 Okay, it is 6 p.m. On Monday, April 3rd. I'll call to order this regular meeting of the Winniesky Liquor Control Board. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Thomas Panner. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. So we have five licenses on for approval. Onion City Chicken and Oyster, Missouri Loves, Mule Bar, Grazers, and our house. Any comments from staff? Good evening, no. Okay. These are all existing, existing places, no concerns. Does anyone have a question or concern about any of these? All right. I would take a motion to approve all of them together. So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Actually, some of the business owners are on Zoom, so if you wanted to say anything, feel free to raise your hand or use the chat, but you are also not obligated. Okay. We are all set then. That is the end of the Liquor Control Board agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? I have a quick clarifying question. So we reviewed the first and third, what about second and outside consumption or those? I was assuming we were keeping them all together. Okay. You would only ask about the first. I did not state that clearly, but just to make sure procedurally we're all on the same page. Yeah. Okay. Excellent. All right. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. It is 6.02 p.m. I will call to order the Wenuski City Council meeting. Any questions, concerns about the order of tonight's agenda? Great. Is anyone here for public comment? The public comment section of the meeting is meant for folks who want to speak to a topic not included on the agenda tonight. So you can use the chat or raise hand feature if you wish to make a public comment. On tonight's consent agenda, we have our Council minutes from March 20th, pay reward for March 5th and accounts pay reward March 29th. We have event permit applications for waking windows Wenuski Wednesdays in a new one U.S. strongman competition. Then we have our city manager evaluation summary, which we saw at our last meeting and recommended updates to the city manager review form and process, which we discussed at a prayer meeting. Does anyone want to pull any item out for any questions or more information? Are there questions from any members of the public on any of those items? I just saw a note about audio quality. Hearing no concerns, I would entertain a motion to approve all five of the consent items. So moved. Motion by Aurora, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. So let's move on to Council reports. Aurora, would you like to start? The State-Healthy Connected People and Inclusion and Belonging Meetings will be next week out of there. So folks are interested in that time, maybe there are those. State-Healthy Connected People is on Tuesday the 11th and Inclusion and Belonging will be on Thursday the 13th. Excellent. For updates, I don't have anything for the Municipal Infrastructure Commission. The Finance Commission met on the March 28th and just went over priorities and strategies for our council retreat on May 13th. Lots of discussion about current TIF and ARPA funding commitments, opportunities for incentivizing housing, density increases in addition to what the Planning Commission is already working on. I'm sure you'll get into the meetings next week, but the Commission chairs will be meeting on Monday the 10th. I know there'll be further discussion about priorities and strategies from the Commission's various commissions there. The Municipal Infrastructure Commission has their next meeting on April 20th. That'll be a joint meeting with State-Healthy and Connected and that'll be likely at the pool if there's space for all of us to fit. And there's, to my excitement, a pickleball tournament hosted at the school this weekend that I will be participating in. So I'd love to see some of our other counselors there. So those are updates for me. Thank you. I want to let you all know that the Planning Commission set a public hearing for April 27th to take input on changes they've been working on for some months now to create incentives to retain historic building facades, historic preservation incentives, which include exempting mixed use and non-residential projects in business districts for minimum parking requirements, and an increase in lot coverage for projects in residential districts. Updates to minimum parking requirements, the creation of detailed bicycle parking requirements, and incentivizing underground parking and electric vehicle charging stations in new projects. And expanding required space for off-street loading activities, increased requirements to make trash less visible, and clarifying driveway retaining wall and related definitions. They also want to start a discussion of reviving a design review board for additional historic preservation. So that's April 27th. I also was able to participate in a focus group with the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance to inform their strategic planning, and we'll be attending their monthly meeting this Thursday with the wellness coordinator from Winooski School District to start sharing what our school district staff is seeing with housing issues in the community in a broader setting and work across the river with other partners. And then Charlie and I were able to join a Winooski High School class on Friday for Q&A time with students. Concerns included housing that is old and expensive, desire for teen space, and more capacity at the school for tutors and counselors, scholarship navigation, and parent education, and support for continuing to have free Green Mountain Transit. And you may have more details to add on, Charlie. That is it. Tell us. Awesome. I just wanted to check in because I saw that all of our mics may not be working. Yeah. Okay. So we're good to go now. We're gonna move the mics a little closer to you guys. Awesome. Thank you. And as far as updates, I've spoken a couple times about downtown Winooski hiring a new executive director. The current executive director will be at our next meeting to announce who they have hired. It's a very exciting candidate. So we're all sad to see Meredith go but excited for this new person to be coming on board. Also, the farmers market is still accepting vendor applications. So if you are interested in being at our farmers market this summer, please do submit an application. And as well, we're starting to plan our events already. So Juneteenth, Winooski Wednesdays, Pride, French Heritage Day. We need volunteers for all of those events. So if you go to the downtown Winooski website, you can see what we're looking for in terms of volunteers. And that's all I have for updates. Thank you. Housing Commission updates. The city is hired