 It's a seven o'clock guys, we're going to start and we're going to have you, I'm going to introduce you to a new member of our community that is not new to the city but new to us that we just met her last week. Her name is Lauren Ambersol. Okay. And she lives on Buell Street. And I'll let you introduce, have everybody else introduce themselves. Okay, awesome. Okay, so I can go first. So I am Keith was right I am new to the city to I moved to Burlington in November, or not November I don't know why I said that in May. I live on Buell Street so I am not a student. I am a fully working professional adult but I am excited to get more involved with Ward eight and especially knowing that we have, we are the student district but there are people other than students here so I'm very interested in that dynamic and getting to know everyone. And would you like to introduce yourself. Yes. Oh, you've got two choices. The press conference. My name is Anne Brenna, and I live on Bradley Street where on Buell Street you live. I live right at the end of hunger for so probably I'm in that big blue house at the corner of hunger for it in Buell. My back is close to Bradley. Okay, where that giant parking lot of all the cars are. Oh, right. I'm not in that house but the one next to it on hunger first. Right. Okay, got it. Good. Well, welcome to the neighborhood. Thank you. Yeah, definitely welcome. We're very nearby. Yes, yeah, I remember you're on hunger for it right Linda. Yeah. And how long have you been on the hunger for Linda for years. Yeah, and I also live on hunger for it. I live in the Brown House, all the way by College Street. Okay, I walk by your house on my way here then. Lots of well less flowers now lots of flowers in the driveway. Oh yes you're my I do love your house that I always admire your flowers when I walk by. I'll tell my husband I have nothing to do with them except say that they take up too much room but your house take the credit. And I kind of live catty corner for Maddie. Yeah, closer to you. Okay, okay, I can picture anyway. Welcome to the neighborhood and you know, it's nice to have like a long term non student resident, join us. And I'm going to make a motion that we that we nominate Lauren to be part of the steering committee for the war day NPA. I'll second. Okay, and I'll war date people are allowed to vote. So all those in favor say aye. Hi. Okay. Now we have a Scott Rogers here is that somebody that he works to see though okay. Okay. Is there any announcements. I need to announce that I did resign as award clerk a couple of weeks ago. I have several reasons. One was one of the ones that's been bothering me for a long time is how the elections are growing in the dorms and they don't seem to be accessible to my students. And then of course my leg. I had it in the cast I said okay good reason. I will, I have a political reason I have a physical reason so I've resigned my neighbor across the street john Alexander who's a young father and a lawyer, he's been on my street for many years, got two children. He. I didn't tell him all the work it was but he, he volunteered to do it. And I've given him the list of all people who've helped me in the past, did you get a letter yet from him. I did not get a lot, but you probably be emailing you. Okay, he will be doing the, the election in November and then the special election in December for our district city counselor. Is he going to need if you're Keith if you're not going to need the word clerk is, is, will there have to be an interim ward clerk until we have the election in March. Okay. So. Okay. Yeah, thank you. Okay. We're going to have a short meeting today so that because we know you're very busy. And we're going to ask you to introduce your speaker, and we will continue on this, we feel that you're, you're really engaged in what you're doing and we don't want to take up a lot of your time. But we have people here that need this information. Okay, so I'll let you do the introductions. Yeah. Okay, and I'm assuming that Sasha is coming online. Yeah. And what would you say, Sasha, that Georgia. Okay. And also Kathy will she be online. She's here. Okay. Okay, so should we wait a bit or. Yeah. Okay. Okay, okay. No, give us an introduction. We need this. This guy needs. I mean, we need to have, yeah, what's that. Absolutely, David. You know, we're organized in morning review, but we're organized. And I don't want to show my bias about nation. You know, I want, I want Claire the chairman of the school board who is a hardworking woman. And I want her to introduce her, her staff. And I'll probably belt for every word she says. Great. Hi. Okay, we'll start because it's seven. Good evening. My name is Claire wool. I am a school board chair, the Burlington school board. I've been fortunate to be working in this capacity for the past five years and a parent of three, two graduates of BHS through the school system and one a senior at BHS. I'm very happy and appreciative of the organizing efforts of ward eight to be here tonight and speak to you. This is a critical time for the school district. We have worked tirelessly, along with Keith a former school board member in my past 10 years in addressing the needs of this high school. So before PCBs were even discovered. The high school was determined by the community 70% of 72% in 2018 to pass a bond for renovation of this high school. Number one, it's not ADA accessible and to that it was a very inefficient for a number of reasons and was costing