 So we will get ready, we will call it to order. I know we will do public forum. Give me one second. I'm just going to quiet these guys down. Great. So we will have public forum before you go. I see one number. My request was that be postponed until everybody was present. OK, I don't know that we'll get more people, but OK. So we will then go forward with the airport team to do their presentation. Can I make one statement? You did ask if the mayor asked if June 3rd was possible for a board of finance to continue the budget conversation. So just so you know, there may be a meeting on two weeks, well, not next Monday, but the Monday after the budget, if you wanted to speak to the board of finance, and that's who you're looking for. OK, is this our clicker? Is this OK? All right, thank you. Anyways, thank you. I just wanted to make sure you knew. Thank you. OK, I appreciate it. Take it away. So thank you for giving us the time tonight to talk about our budget. We've had a very good year since we were here last. And we've had lots of successes. We've had a huge increase of implements. And pretty much every goal that we achieved and we exceeded it in many ways. We also took care of a lot of deferred maintenance and a lot of work that hasn't been done in years. So we'll talk about that today, Nick and Marie. But I encourage you to ask questions. And as always, I encourage you to come out and visit and see it for yourself. Marie? Hi. So our first slide here, we want to give you a good idea of the airport, Burlington Airport at a glance. Most of you have been there, been through it. We invite any of you to come and tour it if you haven't had an opportunity to do that and see it behind the scenes. So we are for this area, for Northern New York, for Vermont, even for Eastern Quebec. And even as far as in New Hampshire, we are the main travel commercial center. People come here because of the services that we offer. And that's recognized. We just had a meeting with Moody's. And they recognize that we are a major hub for the economic driver for how people get to and from here and how we get places. And as Jean mentioned, our implements and the number of people coming to the airport has increased significantly. We'll talk about that as we go through. Our budget is divided. We group it by the kinds of things that we do. So administration, our terminal, our airfield, that's where the runways and aprons are, industrial park and other buildings. So when you're looking at our budget, you're going to notice we've got a section for each of those things. And we have revenues and expenses under there, just in case you ever have any questions. We're very fortunate in the amount of money that we are receiving from the FAA. The tremendous amount of reconstruction, both in our aprons and in our runways is we have been so fortunate in the large amounts that we get from the FAA each year. We manage our products really well, but it keeps this airport refreshed, renewed and our area safe, which is so important for what we do. And part of what Marie's saying is we're on roughly a 25-year schedule that everything has to be turned over. And we are right on schedule to bringing the airport on the surfaces outside, up to date. So we, like Marie says, very fortunate to get the federal funds to do the work that we needed to do. So we're in great shape. I've anticipated about three years. We'll be pretty much where we need to be to be ahead of that curve. To put it in context, we're managing approximately $50 million worth of federally-granted projects. This $27 million that you see on the slide here is in anticipation of the next fiscal year. This is our largest grant application year that we've had in the history of the airport, which is related to a parallel taxiway, which again is the first in its history of the airport. And one thing I want to say is you'll run into this. I know you've run into it with City Health Park and other projects, but this project in particular was a $17 million Stantec project that ended up coming in at $27 million. So we had to have several conversations with the FAA, but it's rampant throughout New England. These excessive costs that we were not anticipating. This is how we make improvements to our runway, how we can take on and keep up the level of service and airlines and make all of these things. If you happen to be coming through the airport, either you're flying or you're picking anybody up, you're going to notice if you're on the walkway from the north side of the parking lot and you're walking over, you're going to see a tremendous project right there happening on the apron. So we have a lot of construction that is going on at the airport all the time. We also, oh, not yet. Thank you. Thank you, Rich. He's ready for it. He's ready. He's ready. I love you. I tell you too. Way to keep the movie moving. Keep it along, Rich. I know we're on slide three, Mr. Simpson. Yeah, we're good. We're fighting. Yeah. We're good. We got cover pages in there. We're good. I meant a presentation. So we have number seats that the airlines are offering are up 22% this year. It is tremendous. What that means is we've got bigger planes, we've got more routes that are coming in and we'll talk some more about that. So tremendous opportunity for anybody who wants to fly to or from Burlington is there. And we're, again, we're looking to surpass our best numbers in about 10 years on a plane passenger. So we're pretty excited about that. Thanks. So just a broad overview on, you can go to five, I think, yeah, on all of our services at the airport. Of course, you recognize many of them as being longtime partners of the airport Delta United JetBlue American. But we've added service to each one of those airlines throughout the last year. Delta offering new service to JFK, which is a healthy competition with our service already happening with JetBlue Airlines. Again, that reduces airline ticket prices. And one of the reasons that we have additional passengers coming in and out of Burlington, United Airlines offers what's called mainline service to Chicago, which are those larger aircraft. Typically an average regional aircraft has around 70 to 80 seats on a plane. Mainline has over 100 to 200 seats on a plane. They also are offering in two weeks nonstop service to Denver International Airport starting on June 8th. American also added new service to Chicago last year. They're gonna pick that service up again this summer. So again, healthy competition with the United Airlines. And then of course our newest airline, which is Frontier currently flying to Denver, which will be a year round service. Orlando just finished their seasonal service for the first season. It was extremely successful. They're gonna bring it back in the fall and they're gonna keep that annual too. So they'll offer both of those service all year round out of Burlington. And just kind of by the numbers here on the side, fiscal year 19 is already, you know, we're less just over a month away from ending. We're already ending very strong. So we're up 62,000 additional implements. That's outbound passengers already. This is the highest third quarter since third quarter FY09. So since in a decade, highest third quarter. And we're total passengers again taking that 62,000 implements multiple by two. That's in and out passengers, over 130,000 additional passengers this year, over last year. That's about almost a 15%, 14.29%. This is by the way the perfect recipe for an airport like ours. You want your airlines competing against each other so that your customer gets the best possible price. And then when you have the ability to get like a Frontier or low cost, it brings that down another tier. So it really is just what Burlington needed. It is when you see other airports in the region and why they're succeeding, that is what brings them to that success. It's those low cost carriers as well as the main airlines competing actively against each other. So we have 51 employees. We've gone through a few reorgs. Last year we went through with our aciders. We were very successful. It was really just taking care of the people who work for us and they are now employees of the city. They're getting city benefits. It's a real win-win. It's something that needed to be done. It was a transition from the past. It was a cleanup that we needed to do and we've done it. This year, I will be back this next year to talk to you about salaries. I hope to review all salaries this year of the airport, except probably the director because I'm a Merrill appointee, but I believe all others should be evaluated and we should be paying our employees that of what the industry pays employees. My biggest concern is we have absolutely amazing employees, but the industry will eat them, take them away from us and we need to protect our employees. We need to take our employees, take good care of our employees. So I will be coming back to you with some sort of a survey representing what I consider to be fair compensation for an airport our size. So expect to have some discussions about it and I hope to give you more information so that if there is a move that's needed, we'll be making it and we will be budgeting for that as well. We wanted to share what our key goals are for the upcoming year. Safety and security are always at the forefront of our mind with everything that we do. We live in a world and an industry that that is absolutely essential to make our customer experience vibrant and enjoyable and you don't always notice that it's going on, but it's going on. We've spent a lot of money in upgrading technology, a lot of money in upgrading cameras and other security things that all goes on behind the scene and we're always sort of thinking about that and improving lighting in areas or garage or even around the terminal and things like that. The second item we have on there is our debt coverage score. It's super important for the airport to stay healthy and remain healthy. It wasn't all that long ago, back in 2010, 2011 that the airport ran it some financial trouble and this has been an absolute forefront of Gene's leadership here and the city's leadership and the mayor's objective is to make sure that the airport remains healthy and viable for not only for today, but for the future and future generations. The Air Service Development and Mark. Very quick on that too. And it's spelled out in there as well, but the airline agreement that we have signed as of two fiscal years ago is paramount to that because of that 1.5, our bond covenant is 1.25, but our airline agreement maintains that 1.5 debt service coverage ratio. So that's going to be paramount with those relationships that we have in the previous slides continuing forward as well. Of course, another key goal is the Air Service Development and of course the marketing of the airport throughout the region. That's always going to be our top priority, like Gene just said. It's so important to maintain the diversity of airlines that we have today. Manchester, New Hampshire is a great example of what's called in the industry the Southwest Effect where one airline comes in and kind of takes over the market and then pulls out of the airport altogether. And that's something that we don't see right now because of the diverse airlines that we have in play and will continue to have in play and will continue to help market and expand those services. Yeah, it's not a good time to get insecure. You know, when you're negotiating with the airlines, you need to be tough and you need to negotiate your position and make sure that you're not putting yourself or giving away your tomorrow for today. So we will always be as long as it's the right thing to do. We'll be diverse in our airline folks that we deal with. And then the last two items we have on there are reserves. It's really important again for the financial health of the airport. We've increased our cash. I'll say all checking account balances from very, very little, we'll say one day cash on hand nine years ago and we have been able to really grow that to a healthy, reasonable to manage all of the things that we do here at the airport. And of course, asset management. What does that mean? It means we have a lot of infrastructure. Infrastructure could be from runways and aprons and our buildings and our garage and our roadways and parking lots and all of these things contribute. We manage them, we don't want to ignore them. We don't want to come to you and say we have a problem with this. So we spent a lot of money. As we've been so successful these last few years and our revenues have been higher than what we were forecasting due to more people, more traffic, we have taken that and we have reinvested. We've been very, very active about having lists and being able to take that and upgrade those things like we've done roofs and we've spent a lot of money upgrading HVAC systems and just carpeting and seating and all kinds of things that we've done here at the airport. And you may see that maybe Moody's or other people want us to have more days on cash on hand and I'm really happy with what we have. I think that you can tie up too much money and in your tomorrows, I'm very content. The airlines do not want us to have money just tied up that's not working for us. So I'm content and I'll probably stay steady right where we're at. And I think it's the right place for our airport during this time. So we wanted to give you a sense of what some of our fiscal changes for the upcoming year are gonna be. We've been