 Hello there. Welcome to Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of Town Meeting Day 2023. My name is Bobby Lucier and I'll be the moderator for the program today, where we'll be talking about the redistricting charter change proposed in Burlington. Town Meeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers all ballot items you'll see on your ballot this year. And our election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with issues that shape your local community. If you're tuning in live, we welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. You can call in and we'll make sure that your question gets on the air promptly. And you can watch Town Meeting TV on Comcast, Channel 1087, and Burlington Telecom, Channel 17 and 217, as well as on youtube.com. So with that, today I'm joined by Lee Turyun and Chris Aisley, who are both going to share a little bit more about this charter change that's proposed in Burlington. And we'll see if we can get the language up here to read the charter change, which is number three on the ballot, and it reads, Charter Change Reward Boundaries shall article two, City Election Areas, to find section two, Election Boundaries of the City Charter, Acts of 1949, number 298, as amended related to city elections, be further amended to provide for the four city electoral districts and eight city wards to be redistricted to reduce the population deviation among the most populated and least populated districts to no more than 10%, as shown in a map entitled, Ward redistricting, eight wards for districts, 12 councillors, requested edits to December map, City edits B2, map date January 20th, 2023. Effective as of the annual meeting in March of 2024 and for all city elections thereafter. So that's what voters will see on the ballot, and we'll welcome Chris and Lee both to share your opening statements and start with you, Lee, to just tell us a bit about yourself, why you're interested in this issue, and how you're qualified to speak on the issue of Ward Boundaries. Thanks, Bobby. Well, first of all, I was active in my NPA for many years. I received the Hugh Blumenthal Award for Community Engagement, and I was a member of the Independent Redistricting Committee in 2012 and 2020. I've been very interested in this subject for the last 20 years. I hope we'll be able to pull up the language again because I want to address that when we're done with opening statements. Okay, we will. I'm opposed to the passage of this bill, by the way. I would like people to vote against this to send it back to City Council for more work. Great. Thanks so much, Lee. Chris, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah. I'm Chris Haysley. I live in the downtown core. I had an interest in redistricting now for probably the past 10 years since the last cycle. The city population has been growing over the last couple of decades. Yet our representation has gone down. We went from 14 counselors to 12, and we're still at 12. It was one of the things that I would hope to see addressed during this process there. I was actively involved during the most recent round. Okay, thanks so much, Chris. Great to have you both with us. So let's talk a bit about the problem that this redistricting is trying to resolve, and we'll start with you, Chris. What problem is the word redistricting trying to solve, and what are your thoughts on a solution, the solution that's proposed, and a solution that you would recommend? I think that the problem is one of population, principally. We had one war that was above the 10% deviation in order to bring the war boundaries or populations into compliance with statute. It was necessary to redraw the boundaries so that there was no more than a 10% deviation between the different wards. Okay, which word was above the 10%? I believe it was word seven, or excuse me, word one. Word one. Gotcha. And were there any that were too low? Or was it just the word one? I think it was mainly word one was the big issue. Gotcha. Can you remind us where word one is? Word one is on the eastern portion of the city. It includes the UVM Medical Center and campus, as well as the UVM. Great. Thanks so much, Chris. Lee, what about you? What problem do you think this word redistricting is trying to solve? Well, first of all, redistricting is always about equalization, so that equal numbers of population have the same number of counselors. So when you have one word that's bigger than significantly bigger than another, the people in the ward that's larger are a greater number of people represented by one counselor, as opposed to fewer. And so my main bone and contention with this charter change is that it embeds the district counselors into the plan. And district counselors represent two wards. Ward counselors represent one ward. That means, for example, I live in Ward 4, two counselors live in my ward. So my ward has two counselors and Ward 7 has one. And that is not equal representation of the people. And when the ad hoc redistricting committee that I served on heard over and over from the public that they did not want the district counselors seat, the district counselors seats, they liked having two counselors in Ward, as Chris mentioned a few minutes ago. They liked having two counselors in each ward. It gave for balance, and everybody had the same amount of representation. That has been seriously violated. And the wording of that ballot question is very deceptive. It focuses you on boundaries, where the key thing there is that they have Ward counselors, Ward redistricting, two wards and four districts, 12 counselors. Well, that means that there's eight counselors who are elected by their ward, and four that are elected by two wards. That's unequal representation. And the public knew that everywhere we went, whether it was surveys or mentee polls or listening to people at public forums, they were opposed to the district counsel seats. And city council just ignored that. They just ignored that, continued it. They cemented it with this ballot question. And that's why people have to vote this down, send it back to council for them to work out that discrepancy. Let's talk a little bit about how these ward boundaries were drawn. Can you, Lee, share a little bit of your understanding about the process of how these boundaries were drawn? You know, I'm going to defer to Chris, because after the redistricting committee stopped, after they finished their work, which was to send recommendations to city council, the youngest recommendation being, we don't want district counsel seats. After that, Chris and I and four or five other people got together and started doing mapping. It's very easy to do. There's apps online. It's very easy to do. And so if somebody said to us, you know, it's a problem that we don't want the King Maple area split off and we don't want it isolated in Ward 5. We want to bring it into another district. If they heard from people, they wanted a downtown district. Chris