a housing initiative director. And she'll be starting soon. And the meeting was moved from last week to this coming week. It'll be on Thursday at 6. Those are my updates. Excellent. All right. Thank you. We'll move to city updates that John Ritchard will present. So filling in for the city manager tonight, she'll be back later this week. So three, just three brief updates. So first one is just a reminder that the city clerk's office is currently experiencing a staff shortage and has changed their regular hours, typically 8am to 4pm. And that's going to be on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday closed on Tuesdays. Second update is regarding the exit 16 DDI VTrans project. So technically in Colchester, but right on our northern border. So they will be conducting some drilling and blasting activities along US 2 and 7. So Main Street just north of the school between South Drive and Mountain View Drive. And just a few notes on that. So all users should expect some delays through that area. Blasting is anticipated to begin this week and continue for approximately two months. Blasting work will be weather dependent, so obviously rain there won't be any blasting. And up to two blasting events will take place a day and will be restricted to weekdays, Monday through Friday and excluding holidays. And that's going to be between the times of 9am and 2pm. It's not that exciting. There's not going to be like visible explosions and things like that. You've probably seen the mats that are out there. So it's not going to be as intense as it might sound. It's not going to be loud. And there shouldn't be any impacts to buildings, things like that. And then you can also follow any updates through the exit 16 DDI dot VTrans projects dot Vermont dot gov. They have a pretty robust website with updates on how the project's doing. And then the last update is hot off the presses. So this is to give some recognition to Nate Eddy. So Nate is our librarian down on the Malts Bay OCC lot. So I believe it was today he was awarded the Sarah C. Hagar Award, which is awarded to librarians that show outstanding service or significant contribution to the field of librarianship in Vermont. So this is through the Vermont Library Association during their conference awards today. So I want to give some recognition to Nate for just continuing outstanding work down there in our little library. That's all the updates on the city side. Thank you. So we'll move into our regular items. And first up is on for discussion or approval, the Chittin Solid Waste District fiscal year 2023-24 budget presentation. Paul, can we bring Sarah Reeves over, please? And Jen Holliday. Oh, we can't hear you, Sarah. I think you can. Yeah. Just people know who we are. And this just means we need a municipality and we're formed by our members that understand that to be the city's town, it should be coming from the back of the city. Here we go. We're going to go two days from this January to within the county. And I also like to start out too by pointing out where we receive our revenue from and where we do not receive our revenue from. So the right time then you can see shows our three main buckets of revenue. These are fees or two fees and those are being directed from our customers for nearly the materials such as our drop-off temperature, our compost facility, the sale of products, the sale of compost, the sale of sewage recycling, and summer waste management, which is a fee that is charged to haulers who make great materials, trash-generated, which can be done up to country to dispose. And where we do not generate revenue is from local income tax, local sales tax, or local property taxes. Because those are the sorts of confusions that we want to take at one time. And the last slide that I'm going to show is two others from how we're doing. And 50 counties are doing really well. We do a very good job as we bring the material away from the landfill. And you can still see that there's about 39% of what we generate in the county that is still in a bag. But we don't right now. What actually would be further deferred into the recycling, so bottles and cans, and cardboard and litter, or to the organic recycling and composting in the backyard or drop-off, or special materials such as neutron plates, or strata, or things that would be construction demolition. So this is my three-day request for I think I'm going to do something away and take a check and make sure that it can only be done in the trash. I'm sorry, we've lost the audio again. I don't think it's you, Sarah. Is it on our side? Sarah, can you just speak once more? I want some more, Sarah, please. You're back. Thank you. So we just started, you know, where we're going to end up. So we are, my name right here is just over $15,000,000. We're by saying our expenses to be just over $14,400,000, so that for maybe about just under $19,000 is what we then transfer to our various reserves. And I'm forward, and I want to be able to improve the fire maintenance, so we make sure that we're properly finding the future to the maximum amount according to what the pressure is. So the job ratio has a certain amount, the employment cost, how much it has to be, and of course those reserves are back for the next month. And then it goes to the capital reserve and that would be a big improvement. So just a short review from the spiritual master next year on nasty or just getting ready to increase about every 10% and the expenses increase of just under 9%. And I, at this point out, one of the increases, I do not know what I'd say, the happy line increase, but that administrative cost is increasing. For some time it's amazing that it can be because we have just moved into the office space. So maybe that are those days housed for about 30 years, and just today we've moved into the office space in South Carolina, so we're sharing space with the staff around here. So you can show us this slide this year too, to illustrate where those buckets of funding go, basically which programs are funded by or which sources of funding. And to focus on the operation program, because that's generally what we're going to talk about in a day-to-day basis. So I'm not going to introduce you, but you're going to be coming to the facility, you're going to have to do both, the gas conversion facility. Those programs are all the times we're funding from major fees or the sales of files. So it's a big asset to be self-supporting, self-funding. These other programs are Jerry Bucketford, he's always managed to be rented, and in the tumble, we really greatly think about why that brought the baby to the station. The song he's managed to be, again, is $37, and it's going to stretch the haulers, add the