able because we've been successful with our revenues, we've been able to maintain or keeping our terminal rents and our landing rights. These are primarily the charges to the airlines though and to other concessionaires. We've been able to keep them the same for this will be the third year in the row. So we're trying to be good partners with the airlines so that they can make a healthy return being at our airport and therefore grow with us. We continue to focus on things other we call them non-airline revenues. So that might be concessions and renting out any available spaces or buildings that we have. We wanna make every single asset that we have do what's best, have a market rate and make sure that it's rentable. Our garage revenues have with the improved traffic have gone up tremendously. This year alone, we're up about a half a million dollars and that's on top of last year being up 400 plus thousand dollars. So our garage revenues have been again, a way for us to re-invest in a lot of our assets and to be financially healthy. We're also up in our Vermont Reinforcing Vermont Campaign. About 150,000, we will be opening this week our Flynn exhibit, which is a full screen of the stage of the Flynn, but we try to work really hard to make sure that we're representing our region and our state and make money doing it. And I've already touched upon, we have multi-year repair and maintenance for the garage and for other buildings and we continue to do that. And then we're starting construction on our QTA. We're starting some of the preliminary. Yeah, we've started it already and you're going to. So if you're coming again past the airport, the quick turnaround is to wash car bay facility that our car rental concessionaries use to get their cars ready and returned for the next incoming customer. So what are some of our challenges? Well, again, I've already touched upon it. We're taking money and monitoring what we are, how we're doing and it went as we've become available, putting in the repairs and maintenance. We did our new budget, has a new sub-program. We're calling it the QTA facility and this is to manage the facility that we are currently building. We're going to be managing that property differently than the previous one. We're going to continue to prove our reserves within management and we always manage our cash. Let's see fiscal year 20 budget. We continue to, we have an inter fund. We call it a transfer account, the 1.475 million dollars. What happens is monies that we get from the government, we have a match on them and that we also, the state has a cap on how much money that they give to us. So that money covers the local share and sometimes a portion of the state portion that we have to do to match these AIP grants that we're getting from the FAA. We long-term we do go under what we call a PFC application and we can get reimbursement from that. So other things, just some of our challenges, stormwater, underground, and Jackson's, we've had some challenges with, always with that and maintaining it and the expenses that are related to that. And we continue to look for any, we have on our website, we're always looking for rental renters or rental opportunities if we have available space. Did you want to talk about that? Any of these people? No, that's all right. All right. I think we're running out of time. I think we are. So who wants to talk about, oh, next one, go back up one. There, who wants to talk about that? We've talked about implements a lot, but this is just our historical level of implements, of course, with 2019 projected on target to hit almost that 700,000 implement mark and then the 2020 budgeted, which is that 688 in the bottom right-hand corner. Again, the 2019 projected is about a 10% increase. We're about 14% right now, but we'll probably level off at around a 10% by the year end. And we're conservatively budgeting in 2020, a 1% increase based off of this level flow moving into the future. Questions? Next year, the 100 years that we've seen is on the airport. Councilor Brescher, and then Pine and then Paul. I think I saw the order. I'm sorry. I said, is Councilor Brescher, then I think Pine and Councilor Paul. Okay. So you mentioned that the state match was capped at $500,000, but you also said that if indeed you don't, if the match, the state match for a project is greater than that, that you then go to the PFC program and that's how you make up the difference? Well, the state typically would cover 6%, which they used to always do, but they don't have the ability to do that, and so they've been putting a cap and say, here's what you get this year. So we're starting to run into, because our funding is so good from the FAA, we're actually, could use more money from the state of Vermont. And so you can increase the amount of money that you get from them. So even though the local share is capped at whatever that is, 4% or whatever, if you exceed that, nobody raises an eyebrow. So to break it apart a little bit, just on this coming year, 2020, we applied for $27 million. The local share truly is 10%, so that's $2.7 million, half a million dollars coming from the state of Vermont. So to supplement the remaining portion of that local share, we've moved to the PFC program. PFC is a user fee on an airline ticket. No, no, I understand that part. It's just that, so when this happened, whatever year the cap was put in place by the state, did we have any recourse? Could we have challenged that? Because up until that time, they were highway programs that have the same split or a split of a federal, state, and local mix. And so I'm a little concerned about this. I don't know whether this is forecasting other caps from the state for other programs. I mean, I'm hearing this for this, but I'm just concerned. We were very aggressive with that. And I think that the state has many challenges and it doesn't look, it also has all the airports have their own issues. So I would say that they look at the long term as not as high of a priority as other issues that they have. And I think that they, I think it's legit. I mean, I really believe the state has got big issues and not enough money to deal with them and probably over tax the people. So I think we're in a real predicament. So I guess I'll keep working really hard in Teamwell and we'll balance our budget. And we'll feel grateful for whatever we do get from the state. So, and I appreciate that because we all live in the state too. So it's like, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul. I mean, it's this shell game, but I just wondered if anyone had challenged the 500,000 and maybe thought maybe a million would be more appropriate. That's all I'm just, I understand the need for a cap, but I guess I understand it. Not only as much as you could challenge, yeah, we do, we do present them with our budget. We do ask like this year, we did ask for $1.9 million to support that 6% share. And we even asked for a rollover from last year as well. The last, the last question I had is that something that has been in the media that Platsburg is seeking to have an international status and do international flights. And that doesn't mean to Canada. They're talking about going to Europe or whatever. And I just wondered if any of you wanted to speak to whether or not you see this as a, not a threat, but as a challenge, as something you have to watch dog, as something, I don't know if this was a direction that you would be thinking of moving in and whether or not we needed to just be careful about how that market will work for or against us. So. I think it's really good to let Platsburg be good at what Platsburg's going to be going at. And Burlington be good at what Burlington's going to be going at. They're limited on population, so they're dependent on the folks coming down from Canada. I never want to be dependent on that. I want to be dependent on what we can naturally support. They live on subsidies. We do not. We don't get any subsidies. So I think what we should do is when we hear something happening over in Platsburg, we should wish them well and we want them to succeed. I don't think any aviation, any new service ever will hurt us. It will only enhance and help us. So I would say good for them and we wish them luck on their endeavor. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Talk a little bit about the effort to regionalize our airport and what you see as the potential down the road for that discussion to where is it going? I think it's good that it's a healthy conversation to have. As I said, where it says up here, we've spent a hundred years that Burlington has taken care of, built with its resources on this airport. I mean, you'll see as we celebrate our hundred years where it started and it started with DPW telling our fields and for years, the city has used many of its assets to build this airport. So it's an interesting discussion. I think it's worth having, but unless there is a value in some way that's associated with it, it shouldn't even take place. And then I think you have to ask, why would we sell it? And the thing is, if someone came to me or to you and said, we'll give you what it's worth, a billion dollars or a 600 million, whatever it might be, and that you felt that we wanna do all of our roadways over and we could bring a value to the citizens of Burlington, then we should probably have a discussion. That's not the discussion. The discussion is we want your airport and we can manage it better. That's not fair. And as I look back on a hundred years, I see absolutely amazing management, not including myself, we'll wait and see. But as I look back, I see wonderful things, great care taking, great volunteer folks who ran the city took really good care of that airport. So it's not fair to have a discussion, but I think we need to have it, we'll have it and do what we do with it. The hotel, will that onsite hotel capture what's it projected as far as market share and does it compete, probably doesn't compete with our downtown hotel much? There's no better experience than being in downtown Burlington. If you go to the airport hotel, it'll be because you're flying out very early in the morning or coming very late at night and or if you're a flight crew and it'll just be out of convenience. And I believe that it'll be full every day because of how early at 5.30 in the morning, it's a tough track for somebody who's two and a half hours away or you have a family, it's a lot easier just to walk across the street. So I'm anticipating a year from now, we'll be opening it and I expect it to be full but it won't compete with our downtown. I mean, we have very beautiful hotels downtown and they offer something completely different. Is it fully permitted? Just about, we're about a month and a half away. We've actually had a really, South Burlington has done a really, asked the right questions during the permitting process and it's been a very smooth and good process. Thank you. So I had also had a question, I think you sort of answered it about the hotel. So you had said that it was gonna start construction FY20 which starts in a couple of weeks. Do you anticipate that it will be open in FY20 or are you talking late in the late next year or do you have an estimate? I'm thinking spring, summer, next year. Wow. Wow. And remind me again how many rooms? Zoom five. Are they, and I assume that they are working actively on contracts so as to fill potentially half the hotel on any given day, contracts with the airlines, contracts. I mean, there are a number of people who don't fly. I mean, don't fly for pleasure but fly in and out of here for business, particularly the people who are airline staff. So I assume they're- About 40 to 60 a night. Yeah. And when you hear main line, they come with somewhere between 10 and 20 people. Yeah. It's a big deal. Then the other question I had was on employment, you have great figures for employment. I may have missed it because you ran that slide pretty quickly. Oh, there are projections. Okay, so you project a 1% increase in 2020 and it doesn't go any further than that, right? No, it's basically keeping what we have and having steady, slow growth. I'm more concerned about retaining that I am growing. Yes, well, you gotta do both, I guess. And then just the last thing I wanted to say is that I do agree that the airport has been managed well. I can't speak to 100 years because I haven't been here that long but I believe that it has been and also just wanted to acknowledge that it was six years ago today that you became the director of aviation. So congratulations and thank you for all you do for the airport. So we have the F-35s coming this year. They're gonna be louder. How are we gonna manage that and make sure that we're providing support to residents and hearing them out? We actually start Tuesday night with community meetings. The president, sorry. And so what we will do is we'll go over the maps with the communities, all the communities. We'll have the first meeting at the BTV, second meeting will take place in Wenduski and all of that will also be on our website and will be available to folks. The next step will be working on a marine mitigation program. And as you know, we've stopped purchasing homes to remove them. So we will be working on a program that insulates homes and it's probably millions and millions of dollars over the years to put new windows in, insulation, doors, potential air conditioning. So that is the best program that we can see right now that the federal government