 Please rise and join with me in resetting the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge of Allegiance is by the United States of America, the Republic of which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. First item on the agenda is the agenda. Councillor Bushard. Thank you. My motion is to amend and adopt the agenda as follows. Note updated checklist for Consent Agenda Item 5.22, Communication Luke McGowan, CEDO Director, and Marcella Gagnier, CEDO AmeriCorps Program Coordinator regarding AmeriCorps Formula Grant, CEDO FY20 per Marcella Gagnier. Note written communication for Consent Agenda Item 5.35, Communication September 27, Letter from City to Brookfield per COS Rydell. Note correct version of the memo regarding Letter to Brookfield Properties, part of Consent Agenda Item 5.35, Communication September 27, Letter from City to Brookfield per COS Rydell. Note additional written material for agenda and noted additional written material for Agenda Item 5.35. Note additional written material for Consent Item 6.05 per Mayor's Office. Note proposed amendments for this agenda item per Councillor Hanson. Note revised version of the Agenda Item 6.06, Resolution City Reinvestment in Burlington Telecom, Councillors Wright and Bushard per Councillor Bushard. Note proposed amendments for this agenda item per Councillor Mason. Remove from the Consent Agenda Item 5.24, Communication Burlington International Airport, regarding requests for approval to contract with Hoyle Tanner Associates for the purpose of the Associated Design Permitting and Bidding Services for Terminal Apron Construction South Phase 7 and Glycol Treatment Project. And place that on the deliberative agenda as Item 6.09 per Councillor Hanson. And I so move. Motion has been made with amendments from Councillor Bushard, seconded by Councillor Hanson is under discussion on the agenda as amended. Hearing none, all those in favor of approving the agenda as amended, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? We have our agenda. Item number two is an item that actually, well there's a miscommunication that is going to happen at our October 28th meeting. So that's postponed until the next meeting. So item number three is a presentation. Car Share Vermont celebrates its 10th year of sharing in Burlington. Annie Borden, Executive Director. Good evening, welcome. You have a presentation and just make sure you have the microphone pulled in very close to you. That's a reminder for everybody speaking tonight. Keep the microphone very close. And it's where, are the microphones on? Try the other one. Not good, is there, is there, can someone check and see if the mics are actually on? Ours are. There's a button on there too, there should be. The question is, how many city officials does it take to get the microphone turned on? I'll share this one. Is there any mic that we can give her? Try it now. Is that better? Yeah. There you go. Thank you. Thank you, Olivia. She started pushing buttons back here and one of them worked. So, you have the floor. Thank you very much. My name is Annie Borden. I'm the founder and Executive Director of Car Share Vermont. Thank you very much for this opportunity to present. This year we're celebrating our 10th anniversary and we thought it was a perfect time to share with our partners our impact over the past decade and also share with you our ideas for the future, how we can continue to expand the benefits of car sharing. So we launched in 2008 with a small fleet of cars and a big idea that we could convince Berlin Tonians to adopt car sharing and get around with fewer vehicles. Today we serve over 1,000 members with 17 cars and we've experienced record growth just over the past few months. So there is still demand for car sharing and we want to continue to thrive and grow. We are among the few remaining independent car sharing operators in the country. When we started Car Share Vermont there were more than 20, maybe 26 independent car share providers. But this isn't a story of failure. It's one of success. Car sharing has grown so much in this country that many of our nonprofit peers have been absorbed by for-profit competitors. And sometimes that's been a good story but at times it has eliminated car sharing in communities where a for-profit model really isn't sustainable and where the nonprofit model should exist. We are a nonprofit by design because we really want to be focused on mission. We want to reduce the number of cars on the road and the amount that people drive them. We also want to improve the accessibility for people who don't have access to a vehicle because ownership may not be a choice for them. Our members are having a really big impact. So our members range in age from 18 or current oldest members, 86 years old. We have, anybody can join Car Share Vermont who has a clean driving record. So we do serve a really diverse group of people and we serve all of Burlington with the exception that we don't yet have a location in the New North End or we don't currently, we have in the past, but it was not successful enough to keep open. But we have a goal of serving every Burlington neighborhood. So 65% of our membership or Burlington residents, households in Burlington, about 35% are made up of the campus community. That includes students, faculty and staff. 87% of our members belong to a zero or one car household, which is a really important statistic. It is not that car sharing allows people to shift driving their personal cars and then drive our cars just as much. We're actually reducing the number of cars on the road by making car sharing available. We also provide free annual memberships to anyone needing financial assistance. That's not grant funded, it's just something we do with our earned revenue to make sure that our service is available to as many people as possible. Here are our locations. We're pretty well spread out with many vehicles in the Old North End and down to the South End and we're on campus at UVM and Champlain College. Eight of our parking locations are provided by the city of Burlington and we've got 10 that are on private partner, private property. We work with local property developers and property managers and property owners including UVM and Champlain to place our vehicles and we try to place them where they are convenient, where they're close to transit, where they're easily walkable and bikeable, safe and within about a quarter mile walk of where our members live and work. So in addition to providing a 24 seven self accessible car sharing service which relies heavily on technology and a small team where five person staff. We deliver a range of innovative programs in our community aimed at advancing our mission. We've conducted numerous outreach campaigns over the years that aim to advance our mission by helping people understand the financial and environmental costs of driving and owning cars and we work to shape policies that reduce car dependence not just here in Burlington but statewide and we've conducted a number of market research projects and actually pilot projects to help us understand how we can advance shared mobility to other towns in Vermont and get beyond our most urban area. Car sharing does not really exist in cities as small as Burlington. It certainly doesn't exist in cities as small as Montpelier or Winooski but we've tried and we are going to keep trying to serve those communities. So our impact, 65% of our members year over year report shedding or opting not to purchase a vehicle. So when a vehicle dies or needs a major repair they're retiring that vehicle and opting not to add a vehicle to the road. For every car share Vermont vehicle put in service 15 are removed because of the rate at which people decide to ditch a personally owned vehicle. Members report year over year that they reduce their household vehicle miles trivelled by about 35%. So that's really important to note kind of how that happens. It's not just that car share Vermont's an awesome service though I think it is. It's because vehicle ownership is the number one factor that predicts if someone is going to drive or choose another mode to get around. And when you eliminate ownership as that factor by giving people the choice to share instead of own cars they tend to choose more affordable modes. All other factors aside regardless of household income proximity to transit age if somebody owns a vehicle they're more likely to wake up in the morning and drive that personally owned car than choose another mode. But car share Vermont facilitates a major behavior change and that's how we achieve such a significant impact. There's all sorts of other great benefits our members walk, bike, ride transit more. A huge percentage of them report feeling more independent because they're able to get where they need to go. To be sure, car share Vermont for a number of people increases their VMT because we're giving access to a car where previously they might not have had a car parked in their driveway. But even when you account for the increase in VMT among that percentage of users as a group our members reduce their VMT substantially year over year. And as I mentioned we make car access more affordable for more people who otherwise might not be able to afford to own one. The Park at Pledge is an example of one of our campaigns. We just launched this last month. We went door to door in the old North End and recruited 18 households to commit to parking a personal vehicle for three months in exchange for free car share Vermont membership transit and a bike tuneup. We did a citywide Park at Pledge back in 2013 with 100 households and within the first month 12 of those households permanently parked a vehicle got rid of it. So this is a program by exposing people to car sharing. It works and it kind of can help people get over the hurdle of trying to get by with fewer privately owned vehicles. So the city has been a key partner to date which is why we're here sharing this update with you. As I mentioned we have 18 dedicated parking spaces. We have a brand new charger at the corner of Maine and St. Paul for our new EV Sparky which went live on Friday. So now if anyone wants to try sharing an EV or if having an EV in our fleet is extra incentive we're excited to offer that. We've had membership from a variety of city departments over the years. We now have one and I'd like to highlight the mayor who has not only been a member his entire time as mayor but he's been a member since we launched. So 10 years strong. So really leading by example we appreciate that. Support for car sharing is well documented in numerous studies and plans around housing, climate change, the transportation plan, energy plans, you name it. It's well documented as a strategy that can reduce car dependence and achieve a host of goals that benefit people personally and the community with the notable exception of the net zero energy plan that just came out. Which I'll talk about on the next slide. So future opportunities for collaboration. We think it was perhaps just an oversight that car sharing isn't highlighted but we do note that NCE, the NCE report calls for a 15% reduction in VMT achieved through alternatives although car sharing really isn't documented at all as one of the ways we can achieve that. I hope I've made the case that we can't expect people to reduce the amount they drive without giving them the choice to own fewer cars because that's such an important predictor of whether or not somebody makes that choice. So we'd love to expand car sharing. If our thousand members on average are retrieving a VMT reduction of 35% per household we would love to help achieve the NCE goal around using alternatives faster and we think we can with the expansion of car sharing. With an investment of eight public spaces we've reduced hundreds of cars off the road in Burlington paired with private parking for our vehicles as well. We're not asking for a ton of additional parking but when we do come to the city and ask for more parking for car sharing vehicles we'd love them to be granted. Although we know that parking is kind of held for the public and we would like it to be recognized that car sharing members are also the public the public is not just people who own cars and they need access to parking that's convenient for our vehicles as well. We'd love to see increased city participation through membership growth with more departments and more employees using our service to help reduce, make the fleet more efficient the city of Burlington uses reduce the need for employees to have to drive their personal vehicles to work but have access to car share instead. And we'd love to continue to convert more of our vehicles to electric as infrastructure continues to grow in Burlington we'd love to see more EV charging spaces for shared vehicles and not just privately owned cars. And we see these as all kind of feasible asks we have a great partnership with the city we work closely with DPW we're just asking for continued support so that we can have a greater impact in the future. Thank you. All right, thank you. I'll open it up to comments, questions from the city council please make your questions concise we have public form at 730 and I will be starting that on time. Councillor Bushard. Thank you. So when you first started, which was exciting my daughter lived in Boston and she told me that development in Boston at that time was mandating that there be car sharing as part of the component of approval and so I went to planning and I know that development sometimes asks for car sharing options but I wasn't sure if the developer actually buys those and how successful that's been because I know we try to have development up on public ways where there will be bus, et cetera so can you speak to that and does the developer own those car shares or are they part of the pool? I just wanted to better understand that if you can speak to it, thank you. Sure, this is an area that could be more formalized so in some instances we partner with a developer and we're part of the parking management plan and in some instances car sharing is there in lieu of building access parking and that's a great model. Cambrian Rise is an example of that where Eric Ferrell hosts a car on site and actually subsidizes the pod so if the vehicle isn't earning what we need for it to earn to cover its costs, Cambrian Rise covers the deficit and that is a great model of helping to anchor car sharing at a location which we may not be able to do on our own in some instances that's not the case we're kind of invited after the fact or we may be pursuing parking in a neighborhood where we know there's a development and we'll ask to be on site and some developers are really willing to have us and others are not but that is a great way to expand car sharing by making us part of a project before building a necessary parking. So the model that you stated, Cambrian Rise is the outlier so the developer doesn't own the cars all the time it's more of they take advantage of the pool. Correct and in this instance they subsidize membership for their residents to encourage that as people are moving to the site to the property that they can choose hey, I don't need to be a two car household or even a one car household we've got car share on site and that's a great model it doesn't always work that way. Okay, that's good food for thought. Thank you so much. Thank you, Councilor Bushard, Councilor Pine. Thank you, Mr. President, I appreciate the presentation and I think the mayor deserves some credit for giving up his parking space although it went around the corner when he allowed car share to take that over which gave it more visibility and I believe you pointed out his membership Councilor Hanson I believe is a member. I checked a little bit with some people and I figured it was worth just pointing out I've been a member for a while but I wanted to ask you if we relaxed the parking requirements for new development would there be a way to essentially put into that relaxed requirement a sort of something giving back to the community through perhaps a essentially a mandatory car share? Do you think that would help mitigate the impacts that will clearly be felt? Yes, I do think that would help and I think that it's not just serving the immediate property it can serve a neighborhood and thinking about the impacts of potentially increased congestion of new development in the area if there's car sharing on site paired with not building excess parking and kind of promoting car sharing as an amenity to the development that's an excellent way to reduce demand for parking and allow more people to live with fewer cars. And now that you have 10 years of operation you have about eight cars as you said, was it eight? No, now we're up to 17 vehicles. What would Burlington be able to support incrementally over time? Can we get to 20, 25? Absolutely, I mean in the next couple of years we'd like to get to 25 vehicles or we're experiencing record utilization right now which tells us that we've not saturated the market here in our small community especially as newcomers come to Burlington from cities where they've been able to get by without owning a car there's a real demand for car sharing. This past weekend every vehicle in our fleet was being used by local, not by tourists and some vehicles are being used upwards of 14 hours a day. In a given year, one of our cars can serve hundreds of different unique users. And lastly is if students are prohibited from bringing cars, do the universities have car share on campus and do they have enough to meet the demand? We have car sharing on campus. Right now our relationship is that the UVM provides subsidized memberships to 200 affiliates in Champlain 100 and we'd like to grow that pool. We'd like to expand it well beyond that 300 and we're working with the campuses to accomplish that. There's definitely, especially if there's further restrictions on parking among students beyond first years. I just wanna ask, is that a well utilized option for students if it's available? Yes, very well, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Pye and Councilor Hanson. Thank you so much, this is great. What do you find to be the biggest obstacles or barriers to continuing the growth and success of Car Shivermont and getting a whole lot more people using it? You know, I think primarily it does come down to parking and being able to place their vehicles where they'll be well utilized and where they can facilitate long-term behavior change. Behavior change is also a key component, sometimes it takes people a major life event to be able to shed a vehicle but we wanna be available to them when they are. But we do need to be convenient to people and we need the flexibility that if a location isn't doing well or it's the middle of the summer that we can pull a vehicle from say UVM campus and place it elsewhere in Burlington and have it well utilized. In addition to parking policies, not just making parking available to Car Shivermont but it's making, you know, constraining parking in a way that's going to facilitate that behavior shift that's when it becomes uncomfortable for people to drive their personal vehicles a quarter of a mile they'll consider walking and biking using transit and, you know, using Car Shivermont when they need to drive. Thank you, Councillor Hanson. Last question goes to Councillor Jang. Thank you, President. So I think we needed to start by saying congratulations. Yes, congratulations. But my question is one of your slide you talked about if the infrastructure is enhanced you will be transforming more car to electric but who are you waiting for, for that infrastructure to be changed? Well that would need to be in collaboration with the city. You know, as an independent nonprofit without access to significant private parking and without access to capital it's really difficult for us to make the investment in charging infrastructure especially for a location that we might be trying and in two years time we need to relocate. So we'd be looking at working where the city continues to grow out infrastructure if there are say two chargers installed as there are at the corner of Maine and St. Paul with where we just launched Sparky that that model continues where there's dedicated space for privately owned vehicles and that would be paired with public and it may not be that we occupy them all at once but that it would be planned that as car sharing expands we're also expanding EV sharing, you know EVs are while they're becoming more affordable they're very expensive if it's a hope and a dream for somebody to be able to buy a car, fuel combustion vehicle we'd rather them have the access to share an EV as well. Thank you Councillor Jang and thank you Ms. Board and for that important presentation. Thank you. We appreciate it. I will now open the item number four which is the public forum and remember there is a light system in front of you when the middle light goes off you're starting to wind down at the last minute or so when the red light goes off you need to have concluded your remarks. All we ask is that you show us as much passion as you want and whatever you're gonna talk about just respectfully and don't personalize it and we will listen attentively. The first person up to speak tonight in the public forum is Albert Petrarcha but I understand Lee Terhune is going to speak for Mr. Petrarcha. Yes, excuse me, my voice prevents me from providing verbal public comment but I left a copy of my remarks in front of all of you tonight and the reason I'm here is because this is now the second anniversary of the civil disobedience against the racist mural on Leahy Way that began the citywide discussion about what should sit in our public square, whose narrative should preside and I would just remind you that as you do business here tonight across the street here, George Lewis is giving testimony to his history fighting racism and the fractured skull that he received crossing the Edmund Bettus Bridge to fight racism. So I would think to honor Mr. Lewis, I think it would be nice, Maro, if you would, in honor of his presence here, stand up tonight. No personalizing the comments, please. In state, well, he's the executive, sir, that you stand up and state publicly that you were not calling for this mural to stay up until 2022 but you demand that that mural come down as soon as possible, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hewn, and everyone has two minutes tonight. A year ago, you passed a resolution acknowledging that the parade mural fails to convey an inclusive and welcoming message that the city seeks to project and the parade mural fails to adequately acknowledge Vermont's diverse history and the parade mural undermines our efforts to promote Burlington as a diverse welcoming place to live, work, and visit and many individuals feel hurt by the emissions and misrepresentations in the mural. You set specific dates, January 7th, for a report on funding for replacement of and location for the parade mural. That was January 7th, 2019. March 1st to replace the placard next to the mural with specific instructions of what that placard should say. And by August 29, 2022, to relocate the parade mural from its current location. Well, the January 7 report date was ignored and the March 1st date to replace the placard was ignored. But it's the relocation in 2022 that I question. Five years was up in 2017. Five years, not 10, is the timeframe described in the RFP, the contract template which is unsigned and in the commitment to donors. The ELAP RFQ included these expectations about the display. Number one, it's expected that the artwork will be displayed and have a life of approximately five years. And number three, the duration of the display is not contractual and may be subject to change. The donor on the task force and who spoke there said she was told five years and she allocated fund from her marketing budget accordingly, five years. Five years was up two years ago. And here's where we are today. City government and the police department are struggling to achieve a diversity of staff and officers. This is dated front page of the free press October 3rd, few days ago. Our dedicated teachers and guidance counselors strive to embed broad cultural awareness and respect in the educational experience of our youth and the caring community is becoming more and more uneasy about signs of virulent white supremacy in the form of neo-Nazi and KKK activities. You, the leaders of our community can sign our values, can signal our values of inclusion and unity by declaring that we all belong by moving the parade mural into storage now while decisions are made regarding its highest and best use. We know more about the parade mural now than we did a year ago. And I'm asking you to please lead by example on this. VARA, the VARA rights, visual arts rights contrary to selective