the taxpayers a lot of money, educational dollars that we wanted to put back into the school time. We returned that $70 million bond we returned 66 million we used 4 million of that bond for site exploration and conditions to get us where we are so that money was not wasted, we would have spent that money in the efforts that we had to put forth today. So I want to be really clear that bond amount was returned the 66 million and we started over with this project and and purposing. Currently, our high school is supported in downtown Macy's it is a temporary lease it costs us a million dollars a year and educational dollars, and we are to be vacating that lease as of 2025. It's fortunate enough to give us $3.5 million to outfit the department store into a high school but it clearly comes it up here so yeah, but it is clearly a department old department store and as a band aid so here we are now coming to taxpayers for $165 million bond. We are looking for taxpayer support because this is a need, not a want, and our need is to be able to open our doors in 2025 for the future students of BHS. We have gone through a very engaged process with the public on the location we own the city, it's an amazing site, and the tax implications are great, and we want to communicate out to ward eight residents that this is our call to mobilize as a city. All of us Berlin Tonians should be alarmed and concerned and joining us in the efforts to address the governor and our federal delegation Bernie's hometown high school and Senator Leahy, as well as Congressman Welsh. There are dollars earmarked at the state level there are $32 million for PCB remediation and addressing schools that have issues with PCBs were first in line for that money, we're the only school in the state that's been shut down by per order of the health department state toxicologist and we also know that the governor in a state of the state address address career technology education and we're looking for close to $20 million in support for the BTC portion of our campus which half of our Burlington high school students attend along with nine other ascending schools. So, I have talked rapid rapid fire, but I am here with Commissioner all well and executive director Nathan Library our financial director for the district to answer questions and also go through the presentation that our school board school leadership has present has created and presented to other MPAs and throughout the city counselors and the mayor and throughout the city organizations and and really the school district cannot campaign for the vote. It's up to the school board members and citizens for the passage of this bond and so it comes your meeting comes at a timely hour because ballots were mailed and will be received by everyone but by October 1. And that's why that was my introduction long winded as it is but thank you, and I am going to refuse myself and give Kathy the seat because this is your your ward and your your ward with Saja representing and clear just before you go if people want to get involved if they want to get your signs they want to help with the kind of effort around organization. Where do they go and do they reach out to If you go on the BSD website, all of our emails are there and phone numbers cell phone numbers or home numbers that still exists. And so we are looking for volunteers. We don't want it to just be the school board and we have a long list of citizens that are committed to supporting us and we'd love you to join us over the next five weeks and speak to your friends and neighbors so reach out to me. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Okay, thanks for putting the presentation up. Again, my name is Nathan Lavery. I'm the Burlington School District's Executive Director of Finance and Operations. Thanks for having us tonight. We're excited to give you a brief presentation about the project and certainly will leave plenty of time for questions. So we want to begin by just providing a video to give people a sense of what this school could look like so I'm just going to pause and let the video run here. Great, thank you. There is sound associated with that video if you're watching online by the way that was coming through on the tape or not so brief history of how we got here. Obviously Commissioner Will was provided a little bit of background here but folks, there is some extra information here. The re-envisioning project, I want to just reiterate the point that she made that voters might remember the $70 million that was passed and that was great but we spent just a tiny fraction of that money. And before we discovered the presence of PCBs that ultimately resulted in the need to close the high school. So just to kind of be really explicit about it, the bond that we have on the ballot this November is not in addition to that $70 million but for $4 million, the rest of that $70 million has not been spent and has been returned. That's been a common question we want to make sure that folks are clear on that. After discovering that having the PCBs specifically having to shut down the school we were able to relocate students to a temporary home in Macy's which has been great, but it is a temporary home and it's important to everyone involved in the school district I believe that we find a permanent home for our students in a new high school. There's a brief timeline. The design that we have that we've put forward and that you can see on the screen is not the only idea. We actually had a