did the work mostly. I'll let him speak to it. Well, I think there are a lot of people that contribute to this. There's certainly a number of folks that, you know, engage with the council and submitted maps. I think it was a pretty organic process. The council held a number of hearings over the course of the fall to look at the different maps and that's ultimately how we ended up, where we ended up. And can we dig in a little bit to just the nature and the characteristics of this new map as compared to the current map? Can you kind of summarize how this map looks different or where the population shift is in this new map? There's some changes to the way the Old North End has been split. It typically had been east-west split and now it's more of a north-south split. Ward 3 has kind of shifted south and become more of a downtown ward in terms of its geography. That would now include the King Maple neighborhood and the Bob and Mill, which, whereas Lee had mentioned previously, split among two different wards, despite being Vermont's largest community of color. And then Ward 8, which was primarily a large rental ward with a large number of off-campus students, that was redrawn as well to provide a better mix of residents there between longer term and the students. And so now each of the eight wards is in compliance with the no more than 10% deviation rule? Correct. I think to Lee's point, a lot of the opposition from this comes not so much from the map, although there are people that do have concerns there, but I think it's more of the representation issues. And I think what folks were looking for was to kind of use this process to simplify things a little bit. In the past, we had had a model where we had seven wards and two counselors per ward for a total of 14 counselors. And so it seemed logical that, given the growth in the city's population and the work that the city council was doing that going back to a model of two counselors per ward, eight by 16 would be a good thing for the city, both in terms of representation, but also in terms of spreading out the work on the council. There's been a lot of big issues that they've had to deal with and I think increased representation would be helpful for everyone. The trend is towards increasing representation, not decreasing it. The state legislature gave Burlington an additional legislative representative. The hospital added six, seven new seats on their board. The university added seats onto their board. And at the same time, our city council reduced seats. It concentrates power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. It weakens our committees. Ideally, when a resolution comes, it gets assigned to committee. And in those committees are a tripartisan group of counselors that work on it, work the rough edges off of it. When you have too few counselors to serve on these committees, your committees are weak, they don't operate and that makes the work of the whole council even harder because they have to do all of that negotiating and ironing out the wrinkles in it during a city council meeting. And so it's really one of the biggest issues in this town right now is public safety. The public safety committee of council has two people on it. And one of them is the council president who doesn't ordinarily serve on committees. The council president is an ad hoc member of all committees but doesn't vote. But because we have a shortage of city counselors, the president is having to serve on this essential committee which only has two people on it. Can I ask either of you why this, why you think this passed the city council if it's decreasing representation? It passed city council in spite of the fact that they all said they didn't want district counselors. Everybody heard that from their constituents. The mayor threatened to veto it. The mayor wanted a smaller council. He told people smaller councils are easier to control. Fewer people whose arms you have to trust, twist. Fewer people that you have to persuade. And my belief is that in representative government, the representatives, they go and they meet with the people they represent. Our council should be going to their NPAs and talking to the residents of their wards as to how people feel. They should be negotiating their position there with their constituents, not in party caucuses the night before the meeting. Chris, do you have anything to add? I think it's the typical political process to give and take there and I think that there were some dynamics that Lee had alluded to with the mayor and the size of the council and trying to get something through. I think it is a big disappointment for a number of people and I think that the number of councillors and the configuration, the retention of the districts is really what I see is driving a lot of the opposition more than the actual boundaries themselves. Thank you both. We'll now jump to a question about what the public should know. We'll start with you, Chris. What more do you think the public should know about this issue before they make their decision and vote on March 7th? The map that was ultimately adopted I think was a compromise. I think the key thing for me is that it did do a lot to bring the bobbin mill and parts of the King Maple neighborhood together into a single ward, which I think is important because that's one of Vermont's largest communities of color. So I think that having that continuity was a good thing there. Thanks, Chris, Lee. Well, I think people need to look at the wording of that ballot question very carefully and realize that they're being tricked. They're being tricked into thinking this is about boundaries when the essential issue here is about equal representation and as soon as they cement those district council seats into the plan, then it's in our city charter. And I've heard from some people, well, maybe we could come back later and take it out. Well, the political realities are, once it's cemented into city council, it's very hard to get rid of it. People need to get rid of it. They need to stop it here, vote no on question three. And then city council will have the clout that they need to say to the mayor, look, my constituents want two counselors per ward. They want a 16-member council and we can learn to function that way. The legislature functions with 276 or something. The hospital functions with 24. The university with 26. I think our council could learn to use their committees and, yeah, to function in a very efficient manner with 16 people. Absolutely, yes, they can. Thanks, Lee. So now we'll move to a question about outcomes. What do you think would be a good outcome on this ballot question and what steps would need to happen next for that outcome to take place? And we'll start with you, Lee. Well, I'm just going to repeat myself. I think the best outcome would be for people to vote no. It doesn't kill it forever. It just takes it back to city council for them to work on it further. I understand that