 Can you unmute me for just a sec? This makes sure it's worth it. Hey, Gary, can you hear us? Yes, I can. Great. Do you want to, do you know how to screen, I assume you're going to screen share your presentation or would you like us to do that? No problem doing it. I'm not super familiar with screen sharing. I'm going to be eating or zoom most of the time. Yeah, so when we get to that item on the agenda, we'll make you the presenter. And then you just go down at the bottom of your screen to, it says screen, hit that, and you'll be able to display your screen. OK, thanks. Sounds good. Can you folks hear me? Alex, yeah. Yep. Besides you, Alex, do we have anyone else from the school board? There's Alex. Oh. He's muted. So say that again. Oh, OK. Here's Bridget. OK, and Bridget. Are there other board members who will be joining us? Everyone's joining us. Brian's on, so Brian, Alex, and so we're just looking. I know Laura was going to join. Oh, there's one. OK. Bridget is joining. Good. OK. Hey, everybody. Hi there. Hi, Brian. Is this our last steering committee meeting with Bridget? And Brian, yeah. Indeed it is. Kind of, unless you count Tom meeting information tonight. True. Good point. Never mind it. Right. If you want to join other ones, Sam, I will. So we'll see you again. OK. I'm going to start a writing campaign for both of you. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. I think there's a little bit of public consent form. If elected, you will not serve. OK. I'm going to drop this all I wanted in the first term, you know? And Dr. Childs has joined, just not by face? Yes, exactly. OK. Yes, she's on. There she is. All right. Well, why don't we begin? Megan is showing up at some point. But I don't. Maybe she's joining us electronically. I thought she was. But so when I call to order the South Burlington Steering Committee meeting of Monday, January 24, I welcome you all on our first item of business is the Pledge of Allegiance. There's the flag. Pledge is to the flag. And it's to the Republic of the United States. To the Republic of the United States stands one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Well, it's like a lot of echoes in there. A lot of echoes. OK, so instructions on exiting the building. I think we all know. Yes. So for those in the room, which you all know, go out the back door, exit out of the building. And then for those on chat, if we do have members of the public who would like to participate, you can indicate your interest in participating in the chat feature. And we will call on you. We're not taking content comments through the chat, but encourage you to express your interest in participating, turn your camera on, and do so when you are called on. Thank you. All righty. So our next item is comments and questions from the public not related to the agenda. Is there anyone? There's no one in the auditorium. So if there's any public member who's interested, who's online. OK, seeing none. We'll move on to the approval of minutes from May 18, 2021, and October 27, 2021. Do I have a motion for approval of the minutes as presented? So moved. In a second? Second. OK, is there any discussion? Comment? OK, seeing none. All those in favor of approval of the minutes from May 18 and October 27 of 2021, indicate by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. OK, any opposed? Aye. Any opposed? Any abstaining? OK, so those are approved. So our next item, I think it's we'll turn the meeting over to Gary, who I think, is it Gary who's going to do the budget presentation or Bridget? I don't know. I don't mean to. Gary Violet and I will be working together as a team. We did this effectively the other night for Channel 17. So we're going to, I think, use the same division of labor. And I will do some slides. Violet will do some. And Gary will do some. And then you're welcome to ask any of us questions. All right, thank you. I will share my screen. Gary Violet, are you going to share? Yes, I will share the presentation. OK. There you go, Gary. You should be able to share now. OK, how's that look? Perfect. Thank you. That's good. OK, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to present the board adopted budget for FY23. The primary presenters will be Bridget Burkhardt, who is our board chair, Violet Nichols, our executive director for learning, and myself, Gary Marcus, the director of operations and finance. So we'll get right to it. So I think. So as we put up this every budget presentation, our budget is really designed to help us meet the ends, which is the policy that governs all the work that we do in the district. The ends were set through a community-wide process about a decade ago. It was a very extensive process. And it really outlines what we want for our students as they leave the South Religion School District and move on to their next steps. We won't go into great detail, but the big buckets of ends that we are governed by with many, many sub-bullets beneath them are a disposition for lifelong learning, academic proficiency, of course, personal development, and citizenship. So we are very hopeful about this budget, because last year, the FY22 budget was very well supported by the South Burlington community, despite the reappraisal and pandemic concerns. This budget focuses both on education and academic recovery, but it also focuses very much on social-emotional factors that are really affecting our students and makes sure that we have the proper supports in place to help students as they move out of the pandemic, hopefully. OK, so we considered a lot of factors when developing this budget and getting input from the board. So I'll highlight the main factors that we considered as we did the development. So on the expenditure side, as you know, there's a significant increase. 6% actually climbed a little higher over the last month or so in the consumer price index, causing upward pressure on all of the consumable, supplies, any professional services and equipment that we need to operate our schools. We also are required, really, to develop and implement a response to the significant increase in enrollment at Rick Marca and Orchard schools and to also continue to look at the high school, because they are kind of in a continuous state of mild overcrowding at this point. We have the negotiations for all three of our collective bargaining units, teachers, administrators, and unit support staff that expire in FY22, and they're in the negotiations process now. So they will impact our FY23 budget as well. And finally, on the expenditure side, we're experiencing, like most places across the country, a critical labor shortage, especially in our support staff forcing market adjustments to be able to attract and retain non-union employees and to continue school operations. So our full-time equivalents of the number of employees that we actually have, we adopted 498.18 full-time equivalents in FY22. Thus far, in FY22, we've only been able to fill 485.75 of those authorized positions. And our proposed increase for FY23 in our local budget are three, and we'll discuss them in a little more detail later, for a total number of full-time equivalents for the FY23 budget of 501.18 employees. On the revenue side, we did, as a result of FY21, unfortunately, a lot of it was a result of the things we could not do during the pandemic. But we're projecting to carry over an estimated $2 million into the FY23 budget as revenue. We also are in the planning process, gathering community input, refining the plan to execute $3.1 million that we are awarded in the elementary and secondary school emergency relief funding through the American Rescue Plan. SR3 is the funding that we still have available to offset pandemic-related expenditures and support. The education recovery efforts for fiscal years, FY23 and FY24, that $3.1 million must be expended by September 30 of 2024. So again, we're planning for the use of that money, how to best focus that money, and have the greatest