design team of architects come up with multiple options. They were reviewed not only by our school board but we had staff and community input in that process. Ultimately the board elected what was at the time option C. One of the things to understand about option C is that it happened to be the least expensive of the design options, although that wasn't the primary reason for selecting it. I think the way the site was situated, the building in this location made the most sense. It was a compact building. It offered a campus feel while at the same time making good use of the surrounding landscape and offering connections to the outdoors. So option C was selected. We move forward. We've also engaged Leonine public affairs to support our efforts to draw down additional state and federal funds to help pay for this project. But that is a painstaking process and our students can't wait for that to play out before we actually continue the process of getting firms engaged to build the school. Hence our ultimate request that is on the ballot for $165 million. That would give us enough money in combination with funds that we've already identified and then I'll speak to further. That would give us enough money to complete the project on our timeline which is to have the building open in August of 2025. Hopefully we'll cover just a few images of the site itself beginning here. You could see the high school, the new high school and technical center will be located completely north of Institute Road. It will to some extent overlap some of the existing buildings, but many of those buildings kind of go up the hill. If you can think kind of vertically on the slide that we're looking at here. This school is the alignment is kind of different on the site and one of the features is that you can see quite obviously is that the parking has been shifted up the hill and behind the school. Those familiar with the current site know that the parking is kind of like the first thing you see when you approach that site there's a sea of payment and cars. Now the parking will be located behind the building and it will be much more of a kind of have much more curb appeal I think in terms of the way it looks. But some other features that you can see on here on the right side of the screen there's a courtyard that offers additional natural light into the building. Natural light something that we heard very much from students in particular and staff as well it was important to incorporate into the design. So there's a lot of surface area to bring in natural light and there's even a courtyard to help enhance that. There's also some places for outdoor classrooms where that are that are close by the campus and again connections to the arms force and the other kind of outdoor elements. So there's kind of a much more compact design of this building than the current high school which is a series of buildings that are connected by breezeways. One of the major advantages of that is that it's going to be a much more secure building from a safety standpoint as well as a much more efficient building from an energy standpoint. Next slide please. So this is looking across Institute Road. You can see kind of on the right side of the screen a large kind of glass area that's that's going to be facing North Avenue. So again you kind of have a nice presence on North Avenue that is a few stories high from that direction. And then as you can kind of see looking on the length of the building there's setbacks so that the building doesn't have a huge imposing feel even though it goes up. It goes up high as it kind of steps back it has a kind of more human scale when you're trying to at the ground level. Next slide please. This is the North entrance. So as you saw kind of from the video there's both a South entrance and a North entrance into the high school in the technical center. That is important both for accessibility. There's parking again on the north side there's a loop for bus drop off on the south side and but also both of these entrances feed into what we will see is a large common area in the in the middle, what we're going to see in the comments. So there's two ways to access that and that's important as well because as folks familiar with the site know it is on a hillside it slopes. So we want to make sure that it's easy to get to the entrances, whether you're coming from the north or the south. Here's just a conceptual classroom here the features that we really want to emphasize again is the abundance of natural light which is a feature of the design overall. Another feature that's not so much a feature of the design but of how we intend to use it you can see that this image features tables that have wheels on it and kind of other opportunities for seating. This is not just a row of wooden desks that are almost immovable in the room without a tremendous difficulty the idea is to create flexible space, both for the use, use when that even a traditional classroom setting, but also so that the rooms can easily be moved to other uses throughout the day. This is a rendering of the student commons again as I mentioned their entrances on the north and south side are on different are different elevations. So you can see obviously the commons is a bright open airy space. One of the things that we heard from students repeatedly and the design teams really look to incorporate into the design is to afford students with opportunities to gather together that are outside of the classroom, whether that's