information given to the mural task force and to city council, the Visual Artists Rights Act does not protect work for hire or commercial pieces. VARA does protect the mural that was damaged by the installation of the parade mural, covering another artist's work, replacing panels that have been removed and again covering the original artist's work and her artist's mark will be a repeat VARA offense. First Amendment rights do not permit harm that has been thoroughly adjudicated. And as for the artist's right of free expression, he was commissioned, he was told who to paint, how much space to allow them, depending on how much money they donated. And it was testified to the task force by the artist's assistant that when he objected to adding people for political reasons, he was overruled, he grudgingly consented and it delayed the installation of the mural by two months as more panels had to be reworked. Thank you, Mr. Hewn. I appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Hewn. John Bassange is up next to be followed by Melinda Moulton. Good evening, Mr. Bassange. Welcome. Mr. President, good evening to all of you. Like everyone here, I have memories, beautiful summer evenings on our waterfront. It's been my home for 33 years, by day, walking and biking and by night, having a dinner and taking a stroll. As all of you know, I have great passion for our bike path and I share that same passion for the entire waterfront and our shoreline. For me, it's a lot more than a tourist magnet. It's truly spiritual. Sunsets, boats in the harbor, spectacular view of the mountains across the lake, thousands of people gathering to walk from Perkinspear to the new pause place in the urban reserve on our newly constructed bike path. You've all experienced it. There are not too many cities in America with this natural beauty of a lake and the mountains so close by. Together, we've done a great job protecting this treasure from developers and inappropriate business interests. No hotels, no extensive commercial development. It's been the people shoreline with few restaurants and buildings tastefully constructed, surrounded by parkland and accessed by our bike path. Who would ever imagine ever a rail yard extended into this treasured land, a second rail for storage? Find me a person who can envision a train parked overnight between King Street and College Street, right in front of Echo and our boathouse, being cleaned, serviced, and refueled. Find me a person who can justify destroying the view from this walkway and our bike path. This is the most popular section of our entire bike path. I'd like to hear from those who thinks that it's okay to return our waterfront to the days of yesteryear when our waterfront was an industrial pit. Thank you, Mr. Bessange. Thank you very much. I hope that you ask questions and continue to. I don't have all the information, but I hope that you continue to ask questions. Melinda Moulton, to be followed by Larry Sedbay. And please, each person on deck be ready to come right up. Good evening, Ms. Moulton. Welcome. Good evening. I am Melinda Moulton, the CEO of Main Street Landing, and I have been a supporter of passenger rails return to Burlington for 30 years. I was the fleecer of America on Tom Brokoff's NBC Nightly News for taking $1.5 million federal dollars to build the train station. I negotiated a lease with the state of Vermont to build the station, and then sold it to them in 2017 for pennies on the dollar. I had Governor Dean proclaim of Vermont Rail Day, hosted Rail Day for 15 years around the state every summer for communities to have free train rides and lunch. And I issued the real advocacy award to some of you in this room, actually none of you in this room, but I wish it was some of you in this room. Anyway, my first award went to John Peneman, the president of Vermont Railway. I sang, she'll be coming around the mountain to 300 folks from the commuter rail pulled into the union station. Listen, I have been a huge advocate for the return of passenger rail to Burlington. But this proposed second track, just a few feet from the wing building reduces the most pedestrian active area on the waterfront to a mere narrow sidewalk. This is Asinine. The plan to locate a second rail line between King and College Streets, just a few feet from residents and businesses shows no consideration for human safety, air quality, quality of life, views, access to the lake, movement of people, access for emergency vehicles, sunlight, recreation, or any of the other things so perfectly highlighted in the Burlington master plan for the waterfront, which was approved by all of you. It flies in the face of it all. And the most galling thing is that there's a rail yard just to block away equipped to service and store trains. And we are supposed to believe that it will cost $50 million to do that. It's a completely fabricated figure. So we don't need a second rail line when Amtrak comes into the station. The city has a voice, and if you use it, the state of Vermont will listen. You do have the power to determine what happens on your waterfront. I suggest you use it before it is too late because once that second rail line is installed, it will be there for decades. If Mayor Peter Clavel could get 15 rail lines removed from the waterfront, oopsie, am I almost done here? I'll skip along. Main Street Landing has done so much to bring life and vitality back to the waterfront. We are deeply dismayed by the lack of communication. For many of you, all this has been going on without us in the room, without the public in the room. And now this is my change. Thank you, Ms. Moulton. We have a voice and so do you. Thank you. Larry Sudbay is up next, followed by Jean Bergman. And I just need to let channel 17 know that I have gotten a text from someone who listens regularly saying that channel 17 is not on. The meeting's not being carried right now. So, okay. All right. Good evening, Mr. Sudbay, you have the floor? Welcome. My name is Larry Sudbay. My wife, Jan, and I bought a 1,000 square foot condominium in the Wing Building, part of Main Street Landing on April 7th, 2016. And with renovations, we spent $400,000. We pay $8,700 in property taxes annually. Our plan is to eventually retire in Burlington and live along the beautiful majestic waterfront. We bought this property knowing full well that a train track was 25 feet from our second store unit. And that in the future, Amtrak passenger rail service would be returning. In the fall of 2018, we were horrified that a preliminary study by the Chittin County Regional Planning Commission had identified Main Street Landing as the top choice to store and service the Amtrak passenger train. Are they serious? This is nuts, were our initial thoughts. We needed to know more, much more. This is what we have discovered. One, Union Station was pre-selected by Vermont Trans Managers prior to the report findings. Evidence exists that the report was only created so there would be air cover for the Mayor and Joe Flynn, the Secretary of Transportation. The committee report has many flaws, totally biased and has been a waste of taxpayers' money. The study cost comparisons are outrageous as it appears as though Union Station is the least expensive, $300,000. However, their costs do not include the following. The installation of a second rail, eight feet from the wing building, less than the distance from me to you, Kurt. The removal of the bike and pedestrian path in the addition of a new bike path, addition of platforms, lighting, stormwater plans, et cetera. It doesn't include the condemnation of the wing building. There are 21 tenants, businesses, and residential people that live there. Think about it, who's gonna live and work there? Nitrogen dioxide is at poisonous levels, exceeding the national ambient air quality standards from 50 feet, and the southbound engine will be idling less than 15 feet from four residential condominiums. Two diesel engines needing to be refueled in the middle of the urbanized redeveloped neighborhood, daily pumping of sewage by the trucks, cleaning personnel, daily train extracts, and future potential lawsuits where those costs included. In closing, the existing one track can accommodate Amtrak to deliver and pick up passengers. Carl Flauer's suggestion is the way to go. You all have the power to do right. I bless you, hope you do. Please stop the installation of the second rail. Gene Bergman is up next to be followed by Gene Hopkins. Good evening, Mr. Bergman, welcome. I have three points on the housing policy resolution. The reforms before you, while basically good, don't go nearly far enough to deal with the real and substantial problem of low income and lower paid moderate income people not being able to find housing they can afford. The reforms will not, in my opinion, produce sufficient numbers of these types of units. They do nothing to deal with one of the elephants in the room. UVMs refusal to house enough of the students to make a difference. The increase in the housing trust fund can lead to building more social housing, but much more needs to be done than what is proposed. Number two, on eliminating the parking minimums, I have a problem with giving this big cost break to developers without getting in exchange the alternative transportation system funding that is and requirements that is desperately needed. It is much harder to get something back after you've given it away than it is when, then it is when, but that is what, I'm sorry, but that is what you've done by delaying the transportation demand management and the impact fee research until after the parking minimums are eliminated. I propose that tonight you amend line 129 of the resolution to require a TDM proposal to be part of the joint committee's proposal to eliminate the parking minimums. This is consistent with what you heard tonight from Car Share and also from Councillor Pines' questions on that. I want to note that people at the summits voice strong support for funding alternative transportation systems in exchange for eliminating the minimums. Not tying them together makes participation in those events seem to be window dressing. Dog and pony shows do nothing but breed contempt and cynicism and public cynicism is the very last thing we need in government, especially these days. And finally, I believe the lines with the caveat that the cap on the weatherization investment not be unreasonably burdensome be amended to add the words quote takes into account the fact that we are in a climate emergency and thank you, Mr. Bergman. To the beginning of line 76. Thank you, Mr. Bergman. What is unreasonably financially has to be viewed. Gene Hopkins is up next. With respect to the crisis. Mr. Bergman, please respect the time. Gene Hopkins to be followed by Carl Fowler. Good evening, Ms. Hopkins, welcome. Good evening, this is Gene and I am so happy to be here tonight to thank Car Share for adding an electric vehicle. A couple of months ago I heard that it was happening and I said I'm going to sign up. And today, in honor of its 10th anniversary, I was able to drive Sparky for two hours today and I am very happy and very thankful for all the help they gave me in showing me where to plug it in and it was much simpler than I expected. So please give Sparky a try, you'll love him. Sparky is the electric vehicle. All right. And I hope he gets many friends. We will all try to give Sparky a try as long as we're not in Florida trying old Sparky there. Carl Fowler is up next to be followed by Andrea Todd. Good evening, Mr. Fowler, welcome. Good evening. I have provided all of the council a copy of my full presentation, so I want to go mostly to summary. The entire tragedy of the controversy about locating the Amtrak servicing facility on the waterfront is completely avoidable if the state of Vermont and the city of Burlington insist on the foresight to repair the 7.97 mile long Burlington S extension branch line to a state of good repair, which would mean that a passenger train could pass over it at about 25 miles an hour. That would allow the train in the short term to be serviced at the existing Amtrak service facility in St. Albans, which fully has the capacity to do so and in the very short term to go directly through to Montreal, which would be of incalculable benefit to the city of Burlington in terms of tourism and business infrastructure and would permit commuter rail experimentation between St. Albans and Burlington and Middlebury. We are arguing about a tragedy that does not need to be argued about. There is no need to locate a service facility on the waterfront. It is a catastrophe even if the railway insists on a second track. There is no need to park a train there all night long and service it. And the city of Burlington needs to put itself clearly on record in support of that option that I have suggested of going in the short term to St. Albans and in the longer term to Montreal. Indeed, by 2022, which is the earliest we can reasonably expect the train to be into Burlington, it may very well be possible to go directly to Montreal from the first day. Have the foresight to do the project right. We currently have two isolated pasture rail networks in this state, one from Burlington to Rutland at Albany and one from St. Albans and St. Junction to New York. But for eight miles of track, they could be a network and flow. We could have service within the state and across the state. Edna St. Vincent Belize, Paul and my clothes with my heart is warm tonight with friends I'll meet and better friends I'll not be knowing and there isn't a train I wouldn't take no matter where it's going. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Fowler. Andrea Todd to be followed by Rick Moulton. Good evening, Ms. Todd, welcome. The wheelie thing always throws me. It's tricky to talk here with this thing moving around. I am so excited to be here today to invite city counselors to- Hold on, Mike, get a little bit closer, please. Is that better? Yes. Okay, to an event that has been months in the workings. I sent an email last week and thank you, Joan, for responding. So far, we've just had one person interested but we'd really like city counselors to know that they're invited to come on a learning journey to Montreal to learn how Montreal infrastructure is used for bicycles and what the Department of Public Works there does to make those projects possible and maintain the infrastructure. We've arranged to be able to see what the facilities of the maintenance, I guess like sweeping materials and machinery. I'm like very excited about this because it's a great opportunity for us to be able to look at a city and that's actually doing extensive infrastructure and how they maintain it and what they do that we can apply to Burlington in terms of things that work and don't work here. The roots of this project came through like a Facebook conversation where things are happening in Ottawa and Montreal that are very exciting and so the spark of that conversation was let's go to those northern neighbors and see what they're doing to learn from them and through really just individual community members, myself and Drew Pollock Bruce and we kind of got together and asked people to be involved and local motion became also involved. So this is three people that sat down at a table and said we want Burlington to learn more and we want them to, we wanna help facilitate this project for Burlington. So we have members from Public Works in Burlington, Parks and Rec, CCRPC and so we really would love representation from people from the city and council to kind of see what's happening as well. Thank you, Mr. Todd. Thank you. Rick Moulton is up next to be followed by Brad Penningill. Good evening, Mr. Moulton, welcome. Good evening, thanks. There's two rail issues I wanna speak to but as a serving member of the governor's rail council for over 20 years, let me offer a bit of background. Our state rail plan calls for an upgrade of that 7.7 miles Burlington to Essex as part of a prioritized re-establishment of the Western Rail Corridor. This upgrade could happen over a single construction season. The fact that this upgrade will allow the Ethan Allen to simply just stop in Burlington and continue on through was never taken into consideration in the study on a location to service and park Amtrak. Even though the pending upgrade will render such Amtrak overnighting as unnecessary or at least just a stopgap situation. So this first issue, overnighting and servicing Amtrak in Burlington should just be a window until the train can continue north to St. Albans in the largest rail yard in Vermont. Our rail council tabled its recommendation on overnighting Amtrak until December when your city's voice could be a major influence on that decision. The second issue, a second track extending actually past College Street is a decision that the city has considerable weight in considering. The track would be laid on state land, not railroad land. The double track will cross both college and King Streets effectively creating more separation of Burlington's main streets from the lake. Don't let anyone tell you this is a done deal. The sources to pay for this building second track, all the costs associated with it have not been identified. In fact, the total costs for the double track to the state and to the city have yet to be itemized and presented. Your voice, the city's voice will be a major factor as the legislature continues this yet to be proposed expenditure. So thanks again for your consideration. Thank you, Mr. Molten, Brad Penningill to be followed by Cindy Cook. Good evening, Mr. Penningill, welcome. I had three minutes, but I only have two, correct? Two minutes. Okay, I'm Brad Penningill, I work at one main street and in the past 30 years, main street landing has transformed an industrial wasteland into a bright, smart, people-friendly area teaming with activity. The businesses brought to the area, the bike path, the echo center, the boat house and the waterfront park have become Burlington's new cultural center. Thousands enjoy this beautiful area that celebrates our natural environment and inspires me to see this area revitalized. People come here for leisure, recreation, education, community activity, exercise, tourism and business. It's an open, uninterrupted space which encourages access to Lake Champlain, our city's greatest acts asset. Adding another rail line is a waste of money and precious space. It will be an eyesore, it would impede foot traffic, people would be subjected to diesel fumes, sewage disposal, unnecessary crowding, noise and confusion. The cast and construction would disrupt daily life and alienate people who walk and shop here. Businesses, depending on this foot traffic, would also suffer and it's unnecessary since there is already a rail yard two minutes south. The bike path comfortably accommodates cyclists, runners, families with strollers, seniors, kids, wheelchairs and people walking their dogs all at the same time. At a second rail line, all that goes away. The International Fire Codes is a fire department access road has to be at least 20 feet wide so how can this path possibly be reduced to a claustrophobic eight feet? How does a nine foot wide fire trucker, an eight foot wide ambulance, make an emergency call down an eight foot wide corridor between a train and a building and still have room for firefighters and EMTs to do their job? We are known as a city for our quality of life. Fresh air, mountain views, a beautiful lake and emphasis on a healthy activity and a great place to raise a family. We're pioneers in sustainable energy, environmental stewards and we must protect this extraordinary area. Let's not go backwards and return it to a monotone of steel, smoke and stink. Let's continue to improve and grow this unique treasure. Thank you, Mr. Pettigirl. Preserve it for our children. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Pettigirl. Cindy Cook, to be followed by Erica Reddick. Good evening, Ms. Cook. Welcome. Good evening. Well, these wheels are a little tricky here. Good evening, everyone. I'm here to speak to the proposed housing policy reform. So you'll be voting on later tonight. And I think these are an excellent start, but I do encourage you to have active stakeholder engagement to really look at the details to it because I think that some of them have unintended consequences. And the one I'll speak to is the short-term rentals because that's the one that I have most direct experience with. Two thirds of the short-term rental hosts are women. One third of them are over 60. I fit in both demographics. And for us, for this demographic, I think the income from short-term rentals is something that's essential for us to be able to continue to own our homes and continue to age in place. Obviously, we're already aging in place because we're over 60, but we'd like to continue to do that. I'm an active member of my neighborhood, my community. I think most hosts who live in the area are. I use short-term rental income to make improvements to the property. That helps both the property itself and enhances the neighborhood. If changes are made so that my short-term income is reduced, I'll have to sell my house. And so duplex, it's very likely that some absentee landlord will buy it because it's great income potential for that. And we know what that looks like when neighborhoods have more and more houses that are flipped from residential to absentee landlord facilities. So let's see. I guess I just want to make sure I haven't missed any points here. I guess what I'd encourage you to do is to take a serious look at making sure that the drafters make it possible for residents to continue to own their homes, make it possible for people to age in place and maintain the character and quality of the neighborhoods. Thanks. Thank you, Ms. Cook. Erica Redick to be followed by Alan Hunt. Good evening, Ms. Redick. Welcome. Simple addition dictates that if you make it more expensive for me to own my property, the more I will have to charge in rent. This will be the inevitable effect of most of the initiatives outlined at the housing summit. Another example of the city of Burlington deflecting blame for its part in causing the affordability crisis. I implore the council to vote no on every initiative other than ADUs. My tenants already have more rights to my property than I do. I assume all of the cost and all of the risk for everything that can and does go wrong, yet if I have a tenant who refuses to pay rent, I'm the one who loses my home. One real solution that would make it feasible for residents and businesses to start new and infill construction projects is to decrease the regulations. Right now, only huge, big, bad corporations like Brookfield can afford to assume the risk of building here. Burlington Code regulation and taxes create an unhospitable environment which particularly harms small businesses. Another obvious solution is to force UVM to build housing on campus and require students to live there. The university and medical center hold 20% of Burlington's assessed property, yet they only contribute about $770,000 of what would be an $8.2 million property tax bill to the city. In other words, they pay almost nothing for the infrastructure they utilize while owning over $1 billion in assets. In addition to what the university owns, it commandeers the rest of Burlington for its dormitories. Long-term residents are essentially subsidizing the housing cost for wealthy teenagers from out of state to attend our award-winning party school. Said college students whom I can't discriminate against destroy their apartments and us landlords have to pay thousands of dollars in repairs over and above the deposit we're allowed to collect. I ask again that the city council say no to all of these initiatives and that renters and landlords fight together against their common enemy, the city and the state rather than each other. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Radick. Alan Hunt is up next to be followed by Patrick Murphy. Good evening, Mr. Hunt. Welcome. Good evening. Point of clarification. I was here to talk about the Form 5 public hearing. It's gonna be held rather than, should I wait? You can, it's up to you, you can speak now or you can speak when we have that public hearing coming up in a short while. I'll speak now. I'll speak now. This is concerning the public hearing on the Form 5 boundaries. I live on Maple Street, 89 Maple. I've been following this issue for as pretty much as long as it's been going on. And I have to tell you, I'm very concerned about sort of the process, not necessarily the properties that are involved, but the process seemed to be a case where a group of people, presumably city employees in the planning department, decided that they wanted to encourage the development or the upgrading of certain parcels of land in and around Ward 5. And to me, it wasn't an open process. There was no process for anybody to come forward and say, I'd like my property to be considered. I happen to have one that I think should be considered. I was told by the city the committee wasn't interested. So it really smacks of spot zoning, frankly. There wasn't a process for allowing the public or certainly people that own property within this area to come forward and ask for inclusion. And as you might guess, if you get into this Form 5 thing, property values are gonna increase significantly. So I questioned the process more than the actual properties that were picked out. I did attend meetings and there was this back and forth. Well, let's put that property in, let's take that property out, et cetera, et cetera. So I ask you to consider that when you look at this process. All right, thank you, Mr. Hunt. Patrick Murphy, to be followed by Jessica Oskie. Any luck, General 17? We're on, because, okay, great, thank you. Good evening, Mr. Murphy, welcome. Thanks, sir, our mayor, city council, city staff, particularly at BED and DPW for their support of car sharing thus far. Not surprisingly, we think that with even more support in policy and in practice, we can greatly increase the impact of our collective efforts. There are a fair number of policies we propose, which we think could help better create conditions for car sharing and in turn, encourage more walking, biking, and transit trips as a result. A way of time constraints though, I wanna focus on the issue where many others converge, namely parking. We offer our support for our current efforts on tonight's agenda to reduce parking minimums, to explore parking maximums, to properly price parking, and to require that developers better manage transportation and parking rather than build more of it and allow it to spill onto the street. All of this stems from the notion that the resources of public and private space are better spent on good things like housing people rather than cars, and in order for car share of a month to help achieve shared city goals around energy reduction, housing affordability, and production, sustainable transportation, and social equity. We also need access to a relatively small amount of that space to expand our operations, our membership, a number of people who might not own cars, whether by circumstances or choice. Just one of our spaces can serve over 200 members of the local public in a given year, and so by reserving a few spaces, more for shared vehicles instead of those privately owned, we're able to open these up to a broader group of people. And so I thank you very much for your time, for looking forward to discussing more of these issues, specifically at a committee at a later date, and to working with all of you in the months and years to come. Thank you, Mr. Murphy. Jessica Oskie, come on down. You're up next. Welcome. Jack Daggett is up next. Jessica Oskie, 37 year resident of Burlington. I came when I was just an infant. I live in the South End, and I've been involved with Car Share of Vermont since its inception in 2008 as a member and as a board member. And I just wanna say that I'm really proud of what Car Share of Vermont has accomplished. It's not easy, this work is not easy, and Burlington is one of the most rural or low density communities in the world that's hosting a successful nonprofit car sharing organization. If it was easy and if it was profitable, you can be sure that Zipcar would be here and would be taking advantage of this opportunity. It's not an easy place to operate. So I want Burlington to take a moment and be proud of what we've accomplished and to know that together, if we're gonna work to achieve our climate goals, that car sharing needs to be part of that solution. And it's not easy to change behavior, but we've shown that we can do it and we can move it along, especially with the mayor's leadership. He's a great user of our service and we really appreciate that. So we look forward to you all being innovative and staying the course and thinking outside the box and working hard to improve this service for everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Oskie and a happy belated 37th birthday to you. Jack Daggett is up next to be followed by Richie Burger. Good evening, Mr. Daggett, welcome. Thank you, I'm Jack Daggett. I live in Burlington in Ward three and the Church Street mural contains symbols that promotes a false narrative about Native Americans and people of color. The mural is clearly offensive and it's been up there seven years, enough's enough and I think it's time that it came down. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Daggett. Richie Burger to be followed by Donnie and Julie LaFountain. Good evening, welcome. Good evening, thanks for having me. I'd like to speak about the plan by the Agency of Transportation to force the city of Burlington to tear up the bike pedestrian path between King and College Streets and why it's unnecessary and I know Melinda has shared a notebook with a memorandum and documents and I know it's a long read but I would encourage everyone to read it. I don't blame the city administration in this because they've been muscled, deceived and frankly pushed into the situation of acquiescing essentially into tearing up that bike path when it's unnecessary to bring Amtrak here. Totally unnecessary. It's proven by the documents that Melinda provided you. Once that bike path is torn up, that pedestrian path is torn up, you're never gonna get it back and it may be impossible for the city council to stop it. I don't think it is impossible but I really truly believe it's in the interest of the city, its citizens, its future residents to say no to AOT on this. The lack of transparency and candidly, the frank deception by the agency of transportation since 2016 as to the shifting explanations as to why the city should be forced to do that have each been proven false, inaccurate and unnecessary and time is short. The city council, if it's gonna stand up for the city and for the bike path and the waterfront needs to do it soon, thank you. Thank you Mr. Berger. Good evening, welcome. Good evening, thank you. We're Julie and Donnie LaFountain. We are longtime car share members and we are honored to be speaking on behalf of Car Share Vermont. Why am I in trouble hearing you? This one? As testimony to Car Share. Sorry, there you go. It used to be a two car family until one by one they broke down and needed thousands of dollars of repair at the same time our son needed braces and was going off to college. So we were a no car family which worked all right for the most part except for there was always something we needed to get lumber at Lowe's or we needed to take our son to college or take our animals to the vet which left us beholden on friends and family to drive us around which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. So we were looking at purchasing another car or some other option and then we met Annie. And Annie worked with my wife and we became involved in car share in part because we have pets and it's really difficult to get somebody to say oh yeah, go ahead, take my car, drive your pet to the vet when they're really sick. So that opened up a world of opportunity for us. Now we're avid car share users. We don't have a car. We definitely use it quite often. We do the share a lot part of the program and what that's part of what we helped us to do is not only do we use public transportation not only do we use the car share but we have saved so much money by using these alternative methods on a personal note we're able to buy a house. On other stuff we're able to donate back to the community through Hunger Free Vermont. It just has afforded us much more flexibility than we could have ever had if we had a $250 car payment with insurance with the maintenance and the upkeep. So we wanted to just come here and praise car share. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much. Rick Sharp is up next to be followed by Jeff Comstock. I do wanna make sure that people understand that the moving of the bike path does not necessarily mean that means that we're going with the option of Amtrak being done at the location that the committee picked. That is not necessarily connected together just so everybody understands that. Good evening, Mr. Sharp, welcome. Good evening, thanks for the explanation. My name is Rick Sharp. My wife Ruth and I run Burlington Segways 277 Pine Street on Burlington, so we're on the waterfront all the time and we see what goes on down there all the time. As most of you know, I've been active over the past 35 years in promoting the bike path. I've watched with great interest as our waterfront was miraculously converted from a derelict industrial wasteland to the park bike path and the waterfront we all enjoy today. The city has made some very wise investments over the last 35 years with the bike path, the waterfront, and the church street marketplace. The result is an explosion of new hotels downtown. The city went from one hotel to four hotels in the space of eight years. That's a remarkable event proof of a flourishing downtown. Clearly the future of our waterfront is tourism, recreation, festivals, events and people-oriented activities, not new unnecessary rail sightings. I support Melinda Moulton in her opposition to the addition of a rail siding in front of Union Station. Rail sightings belong at rail yards, not behind the students treatment plant or up in St. Albans. There are much better alternatives here. So I hope you clearly take a close look at this issue and I think the city does not have to buckle under to the railroad or to the Department of Transportation. What Mr. Berger had to say tonight is very important for you to recognize that there are other options there. I also think Mr. Fowler's idea of having the trains stored up in St. Albans, much better plan. Even if that takes longer to do it, that leads to a connection from Rutland all the way through Burlington to St. Albans and eventually to Montreal, much better plan for the city of the long run. So I hope you will be mindful of the investment that you made over the last 35 years that has resulted in the beautiful city we have today and not take a step backwards by putting another rail line in at Union Station. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Sharp. Mr. Jeff Comstock is up next to be followed by Cindy White. Good evening, Mr. Comstock, welcome. Good evening, I live in Ward 7. I have three thoughts about the non-citizen voting resolution. The resolution states that approximately 3,200 Burlington residents are ineligible to vote because their refugees not yet eligible for U.S. citizenship. Not yet eligible really has nothing to do with it. They simply are not U.S. citizens. Eligibility doesn't mean people become citizens. There is a path to citizenship for a reason and the right to vote is one of the most valuable prizes. Non-voting citizens in this case with a focus on refugees is nothing more than political pandering in my opinion. On town meeting day, Burlington had 40,426 registered voters and guess what? Only 8,112 people voted. A 20% turnout is pathetic. The resolution has grand introductory language about community building through engagement. Based on town meeting day participation, the city is failing miserably to engage the voters it already has. The city council is trying to fix the wrong problem. In addition, the population of Burlington is approximately 43,000. How is it that we have 40,000 plus registered voters? How many of those are non-resident college students that vote on our property taxes, our legislators, our city leadership, which includes all of you and much more and then move away? More political pandering. And again, the city council is trying to fix the wrong problem. And finally, my wife and I work as polling place volunteers on election day. Based on that experience, how does the city clerk plan to accommodate the need for multiple voter checklist? To vote in city-only elections and receive the correct ballots, voters will have to self-identify as non-residents. Think about that for a moment. We don't even ask people to declare their political party when we vote in primary elections. The identity logistic in this proposal is not okay. Just because Burlington wants to create special treatment for one class of people, if non-residents are required to identify for the purpose of voting, how is that any different than requiring them to use a special check-out line at the grocery store? The hypocrisy of this proposal is obvious if you think about it. Therefore, I contend that the ordinance committee should not waste its time on this proposal. Thank you. Cindy White is to be followed by Sidney Ovid. Good evening, Ms. White. Welcome. Thank you. So I'm here in my role as Director of Park Recreation Waterfront. I just wanted to thank John Bossange. He's not here now, but I wanted to thank John for his eight years of service on the Park Recreation Commission. John went to the dark side. He moved to South Burlington. So he could no longer be on the commission, but John did a lot of work for our department. He very often would be passionately if there was a Park Recreation Initiative going on right here that we wanted his support on. He was always willing to come to the meetings and speak up as he spoke up on other topics tonight, but so big thanks to John. And we're fortunate though, in that the Park Foundation does not have any lines drawn as far as where you can be from. So he continues to serve with the Parks Foundation doing great works for the city of Burlington. Thank you, Ms. White. And we all, I think, agree with that sentiment about John Bosange and a little round of applause for I wish he was still here. We did thank him down in the Board of Finance, but he has done an incredible amount for the city of Burlington. And also, Ms. White, we'll pass on your kind remarks to the South Burlington City Council. Sidney Ovid is up next. Hi, I'm Sid. I'm a student at UVM. I'm here to speak about the downtown mural, like many others here today. I have only been here for three years, but I didn't find out about it until this year. Excuse me, my colleague Lee brought it up in our racism and race relations class. I am studying to be a social worker. So as someone who intends to work with communities in need, I find it incredibly offensive that the city would not, or would excuse me, refuse to take down a mural that is whitewashed and that neglects the history of the Abanaki people whose land we are on today. Sorry, I'm very underprepared. I feel like as a city that prides itself constantly on being extremely welcoming to refugees and new Americans that this mural does not portray that welcomeness. I think if I were a new American and saw a mural that was supposed to depict the history of this new scary town that I arrived in, I would be terrified because it is full of white people and not a single person of color. And yeah, I think it's offensive and I think that it should be moved to be taken down as soon as possible so that less people can see it. It just reinforces white supremacy, which we already seem to have a big enough problem with. Thank you. Thank you very much. Lisa LaRocque is up next to be followed by Trisha Gray. Good evening, welcome. Hello, I'm Liza, you're close, though. I'm also here today to discuss the mural. Many of you who are sitting in front of me in this room today are like myself, white. You and I have the privilege of looking at this mural and seeing ourselves represented in this city's history. We see a nice picture. For those who do not identify as white, it is a glaring, glaringly obvious about who is being excluded. This mural is a whitewashed version of our city's history and fully disregards the presence and contributions of people of color in the city. I'm here to advocate for the immediate removal of this mural and thus the condemnation of white supremacy by the city. Thank you. Thank you very much. Trisha Gray to be followed by Kelly Devine. Good evening, Miss Gray, welcome. Thank you. I would like to address some of the housing policy reform. Specifically, I would like to address how STRs are currently being defined, that's short-term rentals. Specifically, that they are being considered non-residential in use. Short-term rentals actually are and continue to be residential rentals and should be treated as such by the city. Owners and tenants who offer rooms or units should comply with the city housing standards for rental property and register as you would any rental. Those offering short-term rentals should also be compliant with the state and local requirements for rooms and meals, taxes and fire safety. Rental properties should not be forced to obtain a change of use to rent on a short-term basis as they are truly not hotels or bed and breakfasts. Short-term rentals are residential uses of the property. Renters are using the property for ordinary living purposes such as peaceful occupancy, sleeping and eating. This use remains residential no matter how short the rental duration. A home, apartment or room is used for residential purposes any time it is used as a place of abode even if the persons occupying the dwelling are residing there temporarily during a vacation or business visit. Short-term rentals should be considered in the same classification as residential rentals due to the fact that even if the properties are rented to different persons every night, the renters are using the property solely for ordinary living purposes. The need for long-term housing is understood and please acknowledge the value of short-term rentals as flexible housing whether it be for a night or six months or a year. Consider that restrictive policies also tread very closely to denying property owners the free and unrestricted use of their real property. In closing, please recognize that short-term rentals are residential rentals and should be governed by the same or very similar guidelines and laws as long-term rentals. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Gray. Kelly Devine is up next to be followed by the final speaker for tonight, Regina Mahoney. Good evening, Ms. Devine. Good evening, thank you, President Wright. Just here to speak on behalf of Moving Forward 6.05, the slate of housing initiatives. As some of you know, our organization is very interested in figuring out ways together that we can expand the housing base. We've been working on this since 2014 when we held a housing summit because really the level of vacancy and the quality of the housing does not meet the real need we have in this city for mainly for anyone who wants to live here, but especially as we look at the problems of workforce development and trying to keep our young people here, they seem to be particularly challenged in finding adequate housing. As many of you know and thanks again for the support on the work we're doing on parking and transportation management, we've been working on that since 2015 and we had talked back then about the parking minimums and I think we've made some really good strides working in partnership with the city and the Department of Public Works and we'd like to see a robust discussion about the parking minimum piece and see how that figures into a real solution for our community that both allows more housing, helps reduce the cost burden of housing and also helps encourage alternative modes. I loved hearing from that couple who just were big fans of car share. I think it's a good example of how when people are motivated to have transportation choice, the community has resources for them. It's really a great coming together and I do think that piece in particular can help us take our transportation solutions to the next level. We're particularly interested in accessory dwelling units which is a way to allow people to, we heard a woman speak about age in place and allow more housing opportunities and a variety of housing opportunities and then finally the short term rental regulation really needs to be looked at. It seems really clear from the data that that's having an impact on our available housing stock. So we're really looking forward to having a further discussion and seeing these things go to committee and being part of that dialogue. So thank you for moving it forward. Thank you, Ms. Devine. Regina Mahoney is up next to be followed by the final speaker, Erhard Monkey. Good evening and welcome. Hello, thank you. Charlie Baker from Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission sent you folks some comments on the housing reforms last week. So I'm just gonna touch on a few of those. We are in support of the housing reform resolution. We really think they're going in the right direction for smart growth and will help increase more homes, decrease single occupancy vehicle travel and make improvements to energy efficiency. Particularly the Housing Trust Fund. We are in support of that and maybe even more so as a resident, let you know that I am in support of that. With the Building Homes Together campaign in the first three years, we have met the total housing target but we have continued to fall short on the affordable target and a lack of capital is one of the reasons for that. So any help that you can do here would be great. ADUs, they're a really great way to try to address our housing shortage without having a big land use impact. So anything you can do to reduce the regulatory barriers on those would be great. Short-term rentals, I love staying in Airbnb's when I go travel places so I understand the value of them but I do think in our tight housing market we do need to take a look at what impact they're having on our actual housing supply. We support the elimination of parking minimums and along with that really support implementation of the parking study. One of the things in the parking study was to try to put some wayfinding in place so that when residents and visitors come to the downtown they can easily try to find where parking is available. We think that would be a helpful thing to go along with that. And we support the energy efficiency work in the rental housing as well. And just want to say we've got about, at least by our count, 14 municipalities in the county really working on this stuff so we appreciate your leadership and just know you're not alone. Thank you very much. Final speaker, Erhard Maki. Good evening, welcome. Good evening Mr. Chair, good evening council members, mayor. Thank you for this resolution, mayor thanks for your leadership on bringing these initiatives forward through the summit, the two part summit. I'm speaking by the way just on behalf of myself as a long time person involved in affordable housing and community development in the area not representing any organization. Support in concept, all of the initiatives especially the Housing Trust Fund, it's been a long time coming. Mayor thanks for including the extra money in the budget for the last few years. I think it's high time to ensure that that's immune to any kind of policy changes and that it's embedded in the charter and that it's done in a way that is gonna survive the next reappraisal to make sure that the same amount remains in it unlike the last reappraisal where we lost ground and basically the value of a penny for the Housing Trust Fund was severely devalued to almost half a penny. I totally support ADUs as another way of increasing the housing stock. I would urge you to look at when you get to the details and the committee structure looks at these things to make sure that they don't become a new vehicle for short-term rentals. I am very concerned about short-term rentals as I know many of you are. I think we do need to protect owner documents especially people who are renting short-term rentals within their home, rooms in their home and I would say up to possibly one or two whole units in a multi-family apartment building. I would not go much more than one or two units. I really think that you're taking away from the real need which is the long-term rental market. So in looking at the detail memo from staff about the proposal for short-term rentals, I think there are many fine points there. There's many protections in there. I like making it subject to the demolition and replacement ordinance but I urge you to take a look at really severely limiting the absolute number of units because I'm concerned about the erosion. Thank you, Mr. Monarchy. Thank you. That concludes tonight's public forum. Thank you to everyone for giving us your viewpoints and doing it respectfully. For the most part. Item number, the next item is the Consent Agenda. Councillor Busher. Yes, I'd like to move to adopt the Consent Agenda and take the actions indicated. Councillor Busher has moved the Consent Agenda. Is there a second? Someone? Seconded by Councillor Pine. Any discussion? All those in favor of passing the Consent Agenda, taking the actions indicated, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? We have passed the Consent Agenda. I am now going to recess the regular city council meeting in order to allow the mayor to convene the Board of Abatement. The regular city council meeting is recessed at 831. Mr. Mayor. Thanks, President Wright. I'll call the order of the Board of Tax Abatement at 832 and would welcome a motion on the agenda. So move. Thank you, Councillor Polino. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Paul. Discussion? All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. And that brings us to the Consent Agenda and I recognize President Wright for a motion on the Consent Agenda. Move to pass the Consent Agenda and take the actions indicated. Excellent, is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Hanson. Discussion? Councillor Busher. Just wanted to see if anyone, if either of the individuals were here, the appellants were here tonight and wanted to speak before we acted. Is there anyone who would like to speak to the two Board of Tax Abatement consent items? Seeing no interest in that, I will go back to the motion on the floor and if there's no further discussion, we'll take a vote. All those in favor of improving the Consent Agenda please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously and we are adjourned as a Board of Tax Abatement at 8.33 p.m. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, very efficient. Back to the deliberative agenda, item number five point, excuse me, 6.01, special event outdoor entertainment permit, Councillor Roof. Thank you, President Wright. I'd like to move 6.01, a special event outdoor entertainment permit application one day only church street marketplace district in front of outdoor gear exchange at 37 Church on the block between Bank and Cherry, Thursday, October 17, 2019, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. for a film screening. Moved by Councillor Roof, seconded by Councillor Polino. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor of the motion please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Item number 6.02 is a special event outdoor entertainment permit, Councillor Roof. They can move approval of a 24 hour total special event outdoor entertainment permit application for the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Church Street outside of City Hall by the fountain, 1024.19 to 1025.19, 12 p.m. to 12 p.m., 24 hours total, 24 hour protest song, violinist amplified music, yes, but restricted amplified music, no amplified music between the hours of 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. Moved by Councillor Roof, seconded by Councillor Hanson. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Item 6.03 is a public hearing regarding the Comprehensive Development Ordinance, ZA-20-01, Form District 5 Boundaries. Councillor Mason. I believe the appropriate action would just be open to public hearing. So open to public hearing. Anyone who wishes to speak on that ordinance. Come on up and just identify yourself please. Good evening, my name is Jonathan Farrell. I'm here in the capacity as Facilities Director for the Committee on Temporary Shelter. We are the owners of 187-189 Church Street, better known to many of you as the Wilson-Hoked Hell, and we are in favor of our parcel being included into the Form District 5 Boundaries. As Burlington grows and changes, we would like to also have the ability to follow Form District code and potentially expand the most affordable housing in our city. Thank you. Thank you very much. Anyone else would like to speak in the public hearing. Hearing none, going once, going twice, gone, and we will close that public hearing and move to the actual ordinance 6.04, Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Wright. I'd like to make a motion to waive the second reading, adopt the ordinance and ask for the floor back after a second. Seconded by Councillor Bushard, Councillor Mason, you have the floor back. Thank you, President Wright. The amendment before us seeks to modify the proposed boundaries of Form District 5 to include additional properties located along the boundaries of the current district, which is pretty much downtown for those watching. Properties considered for inclusion in FD5 district were evaluated for their current use, future potential use, development intensity and compatibility with adjacent properties. They've been recommended to be included in the FD5 in order to include the type and intensity of future infill or redevelopment with adjacent properties to enable greater flexibility for expansion or reuse of existing uses and structures and to reduce existing non-conforming, excuse me, non-conformities. There are 19 parcels that are being recommended for advancement. I think it's important to sort of talk about procedure and how we got here before turning it over to the Planning Commission. So to go into the way back time machine, we started the conversation on adopting form-based code, I don't even know, 2015. This council adopted after substantial conversations form-based code in 2017. At that time, before the Joint Committee, they were recommended that the form district be actually larger than what was advanced. And that was based on the Joint Committee's recommendation that let's start small, see how this goes and then come back to the table if they're to consider those additional parcels. This was started as a result of that conversation and was spurred in part by Mike Trombley at Advanced Music who reached out to the Planning Commission with some limitations in terms of what he was able to do with his property. And that has one of, that spurred a larger conversation by the Planning Commission. Again, looking at specific blocks and trying to figure out should be, in terms of our goal, in terms of incentivizing infill development, should we be looking at allowing greater density and those surrounding parcels. So the Planning Commission did that, I've got to look, in 2018, the Our Ordinance Committee City Councils held a series of hearings in 2018. That was a different Ordinance Committee, the one that is constituted now. We advanced that forward. Subsequent in 2018, subsequent to that, I will admit that the public input at that point was limited to say the least. Subsequent to that, there were a number of neighbors, particularly on South Champlain Street that approached and King Street that approached. And that forced the Ordinance Committee to go back and revisit some of the recommendations in terms of the parcels. Based on that conversation that ended, actually there were a series of hearings that ended in June, that is a result of the 19 parcels that were put forth back to the Planning Commission. Again, because we changed what they were recommending. The Planning Commission then advanced this, which was verbatim what the Ordinance Committee had recommended in August. However, I will note for the record that they've reserved the right to say, look, we may not agree with you that the parcels you pulled out shouldn't be included, and they sort of reserved their right down the road to ask us to put those back in. So that's the process of why we got here. I wanna speak a little bit to some of the public. I appreciate it may have been a little confusing, but Ms. Tuttle did walk our Ordinance Committee as she did with the Planning Commission, literally property by property to see is this right? Is this a parcel that we as a body are going to recommend be subject to form District Five? I will say from my perspective, it was a reasoned process, and it was also, I think, responsive to objections and concerns that we heard from the public. So with that, I would ask sort of, I think we're on a good move here in terms of trying to move the infill development, the affordable housing needle forward, and I think this is an important step to continuing those efforts. I would note Ms. Tuttle is here to answer any technical questions, or also turn it over if you have a statement to make above and beyond what I've stated. Megan, do you have anything to add or? One small thing. I think Councilor Mason did a wonderful job of summarizing the history of this amendment and all of the changes that it's gone through. One thing that I will add is that in both in the Planning Commission's discussions and in the City Council Ordinance Committee discussions, as Councilor Mason said, we looked at every single property and the very specific reasons why each property was being recommended to be included in this district. In many cases, we did the same thing for properties that were ultimately not recommended to be in this district. And of the criteria that Councilor Mason noted, the Planning Commission was looking at, the compatibility and the relationship to neighboring properties was one of the biggest factors in determining where the Planning Commission and the City Council Ordinance Committee ended those boundary lines for these proposed changes. Oftentimes, the potential for commercial uses to expand further into residential areas was a great limiting factor. That said, the Planning Commission has identified the need to revisit the conversation in these neighborhoods that are right immediately adjacent to the downtown area and look at essentially a form district four kind of district which allows some more of that flexibility for the intensity of development, the number of units, but maybe not all of the commercial benefits of the form district five boundary. So I anticipate this will be a discussion that we will have again. All right, thank you. Start out with Councilor Shannon. Thank you, President Wright. I wanna thank Megan Tuttle and David White and Councilor Mason and the Ordinance Committee all for being really very responsive, I think, to public concerns about this. And the basis of a lot of that concern is that form district five is a commercial district. There was concern in the neighborhood that they were going from a residential district to a commercial district. And I think that that was a legitimate concern and I appreciate, Megan, especially your responsiveness, both in email and personally, to explaining kind of why you had reached the conclusions that you had and taking another look at this. I think it is better for all of that effort and not everybody will agree. But I actually was pleased with this process and would note to Mr. Hunt that it is an ongoing process and that we can still have more discussions going forward. FD4 is a more residential form district. And so perhaps that offers something that the neighbors would see as more amenable to preserving their neighborhood character, really. And I just wanted, I was hoping that Councillor Mason might clarify my understanding from reading this is that the Cots building, Wilson Hotel, is included in this FD5, correct? Yes. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Councillor Pine. Thank you, Mr. President. I have succeeded in knocking this cup over all night. Luckily it's empty. Having been involved in several of these processes over my, during my tenure at CEDO, I know how painstaking it is. There are some parcels and I unfortunately recognize every parcel here, practically I can tell you who owns it maybe, but there's a bunch that don't seem to make a lot of sense to me because you've straddled two different residential properties and yet you left out a surface parking lot. So I'm just trying to, in the south end there's some sites that look like I don't really understand how they were characterized as suitable for commercial redevelopment. So Councillor Pine, I think that the challenge is knowing which parcel specifically you're referring to. I mean, because I will say, for example, King Street, like there's tortured history in terms of why we did this or didn't do that. So I don't know if it's possible to- Yeah, I could pick one. If I could, it's at the very bottom of Maple Street. It's a single family house next to a duplex. All the way at the bottom on the right across from Magline Arrows. That's the one that stands out. Yes, why it was recommended to be included, yes. So those two properties and the surface parking lot that you mentioned were all part of the discussions that Councillors Mason and Shannon referred to. Originally when the Planning Commission forwarded this recommendation, all of those properties on the west side of South Champlain Street between King and Maple were recommended to be included in the Form District 5 boundaries. They were particularly looking at those sites both in terms of their present use today. Many of the developed properties on that side of the street are non-conforming for various reasons. And they were also looking at the future potential of that parking lot. How would we like to see that developed if it were to ever be redeveloped? So a lot of the concerns were more around some of the development intensity requirements that are part of Form District 5 versus part of the residential high density zone. Ultimately in working through the recommendations with the Council Ordinance Committee, we heard a lot of feedback from residents that live on the other side of South Champlain Street about the concern about the encroachment of commercial uses. So we ultimately removed those properties that front on South Champlain Street from the proposal. And then the same question if we could just move one block north, and I hate to be a stickler, but that's a brand new social housing building called the Debtman Place. And I wanna know why would that be included when the surface parking lots that span the entire rest of the block that go up to August 1st wouldn't be included? The parking lots that span up to August 1st are already included. Well, they're in there. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Pine. Councillor Busher. Yes, I just wanted to say that this was a challenging process and it was not meant to exclude anybody who wanted their property to be considered. But as a member of the Ordinance Committee, it had come from planning with those properties already identified. So I can't really speak to that process that began in planning that was then handed off to the Ordinance Committee. Although the history, as I understood it, was that during the whole big city council planning process with form district five, there had been, as Councillor Mason said, some requests to expand the boundary that was being discussed and make it broader. And so these properties were part of that conversation. But I wanted to remind, as Councillor Shannon did already, but I think it's really important to state that zoning isn't stagnant, zoning is fluid, there's opportunity for you to ask to have your property looked at and if you want it to be rezoned and it's contiguous with a zone currently in place, so it's not spot zoning, that conversation can occur. That happened for me and my ward where zoning didn't make sense and I brought it through the Planning Commission and ultimately got that zoning changed to be more reflective of the use and the potential for that property. So I just think it's really important. I think also that Councillor Mason did say that during this whole time, after we made a decision in the Ordinance Committee, we did go back to the residents themselves to make sure they were aware of the changes that we had made to give them once again another opportunity to weigh in. So we tried to be as inclusive as possible. It's not a perfect process and so obviously some people didn't feel like their voices got heard, but we do the best we can and try to give people the opportunity for zoning changes. It begins in planning, comes to the city in Ordinance and then finally comes here for final adoption. So I'm hoping people are aware of their chance to weigh in. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Buscher. Are we ready to vote? The motion on the table is to wave the second reading and adopt the ordinance. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Great work to the team and the Ordinance Committee and Councillor Mason. Thank you as chair. 5.05 is a resolution on the Housing Policy Reforms. Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Wright. I'd like to make the motion to waive the re... No, we're gonna get caught up. I'm sorry. They can make a motion to waive the reading and adopt the resolution as drafted. Moved by Councillor Mason. Seconded by Councillor Paul. You have the floor back, Councillor Mason. Thank you. I'm sorry I got messed up because I thought that was a referral, but that's included in the resolution. Well, buckle up just based on public comment. This is gonna be a controversial process. The resolution before us is a series of proposals that would be referred, or at least four of the five, to the Joint Ordinance Planning Commission for Subsequent Public Hearing and the final proposed reform to the Charter Change Committee for its consideration. These proposals are a direct result of the BTV Housing Summit held on June 11th and the BTV Housing Summit to held on September 4th, 2019. At each of these two public hearings, input was heard from residents, stakeholders, and the public on these proposals specifically related to housing policy. This resolution recognizes that in addition to the four proposals to be referenced, the administration has asked CEDO to complete a review of tenant protections and deliver that review and recommendations to the council by month end. It also recognizes our efforts on an ancillary related, but tied to the city's net zero energy goals. At a very high level, these four proposals can be summarized as follows. The first calls for an updating of our standards for energy efficiency and rental housing in order to support our climate goals and protect renters from unreasonably high utility costs. The second proposal encourages the creation of accessory dwelling units to support homeowners aging in place, help owners continue to afford their homes and add affordable housing options within neighborhoods. The third proposal asks to consider implementation of a regulatory framework for short-term rentals that reduce the impact on long-term housing availability while recognizing the economic that certain Berlingtonians are currently enjoying. The fourth proposal seeks to revise the city's approach to minimum parking requirements in order to reduce the cost to construct, maintain and lease housing units, allow more space for additional housing units and support a robust system of transportation alternatives. The final proposal asks the Charter Change to consider the restoration and increase in the city's level of funding in order to support the Housing Trust Fund. I think for the public to understand, this is, because I got a lot of flurry of emails today thinking that we were adopting all of this. And I think it's important to note that if this does pass, there will be significant additional public process. There are already scheduled two or three or more hearings before the joint committee. And I assume the Charter Change committee will also have, it will also come back before this council for adoption. So I think it's important to send that we are not moving forward, other than to recommend that these different groups take up the proposals. And I would expect based on the input we received tonight and the flurry of emails I got today, there will be a very robust public discussion on a number of these initiatives. I think it's important to recognize the cross-departmental team of city staff that not only helped advance these proposals and formulate them, but also did it from my estimation an excellent job in terms of managing the public forums and engaging the public. I'd also like to thank counselors Paul, Chang, Roof, Paulino for their co-sponsorship, as well as counselors Hanson, Shannon and Pine for the active string of recommendations that came across over the past week. And with that, I hope you will consider joining me in moving this resolution forward. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Mason. Open to the council, to discussion with the city council who wants to jump in. Ready to vote? Councillor Pusher. So. I took a shot. This is a resolution that a lot of I really support and I support the mayor and his housing summits and I support the work that the departments did to distill all of that information and come up with some recommendations. What the problem I had with this is probably what Councillor Mason received emails about is that it felt to me when I read it that it was telling me that my role was to implement all of this without discussion. It was to implement to, I'll take the ADUs to make it at 30% or 800 feet and 800 square feet, not 800 feet. And I don't know if I'm there. I need to think about that. I need to think about all of these. I need the input from the community to understand if this is the right way to go. Yes, we want to make ADUs more available. One of the barriers that we haven't dealt with is the affordability piece, which was one of the things we identified that people can't necessarily create those. And so my point is not to belabor it because I could go through a number of these and say yes, I think yes for this and no, I have reservations about that. I need more discussion. So I'm hesitant to sign on to a resolution that says that I am supportive of all of these initiatives when in full conscience, I believe that we're going in the right direction but I'm not sure I'm there with the final outcome. And so here I am stuck with a process that I wholeheartedly believe in and want to engage in and feel reluctant to say yes to a resolution before me. That's very challenging. I've been here before and I am not sure how I'm going to handle it but I wanted to speak to that so that the rest of the council understood my reservation. So thank you. Thank you, Councilor Bush. My apologies, I was starting this off with remarks from the mayor. So we'll just do that now, remarks from the mayor and then we'll go to Megan and then back to the council. Great, thank you President Wright. And excuse me, thank you Councilor Mason for and then the other co-sponsors for bringing this to the floor and for introducing it Councilor Mason. I want to start by echoing the point that there has been a huge team of multi-departmental team really more so than any initiative I can remember over the last seven and a half years that has been working on this effort since the spring. Megan and Olivia in my office I think have been the leaders of that team in a lot of ways but it has also taken huge efforts from Chris Burns at the Berlin Electric Department, David White at the planning department has a planning director of course and Ian and Cito has been a leader, continued to be a leader with the ADU effort and I've started down this path and I'm gonna forget, omit people, not forget, but omit people, key people who have played roles throughout and have really made it possible to get through two major summits and involved contributions from hundreds of Verlintonians and get this tonight. Even that doesn't really fully capture the effort that has gone into this of course in that a lot of ways I see tonight is taking a step towards finishing the housing action plan that the council unanimously approved in 2015 and that Councillor Pine reminded me in a lot of ways started out in the early days of this administration when Councillor Pine was still our housing go-to person within Cito and conversations about what we could do to jumpstart this, to take another run at improving housing affordability and equity in Burlington and there's a reason that these items, these five items or four of them were in the housing action plan. We really hadn't grappled, I don't believe, with the short-term rental issue in the housing action plan but the other four items were all noted in one way or another in the housing action plan. There's a reason I think that these are sort of the last ones. They are in some sense, some of the harder work to do to address our housing issues. On the other hand, I think they are changes that could have an enormous impact if we can double buckle down and get to consensus and get this right. I think there's the opportunity to create hundreds of new homes for Burlington residents in the years ahead, relatively a few years ahead if we are able to make some of these changes and significantly expand our permanently affordable housing stock as well as do more to protect and support tenants that are living in this community and facing very high housing costs, including utilities costs. I'm gonna turn this over in a moment for Megan to walk through a few of the details. Not many, we wanna get to the discussion. We've been talking for a long time. Since the spring, it's now the council's turn with this. I would just like to inject a note of optimism as we start this. I think housing can be an issue that the challenges have been around so long that it can