that's an argument for other ballot questions. People are saying, well, it's a good idea, but it's not perfect yet. We need to work on it more. This is one of them. They need to work on this more. They need to have more courage to speak for their residents and their constituents and be able to stand up to the mayor and say, we can function with 16 counselors and we will. Thanks, Lee. Chris? I don't know how this is going to play out ultimately with the voters. And if it is a failed outcome, it will certainly go back to the council, as Lee has pointed out, and provide an opportunity to address the structural issues with the districts and the number of representatives here. On the other side, if it does pass, then it would advance on to the legislature, where it would be, I think, probably routed to government operations and evaluated. And then ultimately, if adopted by the legislature, it would go before the governor for signature, at which point it would be incorporated into the charter. So I think that, you know, in terms of timeframe, probably next spring would be the earliest that the legislature took this up. Great. Thank you both so much. So we've reached the end of our questions here, and I think we're a little early, but I think we'll jump into closing comments unless there's anything else that you'd like to add. I think you can take a little bit more time than we anticipated on closing comments, but we'll start with you, Chris, if there's anything that you want to leave voters with on this issue at the end of our program today. Yeah, I think really at the end of the day, like for me personally, this was really about the statutory requirements of meeting the populations, and that's really what's driving it, you know, the underlying process. But on top of that, you have, you know, all of the different community values, keeping, you know, districts small or wards small, preserving neighborhoods and communities of interests, you know, keeping the polling place in the same ward, things of that nature. So all these different things came into focus, and, you know, it was a bit of a balancing act, particularly, you know, different models had different effects on different parts of the city. So for example, with an eight ward map, you know, one of the issues was where to draw the line between, you know, with this campus students there along Main Street, between what is currently ward one and what is currently ward eight, and six there, that interface there, you know, the seven ward map would have, you know, changed up the way that the old North End was drawn. So, you know, it was a lot of different things went into it to kind of make it happen. But I think at the end of the day, one of the things that was really consistent from the public process was a desire to go back to a model with two counselors. And, you know, if you're one of those folks and the representation is, you know, an important thing, you know, casting a no vote would probably be the way to go. Thanks, Chris. Lee, your closing statement. Yeah, I agree with everything that Chris just said, and I think it's really important that we have, that we make this decision about redistricting based on what's the fairest, most equal representation for the people. And this ballot question, if passed, does not do that. In fact, it does just the opposite. And we've got to empower city council to make a decision based on what's best for residents. And the only way we do that is we vote this question down. Question number three, vote no. And it'll go back to the drawing board. And I think council will then, because we heard them say, I really don't want district council seats, but, and then the but was, but the mayor's going to veto it if we do it. Well, do it, you know, do it and let him veto it. And then you can override the veto if you feel as strongly as you told us, you felt about it as we watched them voting. They were doing things like, oh, I really don't want district counselors, but it's a good map. Well, there are two separate questions. It is a good map. A great job, I think, was done with that map. In the, in the new north end, we, if they had gone to seven wards, part of the old north end would have had to come into the new north end. It would have violated several principles of redistricting. For example, there's the intervail and the ravine in between us and St. Louis street, for example. And if those people were brought into the new north end, they just don't have affinity with the people in ward seven, for example, village green area. And it's strong. We want our voting districts to have an affinity. And geographic affinity is very strong. And so by going to eight wards, it made the new north end very happy because we were, you know, a street may have been adjusted here or there, but ward four and ward seven are intact. The problem is that ward four has two city counselors, and ward seven only has one. And that's repeated all over the city. And it doesn't make it equal if there's an error in every part of the city. Four wrongs do not make it right. Thanks so much, Lee. Thank you, Chris. Thank you both for coming in. If you want to add one more thing before we close out, welcome to you. Sorry, I saw the- No, just, you know, check the maps online with the city's website. You can take a look with the visual. They know some people that's a little easier to understand and also keep in mind that, you know, this little paragraph that we see here in front of us on the ballot, it's what they call the short form of the question. The long form is considerably longer and it's several pages and that's the actual language and the charter change if you're interested in that sort of thing. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I was on the Burlington website today and found that interactive map where you could pull the layers of the old map and the new map. But is that what you're talking about? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, what I found interesting in the long form of the question was, you know, if you're going to have a system where you have districts and the districts are made up of wards, one would think that, you know, a way to approach it would be to define the wards and then say, okay, these couple of wards make a district, but the way it's defined in the actual language is they define the district and then they define the wards after it. So it's kind of intuitive in that regard. Interesting. Well, thank you both for joining us today. I really appreciate you coming in. Chris uses the word counterintuitive. I say it's sneaky. Thank you, Lee. Thank you, Chris. And thank you. Thank you for tuning in to Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of Town Meeting Day 2023 as we cover local candidates, local budgets and ballot items up and down your ballot. You can find this and more forums at ch17.tv. And don't forget to vote on or before March 7th. 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