 help out with the process there. I've got a few people online right now. So let's start with community announcements and comments. Is there anybody that would like to speak? Hello, Matt. Hey, Martine. It's Martine LaRocque-Culic here. I'm well, thank you. I'm your ward four school commissioner. And I am here for a very short announcement tonight. I will follow up with a longer presentation in June, but I wanted my neighborhood, my ward to know first that I have decided to run for state Senate for the Chittenden Central District. And I have collected all my signatures, although feel free to sign those of you who are here tonight. And I filled out my paperwork, I'm gonna drop it off tomorrow and just wanted to let you know, I hope I have all of your support when the time comes. Fantastic. Thank you for announcing. Anyone else with an announcement or a comment? If you're on Zoom, just raise your hand. There's a few people. If you're at the Miller Center, we'll get your microphone. Hello, am I on? You are on. Okay, my name is Sal Millichamp. I'm the ward four clerk. And I just wanted to let everyone know that we're getting new tabulators all across the state and all the ward clerks went to tabulator training. And that's a fun to say. But anyway, with these new tabulators, it seems it will be, we had some problems with the old tabulators being jammed and the new tabulators will be even more secure. And there'll be some information right on the front as you put your vote in, your ballot in, that will give information to you that it went through. Are you, if you voted twice accidentally, and do you wanna take that ballot back? So it has some new systems that informational, it's like as big as a phone where that information is right to the voter. So I just wanted to let everybody know that things will be a little bit different and a little bit better. Great, thank you Sal. I have a hand on Zoom. Do we have anyone else at the Miller Center while you're passing? Mike's Jeff. Yes, Matt's Jeff. Sort of to follow up on Sal's election theme announcement. I just wanna make sure that everybody understands that for the August primary state law does not provide that everybody gets mailed a ballot. So if you want an absentee ballot for the August primary, you have to request it, okay? The general election in November is covered by the mail everybody a ballot provision, but the primaries play by a different set of rules so that folks are aware of that ahead of time. How do folks request that, Jeff, do they call City Hall? They contact the city clerk's office. Okay, excellent, thank you. Two minutes to go. I've got two hands, SK Knight. I don't have a formal name. You're first and then I've got one more. Do you have 60 seconds to SK Knight? Yeah, hi. Hello. This is Sylvia Knight. Oh, hey Sylvia. What's the date of the primary again, please? August 9th. Thank you. You're welcome. Write it down, please. Yeah, sure, I'll mute when I'm done. Thank you for that. Did you have an announcement or a comment, Sylvia? No. Excellent, thank you. And I have, I'm sorry, BRW-1, I don't have a name for you. Sorry, I couldn't rename myself. That's okay. I'm Sophie Sove, I'm the Parks Comprehensive Planner with Burlington Parks Rec and Waterfront. I just wanted to let everybody know we're having a public meeting next week at Letty for the Letty meeting. We're at Letty for the Letty Comprehensive Plan Project. Everybody's invited to come join us. We have information on our website, but it's from 430 to 630 behind the arena if the weather allows. And if not, it'll be inside the arena. Thanks. Thank you, Sophie. Jeff, do we have anyone else for one final? Where's the Miller Center good? No. Excellent. I'm gonna jump right in then with 30 seconds ahead of schedule in the bank to move to our elected officials. And we have city council first on deck. So who would like to start for the council? I can't see anybody in Zoom. I see Mark standing at the Miller Center. So I'll let you guys lead because I can't see who's there. May I move the mic a little bit? Let Mark go first. He looks more prepared than me to nothing. The floor is yours, Mark. I'm Mark Barlow. I'm the North District City Councilor. And in the month of May, we've had a council retreat on the third where we reviewed a lot of... Well, we decided we were gonna review council rules. We've explored ways to make our meetings run more efficiently. And we're gonna probably start earlier than we have in the past. We've also are trying to look for ways to make our meeting a little bit more interactive. On the ninth, we had a council meeting. And one of the proposals that we've sent to BED is to bring back policy proposals on how to decarbonize buildings and provide incentives and policy around that in support of the Binette Zero 2030 Energy Plan. And then there's another, I'll let you talk about the property tax. Sure. If you all remember, as a result of the reappraisal, we had a problem with recipients of the homestead credit. There was a lag in the amount of homestead credit they were able to get because the state bases that amount on last year's tax information, not this year's. So we provided a relief program that we introduced for eligible applicants for the March tax payment. And we've just extended that, increased somewhat the eligibility for that. You should be getting a letter directly from the clerk treasurer's office if you are eligible or you can go online to see if you're eligible. But I just wanna remind people about that. And if you get a letter from the clerk, it means you may be eligible for a one year credit towards your tax payment because of the lag from the state. We'll hit redistricting last maybe, yeah. So the other things we discussed this month at the meeting on the 23rd, we approved a contract amendment and we approved the road width change on Main Street to facilitate the Main Street project. And all throughout the month of May, we've had four meetings around the city budget. So the fiscal 23 budget, which starts July 1st. So we've had a bunch of departmental, all the departmental budgets at this point, except for police, which I think we're getting on the 31st have been presented to us and we've given feedback. And it's part of between now and the end of June, there'll be additional refinement to the budget. And then we'll need to pass that by the end of June. Just wanna point out that included in it is the continuation of the North Avenue library branch. Yes, I'll refund it, yeah. And then there's been a discussion around what to do about Memorial Auditorium, which we've begun and that people get an ongoing community discussion. It looks like their support to stabilize the current Memorial Auditorium and spend some money to make sure it doesn't deteriorate further, but beyond that, there's a lot of ideas, I would say at this point, around how to move forward. And then redistricting is the other big item that we've been dealing with at the Council. And we have a set of maps that have been provided by the new mapping specialist in the city, Nancy Stetson. And we started to review those maps and have a discussion at the Council. I would advise anybody viewing to look at the maps, they're at burlingtonbt.gov slash redistricting. And there are some interactive story maps there that you can look at to get more detail and get more context. And Sarah, Ali, and I are all very interested in what you think about this. So please let us know. Do you have more to add? Sure. I sit on the Charter Change Committee, which has also been discussing this and kind of tangential to this our two proposals. One is to ask for a Charter Change that may allow the city voters to directly decide rather than having it go to the voters and then to the legislature. The city of Montpelier does it. I think there's several other cities in Vermont that do it. And it would eliminate the step of waiting, waiting for Montpelier, which is problematic. For instance, if we try to do this even in November, they won't vote on it till January, February of 23. So it really can't go into action technically of 24. And so we're trying to eliminate the step with the legislature. So that's on the docket. And a more minor proposal, which may or may not need a Charter Change is to see if we choose whether or not polling places for awards could be combined into, not all polling places, but for instance out here could we have one polling place as opposed to two? There's a lot of logistics to that, but there could be some advantage. So we're exploring that. I also have a couple of other issues on Charter Change, but we definitely want your feedback on the redistricting map. So thus, oh. One other note on redistricting, the council intends to have another sort of public hearing to hear a public input. We haven't decided on a date or a format quite yet, but I look forward to that sometime in I would say the early part of June. Two other issues I've been working on. One is regulation of short-term rentals. As you recall, there was a proposal that would have effectively shut them all down. That was vetoed. It was sent back to the Ordinance Committee and we're working on it, or they are working on it as we speak. The hope is to have a recommendation based on a proposal that I was involved in sending to the Ordinance Committee and they helped to have that reviewed and out by mid-June. Two other issues, the Charter Change Committee have been sort of stalled in Charter Change and we're gonna begin doing some discussion on. One is resurrecting the proposal to allow voting for legal non-citizens. That is likely to be something that might be considered in the March annual meeting, but that discussion and concept is just beginning. It has been approved in Winooski and Montpelier and we'll be looking to them for how that experience has been. The other issue that was referred to Charter Change and I think is on a slow walk, but is research on council compensation or council supports to council support. So that'll be, there's no deadline for when those recommendations will come out. I, Charlie asked me to just tell everybody, once again, the location of the redistricting information, it's on the BurlingtonDT.gov website under redistricting. So BurlingtonDT.gov slash redistricting. I think that's all we have. Yeah, I didn't do that. Allie did that, I'm trying to see it. Open to questions, but... Thank you. Regarding redistricting, are there some issues on the table that are of specific or potential concern to the new North End that you think are worth highlighting for people to consider when they look at the mapping options on the webpage? Well, you sort of have to look at them. Depending, there's three proposals, the 12-ward and eight-ward and the seven-ward. The 12-ward is interesting, not getting a lot of takeoff. Of the seven and eight, because of the population shifts, particularly in the seven-ward configuration, there's a shift south of the traditional New North End boundary sum to the old North End. So you may want to look at that. And then I probably have more interest is potential splits of effectively four and seven. Do we go north, south, east, west? The two proposed maps we're looking at is that a fair amount. And so I would encourage you to look at that. Councillor Barlow and I and Councillor Janger, talking about, we need to figure a way to drill down more into that and how do you shift the census box? And we'd be obviously interested in your opinion on that, but that's a big change. And so you should look at it and tell us what you think of it. Yes, and one or the other. So the way we divide the New North End up into words four and seven in an A-ward map would still keep a lot of what we think of as the New North End intact. Seven-ward map, the New North End, because of the variations and population growth in the city, the New North End would have to grow into the old North End. And this has been, in the past, in 2013, the last time we did redistricting was contentious. And although it hasn't been contentious yet, I would expect it's at least gonna be a topic of great interest and discussion as we move forward. So I see that as something also to look at. So I've embedded in that, though, our decisions around the size of the council and how many councillors per ward times how many wards. There seems to be consensus on the council about reconfiguring ward eight, which is the so-called student ward. I'm not quite sure the maps that we're looking at reflect that as best as the best option. Although I hear in conversation that most of the councillors do support that. So that's another area that needs to be looked at. Any idea? Hi, my name is Peter Ireland. I'm deaf. My representatives have their back to me. Why can't we amplify what they're saying? I know this ward can't handle electronics, but it's ridiculous that they're mumbling. I don't mean mumbling, but you're very soft folk people. Why can't it be fixed? I hear and see my representatives. As a member of the NPA Steering Committee, I just wanna say that I'd like to take this up and steering committee and make sure that we're working with CEDO to make sure that folks have the access that they need. And so, sir, if you don't mind staying in touch with us, we definitely wanna make sure that you can hear what everybody has to say. And thank you so much for speaking up. I heard it if I don't mind and then I couldn't hear what we want to be to do. Okay, so if we could get this gentleman's email address so that we could have written communication with him so that we can make sure that folks who need to be able to hear are able to hear and that this meeting is accessible to everyone. I know that everyone on the steering committee cares about that. Evan, we know who Peter is and we actually have equipment at the Miller Center. Okay, awesome. That broadcast by speakers. So we just need to next meeting, make that equipment perform. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. If it doesn't solve the amplification problem, let you sit over here where I am. You'll be able to hear better. That's why I said it. Thank you. Are we still asking questions, guys? We have time. We're off track. Leigh's hand is up, I'm gonna give Leigh the floor. Is Councilor Jang on our wait room? No. Back to you, Matt. Is the presentation done? Can I move to questions? We have two of you, if there's no more presentation, I'm gonna go to questions and I have a hand up for Leigh. You know, Matt, something happened to the volume. When Peter raised the issue of the audible, the audio, all of a sudden the very clear audio that we had from Sarah and Mark was significantly reduced. Anyway, I could barely hear you. Sarah and Mark, my question is, is it possible to show the two versions of the North end that are being considered for redistricting, the North-South split and the East-West? And my other question is, in regard to any charter changes that take place, will you protect the voter's right to vote, the voter approval of any redistricting plan in the future? On the latter, would certainly be my recommendation. I don't think there's been a discussion otherwise. So it's modeled after what Montpelier does and that requires a voter approval. So on the maps, Mark gave you the website and you really need to look at it there. And those are the two proposed by the city analysts. I don't think they're final, but you can look on that website and see what they are. Well, they're very similar to the splits proposed by the Independent Mapping Group, which has been posted on the New North End Neighborhood Forum. But the basic question is, does the New North End wanna be split North-South or East-West using partially North Avenue? But that is gonna put Cambrian Rise in Ward 7 going all the way up to the far North. Now, I spoke with Evan about this and he had concerns about it. And it seems to me that this decision about the Northwest split of the New North End or East-West should be discussed right here at NPA. And you should take a straw poll as to how people feel about it. I don't see if the NPA Steering Committee is interested in another special meeting on redistricting. We could certainly organize that. I don't know that we can do that tonight. I'm not talking about a special meeting. I'm talking about right here and now. How many people like North-South and how many people like East-West? I said a straw poll. I don't believe that can be decided with the information I know because I'm not technical on the census blocks, where the census blocks go, and there's some weighted, there's some dense census blocks and there's some light census blocks. I understand that very well. But in general, the North, New North End is either gonna be split North and South, the way it's split in legislative district and the way it's split in front porch forum, North and South, or it's gonna be split East and West down North Avenue. But when you get to the high school, that density of population kicks in at some point, whether it's Shore Road or where, but the density of the population is in the Northwest corner of the New North End. But I think people here ought to be able to talk in general whether they wanna continue a North Avenue split partially, or whether they wanna look at a North-South. I'm gonna jump in on that one because I think you're coming at this from a position of being very well-informed. And I think that's an ineffective question to try to pursue at tonight's meeting when we have a dozen people in the room. To me, that doesn't come even close to any sort of representative assessment of how people feel. So- But Jeff, isn't it better than nothing? If we don't talk about it, we have nothing. No. We have no input at all. No, see, I'm gonna, my proposal at this point to that would be tomorrow on the New North End Forum, I'm gonna post the website link that Mark and Sarah talked about and try to highlight that so that people can actually go look at it so that we have a wider informed conversation of opinion about that. I don't think it's reasonable or effective to try to force that kind of a decision out of a small group this evening. I agree, I will interject really quick. I feel like going North-South, it's going to greatly confuse people going to vote because the voting stations are East-West, but I won't get into it deeply. Evan, your hand is up. I'll give you a few secs. Thank you so much, Matt. I just wanna thank Lee and Jeff Komsock first. And sorry if my mic is not great. I just wanna thank you both because they have been steadfast representatives for both board four and board seven working tirelessly for almost a year now on redistricting. So they are well-informed and thank you both for being such strong voices for both our communities. I do wanna say I am probably the only neighbor that from Cambrian Rise that is currently on the call right now or the Zoom. And so I wanna echo Jeff Komsock's comments about that it's not necessarily representative but we can do better. And Lee, you're absolutely right. It is better than nothing. So what I would say is just doing a survey and I just wanna point out to Sarah and Mark that you have somebody with a hand up behind you. And so I'm so excited to see folks at the Miller Center again and I can't wait to be back myself. But I just wanna just say that we do need to have that conversation that is probably one of the more important conversations to have as far as redistricting goes about the old North end and the new North end and where is that line and how do we divide it? And I just also wanna add that Ward 8 was, in my opinion, a mistake in 2010. It was very clearly an example of gerrymandering whether it was well-informed or not. And so I would like to make sure that we're having really robust conversations and not everyone can be here tonight. And so a survey link, a Google link, whatever that is might be helpful for the new North end. And thank you, Jeff, again, for mentioning From Horts Forum. It's a great way to reach the majority of our neighbors as well as the Facebook group which has over 1400 neighbors in it who have verified their location as being in the new North end. So thank you all. And it's definitely something that we need to make sure that we continue to have a conversation about over the summer, which I think we all plan for. So thank you. Did you have a question, Evan? No, I had no question. I really just wanted to offer that. I appreciate that. And thank you, Evan. Thank you. Do we have any questions? Not really a question, but Evan, I wanna introduce you to your neighbor, Sal. She's sitting here with us. I love Sal and I'm so glad that you pointed that out. Sal is my fourth floor neighbor and I thank you, Sal, for being there in person. I couldn't be there in person tonight. I see no hands on Zoom. Are there any other hands at the Miller Center? So three minutes up here. Go ahead, Robert. It's my turn. All right, so I wanna get both technical about some things about the redistricting and to correct some misconceptions. Just because a ward is non-compact does not mean that it's gerrymandered. Gerrymandered is an implication on the intent of the map drawer. I am the map drawer and that ward is not gerrymandered. It was not gerrymandered to advantage a politician, you know, like where politicians get to draw their own boundaries. It was essentially leftovers. It was what was leftover after we kept all the other seven wards pretty much intact as they were, which is why it grew legs nine years ago in 2013. The other thing I wanna say is that even if we stay with eight wards, approximately 24% of the city lives north of the Yankee Medical Building, which is where the line kind of is at the moment. And that's still, it's either two eighths or it's one fourth of the city. It could be one big ward or it could be two little wards. Yet ward seven is still has much less population than ward four. And so a part of ward four that is present ward four would have to go into ward seven at a very minimum. And so even if we keep the line going on North Avenue, there would have to be at least some part of the present ward four that goes into ward seven. The one map puts some Cambrian rise into it. It could also be Northgate instead of Cambrian rise, but that would require dividing a census block and getting some population data. The other thing that if we do go to seven wards, I hope that none of those maps that are presently considered by the city are used at all. They're not good. What we could have, instead of having ward, let's say it's ward four coming down into the old North End and taking over the western part of the old North End, if we could keep it maybe Lakeshore, keep it entirely west of Park Street and it would go all the way down to the downtown, to the waterfront park in that area. It is possible that you could have a seven ward map that would have only the parts of the old North End that's west of Park Street in the ward that would be extending up into the new North End. And that wouldn't be bad. The ward identity would be more Lakeshore than it would be old North End versus new North End. It would be that. Another possibility that this council hasn't considered, it has lots of upsides, but one big downside and that's six wards, 12 counselors, staggered two-year terms, lots of pluses with that. The only negative is that ward seven is gone and ward three would have to fill in the gaps instead of like ward eight is doing that now. And when that happens, you're gonna have a monster ward three, but that would be the price to pay other than that, there's probably only pluses for a six ward map. All right, thank you, Robert. We're gonna move to the legislature to keep on track. And I don't have their lovely smiling faces on Zoom so I have to rely on Jeff's eye to put them to the table. Buddy, no. I'm gonna go first because I got you complete. Okay. Good evening, Bob. Have you got the floor? Good to hear. I have company coming, I met as graciously said I could go first. So I'm gonna hit some high points and then I'm gonna ask you all for something and I'm asking you a question really seriously and I really wanna hear back from you because I think it's gonna be one of the issues of the next legislative session. Government Operations Committee, which you know that I'm on, did a lot of the charter changes, some of them the governor liked, some of the governor didn't like. I will be putting out something this weekend or early next week, which sort of encompasses the entire operation of what we did. Part of that particular thing though with charter