offers. We facilitate that. We know, again, it's not airport money. We just facilitate that. But that's really all that we can do as the host airport of the F-35. But we do anticipate this to be potentially hundreds of millions over the next two decades to support the mitigation program. And so we believe it is the FAA's preferred method is to remove homes and we have made it clear we have no intentions of that. You may hear that the airport is purchasing a home. If we purchase it because somebody wants to sell it, it'll be because we purchased it, we insulated it and we put it back on the market. But we will not be tearing them down in this new program. Okay, thank you. So that's all we can offer, the answer to the question. Yeah, and then on another topic you had talked about trying to increase non-airline revenue. And I think that that's pretty apparent just in terms of how much, there's been definitely a proliferation of advertising and other things within each of the different terminals. What do you specifically mean by that? Like where else is there to grow and do you foresee yourself kind of continuing to expand that advertising? Or is it kind of where it needs to be? No, I have issues. I stay up all night always listening and thinking of ways to do that at the airport. There has endless opportunities. What I want to do is I don't ever want to be like every other airport and look commercial. I want to be an airport that brings value and stimulates our folks. Like if you look at what we did with Champlain College or with Bag Bomb, it's something that you do with the advertising. So what we just did with the film theater, it'll be a screen, it's something that really will, it's almost like, I don't know, it just kind of brings out the not fun part about advertising, it makes it more fun. So I will continue to be creative. I don't know what the future looks like. I look for opportunities for our community to be our partners. I can't tell you what it would have looked like only that I will continue to work really hard and be sensitive to what it looks like. I am very careful about what I bring in and who we let do that because I don't want it to become an airport that is just over-commercialized. I want it to be something with a personality. Right, yeah, no, I certainly appreciate that. I think that we're starting to run up against that, at least in my mind. Like, in and out of a lot of airports, it feels like it's getting a little cheesy, a little campy in some respects. I like the emphasis on local, but some of the things are just, I think, taking it a little too far in a way that, I don't know, may detract from the experience. So I think it's a fine line that you kind of know you seem to understand that, but I just don't want us to sell out our identity and lose some of the charm of the small airport in pursuit of what may be a smaller budget item because I think that there's other ways to do that. And I don't know, I just wouldn't want us to lose that. So that's just something I noticed recently having been in the airport and traveled through is that we have a lot more stuff than a lot of other airports in terms of just the terminal experience. And so I don't want to get too crowded with that, but this is my point. When you see those things, if you wouldn't mind shooting me up and email me, because I only have my own personal experiences and interpretations of what I consider that to be, so it helps when people reach out and they say, you know, maybe you've gone a little too far in this one area, like, we don't like cabbage cheese. Don't put that up. And I don't know what it is, you know, but it helps me better define where we're going. I want to be good. Yeah, no, and I love, like I said, I love that it's all local, that it's pretty much all local companies. I think that's great. It's just, I feel like there's a balance as long trying to get across. Can you talk a little bit about your parking, your numbers and whether you need more or have you explored more. And I wanted to know specifically, have you considered like a long-term parking lot ever or a long-term parking lot garage? I know there's some revenue loss to Thrifty and things like that. I mean, not substantial, I'm sure, but we have thought about that. There's an expense related to it, you know, transporting people back and forth. So we're not quite ready. We still have capacity in the garage. I don't mind losing some volume to people who want to walk or go to Thrifty. I think that's a choice that they have to make. And I think we don't want to take out that part of the market. I think we have not ever had a day where we don't have some parking. But the answer is we have in our master plan, we plan on having parking, $5 parking here on the northern end of the airport where people, it's still very walkable. It's about 100 yards maybe. And people can walk from that area. I just have to find a way to gait it, maintain it and take care of it so that we preserve the revenue. The way we look at kind of parking as a whole is a ground transportation structure. So you have, like you said, you have Thrifty off-site but then we have our car rental companies on-site. We have a parking garage and then we have transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft and things. A lot of airports see a decline in their parking garage revenue because of the introduction of Uber and Lyft. We're not seeing that. We're seeing an increase in both the TNC revenue in the parking garage revenue and the car rental revenue. So we see it as a whole end as a seasonality thing too. So when car rental companies go up, our parking garage capacity or our demand goes down and vice versa. When our parking garage capacity goes up, our car rental companies go down. So it's a really nice balance right now on the increase of total passengers coming to the airport. And we're doing better signage. And that's what the impression a lot of people will be able to go in there's no parking or you have to go to the fourth or fifth floor to get that. So we put up better signage. And we also made our challenge just to that and our beast stat. And we have the promotions and the free press in different places where you get a date for free if you park a week. So that seems to be working. So right now my hope is to just keep the garage full or close to it. And if we lose a little bit, I will make that up. I anticipate in another way. Just quickly, more of a comment, which is I appreciate your answer about the regionalization of the airport. And the fact is I don't think that we should spend a lot of time on that particular discussion. I know there were bills that were introduced in the legislature that didn't really see the light of day. From my understanding from South Broingsen-Wanooski reps, I think the more appropriate discussion is finding a way to give those towns a little bit more representation of some kind. But unless they are willing to do, as you suggested, and I have heard nothing like that, I don't think we should be entertaining or wasting a lot of time on that type of discussion because the airport is running very well and successful and we shouldn't be fooling around with something that is so important to the economy of our city and the region and the state. Okay, we will as the teams are switching VEDs, waiting patiently if we want to go back to public forum. Did you say earlier that the mayor would be joining us later? My understanding is he will be joining us. I don't mind waiting, I don't mind. Fine, I think the VED will be more than happy to start it. Thank you all very much. Thank you. So we've been trying to do, I know you will get your time, don't worry, but we're trying to do about 10-minute presentation on the questions. Okay. Are you trying to reach? We're just in charge. All right, good afternoon. Darren Springer with Burlington Electric Department. I want to introduce the team who's here with me, kind of scattered throughout the room, but I'll start right next to me, Cheryl Mitchell, in the finance division. Jim Reardon, who's our director of finance, is on travel and can't be with us today, but did a great job working with Cheryl with the team on the budget. Paul Alexander, manager for safety, Muneer Kasti, COO, and manager of operations reliability, utility services, engineering, number of different areas. Mary Peterson, manager of strategy and innovation, Mike Canorek, manager of customer care, communications and energy services, and James Gibbons, director of policy and planning, are all here with me. So I won't bury the lead. The budget we've developed goes an 11th year without requiring a rate case. That's something that we work very hard to achieve. That's something that's fairly unique accomplishment, I think, in the state, and really even nationally, particularly if you look at some of the things that BD has done over the last 11 years. So obviously that's our assumption going in. We monitor as we go, but 11 years with no rate case. We are facing some challenging trends, and those are outlined here, and in the following charts, decline in rec revenues and sales to customers. We've had that trend for a couple of years now that continues into FY20. We see some recovery from that in FY21, but for the moment we still are challenged with those declines. We balance those declines in FY20 with savings, particularly in the power supply budget, as well as some other cost savings throughout the budget. And critically, we're still making the investments that we need to make. We have an IT forward upgrade, capital upgrade that's been in the works. We have gone to RFP for that. We have vendors who are coming in for demos this summer. This budget includes the funding to carry that project forward. We are also doing some overdue maintenance at a few of our plants, including the gas turbine and Winooski-1. And we're funding the Net Zero programs for customers that we've been rolling out and will continue to roll out as part of the budget. This is just a visual representation of the rec revenues. You can see that in the middle part of the decade, revenues were high, rec prices were high. They've come down a pretty good amount since that time. Their forecast, as you can see, to kind of continue a downward trend for the moment, but then they're bouncing back up in some of the out years. So we have some modest recovery there with the rec prices. This next slide's actually good news for us. Overall, the capacity prices that we pay are based on how much energy we're using during the one hour of the year when the ISO New England grid is peaking. That's constituted 15% roughly of our cost of service in the past. That price is now coming down, as you can see right here. And so while we'll continue to focus on reducing energy use during peak, because it saves money and it reduces our reliance in the region on the dirtiest fossil fuel generators, this number and this kind of trend here yields some positive savings for us. We continue to see, although it's moderated a little bit in this year, transmission costs that have gone up in the region and this slide makes the point that since our last rate case, which was in 2009, we've really absorbed a significant amount of transmission costs, really a doubling in our cost of service. The increase from 19 to 20 is not as significant as some of the jumps earlier in the decade, but it's still a significant cost. And lower kilowatt hour sales, we have seen a trend of lower sales that continues into 20. We think it actually recovers a little bit in FY 21, partly because some additions that have been delayed may come online, but partly this is also a trend that's a good trend in the sense that our energy efficiency programs have worked. We're using roughly 6.1% less electricity today than we were in 1989, which is the year before the city launched an $11.3 million bond for energy efficiency. And that, just to give a sense of it, that savings is roughly 12 million annual savings for customers on electric bills. Even though obviously sales to customers makes up a significant portion of revenue, and it is projected to come back in 21, this is a slide that also demonstrates energy efficiency has been working in the city. And this is really looking at kind of what our trendline was prior to the reorganization effort that happened in the 2015, 2016 timeframe. And then the red bars are projected, continued growth had we stayed on the path that we were on. The blue is our actual as well as in 19 and 20, the budgeted numbers. This has moderated a little bit in this graph because some labor that would otherwise be in this is actually allocated to capital to implement capital projects. But even if you account for that, the trendline has essentially flattened in terms of controllable costs. And we're talking about things like labor as well as consulting, dues, fees, services, those types of things. So this is a positive trendline in terms of our fiscal management. So key assumptions for this budget. We have savings assumed in the power supply budget that we have expectation to materialize that needs to occur for us to be on the track that we're on. We want to see no further decline based on the projections and sales to customers. That's a key metric that we'll be watching. We have in our strategic direction for 2019, 2020 launching several new net zero incentive programs. One that's in that plan was actually just recently launched which is our new lawn mower, electric lawn mower rebate program which has gotten quite a bit of good