banknotes, kind of treat what they are, exposing it to the county and the police. And that's been a tough change in about 10 years, and this is something that I'd ask my board to consider for the next 10 years or so. How important was the solution to selling this mansion for the day-to-day manner? These are what were philosophy before the past 20 years, choice was being still relevant. And so what we're using for now is to get to help support the management of the district and also provide them with communications, activities, say tours and field trips to those coming to our facilities, and manage the general administration. But these also use as a source of subsidy for the operations that are now in supply. But you know what I'm saying? We've been selling this mansion for 15 years, I've not needed the English accessibility. We are, however, we need to increase, we took the afternoon, this year, from 80 all the time to 85 all the time, and we should do that because the operations contract that we have with Costello expired last year, and in the new contract, our team went from 25 all the time for an operation to be 70 all the time. So that fixed price is going to increase clearly by direct, and we're going to cover some of that in a small increase to the tip group. We then, if we started on March 1st, we have probably increased in the end of this new year, so with this tip group, we should start on July 1st. We are budgeting for a basic mortgage service, a separate revenue. The market is to people, but it feels like we're suppressed. So we are not looking for the end of the year in such a situation where we can see, on that first call, we realize what was going on in dollars and material sales just out of the market. And everyone in here should recognize that that is anomaly, so what was anomaly. So we are back to our conservative numbers again for our next year. After a gangster in the facility a few years ago, it was also a pretty good year. We got bottom line and we were shocked about the great event, and we are budgeting for all the sales to be this year at the end of December 24th. So we are increasing the tip group in Asia to be from $5 to $70 a time, and something is directly related to the loss of peers coming into our facility. When they saw it was there, their new operation, their two-hatch facility in the last two years ago, much of the five-day time when it comes to our facility, we're deferred to their facility. So if we have some of those times back when we're not, we have no idea where they were just two years ago. So we're working on creating some of those inbound times, and then that loss of revenue is showing up at that facility, and that is pay for the salaries in that facility. Probably the drop-off centers have, for many years right now, had a part of the facility. The actual fiscal 22 was just over $400,000. So if you were rushing fiscal 23 from $4 to $22,000, and without that increase, we would be leaving a profit of $100,000 at the drop-off centers. And so they're increasing bank prices of $3 over a small bank, $8.4 a year side bank, for a large bank, and a small bank is up to $15,000, $8.8 a bank, up to $34,000, or $5,000, and then a large bank is up to $4.5,000. We're going to look at our big bill refreshing. We made some crazy changes in 2020, but before that, the small bank was $2.25. So we wanted to limit any points right moment, and we probably made it up or down. And so we're getting an action. Mostly what it was that we could represent, it's a significant number of, which I'm pulling, and so there are, this is there with healthcare and co-workers, and so on and so forth, in my way. And if you don't mention costs, those are all costs. So those are the people we pay to collars, to transfer station, or to your, or to those costs are increasing. One change that we think would be a positive change is that we're intending to move, as July went to, a schedule to take through Saturday for all of our drop-off centers. So that is designed to reduce confusion for our customers. Not planning to look at the technical board schedule to see which drop-off centers open up each day. They can actually see if we can keep that. And it should be able to provide our employees. Our drop-off center, what it is to do about the work, which we generally gather, has. It's the introduction of the center. And so one of the drop-off centers in Central California, where we are 55 parties, they only do it one day there. Everyone else will be open Tuesday through Saturday. So that is increasing our hours at Milton, and from, what our weight has had over the past couple of years to tackle challenges, our competition budget, and this year's budget, this is making up a budget that's seven percent, where there's more competition for employees, more of a 1.4 percent compared to the current fiscal year. And I think that people should not convict those expenses by wanting to make a higher schedule of their plan for our employees on the January 1. And increasing our contribution premiums up to 2.5 percent of salary as of July 1. So there are those two savings soft cents. There are those two items, and we have a team today that's leading the drop-off centers in our drop-off center. So in the coming year, we are going to go to Milton, and we are also going to expand our budget. And now, as I mentioned earlier, that's a capital reserve. It's about $3.3 five hundred dollars, and that is really helpful, and that is the result of the excess revenue from the work to choose from, including back to that capital reserve. The one reserve that is questionable, and this is where we can, you know, maybe have some creative solutions, maybe create a solid expansion for the land of this portion reserve. So we will be, we will be assuming responsibility for more than that doesn't matter. So we will be back in our management chair. And that total plan is a 30-year plan, and we have had about a year's total use, and as is pretty normal, it's the end of the year. We've lost her again. Sarah, we can't hear you just a moment, please. Sorry. Oh, are you? Yeah, yeah. Thank you. So in the post closure, Relayville post closure reserve, we have enough money in there to last us through year 30, but we're pretty confident we're not going to be able to move into the next phase of care, which is custodial care, which is kind of a, it's less active care, it's more monitoring, but we need to do some minor repairs, and we need to make sure that we have enough money if there is, for example, if we need to do any treatment of our, our leachate, which is the liquid that kind of filters through the landfill and collects in the tank and then gets pumped off, but we need to treat that for the forever chemicals, right, for