changes is, and Lee I think asked the question if she's still here, nothing can go forward for consideration unless the voters have actually given their approval for it to go forward in an election. So you're never gonna see a charter change come from the town, but you can see the charter changes come out of the house, particularly government operations where a change is made that nobody asked for. It doesn't happen often, but it's not barred. Carol, I might add since I have a note here is at her son's graduation, she sent her regards and regrets. And in order to save time, I think here's my question. Today, you can't turn anywhere on the radio without hearing something about another really bad shooting of innocent young children this time in Texas, who knows where next time. Last session, we had serious discussion about doing something more with gun control, not necessarily gun constriction, not necessarily gun prohibition, just something that everybody could get together and make sense on. That's a really tough discussion to have. And it's one that very few people can sit beside each other who don't have lockstep opinions already and not get into some heated words with each other. I think next year we will have a serious discussion about this because there's just too damn many kids dying because people have access to weapons that really should not be out on the street. I own a lot of guns myself. And that's because my father and my uncle were both hunters and when they died, I got them. Some say I have more guns in my house than some small countries. And that's probably not true, but we do have to start doing something so that we are not the country that is on the top of the list of school shootings. The next below us is Mexico and they have like five a year. We're up in the 200s. So I wanna hear from you at my email address, staterephooper.com, at Gmail, on what your thoughts are on this because they think that as a community, we should come together early and get a position that we can live with. And since the last reapportionment gave us an extra representative from the city of Burlington, our power has grown by 10%. And we should be able to make a difference. Our voices gave us a lot of good input on the people waiting study because we had gotten together and gotten a plan together and basically said this is what we're gonna do and we're not willing to do anything else. So I'd like to hear what your thoughts are on this. It's gonna be contentious. It's gonna be neighbor against neighbor and it's gonna be something that needs to happen. I put a bill in the last year that didn't make it out of the writing portion because the Supreme Court is reviewing a gun control issue in New York state at this point which could wipe the slate clean for everything which throws us back into the wild west. We need to know where we wanna go from there. And if you have any questions on that, Sal. Thank you, Bob. Thank you so much for bringing that up. I was just at a vigil against gun violence. I can tell you personally at Cambrian Way last night a woman, my neighbor of color texted me and she was sobbing. And I asked her to come up to my apartment and she told me, she said, I don't know when I can go to the grocery store. When, and she asked me when is a safe time to go to the grocery store. And I just listened to her, I don't know. I don't know what can happen in the future. So that was my night, last night. And then I went to teach swimming lessons at the Y. So it's mothers and babies or their fathers and their children. And there was a pregnant mother sobbing in the pool about the gun violence. And all I can do is say yes. Yes. And the thing that concerns me about this Sal is that there are a lot of people that have a perception. An assault weapon, a military, blah, blah, blah. It's ugly, yada, yada, yada. None of that means anything. So if people craft a law based on what the gun looks like they missed the entire point. The number of shots you can fire a semi-automatic weapon is what causes the carnage. So that should be the focus. It's going to be an issue where people who know what they're talking about are gonna be arguing with people that don't just because something looks more gruesome than it is. A semi-automatic weapon is a semi-automatic weapon. If it throws out 30 rounds in 15 seconds that's not a good thing for little kids. And that's legal here, Bob? Yeah, yeah. It's a misperception that even, you see people in old movies with Thompson and the submachine guns and you have the perception that they're not legal anymore. They're not legal for you to have in your house unless you get a special permit from the federal government and you can buy it and you're registered and everything blah, blah, blah. So there's one here. Yeah. But there's a lot of misperception about what can and can't. But it's not a decision that I think I or I don't wanna speak for Emma but not a decision I would wanna make without a hell of a lot of input from y'all. And there's only four boxes lit up on the screen there but I know there are a lot of people that listen to this afterwards. So, yeah, a lot, a lot more. I don't know, that's sort of all I have to say except Sylvia you scared that dickens out of your husband by showing up without being on screen sometimes. Thank you, Bob. Amir, are you ready to present? I'm ready, are you ready? Yes, we did five minutes of questions following Bob so you have 10 minutes and then followed by five minutes of questions. Okay, great, all right. Hello everyone, I'm represented Emma Mulvaney-Spanic. I represent what is right now Chittin' 6-2 will become Chittin' 17 which is basically half of the old North End down to about Battery Park up to Letty Park and Ethan Allen Parkway with a couple of census blocks mixed in between there. So I serve on the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee and we, first of all, I just want to say, I appreciate Bob bringing up the gun issue as a mom of a first grader this morning, I don't want to cry here, but it was quite emotional. It's very scary to have young people in your lives and be a mom sending a kid off to elementary school even in Vermont. I had a colleague in the legislature text me there was a gun seized around Montpelier High School. We're not immune from this in Vermont and we're overdue for this conversation. So I appreciate you starting that. I think we have to have some big bold conversations about what kind of state and communities we want and where our values have been eroded frankly around just safety and it's not just guns. I think it's a bigger conversation that also has to look at how violent our culture has become. And there's some of this that can be addressed with policy but I think we have a lot of community work to do as well. So not to, I just wanted to name that because I've certainly been feeling that today. And for the last several years, frankly, once you become a parent, you look at the world very differently. Anyway, back to, we do not talk about guns in commerce. However, we've done some important policy work since the session ended about 10 days ago. It feels like yesterday about 10 days ago we ended and wrapped up. So there was a lot of bills that moved. I'm gonna speak to commerce because that's where I serve. But if people have questions, there are a lot of bills moving. There are a lot of vetoes by the governor. So happy to touch on anything people are interested in. But the large bill that we passed out of commerce combined a lot of policy work on economic development and workforce development. And there are a few pieces in what wound up being S11 which had maybe 35, 40 different policy ideas in there. But I wanna lift up a couple of those. One is the state of Vermont will create a COVID relief worker grant program for employers. It's voluntary for employers, but it will run for as long as the money exists for the next fiscal year for the state. This is an extension of what the federal government did for a large portion of the pandemic to basically allow money for employers to access to pay their employees to stay home if they have COVID or they have a COVID related reason at home. For example, school shutdown again, childcare stops, a kid is sick, someone who's dependent on that person is sick. It's a really important policy for public health. Also knowing we're not out of the woods with the pandemic and we know now when surges happen in our calendar and we need to be prepared. So this program will be stood up by the beginning of the fiscal year and be available on a quarterly basis for employers. Again, it's voluntary, but I'm really proud we did that for both employers who want to do the right thing and to keep workers safe. And I can go into details on that if anyone's interested. A couple other pieces in this bill, there was, I might have spoken this out of previous MPA meeting, but there is a sizable amount of money invested for justice-involved individuals for the Department of Corrections to look at the job training that they do within the facilities around the state to really frankly modernize them and make sure skills that we're offering folks in these training and education programs are relevant to the jobs that exist in Vermont. Because these are our community members, our neighbors, and when they return, the programs we run right now are pretty antiquated. They're sign-making for roadways, they're building furniture and those jobs don't really exist in Vermont once you leave a facility. So this is a big investment. The Commissioner of DOC's supportive of this to really explore updating it as well as really partnering with higher ed organizations like CCV to make sure that there's education access there for folks to start a degree, finish a degree, depending on how long they're in the facilities in Vermont. So I'm excited about that. And there's a pilot program piece of that with Vermont Works for Women who does partnerships with the Chittenden facility, which is the Women's Facility nearby, to do a pilot to do support services for folks starting in the facility, but preparing them to support them for the first six months once they leave the facility, which is the hardest time, frankly, to get your feet under your view and find employers who's willing to understand, grow and obligations people have to get back on their feet. So we're excited about that. And hopefully that will become a program that extends to all the facilities around the state, assuming that goes well. A couple other things, there's a lot of money in there around supporting folks to stay in professions or enter professions that are critical needs. So healthcare workers is obviously a big one, nurses, LPNs, personal care staff, et cetera. And there's a lot of money we're moving there to help with loan forgiveness, but also to help with the pipeline. We have a shortage and we had a lot of conversation about how much money our healthcare system is spending on traveling nurses because we frankly just need the people with the expertise and our facilities and that we really need to grow our own and support our own. And knowing that student debt is a crushing burden on a lot of students. We wanted to do some smart investments with money in this bill. So there's a lot in there around healthcare ranging from those in nursing to those in senior facilities, et cetera. So again, happy to go into more details there. The final piece unemployment, as folks might remember from the first session of this biennium, we passed a large piece of legislation to provide employers tax relief. So they didn't have to refund our unemployment trust fund too quickly. Our structure requires a, there's a formula and it was sort of this artificial formula that doesn't really work if there's a pandemic and suddenly we have thousands of remonters that was obviously a huge abnormality. So we addressed the employer side of it in year one of the biennium, the employee or the worker side for unemployment claimants was not able to be implemented last fall. So we in this bill had came up with a solution to move money towards unemployment claimants by increasing the maximum weekly wage. I know a lot of folks I'll be in this room and maybe watching at home experience the unemployment system one way or the other. This