gathering together to do work or just to relax, have a little snack whatever it might be. We wanted to make sure that that was a feature of the design because that was something that students said was really missing from our current high school. So this student commons is an attempt to provide some of those spaces while connecting the whole building it's off the student commons you'll see on some other slides there's access to auditorium gymnasium and so forth. Here's a rendering of the auditorium. It'll be 750 seats with a balcony. One of the advantages of that is it allows us to offer that additional seating in the balcony without needing additional floor space. Again, we're doing everything we can to keep this project as affordable to the community as possible. So that was a way to ensure that we had adequate capacity in the auditorium, while also reducing ultimately the cost of the building by reducing the floor space. And here's a shot of the learning center or what has traditionally been called the library in many high schools again feature here abundance of natural light a space that is open and flexible and can can accommodate different types of furniture as really with the hope ultimately that the school which you know is going to be with us for generations is something that can adapt to the changing instructional environment that you know only some of which we can anticipate. When it comes to the cost which is obviously a major consideration in any construction project. We have projected that it will increase taxes in Berlin, and we've estimated at the top end about 15 and a half percent. That comes with a significant need really a few significant caveats that we're going to talk about one is our commitment to continue to raise money to reduce the amount of total money we have to borrow, meaning that even if the school district is authorized to borrow $165 million. If we are able and we believe we will be successful, but if we're able to bring in additional funds to support the project, and we therefore don't need to borrow $165 million, that's going to reduce the amount of money that we have to repay it's going to reduce our debt service. And ultimately that means that the tax impacts won't be as high. We also know that there are changes to the state's funding formula related to how pupils are counted. And while that efforts going to allow us to make some important investments in serving some of our neediest students, it's also likely to mitigate to some extent the projected tax rate increase. One other element of the potential borrowing associated with the project and the resulting impact on taxes that I think is really important to highlight is that it's not all going to happen at once. We are likely to borrow funds over a period of probably three, possibly even four years to build the project. Beginning earlier in the process with the money, for example, that would be borrowed to help clean up the existing site, remove the old buildings that are there, do it properly because again some of those buildings have various contaminants. The most obvious one that's in every building is our PCBs, but there's other things we need to be careful with when we're cleaning it up. So that's going to be the first major phase of the project, and we'll be borrowing some money for that before we transition into constructing the new school. So as this chart shows, the borrowing is phased in and therefore the resulting impact on our budget and taxes is also something that accumulates over time. It doesn't just hit people all in the first year. We've published a chart and if it's difficult to read the slides available on our website is just an easy way for people who pay their education taxes solely based on the value of their house site. To kind of quickly reference approximately what the impact will be in potentially in their situation. Again, this assumes fully bonding for $165 million. So there's a real possibility that's less than that, but in the interest of full transparency, we thought we should provide the community with that kind of maximum case scenario. And then we have a couple of charts and they're also in the handouts that attempt to provide people with some sense of what the impact would be if you are someone who qualifies for the education credit, the income based education credit. So then this chart is intended for people to kind of find their income level across the top find their home value, kind of on the left side there, and where those two points intersect is the estimated annual impact on taxes. This is the same version of that chart, but this one shows the monthly impact again it's a kind of multiple accesses here so we had to do two charts but it's the same type of annual and monthly in this case information. Okay, so I've mentioned a couple times already the district's efforts to reduce the burden on taxpayers to, and I wanted to talk about some of the progress we've already made. So, already the district has identified opportunities to put substantial money toward the project that doesn't need to come from new borrowing and therefore new taxes. Part of that is funds that we have already saved or anticipate we'll be able to manage through careful stewardship of our own budget, we expect to be able to contribute at least $5 million for that. That doesn't mean that we're increasing the budget, and then just collecting that money rather it means even without increasing the budget we think that through efficiencies and careful