impact on students. So the state factors that we always have to consider is near and dear to the South Brompton Board, as well as the CLA. So we had a significant drop the year after the reappraisal CLA was in effect. We dropped down from 112.03 on the CLA for FY22 to a projected 100.99 for FY23. So that's a significant driver. In my experience, I've never seen a drop like that, never really seen much more than 4%. But it just shows how much property values are actually increasing in South Brompton when you look at actual sales. Our equalized pupil, iteration one, this can change. And it actually changed very, very slightly in iteration two. But it was post-adoption. And it may change a little bit more, one or two more times. But the swings shouldn't be very big. 2568.67 for FY23, even though we're seeing increased enrollment, we did have a slight decrease in equalized pupil. And it's not a one-for-one count because those equalized pupils are determined by a weighted average from the actual student body. So for FY23, we're down 1.64 equalized pupils. Kind of big story, kind of unprecedented increase in the yield, about $1,620 if you use the conservative property yield, which we are, of $12,937 for FY23. It has the potential to increase if the full $90 million surplus in the education fund and the state education fund is applied to the yield. We don't anticipate that happening, but the upper range of what the legislature could decide on the yield is $13,846 for property. And the income yield was also up significantly to $15,484 for FY23 with a potential ceiling of $16,705. We decided to use the conservative numbers in our budgeting, kind of been our approach for quite a few years to try to stay conservative in our budgeting. I'd like to walk us now through some of the enrollment projections that we've been seeing. We were able to work with someone locally, Mr. McGibbons, who conducted a broad research giving us some indications about enrollment projections. Of course, enrollment has a significant impact on our future planning, and it certainly will in years to come. And we're also seeing an imminent need to deal with some of the enrollment crises facing our elementary schools, particularly Rick Markott Central School and Orchard Elementary School, which are exceeding capacity right now. The board is working with the community and the administration to seek out and develop some solutions for next year. And you will see these solutions in proposed ARPSR funding for fiscal year 23. And I'd like to share just a little bit about where we're seeing the largest increases right now. We're seeing, of course, at all five elementary schools throughout the district, and with that, the greatest numbers being at the elementary numbers, which are around 30 students projected for next year. Gary, we can switch. Thank you so much. So to link, connect what our enrollment projections and our priorities that Bridget described when we began the presentation, what does this mean for our budget? What does that mean for taxpayers? Right now, we're seeing a proposed increase for the board-approved budget for a 4.89% expense increase that's from the fiscal year 22 approved to the proposed fiscal year 23 budget. And that's a 3.64% proposed increase for net education spending, again, from the approved fiscal year 22 budget to this budget that you're seeing here tonight, the FY23 proposed budget. And I'd like to put that in dollars and cents for our taxpayers, though, one of the conversations that we've been particularly mindful of at all levels is really thinking about what does this mean for homeowners and community members in South Burlington. So if we put this into dollars and cents here, we're seeing that the residential tax rate of the proposed increase of 4.89% in budget equating to a modest average of $8 per $100,000 of tax-assessed value. And this is off the back of a $309 reduction for $100,000 of tax-assessed value from the approved fiscal year 2022 budget. So I think this is showing really responsible planning here, again, a change from the fiscal year 2022 budget being an increased $8 per $100,000 from the FY22 budget. And so what would this $8 per $100,000 of tax-assessed value get for the district? Gary mentioned that we are proposing three full-time equivalent employees. And I'll talk to you a little bit about each of these briefly. So at the district level, an executive director of equity, this person would round out the executive team and work directly with the executive director of learning, which is my role, our executive director of educational support systems, and of course report to Superintendent Young. This position would work across all of the educational systems within the district and help to support equitable programming and structures for our students and for our staff. We're seeing a few non-FTEs expenses here following the executive director of equity. Utilities and cleaning, as you all know, having vacated where central office is currently located. The central office for the South Burlington School District are relocated this fall from our offices that were located in middle school to 577 Dorset Street. And so these costs that you see included in the column to the far right are for electricity and heating and cleaning contracts for the district's central offices. Following that, you'll see a playground upgrade. This slated expenditure is to make improvements to the playground at Gertrude Chamberlain School. If we look at the elementary schools, Rick Marcot and Orchard, we're seeing that Chamberlain's facilities are not comparable to those levels. So this is a necessary upgrade to bring that playground up to the, I guess I would say, the equivalent of the other two elementary schools. So I'd like to talk about a few FTEs here. We have assistant principal listed three times here. It's a 0.4 proposed at Chamberlain School and a 0.8 at Orchard and Rick Marcot. What this model is really proposing is two full-time staff assistant principals who will serve the three elementary schools with roughly the equivalents that you see here. And this number is based on number of students and staff so that we can provide proportionate support to each of these schools. One of the numbers that has been supporting the addition of the assistant principalships at these elementary schools is the increased enrollment. The number of students and then staff members and burden on daily operations, of course. And when we look at the administrative to student or staff ratios, we're seeing much greater need at the elementary level for increased administrative support. So that gets us to the three full-time equivalent additions here. OK, I will review kind of our facilities stewardship plan. So as you may recall, we had a $2.5 million bond approved by the voters of South Burlington in fiscal year 2022 because of a whole bunch of reasons. Pandemic-related contract or availability, it was a really difficult year to really execute the bulk of that bonded work. So we did execute, we're planning to execute $537,600 of that. And then the balance, we will work to get done in FY23 of that bonded plan work. So that means it's the majority of that FY23. Those FY23 dollars are going to be expended to replace the middle school roof at Tuttle. We are hopeful but not guaranteed that that whole project will be completed in the summer following the coming school year. We're not positive of that. We think that's a reasonable goal. But again, we're having to start looking at ordering material really soon just to get it done by then. The out years from 24 to 31, they're making some assumptions that a proposed bond funding in 2024 and then again in 2026, those are to do a myriad of upgrades, hazardous material, code, things at all five schools. And the assumption is that if we, this plan is based on having to try to keep the high school going really throughout this period through 2031, we will be undertaking master planning and visioning