PFAS and PFOA. That is unknown as far as what that could look like or how much we've lost. So we don't think we have enough in the reserve to manage both the necessary repairs and just kind of upgrades to the current closed landfills and to treat significantly for PFAS PFOA. So that is a bit of an unknown. And I also would like to remind my supporters and my city councils that our charter does require us to ask for your adoption of our budget. And with that, I will stop the show and take any questions you may have. I hope we can tonight. Thank you, Sarah. Brenda, do you want to add anything? So I do serve as the city liaison or the commissioner for the, for Winnowsky, the Chittin's Allways District, and I believe I've been held at roll since 2017, so six years or so coming up on it. And I think, you know, going back to one of the first few slides, just highlighting that Chittin's Allways District actually has doubled the diversion rate or close to it of what the state's diversion rate is. So CSW has received a number of awards for just really excelling in their education and outreach programs, messaging, and all of the support services that they provide. So really significant kudos to Sarah and everyone at CSWD for all the hard work that they do. So just want to extend a thank you and acknowledgement for that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for calling that out. I also, I just want to recognize that it's a fiscally sound budget. And it seems more on, I shouldn't say more on track. I know like in the past years, there's been like issues with recycling materials and stuff. And you were, you have come here before talking about, we're going to figure that out. And you are doing that now. So thank you to you and to our board of commissioners. Yeah. And I'm certain that if anyone wants to go on a facility tour, that I would be able to make that happen, coordinate to make that happen. Any other questions? I don't think we have any audience. We do not. Okay. Okay. Well, hearing no questions or concerns, we're getting a little bit of feedback in here. Okay. It's not too bad. Do I have, would someone like to make a motion to approve the CSWD fiscal year 2324 budget? So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn Second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. The motion carries. Thank you very much, Sarah. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. We are on to item B. This is on for discussion. It's the next operational overview finance HR communications. Angela, are you kicking us off? I am kicking you off. I'm just going to start the PowerPoint that was included in your packet. So the last three sections of the administrative team are up for present presenting tonight. And that's myself in the finance department, the human resources director Jesse Acree and our communications director Paul Sarn. We're just reusing the same template that Elaine started with last week identifying where in the organizational structure, our department's fall, all three of us report directly to the city manager. And I am the only person of those three who has a staff in addition to being a director. I have one accounting clerk who provides support for our segregation of duties. And again, we are the last three administrative team members to present that are currently active departments. The equity director is currently on pause and our housing position is about to start in April, but is not yet ready to present on what they do on a day-to-day basis. So the finance team is myself and one other full-time person. We handle every single dollar in and out of the city. That includes billing, which is the calculation of our tax rate, about 2,200 tax bills, 1,780 utility bills on a quarterly basis, all the rental registry billing, and about 1,000 other miscellaneous bills that we send out on an annual basis. We also handle all of your account's payables, payments to vendors and payroll vendors. For fiscal year 22, this was over $17.5 million or about 2,100 checks. We process payroll in this office on a bi-weekly basis for all city staff, including yourself as counsel. We have a mix of union contracts, two separate unions, one for the public works department, AFSCME, and one for our police department, which is the fraternal order of police, and personnel policies that we need to consider when we do that, as well as following all federal rules and regulations for payroll. We have anywhere between 89 and 119 employees on any routine basis. This office is also responsible for all reconciliations, comparing our transactions to source documentation to make sure that they're accurate and that we are going to be in compliance with all our own policies and procedures. We also do all of the financial reporting for grants and debt compliance, including filing reports with the state of Vermont for sub-recipient grant monitoring, and our post bond issuance compliance filings with the Vermont Municipal Bond May. We are responsible for the audit of the city of Winooski. This starts actually about May and runs right through the end of December, so it does take a significant amount of time. This is a very important document as showing that we are financially healthy, sets us up to receive grant funding and be able to borrow significant sums of money without having our financial stability called into question. We are on our 10th year of clean audits, so we're doing great there. This office also does all of the internal controls and risk assessments for the city. We do an annual conference with individual departments to identify risks and attempt to either mitigate them or for controls in place or accept them as accepted risk. In addition, we provide all of the departmental support for financial analysis, budget preparation, providing budget reports on a monthly basis, and help with the implementation of all of the strategic vision priorities. I serve on our IT team internally with a focus on our strategic technology replacement and an improvement plan, and I also provide support for internal troubleshooting. For the current fiscal year, I did make a note here that my office does do a lot of the financial support and analysis for every strategic policy and priority, but the ones that I've been focusing primarily on are the planning for the TIFF expiration, the ARPA funding discussions, helping on board the new city manager, orienting our new treasurer, Jonathan Fenney, working on updating our financial procedures, which are severely out of date and don't even reference my current position. We are also working on a procedures manual to help us address the risk assessment items as we identify them. You may not be aware that Raul Wills-Viles, our previous