management of our financial resources over a period of a few years we'll be able to generate those funds we've already identified in actual savings 1.5 million, and we expect to be able to make further dent in that soon. Another major source is $10 million of funding from the elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds, those were covert relief funds. We have received major influx of money from that federal legislation, and we're committed to putting $10 million either directly or indirectly toward offsetting the cost of the building. Additionally, we've reallocated $10 million from our existing capital plan to support the high school that plan already had some money in it to support the high school, but we further shifted resources toward the high school because it is such a high priority. Additionally, not only have we identified funds to help pay for the cost of the project. On the other hand, we've also looked at opportunities to reduce the cost of the project and one of the major decisions that the board made was to relocate a portion of the Burlington Technical Center program permanently to the airport. One of the ways that we're able to afford doing that is we were the recipient of a major $10 million federal influx of funds secured through the work of Senator Leahy and his team, as well as our aviation program staff, Moses daily in addition to the money that we've identified to help pay for the cost of the building. We've also looked for ways to reduce the cost of the building. We're really excited about the potential partnership with the airport and with some of the firms at the airport, particular beta technologies. So we're really excited about what the opportunities are there for our students in the future and having the tech center be located primarily at a combination of the airport Institute Road will certainly be a lot better from a student experience than what we have right now, which is satellite locations for the tech center. All over the place because again that was another program that was displaced by the need to close the Institute Road campus. We're continuing to work to identify additional federal and state dollars. There are a lot of programs as you can imagine that are out there, federal and state that are associated with things like the storm water that we might be treatments that we might be putting on the site other environmental investments, energy efficiency. We plan to partner with Burlington Electric Department to identify what opportunities there are to create incentives and have an even more efficient building. That's not only, you know, the opportunity to reduce our costs up front in working with Burlington Electric and drawing down incentives, but obviously over the long run a more efficient building is going to be cheaper for us to operate a cheaper building means lower taxes at the end of the day. So there's a lot of effort to go in there, but that is a painstaking process and there's a long way to go before we can bank on on any of that money. We've also starting an effort to fundraise through donations in a kind of more traditional fundraising program. We're partnering with the burning Burlington students Foundation in an effort to receive donations. We've already kind of got off to a good start there, but certainly that's an opportunity for folks who are interested in giving directly to the project to do so. So in short, we are committed to raising more funds for the project, even if the bond passes and even after that point, we're going to continue that effort. We know that's a multi-year effort and we're confident that we can make a real impact on bringing down that cost of the project to voters. So we are kind of in the point in our timeline here where the next major milestone is going to be the bond vote that culminates on November 8th. If that passes, we would expect demolition of the old site to begin possibly as early as December, more likely January, February, but clearly over the winter. The goal being to have the demolition completed over the winter so that as the weather warms up in the ground thaws, we can actually begin construction of the new high school. And again, the kind of move in date for that is August 2025. So it's going to be a multi-year project, but one that we are confident if we can stick to the schedule that we'll be able to meet that deadline. And that's I think it for the presentation. So we'll stop there. And if there are questions from the room or people attending virtually, we're happy to answer them. One of the major selling points of the $70 million bond was better security, better energy use, efficiency, accessibility, and fire, water, I guess coming out of the ceiling or whatever that's called. I assume that's all taken care of here. We have up to date. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, you know, that's one of the real advantages of building new, you know, in that renovation project, we were trying to achieve all those goals within a framework with the bones, so to speak, of a building that really wasn't designed to do many of those things very well, certainly not not very accessible building, not very energy efficient building those those breezeways and those ramps, you know, kind of made both of those things difficult to achieve. So this building, almost inherently because of its more compact design is going to be more energy efficient. There's also going to be multiple elevators we're still on a hillside we still have a multiple story building, but they've put all the architects for the life and how making sure that the building is accessible from both again the north and south side that you're never too far from an elevator, so that if you need to use the elevator you can easily move between floors, and they've also thought about just general generally how the circulation will work in the building so that students can easily get to from one class to another and and the floor plan kind of has blocks of classrooms that are that are continuous and should make that a lot, a lot more easy. It's obviously going to have the be up to date with all the fire codes and all the kind of standard elements of that but I think security will also be greatly improved both in terms of the types of features such as having blocks and kind of electrical locks that we can engage but also just having a design that allows for supervision of the entrances and frankly fewer entrances than we have at the old school which has numerous entrances. And then the again the design of this building being much more compact will dramatically improve the kind of sight lines and the visibility around the building if you can think of the old campus and how broken up it is. It's going to be very easy to kind of like duck and dive between buildings and kind of, you know, be difficult to identify who who's out there and where this building is going to be much easier to surveil if you will. And that should help as well. And also it should be. I mean, the plan is to have it net zero or as close to that as we can get. That's a great, great point, Kathy. It will be net zero ready. So it's possible that it will even be net zero when it opens but if not it'll be net zero ready so that as the technology improves. It could truly be a net zero building there is substantial space on the roof of the building already identified for solar and we're working with a firm in Vermont that we could partner with to install solar on the building as well. So the school building plus parking going to be the same or is it is a parking area expanded. That's a good question. See if I can recall the exact difference here. In my head, I'm not sure what the parking footprint is you recall Kathy are we going to remember a discussion that it was close to the same number of parking places because if I remember rightly, the student parking which is across the street where that states doesn't the student parking stays the chain. I'm trying to remember how many how many stalls there are it's there's not a substantial difference in parking for sure. But there are we have the there are certain standards that we have to build build to with respect to parking. I can definitely look up the exact difference between between what we have now and what what it's not significantly different. It's not significantly different. No, no, no, I think what it will be significantly different with respect to parking is really the bike parking. There's going to be substantially more bike parking available that there is the current building but there's not going to be substantially more vehicular parking. I'd have to get the exact counts to check that it's been a while since I looked at those numbers. And you mentioned that you're trying to leverage for additional funding to reduce that 165 million. Over what period of time will that number be changeable? Good question. So the way that the borrowing will work, as I said, it'll kind of be phased in. So at a minimum, we can obviously during those first few years, we can easily just not borrow as much money if we have more. If we find ourselves in a position where we have at any point whenever we get through and we're finished borrowing, if we then subsequently receive an award, for example, from some state program or something of that nature, we will be able to use the funds potentially, if not directly on the project to set them aside in a debt service fund that will allow us to then pay it out against the debt service. So there's a possibility that even funds received after the project is completed could help reduce the tax burden. But the primary goal and the hope would be that we would be able to get some significant funding over the next few years so that we wouldn't have to borrow the money at all in the first place. And because again, we're phasing it in, even if we begin, let's say as the chart showed, and borrow $30 million to begin the demolition abatement, perhaps that next year instead of borrowing, you know, $65 million or $70 million, we would need to borrow maybe only $60 million. And so we could make that determination. And not to get too technical, but another opportunity to kind of extend that is that we are not necessarily going to, when we borrow that money the first time, we're not necessarily going to immediately use a 20 or 30 year bond. We may do what's called a bond anticipation note in consultation with the city, which essentially means you borrow the money for one year at the end of that one year term, that's the bond anticipation, you then convert it to a long term bond. That just extends the period of time we have to kind of phase in the borrowing and allows us to adapt to the changing financial situation. So if we get a bond anticipation note for let's say $30 million, and then a year later when we need to convert that to an actual bond, if we've raised additional other funds, the bond that we converted into might not be 30 million, it might be, let's say 25 million. So there are some