will put more money in the pockets of folks who are on unemployment and trying to get another job. So that's a good piece that we were able to sort of fix something that didn't work year one and year two in the biennium. There's a lot of stuff that didn't move of course in the legislature, but, and we had a lot of vetoes as I mentioned from the governor. I know Bob said he'll give an update on the city charters in more detail, but we had five that went through. One in the very end was vetoed by the governor just cause eviction failed or it was vetoed and we failed to override that by one vote. Bob will give more details, I'm sure in his update. And there's only one remaining that's the governor hasn't acted on, which is the one we just voted on in March, which is the related to the antiquated language in our charter around sex workers. So that hasn't been acted on for what I could tell from the governor yet. And again, Bob will send more information out. I'll send him out too for the southern portion of the district. I'll pause there because you may not be interested in what I covered, but there's a lot of other bills that move. So I'm happy to answer questions as well. I'll open the floor to questions. I can only see the screen in front of me. I have no hands at the moment. Jeff, do you have any more? One thing that a lot of people have said is, and we should really make note and if you get the opportunity as to take a stress test with one of these on, that's a real fun. If you bump into Pat Leahy, some place as he's making his farewell tour, one of the biggest things you can thank him for is a small state minimum, which in all the federal funds that came in, there was a threshold, a bottom line that said, if you're in a small state, I mean, I mean, you get to this. And that allowed us to split just a ton of money out into our communities, which I think is going to pay back over the course of the next three or four years. It's really a big thing. It's going to probably stabilize us to some degree. So thank those that have done us good service. Thank you, Bob. Jeff, do you have questions in the room? This is just a comment. Thank you, legislators. There's a significant amount of money put into housing, affordable housing. I don't have all of the details, but working with my colleagues, we'll try to get that out, but we've been following that a lot. And I think the city is poised, our non-profit partners are poised to do some good things. So thank you, legislature, for that. You're welcome. If you have friends at home, like different state, don't come on up because quite frankly, all of state government is running on a workforce that is probably 10 or 20% less than they should have. Jobs are available in plentiful in our state. You can't find any place to live. So when you invite them, be prepared that they're going to sleep on your couch for a while. As Sarah sort of mentioned, one of the problems that we have is we build housing that's really expensive or we build housing that's really small, compact, designed for older generation to move out of their four bedroom house in the new North End and moving to something community-based. There's a huge gap in the middle that is not being addressed. And that's the gap where kids out of high school, moving from college, coming back to being the same town they grew up in, look for housing. And one of the things that we found when we did, oh, and I have one more point, one of the things we found when we did the Just Cause Eviction Charter Change was over 60% of the people who live in Burlington live in rental housing. That's a huge, even though we're a college town, that's a huge number. So those are things when you do address. And I'm sure that Sarah will probably provide a summary. I'm happy to work with you that, Sarah. There's two large housing bills and one large chunk of money in particular went to address one of the populations Bob just mentioned. It's often called workforce housing for folks who are sort of in that middle to make a little too less but too little or too much, I should say to qualify for a classic housing subsidies but don't make enough to build a house on their own. So there's some money in there, there's money and for first-time home buyers in there, there's money that is hopefully gonna be moved towards BIPOC, Black and Indigenous people of color to acknowledge there's a lot of gaps in generational wealth with folks who are folks of color. So I think these are pretty big, bold housing bills and we can certainly get some more details out to folks as needed. I'm gonna jump to some questions. We have four minutes, Evan, and then I have Birgit. Um, thank you. I'll let Birgit go. Thank you, Birgit. Oh, I'm sorry, did I jump in? No, no, I'm happy to. Ladies first, please. I didn't quite hear, because it went by very quickly, the legislation about nurses. I think I've heard, so I think I heard the legislation would provide monies for nurses, for training purposes, to increase the number of nurses in Vermont. Did I get that right? There's several components of the nurse, of the healthcare section of S11, and I'm happy to give you, I wrote a summary for another constituent, so I'm happy to email you that, Birgit, if you'd like. But the high points are that there's money for loan forgiveness for folks going into LPN, LPA, RN. There's money for nurse preceptors, a term I learned this session, which are basically nurse teachers, which is a very undercompensated and often not even paid at all role. So nurses in the profession now having to teach student nurses, now there's money for participating hospitals. There's money for pipelines. So I was actually visiting the Ethan Allen residence the other day, and there's money for programs like that that want to move people who are personal care attendees to LPA. I might have the order wrong, so forgive me, but LPA is to then LPN. So pipeline moving people along the healthcare profession to a higher degree. So there's money to invest in facilities who can host those kind of like apprenticeships or on the job training, essentially. So there's a lot. And Birgit, I can happy to give you that summary because we could be here all night. It's several pages, yeah. No, thank you. Not necessary to send it to me, but that is somewhat what I understood. And my observation, my comment would be that there must be other factors involved in why nurses are leaving Vermont and Burlington. And I would assume one of them is salary and quality of life and housing. And I'm not sure there's a role to be played here by the state, but at one point in time, there's, we're really gonna get into trouble with the number of nurses that we have here. So thank you for that legislation. Thanks for taking my question. Yeah, it's complicated. I agree. It's not just one thing. And your assumption is correct. There is that, but as Emma mentioned, the pipeline thing is one of the main focuses we had in directing money was to get educational opportunities available for people who could come in and start working their way up through and remain in the state. Because that seems to be a deficit training-wise. We used to have a lot of schools were based in hospitals and they've now sort of plowed it off other places. Bob, I'm gonna jump over to Evan and we've got a couple more questions. If we have time, we're... Thank you. I appreciate it. I'll try to be quick, but I know this is an important time for us. Thank you all. Thank you for the legislators who have shared. I mean, clearly some good work has happened in Montpelier, which is a nice thing to be able to say. What I will say is I could spend the next minute literally just saying over and over, we are in a housing crisis. We are in a housing crisis. The reason we don't have nurses is because they literally have nowhere to live and the hospital has to build a building for them. That is unprecedented. The studio apartments next door to me are the size of a hotel room at 320 square feet and are charging $1,625 a month. We are in a housing crisis. I'm disappointed that Carol Odie is not able to be here tonight. I know she had other family obligations this evening. What I do wanna share is not only is are we on a housing crisis, but the renters rebate was removed from renters making very low incomes. Often those incomes fall below what we even consider a livable wage. Carol Odie sat on the committee that made that decision. That decision was made five years ago prior to the inflation that we're experiencing today to the housing crisis that we're in and to the pandemic that we have lived through. So I really wanna ask each of my representatives that are here tonight, what is your commitment to renters tonight? What will you do in the next legislative session that will advocate for renters? Let me just also add, people who have the homesteader exemption did not see a reduction in their benefits. Renters are strong- And then time is up, sorry. What I will ask is then for you to make a commitment tonight on camera, on record, what will you do for renters tonight? We really don't have time to get into- I'm not gonna move on until somebody gives me an answer to that tonight. Some sort of commitment. I can give you 15 seconds. I wanna reintroduce the just cause eviction issue that has to be reintroduced because it failed. And also the renters rebate thing, I think it needs to be reexamined of what the policy was for five years ago. There's a lot that has changed. And even then, I think the impact on slightly higher than low income folks was not well understood around the impact. And sometimes that happens in policy so we should fix that. And I agree. Five years ago, different economic circumstances, we went, Carol and I both went to the committee and talked to the share about the renters rebate. Competing interest is all I'll say. But I mean, our state cannot run without workers. And it has to be the broad spectrum of workers. And if we don't have an adequate pool of reasonably priced, and that's the really sharp point here, rental housing, then they're going someplace else. And the only way that we get, I mean, you're in competition with UVM, you're in competition with all the other schools. It's tough. It basically boils down to giving away money to convince somebody that owns a piece of property to charge less to the individual who needs housing. That works for a short period of time, but it's not sustainable. I think that we should have housing policy in the state because we want people all over the place. You need people at ski areas the same way you do here. That says, when we grant you the authority to build housing, more than just a wink at a nod needs to be reasonably priced and available to low-income people. That's my shot. Very important conversation. And I wish we could keep it going, but we are out of time. Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Emma. And let's continue this conversation when we have time. We're four minutes over, so I'm going to shift to the next topic, which is DPW. And I believe we have Robert Goulding present. Robert, are you with us? There you are. Yeah, Si, thanks for having us. I'm also joined by our director, DPW director, Chapin Spencer. Thank you. Oh, Chapin, you are there. Excellent. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Rob. I'll just do a very quick introduction. We are very excited to have a bullish list of projects this season in the new North End, capped off by paving a number of key streets, North Avenue and Plattsburgh Ave, Franklin Square. So I'll turn it over to Rob. It was a short presentation. We're happy to answer questions. Thanks, Chapin. Can everyone see the screen? Yes. All right, thanks a lot. And thanks for having us. We know Agenda Space is always valuable, and we definitely appreciate coming by every spring. Giving you a quick rundown of where we're going to be this summer and fall, and especially focusing on where we'll be in your awards this summer and fall. And then as Chapin said, answering any questions you have about this work or anything else, you think is pertinent that we might not have addressed. So just to start with, I think most folks generally know what DPW does. There's a quick list of everything we kind of manage in the city's right-of-way. Not going to dwell on this list very much, except for the things in highlight here that you'll see, we'll kind of dive a little bit deeper into and is generally the work we'll be focusing on in terms of our big construction projects this summer. A lot of folks will often ask what we, how we manage our work plan, how we build our work plan. We had a great discussion last night with our subcommittee of the city council on how our sidewalk plans get built, but essentially residents, funding and city plans and council priorities are generally the drivers of our work. Certainly we've listed a couple other very important things that kind of help dictate when and how work gets done, but certainly the first three are valuable pieces, building blocks of how we plan our work plans every year with limited city dollars that we have. We are here mostly to talk about our progress and this year's implementation of the Sustainable Infrastructure Plan. You may recall either from prior presentations or just hearing about it that this was proposed in 2016, originally passed overwhelmingly by the city. An additional bond was passed this year in 2022 after one that didn't pass last year, but essentially it allocates additional dollars towards paving, towards sidewalks and some other work that we'll be able to get done in the city. As I mentioned, the original plan did focus on sidewalk streets and water infrastructure, our drinking water infrastructure, about 110 miles of water mains that run below the streets. We then did come back to voters in 2018 after what was a challenging summer at our wastewater treatment plants and proposed and had passed funding for the Clean Water Resiliency Plan, which focuses on, as I mentioned here, the initial round of some urgent upgrades we have to make to our system. We're gonna go a little bit deeper into that in a second. Just a couple of quick funding updates that I think are important for the community to know about. We will begin to use that new bond money this year so it will be informing our work plan starting this summer and going into fall and then next year. Folks often ask about the federal infrastructure money that was devoted to the states and to the municipalities through the big infrastructure bill and also some other targeted funding. Overall, that money is targeted. So it has to be used in very specific ways. So we can't just easily take that money and flip it to say doubling what's already really significantly increased paving contract that we'll be managing this year compared to prior years. So the money that the federal government has dedicated to states and cities, certainly we're looking at every way we can possibly make use of that, but that doesn't directly inform most of this work that we're looking at right now. And then additionally, construction prices are up as I think most of you have either heard about or maybe you're experiencing yourselves, inflation's up, supply chain has been stretched in a lot of areas. Here you can see a simple chart that V-Trans publishes on the price of asphalt up about 20% or so in the last five months. And that does have an impact on our work plan. Needless to say though, even though there are some impacts, construction has started. When we do get to your neighborhood or your street, you will see from porch forum posts and you'll see Greenbelt signage. Hopefully many of you have already received some postcards in the mail about some of the paving work we'll be doing this summer and fall. So we're gonna try to reach you in many different ways so you at least know the work will be happening this year. Sometimes if work does get stretched, it could be pushed to next year, but we'll go over the schedule a little bit in a moment. But we just wanna let you know you'll hear about our work. If you ever have questions though, we have some resources at the end of this and we wanna make sure you're aware of how you can learn more. If you're ever curious about what's on the work plan or how it may impact your few weeks of construction on your block or your commute or other aspects. I mentioned the clean water resiliency plan. I'm not gonna read everything here. I do wanna let you know, give you the confidence that this work has been underway since the bill passed in 2018. We have an amazing water resources team led by a great division director who is looking at our infrastructure every day and trying to figure out what investments we need to make to make sure it runs. We rebuild it and then it thrives. We have completed significant projects at the wastewater treatment plants since 2018. This year alone, we have eight miles of sewer and storm pipe repair underway. We've rebuilt other important components of the system and we've added green storm water infrastructure around the city, including last year, some in the new North end. This green storm water infrastructure has many benefits, one of which is it'll slow the storm flows to the plants, it'll reduce some nutrient contribution to the lake and it's oftentimes can beautify the city. We either do it subsurface or above the surface with respect to things like rain gardens that you might notice on St. Paul's street or some other streets. Water resources does have plans to ask for some agenda time later this summer. So hopefully you'll be hearing more in-depth from them and you can certainly ask away today but wait for them too and they'll have some great information to share with you. We know sidewalks are tremendously important and valuable to your day-to-day quality of life. The city used to really only be able to fund about a mile of sidewalk repair a year. We have since tripled that thanks to your support, thanks to city council and thanks to the mayor for giving us more funding to roughly rebuild about three miles a year. You can see we've done about 16 miles since the start of this new bond funding in 2016. That would have been about five miles in an average five-year span. We have a big network, it's 130 miles. This enhanced funding does keep us on a sustainable cycle of roughly replacing our sidewalks on the traditional life cycle of a sidewalk which is 40 years roughly. Obviously that always depends on soil conditions. Different neighborhoods have better soil for sidewalks and certainly on the activity of a sidewalk. Wanted to share quickly the draft list of the sidewalks will be repairing in wards four and seven this spring, summer, and fall. I wanna point out this is two things. This is a draft list, though very likely to be the list that we are attending to. Very often as we're on a street, we might add an additional segment or an adjacent sidewalk to some of this work. But I also wanna underscore that construction is challenging, supply chains can break, weather can turn against us. So while we aim to get this list done this year, I just wanted to prepare everybody that we always have to be mindful of impacts to construction schedules. I also add up top here that this is the short run list. This is typically anywhere between one or two sidewalk panels in front of a house to about 50 or 100 feet of sidewalk. Then we have a longer sidewalk list that we use contractors for, which I'll share with you in a second. It does have a couple of New North End streets and apologies, it might be a little fuzzy for you to see, but you can see some of the longer runs where we're doing a quarter of a mile to a third of a mile of sidewalk using our contractors on these five streets. This list typically doesn't change throughout the year, but we never say never in DPW, but this is the contract that was approved by city council in April where we'll be doing about two miles with our contractor. I'm gonna keep going and just let you know about paving. We certainly know the roads were challenged this year by a very difficult winter. We noticed pothole requests were up about three times, certainly from our director to our city engineer to our water resources division director who manages an extensive subsurface pipe network. We are noticing that the last four or five years there have been increasingly challenging and numerous freeze-thaw cycles throughout the city. Some of our engineers who have been with the city for decades have let us know that, where we would have traditionally one or two major freeze-thaws during a given winter, we're seeing a rapid cycle of that, that when that happens, the pavement moves, pipes move, things break and asphalt certainly will erupt. And it's a difficult situation to manage. We are on this enhanced level of rebuilding right now. So we are managing the rather difficult kind of climate change impacts that are being thrown our way, but we have a pretty aggressive plan this year. And as you can see what's in highlight here, the new North End streets that we'll be getting to. And I'll talk a little bit about the schedule on the next slide, but all of Franklin Square, all of Lakewood, very large segment of North Ave that we have of course been asked about at the Ward 47MPA in the past we'll be getting to this year, Plattsburgh Ave, a quick mill and fill at the Route 127 bridge in all of Tallwood. With that said, when there are potholes, our streets crews will repair those. When there is something between a pothole fix and a full paving repair, we do have money set aside to do that too. Our engineering team is out right now throughout the week, I should say making inventory of some of the worst of the worst streets to figure out where and how that extra money can be devoted toward repairing our road network. The new North End draft paving schedule, I think it's gonna be important for most of you and important to note, this is how it is currently being phased, set to begin in a few weeks. And North Ave, which will be the longest stretch, the most impactful stretch and the longest stretch is scheduled for later this summer. Schedules can change, things can shift up, things can shift backward a bit, but we're pretty confident that this is the phasing of these four segments of new North End roads that we'll be able to get to this year. We don't quite yet have, if anybody's tuned in from Tallwood and Lakewood, that schedule yet, that's being managed under a separate contract, but certainly happy to answer questions about that. I'm gonna keep moving for the sake of time, but certainly willing to throw this back up on the screen if folks have questions. Do wanna let folks know about a state paving contract that will be kind of partners on, but the state's managing the project, they're managing the outreach and it'll begin in a few weeks on June 6th on Main Street, where North Willard, eastbound to the city limits will be repaved. This work is going to be done at night, it'll limit a lot of the impact to the commuting public and residents who were driving during the day. It could be a little disruptive at night if you happen to drive at night or live along these corridors. So which I don't think most folks on this call do, but be mindful if you're traveling, there will be night work. You will see digital message boards and the VTrans outreach team will be trying to let the community know what's happening and we will piggyback on that to let folks know when this work is happening and the impacts it's going to have on the public. We do have a bunch of transportation improvements that are underway, we're planned for this year. The one that is highlighted, I wanted to make a special note of for the Words 4 and 7 community, Platsburg Ave, we're having a meeting tomorrow night and we have sent a couple dozen, a couple hundred mailers out to the property owners and the residents of Platsburg Ave to let folks know about this. But we're proposing potentially looking at removing the parking on that, I guess it would be that west side and adding bike lanes on both sides of the street. There's a website set up if you wanted to view these plans a little bit more closely on your monitor, certainly you're welcome and we'd encourage anyone to attend tomorrow night where we'll be talking more in-depth. Our planner for DPW will be there and be able to talk a little bit more in-depth about the plans, answer any questions and certainly happy to answer any questions you have today. I'm gonna keep moving again for the sake of time but if I'm skipping