accounting clerk had resigned at the beginning of the month. We are currently seeking his replacement, and so we'll need to be onboarding a new accounting clerk soon. And this year's risk assessment will be conducted with the administrative team, including the clerks, city manager, HR, communications, and all of the departments that you're hearing from last week, last meeting in this meeting. And then, obviously, also working towards that redevelopment of 17 Abnaqi Way with the hotel and garage project. For next year, we're going to continue working on ARPA funding and what we will do with that money. I will be working with Paul to create an internal IP procedure to guide our departments on how they should be interacting with technology. We will also be coordinating for the expiration of the TIF district, including our final audit by the State Auditor's Office. And Jesse and I are going to be working on implementing full compensation statements that we can use internally for recruitment of staff and retention of staff. I will also be taking a look at the reappraisal valuations that are going to be coming out from our contracted assessor and performing a quantitative analysis on it to make sure that all of the assessments that are coming in are within the same average of what we anticipate, and there are no outliers that are not able to be explained, just to make sure that there's no bias on ownership leaning assessments one way or the other. We also have received a significant amount of opioid settlement funding. Over $18,000 has been received to date with future settlement possible. I am working with John Audie, Rick Heaver, and Elaine to identify ways that we can spend that funding in compliance with the settlement agreements. I am working to explore a purchase card program with TD Bank, which could address some timely payment issues with some of our vendors where we are seeing things like our fuel cards be shut off due to the timing of when our warrants fall and when their due dates are. This could also be a potential revenue source for the city in the future, and then next year's risk assessment will be with the public safety team. Jesse? Hello, everybody. Can you see me all right? Yeah, welcome. Okay, I'm fortunate for everyone. Okay, I'm going to take you through just some of the function data operations that I do day to day. First, a lot of my folks, a lot of my time is with recruiting with all the vacancies we've been having lately. So I'm responsible for the attracting, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding for all the vacancies, creating the job descriptions for them, scoring the positions along with Angela, and then pitching to you, lovely folks, to make sure that the purpose and title can be approved for it. I also worry about the benefits of registration. I'm responsible for the enrollment for all new full-time staff doing the yearly open enrollment, deactivation upon separation, and the adjustments and additions that may come up during the year changing the address. If somebody leaves unexpectedly, we need to make sure that depending on what time of the year it is, what time of the month it is, we're not going to get charged for having them for another month, but we don't have them as an employee. I do the record management for the employees, manage their records including whatever their status may be, whether it's full-time, part-time, seasonal help like we have for the pool. I maintain the online databases for the employee portals and get grant them access to the portals, the logins, passwords, get the setting up their emails, that way they can access their benefits information, their tax information, and make any adjustments there. I support the internal relations, performance management, compensation management, and also work on relationship building, maintenance and growth and work to stabilize and improve our city's work culture. We've come a long way from where I first started here and we're heading in the right direction. It's just a day-to-day thing that we need to work on and work towards every day. Training, I manage the preliminary training for new employees. I also work on doing research for specific resources for employees in the city, things like emotional trauma, management, and stress management and things like that, kind of on a case-by-case basis is needed. I also manage our cybersecurity training to reduce online attacks to the city and make sure there's enough appropriate follow-up so we're not clicking spam emails and things like that. And so you want to go to the next slide? So when it comes to personnel policy, I track changes needed for the personnel policy manual and manage any of the updates. I'm also to go to if there's any questions around how to interpret something. I'm working on updating ours. It's taking a bit of a longer time than I had originally anticipated, but I'm hoping to get something out for that pretty soon as it hasn't been updated since I believed about 2014. There's been a few addendums, but it'd be nice to have everything in one specific document. I make sure that we are compliant for any kind of audits, including OSHA violations, and making sure that all those are reported, I-9s, workers comp, and personnel record retention. I'm a member of the IT team as well as Angela and Paul, and we focus on better technological literacy and safety. We're also working to improve efficiency. Certain IT problems that people are having can be resolved in-house through one of us as opposed to having to log a ticket for SimQuest and having to wait for a response and that call time and all those things. I also manage some of the public complaints that come in, especially those if they're against specific employees. I performed internal investigations as necessary for those items. So if we're looking at the progress of what we've done so far for the strategic vision areas, the city manager has been onboarding, which has been great. We're still up. I'm still updating the personnel policy manual as well as the conducting the staffing audit. So I've been recruited or I've recruited, excuse me, for 21 different positions through the last fiscal year. That was 227 applications, 113 interviews, and 66 people. Now, that 66 people may seem like a big inflated number, but there was a good amount of seasonal positions in there. So like guards, pool supervisors, and things like that. Again, hired and onboarded 66 new employees. I actually developed an onboarding process from the ground up as when I first started, there wasn't one here as well as a preliminary training program. I reduced some of the obsolete plans when it came to some of the healthcare for last year, last fiscal year, because there were just a lot