update just in the last week or so that it's been available. I think several hardware stores in town have sold out of electric lawn mowers. And then our credit ratings metrics I'll talk about a little more on another slide but we are obviously keeping close watch on our credit ratings metrics and we're challenged in one particular one that I'll talk about coming up. So in terms of capital, we want to maintain and improve our infrastructure. The work I mentioned McNeil-Wanowski won in the GT as well as the IT upgrades are part of $7.9 million capital budget. That does not include customer contributions. So customer work that we charge for goes on top of that and makes the capital plan look closer to I think about 10 million with that. And that does include 650,000 roughly for Velco equity. We continue to invest in Velco, the statewide transmission company which we are a member of as well and yield to return for rate payers. Safety is number one value. We continue to invest in safety. We had our first ever safety day where everybody in the operations team took an opportunity during the course of a day to do training. We did chainsaw training this past year. We did pull top rescue and we've got plans to do additional work around that as well. We think it's important to have days where we dedicate our work to safety and to training and have everybody understand that that's a priority. We continue to boost training and education opportunities throughout the company. We've been going through the tiering process which you all have seen the results from, the early results. So we continue to budget with that in mind. And obviously we're going to continue our electric vehicle, our plug-in hybrid rebates. This budget has funding in it for several new public charging stations including a partnership with Car Share to launch a Car Share pilot program where folks who are part of Car Share will be able to have an EV as a part of that fleet and we'll have a public charger that'll be dedicated to that. And I mentioned the lawn and equipment incentives which are already out. We're looking at heat pump incentives as well. This is a graphic representation of the capital program. In the chart for the FY20 budget you'll see the 7.2 million. That's the capital number without customer contributions and without Velco equity included. The 7.9 million includes the Velco equity and then you see we have customer contribution that takes it up closer to almost 10 million. Capital and the distribution systems been pretty strong over the last few years. Our reliability metrics have been very, very strong. Last year in 2018, not only did we exceed our state targets but roughly one third on average of a BED customers even saw an outage during 2018. So two thirds of customers essentially didn't see an unplanned outage. And then in terms of duration, the average duration for planned and unplanned outages was less than an hour. So our reliability compared to other systems in the state is very, very strong. And this budget will help us continue to do that work in reliability. So I mentioned the Moody's metrics. Obviously 11 years without a rate case, by comparison Vermont rates are up roughly 15% since that period of time. So we've delivered a lot of value I think for customers by holding rates steady. Our benchmark is always the A rating for Moody's and we are on target and above target in every respect, except for the adjusted debt service coverage ratio where we've seen some erosion due to the revenue declines in the rec revenues, the sales to customers. We wanna get that metric back up. Our early projections for FY21 show some recovery for that metric, which is a positive. And in fact, our FY20 budget recovers that metric a little bit from where it is currently. And the difference between the adjusted debt service coverage ratio and the conventional debt service coverage ratio, the adjusted debt service coverage includes geo bond obligations and includes pilot payments to the city. So that's the major difference there. So we'll be monitoring that very closely and making sure that we stay on target and that we continue to see hopefully some recovery in that metric and the other metrics stay strong and at or above the A target, which they are currently. And then I think this is the last slide, just a summary of some of the accomplishments that we've had over the last year. I mentioned some of them around reliability, safety, no complaints to the Department of Customer Service in 2018, which was down from 15 complaints five years prior, credit to the customer care team doing a great job. We continue to be 100% renewable. That continues to yield benefits for us, not only environmentally, but also in terms of keeping us exempt from the state standard offer program, which would otherwise add potentially two million or more in power supply costs every year. We are looking at a, not only an IT upgrade, but business process improvement work, which is happening. We've worked with VMEK, which has the lean training model for process improvement. They've been at BED and working with us on that. At McNeil, we've seen a really positive trend in terms of lower fuel costs for wood. Our wood supply costs have come down significantly over the last few years and the McNeil budget reflects that and is actually looking a lot better because of that, lowering of the wood prices. And then I mentioned, I think most of these items, we do have a $500 bonus incentive going right now with the other efficiency utilities in the state with efficiency Vermont, Vermont gas for weatherization to support low income, moderate income weatherization. We continue to offer our EV rate, 60 cents a gallon equivalent of gas to charge up an electric vehicle. We're looking at ways to make that even more accessible. Right now you need a level two home charger, but we're hoping in the near future to offer even easier ways for customers to sign up for that. And coming this summer, we know that two electric buses will be joining the Green Mountain Transit fleet and charging here in Burlington as part of our tier three program and some grants and incentives that we were able to help secure for them, as well as we'll be completing our work on the net zero roadmap, which will be an analysis, a comprehensive analysis of the pathways to get to that goal of reducing and eliminating fossil fuel use, not just for electricity, but heating and transportation in the coming years. So that'll be a very useful analysis for us. And we're getting close to that being done. I think right now the target is sometimes towards the end of July, we'll have that finished. And I think that's our slide. And hopefully it kept us on track time wise. Can you explain how no further sales decline and the net zero goals go together? There's something in there that I'm missing because the two don't line up in my mind automatically kind of like you're gonna go to our net zero, you're gonna see your sales, but maybe you projected that. And that's what you're saying, it's the projection. Well, so for the current year coming year budget, we wanna make sure that our estimate of sales, which are already on a decline, don't decline below our estimate, that would challenge us from a revenue standpoint. The net zero goal is actually going to require probably something on the order of doubling electric use over a 10 to 20 year period. Because we have 100% renewable electricity because we have the ability to use that for heat pumps, for EVs, for electric buses, for other uses. If we wanna move towards reducing and eliminating fossil fuel use for heating for transportation, you're probably looking at a doubling in some sense of the electric consumption. So 10 years from now, if we're sitting here and talking about lower electric sales, that's probably not a good thing. We probably wanna see electric sales go up and see gasoline and other fuel consumption go down. So given that we are natural gas, 95% for customers, how do you propose to move toward that? And the thermal side is what I'm trying to do. It's one of the most significant challenges. The good news is Vermont Gas is thinking creatively as well as a partner to us on this. They've been engaged in the roadmap development process. They've provided data. They've launched a renewable natural gas program which is looking at trying to have landfill methane be a part of their system. They're also looking, I think, at hydrogen and whether hydrogen from renewable electricity could be fed into their system. So there's some innovation opportunities there, but there's no question that to get to the net zero goal, we're looking at things like district heat. We're looking at things like additional heat pump exposure and deployment and certainly additional weatherization. All of those things factor in to get to that level of penetration. So one of the challenges for us with heat pumps is I have them and I know people do have them who have natural gas service, but they're not necessarily economic to switch to a heat pump versus gas at today's prices. Some folks do it for the environmental reason or for comfort. Some do it because they want an efficient air conditioning option as well. But we want to look at options to make it more economic for customers to look at heat pumps as part of that portfolio. And that's when I alluded to new net zero incentives this year. That's one of the areas that we're focused on. And then lastly, the adjusted debt service coverage ratio was a little tough to get my head around. What does Moody's care about? Which one do they care about? They care about all three of them together. They care about days cash on hand debt service and adjusted debt service. But those are only a factor in the rating. They're also looking at broader things like how we're being managed, what's the appetite for the public utility commission to approve a rate increase when we need one. Those are the types of things we get asked about. What's the strength of the local economy? So in a variety of ways, we have a very strong case with Moody's. It's really just that one metric which is not quite where we want it to be, mainly because of that erosion with revenue. Can you just tell us where we are with the conversation on district energy and how that's gonna be advancing in the coming year? Absolutely. We had legislation that has now, I checked the website today, has been sent to the governor. So it's passed in the legislature that would allow us to use some of our thermal efficiency funds to support the next phase of work, which is the advanced engineering and design phase for that project. We had previously gotten authorization to even put funds towards the construction of the project, but we hit a point where it really made sense to have some authority to use those funds to advance the project to the next phase, the engineering and design. So our goal was that, assuming that legislation signed into law, we wanna reopen discussions with the potential stakeholder customers in the spring, summer time frames to right around now to be able to say here's an updated set of assumptions in terms of what we can put on the table to help move the project forward. We were at the letter of intent phase, essentially, asking customers to sign on and say, I wanna be a part of this, I'm gonna put some additional skin in the game myself, and then BED through this legislation can say we also can put some additional skin in the game to move it forward. And is the mall signing onto that? They've been a partner throughout. We continue to have conversations with them. We haven't officially reopened that discussion yet, but I've been in touch with them and I believe they're interested in continuing to work with us. Okay, thank you very much. Councilor Scher. Just picking up with what Councilor Tracy just said, could you provide us with a list of organizations that are interested or were with this project because I don't remember everyone at the hospital signed on or the university. I can't remember if they all, I mean, are they there or is it a soft commitment? I can't remember. Yeah, no, it's a good question. The context is we have an original feasibility study and the major stakeholders were the Burlington City Place, the UVM Medical, University of Vermont for some of their buildings, Burlington Electric, Vermont Gas were the key partners together and that feasibility work was completed, but those continue to be the major folks involved. The state government has a few buildings that could potentially be involved. There was one or two federal buildings that could potentially be involved, but really, if you look at the system and where the energy would go, the hospital is by far the largest potential consumer followed by City Place and UVM. What about Champlain College? Were they at all interested? I mean, I know that you're small, but I just. Yeah, they weren't part of the original feasibility route that was selected. So it's not, it's entirely possible they would be interested, but just to get that initial route built, they weren't one of the key folks to hook up. So I'd like just in two minutes, a refresher on why the wrecks were declining and why you think that there might be recovery in FY22. Sure. So the wrecks are based on the New England market and really based on the renewable portfolio standards in each of the six states. And Vermont has one now. Ours is different values, resources differently than Connecticut, Massachusetts. Those states really drive, I think in a number of cases, the higher