work surrounding the high school. Bridget will talk about that a little more in detail shortly. But this plan would be if we had to keep those facilities going in their current configuration and condition, we would need a total over this period from 22 to 31 of about 13.7 million in bonded funding. The bottom line in each year is the proposed operating budget that would come out of local funding. So as Gary mentioned, I'll just touch briefly on master planning and visioning. I know all of you who have heard me talk about master planning and visioning know I can talk about it all night, but I won't, I promise. But as both Gary and Violet have alluded to, Orchard and Rick Markott Central School both have urgent enrollment issues at this stage. Both of those buildings are meant for a capacity of about 350 students, and they're both well over 400 at this point and continuing to grow. One thing Violet didn't mention when she was talking about our demographic projections, these are raw demographic projections that we had shared earlier tonight without any sort of additions from the superintendent. We have a sense given how those predictions were built that they don't take into account fully all the development that is expected in South Burlington in the coming years and coming next few years really. And so we're a little concerned that those projections might even be on the low side. So phase one of master planning and visioning will really be to address those elementary enrollment issues. The ARP asks for funding that Violet mentioned will go toward putting trailers at Rick Markott and Orchard School for temporary purposes. Some offices will be moved into those trailers to make space in the actual buildings themselves for more student activities and classrooms. There may be some services provided to students in those trailers, but as few as possible really is the goal, but by getting some of the adults that are providing support and their office spaces out of the big buildings, hopefully we'll free up some more space there and give us some breathing space to figure out what the long-term options are for elementary enrollment. The enrollment committee that Violet alluded to is made up of community members. Brian Minier and I are also on that committee from the board. Doran Whittier have been doing a lot of work in the background, trying to assess the condition of the elementary schools. So we should have a report on that very soon from them to share with the community. And that committee will give the full options with pros and cons and hopefully some rough costs as we talk more about this with the community. And the community should expect to see more communication in the next few weeks and months about those enrollment issues. Phase two and phase three would really be to look at the high school and in the middle school, all of the challenges that the high school and middle school that were there as we discussed master planning and visioning a couple of years ago with the community are still there and they are not going away. The schedule that Gary just shared with you addresses some of those issues in the lightest touchway possible, but it doesn't solve a lot of the issues that we discovered and shared with the community as we went through that process. So the high school has the greatest need because of capacity challenges and just the status of the building and it's aging that middle school could end up needing to be prioritized above the high school depending on what we decide to do with regard to elementary enrollment. One of the options for elementary enrollment that is on the table is potentially and it's only a very early potential discussion is potentially moving fifth graders to the middle school that that would take an enormous amount of advanced planning. It would take some renovations and pretty serious renovations at the middle school. So there is a possibility that that could have to be prioritized over the high school, but we believe that it will probably, the middle school will probably wait until after the high school has been addressed. And then phase four would really be to keep on the city's agenda. We've been talking about this with Jesse and Helen and prior to Jesse's tenure, we had been talking to Kevin and Paul Connor about the need potentially to make sure that there's still space in the city if the city continues to expand in terms of the amount of housing that suddenly and is set aside in case there needs to be another school somewhere very far down the road. And that could be a potential challenge for the district and for the community if it continues to grow. So those are the four phases of master planning and visioning that we have sort of on our long-term agenda, if you will, at the district. So projected tax impacts, one of the challenges that all districts across the state have in terms of school funding is that we can only project what the tax rate is going to be. So we can tell community members what to expect when they go to vote on our expense budgets, but until the state sets the yield, the property yield rate, which happens at the same time the budget is approved, typically out in April or May, we don't know exactly what the tax rate will be. So the state gives us the common level of appraisal equal as pupil number and yield as Gary alluded into. They give us a steer on those in December. There are some updates along the way. So this projected tax impact that I'll walk you through takes into account those numbers that we've received from the state so far, but taxpayers need to understand that they could potentially change even after the vote. So we start off in the terms of calculating the potential impact on property tax with our proposed expense budget. So as Violet mentioned earlier, our proposed expense budget for this year is $58,344,602. That's a 4.89% increase versus the approved budget from FY22. Next, you take out offsetting revenue. And offsetting revenue includes that $2 million that Gary talked about, which was not used in FY21. So that's a carry forward to this year. It takes into account tuition from students that come from districts that don't have high schools and in some cases middle schools. So those communities pay their property taxes and in effect choose South Burlington to educate their students. So that gets counted as offsetting revenue. There are other grant funds that go into this bucket. So Title I and Title II funding, some funding from the state for transportation. There's some other line items in there that get funded separately from what we ask for from the ed fund in terms of net educational spending. So once we take out that offsetting revenue, which has gone up about $1.1 million this year, we get to net ed spending, which is what we're asking for from the state ed fund. And that's $44.7 million, which is an increase of about $1.6 million from last year or 3.64%. So you start with net ed spending and you divide that by equalized pupils. So equalized pupils is a number that is confusing somewhat to some community members who haven't been super close to the discussions about school funding. The state takes information from us about our average daily membership, so our average seated students, resident students, for a certain period of time during the school year. And then they take into account other reporting that we do about the number of students in poverty as determined by the proxy of those who have applied for help with school lunch funding and the number of English language learners and then the number of students at each level. So at secondary level, elementary level and pre-K level, they apply different weights to different students. So for example, a high school student is weighted more heavily than one. So they got, I think 1.13 in the current formula. And then pre-K student is weighted less than one. All of this kind of gets mixed together in a very complicated calculation. And the state sends back to us what our