of plans that nobody was using. So instead of increasing confusion and trying to help people decide what kind of healthcare they needed that we were able to reduce plans that weren't utilized, making that a much smoother process. Cleaned out a lot of the unnecessary files for compliance and organization. I recently did an entire I-9 audit because we had I-9s dating back for years that need to be terminated as per federal policy, and that's now updated. So we are in the clear for that. When it comes to safe, healthy, connected people, we're still working with the police department in recruiting, hiring, and working with internal promotions and retention. I'm working to move onboarding digitally. It's a little challenging right now as we don't have an HRIS, but we'll get there when hopefully the funding comes through for that and when it comes to improving service through technology. Last couple of things here continuing to integrate equity considerations in all aspects of staffing and operations, community engagement effort to tackle equity audit findings. This is all for next year and kind of the big overlaying goals and development implement inclusive community engagement plan for the staff. I'm continuing to onboard the housing initiative director we've made that hire recently and they'll be starting at the end of April, and I want to make sure that we have a very, very smooth and solid onboarding, as well as enough support for Jasmine to make sure that they stay here and they're successful in their role. And as we are coming on with more police stuff, we're looking to recruit onboard and support the new police chief, which is going to be in the works towards the end of fiscal year 24. Hi, everybody. Good evening. Thanks so much. Everybody hear me okay? Sorry for the audio technical difficulties this evening. So I've gone ahead and split up a sample of the communications daily operations into four lovely little sections here. Those are section one policy. So as a member of the leadership team, work on the city's internal and external communications related to strategies, policies, and procedures. Section two, communications. This includes developing press releases, news updates, emergency alerts, managing the city's website and social media platforms, providing things like copy editing, graphic design, photography, content creation, certainly our marketing and branding functions and project management. Section three, community engagement. So this includes posting all of our public meetings in minutes, coordinating our town meeting TV coverage, managing public surveys and feedback opportunities, responding to inquiries from our residents, businesses, and visitors, and providing direct support for events and meetings. Section four, of course, is internal support. That includes daily administrative assistance to all of the other departments. This can range anywhere from help with forms and creating different documents, software support, creating templates. And of course, as Jesse and Angela have mentioned, also a member of the IT team and offer support there. We're certainly a great resource for the staff to have as an intermediary between the staff and SimQuest. And it's nice to have people there on a day-to-day basis to be able to answer stuff as it comes up. Moving on to some FY23 accomplishments worth calling out. These are organized by Strategic Vision Area. I've included the Community-Wide American Rescue Plan Act survey process, which was really great, supporting communications on the Exit 16 Diverging Diamond Interchange Project, which is currently ongoing, launching the Winnieski Housing Trust Fund, completing the Legacy Campaign and Centennial Celebration Initiative, and of course, work with our state and local partners on COVID-19 messaging. So looking ahead to some proposed FY24 goals and initiatives, this includes work on language access, creating an internal IT procedure, as Angela was discussing, implementing communication solutions for the Main Street Revitalization Project, as well as the Winnieski Bridge Replacement Project, which is certainly farther out, to terrify anybody, coordinating with the leadership team about wayfinding next steps and developing an equity audit event, if you will, with the Winnieski School District. What about covers it for me? Obviously not the easiest thing for any of us to do to distill our positions into presentation slides, but happy to answer any questions you may have for either now or later. Thanks, Paul. And in the context of strategic prioritization, right, so they're sharing likely what are going to be the recommended FY24 focuses, but all that content beforehand, that's all the day-to-day work that staff are doing in addition to whatever initiatives we prioritize. So that'll be something to keep in mind when we get to those discussions. Are there any questions for Paul? Or anyone else? Okay. Thank you for taking the time to illuminate more of the details of your day-to-day for us. Okay. We will move on to Item C also for discussion, the Strategic Vision Update for Municipal Infrastructure. Great. Thank you. So this is our third installment of the Municipal Infrastructure Policy Priorities Update. I won't go through each of these, but I will focus on, for example, the Main Street Project. That's kind of where our main focus is right now. So we are, our target is to bid the project out next month in May. What we're wrapping up right now is sort of the last financing piece. So in order to bid the project, our main financing partner, USDA, has to give us a green light to do that. And in order to get that okay, we need to procure interim financing through a lender. So Angela and I are working with a couple of potential banks. I think actually a bond underwriter is the actual term. So we're working with the same bond underwriter right now that did the the Winniesky School District Capital Project. So we worked with Nicole up there and got in touch with them. So we expect within the next two weeks we'll get an answer from them and then hopefully get the green light from USDA to put the bid package out. In the meantime, we have been talking with some of the big contractors around town just to get some interest. So we do think that the usual larger contractors that we see around town are going to be providing some bids on this project. So that's that's pretty exciting. So that's where the majority of our focus is right now. I do want to call out in the in the memo that I provided one financing piece that's that's not great news is that we've been working pretty closely with VTrans on two of the existing grants that we have. I think one we procured like 2019. These are some pretty old grants. One was for a it's