtown or up and down a major transit corridor. When we make these investments we reduce need for cars and when we reduce need for cars then we free up all of this car space. Downtown is full of surface parking lots. What if those lots were full of affordable housing and then you could walk and get on a bus? When we build dense communities we relieve the need for cars and we also build tight-knit neighborhoods where you can walk 10 minutes to the library to get groceries, to your place of worship, to your kids' school. That's a Burlington that is fit for the modern age and will bring us in alignment with our climate goals and make this a safe place for people to get around. If you can't afford a car, if you don't want to drive a car, no matter what transportation you choose you should be able to get where you need to go. Thank you very much. And we'll move on to Ben. Thanks very much. So first of all, I completely agree with Lena with respect to becoming a more walk bike-friendly city by becoming a more dense, tighter-knit community. In my work in the city council I've really been working to champion that cause. Soon after being elected I worked hard as chair of our ordinance committee to see through the elimination of minimum parking requirements here in Burlington as well as to stand up transportation demand management plans where now new large residential buildings and large commercial buildings now have to help their tenants and help their residents to access new public transportation options and this is going to help make us a denser city. I move forward with what's now the South End Innovation District opening up new housing opportunities in a light manufacturing zone of our city for that's traditionally been not permitted. And in so doing, we're going to be replacing surface parking lots with more housing, tighter-knit housing. I've since been working on the neighborhood code, a city-wide rezoning effort to promote a denser, more livable city. I oftentimes also hear from constituents about it'd be really great if we got a sidewalk here or a bike path there. And I often turn them to the walk bike plan that the city has. It's our comprehensive plan for a walk and bike infrastructure. And if you look at that, you'll see that oftentimes that location where our residents would like a new sidewalk or a new bike path, it's right there in that plan. We just need to put more resources towards it. I think it's been seven years since we did that. I think it would also be worth our dusting it off and seeing where we could continue to make improvements. But we need to put more resources towards that. This council recently heard, for example, about the new bridge that needs to be put in place between Burlington and Winooski. This is a generational project where I'm gonna be pushing us to make that a bridge for 50 years from now, not necessarily a bridge for now with dedicated biking facilities and walking facilities. Thank you very much. Our next question is related to development and change. So places like Morrill Auditorium, the Pitt, the Vermont Department of Health and more, Burlington is really undergoing a lot of change. What is the first location you would address a city councilor and how will you leverage public and private partnerships to get this done? We're going to begin with Ben. Yeah, thanks very much. So I just mentioned in response to my last question, the South End Innovation District. So this area down near where Hula is now, down Lakeside Avenue, that's been in our enterprise light manufacturing district. I mean, right now, if a light manufacturer wanted to move to town and put a building right there on a surface parking lot, they could. They could have for quite some time now, but it hasn't happened. We need to turn surface parking lots like that into more usable space. The South End Innovation District is now going to allow for hundreds, if not over a thousand new housing units in that area. It's also going to promote a mixed use neighborhood with neighborhood oriented businesses. And right now, now that we've done that zoning work, we're in the process of a South End redevelopment agreement where we're working with private developers, we're working with affordable housing organizations, we're working with local businesses on a development agreement as to what that new neighborhood is going to look like. We should be hearing about that in upcoming council meetings and if we elect it to the council, I'll look forward to seeing that through. Thank you very much. We'll now move to Lena. I think this question is less about where and more about what and how. The what is housing without a doubt. We need housing. We have not been building enough housing for 50 years. We're feeling the squeeze. So we need to be building affordable housing. Everybody needs affordable housing. This is not just housing for folks coming out of houselessness. This is housing for everyone. We need mixed income units to rent, units to buy in the South End Innovation District and all over our city. We need to build things that bring us together. That means also green space and playgrounds. We need walkable neighborhoods that allow you to get where you need to go and run into your neighbor when you're on your way home from work. I wanna see us building in a way that is respectful of existing communities and community input. There is so much development going on, but mostly we're only invited to participate in that process when it's far too late. When we make bad planning decisions and bad development decisions, we have to live with those legacies for decades and generations. The Champlain Parkway, unfortunately, has become a road to nowhere. It's not gonna alleviate traffic on Pine Street. It's not gonna save us from anything. And if instead we're making planning decisions in deep consultation and with respect to community, then we make better decisions. So it is very much less the where and so much more. Are we building housing? Are we building housing for people in the way that we want to be building? Thank you very much. So our next question has to do with school budget. The Burlington School District Administrators have proposed a $119.6 million school budget resulting in a tax rate increase of 13.97%. Do you support this budget? Why or why not? And we'll begin with Laina. Thank you. I do support this budget. I've had the pleasure of speaking with folks on the school board and parents about how essential it is that we make this investment in our school, in our high school, specifically, excuse me. And if we don't, we are saying to the young people of Burlington that we don't value you. And that's not okay. We do. And this is not just good education policy. It's good economic policy. This is supportive of workforce development. And I also recognize the tremendous burden in this place is on taxpayers. Again, we need to tax folks based on income and not on property value. We need to be able to afford to live here if we're gonna take advantage of our tremendous school system. I would also love to see the state contribute more. We live in the densest part of the state and we need a high school. We cannot shoulder that burden alone. That should not be on the budgets of working families to get that done. I'm so thrilled that we have lawsuits going against Monsanto, the corporation responsible for making our high school unsafe in the first place. I really think they should be footing the bill. Last but not least, we have to ask why the budgets keep going up. A huge part of that is healthcare. We're paying for private insurance, which is so expensive, keeps getting more expensive. We could pass Act 48 at the state level, which would provide affordable healthcare for folks across the state. Teachers, staff, folks who are uninsured and underinsured that would drastically change the economic reality for folks in Vermont and take a huge burden off of our school budgets. That would make it easier for us to pass those budgets and fund schools and also take care of people. Thank you very much. We'll now move to Ben. Thanks, so my oldest daughter is a third grader at Champlain Elementary. I have a kindergarten at Champlain Elementary too and a local preschooler who will be a Burlington school student here soon enough. So I'm deeply concerned about our schools and our kids and our educators and I do support the school budget. You know, I'd love it as well if Monsanto could pay for the costs. I'd love it as well if we could get a universal healthcare system stood up here in Vermont, but I also think we need to be realistic about what's ahead of us. You know, here in Burlington we're in an impossible position. Burlington taxpayers are having to foot the bill for a new high school and for the cost of placing displaced students into temporary spaces. We're solely responsible for that even though it was the state that mandated our high school close. In addition to that, more than half of the tax increase that's proposed in our budget is being mandated by the state as part of this common level of appraisal system where they equalize tax spending such that Burlingtonians are gonna have to pay more in order to pay for the higher school budgets of other school systems. That's not right. We need to fix our statewide education financing system. It's broken. I'll be introducing a resolution at our city council meeting on Monday calling on our state to do just that. Meanwhile, here at the local level I think our school board has done a great job to keep operational expenses low. As it is, if we were to even get our school tax increased down to 10% from where it is right now that would involve our having to lay off 50 teachers. That would be catastrophic. We can't do that. We need to fix our financing system and in the meantime, support the budget, support our kids, support our educators. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for tuning into Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of local candidates, budgets and ballot items. You can find this in many more forums at cctv.org slash 2024 or on our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel. And you can tune into our live election results shown after you cast your ballot on March 5th. Contact your local clerk to find out how to obtain a ballot and to register to vote. In Vermont, you can register to vote on election day. Thank you so much for watching and sharing Town Meeting TV.