opportunities there and we'll work closely with the city to make sure that we minimize or really do everything we can with the funding we have to minimize the cost of that borrowing, whether it's considering the term of the bond, how much we borrow, what other sources we've brought in. There's going to be a lot of, between now and 2025, I think there's going to be a lot of changes in the borrowing conditions in the world and we're going to have to keep a close eye on that and I think we can take advantage of that to kind of again keep the costs as manageable to our community as possible. I don't think there's even any steps to the best of your ability kind of future proofing. So, in, you know, leaving room for potential new construction and avoiding a situation like PCBs I know sometimes that can't be predicted, but I'm just curious if that was part of the projections as well. Great, great question was you can imagine the design team is very intent on a design that uses material building materials that are not known to have any significant environmental risk that would obviously be, you know, huge mistake and and so to the extent that there is knowledge of that, you know, we're going to be very very careful about that but you asked about the potential to kind of expand the building so if you go back and look at the kind of overhead view of the site. There is space if you're looking at the screen kind of between where the between North Avenue and the, and the East end of the building that is specifically identified as a possible site of future expansion. And specifically that that's also the wing where most of the classrooms are. So it's a natural place to put additional classrooms if they're if they're needed. The other thing to understand about any building like this is it's designed to with an anticipated enrollment figure in mind. We made sure that that anticipated enrollment figure isn't today's enrollment. We had a reasonable look at how many students have been at that high school at different times in its history we didn't build to accommodate the absolute maximum, either because that hasn't. We haven't been at that high of a level and in many years so we tried to do a reasonable estimate for what they call the design enrollment so there is some capacity there and even that design enrollment. So in terms of actual capacity you can squeeze more seats in the classroom in many cases and so forth so in terms of kind of the possibility of growth, we both have expansion opportunities but we will have some room in that building without immediately needing to build an expansion I don't want to suggest that that's like, you know the very first thing will happen if a few more housing units go up that that won't be immediately necessary in any any scenario. So in the sense that your question may also imply like kind of other features of the building I mean we're trying to build the spaces flexibly as we can to allow for whatever those changes are that we can't anticipate very reasonably. And also trying to again make sure that the building from an efficiency standpoint is equipped with the tools to generate its own energy so that as solar technology and so forth becomes more efficient we can take advantage of it. Did Linda or Kathy have any or Maddie have any questions. So. Okay Linda. So I had a lot. So. I watched the tape of the Ward 6 MPI meeting where the presentation was given and at that meeting. There was a discussion of what the difference between net zero ready and net zero. And I think it was kind of thrown out as a completely estimate. It's another $30 million to become move from net zero ready to net zero. Can you clarify that for me and whether that would involve more taxes. Sure. So, yeah, so the first answer is to kind of maybe your your main point. I don't think we have a concrete estimate on that but there is no plan to increase taxes to make the bill to kind of guarantee the building is net zero so I just want to like say that and I'll come back to it but kind of that's probably your, you know the main question there. So, just, I won't go into detail on this because I'm not an expert either but I'll give you my high level understanding. The idea of net zero in a building like this would mean that the site itself can create enough energy to completely meet its demand for energy right so all the lights all the computers all of the things that are taking energy in the building that that energy would be met by things like the solar panels current solar technology combined with the amount of roof space we have is not sufficient to generate enough energy based on how much energy we expect the building to require. Those are inherently estimates will you know once people start using the building will have more, you know, more evidence of that but the point is, we don't think that there will be able to be enough solar on that roof to be truly net zero, given today's solar technology. There's the, when I say it's going to be net zero ready it means that the building will have the equipment and the infrastructure in place such that if we could generate more energy on that site, which that could power the building then we would be able to achieve net zero. One possible way to do that, for example, would be to put up a whole lot more solar on other places at the 52 Institute Road Campus. However, right now that would involve either putting a lot of solar panels up over our green space if there is enough of that, which would, you know, really