feel like an unsolvable issue, something that we really can't make much progress on. In fact, despite our all efforts and by some measures it seems like housing affordability just keeps getting worse and worse. I urge the council to see this as a problem that we can solve. In fact, I think if you look at recent years there's a lot of evidence that we are making considerable progress. We have built or preserved more than 500 permanently affordable homes over the last seven years in Burlington. We have continuing on, I really stress hurry to add, continuing what has been a very proud Burlington tradition of Burlington, building permanently affordable housing for at least three decades. We have made improvements with our code enforcement efforts. The code enforcement office is functioning better than it has ever and we are doing more to protect tenants living in Burlington rental houses from being victimized or unresponded to than we ever have and continue to improve those systems. We have notably, I think as a departure from some of the relatively recent history, we have made progress addressing the housing, our problems within the housing market of having the market actually create more homes and that has created more than 600 new market rate apartments in the last, in recent years and it has doubled the housing vacancy level, still at unacceptably low levels and it has started to have an impact on rising rental inflation. We actually are seeing rental inflation now, at least in the last couple of years, lower than broader inflation, which is a sign of some progress. I say all this to urge us to double down on the strategies that are having an impact and keep moving forward and have the courage that we can do something about this issue. Final point I want to make before handing it over to Megan is to say what is not here because I have found in talking about this for the last six months that it is important to acknowledge right up front that this is, although this is a comprehensive package and does do many things, it does not address all issues of the housing crisis and it is important I think for the public to know that we are working on those other critical elements. We are working, in fact, the last time we convened as a council, we extended our housing agreement with the UVM with the explicit intent of amending that agreement within this extension period, which is until next summer, so that we do see more progress on the creation of purpose-built student rentals. Not in this resolution, or it's referenced in the resolution, but not one of the action items on one of the resolve clauses is further efforts on tenant protection, rent or protection work. We have simultaneous with this task, I have tasked CEDO with coming to this council by the end of this month with having reviewed all the tenant protection work that is going on, that has been suggested in the housing summits and that has been going on elsewhere in the country to make sure that Burlington is doing all that it should to protect tenants in the community. So with those caveats, I hand it over to Megan for some additional detail. A few additional comments, Megan? Only a few. Again, Councilor Mason did an excellent job of summarizing what we've provided to you here tonight. Just go over those really quickly again. The recommendation, the first recommendation regarding energy efficiency and rental housing is specifically to look at amending our current time of sale ordinance to make it applicable as part of the minimum housing code in order to achieve those goals that Councilor Mason talked about, strengthening our response to the split incentive paradigm, improving energy efficiency and quality for rental housing, lowering utility costs, and making a significant improvement on our energy efficiency goals. The proposal to expand the construction of accessory dwelling units is specifically to amend parts of our zoning ordinance to further our work. We've been doing this for a few years to make it more permissible for ADUs to be built in the city in order to afford all of those benefits that Councilor Mason talked about for aging in place and adding affordable housing options within our neighborhoods. Creating a regulatory framework for short-term rentals is a really important one in that the proposal that has been put in front of you recognizes that there are different types of short-term rentals that offer varying degrees of benefit and impact within Burlington. And the proposal that we have shared helps us to actually disincentivize the most impactful of those uses in order to limit the impact on the city's long-term housing stock, but ensure that some of those conversions can still take place because we recognize that, like ADUs and other forms of housing, these can have benefits to the host and to the Burlington economy. Regarding the requirements for parking, we would like to amend our zoning ordinance once again to look at how many new parking spaces must be created as part of new development within certain parts of the city in order to help us reduce some of those barriers that drive up cost and actually, in some ways, dampen the creation of homes within our community. While we also look at other mechanisms for us to support investment in alternative forms of transportation and the systems that support that. And then finally, looking at how we can increase and sustain the level of investment in the Housing Trust Fund to a level that this council and the administration have been committing to the fund, but to make sure that that level of investment is sustainable over time and is not devalued by inflation and other changes in the market. And then finally, related to this, we'll be coming before you the proposal or the recommendation, the review and recommendations around renter protections. So the last thing I just wanna say is to build off of the comments that counselors Mason and Bush are shared is that this resolution is not a final vote on these issues. It's actually asking us to begin the hard work of digging into each of these issues and evaluating exactly how we want to move these forward. We have, as counselor Mason noted, we have been working with the Planning Commission and the City Council Ordinance Committee to get them prepped to have some meetings as soon as we're able to, to start talking about the three amendments that have to do with zoning. The short-term rental, the accessory dwelling unit and the parking proposals so that we can really work through the details of that. The City Council Ordinance Committee itself will then look at the energy efficiency in rental housing proposal. We will have the Charter Change Committee look at proposed language that would help us to ensure the stability of the Housing Trust Fund. And then ultimately the Community Development and Neighborhood Revitalization Committee will review those recommendations on tenant protections. So a lot of work in the months ahead, we're just kicking, we're asking for you to kick off that process with the resolution here tonight. And then the last thing I'll say, just for the benefit of those that might be watching, is that there is a web link on the screen for people to follow along with the process that we hope will follow from tonight. Thank you. Just before we start going to the counselors, I just want a process question just to be clear. And I know you just said this is just the beginning of the process. So if a counselor, me or any other counselor has, supports a lot of this, but has concerns about any particular item, this will all be coming back to us. It's gotta go be worked on. And how will it come back? And will it come back as there will be opportunities to vote on each one of the different items at some point or as one big proposal? So each one of these will have a different deliverable, I guess I'll call it, in terms of what the council will actually take action on in the future. In some cases, that will be the approval of language for a charter change question to be put on the ballot. In other cases, it might be an actual red line version of a zoning amendment that you would look at and consider through the typical process that any zoning amendment would go through. So the deliverable for each one of them will be, for many of them will be different and will be distinct. So the line about supporting the administration's goal of pursuing the above reference housing policy reforms, we're just supporting the administration's goal, but not necessarily the final product until it comes back. Exactly, you will have a chance to vote on each one of those when we come back. Thank you. Councillor Shannon. Thank you, President Wright. This does seem a little bit unusual to me in that it's starting as a resolution with a great deal of specificity. And usually we see this kind of specificity in a first reading of an ordinance, but I think that that's also okay because it kind of adds, I think it presents these ideas very specifically for discussion and I assume that it comes back to the, you will draft an ordinance for the things that are going to be an ordinance, that it will come back for a first reading. We'll have opportunity to have input on that first draft of the ordinance and then it goes back to the committee and we'll have it for more work and then it will come back as a second reading. Is that all correct? I'm kind of getting nods, but President Wright, is it okay if Ms. Tuttle responds? Yes. Yes, so each of these in the sense of zoning amendments that do first and second read, these will come back to the council for that process as any zoning amendment typically would. One of the things that we have been working with counselor Mason on is to actually bring the city council's ordinance committee into a joint process with the planning commission so that they can work on the zoning related pieces of this together. But again, when their work and their recommendations come forward to the city council, there will still be the opportunity for the council to have the first and second read and if they would like to make more changes to those proposals. Okay, thank you. With that, I share all of counselor Busher's concerns. My conclusion is I'm going to support this because I think that it starts a discussion in a very good way and there are, I would like to just state for the record some of the concerns that I have in the specificity of this language. So the first concern I have is line 88, eliminating the parking requirement for ADUs. Also, since I created my own red line draft here, it's possible that there's been some amendments and I have the lines wrong, but eliminating parking requirements for ADUs. I am not necessarily opposed to that, but I think there may be other options worth considering as well, such as allowing tandem parking to meet the requirement. So I'm not sure that eliminating the parking requirement is the best idea or that it has to be one solution in all areas. There might be some areas where a different solution is better. The next concern I had is line 104, limiting the number of whole unit short-term rentals within a building so that any building with four or more short-term rentals is considered a hotel. Actually, I would like to consider other options and possibly more restrictive, not allowing these short-term rentals in many cases because what we really need is housing for people who live here more than we need housing for our tourists. And I think that there was a lot of discussion about that at the work session, so I don't object to that particular solution, but think other solutions should also be considered. And then lastly, line 116, eliminating the requirement for a minimum number of parking spaces for new development that is within downtown neighborhood activity center and neighborhood mixed use zoning districts. I think that that should be reviewed, but again, I'm not convinced that eliminating parking requirements is the best answer. I know that some people believe that eliminating parking requirements will reduce our carbon footprint, but I'm not sure that that's really the case. I'm not sure that people will drive less cars. I think that sometimes they'll just, the impact is transferred elsewhere. It puts a lot of stress on the community when people can't find parking spaces, where they need to find parking spaces and often pushes the problem to the next neighborhood. So I would like that to be more broadly considered. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Shannon. Councilor Hanson, are you prepared to put your amendment forward? That wasn't next to the staff, but sure. All right, let's get that on the table. Okay, yeah, so it's attached in the, it's attached online, proposed amendments. I don't know if we can put them on the screen or not, but I'll start with the first one. So I think in just speaking more generally, I'm really glad to see that we've included more work around renter protections, tenant protections and really wanna thank a lot of the tenants who came out to the Housing Summit and really pushed for that inclusion. I think it's really critical that we don't forget about that as we move forward in other ways. So the first amendment that I'd like to introduce is on line 26, insert after the word rating, comma, and the city is committed to increasing awareness of this information and making it more accessible and user-friendly. And I would ask for the floor back after a second on that. I was asking for the floor back after a second. Okay, so the motion, the amendments have been moved, seconded by Councillor Freeman. Councillor Hanson, you have the floor back. So this amendment is, there's a whereas pause, line 26 discussing, let me just read it. So whereas the city has also continued to strengthen, it begins on line 24, ends on line 26. The city has also continued to strengthen its enforcement efforts, including implementing the five-star rating system that allows tenants to see the compliance history of a rental before they sign a lease and indicates the properties compliance with minimum housing standards by way of a one to five rating. I find that very misleading and having attempted to use what we're referring to here through the city website, it's very hard for someone who's not deeply, deeply involved in city processes to understand what they're looking at when you pull up the document. Even for me, I don't fully understand what I'm looking at here. And the meaningful component of it that I can see, which is there's a line buried in other information, COC expires expiration date, and then in parentheses, one year COC. I know what that means. I know that one year COC means this is a property that has had issues with code enforcement, so much so that they were put on the faster cycle. But I don't think most people are gonna read that line and understand that. I'm glad that we're moving in this direction, but we really shouldn't say that we're there yet. This isn't a system that is usable for prospective tenants yet at this point. So I think it's really critical that we not only say that and acknowledge that, but also that we do commit to working towards making it user-friendly accessible, because it's really critical that people understand what they're getting into before signing a lease. That's all I've got on that one. Okay, have you completed your amendments? Just the first one. Just the first one. Okay, all right, Councillor Paul. Thank you, President Wright. So the five-star system came as a result of a resolution that was done in 2012 on landlord accountability. I remember it well because I wrote it. And the idea was to have a system so that tenants would have one more tool to be able to evaluate properties. In order for us to be able to use the system in the way that you are encouraging, Councillor Hanson, is that, or to President Wright, to Councillor Hanson, is all of the properties had to be evaluated. It wouldn't be fair for some to be evaluated and not all to be evaluated and be using the same system. So it took three years to do that. That was just done in the last couple of months. I have been in touch with Brian Lowe, our Chief Innovation Officer. It does take a fair amount of effort to get all of that online. And I'm waiting to hear back from him on whether or not that can be done by the end of the year. That will be put into a resolution that I'm working on for a subsequent meeting. I mean, I'm happy to support this now, but I do want the public to know that that is actively being worked on. It is not something that we just simply had the five-star system and now we're going to leave it. The entire idea behind the system was for it to be another tool for tenants to be able to evaluate a property. And the idea behind the five-star rating system was not to shame landlords or property owners. It was to raise the bar in the hopes that all properties would become five-stars. That being said, those properties that are one-star, the public deserves to know what those properties are. And that's the idea behind getting all of it online so that it can be looked at in a way that you're referring to. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Powell. Councillor Roof. Just super quickly, following up on Council, I see this, I'm going to support this. I see it as non-controversial. If anyone looks up community innovation proposal on the city website, you'll see something that's put out by the Chief Brian Lowe's office and as well as my professional work, BTV Ignite is partnering on this to create a lightweight app that's going to take all, much of what is being talked about here and put it into an app that can be disseminated for free out into the public so people can make those judgments as they go into the rental market. So this is good, right on the mark. The work is happening. I think this is non-controversial. Thanks. All right, great. Thank you, Councillor Roof. I think that it seems like we have solid support for this. Do we may be ready to vote? I'll be quick. All right, Councillor Hanson. I just wanted to say briefly, just thank you for that additional information. And I think, as you said, I think that plays right into this language of the ongoing commitment to improving this. So let's vote on this one. We can move to the next one. All those in favor of this amendment, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. So that amendment has passed. And I'll give us the next one. Okay, great. So the next amendment is after line 129, insert derevising parking maximums so as to prevent an overbuilding of parking that would undermine the goals of this policy change. So this is in relation to the elimination of minimum parking requirements in certain zones. And I think we've laid out clearly tonight and we got to hear from several folks during public comment and from car share Vermont on the importance of transportation demand management and really shifting the system to disincentivize individual car ownership and single occupancy vehicle simultaneously incentivizing alternatives including car share, including biking, public transit, walking. And I think one of the goals stated out in this policy is to really reduce the overbuilding of parking because not only does it have an adverse impact on our transportation system but also on the cost of housing as well. So I think with that being the goal and wanting to avoid this overbuilding of parking that we've seen, I think a simple way to help to do that is to have appropriate maximums that literally prevent that overbuilding. And I think we can identify a level that allows us to do that through continued work. So that's the idea behind this. I think just to throw out there probably whatever level we would land on I personally would probably still see it as too high. I think it's gonna be a compromise but I do think we can get to a place where this is relevant and this helps us towards these goals. Okay, we need a second to this. Seconded by Councillor Tracy. And now we'll open up anyone. Any comments on this? All right, hearing none, we're ready to vote. All those in favor of this amendment, please say aye. Any opposed? Passes unanimous. No, no, no. Oh, okay. Raise your hands if you're opposed again, please. Councilors, there's two no votes. Councilor Polino and Councilor Shannon. So that passes by a vote of 10 to two. Councilor Hanson. Those were my two amendments. That's it. Thank you. All right, thank you, Councilor Hanson and we are now back to the resolution as amended. So I go back to the, Councillor Jang, you are up next to be followed by Councillor Tracy and then Freeman. Thank you, President. So I think what I'm about to say is also I've been, I shared it with the mayor and also asked a couple of questions to a couple of the city councils to try to understand the number 12, whereas these strategies have also focused on reducing chronic homelessness, including implementing a coordinating entry system. And the housing support to the housing support and to end resources for people experiencing homelessness. I think based on my understanding, it was a little bit for a lack of a better word, weird, how we have a summit about housing and not mention homelessness anywhere. People discuss in groups, but homelessness that the people did not talk about it at all. And to me, I think that there is a tie to it. And in this resolution, it's saying that these strategies are proposing, are strategically applying to it. So, and I wanted to understand to date, Mr. Mayor, how much of a, in terms of resources, have we been allocated to the issue of homelessness and why that issue was not included in this effort? That's a question to the mayor. Question for the mayor. Great, well, first of all, I think it's important to note that in a very significant way, homelessness is part of the resolution and that we're talking about expanding the Housing Trust Fund significantly. Expanding the Housing Trust Fund is the main mechanism the city has to invest local resources in anti homelessness efforts, which we have done in recent years, for example, with the, using really for the first time, local funds to expand the operations of the winter warming shelter. So, I very much see that this is really one of the most direct things that we, as a city, can do to address homelessness is put more resources into it. And that's exactly what the Housing Trust Fund expansion is in part aimed at doing. So, I guess that's one important point. I don't quite accept the premise of the, I think it's important to note, homelessness is very much part of the discussion. If the question is like what else has this city done or why is that whereas clause in there? Well, the city has made, had been, the city and the many partners who are involved in working on homelessness have made some real progress with respect to homelessness in recent years. The chronic homelessness numbers are down significantly from their peak several years ago. The family's living with homelessness has gone down consistently for many years, year after year now in terms of the number of families with children living in homelessness. This progress has resulted from specific policy changes that the city has either led or supported, been a part of notably the housing first model which was a real shift in the way the very substantial amount of local and state resources and federal resources that we have to combat homelessness the way that they are addressed, the way they are prioritized has had a big impact on that. Final point, the other, I think, major change to the landscape and the reason why that whereas clause is in there is that for five years in a row now we have had a winter warming shelter. That was something the community had not moved forward with until five years ago. This council and the administration came together to support moving that direction that's been a very critical change that I think has saved lives and which the city is actively for several years now work to expand and work to create some sort of low barrier option during the warm weather months. So I hope that addresses what Councillor Jang is driving. Not really, but it's okay. I think we can continue to explore ways that we can reduce homelessness. And I think to your report, it seems that what we, what have been reported in this community is actually chronic homelessness is on the rise while homelessness is going down. I think there is, it's important to make that distinction. But I wanted to also just really say to the member of the community that like many of you, all that we have been receiving in terms of communication is the city council is going to make these recommendation and today. And I think Megan outlined it clearly that this is just the second step. And I think the first step went incredibly well. This room was packed of people, the community members who came here, divided in groups, and then that led to this resolution. But still, we are now in the phase of refining it and also to bring real concrete proposal and that will allow us to move forward. And I think since Brian Pine, Mr. Consular Brian Pine was the director of CEDAW around housing, the issue has been here. I want to salute this effort because it is going to move us to the next step. Thank you all and thank you, especially Chip Mason and Mayor's Chiefs of Staff, communication person for being very diligent in reaching out to us in making sure that what we want to see, I think it was well thought. This is something that I'm very proud to support. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang. Councillor Tracy, then Freeman and Pine. Thank you, President Wright, appreciate it. And I definitely share a lot of the concerns that have been raised about these and I look at this as sort of a first step in terms of considering a number of these issues. But a couple of things that stand out to me are specifically around the parking minimums and really wanting to see a trade-off because there is a real savings in the part of developers when you don't require them to build in parking. That's really recognized in a lot of the documentation that we've heard and so I would like to see us consider balancing that out with some sort of something to really incentivize and create the funds to help us to essentially drive that forward. So that's something that I think needs more consideration and more balance as far as this ordinance goes. On the accessory dwelling units, I really agree with the concern that's been echoed specifically around the conversion of entire units. I certainly hear the folks who are saying that they need to rent out a room in their house on a short-term basis in order to stay in their house but the conversion of entire units and in fact multiple units within buildings has a really detrimental impact on affordable housing stock and just on neighborhood fabric. So I think that we need to put more pressure on short-term rentals when it comes to those entire unit conversions. And then finally, and this is really, this comes more in the line of a question which has to do with the last point which has to deal with the Housing Trust Fund which is that Burlington residents in a town meeting day referendum several years ago very strongly supported looking specifically at progressive forms of taxation to increase the Housing Trust Fund. So what I'm wondering and perhaps the mayor can answer this, perhaps Megan can answer this is if you can answer the degree to which the tax that is being contemplated to be sent to the Charter Change Committee would in fact be a progressive form of taxation meaning that wealthier folks would pay more and if so how it actually does that and then also in addition to that what other forms of progressive taxation were looked at before this particular choice was made. Mr. Mayor, did you wanna respond to that or Megan, River? So I appreciate the questions from Councillor Tracy. So I've understood the Housing Trust Fund funding that has been eroded over time to be seen as restoring that funding, creating a mechanism whereby that funding, that base funding can expand over time, rise, not be eroded by inflation has been a long held goal. I think it is something that is on the property taxes I think there can be some debate it is progressive in some ways and that there is higher income households are more likely to be owners than lower income households but I think we all know the limitations of the progressivity of the property tax as well. However, this has been something that has been a long held goal I think of the community to increase this base level as being something that should be part of our property tax structure. We are on two fronts looking at additional ways of supplementing that kind of base funding of the Housing Trust Fund that tonight's action would move forward one of those in that the proposed short term rental regulation has the potential of creating a very substantial new revenue stream for the Housing Trust Fund if we don't know how great it will be but because it is expected that there will be some households that some property owners that will pursue the conversion that will potentially every time a conversion takes place the estimates are 15 to $40,000 of new Housing Trust Fund income will be generated that is large to compare when we only fund even if this proposal goes through on the order of $400, $500,000 a year in one unit you could be adding 10% to that total. The other possible significant new revenue source that is you probably could debate I think there are progressive elements of it is the new inclusionary zoning proposals that have been debated at the committee level for substantial period of time and also represent the possibility of creating substantial new perhaps one could envision if a major project were to come forward it could be a doubling of the annual amount in the Housing Trust Fund. So what the resolution currently contemplates I think kind of bringing it back to the question that Councilor Tracy has asked those are the active funding considerations for the Housing Trust Fund currently that there has been a significant amount of process and effort that has gone into what the resolution contemplates is that if the housing that we build in we commit ourselves to a further review of the funding for the Housing Trust Fund in three years after these changes have been implemented to see what level of new revenue that creates and whether further measures are warranted so and needed. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. May I just ask a follow up? So do you, Mr. Mayor, see this resolution as precluding the Charter Change Committee from doing such a review now? Like why do you think that we wouldn't that it wouldn't make sense to look at other progressive forms of contributing to this in concert with this particular mechanism just to make sure that all the effort that we're gonna put into this one is in fact merited. I don't see how this resolution precludes the Council and committees from pursuing other work. I do think the timeline, I would hope that additional work would be seen as supplemental and additional to taking some action to address this I think longstanding deficiency of sorts in the way the Housing Trust Fund is funded in the way that we currently have on the books in the Charter something that allows the Housing Trust Fund funding to be eroded substantially by inflation over time. I don't think it's something we want to remain on the books. I think we want to find a way for it to be increased and for it to rise with inflation and I don't think and the timeline for doing that and getting on this town meeting ballot is tight. We will have to take pretty prompt action from here. I think would be difficult. The review that I was just talking about, I don't see how we can do it now in that I don't think there's anyone can tell you how much new revenue is going to be created by the not yet implemented inclusionary zoning change or by the not yet implemented short-term rental change. So we can certainly we would welcome, I think and staff probably could do some work to do more kind of scenario forecasting than we have today at about what kind of revenue that might generate but I don't, I think the reason we have framed it as a review is I think we're going to need to see how these changes work for a little while to know what kind of revenue they generate. If the council wanted there, I'm not aware of any other revenue generator for the housing trust fund that has gotten substantial kind of due diligence and work to date but certainly if committees want to, I'm not against us doing that kind of additional due diligence and the additional exploration. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Thank you very much. I appreciate those answers and I look forward to having a robust conversation at the Charter Change Committee, hopefully looking at a variety of different scenarios, getting a lot of different information on the table about this particular change. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Tracy. Councilor Freeman and then Councilor Pine and we may be ready. Thank you President Wright. I wanted to introduce two amendments. The first is on line 146 and this is after one and a half cents per $100. I'd like to add the language of two cents per 100 of assessed property value. Could you repeat that please? Yes, absolutely. So it's on line 146 with the possibility of this tax increasing to one and a half cents per $100 and two cents per 100 of assessed property value. Sorry, $200. Does the clerk's office have that? Do you need me to repeat it? Sure. So line 146 with the possibility of this tax increasing to one and a half cents per $100 and two cents per $100 of assessed property value. I'm not actually, grammatically it might make, I think it's and, not or. Essentially I'd like to add the value of looking at both values, the possibility of increasing to half cents per $100, one and a half, sorry, or two. So and two cents per $100. Is there a second to that motion amendment? Councillor Pyn seconds. Councillor Freeman, do you have more to say? Yeah, I just, you know, to, you know, we were just talking, you know, Councillor Tracy brought up the aspect of, you know, revenue towards housing and I think it's clear that voters, you know, support, it's, you know, substantial increase to our housing and I just don't think we should wait to look at those sort of revenue options. So that's why I'd like to add this value. All right. Thank you, Councillor Freeman. Open it up to the council to discussion on this amendment on the amendment specifically. Any councilor have anything, we're ready to vote. I think we're ready to vote. No one's raising their hand. All those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? Passes unanimously. Councillor Freeman, what's your next amendment? Thank you. I would like to go to line, it's 129. I would like to strike lines 138 and 139. And I would like to add after line 129 or a former 129, I believe the amended resolution would be a different line after council. I'm a little trouble hearing you, Councillor Freeman. You wanted to strike lines 128 and 139. And then what, in addition to that? And then from the original, I'm not sure. I don't have the amended line numbers after Councillor Hanson's amended version. So it's the lines that say an exploration of other possible regulatory mechanisms, including transportation demand management requirements to ensure additional investment, alternate. Do you have this written down that you could send to the clerk's office? I can, but it's going to have the lines from before Councillor Hanson's amendments passed. So I don't, I can send them before the amendment passed. So. I would say if you. Point of order. Point of order, who said point of order? Councillor Plaino. So is it a motion to strike the lines? And. Not a mint? Wait a minute. Councillor Plaino. Or strike and replace. I was just confused. That's more of a point of information. So a point of information is you are moving to strike those lines and add another line in place of those two. Yes. And could you repeat the words that you are looking to add to the resolution, please? So I want to add after point, the amendment that Councillor Hanson just made after line 129 point D, I'd like to add after that a final point, which would be when I have the language here, creating a transportation demand management requirement to ensure additional investment in alternative transportation. Do you need me to say it? Did the clerk say, no, please say it again. Did you send it to the clerk's office? This is why we get in trouble when we have these down on the floor button. I know, I'm sorry. Is anyone clear about the amendment? No, no one, no one is clear about this. Councillor Buscher, you had shed some light on this for us. So what I had thought was the intent but was to actually to move lines 138 and 139 with that language up and put them underneath what now would be a BCDE, I guess would be. And that was what I thought was going to be proposed but I don't understand it now. It's only to look at transportation demand management requirements. Well, we're not going back and forth. President Wright, I want to understand. I understand the, yeah, so. Counselors need to be recognized. Councillor Freeman. I see what you're saying. So, yeah, so striking lines 138 and 139 and moving it under section four and one, which was line 118 to say, does the clerk's office have this? Does the clerk's office have this yet? I have to, no. I'm sorry, we're taking a recess for five minutes and only five minutes for you to get this straightened out with the clerk's office and come back and have this so that we all can understand it. Recess for five minutes. We are back and hopefully we have this straightened out and know what we're doing. Councillor Freeman. Thank you, yes. And I sent the language to. Go ahead, Councillor Freeman and make sure you're speaking right into the microphone so we can hear you. So the motion is to create a line E above existing line 130 that reads creating other possible regulatory mechanisms including transportation demand management requirements to ensure additional investment in alternative transportation and then striking lines 138 and 139 to replace it with this line. All right, thank you. And the clerk's office now has that. All right, and it's up on the board. Mr. Mayor, do we have a second for this? You seconded, Councillor Pine. Okay, so the amendment is on the board, is it on the board? And. I've seen it, I think I understand it, but I'd like to actually see it. Are we getting that up on the, are we getting that up on the board? Have you sent that to the clerk's office yet? So we can get that up on the board. I sent it, yes, at 9.52 minutes. Does the clerk's office have it? This is what should have been taken care of during the recess. We are starting to fall into the not looking good again here. Good information. Councillor Bushier, what is your point of information? President Wright, if the council understands the amendment, would it be appropriate for the council to act on that and let the clerk's office catch up with the transmission? Are we ready to, are we ready to, the city attorney shaking your head? No. No, okay. I don't know what it is. No, the minute taker has to be clear on what the motion is. Okay, understood. One more time. And if we don't have this, then we're gonna have to take another recess. This is ridiculous. Do you have it? It's on the board. Okay, it's on the board now. President Wright, I think it's not yet. Mr. Mayor, remarks by the mayor on this amendment. Appreciate the opportunity to speak to this because what is being proposed here is something that quite a bit of staff time and analysis has gone into. The transportation demand management plans are something that can be, they can be very helpful tools for new development. And in general, the city is supportive in many situations when they are done. Unfortunately, it is not such a simple thing simply to require them as this amendment suggests. After substantial time with the regulatory, the people that are responsible in the planning and zoning office responsible for enforcing regulations, no good way of achieving what this, no way that has been found that the planning and zoning office, well, the now the zoning office, or I guess both the two offices, see a good way to implement this. There are concerns, there are just concerns about how we would actually attempt to do it and what the impacts would be and whether it would be creating a major new tool by which opponents of any development could simply stop any project. So we are not recommending this at this time. We, after significant conversations with Councillor Hanson, what is in this resolution now is a commitment by the administration to spend between now and the end of the year to see if there is anything else than what is already contemplated here. And let's be really clear because there was some suggestion, I think maybe confusion or suggestion to the contrary earlier. What is proposed in this resolution is that as we are at the same time that we are removing parking minimums from our regulatory effort, we would also be starting the lengthy statutory process necessary to put in place a new alternative transportation impact fee. That process in this resolution is projected to conclude by October of next year. That is the clearest way that we have seen to ensure that what several councillors have expressed wanting to have, which is to have at the same time we are getting rid of parking minimums, we are moving forward with alternative transportation. That's the clearest way we can see to achieve that goal. It may be that there's other ways to support that goal as well. We've committed over the next 90 days to do some work and bring back a report on that whether anything can be added here. I would encourage, I think it's important that we go in that direction as opposed to put this new requirement in place, which we don't see any good way of implementing at the current time. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Councillor Tracy. I'd just like to see this example weighed in the committee work. I see this is the beginning of that process. So I would like to see us put this on the table and hear more about those reasons because we have as a council have not been privy to the conversations that you've been having in the administration, Mr. Mayor. So I think it would be helpful for us to understand the challenges exactly to that because I don't know those challenges. So I would like to at least have that conversation before deciding in fact that your way is the best way. That's it. Thank you, Councillor Tracy. Are we ready for the vote? Councillor Hanson. Thanks. Yeah, I think this is an important discussion. I'm really glad that we're pushing on it. I do support this. I think this is a way to ensure that we're looking at it more seriously. I obviously put it in initially and supported it in that sense, but this is another way to potentially make it more concrete. But I do think it's necessary in communities that have required developers to implement transportation demand management have certainly seen the results of that and employers that have transportation demand management plans have been able to really pretty dramatically decrease the number of folks commuting by single occupancy vehicles. So I think it's a proven tool. I would be curious to hear more about why it seems like it might not work here because I think from what I've seen so far it's a pretty well proven tool. Okay. Thank you, Councillor Hanson. Councillor Roof, then Councillor Mason. Did you, were you in the queue? I wanna go to Councillor Zafiq and spoken yet. Councillor Roof. Yeah, I sort of agree with Councillor Tracy and to the degree that there seems to be a conversation or information that's been pulled together that some have been shared with some, but not all. And I think that whether it's in this resolution or not it's going to be talked about at committee because a non-trivial amount of Councillors on the table wanna talk about it and there's nothing that precludes us from having that conversation. This is a handoff from the Executive Branch or the Legislative Branch. We're not contained so much as maybe some readers of this resolution could think. I think I'm not sure this amendment is necessary to have the conversation so I'm going to regardless of the outcome of this request the administration to send all that information that you pulled together to the committee, the relevant committee so that we can look at this and kind of have that contemplation then. I think also there's almost an effort here to stipulate an outcome and we've already gone through the conversation that that's not what we're really doing here. So I see this is really either or. I think this is a conversation that we can have in committee. I understand the point and I'm actually interested in learning more about it and thinking about it. But I think with that I'll vote no and let's get the information to committee. Thank you Councillor Mason. Thank you President Wright. I too will be voting no for, we have put forth a very aggressive timeframe in terms of a report back. I'm a little confused about the need to given the complexity of this issue just based on this conversation to introduce that in and require a report back when as drafted there's already a report coming back January 1st. So I'm not understanding why the yank that has to be passed today. I think I agree and there's nothing that precludes based on the report back in January us from continuing the conversation just because this joint committee happened to have completed its work. Thank you. Thank you Councillor Mason. Councillor Freeman. I'm surprised to hear the aspect about the regulatory framework. I mean if there's a regulatory framework to require parking it doesn't seem like a stretch that there would be a regulatory framework to have the TDM. So that I guess is just really surprising to me and doesn't really pan out but I'm interested in more information about that. In regards to it stipulating an outcome I mean the prior language here is so clear about eliminating the minimum number of parking spaces which is a pretty substantial stipulation. So the recommendation that we put more commitment and more teeth to the aspect of the TDM and to really say that we're not just interested in giving a handout to developers who will see sort of a cost or a benefit in terms of this. I just, it really strengthens the language and I don't think it's satisfactory to leave it as an exploratory. I mean under that argument we should make all the recommendations in this exploratory and what are we really committed to? And I'm not, I'm committed to the TDM model so. Thank you Councillor Freeman. Councillor Busher and then Shannon and then we're going to vote. So I began this conversation saying that I didn't feel comfortable with the resolution because I thought it dictated outcomes. I listened to my fellow councillors and councillor Shannon. I really listened to her and understood that she agreed with me in some respect but was still going to support this because this was a framework for discussion. So with that in mind I don't see why people are concerned about this language when this is another action that if indeed this is a framework for discussion I don't see how this binds us any more than any of the other actions that some people around the table said that we weren't really committing to those actions. So I'm confused by my fellow councillors as to what really the intent of this resolution is. I had fully intended based on Councillor Shannon's comments to support this. With the caveat that the minutes reflected that by supporting this because I want to it didn't mean that I committed to any of the proposed actions but I was committed to having the discussion and not closing the door and being open-minded to what the community and my fellow councillors thought. I still want to do that. I will be supporting this amendment based on what I just said and I hope everyone reflects on what I just said to understand really what we're doing here tonight. Thank you Councillor Bushard, Councillor Shannon and then we're going to vote. I would say yes this resolution is exploratory in the sense that the committee this is a referral to a committee that's going to come back to the council it's going to get referred to the committee again it will come back to the council and possibly voted on. I don't even understand what this proposal is because transportation demand management is already in this resolution but I also don't think it's really, you know there were a bunch of things that I don't agree with too I didn't make amendments on them I stated what my disagreement was and I'm leaving it to the committee to have further discussion on it and I would put this in the same category and I will not be supporting the amendment. Thank you Councillor Shannon. Okay with all those in favor of this amendment please raise your hands. All those, whoops excuse me put them back up again please. All those opposed? The amendment passes seven to five. We're back to the main resolution. Any further discussion? Councillor Powell. Thank you. I just wanted to mention because I think it is important that people understand that there is a lot of information in this resolution and I agree to be a co-sponsor there are things in this resolution that I'm not particularly in favor of but I am in favor of this having the conversation and I hope that people will vote for the resolution with that in mind so that we move forward and we as everyone has said we'll have plenty of time to come back to this and debate the specifics of what each of these committees comes back with. Thanks very much. Thank you Councillor Powell. Anyone else? Councillor Hanson. Councillor Pine. Who else? Put your