over anything folks wanna talk more about, please do let us know. For the traveling public and for interested residents, Sheldon Street Roundabout is still underway set to complete next summer. You might know about a pretty significant disruption, important disruption this week where the road is during the day open one way with flaggers leading to a pretty significant slowdowns for the commuting public and also some night closures. So if you need to know more about that this is some great contact information that the state makes available. Certainly the website SheldonStreetRoundabout.com is a great resource if you wanna sign up for a regular mailing list updates. We are very excited to share with you that the Champlain Parkway is set to start construction in about two months in July. One segment of the Champlain Parkway is going to be built. It is not the connection from the interstate that is getting built. It's being phased in a very careful way mindful of all the other work we have underway specifically the Sheldon Street Roundabout such that Pine Street work won't be happening in 2022. Overall, this is a two lane 25 mile per hour road. It adds multimodal access for a better pedestrian access better biking access. And we think calmer, better driving ability to get from the South end to downtown or to get from out of town to downtown. We believe this is gonna be a project that makes while not perfect gonna be a very important transportation project for the city. If you have any specific questions again, we can answer those today but you have some great contact information on the left hand side of your screen and you're always welcome to reach out. This is the sequencing plan I just referenced. I'm only gonna have it up for a second. It's a lot to digest but it's a pretty careful way we've taken a look at all of the major multi-year, multi-phase projects and laid them out so that we have and the public can have greater understanding of how planning, design, construction is going to happen to all of these projects many of which are intersecting or adjacent to each other. Just keep that in mind. This is available on the Champlain Parkway.com website and again, certainly always happy to take your emails or calls after the fact. Main Street Revitalization Project, the Great Streets Project is underway. We just got a vote at the City Council on Monday that allows us to redesign the street parking on that road which will add more pedestrian space, add more transportation improvements, shorten crossing times. We'll reduce some of the parking on Main Street but it allows us to add really important stormwater features, traffic calming features and pedestrian space. If you're not aware of this project go to GreatStreetsBTV.com or ask us, ask away any questions you have but it's a very important initiative that's underway. Construction is still a ways out about a year or so out but design is happening now and we'd love to hear feedback if you are aware of these plans. I'm gonna skip over this for now just a couple other projects you might have seen on another slide. University Place and Mansfield Avside Path and Traffic Calming Projects will be underway very soon. And here's a couple of resources and I'll share this after the fact but you can always call us if you have questions. We do offer real-time interpretation for folks who may not speak English as a first language. We use a service called TeleLanguage which we can connect to in real-time roughly during business hours. Maintain a construction portal where you can see a map-eye view of all the projects that should be underway. C-Click Fix is a great tool for short-term requests. You'll hear back from us I think pretty quickly long-term requests we'll get back to you in a little bit longer timeline but rest assured they are in queue if you submit requests here. VT Alert will send real-time texts and emails out for major traffic disruptions due to construction projects, snow bands, boil water advisories which we had a very small one in the New North end a few months back and we're able to make good use of VT Alert to let folks know about that and you're always of course welcomed just to reach out to me if you wanna have any discussions about DPW's work and we wanna thank you for your time hope that kept us roughly in the right timeline and I'm gonna take my screen away certainly open it up to questions and happy to bring the screen back if you have the need to reference any slides. Thank you so much for the time here. Thank you Robert and we can move into some questions. We have eight, nine, 10 minutes. I'm looking for some hands. I have some questions but I'm gonna move to some folks first. I see Virgil and I see somebody in the Miller Center. Let's start with the Miller Center. I can't see who that is. I'm sorry, who are you starting with? I'm gonna start with the Miller Center. Young lady on film. Who is that? Thank you Matt. I have a question regarding the bike lanes on Plattsburgh Avenue. How was the decision made to put in two bike lanes there and instead of re-routing the bike traffic through the condos at the end of Plattsburgh Avenue and down onto the bike path or North Avenue from there. Plattsburgh Avenue isn't wide enough now for all the 18 willers that travel through there and I just think bikes would be much safer if you did what you did at the south end of North Avenue and re-rooted the bikes off from that street onto the, and through a neighborhood. Can that still be done? Well, I'll maybe add two things and Director Chapin Spencer may wanna jump in. A lot of the feedback we got about that plan did come out of an extensive planning process from a few years back in the Burlington Bike Walkmaster plan. So a lot of thought had been given to kind of good routing for our transportation network. That's one of the ways that informed this proposal. I do wanna underscore it's a proposal we're bringing to the community, to the property owners and the residents of Plattsburgh Avenue tomorrow to better understand ideas around this bike lane. The routing we're proposing and the parking that we're proposing. So certainly this is feedback that I appreciate hearing that I'll share with, that we'll share with my team, with our team. And Director Spencer maybe has more context, but... Great, I think you hit it well just to make sure we get through everybody. If you're interested, please do feel free to submit formal written comments or attend tomorrow night's meeting and happy to have any discussions offline. Thank you, Chapin. We're here. Two other questions regarding Plattsburgh Avenue is can the speed limit be reduced to 25 on Plattsburgh Avenue and in force? And also can trucks, 18-wheelers that come out of the groceries, the Hanna-Fords and Domino's and all the other 18-wheelers can maybe diverted onto 127 and then out to Colchester so that Plattsburgh Avenue can have a little bit of neighborhood feel to it instead of constant 18-wheelers flying through there? Yeah. The quick two answers is one, for the speed limit we are looking at whether or not Plattsburgh Avenue should be changed from 30 miles an hour to 25 miles an hour as most streets in Burlington are. I think the thought is that the restriping of the bike lanes, it's about a 30 foot curb to curb width will create narrow 10 and a half or so travel lanes, 10 and a half foot travel lanes which should reduce speeds. And we want the street to be safe for everybody, both the residents and the traveling public. So we are taking a look at that. The second, we can talk about truck routes and where they should and shouldn't be. My understanding is Plattsburgh Avenue is currently a truck route and therefore the trucks are allowed to travel on North Avenue but happy to have that further conversation. Okay, I think that currently that it is a truck route. I think that I'm requesting that that be changed. Okay, that's certainly something that the DPW commission could entertain. Happy to receive a request and can have our technical service staff look at that. Thank you. Thank you, Nancy. Bridget, you have the floor. Rob, chapter about two weeks now we reported a pothole slash sink hole on Appletree Point Road. You came and you put in orange cones but that's been it. It's growing, it's dangerous, it's deep and nothing has happened and it's causing a bit of a traffic worry because people have to go around it and there's a curve up there and you can't see that diversion of traffic. So my first question is when is that gonna be fixed? Two, in my view, we've raised the associations raised this with you, the communities raised this with you. I'm not a water engineer, but that's a water management or a water infrastructure issue because that water is gushing from further north down Appletree Point Community into the lake and we have already one huge pine tree from that storm, which is probably during the same time period as that sink hole. So I'll defer to a neighbor who's on the Zoom with me, but Cumberland Road, that intersection at Appletree Point and Cumberland has been patched and patched and patched. It floods and it floods for all the same reasons. There is a water infrastructure issue underneath. In the years previous, I think your department has admitted that. You've seen it, your engineers have been out, this is not a new issue for your department. So I would be very remiss if I did not raise this with you again during this NPA meeting, but I think that our community needs an answer and a schedule of when you will address this because that road, especially Cumberland Road, it's going to flush away into the lake pretty darn soon. I exaggerate, but briefly. We just have Chapin and Robert address Brigid we're getting short on time and a few more questions. Great, those are three great questions. We have had a number of sink holes this year. They are usually, as Brigid, you mentioned, related to stormwater management and we are relining a record number of our 110 miles of storm lines and combined sewer lines to help try to get at this. I don't, right off the top of my head, have the timeline for fixing that particular sinkhole, but Rob and I can get back to you tomorrow once we check with staff. And the erosion issue, happy to talk about that. We have over a hundred outfalls around the edge of the city, dumping into the Wineski River or into Lake Champlain. Many of those after decades are badly eroded. We've done an analysis of all the outfalls and do have a prioritized list. If one erodes faster than others and we need to re-rank that list, we are happy to do so. Right now the number one repair is on Manhattan Drive that could actively threaten Route 127 in its entirety. And that has to be our number one focus to keep that asset going and that's what we'll be working on this year. Thank you, Chief. Jeff, I see your hand up. Jeff Clark. Thanks for presenting you guys. The, a couple years ago, I think it is now, you presented a roundabout at the beginning of Ethan Allen Parkway and with the construction on North Avenue. Is that included in the plan for North Avenue stretch you're going to be working on? It is not included in this year's plan. This year's plan is a repaving plan. We got mixed feedback from the community on that roundabout at that time. And there was interest in the community to look at other adjacent intersections and do a coordinated improvement. And so at this time, we are coming through with a repaving from Ethan Allen Parkway to shore. I've got two more questions. I'm going to take two minutes from the school board because we ran four minutes into DPW. I've got, I will take one of the two minutes with two quick questions. I heard you say again, reduce parking on Main Street. I have an office on Main Street so this is a New North End question. The only improvement would be to increase parking on Main Street. So that's number one and number two. And I look real quick at your Google Earth view of the new rotary on Route 7. It doesn't look, and maybe it's just the scale like 18-wheeler semis are going to get around that baby really swiftly getting into town and that is the route into town on Route 7 from the south. So two quick responses and then I'm going to get to Arthur Frank. Great. So to answer the first question, well, let me just