equalized pupil number is. So you divide net ad spending by the number of equalized pupils to get your ad spending for equalized pupils. Marshall, Bridget, so audio cut out? Yeah, we can't hear, Bridget. That number could potentially be higher, which would make our tax rate lower, but that really depends on some discussions in Montpelier. A lot of districts I've seen around that are making presentations to their communities are kind of using an average, but we chose to stick with the more conservative number. So that yield number has gone up 14%, even the conservative one. And that gets us to a homestead tax rate that's not actually on here, because after you go to that number, you then divide it by common level of appraisal and that gets you to your final estimated homestead tax rate. So we're estimating a homestead tax rate of 1.33 versus last year's 1.32. So increasing less than a penny or by 0.63% for residential property taxpayers. The non homestead rate is a rate that is set statewide and then divided by a community's common level of appraisal. And this budget would result in an estimated 1.99% tax rates for non homestead taxpayers. So businesses and second homeowners and the like. Thank you, Bridget. So one of the things that we take a look at and kind of grade ourselves a little bit is like how we're doing year over year on the income sensitized property tax rate. So that threshold this year, it looks like was recently released at 137,500. Anyone who earns that much or less is eligible for income sensitization. It doesn't mean that they will all pay solely on income. It has to do with house site value as well. But if they do meet the threshold to pay solely on income, the percentage of household income is dropping from 2.48 to an estimated 2.25% of household income, which is I think a really good news story. About over 60% of Vermont's property tax rates property taxpayers pay based on, at least partially based on their income. So for this coming FY23, if a person paid or if a family paid solely on income and their income was $60,000, they would pay 1350, an estimated 1350 in annual property tax, which is a $138 reduction over FY22. This is the updated with the most current information, 10 year property tax rate history. So again, FY23 is not final until the legislature completes their work and sets all the state level rates. But if you look at the five year average on the expenditures on spending, we're up 3.46 on average and the 10 year average is up 3.33%. And then the tax rate, the change in tax rate over five years were down 2.96% on the tax rate and over 10 years were down 0.31% on the tax rate. This is FY22 data, but it's interesting. I took a look at your districts, districts that had over 2,500 equalized pupils and these are all of them in the Northern part of Vermont with over 2,500 equalized pupils. The net education spending and then the per pupil spending is the key metric. You know, those districts, you know, they all provide quality education. We think we do too. And we are third out of the six in per pupil spending, third lowest per pupil spending for FY22. So again, another measure that I try to look at and Superintendent Young tries to look at to see how well we are doing from a financial management perspective to deliver our education. I thought this was an interesting slide to share. In comparison to our statewide, the statewide estimates that come from the AOE and the Vermont Commissioner of Taxes, the growth in education spending and total educational spending at the state level is projected at 4.28% for FY23 and South Burlington is projected to come in at 3.64% increase, change in equalized pupil count. Overall, the state is projecting to lose four cents of 1% in the equalized pupil count. And as of right now, we are projected to go down by six 100ths of a percent. So just 1.64 equalized pupils. The growth in spending per equalized pupil, statewide projection 4.74% increase, South Burlington proposed as 3.70% increase. And the average equalized pupil per pupil spending in Vermont statewide is $18,023 and we're projected to spend $17,419.41. You're very familiar with this, but this is just a kind of interesting slide about the impact of the appraisal cycle and the common level appraisal, which is doing what it's designed to do and kind of equalize and make it equitable across the state by applying the CLA to determine the final tax rate. But it's pretty significant that you can see the lower CLA rates result in the higher education tax rate values. And again, from FY22 to FY23, post reappraisal looks like South Burlington property values have continued to escalate pretty rapidly. His actual sales data for the last year has dropped that common level appraisal from 112.03 to 100.99. This is the, these are the final numbers that we'll see on the ballot. Bridget, I don't know if you wanna take those. Sure, we just wanted to reiterate that these are the numbers that folks will see on the ballot. There's always confusion in the community because the expense budget is going up by 4.89%, but the change in per pupil spending is going up by 3.68% because that's determined by what's coming out of the state Ed Fund. So you'll recall that amount was 3. something. And so there's always confusion about that, but we want to be clear that the numbers that are on the ballot are the 58,344,602 that we're asking for in terms of expense budget. That is $17,415.41 per equalized pupil. And that is an increase per equalized pupil of 3.68%. So those are the numbers that you will expect to see on the ballot when you vote early or when you vote in person. Yeah, I'm having a little bit of internet trouble. So I'm not sure if you guys are hearing me. We can move on to the next slide. I'm still seeing this one. Okay. And that is really the end of what we had to say. I don't think I need to remind the city, but I'll remind any community members who are watching that time meeting day is on March 1st. I understand that ballots will be available for early voting starting February 9th. And if you want to vote by mail, you can request a ballot, but that ballots are not being sent out to every registered voter in South Burlington. So if you choose to vote early by mail, you need to request that ballot through the Secretary of State's website. And those ballots need to be back to the city clerk before March 1st, if they want to be counted in the tally. So happy to take any questions or we can move on to the city's budget. Megan has a question. Yeah. Thank you. That was really well done, very clear. And I have just a couple of questions. The one has to do with it's slide 21, which has the tile proposed local additions to fiscal year 23 budget. And being a member of Gertrude Chamberlain School, I saw that the playground upgrade was a request under the ESSER grant funds available. So I was just curious if those grant funds can be used towards the playground upgrade or is this part of your, you know, amount to be raised from the taxpayers? Megan, it is part of our local budget. We're kind of focusing those ESSER dollars on education recovery in our current plan. And, you know, this was something that we would have needed to do pandemic or not. So we included it in the local budget. Okay. Are there other additions that the ESSER funds are covering that you could just list off a few things or? I think our ESSER slide got taken out because we thought we had less time than we actually did tonight. But Violet and Gary definitely know a lot more about ESSER than I do, but there's a pretty extensive community discussion process going on about how to spend those ESSER dollars. But the trailers that I mentioned before for master planning are one of the expenses that will be covered partly because that allows us to make more space to physically distance kids from one another in the buildings if we move some of the adults out of the buildings. So some of those temporary trailers can be covered by that. And there are a