hands up. I want to see who wants to speak right now. Get in the queue because I'm closing it down here in a minute. Councillor Pine. Councillor Freeman. Anybody else? Okay. It's quick. It's still on the parking. I just wanted to get clarity on the language here in terms of what zones we're talking about just the language is within the downtown neighborhood activity center and neighborhood mixed use zoning district so those are the districts and is within 200 feet of a property with frontage on a designated major thoroughfare. I just wanted to have clarity around whether it's it has to be in one of those zones and within that district but I thought my understanding was it was within one of those zones or is along one of the thoroughfares. I just wanted to clarify the wording on that and what we're actually what zones we're actually talking about. I've seen the map and I based on the map I think it would be or but I just Okay, let's get the answer. Megan, can you respond to that? Yes. The intention of this is what you had suggested Councillor Hanson that we would be looking at properties that are wholly within those zoning districts that are articulated as well as properties that are within 200 feet of a major thoroughfare which you have seen the map of. It's both. Okay, yeah, I just wanna make sure that that's what the language is saying what we are intention is reflected in this language. Okay, thank you. Councillor Pine. Thank you, Mr. President. Real quick, the three broad goals for the city for pretty much three decades have been production of new housing protection of our vulnerable residents and preservation of our existing housing stock. It was called the three P's. I just wanna point out that this resolution and the work we're doing here tonight is critical for our community to advance the housing needs of all segments of our community. We hope to leave no one behind here. The parking and housing trust fund and the ADUs meets the production goal. The weatherization and tenant protections and housing trust fund dollar increase is covers the protection of our vulnerable residents and the short-term rentals and weatherization hits on the preservation of our existing housing stock. So I just think it's good for us to remember that we actually have goals that support all of these and we're just hopefully bringing these forward with that in mind. Thank you, Councillor Pine. Ready to vote? All those in favor of the resolution as amended, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. And in the future, please, if you do have amendments, that's particularly if they are confusing and not clear, get them in ahead of time and get them to the clerk's office. Item number 5.06 is a resolution regarding city and reinvestment in Burlington Telecom, Councillor Bushert. Yes, I'd like to move to waive the reading and adopt the resolution. And after a second, I'd like the floor back. Moved by Councillor Bushert, seconded by Councillor Hanson. Councillor Bushert, you have the floor back. Thank you. As the council knows, we are about to embark on the second phase of the sale of Burlington Telecom to decide how we are going to deal with the proceeds from that sale. And this resolution just gives, lays out for us and for the public who may look at this, the history that brought us to this point, the fact that we developed the Burlington Telecom Advisory Board and they carefully established criteria, which was really important, noting that it's important for the city's public officials to try to recover as much of the taxpayers, 16.9 million as possible. Part of that should come from the price paid by the purchase of the BT system and part from the city's maintaining a continued meaningful interest in BT that enables financial recovery over the next decades. So now we come down to, that was stated in 2015 and 16. We come down to 2017, where once again, we have now identified a buyer. Gotcha. And we have stated in the agreement and the purchase agreement that we want to enter into a membership interest purchase agreement to purchase up to 33% of the voting membership interests of the buyer and the right to appoint a board member to the board of managers of the buyer provided the city elects to purchase at least 7.5%. Once again, that is stated there. Now you come to the city then talking about, now we've made these statements and do we want to decide, do we want to take a carried interest or not? We had a work session in January of 2018 and in February of 2018, we adopted a city council resolution on pursuing membership interest purchase agreement. So now at this juncture, we, that sale went through and we have the sale closed on March 12th, 2019 and we have until March 11th, 2020 to negotiate and enter into such an agreement. And so this resolution lays out the history in a little more detail than I did. And then says, as we move forward and the administration has already scheduled a meeting to have some of this happen, that we'd like to make sure that we are looking at soliciting an investment proposal from Champlain broadband that identifies detailed projections of revenue costs and capital investment in an updated 10 year financial pro forma, assessing from Champlain broadband and others the market opportunities and competitive landscape in Burlington and Chittenden County, projecting the range of possible financial returns to the city from different levels of investment in BT, the purchase of a 7.5% interest up to possible 33% interest through a redemption process, a dividend option or other possible strategies and exploring the specific ways the city should manage the possible downside risks while still benefiting from the investment. I think that this is really important information that we will need in order to make a good choice. I know we're not of all one mind but I hope we are all one mind of what information we all would like to have as we move forward to help us make the right decision. I know that there is an amendment and I am supportive of the amendment and would have incorporated it into the resolution if I'd had it in a more reasonable time. And actually, Councillor Buscher, you are moving as it is the revised resolution with a small change. If you could let the council know what that was. Oh, certainly. The original resolution, so the revision comes on, excuse me, lines 60 and 61. Originally it said either through the redemption process or other possible exit strategies. And so that was modified and revised to say through a redemption process, a dividend option or other possible strategies. Thank you, Councillor Buscher. I'm going to recognize Councillor Mason now. Thank you, President Wright. I'd like to make an amendment along the lines of what's on board docs. So the specific amendment is deleting and from line 61, adding line and at the end of line 64 and then adding in the following resolve clause, exploring other uses of the sale proceeds in the event the city council elects not to reinvest any portion in Champlain broadband and then ask for the floor back briefly if there's a second. Seconded by Councillor Polino, Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Wright. So this merely recognizes, I appreciate the efforts of the sponsors to put a process which I believe is already underway in terms of getting us diligence relating to the potential investment. This just seeks to recognize that there is the possibility. It's an optional rollover. So this council could elect not to rollover all or a portion of it and it's merely recognizing that fact. And again, I believe that work is already underway in terms of potential uses of those funds and we will be getting a report on that in the not too distant future. Thank you. And as Councillor Burscher said, both sponsors are fine with the amendment. Councillor Shannon on the amendment. On the, nevermind. I'll wait till the. Only on the amendment. Any discussion on the amendment? All those in favor of passing the amendment as proposed by Councillor Mason, please say aye. Aye. Opposed. Councillor Jang opposes Clerk's office. Councillor Jang opposes the votes 11 to 1 in favor. Councillor Shannon. Thank you. I, we received a communication from Attorney Blackwood outlining all of the various information that all of us wanted in this process. And I don't really understand what this resolution is accomplishing that's not already happening anyway. So if somebody can explain if I'm missing something I'd appreciate it. Councillor Burscher. So yes, I can try to explain. I met with the mayor and over the summer and I've been talking about BT and wanted to make sure that our process was all inclusive. And the last meeting I had with him, he assured me that, you know, there was a meeting scheduled in November and that the process would be inclusive. The resolution was in the works before the city attorney sent out the information. So this had already come to the city attorney's office. And so I still feel it's important for the public to have this information and for the council to concur that this is what we're going to consider. And I would hope that the rest of the council would want to support a process that reflected the history and the actions that are consistent with really what the administration's saying also. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Burscher. Further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor of the resolution as amended, please say aye. I'm sorry. I think I was on the list to speak. Oh, you are. That's right, my apologies. Councillor Polinom. So I would speak, I would say that I strongly oppose reinvesting funds in BT and I would like to voice that concern. I think that when I read words like, you know, require careful examination of an investment opportunity in a company that we've already lost $60 million and I have a strong objection to that. And I think the question we should all ask ourselves you know, would we invest $4,000 of our own money in this company as individuals? Why would we spend a significant taxpayer dollars at this point, $6.5 million in this company? Is the money that we have left to spend, we have other more safe investments that and opportunities, capital improvements that could be done. And I think that we should vote against resolution for the simple fact that it's designed to incentivize this track of, you know, as I hear the words reflected a process that reflects the history. And I think that we have chosen to sever ties and there's good reason for that. And I don't think that the public wants us to be engaging in this path and I think it's a mistake. Thank you, Councillor Polinom. I'm going to pass the gavel to Councillor Mason. Councillor Wright. Thank you. Thank you, Acting President Mason. So this resolution is an attempt to get all of the information to the council in regards to this issue. There is no reason why we should oppose getting as much information as possible. I don't know where I would come down at the end of this. I'm open to, it could go either way. But we should want to find out. I think we would be negligent in not finding out all the information that we can get, including information about dividends. That may not be the right answer at the end. But let me tell you in regard to the 16.9 million, if we found out that this company was really going to take off and that we were able to actually make significant money or dividends, I think that the voters would actually want to know that and know that there might be a possibility that they actually could get more of their money back than the six or $7 million that we're talking about now. Now that may not be the way it works at the end of the day, but why would we not want to get that information? And I think taxpayers would want us to get that information and find out whether there is a way to get more money back for them than they're currently getting. Bottom line is let's get all the information, let's accumulate all the information and make a decision based on all the facts. Thank you. Councilor Jang. Thank you, Acting President. I do think, you know, based with Councilor Polino, we need to just get out of this deal and just move forward. And I think most importantly, when the mayor of Burlington told us here, in front of everybody that we will not raise the taxes because we will use the revenue in order to do other things with it, telecommunication is changing. I think we need to cash out all of these efforts. I think we need to move away from it and just cash out and then move forward. If there are all the opportunities for that money to bring investment, to bring our $17 million back, but not through the same company, I think we need to explore that. That's the reason as to why I'm voting no to amendments and to the resolution as well. Thank you. Councilor Shannon. I hear that the reason we should pass this amendment is so that we get all of the information, but my feeling is that this is not inclusive of all of the information that we need. And it's not necessarily going to give us a lot of information about, you know, if we could get a whole lot more money back in return. There's certainly the possibility we could get a whole lot more money back in return if we bought lotto tickets. But that comes with risk, as does this. And I think that there's already a process in place where we are going to be getting the information requested here and a lot of other information, I hope, including information that I have requested that isn't included here. And for that reason, I'm going to be voting no. Thank you, Councilor Schoep. Oh, sorry. Any other Councilor wish to speak at this time? Seeing no one, we will go to a vote. Councilor Busher, my apologies, you were in the queue. Councilor Busher. So for those who weren't here through the whole process, I can understand your hesitation. But for those of us who were here through the whole process, the investment, the money we spent, was to lay down the infrastructure for a system that was meant to supply more than just Burlington. And so the money that can be realized since we sold it, it's not the same entity. It's not BT. It belongs to Shores. It belongs to Champlain Broadband. And they don't have the same restrictions. And I think that I'm really surprised to hear that people don't even want to explore what their 10-year business plan financial pro-former would be and not understand what might be realized. And if we carried more than just our 7.5% interest in this company, that maybe we could generate a lot more money for the city than just the few million dollars that we are going to have as a result of this sale. I myself am not a risk taker, but I certainly want to understand the relative risk of investment before I decide to turn my back. This city has already invested some of our money to draw interest. They've made some choices already. So on your behalf, and I don't see any of you going, oh my God, what's happening to our money? Because probably none of you even are aware of that. But I'm just frustrated with the level of, because I didn't, you know, I support a lot of resolutions that all of you put forward that I didn't have my fingerprints all over. I just really am disappointed with the fact that something that is historical that just asks for information is not being supported. I'm glad it got out on board docs. I'm glad the public got to see it. If it goes down, so be it. But I'm very disappointed in my fellow councillors tonight. Councilor Zhang, followed by Councilor Wright. Yes, I just wanted to clarify also that there is nothing wrong about this resolution. It is well-written, it is very smart, and chronologically it is accurate. It is accurate, but we all, I think, sometimes we need to go with our principles. What we think, and I think we need to also go back again, how we voted about this issue personally, and each one of us, we have hold something dear inside us because of this issue, how it plays out. But this is the most beautiful resolution that I ever read because it's beautiful, it's well-written. But it is just that to me, it's not because who brought it or anything, but it is just this has always been my point that we need to cash out, and that's the only reason as to why we don't need to explore anything else. And I'm very sorry. Thank you. Councilor Wright, followed by Councilor Paul, then Councilor Freeman. Thank you. Thank you, Acting President Mason. I'm just gonna make this point one more time. We still can cash out after we've accumulated all the information that we ought to be looking at. We still can end up where Councilor Shannon talked about that we'd be better off buying lottery tickets. We can buy those lottery tickets at the end, but let's do our due diligence here. I frankly don't get what the Council is afraid of here, frankly, in not wanting to have all the information presented. Why would you not wanna find out first and then come back and make these decisions? I may end up in the same place that Councilor Zhang is. I may end up in the same place where Councilor Shannon is going down to the 7-Eleven or whatever the story is now and buying lottery tickets. But in the meantime, let's do our due diligence for the taxpayers at Burlington and find out what the best option is. Councilor Paul. Thank you. So my first comment is through the Acting Council President, just wanted to say that I think a lot of my resolutions are beautiful and I'm disappointed that Councilor Zhang thinks that this one is more beautiful. So noted. Continue. I'm not really sure why people are against this because in online 52, it says that the process and the information that we're gonna get, and it says, will include, but not limited to. So if anybody wants any more information, they can get it. So if people are concerned that there are things that they want that aren't in here, that's not a reason to vote against this because it does include all of those things, whatever it is that you want. The second is that due to Councilor Mason's amendment, we are going to explore other uses of the sale proceeds. So we're gonna explore the uses of it towards potentially making a further investment in the new Burlington Telecom and we're gonna explore the other side of it. So I'm not really sure why people wouldn't want to support this. I will be voting in favor of it and thank you. Thank you. Councilor Freeman. I just wanted to speak. I will be supporting this resolution and I hope that I think the interest in having information and having open access to information is a principle that I feel strongly about and so I really heard and I'm hearing what Councilor Busher is getting at and yeah, I just sort of, I want us to stick to that as a Council. I might not support given this information, this pathway, but it's really hard to make decisions in a vacuum and I've come to the Council and asked for information on a lot of different policy ideas and I really hope that we can support access to information as a body so I will be supporting this. Thank you. Any other Councilor? So can I look to Eileen? I want to correct one point on the record. There's continued reference about us caching out. We have cached out. We do not, I just want for the public and this Council body to understand we do not have an ownership interest. We have cached. The question is whether we reinvest into the surviving entity. Yes, but I think the issue in the resolution was that there was a question about looking forward part of our deal with BT, if we do reinvest is how can we then get our money back out again? Understood. So that's a term and I understood that was what was being referred to in the resolution. I just did not want the public to think under any set of circumstance that we have not cached out. We have sold our interest, we have cash. Okay, with that, all those in favor of the resolution as amended, please say aye. Aye. All those opposed, raise your hand please. So let's do that again. Sorry, hands down. All those in favor of the resolution, please raise your hand. Thank you. All those opposed to the resolution. Third time the term. All those voting yes, please raise your hand. Thank you. All those opposed voting no, please raise your hand. One, two, three. The vote passes nine, three. Back to you, President. I'm gonna turn it over. Yes, Kurt, you can handle this one. Go ahead. Thank you, Acting President Mason. And I will, we have reached the 1030 time and we need a motion to suspend rules. Councillor Shannon. I move to suspend the rules to complete our deliberative agenda items through 6.09. Motion has been made by Councillor Shannon to complete the deliberative agenda only. Is there a second to that motion? Second. Motion by Councillor Pine. Any, all those in favor of suspending the rules to complete the deliberative agenda only, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously and we will go back to the deliberative agenda now, which is resolution 5.07, expanding voting rights to municipal elections, Councilor Roof. Thank you, President Wright. This will, I will not go into wax on and on, but I would like to introduce 6.07, excuse me, which is resolution related to expanding voter rights in our local municipal elections. A main goal of the city's diversity and equities. What's that? Yeah, I need a second before I. Motion has been made by Councillor Roof and seconded by Councillor Powell. You have the floor, Councillor Roof. A main goal of the city's diversity and equity strategic plan from 2014 is to create a more inclusive and engaged community, which is critical because we know that broad participation in the democratic process strengthens the entirety of any community. The plan speaks to this value in saying the following. Meaningful community engagement deepens innovative silo busting partnerships by connecting the concerns of communities to the decisions on allocating local and regional investment dollars. It goes on in saying engagement brings meaning and relevance to sustainability goals across a broader spectrum of players, which will lead to a shared vision for a prosperous future. While these words are important, it's also important to recognize that in order to make progress, we need to take action. And while considering this action, we can look to a later section of the plan that speaks about challenges to our community engagement. And it says as of 2014, and I quote seven and a half percent or over 3,000 Burlington residents are ineligible to vote in local elections due to their status as refugees, not eligible for US citizenship. In addition to actions such as extending the time period for early voting or investing in voter education, opening up the opportunity to vote on local issues to more Burlington residents is a viable way to lower barriers to our democratic process. And I believe there is a way to accomplish this expansion of voter rights while remaining in line with the rule of law and in line with stated values as set forth in the diversity and equity plan. I wanna also note that this is a complex issue as it intersects with dynamics related to constitutional law, international human rights standards, immigration law, Supreme Court rulings, state rights as well as complexities in administering our elections here with city staff. To close, I'll add that my intent in moving this forward tonight is to keep alive Burlington's conversation about expanding voter rights and promoting local participation while also recognizing that other Vermont communities are discussing this as well. And to that point, the state legislature will likely be taking up this topic next session. And it's my hope that Burlington can be at the table while they do so. It will be five years since the last time our community had this discussion at the ballot. And I think that it's an appropriate time to go back to the public with this question. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Ruf. Councillor Polina. Thank you, President Wright. I'd like to thank Councillor Ruf for bringing this issue forward that I feel very personally attached to. And I'd like to speak on it for a moment. I think that this resolution, and actually I also wanna thank the media for drawing attention to his resolution and the issues that are being discussed as a result of this resolution being brought forward. It's a great conversation to be having right now and I think I'll speak to that. So I think this resolution brings more people to the table. When you read the Vermont Constitution, it uses the words qualified to vote. And I think those words have meant different things throughout time. And as we progress and move forward, we are redefining what that means. And on September 27th, our mayor denounced the Trump administration's drawdown of the refugee resettlement program from 110,000 in 2016 to 18,000. We depend on that program. In Burlington, that's a reduction of 29% in the last three years. Every day we read about other ways the Trump administration has worked to discourage and slow down legal immigration. I am myself of the product of legal immigration. I came here because my mother married a U.S. citizen. I often think about my life, what it would be like if I had remained in a third world country. This resolution is about equality. It's about bringing more people to the table and exploring ways of allowing legal permanent residents and others who pay taxes here, who live here, to come to public forum, to put a sign in their yard, to engage in a political party and to hold this accountable. I hope the council supports this resolution. Thank you, Councillor Polino. Councillor Shannon. Five years doesn't really seem like that long a time to take up an issue that was pretty firmly opposed to by the public in a vote five years ago. But I do think that times have changed significantly in the last five years and that it is worth taking up this discussion again. I'm not sure at the end of the day where I will land. And I think that they're, even if our intentions were to grant this power to vote to non-citizens, I am curious about the legal complications in doing so and if that's even possible. But I look forward to the discussion at the Charter Change Committee and I will be voting in support. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Councillor Hanson and then Councillor Bushard. Thank you, really glad to see this before us and excited to support it. And for me, it's really simple. It's, if you live in this community, you're part of this community, you pay taxes, you know, your kids go to school here, you own a business here, whatever it may be. I think you deserve to have a say over the policies that influence your life. So I think that's fundamental and critical and I'm really glad to see that we're hopefully moving forward on that. Thank you, Councillor Hanson. Councillor Bushard. So thank you. And just picking up with what Councillor Shannon was saying, I think in the five years, not only have attitudes changed but the faces have changed in our community. Our community I think is far more diverse now. And I think that more and more people really want to have a meaningful engagement. And I see this as a really appropriate step. And I wanna thank Councillor Roof for bringing this forward. Thank you, Councillor Bushard, Councillor Freeman. Thank you, President Wright. I will be supporting this and I'm glad to hear the initiative being brought forward. I think considering, you know, when I think about issues like this, considering the history of colonialism in this country, colonization, it always seems odd to me how we govern and sort of decide who gets to participate in our governance, just given the sort of injustices that have historically existed around governing and who has a right to this land and to make decisions over our livelihood and the stewardship that we have here. So I will absolutely be supporting this while I, when I go out and talk to people in the neighborhood, it's always, I always feel disappointed when I realize that someone can't vote and they feel like they're not even really sure if they should share their opinion with me and I feel like their opinion is so important. They absolutely have a stake. They are a stake, everyone is a stakeholder in this community who lives here. So I'm really thankful that this initiative is being brought forward again and I will be supporting it. Thank you, Councillor Freeman. Anyone else? I'll, Councillor Jang. Thank you, President. But I think around this table, maybe I'd be the only person who became citizen and not long ago, I became citizen and the only thing that I was looking forward to is to vote and I think I went beyond that. I voted and I also sat here, I am right here. I think it is important to understand that voting is sacred to me, it is sacred because you have a voice, you're part of this community and sometimes most people, they wanna hold both sides. They wanna be French people, they wanna be American. But here, I think we are talking about giving a person, when you become a citizen, this is your right. And your right is not you vote only for something and you cannot vote for the rest. You have to vote, you vote for everything. You give away, you take a pledge, you wanna become a citizen of this country, you can die for this country, right? But if you are in this community, you go to another community, it might be something else. To me, this is what I do for work. I work directly with immigrants. I work directly with refugees and to tell you the truth, most of them are citizen, but they do not vote. They do not show up to vote. I think that's where the focus need to be. This guy in front of us told us, 40,000 people, not even 8,000 people only show up to vote. Where is the rest? What are we doing for that? I think that's the most important and critical part. That's one. And the second thing, God bless you, the second thing is there is a bill in the state of Vermont, S110, very specific and the governor, when did this pass in Montpelier, he made it clear. This is in contradiction with that bill because we should not hold different information about the community members we live with. We have one list, you all registered voter, you qualify to vote, you show up and vote. But when you come, it's going to be like an apartheid. Those who are not citizen, you vote, you go there. Those who are citizen, go this way. It's a divisive. I became citizen, voting is sacred, and let's help people pathway to citizenship. If you become citizen, let's educate them to their right to show up and vote. I am not, and the third part, what I heard is this was defeated by Wellingtonian. Times change, yes, that's true. Times do change, but I think the critical foundation of our democracy, we need to strengthen it, we need to make sure that people get involved, engage, and we move forward. The fourth part, if this resolution also is in contradiction of our way of doing democracy, people who are eligible to vote, the council refuse to give them that right. Around citizen, around local issues. And now we want to bring those, the number you're talking about, I'm pretty sure is no longer accurate. There is not over 3,000 people here who are not citizen. At least the Burlington School District is the biggest entity here. We serve over 4,000 kids and their families. Most of them, they're citizen. Pathway to citizenship, community engagement, one ballot item, one list of voters. I'm not voting for this. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang, Councillor Pine. Mr. President, I wasn't going to speak, but now I'm motivated to speak. But I think around this table is a few of us who came here to go to the University of Vermont, just a quick, I think there's a few. When I was a student at UVM, there was a debate about whether students should actually have the right to vote. Believe it or not, this council through the Board of Registrations said, students, unless they can prove they live here, should not be voting in local elections. Took it all the way to Vermont Supreme Court, and it was a friend of mine at UVM who fought that and won the right for students to continue to vote, even if their parents were sending the tuition checks from outside of Vermont. As a result, myself and a few others, I would say, got really invested in Burlington and have stayed and have made this our home. Raised our families here and contribute to this community. I think every time you open up democracy to more people, you break down barriers, you make them part of the community, they feel more welcome, they become more engaged, we have a much stronger community. I think this is a great direction. I really appreciate Councilor Roof to bring it to our attention. Thank you, Councilor Pine. Councilor Roof. No, quickly, just to be sure that everyone is aware that this is not some new grand issue that came out of nowhere. Yes, it was brought up in 2015, but also from 1776 to about the 1920s, there were actually 40 states and federal territories that did allow now non-citizens to vote. So this is not unprecedented. This is something that has been rooted in our democracy before in its ongoing evolution of a conversation as opposed to some new conversations starting today and going forward. Thank you, Councilor Roof. Councilor Zhang again. Yes, thank you. I think it's also important that this is also a little bit different from the resolution that came here in 2015. This resolution doesn't have non-citizens to be able to participate locally in like boards and committees. But that resolution, if I understand correctly, did have it. Is that accurate? It's more of a question to the resolution sponsor. Councilor Roof, did you wanna give a quick response to that? Yeah, this resolution does not dictate what the charter change language will be. It sets forth a process to get the question into charter change. The charter change committee will come back to us with language. So I think at that time, it would be appropriate to judge the identicalness or not to one question versus the other. Yes, so I think this resolution, Mr. President, it will be important then to read the where are closes. The whereas clauses. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're not going back and forth here. People are not getting recognized. Councilor Jang, finish up and then we're gonna, we should be ready to vote. I think people know where they stand on this. I think we're not asking the charter change committee to look anything about giving the right for non-citizens to participate in boards and committees. And I think the previous resolution did have that aspect. Then yes, this resolution did change is not the same. I'm just gonna finish this. There were two questions back then. One was about extending voting rates to non-citizen. The other was about allowing them to serve on boards and commissions. One failed to buy about 58 to 42%. The voting citizens voting. The other one failed, but by a closer margin. I think we should be ready to vote now. I think everybody pretty much knows where they are on this. All those in favor of this resolution, which is to send this extending voting rates to the Charter Change Committee, please say aye. Aye. All those opposed, two no votes. That's Councilor Jang and Councilor Wright. The resolution passes and this will go to the Charter Change Committee by a vote of 10 to two. Item 5.08 is a communication with Councilor Shannon regarding a question from the Special Committee reviewing policing policies. Thank you, President Wright. I moved to authorize a special committee to review policing practices to spend up to its previously authorized budget for the purpose of securing one or more trusted and independent third parties to support its review and recommendation process if it so chooses. I'll ask for the floor back briefly after a second. Second. Second by Councilor Bushard. Councilor Shannon, you have the floor back. And by the way, that this is for item, as Councilor Mason pointed out to me, 6.08, not 5.08 as Councilor Bushard whispered in my ear. Thank you. The special committee noted in the resolution establishing the committee that there were funds available, $50,000 of funds available to hire a consultant. And there have been various ideas proposed by the committee of different consultants that might be helpful to the committee. And so just wanted to clarify if it was acceptable to the council to potentially hire more than one consultant with the same, they're not asking for a budget increase, just the ability to hire more than one consultant if desired. And I would also note that the committee hasn't reached any conclusions about who they would want to hire at this point. Thank you, Councilor Shannon. Discussion or questions? Councilor Polina. It's more of a comment, but from my recollection, I guess I just want to bring this forward. The 50,000 was for one third party to consult and to revise the use of force policy. And maybe I'm wrong about that, but if it is, then this motion is substantially different, right, because it says that we can now use the 50,000 to hire a consultant for any other topic we want to carry out, I guess, the mission, the broader mission. So I just wanted to put that out there because I'm unclear about that. Councilor Shannon. I don't think that there was a request from the committee to change the mission of the funds. And, but I wouldn't want, I don't think we want this to be interpreted that way. And so I would entertain an amendment to this to further clarify that it's for the same purpose. But actually, I think I would ask, could Attorney Black would comment on this because when this was adopted by the committee, I was not at that committee meeting. And I think she was at that committee meeting. And if there was, it wasn't reported to me, but if there was discussion about changing the mission, Attorney Black would know. City Attorney Blackwick, can you shed some light on this? The committee certainly interprets its mission as much broader than what Councilor Polino just said. There was not specific discussion about changing the mission. Councilor Shannon. I would say there have been some discussions at the committee level about things that they may want to discuss that were broader than that. But that was not the point of this question as I understood it. The point of this question was to be able to use the funds on more than one consultant rather than to either change the budget amount or change the, change the mission. Attorney. And I would also note that Councilor Freeman is on the committee and she has her hand up, she'll be, she's in the queue. No, I would say that statement by Councilor Shannon is correct also. Thank you, City Attorney. Councilor Freeman. Can point of information to Councilor Polino or to recognize, I'm curious about the line about the use of force as that being the mission of the consultant. Is that from the original resolution that drafted the committee? Is that where you're reading that from? Because I guess I don't have that in my recollection. So there is no point in information that you can call to go to another Councillor that I mean you can do a point of information generally but you can't. Is that a point of information generally? I just, I guess I don't remember that. Can you repeat what your question was? I'm wondering where the directive around the use of force for the consultant is. I don't recall that as being part of, as being part of the original resolution. Okay, and is that your, do you have other questions or is that the one thing you'd like Councilor Polino to respond to? I had that question and then I was going to clarify about the intention of the committee. Okay, so I'll get a response from Councilor Polino and then come back to you for whatever you're coming as. Perfect, thank you. Councilor Polino. Thank you. So that comment was the product of my own recollection as to the intent of where the funds would be used so I'm more concerned from, you know, it's a significant amount of money so I just want to make sure it goes to the intended purpose, that was the reason. Thank you, Councilor Polino. I think the actual resolution had a limitation. He's basing it on his memory as he said, so Councilor Freeman, it's back to you for whatever you choose to say. Sure, so I believe the resolution was a bit broader. It was a consultant to advise, yeah, and assist the committee on a, and my understanding is that the committee is looking for multiple parties because there is an interest that has been put forward as an idea of a proposal that has been put forward around creating focus groups or contracting with the consultant that would be able to allow us to get quantitative and qualitative data from the community about their experience of policing in the city and that though there was interest in doing that, they didn't want that to then make it unable for us to also contract with another consultant for another purpose, for example, reviewing the use of force policy or various other things that the committee has been tasked with doing. So it was to really just open up and make sure that we have more capacity as a committee to look at various options in terms of how to seek a consultant and their expertise. Thank you, Councilor Freeman. Councilor Roof. Oh, you'll be next time. Councilor Roof. I pulled up the signed version of the resolution that established the committee. And I'm just gonna read here. It's the resolve clause on line 76, resolve the special committee shall have a budget of up to $50,000 made available to it for the purpose of securing a trusted and independent third party to support its review in recommendation process, if it so chooses. I think that's pretty broad and open. Thank you, Councilor Roof. Councilor Busher, and then we ought to start moving towards some... Just, I was just gonna point everyone to the minutes that were attached to this and which reflected what Councilor Perry Freeman said and Councilor Roof confirmed that this was to be used for a broad number of issues, not just what was originally stated. So that's it, I'm ready to vote. Thank you, Councilor Busher. I think we are ready to vote. All those in favor of the resolution, the motion made by Councilor Shannon, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Item 6.09 was item 5.24 on consent. Who would like to move this? Councilor Paul? Councilor Busher. Councilor Paul. Councilor Paul, you win it. I didn't realize this was a lottery here. So I will... You go to the lottery with Councilor Shannon. See, this is what happens when we've been here a little bit too long. So I will, let's see, I'm trying to see here now. So I'll move the, actually it's not a resolution. It is simply a communication and there's a recommended action that is rather long, but I will move that action step. And I'll second. Okay, moved and seconded by Councilor Busher. Councilor Paul, you want the floor back? This item was removed from the consent agenda. I'm happy to speak to it, but perhaps the Councilor who removed it would prefer to do that first. Councilor Hanson removed it. So Councilor Hanson, you, we talked earlier and you said you wanted to make a relatively brief statement on this. So yeah, I don't need to keep us long, but I removed it. I'm gonna be voting no on it. I think this might raise some eyebrows, but I think it's really important that we do that. I think we have acknowledged as a body that we are in a climate emergency twice, actually. We acknowledge that twice in a row. And I think being in a climate emergency, we do need to start to question what are typically thought of as normal decisions. This is a decision about expanding the airport apron to be able to accommodate more planes overnight and essentially expand operations, allow more airlines and with the goal of increasing ridership and flights. I think when it comes to the airport and I got to speak with the director earlier today at length about this, I think the focus of our investments should be on mitigating the environmental impact of flight, which is one of the most environmentally impactful activities that is normalized in our society. It has an incredibly high greenhouse gas emission impact flying does. And so I think we have to really double down on our efforts. There is a lot of efforts underway and I'll be really digging into those with the director of aviation. But given that context, the idea of expanding and trying to drive up flights is, I think, going to make it more difficult for us to reduce emissions and tackle this problem. Thank you, Councillor Hanson. Councillor Paul. Thank you, President Wright. So I just wanted to mention two things. The first is President Wright mentioned this at the Board of Finance. Normally, when there is an item that is about the airport, we don't just get one person who comes from the airport, the entire team comes. And because of the late hour, we were told that the airport team would not be here, mostly because Councillor Hanson had made it fairly clear that there he would not have any questions. So just wanted to put that out there. The other thing is that I think it's important to understand that overnighting planes is a way of expanding air service. And if we do not increase air service, people are going to find ways to get to where they have to go when they are going very, very long distances that preclude being able to get, for example, in an electric vehicle and drive there. So two things. One is that the leadership of the airport has been a strong supporter of rail service. They have been at countless meetings and they have been an active, not only supporter, but a promoter of rail service. That's pretty unusual that you've got the leadership of the airport who is supporting another mode of transportation. They do not see rail as a competitor. The other thing also is that if there are people who are going to be flying anyway, think about the fact that when we get larger airplanes here, which we have fortunately been fairly successful in doing recently, that is say 100 people that instead of going a couple of miles to the airport are now going to be getting in some other form of transportation and are going to be traveling far distances in order to get to where they need to go by going to another airport. So I'm not really sure that that really is a way of reducing our carbon footprint by making people go further. And the last thing I did want to mention is that there is a very large informative brochure that is also available online talking about the number of ways that the Burlington International Airport has been a leader in energy efficiency and a sustainable airport. I would encourage everybody to read that. Just want to mention one thing that they have done and those are the solar panels that they've installed on the garage. Those panels were a cost of one and a half million dollars that was done in 2015. They're expected to generate a savings of three and a half million dollars over the following three decades. And that I think is a very good example of what we talked about in the resolution which is making investments not necessarily because they make short term financial sense but because they are a great investment in what we all want the outcome to be. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Powell. Councillor Freeman, you're gonna get the final word on this. Sure, thank you. Thank you. I will be also voting against this measure. I agree with a lot of what Councillor Hanson said about sort of the aviation industry as a whole and to the point of the argument that people will just fly somewhere else. Why should they? Why? We just passed the net zero energy roadmap which called on the community of Burlington to make considerable personal individual consumer choices that change our behavior and change how we live in the world because all of us want a world to live in beyond the next sort of decade. So I just don't hear that argument. I think we need to actually support and consider what reducing miles traveled, airline and flight miles traveled looks like and we should not be expanding aviation. This is normalized, but when we hear things like clean coal we think that's wrong. That's not accurate, that's incorrect. But then we hear let's expand aviation and we think, sure, yeah, let's fly. Flight shaming is becoming popular. I can't remember the Swedish word, but it's becoming popular in Sweden. There are other countries, other communities that are taking on this initiative. And I think what's important is that this 1.5 degree target, so the effort of globally reducing our emissions by half over the next 10 years gives us only a 50% chance. And we know this, a 50% chance of reaching that 1.5 target. Here's some things that will happen if we go over it's predicted. Global fisheries could decline by another 1.5 million tons. The coral reefs could decline as much as 99%. 1.7 billion people more could experience several severe heat waves at least once every five years. And the list goes on in terms of the increase in sea level rise, drought, just the amount of hardship, the sort of dystopian novel that none of us, I think truly want to see played out. So I will absolutely be voting against this. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Freeman. We are ready for the vote. All those in favor of the resolution, please say aye. Any opposed? No. Three, raise your hands, please, on the nose. So it is Councilor Freeman, Councilor Hanson, and Councilor Tracy that passes by a vote of nine to three. Point of personal privilege, Councilor Wright. Point of personal privilege, Councilor Shannon. I just wanted to say for the record that I did not propose tonight that the city invest in the lottery, nor do I support that. I don't think I said that. I just said that you and I will go play the lottery if it comes down to that. Motion to adjourn. So moved. Second, by Councilor Bush, are all those in favor? Please say aye. Aye. Opposed? We are adjourned. Mercifully.