value wreck market. And I'd ask James to weigh in if he has more to add because he's really the expert on this topic, but what you probably saw was some level of supply and demand. In terms of how many renewable generators were out there generating wrecks, how much was the state requiring utilities in those areas to have, has that softened? Is there now kind of a supply and demand that's gonna change over the next few years? Because Connecticut in particular changed their statute and changed in terms of not only the cost that they allowed to be recovered, but the quantity that they want. So really, I don't pretend to understand those markets perfectly. I don't know that anybody does, but James, if anybody doesn't be, Dee James is the person who does. I think during the next one, I'll be answering that. It is not a very transparent market. It's not a very liquid market. There's not a lot of players in it. It's not publicized well. And it's driven by statute and expectation. So if someone thinks a Cape Wind project is gonna be built, the wreck's gonna be long, the prices start to fall. If something gets announced that it's not going forward, the prices come back up. What we have seen is a recovery in the wreck prices in the most recent because it announced a shutdown of a couple of biomass plants that have been driving it right now. And the wreck prices had fallen to maybe $6 a wreck for 2018 wrecks, and then they recovered to right now they were sitting around $16 or $18 in the space of like two months. I mean, that's the kind of dynamics you've got on these plants. Okay, so it's volatile. It's volatile, very volatile. It's an absolute market that is very sensitive to too much or too little. In other words, it tends to collapse either to the floor or to go to the maximum levels. Because if you know there's plenty, then it's a musical chair with too many chairs and dead balls. If you know there's not enough, you've got a penalty price that you'll have to pay as a load serving entity that you're not complying. And you know what that is. Right now though, what we can do and what we have been doing is we watched for the timing and we decided we're gonna sell wrecks in advance of delivery. So if you looked at our graph of wreck revenues, the prices have not fallen anywhere near and the revenues have not fallen as much as the prices because we entered multi-year commitments while the prices were high. And as long as they come back up again for all of those roll-off, we can buffer the effect. Thank you. Councillor Hansen. Yeah, thank you so much. This is really impressive stuff. I wanted to know a couple of areas I would just hope to head on. Can you talk about any peak shaving? Not during the city or all the different? There are two primary items that we're working on when it comes to the peak shaving. And again, that's looking, typically at the summer, the one hour in the summer when the New England grid is using the most energy and how much are we using during that time. And solar has been helpful to us in shaving that. We've had some benefit there. We have the Defeat the Peak program, which is sort of a community-driven program where we ask folks in the residential and commercial sector to sign up, get email updates from us, and then we call a peak event, typically it'd be six to eight times during the summer when we know it's going to be one of the days that may be a potential peak. Typically the hours are going to be sometime between about three in the afternoon and eight in the evening. That will change from time to time depending on what's going on in the region. And we ask folks to reduce their energy use. And each time we call an event, if we reach our target for that day, we make a $1,000 donation to a charity, a local charity. So last year we had six peak event days. We made $6,000 in donations to local charities and we saved the rate payers significantly more than that through the participation. So that's one program that we'll be continuing to bolster this year. The other is a pilot program with a company called Omega Grid, which is using a blockchain system with commercial customers. And with that, we're not only looking at the annual peak, we're looking at the Vermont monthly peak and how much energy is being used in Vermont. Some of our charges are related to that. So we look at when the Vermont peak is going to happen and these companies can get a signal from us via the blockchain program and reduce their energy use during that period of time. James has more. They're just going to offer one other which is that we're getting ready to start a process of replacing our old radio controlled water heater controls with a much more dynamic device made by a local company called packetized energy, which it takes away that whole structure where it's like six o'clock off, 10 o'clock on and allows us to stack those and destack those to essentially safe peak. So we're going to be starting. We've actually had them out in the field and a lot of them are going to start asking people to replace their old radio controls with these new devices and stay on that rate we have when they get credit. This was the power miser rate for folks who were but it used to be a radio signal system. Thank you. Can you speak to the gas turbine if their long-term plan to phase that out over time? So the gas turbine is one of our power plants down on the waterfront. It's actually runs almost never but it happens to be very profitable to keep it in service because it can meet demand during those costly peak times. So it helps us in terms of revenue. It's due for an overhaul this year. So that's part of the capital program is to do an overhaul of one of the jets there. We've looked at, we haven't looked at phasing it out. What we have looked at is converting it to biodiesel. So we did an analysis that looked at whether there'd be adequate supply in the region of biodiesel either through restaurant vegetable oil or other sources and what it would cost us to be able to switch some portion or all of the fuel supply to biodiesel which would make it a renewable plant. So we want to get through the overhaul process. It's probably been in need of that for a couple of years and then we're looking at that as a longer-term option. That's great because then you can keep the revenue benefits too and also get rid of it because those things are pretty heavy consumers. Even though it's that short window, that's a pretty big jump. Did you have something on that one? I just would say that when Darren was talking about capacity market prices, that unit is one of our two significant capacity producers. It produces almost 20 megawatts of capacity. McNeil produces about 25. So in terms of our meeting those obligations for those markets where the prices are moving so much, it's a key component. Yeah, yeah. The biodiesel would be the nice way to sort of solve that emotional angst I have. So for the EV rebate, what has the uptake looks like for that and what are we looking at to kind of boost the low income side of that? So we're roughly 80 customers who have taken an EV or plug-in hybrid rebate. We've had the program since May of 2017, although we've revised it a couple of times, changed the pricing structure. Our low moderate income rebate is essentially at the highest level that we're allowed to offer under Vermont's renewable energy standard which caps the amount that we can spend to acquire fossil fuel savings. What we're looking at though is whether in that process there's something called the tag, the technical advisory group that designs those limits each year and there's also a 2020 program review. We're looking at whether or not we can have really additional claim of savings for EVs because we think folks in Burlington are actually getting more value out of them than the state is permitting us to claim at this point. If that was the case, we'd have an opportunity to claim more savings and offer a better incentive. But currently for low moderate income, we've had three customers who have taken advantage and we have also offered the EV rate but we haven't gotten quite the update there that we wanted as well. So we're constantly looking as we roll these things out, these are all new and we're getting the benefit of having folks test them, try them and give us feedback. And 80 rebates on the one hand is not a bad thing but it's nowhere near the scale of change that we wanna see. So we're constantly re-evaluating that. Yeah. How are you looking kind of on the marketing now that we've decided to have them because you're proud of that. Yeah, we are. We've tried to have partnerships with dealers. I think the real benefit is if you can get a lease because then you get the federal tax credit included in the price sort of upfront. And so for leasing, you can get a monthly payment that's not unreasonable, $230, $250 a month for a brand new EV with the incentives included. But really we wanna work with the auto dealers and it's a hit or miss situation. Some of them are very motivated and interested in the market. Some of them aren't. So one of the things that's been really eye-opening to me is if you drive an EV, you're more interested. I mean, it's a unique experience. They're fun to drive, they're interesting to drive but they can be a little bit demystified by testing one. So we're hoping that the car share pilot will really get more folks in Burlington exposed to what it's like to drive an EV. And once they've done that, we're hopeful that we can help them with an incentive with marketing, without reach, et cetera. Great, and then, oh yeah, and then speak on that same point, what do you all do for the, do you give rebates for the charge station, the home charge station? We do, so if you're an EV customer, you go and buy an EV, you either get $1,200 if you're getting a rebate or 1,800 if you're low-moderate income and then you're eligible for an additional 400 towards the home charger that can help you sign up for the rate. Thank you. So it sounds like new revenues are expected and I was just wondering if the surplus of the BAD, we know it cannot be used by the municipality. If you have a surplus on your budget, where does it go? We don't have a surplus really at this point. What we have in the budget is a net income of roughly 900,000 but that net income helps keep our debt ratings metrics roughly where we want them to be with one exception which is the adjusted debt service coverage ratio. We try to keep our cash on hand and our cash balance at reasonable levels so that we go into FY21. Hopefully we don't have to ask for a rate case but we can actually continue to kind of manage the budget as we go. Typically in the better years, we've had an income that's higher than what we have this year. Our margins are getting tighter but in terms of, we provide a pilot payment to the city as one means of supporting operations because we're not a taxed entity as a utility but I don't know that we really have a surplus as much as we really have the operational piece to keep going without a rate case. And my second question is, how long you've been director now? Since October. October and almost a year. And I was just wondering where you are at with the study around how much it would cost to bury utilities underground from a mile perspective. Yeah, Muneer has looked at that for us and if you were to do that all throughout the city, I think we looked at a ballpark number for that. Do you recall? I think it's close to that $400 million. $400 million. My memory's correct. It's significantly expensive. What we find we're doing is piece by piece where we're doing projects like the Great Streets project or Champlain Parkway where there are opportunities to bury the lines that make sense from reliability and then aesthetic and other purposes. We're working on those as we go. So we have several of those projects that are underway right now where we're burying the lines. But if you were to do it all throughout the city, that's a significant cost. So I think it is all about goal and timeline. It can be 100 years goal to bury them all, not currently, but I think to look at it that way in 50 years, how much by yearly, how long it's gonna take. And this is budget presentation, that I would wanna know in the future. So the other question that I have is specific to the investments. Be do you have a lot of investment and one of them is Highgate, I remember correctly. Where can I find those information? So Highgate, we actually, we sold our ownership interest in that as part of action last year. But wait, I think it was clear to the council back then that we would be investing if I remember very correctly. We will be selling it $200,000, I believe. So let me just speak to investments just broadly speaking. In terms of investments, the main thing that we tend to invest in other than our system is we invest in Velco, which is a statewide transmission company. We earn a return on that investment that benefits our ratepayers because that's, we get charged transmission costs through Velco, but we also earn a return on Velcos in investing in building new transmission. So that's an investment. In some cases we have a power infrastructure investment or an investment in owning and operating a plant, but we don't typically have investments outside of that. And I think with Highgate what you had is sort of a legacy investment where originally we needed to have a share of that to be able to take power from Hydro-Quebec and we no longer needed that to be able to do that. And so that's