range of programming and other FTEs that we temporary FTEs really to support recovery from the pandemic. I don't know if Violet, you want to change in any of those specific bullet points. You're on mute right now just so you know. But yeah. Yes. Thank you, Bridget. I am actually looking for this slide right now from our, that Bridget just referenced. And it walks through some of those ESSER expenses so that you can have a visual in front of you. But I'm certainly happy to talk to you. You know what? It looks like it isn't in that one either. So I guess what I'll do is I can just verbally answer this without a graphic. So for starters, yes, we are seeking feedback from the community. Not all of our ARP ESSER funding has been committed. We've proposed a plan for the community which we are seeking feedback on available on our district website. It's on, it's under the COVID reopening page and on the left hand tab, you'll see it indicated as recovery planning and ESSER funding. And this plan is at this point in time based on the feedback we've received from educators and students in our community is focusing on building a social emotional learning model and academic supports as well as continuing daily operations. These are the three required categories which are the allowable expenses that we can propose expenditures for under the ESSER funding. And our model at South Burlington is really focusing, some of you may have seen this graphic before that Mr. Young has used and it's a tree with our roots and then the trunk and the fruit of the tree. And so we've been referring to that quite a bit when we talk about ESSER because we're talking about the fruit of the tree being academic proficiency which we know is not possible without the trunk and the roots which are safe and healthy schools and social emotional learning. These are goals you've likely heard before. There are continuous improvement plan goals and they're in line with our ends policies. So I can, without having the specific number of FTEs funded through the pandemic in front of me, I can tell you that we've allocated for ESSER one and two, I'm in a good deal in ESSER three really to the continuation of operations of our schools. So I think it's about 8.6 full-time equivalents of staffing, many of them are 0.2s and 0.4s and we've used that staff to support everything from social distancing and cafeterias to increasing counselors in many positions speech language pathologists, behavioral clinicians we've increased our contracts with some local agencies who are providing mental health services to our students currently. The academic supports and FTEs proposed our reading and math teacher specialists primarily at the elementary and middle levels. At the high school, we're proposing partial FTEs for English language arts drivers ed and social studies. And those, I think those are actually all of the FTEs that we're proposing to fund with our ESSER. Of course, the continuation of operations trailers as Bridget mentioned to meet the eminent needs of our learners at the elementary levels and many operational expenses from PPE to additional support in human resources and the business office. We've seen a massive influx of hiring paperwork, for instance, or requisitions for our offices to handle. Of course, with federal funding comes the responsibility of performing procurement and doing our due diligence on ensuring that our vendors are SAM.gov certified. And so, we've used some of the ESSER funds all along to allow us really to spend the funds. And I think that is, those are the major highlights folks. Let me know if I've missed anything. And I'm happy to go into detail on it further. You look at think of Violet that I remember from the list because I asked a bunch of questions about it was the additional partial FTEs at the elementary schools for health and for music and art and all of that to try to basically change the schedule in such a way that students can be socially distanced and that all of their needs can be met without them being crammed into smaller rooms. But you might wanna say another word about that but that's the only I can think of that. I remember from the list that you didn't mention. That's exactly right. And I think that that was part of the 8.6 FTEs. There were partial in the elementary schools, as Brigitte said, many of them being itinerant teachers and many of them being employed as 0.6s or 0.8s pre-pandemic and that additional staffing has really allowed us to do a number of things. Everything from meeting our collective bargaining unit, requirements for our educators in the system, support social distancing, increased staffing and we plan to continue those for FY23 utilizing our best funds as well. Wonderful, thank you, thank you. Another question I had had to do with the facilities and you talked about the stewardship. Can you tell us at all about your discussions with Montpelier or what's available through federal grants in order to fund those major renovations or perhaps new constructions that you're envisioning? Yeah, well, I mean, I can address a little bit. I know that there are discussions going on in this legislative session. I don't, to my knowledge, there has been no movement except for the building assessments. There's I think 4.1 or 4.3 million dollars to do a survey of all Vermont schools and it really wasn't an onsite survey. It kind of ended up being a data collection and analysis to try to determine the need across the state before the legislature takes any action. I don't believe any action on construction funding has happened yet to bring the construction fund back that was here pre-2007. And to my knowledge, we know that the first federal bill school infrastructure money was kind of removed from that for it past. And we don't know what's gonna happen with Build Back Better. We are hopeful that there'll be some funding that does support schools across the country to be able to do some upgrading and especially hazardous material mitigation from my perspective. So it wasn't in the infrastructure plan that did get passed through Congress? No, okay. And my third question and the last question, unless other things come to mind, but I was a member of the Citizens Budget Advisory Committee, I believe summer of 2020, when some things were removed from the budget and I was wanting to know the status of those various budget lines that were removed. And I remember Bridget saying that there was a real regret over some of those things that were taken out. Were they able to be restored? So they weren't all restored and I'm sorry, Megan, I can't remember off the top of my head, but ones came back. But some of the most important things that the principles required or lost have come back. The co-curricular is kind of back up to full capacity, almost to the level of where it was pre-2020. The other pieces that are happening is some of those priorities can be addressed through education recovery. So temporarily some of the ones that they believe would be most effective and could relate toward education recovery, social-emotional learning, those are proposed and in the district's plan to use federal funding in the near term. All right, I appreciate, yeah. And I thank also Bridget for having served so long and so well as well as Brian and Laura. Thank you for picking it up when needed. And just thank you. I wanna thank you for the tremendous work that you have done. I wrote to the board and the superintendent privately to thank you for making in-person learning possible. And I wanna say that publicly in this meeting and to you all that you have done a really fine job and our children have benefited from your leadership. So I'm very grateful and I know I'm not alone. Thank you. Thank you for that. I have two questions. Okay, Tim. Sure, the first question is really simple. These trailers you're talking about for the elementary schools, do they require having plumbing and sewer? No, no, there'll be no sewer plumbing. There is