called a tap grant. And the other one is called a bike ped grant. So I think all together those two grants were on the order of like 545,600 that we were putting towards the transportation portion of the project, mainly sidewalks, some of the curb bumpouts you see. So unfortunately, what we've learned in the last month as we've been coordinating with them is some of the federal provisions that have been enacted, specifically this build America by America provision is we would have to basically place that provision on all aspects of this project in order to use this funding, which based on discussions with federal highway VTrans, that's like a 10 to 20 percent increase on the project and some potential schedule impacts trying to get a hold of those materials. So we, you know, in conclusion, we've sort of working with the main federal highway folks that that administer this grant and VTrans sort of came to the conclusion that it's not feasible to use this funding, unfortunately. So it doesn't impact the project scope and it, you know, we're still below the threshold for the bond amount, but it's never great to have to, you know, give money back. We are currently working with them to see if we can pivot that funding to a standalone project where, you know, if it's just a sidewalk project, you know, there's not the impact of having those federal provisions on it. It's concrete, you know, so it's not like we would have to disperse that on to like the duct liner pipe, so we have to buy for the water main. So it's unfortunate, but in the in the long run it will, unfortunately, save us money not taking a grant. You know, we are not alone in this. There are a couple other Ms. Pellies I've heard of that are having the same issue with some of the new federal provisions. So we're also trying to make that known with federal highways and VTrans. The good news is the USDA funding that was procured in 2019 does not have that provision. So our estimates that we, you know, did back in 2019-2020 and have consistently updated are still okay. So we still think we're, if bids come back, the way they should come back and no way throws in some really high numbers at us will still be below our bonding threshold. So that's kind of the big one on Main Street. But I will open up if you all have any questions on some of these infrastructure items. So staying on the VTrans grants and the federal grants there, have you reached out to our legislative, our delegated legislators and senators? No, we haven't. We haven't done that. We've mainly stuck to the like the federal highway folks and the administrators. Because it does seem like it could have some significant equity impacts to our municipality actually by not being able to utilize funding that has previously been rewarded and that have new conditions applied. Seems like something our elected officials would be interested to know about. Yeah, I will, when Elaine gets back, I will run it through her to try to get in touch with some of those folks. Especially, yeah. And I think especially if you are aware of other municipalities that are experiencing something similar for such a small state, those federal funds have, as you know, huge impact on what capital projects are able to move forward. So it does seem like while the intent is there that the impact may be misguided from what they're hoping to achieve for a community like ours. Yeah, and I will say, you know, I'm not questioning the intention of the provisions. It's the issue of our bond vote was in, you know, obviously like well before these provisions came into place. So we couldn't factor in that additional funding need and schedule needs. So going forward, you know, we will we can factor that those things in. But yeah, it's really tough on a sort of a legacy project to add that kind of stipulation. Yeah, it feels like after the fact conditions on the funding that was awarded. Right. Which is really hard to hear. John, I don't know if, and maybe this is something that you should pass to Elaine as well, there are waivers that are available for bill, whatever, I forget the full name, but billed by America by America. There's a waiver process if your project is going to accrue significant expenses due to having to comply to that program. So that's something that possibly we could look into. Yeah, I will run that through the city manager. We did try a couple different avenues with federal highways and B trans to retain that funding. So going as far as like breaking out the scope into its own little project and you know, there's a lot there's a couple other like smaller items like you have to hire different inspectors to do the work and it became logistically like it just wasn't feasible. But we did we did try to pursue that. But maybe with the help of Elaine and getting some of our state folks involved, they can they can push that. And actually, so counselor judge, I should mention to I am more than happy to meet separately to go over any of these items to because these are probably new. So if you're interested, doors always open. Thanks. I have a question about just a couple little questions about some of the other items. The first one, I'm excited to see it having a more set process around 88 complaints. I was wondering about, maybe it doesn't come up as much, but if there are complaints that come up around like accessibility and hiring and accessibility and communications kind of how do those get rabbit? Yeah, so the the ADA, so any complaints related to ADA, whether it be communication, like not being able to access the website properly or as you mentioned, like any sort of hiring issues. So that can all go through this process. And then I am the public works director myself, I am the ADA coordinator because a lot of the requests that we do get are related to more infrastructure related things. So anything that comes in that's more administrative like that would get funneled to the appropriate staff person. So it does work basically for all any and all 88 type of issues. Okay, awesome. That's good to know. I just want to know those details too, especially thinking if there are likely here arrested complaints, you know, I wanted to direct them. I was wondering with the lease of the Louisiana Senior Center and you note that it runs through 2043. Would that lease, I mean, if there are potential other buyers of the property, they could ask to renegotiate that, but do we have to renegotiate it? Or is it, I guess, they would have to ask us to city council because we make land decisions and we could decline to make changes. Yeah, and I will say raise on screen right now. So this this memo was a collaboration. Some of these items obviously fall into Ray shop. Some of them fall into even our