why it was sold. But we typically don't make investments outside of those areas. So we'll have a share and then present it right. Oh, no. So congrats to BED staff over the years in keeping the rate steady for the last 11 years. And you probably answered this, and maybe I missed it, but so I apologize. But can you just crystallize for me on a short answer how BED has done that while the state increases have been 15% over that period? And are we projecting likely rate increases in the coming years? Yeah, so we originally were projecting a rate increase this year. And when we started the budget process, we had challenges to work through. I would say that in the middle part of the decade had we not gone through the reorganization effort that happened under Neal Lunderville where we really kind of right-sized the organization, strategically transformed the organization, there were savings and efficiencies that came out of that that were valuable. Being 100% renewable the way that we were at the time when the rec markets were high and being able to benefit from that was another key aspect to having additional revenues that really benefited the rate payers in the city. And looking at it this year and knowing we were going to have a rate case potentially and being able to avoid one, it's partly due to cost savings, prudent management, partly due to opportunities to save on our power supply contract. So even though we stay 100% renewable, we've had a couple opportunities to extend or renew contracts that are better priced because of the energy market than they were prior and that helped save as well. I certainly would not be surprised if in FY21 we needed a rate case, but at the moment our management philosophy is to try to build a budget that doesn't require one. And if we're able to do that, then that's what we'll do. As long as we can continue to be safe, invest in the infrastructure, keep moving the initiatives forward. I think our ability to do these things and not ask rate payers for a rate case is what makes us special and something we want to continue. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Our resources will be up next because they'd like to keep coming that way. Oh, shit. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. Yeah, that's true. Yes. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Good work. Appreciate it. Thank you. No, it's okay. I have a problem in charge. No, it's gonna work. She wouldn't yell at me. I'm afraid I'm used to it. Let's read it. I haven't seen her in a while. What? I don't know. How long has she been here? Okay. Here we go. Try to do your 10 or so minute presentations and then questions. Okay. All right. Great. We're gonna make this quick from one great Vermont, relative to one utility, to another. We are presenting tonight on water, wastewater, and stormwater. You know, it has the Water Resources Division of Public Works. You all are familiar with our mission. There's a nice little pictograph of all the ways that we do everything in water. This explains a number of the areas of our operations. Integrated water resources is really our division able to look at how we manage water, wastewater, and stormwater for Burlington's health and vitality. So I will finish up with this slide and turn it over to Megan. We on each of our three areas run a myriad of operations and programs. And one of the pieces I'm very excited about in this year's budget is not only are we continuing the operations that we do 24-7, but we are similar to the general fund tackling the deferred capital reinvestment challenges thanks to the voters and your support with the Clean Water Resiliency Fund and other reinvestments Megan is going to talk about. We will leave this division more resilient than we found it. So Megan, why don't you hit us? Yeah. Go ahead and skip that slide. It's just all of the things that we manage. If you can go back one, just one slide. Just wanted to thank you with the Council's continued support. We've been able to do really great work ranging from reinvesting in some of our pipe infrastructure as well as sort of a reliability project up at the reservoir pump house that's going to enable us to take down one of the elevated storage tanks and also make sure that we can provide high pressure water to the hospital even if one of those tanks goes down. And then in the lower right-hand corner, that's another example of an efficiency improvement that we've made at the East Wastewater Plant which enables us to provide air to the bugs so that they can continue to treat the wastewater. So thank you again for continuing to support all of that work. So we've got four high-level budget goals. The first one is really advancing near-term operational and capital needs. You guys are all very familiar with one of our major advancements this year, which is really ensuring that we have sufficient staff resources to maintain smooth and safe water, wastewater and stormwater operations as well as strong regulatory compliance. We're continuing our water main reinvestment, another $2 million in calendar year 2019. We are beginning. We came to board of finance to kick off the investment that the voters approved last year, the $30 million worth of wastewater and stormwater. And another project we haven't talked to you about a lot, but we'll be bringing to the boards soon, is rehabilitating our primary high-service water tank up at UVM, which is critical to serving water, as I said, for UVM and the hospital, as well as all the people who live on the hillside. Next slide. Like BED, we have to always be thinking about our sustainable utility financial health. You're familiar with that service coverage requirements. I would say the newer one for this year is working with the Clerk Treasurer's Office to establish designated capital reserves. We do have some cash on hand, and it's kind of all lumped together. And what I would like to see is in a year in which we don't spend the capital line item that you all have authorized, that we actually keep that in a separate pot of money so that we can make sure that we're building our ability to pay for capital in the future. We're also looking ahead on the capital front and planning and investing in our long-term capital stability. We have had a hard time maintaining and doing all of the proper maintenance on our two storage tanks. We have the very large one at UVM, as well as the smaller one on Redstone, has all the cell phone antennas, looks a little bit like Sputnik. Those are really, really important and have to be maintained, and we're not really well set up to be getting up there and climbing on there and riveting and recoding and whatnot. And so we did an RFQ to hire a company who specializes in this. And in fact, they are the company that maintains all of Champlain Water Districts. I think they have 11 to 14 of these storage tanks, and they've come highly rated. We are looking ahead to what the next five years looks like for all of the water system. So we had our capital, our bond, that everybody passed in 2016. And that money is being drawn down. We only have a million left. And so we need to start thinking what's next. One of the things that hopefully will save us money, though, could still cause some pain to staff because of the paperwork, is shifting our financing source to the drinking water SRF. Similar to the clean water SRF, which has a low interest rate. The drinking water SRF has a 3% interest rate. And right now, because they're sitting on a lot of money, they may even be willing to buy down the interest rate more. So we're looking into how we can use that program. And then we talked about this at the board of finance a couple of weeks ago. We're going to be finalizing our integrated water quality management planning project, which is going to really tell us what the next set of wastewater and storm water improvements are. Next slide. We spent a lot of time with you guys talking about rate payer affordability. Unlike BED, we don't have renewable energy credits. So it's really the water that people use. And so we get that sustained rate increases over a period of time. And when we're all looking at what the investments are that we need to make, it has been a concern for us. It's a concern for you. We, I quoted the scope of work that we had agreed upon. We're close to finalizing a contract with a financial consultant so that we can get that work kicked off. Next slide. So some of the key drivers, we have seen a continued loss of volumetric revenue, not because necessarily people are using less water, but because we do continue to uncover some of the meter billing errors. So as we progressed past the compound meters, which provided the initial chunk of money that we owed to some of the large customers, we have continued to find mistakes and we are continuing to accrue some, both money that we have to pay back as well as long term loss in revenue. We lost the remainder of the Hadley Road customers, which I broadcast last year. In stormwater, there are no major revenue drivers, positive or negative. The one thing you'll see if you look at the budget is that last year we had included a large grant as part of our grant revenue in our annual budget. And from here on, I'm going to be tracking larger capital grants and loans in a separate capital account so that our operational O&M budget kind of remains a little bit more flat, unless there's actual cost increases operationally. You guys are familiar with the personnel additions. The rate affordability study, we had some healthy professional service capital lines and we're going to need to maintain those in order to fund that study. The other things that we weren't necessarily anticipating and continue to be challenges for us are our biosolid sludge management. That's all of the solids that comes from the wastewater treatment process. There's one game in town and it's Cassella and the new contract, between the new contract and between, frankly, our great ability and we've been improving our ability to treat wastewater, which guess what means we have more biosolids. And so we're now up to paying about $900,000 a year, which is a significant portion of the budget just to manage the biosolids. So it continues to be a, huh, what are we going to do about this? We either need to invest in better dewatering technology, potentially look at digesters, but of course again, those all cost money. So we have to figure out the return on investment. We did have increases in our pilot, just similar to BED and that is a challenge to deal with. And then a couple of other increases due to the other cost allocations, next slide. Listed out the different debt service increases, mostly on the water debt service side and then this UVM tank rehabilitation. So the company that we're working with, in addition to maintaining the tank on an annual basis, also has the ability to help us fully renovate the tank and spread out the costs of that without us having to necessarily take a loan. Next slide. So all said and done, what does this mean? We had talked during the staffing assessment that we were trying to keep the rate increase between 4.5 and 4.9. When all said and done, I landed at 4.66, which does mean a approximately $3.14 a month increase for your average customer who uses 600 cubic feet. I looked at my bill today, I don't use 600 cubic feet. A lot of people don't, but we wanted to bribe a good number for people to think about. And depending on how much you use, your percent increase will be 4.6, but the amount will be slightly different. Looking across the budgets, we do have small surpluses in each of them, which is important, particularly in wastewater and water, where while we have healthy days of cash on hand and the table at the bottom, that's how we're going to be paying back some of these large customers. And we have a goal of trying to maintain, if possible, 90 days of cash on hand or hire, particularly in water for our moody's rating, but also just as a good practice. Stormwater does have a very healthy days of cash on hand, and I'm looking at whether or not that could be used in a certain way this year. However, the challenge is stormwater is one of the fund that's probably most susceptible to a natural disaster or a really bad storm event that could wipe out a whole bunch of things. And so I'm probably going to be arguing for that to stay at a higher level, just because you could have something that's really weather driven that is completely out of our control. Looking ahead to FY21, a reminder that in FY21, which is why this rate affordability study is so important, any projects that we've completed under the Clean Water Resiliency Plan and FY20, the debt service will kick in in FY21 and then we'll continue until we draw down that 30 million. There are some additional water resources borrowing needs that I think we've been trying to broadcast to you all. The continued need for investment in the water distribution system. I'm glad we started investing because if we hadn't, I don't even know how bad the breaks would be this past winter. That being said, we do continue to see breaks and the pipes are still very old and we still have I think 75% of our pipes are cast iron and that's the one with the highest break potential. The Reservoir Pump House Building, it's the building if you're driving up Main Street on the right, very old, it's historical. It's built in 1868 and it is getting to the end of its useful life. But that pump house is very critical because again it's what pumps the