electrical data, telephone, heating and cooling. Yeah, okay. Just curious about that. And the other question could be also directed back to Jessie Baker, if she knows. When the city went through the reassessment, one of the things that happened was that the commercial ended up dumping a bunch of burden back on residential because the pandemic had reduced revenues for many companies. And so Martha Lyons had talked about an ongoing process of re-establishing what those commercial values really should be as revenue streams came back post pandemic, whatever that means. So I guess the question is, from a residential taxpayer perspective, do we have an indication from the assessor's office of any increase in commercial values or revenue based values going on for the next six months and how we had an increase in commercial assessments or we will see those in the new bills going out in June or July? So the grand list is set as of April 1st. So Martha, the city assessor is certainly working on the process to do that reappraisal starting effective April 1st, but that hasn't actually happened yet because it will depend on the revenues that come in, including over the next couple of months. Okay, I was just curious what the status was of that because that's an important factor in determining what that final tax rate will be, I think. Thank you. Thank you. I just have a follow-up on the ESSER funds and I'm unclear. Is that a one year grant or gift or whatever you want to call it? Or is it something that will be reoccurring for the duration of the pandemic? So right now, all ESSER funds will be expired by 30 September, 2024. So that's their allowable use period. So what you have received is what you will get. There won't be additional. So then my question is, I think I understand how you're using them. Is the anticipation that some of the additional support services that they're paying for will go away once we aren't social distancing and that will not have to be supplemented by tax dollars. I mean, it's hard to predict what you need but because kids will be, I suspect, emotionally affected after they take the masks off and can sit next to their buddy at the same table. Absolutely. Right now we're anticipating the academic and social emotional learning effects to, as you said, stay with students and we don't know how long that will be at this time. We're monitoring student achievement results to try to get an understanding of what trends have looked like so far but I think it's very reasonable to say that we're anticipating needing social emotional supports going far beyond as well as academic supports far beyond the 30th of September, 2024. Some of the expenses that we can certainly anticipate decreasing are gonna be relating to any staff or expenditures relating to PPE, social distancing, any kind of health and safety requirements that are pandemic specific. Of course, that's all completely dependent on, what happens with COVID cases. And some of the operational expenses, as mentioned, could likely be decreased as we return to any kind of pre-pandemic structures or systems in schools. We're hopeful that could happen and of course we'll base decisions on continued guidance from the state and our health partners as far as when to make those safe transitions. Thank you. Matt, do you have any questions? Just wanted, I'm not sure who to direct it to, on page 23 of master planning and visioning, phase four, years FY2630, explore property available for future school options. Does the school district own parcels within the city that is not developed, not part of the contiguous? No, okay, thank you, Bridget. No, we do not. No, let's put a discussion between David and Kevin and between us and Jesse and Paul Conner about just, yeah, having, we've been, we're not gonna put it off until then sort of having that discussion about where those potential sites could be. But we don't need one right this instant, but we also know that if all the development that does happen happens and just continue to shift in terms of demographics in town, that we could end up in a situation where we need a fourth elementary school or perhaps we need to do some complete readjustment of how the five buildings are configured and that might lead to the need for more property in the future for school development. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing concrete that we're targeting at this moment. It's more a discussion as Jesse's sort of reopening the comprehensive plan and talking about the broader future for South Burlington making sure that there is enough infrastructure in place to meet the needs of students in South Burlington. Thank you very much. Okay, are there any questions? I don't know if there's any public members who've sat in. I can't tell from our screen, but if there's any other questions people might have, seeing none, I guess we'll shift over to the city presentation and Andrew. Bullduck will do that. Okay, I pronounced it right. Thank you, Helen. And thank you, Bridget, Gary and Violet. It's a tough act to follow tonight, but I will do my best and see if I get the screen share. All right, so walk through our presentation. As you can see, prepared between Jesse, myself and Martha. But I don't think that fairly encapsulates the number of people involved in preparing this year's budget. This is a process, as you all know, that starts very early on, back in September, with input from our department heads, leadership team, our committees, and in particular the council. We were making edits to this right up until council approval on their 18th meeting. Thank you. So here's a brief overview of where we'll be going tonight. Just as a reminder, all of our documents are available on the city's website. There's a link to it here. There's also a link to it in the agenda for this meeting. First, I wanna talk a little bit about our goals, both going into this budget and goals we looked to meet as we were preparing. Number one, it was sensitivity towards tax rate increases. You may recall, last year, the city had a under 1% tax increase. You will see as we move through this budget, the council was very sensitive to that, to our overall tax rate needs here in the city. And we're looking at an operational increase of 5.19%. If you net those out over two years, that's a 3.09% averaged over those two years. Second point, just like the school district, we're conservatively planning for wage adjustments with the city's three expiring collective bargaining agreements. And this is occurring during a high inflation year. When we first started preparing this budget back in September and October, we were looking at a CPIU cost of living increase of around 4.5%. As you know, that's gone as high in November as 6%. 5.9% is the most resistant data for December. Because of our tight budget year going through the pandemic, both in FY21 and FY22, there are a number of positions that we froze and there are a number of positions that were unfunded in FY22. One of the goals this year was to refund those positions to restore pre-pandemic levels of service. We also have two new buildings that you'll see, kind of the costs included in this year's budget. We have a number of operational needs for 180 market straight, as well as 19 Gregory Drive, the South Burlington Police Station. We were a tenant for a number of years and through the generous donation of Bobby Miller's trust, we now have assumed ownership in our full owners of 19 Gregory Drive. We're also looking to fund critical pandemic-deferred capital expenses. One of those is a new ambulance that's in kind of year 13 of a 10-year life cycle. You'll see that in this budget. We're also looking to incrementally restore FY22 CIP funding reductions. In FY22, again, a tight year, there was over a 300, exactly $300,000 reduction in the CIP. And we're also, just like the school, with its S response, we're looking to strategically allocate our ARPA funding to achieve both these budget goals and tax rate goals. A quick look at our fixed liabilities from FY22 to FY23. Talked a little bit about salary increases with our three expiring collective bargaining agreement. Between COLA and STEP, we budgeted a little over a 5% increase. A few of those positions that I talked about before, there were three positions in particular that were unfunded in FY22 that back in August, the council identified as critical needs and were refunded with ARPA dollars. 