planning director's shop. So I think I think Ray and maybe Elaine may have added this language in on the memo. Yeah. Yeah. And Christine, you're you're spot on that, you know, if there were to be a renegotiate of renegotiation of that lease that would come back through council for approval. So you all would see that before anything changed. But the my understanding and and I would want to kind of up this through legal if we got to this point. But my understanding is that that lease will transfer with the property to the new owner. And so there's no there's no impetus impetus for us to change anything necessarily if the property transfers, but it might be an opportunity for us to revisit that lease with a new owner and decide from there what we want to do. Okay, thank you. That was kind of my understanding, but it's helpful to know just the little details too. I appreciate that. I wanted to go back to the the ADA transition plan. What is like that? The transition plans output? Like what are we what are we using that to do? So the transition plan is a living document that will outline to start because we can have the Chunning County regional planning folks do it at no cost. Mainly on the transportation assets. So what it will do is there's a couple components. One is inventory all of the applicable components. So for example, curb ramps, they have an ADA sort of component to it, like what the slope is. So they will inventory it, see if it is with meets ADA compliance or not. And if it does not, we will inventory it and say, okay, this needs to be repaired. The other components of the transition plan will say, okay, what are the priorities of the inventory items that need updating to meet ADA compliance? And then there's also sort of an estimate, like a cost estimate portion of it. So it's basically identifying like, okay, these things need fixed and when are you going to do it? How much is it going to cost? And ultimately, it will include all city ADA associated assets. So our facilities, for example, is the door push button working? Is it in compliance? Is the height correct? So that's why it's it will change quite a bit over the next few years, because hopefully we'll be continuing to add as we sort of build it out. Okay, that's exciting. I think this ties in nicely with our existing transportation master plan, which sort of says where the community sees the need for changes. Then here's the actual like, here's where you're legally required to do them. Right. Is there any update that you would be able to give on city energy goals and possible development initiatives? Yeah. And I think Councilor Oakleaf can probably help me with this. So we have begun talking about it at the commission level. And there's a few little projects here in there that actually Commissioner Oakleaf has been helpful with partnering with VIC. I think there's still work to be done in sort of an overall goal and plans and what our priorities are. But we're at this stage where we're looking for opportunities that come up and then just trying to tackle them. So for example, Councilor Oakleaf helped us with procuring a grant to switch out some LED light bulbs up at the Public Works Garage. We are currently looking at some potential grant opportunities for electric car charging, replacing the car charging stations in the garage. We are looking at right now, our treatment plan operators have been coordinating with GMP on signing up for a program that lets them look into our electrical system. And when there's those peak days, they can coordinate with us to say, okay, well, your blower is on the plan to take up a ton of electricity. Can you just turn them down for an hour while we ride out this peak? So there's little things here and there. But I think the policy side is maybe where we'll be looking to do some work in the future. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. I'd say from the Infrastructure Commission side of things, we're, so the master plan just kind of dives right into solar. And I think as a starting place, we want to see just a better assessment of where we are now, where we can save energy, you know, do demand side management to curtail loads during peak times of the day and of the year that happened both in the summer and the winter. That can have significant financial savings for the city. You know, we adopted energy efficiency day resolution for October last year. So hopefully we can have more communications and outreach around that for just the general public this coming year. But the group is really focused on because there's so much to talk about really just looking at like, okay, as as city operations go and city functions go, what can we do that's tangible improvement? What questions do we need to ask first? What is our baseline demand energy demand right now? And so, you know, John completed an equity assessment tool last year that kind of gives a roadmap for step-by-step improvements that can be made. And I think that kind of just touches on the wide array of conversations that we've had at the infrastructure level. And obviously the city staff are pretty overwhelmed with capital projects as it is. So I think we're really focused on these incremental improvements as much as we can. Yeah. One other thing that I just remember too is it is interesting. We're starting to see some more state funding come through related to energy projects. So there's also a facilities grant that's going to be coming out that we've been coordinating with regional planning on. And basically what they'll do is at least the least competitive portion of the grant that we think we'll be successful in is having a more robust energy audit of our facilities. So we've done sort of the walkthrough, like what's the low hanging through, like can we change light bulbs, that sort of thing. But I think it's either later this month or next month, they're going to be rolling out this like audit of facilities program. It also ties back to an earlier conversation. They will be looking at ADA upgrades as well as part of that because Elaine and I were on a call with RPC and we identified like we can look at some of these electrical issues, but there may also be ADA issues that kind of also go hand in hand with that. So that's going to be another, I think they'll be smaller grants, but I think they'll be worth it. We'll get some pretty good data out of it anyways. Are there any questions from members of the public? You can use the chat or raise hand feature. Any more questions from council? Any public questions over there? Okay. Thank you for the update. We have reached the end of the agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Charlie. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you.