hit the roundabout one quickly and then we'll go to Main Street. Roundabout is going to accommodate the largest of tractor trailers. It has been designed to do so. It may be challenging to see at the scale but it is a rather large roundabout and it needs to handle that for Route 7 absolutely. And we've worked with V-Trans that's critically important to them. Main Street, happy to continue the conversation. We are embarking on a couple strategies that will look to increase supply both by partnering with private lot operators to open them to public parking but also looking at potentially whether supply needs to be increased. One area that in particular has come up is by Memorial Auditorium so that as people come down Main Street from the interstate, they can turn right into a facility as they approach downtown and don't have to drive around downtown looking for parking. So we do acknowledge we are proposing to reduce on-street parking on Main Street but not necessarily think that that's all we're doing. We are doing this parking study and I do believe that around Memorial there may be need to do a structured parking to accommodate additional parking. Well, thank you. And Arthur, I'm gonna go to you for a quick question. Yes, just a very quick question. I'm at 80 Cumberland Road and I have to tell you and I know you guys work real hard. I know it's tough to get to all these roads in the city and I appreciate that. But for five years or maybe even more between 70 and 80 Cumberland Road potholes come up all the time and I know you guys hear this all the time as well. It's different streets and you've come and patched it many, many times. It doesn't last more than two weeks. And again, and this is whether it's summer or winter it doesn't matter when. Certainly I'm hoping instead of patching if you could just take another look between 70 and 80 Cumberland Road and maybe do a section if you could just maybe pave a section. The whole road needs to be done but that's not the issue. I know you can't get to it, I appreciate it. But if you could just take one more look it keeps coming up. And all I can say is you've patched it, thank you but it doesn't last, it doesn't last two weeks. I would really appreciate if you think of patching a section between those two houses. Thank you. Thanks Arthur, I will say just quickly that in addition to the streets that Rob talked about generally we do have about $100,000 and we're trying to find some more money to do larger patches to do precisely what you're talking about. We will add this street into our mix. We understand that there are streets like Cumberland and I've personally visited Cumberland that do have problem areas and we will add it to the list and be able to communicate with you in a couple of weeks about where we're going to be focusing that large patching effort. I appreciate it, thank you. Thank you Arthur, thank you Chapin. Thank you Rob, appreciate your time. Another hot topic tonight, thank you. And without further ado, I lied, I'm sorry guys, I took four minutes, so we'll make it up. I believe Martine, you are here for the school board and I'm not sure if you have anybody else, I can't see everybody in the Miller Center but I'm gonna give you the floor and let you go to it. And Sam is going to share your website request when you're ready. Okay, so I can tell you when to move forward and so on. Hi everybody, Martine, Julie here for board four and Monica Bancicere from board seven. We are here to give you an update on what's happening with the BHS-BTC 2025 project. And before doing that, I just wanted to say a few things on a couple of various topics. The first one just being that this work that the board is doing around the high school, this community engagement is a really important part of our work as school commissioners. As you all know, we are trustees with very specific roles to play in the community, one being community outreach and engagement. So it's important to remind folks of what our job is and that's one of our most important jobs. So putting together that strategic plan, looking at vision for the district, hiring a superintendent and monitoring his progress and the progress of the district and community engagement. These are important pieces of our work. So we're happy to be here tonight to talk about this. I wanted to say thank you to Emma while she was here and Bob Hooper as well. They received many emails from me in the last couple of months. Most of them around PCB remediation, some of them around the student waiting formula as well. But ultimately there was a, in the 11th hour, H737 was passed, which put aside $22 million for PCB remediation. With the possibility of adding another 10, so possibly up to 32 million, for schools that need help remediating higher levels of PCBs in their buildings. And as you know, the whole testing process has just begun and there's a schedule. They're going through the high needs, the older schools first, and then they're gonna work their way down to the newer schools. It's my personal opinion that we, Burlington are in a state of emergency and need some of those funds right away. The plan is for them not really to be released until January, but I am in the process of working with some folks to put together a letter, just reminding folks of what we went through over the last year, being asked to move out of our high school when the PCB level was set at 15 parts per billion. It has since been raised. So part of the emergency that we had to face was due to those very unrealistic levels that were set by the, for example, natural resources. So I'm working on that. Yeah, I could go on, but needless to say we are in a crisis. We're in a state of emergency and we need support from especially the folks who made us sort of prematurely leave that building and have to put a lot of resources into Macy's into finding rental spaces for the tech center, et cetera. So anyway, without further ado, let's talk a little bit about the HSBTC 2025. So what you're looking at right here on this particular page is the old campus Institute Road. The large parking, the high school, which as you can see is made up of multiple buildings with those plastic plexiglass pathways that went from one to another. And also just please make note of this particular webpage, because this is there for all of you to look at at any time. It's available, bsdbt.org and then the backslash bhs. You can see it dash BTC dash 2025 with a backslash. So feel free to check that out. I'm gonna move us over to community updates so that you can see what we're looking at now for the future. Probably many of you know that we had five designs to choose from and there was a public process. There was a survey that folks filled out. We got some, a lot of great feedback. There were also five sessions at the Fletcher Library where folks could come and speak with Monica and me and some of the other commissioners. The commissioners got to meet with the architects in small groups. So we did have a public process and asked folks for input so forth. Typically we don't get a lot of folks coming to our board meetings to talk about this. David Kirk have been someone who's shown up multiple times but if folks do wanna talk about this, I do recommend that you either email us or come to a board meeting. So we ended up choosing and Monica feel free to jump in. In our April meeting, after having looked at the public input and having had our meetings at the library, et cetera, we decided to go with option C. And if you scroll down a little bit, you can see the various options. And if you go to this page, you'll be able to click on them and get more information. But option C is the one that you've got up on top there. And if you click on that, actually higher up, that's okay. If you click on that one, you get, there you go. You get a conceptual sense of what the building will look like. Some of the aspects of this particular choice that folks really liked were, for example, the fact that the building faces Institute Road. It's very Southern facing. So it sort of runs along that whole piece of Institute Road with a tech center next to the high school as opposed to the tech center sort of being tucked into a back location. It's got ample parking up behind the building. And it has kind of a low profile in terms of its relationship with North Avenue. So it's kind of sort of an endpoint at the North Ave level or area. There is a really nice open space, a courtyard that is built in. And obviously, as you can see, it keeps our sports fields, which that was important to many folks. One of the other really attractive features of design C was that it was the least expensive. So don't get me wrong, it's still expensive. It was the least expensive of the five that we were looking at. So feel free to dig in more on your own time, but I did wanna share that with you. Right now, we are in the process of getting into more. This was just like a conceptual design. We're in the process of getting a little bit deeper and asking for input from teachers and folks who will be really spending a lot of time in this building. We're looking at the lead certification, which someone will probably be talking about in the North Avenue news soon, so you'll get more information on that. And our next step in June, you should be receiving an email or you'll see it on front porch form, that there will be another community engagement session for you to attend. So instead of hearing it from us, you can actually hear it from the architects themselves. So yeah, this is June 14th. I think so, yeah, but it's listed right there on the right. But that could change. So just make sure that you're checking from porch form. That's tentative right now. So if you can't attend that and you'll get information from the experts. Let's see. I was gonna add that this option C requires that we tear down the current buildings before constructing the new high school, which is also a more efficient way to go about tearing down the existing high school, taking care of the contamination. So doing that all in one swoop, as opposed to tearing down part of it, building and then tearing the rest mostly after the construction's been done. Right. And I know we only have till 8.45 for this. So I guess we can possibly take questions now. Anyone has any questions? You have the floor until 9. And I'd love to have at least 10 minutes for questions. Well, that's where we are right now. I'm not sure we can shed too much more light on what's happening. Obviously, we're gearing up to try to come up with an amount to put on the ballot in November. So that's gonna be the work that we're doing in the near future. And we'll continue with the outreach in the public. And one of the timeline for this design and cost estimate is right now earmark for August 2nd because to be able to put this on the ballot for the November election, the ballot language has to be finalized by the end of August. And of course also city council needs to approve this language. So that's another step. I believe on June 14th, the Burlington Planning Commission's having a public hearing to consider proposed amendments to zoning regulations such as maximum building height, maximum lock coverage setbacks and allowable uses for that property. Yes, great. Thanks, Monica. Awesome. I think Evan has his hand up. Let's move into questions. Evan, you've got the first. First, I wanna say thank you so much to Monica and Martine. I couldn't feel better represented by our school board members. And I cannot think of a school board that's been asked to do more than the school board that sits right now, which has led us through a pandemic, a global health crisis very well and also through the crisis and the emergency that you mentioned yourself. So thank you so much. And thank you. I'm so glad it's the cheaper of the options, joking aside, but as a close neighbor of the high school, I can see it out the window that I'm looking at right now. One of the concerns I would have and is about the driveway that's particularly on this schematic, and I would just say that the obvious issue for me will be that U-shaped driveway in the front of the school, which currently does not exist, would obviously be folks who are entering into Institute Road from North Avenue. And