100% of those being funded in FY22. And the council approved a plan of slowly folding in those dollars into the general fund over a five-year period. So in FY23, 20% of those three salaries are reflected. We saw kind of consistent growth in group health that's fairly market standard. Our pension liability increased at a relatively low amount. This is based on a very strong returns this past year. Our retirement match, that's our supplemental 401k plan or 457 plan saw a jump. Our property insurance costs, those are some of those that's specifically on 180 Market Street that shows a significant increase there, as well as a pennies increase of $190,000. I'll talk a little bit more about that later on. So overall, the general fund budget we're looking at around a $2.3 million general fund increase. The amount to be raised by property taxes is $17,962,812. That's a 3.24% increase. But one of the issues we came to this year was the penny for PAS and open space funds were folded into the FY22 budget and have historically sat in the general fund budget. Because of the reappraisal this year, and I'll talk and there's a slide on this later on, those are seeing an increase of 190,000 overall. So one of the goals Jesse and I talked about this year was pulling those pennies out of the general fund budget, having those lies separately. So that accounts for that difference between that number, total amount to be raised by property taxes and the overall operations increase. The overall impact to the taxpayers of the entire 6.27% increase is a little over $118 for the average residential home and 79 for the average condo. If you pull out the increase to the pennies, that's the 1.08% flat increase of tax rate impact. That's $20.35 for the average residential home and $13.63 for the average condo. That's that 1.8% increase that reflects the pennies. Those amounts that you just stated, Andrew, go into the pennies. Correct, yep, yep. Just wanted to. So some of the highlights from this year's budget, the proposed budget. Talked a little bit about 180 Market Street coming fully online. Built into the budget is increasing library staffing so that we'll have two new part-time and one current part-time employee increase to full-time. We are also seeing a need for a handy person for our overall city maintenance costs. We're also seeing a significant increase in our information technology needs at 180 Market Street, particularly in the library. And that's part of built into the information technology budget line. We're also seeing, I think, as a lot of institutions around the state are, particularly municipalities and school districts, a need to have more better cybersecurity and resilient, yeah, better, sorry, better cybersecurity throughout our systems. This includes bringing us into Office 365 implementation. This has both one-time costs and long-term costs associated with it. We also have looking to meet our public transparency objectives through modernizing body camera and our cruiser camera technology. We're also looking to focus on capital planning strategy and connecting to maintenance with one full-time staff person to oversee city-wide capital projects and connect to maintenance staff. Then this is split between the general fund and our enterprise funds. Talked a little bit about ARPA funding. The first line there is that 80% I talked about for our three refunded full-time staff. These are the other allocations of ARPA funds proposed in this year's budget. We have dispatch consoles that are at the end of their working life. The ambulance, which I talked about before, which is in year 13 of a 10-year life cycle. The Microsoft Office 365 cybersecurity is one of the items that's eligible for ARPA funding that is built into this budget. The planning and zoning software. This is a project that will include, sorry, improve the user interface and the customer experience for those seeking planning and zoning permits. On the back end, it will also improve our internal efficiency to speed up service delivery. We also have some firefighter clothing slash PPE items that are at the end of their life cycle, all coming due in one year. We're allocating ARPA funds for that purpose. Council also is allocating a portion of fire EMS staffing person and an additional staff person. 50,000 of that is also built into the general fund. This is looking to support our fire EMS staffing needs. So overall in this budget to be very clear, we're looking at a total revenue side of just shy of one million. The city's total ARPA funds that we received is 5.8 million. Some of those are built into the FY22 budget. But this leaves about 4.5 million. There are other ideas being discussed. We're gonna be seeking additional public input in how to use those funds, both in this next year as needs arise, but also building that out into the future. Some of the ideas discussed are shown here. Maybe some million dollars into the housing trust fund, smoothing, refunding CIP into the tax rate in future years. So in these other ARPA projects column, there may be a way to slowly build in kind of the CIP lost tax capacity that 300,000 from FY21 to 22 and smooth that into future years. Talked about funding supports, businesses, commerce, and hospitality events, stormwater wastewater projects. And in February, be talking with council a little bit more about future uses of these funds. Just to show broken out what the FY23 general fund expenditures look like by department and what sort of the service deliverables your tax dollars are funding. It's broken out here by department. One thing that we'd like to do in future years is bring some of the HR benefits in administration, bring those into each department to show, kind of give a full picture of what these departments cost. Talk a little bit about general fund revenues. So 63% in this budget of the general fund revenues are from property taxes. 37% are non-property tax revenues. One of the things we did this year was we kind of conservatively are projecting local option taxes to rebound to pre-COVID levels. You will see that there was a, back when we did the FY22 budget, we had very conservative estimates particularly for the room and meals and local sales tax. When we did this year's, we looked at the 2021 kind of peak pandemic era numbers and we gave a 2% increase from that in FY22 for the sales tax and we brought our room and meals number up to still below pre-pandemic numbers as a conservative estimate. I will say that through FY22, we are far exceeding our projections and particularly in the sales tax. We're also talked about the ARPA fund investments. We're also in future, in this year, we worked on, the best way to say this, the formula we use for our enter funds to support the general fund, those haven't necessarily been clearly defined what that formula is. So we're looking to have a formula-based support built into the enterprise funds that support the general funds, looking to implement that over three years so there's not a one-year tax impact, significant tax impact. We're also anticipating continued lower programming revenues as we go through, continue to go through the pandemic and recreation and continued increases in permitting and clerk's office revenues, recording revenues. Here's the revenue side and where those revenues lie throughout the city. And if folks are interested, I know this is a kind of small print on the screen here. If you go to the website that was off the city's, if you go to the city's homepage and click on the main icon there on the