water from the big reservoir area to the tanks to then feed the hospital. The hospital has to have water. And then we've also talked about the stormwater and wastewater systems where anticipating completion of that integrated plan by 2020. And then at some point that plan is going to turn into likely another request for funding in the long term. Next slide. Little bit of good news. We maintain a very conservative rate model. I don't plan even if I know that a mall is coming or this is coming, you don't put that money in until the money is in your pocket and the person is turned on the water, which I think we all know is a good thing because we could have planned for a certain way and then things always go differently. Because we're investing in our revenue assurance program, over time we're hoping that with our meter replacements, as we replace these older meters, which generally are slower, we should actually start being able to count the water a little bit better and thus may yield a small bump in volume as those are replaced. We're looking forward to working with you on our affordability rates and programs, looking at new revenue streams and making sure that we mitigate those impacts. One of the things we're adding to the scope of work, which I don't necessarily think we talked about with you guys, is having the consultant do some sort of analysis of cost efficiencies. Are there any other low-hanging fruit that we've missed, things that we could start to implement that would actually save us money, not just be looking at our revenue coming in? And I've been really proud of my team. We have been pulling in grant funding at a really great rate. We have a million dollar grant from the state to do combined sewer retrofits. We just filed our priority list applications for the Clean Water SRF and we're eligible for up to a 32% pollution control grant. It all depends on who else applied at the same time and where they fall on the priority list, but at least I know the quality of our projects are such that if there's nobody above us, we could be getting a significant amount of that money covered by a grant. So we work hard to get that money in because it's a great way. There is money out there and we try to leverage it at every possible opportunity. Next slide. This is just a summary of various metrics or ways and to look at what the rate increase would look like. So, as I said, about a $3.14 increase for a 600 cubic foot user. The annual increase would be about $37.68 of that. I think $20 is the staffing piece and yeah. So take questions and just a little subliminal message that it's totally worth it for you. Councillor Bush or Heather, hand up worse than the Councillor Paul. So just I have a couple of questions, but one of them, when you talked about cash on hand with stormwater and then you show with your summary of rates and it's two cents. I know for stormwater, but why are we adding anything to that? I guess is my question. It had more to do with what things looked like later. A small rate increase now meant a later rate increase later on for sort of for long-term rates. Because there's some heavy lifting coming in the future as the debt service comes on. So rather than hit people hard with a rate increase next year, feathering it in a little bit. But I mean that is something that we could be open to. Yeah, I mean it's not, it just jumped out at me when you mentioned, I was going to ask you about cash on hand and et cetera, but then when you referenced it yourself, I thought, well, why are we doing this then? I understand the need to build and not to hit someone with a high rate, but I don't know, maybe the two cents really isn't necessary. I can take another look at that, but I do recall playing around with it and it was one of those things that we are going to need a rate increase in the future because of the debt service that's going to be coming online with the Clean Water Resiliency Plan. And because one cent in stormwater doesn't raise a lot, I, but, yep. So here's something that's annoying what I'm going to share with you is that, you know that years and years and years ago, I was on the Public Works Commission. And we were talking about sludge then and we were talking about trying to remove the excess water because we didn't have any place to send the sludge. We didn't know what to do with it. And it wasn't as big an issue as it is then as it is today because of the environmental restrictions, et cetera. So I know that you're saying that you're going to spend or because Cassell is going to charge you about $90,000 a year to deal with the sludge. $900,000. $900,000, excuse me. $90,000 more than. Yeah, $900,000, I'm sorry. I wrote that down wrong, but anyways, okay. So what would it take? I mean, I don't know if we did this exercise, you know, when it's too long ago anyways, but what would it take to be more serious about reducing the amount of water and then how much would that save us? How much would that reduce the amount of sludge that we would then still have to get rid of? Because I think it's deserving of a conversation if these rates continue to go up and up and up. And this is a conversation that unfortunately must have got buried or stalled or something, or maybe just never a priority, but now it seems to be becoming more important, at least in my mind it is. And I will triple check, but a dewatering, sort of answering that question, a dewatering study and figuring out what our trajectory is. I think we're sometimes a little bit paralyzed by trying to figure out what the market's gonna be for sludge. Are people going to continue to be repulsed by the concept of spreading biosolids on the landscape? In which case we should go the completely only dewatering and just bring our costs down? Or should we do the more sustainable thing, which is do a digester which creates a more reusable product instead of sending the stuff to the landfill? And I know that my staff, we talk about it all the time and we really just need to hire somebody to, based on what we know now and based on what the markets look like, decide. And then also figure out, I mean one of my worries when we did partner with BED with the district energy to try to figure out if there was some sort of synergistic solution with district energy and a digester. And right now the scenario that they're advancing doesn't involve that. The costs were substantial and the costs per wet ton were substantial given the sort of current case. And it seems like we're not necessarily gonna be able to go the sustainability digester route unless we do some sort of venture capital like P3, which I'm not opposed to. It just is a little bit more complicated. We have so much other stuff weighing down our debt service capacity. So I understand that. I guess what I'm just saying is that if we're having to spend a million dollars, basically a year. I think, and you know better than I that the couple of scenarios which we should consider. But to me, I think it would be good to understand really what those costs are, what the savings would be, what the reuse of the matter at the end of that whether it's dewatering or the other process. To me, this makes sense in the long run. And I understand that's just another project that needs attention. But I feel like, you know, I don't really wanna spend a million dollars a year on something that we potentially might be able to utilize ourselves, you know? Anyways, so. I totally agree. Two years ago, we did also do a study with Chittin' Solid Waste District looking at regional solutions to this as well. Again, there was no silver bullet here and the costs per wet ton were still over what we're paying currently. So we're trying to each, you know, to your point, Sharon, each couple of years we try to figure out as the market changed is there a new, better way of doing it? And we haven't found that perfect solution yet. I don't think there's a perfect solution, but there might be a more cost effective one. Well, and I think there may be where I've been landing lately is there's probably an interim solution. If you ultimately are gonna be dewatering anyway, then maybe you go ahead and you just get the dewatering, you try to, because the dewatering equipment should have a good return on investment. I mean, if you're spending $900,000 on it, you should be able to save something over time. It's the digester stuff, but I do think that we may just need to literally pick a path that may only be the next 10 years, but make sure we're not cutting off other paths. So thank you, thank you, because it is something I do struggle with. So the last thing that just rebates when you're looking at the, trying to deal with the rate restructuring. A traditional rebate is that people pay the money upfront and then they get the money back, but is there a different scenario because with rebates? Where are you referring to rebates that they don't have? So your rate payer affordability, and you've got all these little bullets, identification of affordability programs, including discounts, rebates, et cetera. And so I'm not, maybe there's a, when people say rebate, maybe because BED said rebate too. Maybe there is a scenario where you don't have to spend the money to then get a return because I don't think that people can spend the money and wait for the return. So that's what my point is regarding the rebate. I'm concerned about that unless there's another scenario that I'm not aware of. Right, no, and I was just listing the universe of possible affordability programs, and we may look at rebates and be like, nope, not gonna do it, we need to figure out a different way of buying lots of shower heads and just giving them to people or, you know. So I think I get your point. Okay, thank you. That's it. But in the world of rebates, just because we give with those, I would add it's upstream where you pay for the rebate at the supplier until the customer actually gets it without you get the discount at the point of sale. That's the way to look at rebates, not as an ascended coupon. Well, that's why I was asking, is there another way of doing rebates? I have like three rebates to file for things I've purchased recently, so I'm totally on board. I cannot find the time to just fill out the paperwork and I'm probably gonna miss out on the rebate. Okay, all right, thank you. That's sort of what they're counting on, I feel like sometimes, although maybe I'm being cynical about it. I just have a couple of questions and I'm hoping you just can remind me now. I remember it was probably about a year ago that we discussed Hadley Road. And I'm trying to remember and just for clarification, is Hadley Road the only road in South Burlington that falls under this category of they used to get their water from us and now because of the pump station, they are in South Burlington. And I know we are swimming, all you have to do is walk by or drive by Hadley Road, there's major construction going on there. They still get their water from CWD, they just send their wastewater to us. I mean wastewater, so are they the only? They're not the only, there's a handful of other customers, but not in that volume, not in a way in which we anticipate that South Burlington's gonna put a pump station and to get those other customers. So we don't have that risk moving forward. Is there any one, are there any other neighboring towns that fall into that kind of category like we have? We serve water to Colchester, to Colchester Fire District two. So should Colchester Fire District two at some point figure out a way to run water and get Champlain water to that part of Colchester, then we would stand to lose, I think about 220,000 on the water side, but not the wastewater side. Not at this time, they haven't, yeah. They haven't heard anything. And we do, we have technically have a contract with them, but I'd have to look to see if there's some sort of notification period. I mean, it's obviously a significant investment on their part that. Yes, they would be playing the long game just like we would if we did dewater. And you mentioned about the grants that you had gotten. I'm just curious to know is there an expense, did we have to put up to get the grants? The million dollar grant is a no match grant. So we were very lucky. It was 1.25 million. There's five CSO communities and we figured it best. If everybody put in, we were gonna get a slice, 250, but I said put all of our projects in, have them tell us no, and they gave us most of the money. I think Rutland got a teeny amount, so. There's nothing like a grant with no match. Yes, I mean, still substantial, it is substantial paperwork, but hopefully with the new staffing, we're gonna be able to. An investment of time and resources. I just wanted to also thank you for the presentation. I particularly like presentations that have numbers and figures so that we have a, not just a, not just simply a. A pretty face. Thank you very much. Can you please go back to the last slide? And do you mind spending a little bit of time here? Can you explain again what is this? So this is just the breakdown of, so on your far left-hand corner, the proposed rate, either $6.62 if you have a single family home, $6.21 per 100 cubic feet. The increase for the monthly homeowner is, is taking the, for your average bill compared to a bill you might get this year to next year's fiscal year, what the monthly increase could be if you're using 600 cubic feet in your single family. And then we just multiplied the monthly cost for the average homeowner in total. And