during pickup time or drop-off time, my concern is that traffic could potentially extend into North Avenue and cause disruption, similar to what I've seen with the Sarah Holbrook Center on a smaller scale. So if you happen to drive by the Sarah Holbrook Center in the, during drop-off or pickup time, you'll see sometimes parents whose cars are like, they only have like enough room for four or five cars in their turnaround driveway. And they're just sitting in North Avenue, blocking North Avenue. They're not finding another safe place to pull over and go and pick up their kids. And while certainly I have no comment on that, my concern is that it forces traffic into unsafe maneuvers around stopped traffic. And I've seen some incidences around the Sarah Holbrook Center with pedestrians crossing, while also cars are like crossing into oncoming traffic. So I see that the driveway is very large. And so maybe it wouldn't be a problem, but would you be willing to consider putting in measures that would try to protect North Avenue from getting blocked by cars during pickup and drop-off time? Yes, Evan, definitely. And this is also a question I can ask the design team. I would imagine they've already given this some thought and might be able to respond a little bit better than the two of us can. I would like to point out, though, that could you possibly pull up that total one more time? There was a purposeful design feature here that does allow for, can you just like zoom in just a little bit? It does allow for the tech center to avoid that ring, drive in Institute Road and then go up the west side of the building for potential drop-off in the back there so that there won't just be the one drop-off in the front. Obviously, some folks will be going to park in the back, which is a new feature because we used to, everything was in the front of the building, the drop-off and the parking. Here, we do have things separated to a certain degree with parking in the back, tech center drop-off behind the west side and behind the building and then the high school drop-off there in the front. So I think they were hoping that that might mitigate some of the backup, but we will certainly take that question to them and I know Monica's made notes for us to share your thoughts, Evan, so thank you. Well, thank you. It looks like a beautiful building really and our students deserve it, so thank you. Thanks Evan, thank you. I just wanted to add that the student parking still stays there across Institute Road as you see on the design and also that we need to encourage our students and teachers to use alternative transportation and visibly because it's not okay to each of us drive our own cars willingly. I might say many of our teachers might not be able to afford to live in Burlington and so we are in a housing crisis and so considering how they have to commute to school is important as well. I can add Evan that any commercial project to get a permit, especially in this good city must undergo a very stringent traffic study. So I'm sure the good zoning office wouldn't forgive his traffic study. And I'm sure- We love our traffic studies here in Burlington. We have them all over the state for anything. If you wanna build a popsicle stand, you need a traffic study. So I'm sure they'll report on their traffic study at some point. Do we have other questions? I see a hand at the Miller Center. I can't see whose body is attached. Is that Jeff? Yeah, it's attached to me. Okay, then you have the floor. You end your hand. Martin and Monica, I have a question about the 23 million allocated for PCB testing. That's sort of a two-part question. First off, do you have an idea of what the age range for schools that are eligible for that money is going to be? And secondly, given that Burlington is proposing the complete demolition, since we're the district that precipitated that crisis, are we actually gonna be eligible for any of that 23 million to assist with remediation of demolition? Such a great question, Jeff. Thank you for asking it. First of all, I don't believe that the PCB money will be allotted based on the age of the building. I think it's strictly are the PCBs there. So as they do the testing and as they locate, if they locate PCBs, it will be, it'll be doled out on that regard, not necessarily the age of the building. I don't think PCBs were used beyond the 1980s. So any building that was built beyond 1983. I think it was 1978. Okay, well, we have some differing opinions here, sometime in the late 70s, early 80s. So that's your first question. Second question, that's exactly what I'm exploring, Jeff, is how do we get some of that money? Because we are a known entity right now. We are a known crisis. There are a whole bunch of unknowns out there, but we're known. And as I've said, as we've talked about before, we were asked to leave prematurely based on a number that was the lowest in the world, I might add. So I do feel as though we are owed something at this point for what we had to go through, not to mention the emotional toll on our students, on our teachers and our community. Sorry, I get a little heated on this one. Yeah, all right. So I just wanted to add that the state, so there's statewide PCB testing of schools and there's two schools in our district that were selected for this are SA, Sustainability Academy and the Early Ed program at Ira Allen Building. I'm not sure how the selection of that happened. They selected based on the age of the buildings and when they perceived needs. So they obviously thought that those two might be in need of assistance more than some of the newer buildings. All right, so yeah, kind of curious how we are gonna, if we're going to demolition mode, how are we gonna legally, if you will qualify for that piece of that testing money? Right, to be determined. Like I said, that's what I'm working on. But Jeff, I would invite you to communicate with your legislators, communicate with your governor. This is a democracy. We have an opportunity to speak to these folks and make asks. And that's what I would recommend that folks do. Thank you. Go for it. I think David Kirk has his hands up. And David, you have the floor. It's hard for me to see the Miller Center. Go ahead, David. So along those lines, I know that, I know that estimates to clear Burlington High School are not included in the $182 million school building. And those estimates I've heard range between $20 and $50 million. So if we went with just the $20 million cleanup costs, that would wipe out the fund completely if they gave it to us. So my question is, are you guys gonna come to the taxpayers and ask them for another $20 plus million for cleanup costs? Because even if we go after the manufacturers of PCBs, that court case will be going on long after I'm dead and buried, I'm afraid. Absolutely, you're right. Because, I mean, we have to add these numbers together when we're talking about this. And what is $200 million going to look like to the taxpayers on their tax bill? That's a real question, especially with the mayor running up his needs, Burlington Memorial Auditorium. What are we gonna do with this mess? You know, they're- Look, look, David, David, you're right. It's a big number. The PCB cleanup is $27 million. That is our current, that's the current number we have. 27? 27 million. And yes, it will need to be tacked on to the 180 unless someone to me does what they should do and help us out because we've been put in this position by others and I believe they should help us out. David, ultimately it will be up to the taxpayers to make this decision. You're absolutely right. But we're doing our job to come up with a building that will be as good as it can possibly be for our community and our students. It's expensive, we can't lie about that. And ultimately it will be a decision that we make as a community. I understand. And I'm not arguing that we need the building or we don't need to spend the money or whatever. I just wanna make sure it's done wisely. I mean, we're backed into a corner now because of lack of maintenance on Burlington school buildings. And that's been an ongoing problem since I served on the board. So for over 10 years, we've been lack of maintenance on all of our buildings. I'm hoping that we're trying to help this so we don't get into this position. Again, building is only 59 years old. That's kind of a young building. I understand the side from the PCB issue. Edmunds is 121 years old and look at where we are with that, we've done renovations, we've done a lot of things in that building and parts of that building are probably in the age range as well. And I just wanna make sure that you as our stewards currently, as you said, are spending our money wisely and making sure we're getting the most bang for our buck because when I talked to the design team, they told me that if I wanted a building that was gonna last more than 50 years that I needed to pony up more money. And I thought that was appalling. I always appreciate your comments, David. I do, I actually really do. I appreciate your engagement and I appreciate your comments and we all need to be held accountable on this. I'm being sincere. And I'm not trying to say you guys are doing a bad job. I know you're not, I know you're not. There are other problems in the city in the way we manage things that create these problems too. Some of these problems. This problem is this PCB problem isn't something we own with something we're gifted. Now we have to correct it and I just wanna make sure every step of the way that we're doing it the right way. I mean- Absolutely, got you. We hear you loud and clear. I hope so. Thank you. I'm here often enough. Thank you so much. I think Evan has his hand up again and we're at two minutes. Two minutes. I know and Olivia's gonna really hold me to it so I'll be really quick. First and foremost, thank you, David. I haven't met David, but I couldn't say everything he said, absolutely 100%. And so we have to hold our legislators to the fire. If Martine has said anything tonight, it's that she's asked us to think about that tonight is that we are in a state of crisis. We were in a state of emergency with this building and she has made the point that this was not anything that we really should bear the fault for that the state made this decision outside of the rest of the world, even, which I didn't know until tonight, so that just fires me up even more, Martine. And so I wrote, I personally wrote months ago to the Education Committee. I wanna say it was like January or December or something where this first, I approached them and said, this is unacceptable. Our school is unique and our school serves people from all over the world who have come to Vermont, who have come to Burlington and how dare they leave us out in the cold. That being said, not a single member of that committee wrote me back. So it's really important that we hold our representatives to the fire and not just the ones here in Montpelier, the ones in Washington as well, to get us emergency funding for our school. So they really need to hear from us and it's really easy to ignore me. Well, maybe not, the time's up sign is there. So that's a great transition. But what I will say is, please, please, please email your representative if you care about this. If you care about spending $200 million and you're wondering what it matters, what it's gonna look like on your tax bill, write your representative, that's gonna reduce your tax bill. So please, everybody, raise your voice and say something. I don't even have kids in the school system and I'm passionate about this, so please. Thank you. And I know we have a team from the district that met with representatives from our congressional delegation for ideas on getting federal support. So hopefully that'll lead somewhere too. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Martine. Stay tuned. Thank you for the passion. Absolutely. And without further ado, I believe that's a wrap. So thank you all and we'll see you next month. I believe next month we're gonna focus on public safety. So we'll look for any suggestions in the first week. Maybe we need a housing meeting, it sounds like. Sounds like we need some housing as well. Thank you, guys. I guess we're gonna sign off.