eliminate a lot of the green space that that I think is important to our students and, and kind of the fuel of the campus. Maybe the least kind of invasive way if you will to add extra solar would be to put it on canopies that cover the parking. But as you can imagine, building big steel structures over all that parking is also very expensive. And that's not in the plan right now. Doing that would add a lot more cost and we are not planning to do that at a cost of the taxpayers. There is a possibility that we could achieve something like that through contractual agreement with some of these firms where whereby essentially they pay the upfront cost of installing that extra solar. And in effect, the way we repay them is that we don't get the full benefit of that the savings that to our electric bill that that solar power generates. So if you can think of it it's kind of like they say hey if you'll, if you will give us some of the savings that you get from this extra solar will give you the money upfront to build it. So we're going to have those conversations, even if that's not part of the design or the feature of the site when the school opens. There's still a possibility that it could come online in the future and more generally, as solar technology improves, and the solar panels are more efficient and able to capture more energy from the sun in a smaller amount of square footage. It may become the case that the solar panels as they get upgraded on the roof are sufficient to generate all the power that the building needs. So that's kind of what we're talking about in terms of the building being net zero ready, but not necessarily net zero on day one. We don't anticipate and don't have any plans to increase the cost of the project to kind of force it into a net zero state. We're just going to design it as efficiently as we can get as close as we possibly can, and, and operate within the plan to budget. I have another question when it's my turn again. We've got we're actually use geothermal is going to be a major feature of that we've done testing on the site, and they drill these test wells again I'm not a technical expert in this but they go way down they have to find a certain differential in the temperature and it looks like that the site is very promising for for geothermal so that's going to be a major, the major kind of tool for heating and cooling the building. Yes, that is part of the cost. Correct. Linda. I have a question. It's a little bit different subject here. It has to do with the timeline and the cost. So I know that, you know, we need the high school yesterday, but still getting it done by 2025 seems like it might be kind of aggressive. Everything I've heard it's very hard to find people to work. And I'm just wondering how you're considering the costs and the timeline and the, the, whether or not you'll be able to find enough people to do the work. You're absolutely right that it is an aggressive schedule. Again, we consulted with with our design team as well as construction firms. They agreed that it was both an aggressive schedule and achievable one. In fact, their belief is that the, the most risk in terms of schedule risk for the project is actually more in the design phase that we're in right now. And that if we can complete the design in time to bid out the project to construction firms on our current schedule that we are that we should be able to meet it. But we've also seen kind of unprecedented changes in the labor market generally. And so that you're, there's no doubt that there's always a risk there. And you know, we hope that that doesn't, doesn't materialize. I should note that the budget includes some escalation factors, some, some contingency costs, if you will, anticipating costs going up over time. So we have, we've kind of played it safe in the budgeting for the project. But at the end of the day, we think it's achievable, but you're absolutely right that there's, you know, there is risk there in terms of ensuring that there's a sufficient workforce to do the work. I would note that it's common in a project of this size and scope. Not all of that labor is going to be coming locally like they're the construction manager that we've hired waiting Turner is part of a national network so they have access to to folks all over the country who could potentially work on the project. And there's a plan B for if it's not done on time. I wouldn't say there's a plan B in a big picture sense, but we are going to be discussing the possibility of extending our lease at Macy's if we need a little bit of extra time to finish the project. Thank you. Thank you. We want to be respectful of your time. We said till 8 at 745. It is just a little bit of some 52 Kathy I didn't want to ignore you. Thank Kathy Orwell is our district school commissioner, and we appreciate your being here. And thank you for both coming tonight. And I just wanted to say to people that we also have postcards as well as yard signs, and postcards we hope people will take, and you can call me or any of the board members to get some of these to send out to friends and neighbors, asking them to please vote yes on the school on the PHS bond. And we also have yard signs here and we will have them also in, you know, I'll have them at my house or I could bring them by anyone's house if they needed one and stick in the yard. Well, thank you very much for coming in. Thank you all for coming. This is our second board a NPA and we appreciate your tendons. Good night.