FY23 budget, you can zoom into all of these numbers. Just to kind of outline again what this penny increase means. When the reappraisal occurred and we now have a larger grand list, the levies as they were approved by the voters, both the open space in 2000 and the penny for pass in 2018 spoke specifically to the percentage raised on the tax rate, so the 0.02. This means that going from pre-reappraisal to post-reappraisal we have, there's an automatic levy increase in the amount that those cents raise on the overall grand list. So we're looking at a, those funds will now receive an additional $95,000 each. The capital improvement plan, just to highlight a few of these, there's the city center reserve fund. This has in the past been funded at 800, sorry, 850,000 during its deliberations over this budget last week. Council reduced this by 50,000. We've increased the paving budget. We've, city-wide we've heard a lot about the need for better paving and to meet that, we've increased it by 50,000. We've also, council has dedicated 30,000 of that to Recreation Path Maintenance to meet needs there. The park departments significant decrease in their CIP from FY21 to FY22. There's a slight refunding of those to meet some of our needs there. And then the ARPA funding talked a little bit about this. There's those technology and permitting improvements, ambulance replacement and our dispatch council replacements. To talk briefly about our special funds. And this year seeing very, very slight increases from FY22 to 23 and stormwater 1.67 and sewer 1.95% and then water 3% increases. These rates particularly in water remain some of the lowest in the state. Total increase to the average homeowner for FY23 utility fees is $16.80. Also kind of have the historic city tax rates. As you can see, a dip in the tax rate in a reappraisal year. And the city ballot article, that $52 million figure that includes our enterprise funds and outlined is the amount to be raised by taxation. A little bit different this year is there's a line excluding previously voter approved levies. Those are not built into the amount to be raised by taxation in this ballot article. That's again us trying to remove the pennies from the general fund annual budget. They'll still show up separately on the tax bill. Emerging issues were projecting into the future. This continued to track inflation, unpredictable costs of goods. Our union contracts being unsettled. We'll have to see where we come out in those negotiations. Regional dispatch planning. I don't know just if you wanna talk about that at all but we continue to be in the process of trying to regionalize our dispatch and what those startup costs may be and the levy against on the city. Climate action plan, the city is working, continues to work on its climate action plan. There may be future funding needs associated with that. And with this sort of flat as I talked about 3.9 average increase over the past two years and using some of these one-time ARPA funds to absorb deferred costs, this will require that we'll continue to be catching up in future years. Next step from here, community outreach, warning going into the other paper. We'll have additional information in some of the February other edition editions. Budget book be available shortly in the clerk's office, city manager's office and on the city website. Jesse and I will be doing the town meeting TV presentation tomorrow. Pre-annual meeting of course as always and March 1st, get out and vote. Here's some voter information we will have ballots available as soon as February 9th. If you have any questions, contact the clerk's office. Thank you, anything? Thank you, are there any questions? Any from the public? Okay, thank you very much. Well, if there's no questions, we can move on to item eight, which is other city and school updates for the council and the school board. Are there any? I was going to give a few quick updates of things that Bridget and Helen and David and myself have been talking about. Bridget, is that all right with you? It's been a quick mail. Great, so really this is just for everybody's awareness, both elected boards as the council very well knows there's, we have stood up a climate action plan task force that is hard at work looking at how we specifically here in South Burlington leverage the statewide climate action plan and work to address climate change in our borders. And we're very thankful to Bridget and David for their express interest in that work and looking at how we include school buildings in with our municipal building evaluation. You also I think we'll be having a conversation in February the council's interest in standing up a charter committee to look at governance over the next two years. This is not going to be a instantaneous change, but council considered that at their last meeting and is interested in moving that forward. And we hope to do that in partnership with the school board. So ensuring that you have representation on that committee, not necessarily school board members they can be other folks representing the school community, but really would hope to do that in partnership with you all thinking about how together we govern ourselves as a community. And then just because we are saying this all the time for public information February 7th will be the next public hearing on our land development regulations. Many, many hundreds of hours of volunteer work have gone into crafting those and lots of council considerations so that potentially final public hearing will be on February 7th. And then finally, I do have the candidates if folks are interested in that. I think you all got those. Yeah. Would you like me to say and publicly say those? Sure. Sure. All right, so we do, we have- No, keep it a secret. So starting, I'm going to start with the school board for the two-year term. We have one candidate who has submitted nomination papers that's Kate Bailey for the school board term, three-year term. We have one candidate, Michelle Boyer, who has submitted an intent to run. And then two of three-year term. Oh, the two years of the two remaining years of the three-year term. We have Brian Champion and Chelsea Tillinghouse. Tillinghouse? Hust. Hust. It is possible that Brian may withdraw tomorrow as indicated by the city clerk. On the city council side, the two-year term is Megan Emery has submitted and Chris Trombly. The city council three-year term who is currently held by Tim Barrett. Tim Barrett has expressed interest and Linda Bailey as well. So those are the sum total of the candidates that will be on the ballot on town meeting day. Okay. Is there any- Do I get my speech now? Yeah. No. No campaigning. Are there any items that the school board would like to share? Just a quick question. Who are the two candidates for the other, the second seat that you mentioned? One was Tim Barrett. The second one was Linda Bailey who was actually with us- Okay, thank you. Okay. Well, if there's no other updates, is there any other business? Have we set a date for the next meeting? We have, I think, haven't we? No. Should we do that? Okay. Or should we wait till a time when David's here? We also don't know who- Probably when David's here. Oh, that's true. And we may have, and we have all these new school board members. So let's hold on that. Sorry, just getting ahead of myself. All right, if there's no other business, I'd entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. All in favor? Aye. Raise your hand or signify? Aye. Aye. Well, thank you all for all your service to this community. And we're sad to see some of you go and we hope some of you might stay or at least have experienced the democratic process. We'll see what happens. But at least we have some candidates unopposed for the school board. So that's great. That's very good. So good night, all. Thank you. Thank you all. Good night. Good night. Yeah, thank you, Andrew. So, could you say again how many for the pennies per month or for year?