then we look at the annual increase. So over last year, somebody who uses 600 cubic feet might be expecting to pay almost $40 more. And then the other one is just the total annual cost. So basically, this is a total increase, but not what you expect people to be paying next year. The last column would be the total. If you went home and you looked at your water bill and you use 600 cubic feet, then you would see, you would expect your overall annual bill to be about $850 a year. To be about $850, or this is an increase that we expect. No, no, no, total. So that one's definitely a total. The, like every other column is the increase. So the second column is just what you would expect is to be the increase. The next one is the total. Your total bill you would expect to see is about $70. The next one is just the annual increase for the homeowner. Next time I can try it, maybe I can try to make it. Because I wanna come to a point here. And in your budget, how much have you allocated for people to do outside entities, to do research, or to do, you know, yeah, to do research? Or you contract an entity to, such as Raftelis. I don't know, at the top of my head, probably until, I mean, there's a professional, the professional and consulting services line in each of the budgets. And that would be, that would be primarily where we're hiring consultants, but sometimes it also includes contractors. So if you wanted to know specifically how much I was planning on spending on firms like Raftelis and other engineering firms for design, I'd have to tease that out for you because it's kind of lumped in. So in that line, we might pay for a landscaping company and also pay for a somebody who's a professional expert like Raftelis. We're getting close. So I think to my point is this, we just had BED here and no increases, nothing for years. But I was wondering if that line budget item where you contract entities to do studies, to combine those two entities. Is it part of your, is it in your radar? Is it part of your scope of work? To look at combining water resources with BED. Is BED at this? We continue to look at that and think about ways in which we could combine services and one example that has already come up as far as the cost efficiency would be if we could figure out how to ever have like a unified bill. It's whenever we've looked at it, the clerk treasurer's looked at it, it is more complicated than not because our customers don't overlap exactly and so there'd be a lot of massaging. It is something that continues to come up and I am not opposed to but we do not specifically have anything in there right now to study that specifically. I think it was last study, you might have been around, I think it was last studied like in the 80s and I don't know the reason why it didn't work. Political. Also what you said about the two don't overlap. Yeah. Lots of tenants have electric bill and no water bill. Exactly. That's the issue that's right. We looked at this maybe two years ago with counselor Paul and it was. It, there was so little overlap, it was really hard, yeah. Right, it doesn't mean though, we've even met with them though about our meter technology. Could we leverage their meter fixed network to have our meters talk to them? And again, I feel like everything in my life, it's always a little more complicated than that but we continue to be in constant contact because we do see that naturally there could be a synergy there. But we've also partnered with them on reducing our electrical demand. We are a very high demand user in the city's portfolio and so some of the variable speed pumps that we've brought in have driven the price down somewhat or crossed it down but BED and DPW are close partners on a number of fronts. My question again, what will it take to get there? What will it take to look into that combining those two entities? Just the water division and Burlington Electric Department. I would say it would take a very clear direction from the administration or council to say we want to spend our time and resources to take a good look at this. It is not a quick study and in the midst of a generational reinvestment on the water side and the rate affordability study number of other activities, this is currently not in our ability to do that. Right, it's a public service board. I think when we say to study something it's not only one aspect. Yep. Right, you could come back and say there's clear reasons why not to do it. So it sounds like it would take a council initiative to do it or the administration to do so? Yes, and there's not currently money in the budget to do something like that. Thanks, I will say that there's a lot of good stuff being done and the voters obviously have been very resoundingly approved the initiatives that have gone forward with good reason. As you said, it's water's worth it. But, and the council has been too, it's been supportive, but I do hope that we can find a way to begin to stem this because it is getting expensive. So the average, the $846.24, that's the total utility bill for a year for the average customer. For somebody who uses 600 cubic feet, yes. So when you divide that out times 12, it's $70.51, which is getting expensive. I mean, and just, and there's a lot of other expenses in Burlington that are not within your purview, but just hopefully we can find a way to, and we can't continue to have significant increases. Forward to the rate of affordability study and understanding how best we can look at programs, rebates, rate adjustments to address this. And new revenue. Again, I do believe there are things that we're not charging for that we could legitimately charge for if there is a appetite for those particular customers having to absorb some of those costs. So I am hopeful that we're going to figure out how to at least slow down the slope. We are, as I know, we're not the same as everybody else, but when we do look across the nation, we are not an anomaly in meeting these rate increases. If anything, we're below the sort of national averages. I know that doesn't help the average rate payer, but it at least helps me know that we're not somehow doing weird things and costing way more than at least on average. It's really this driver of the infrastructure deficit and all of the water resources are slamming into, or being sandwiched between this old infrastructure and new regulations. And it's really hard. It's really, really hard. Thanks. We'll move on to traffic then. Thank you. Welcome. Passionate about parking. I don't think it's a surprise that she tries to convince me of that. Jeff, come on up. That's great. Excellent. Thanks. So I understand we have 15 minutes for this, so please excuse me if I run through this. This presentation's been in your packet, so I will jump to the important parts. With me is interim assistant director, Jeff Padgett, former commission chair who's been able to help us out and provide us good leadership over the last, what, five months? Yeah. Half time to three quarter time. Not that he's counting. Thank you, next. A lot of work. All right, so we're focusing on one of the four divisions here in public works, those in blue. You'll see the activities that Jeff oversees and we'll be talking about the budget tonight. All right, so we've accomplished a lot this coming year, this past year, this current year, and you'll see that detailed here. One of the areas I'll draw attention to is that we have installed a new parking and revenue control system called Parks in the Garages. It has been problematic and we have not accepted the equipment yet. It's been six months of install and we have yet to accept it. So this will be an issue that we are needing to manage through 19 and into 20. On the good side of things, we have transitioned our attendance to be ambassadors to provide better customer service. We've also initiated a much larger holiday parking promotion thanks to the support from Brookfield and City Place, Burlington, as you all saw last December. One back one slide, the second to bottom, we've also upgraded a number of signals across the city. You'll see listed there either with RRFBs or new pedestrian infrastructures. We've opened through a partnership with Champlain College, the 53 public spaces at 194 St. Paul. It's been great to have that new resource. We updated the residential parking program thanks to the study that was done a couple of years ago and the police have helped launch that and Traffic Fund has helped launch the bike share program next. We're talking about two separate funds for the new counselors. The Traffic Fund was split in 2017 into two funds, the Traffic Fund and the Parking Facilities Fund. This was due to a close read of the charter and the charter change, which made it clear to have two funds, special revenue funds regulated differently. FY20 goals, I will pick out some highlights here. The Traffic Fund has helped to not only control and regulate traffic, but help with the infrastructure deficit in controlling and regulating traffic as it relates to our street grid. And so the Great Streets Project at St. Paul Street is a beneficiary of the Traffic Fund support. Like I said before, we've installed new signal equipment in FY19. We're gonna continue that in 20. One of the pieces we're considering with BBA and our partnership with them and CAPMA, the Campus Area Transportation Management Association, that is actually rebranded into the Chittenden Area Transportation Management Association, is a wider suite of benefits for downtown employees. We are looking at flat rate evening parking for restaurant workers, bar workers, to help them get off street, put them in a garage that has plenty of capacity like Lake View and College, and also look at discounted bus passes. Every bus except for two come to downtown Burlington in the region. We wanna help our frequent commuters find alternatives so that the retail shoppers can have more access in the transient shoppers to parking. I will also hit the third from the bottom. One of the great pieces with the BBA has been over the last three years. We've had a partnership agreement. You've probably seen the Park Burlington website. You've seen the monthly e-news that we send out to downtown stakeholders to help maximize the resources and get people to the available parking next. For FY20 on the parking facility side, that was traffic. On the parking facility side, fixing the parking and revenue control equipment is our number one priority. Jeff spends a significant amount of his time working to manage that issue. We are looking to bring more interactivity online so that people can get their monthly leases so that they can pay tickets. That is the paying tickets part has started online now but we wanna enable people to sign up for leases online. We wanna look at adjusting our staffing and security schedules so that the gates can be down all the time and we are capturing all the revenue in the system. If we have a lot of hotel guests that leave at six a.m., we are not collecting that revenue when the gates are up. We have some minor repairs to make in Westlake garage and we're also planning for significant future repairs at Marketplace. Marketplace was built in the mid-70s and is in need of some significant upgrades similar to what we did for College Street in the last couple of years. And then there's a number of improvements to the downtown parking plan. Councilor Wright, we will get to a slide where there's no recommended rate increases across the board but we're continuing to look at occupancy levels and adjust based on an 85% occupancy. So why don't we go to the next slide. Talk about numbers. Here are the numbers. What we have done in FY19 and 20 is combined parking facilities and traffic so you can do an apples to apples comparison. Over the last four years, revenues have increased 11.5% expenses about 5%. This has enabled us to reinvest in our system and carry a healthy fund balance which is something that the traffic fund did not have a couple of years ago. You will see here the traffic fund in particular has about a $2.5 million budget and the main cost area for that is the right of way program. This is signs and lines. This is managing our meter program where the crossing guard program and signals and administration round out the program. The modest net income plan. As you're seeing here, the revenues that fund this program come predominantly from meter revenue. On the parking facility side a similar sized budget, 2.8 million. Your expense drivers are operating the marketplace garage and the College Street Lakeview garage. We have budgeted in this budget about $115,000. You'll see in the bottom bullet for capital repairs that will be transferred if this budget is approved to a capital account 764 which is the fund where capital reinvestments are made from next. All right, so rates. Are no assumptions for downtown rate parking rate increases. That said, the downtown parking transportation plan has identified a number of strategies. One is shooting for this 85% occupancy on street. We're continuing to do meter occupancy accounts thanks to a partnership with the UVM Transportation Research Center. And we are doing counts in the evenings, six to eight, excuse me, six to nine PM to take a look at what our occupancy levels are in the evening. The garage parking options. We talked about the shift worker parking option. We're also eager to implement an overnight lease option for downtown residents. And I know a number of you have been interested in this. We are considering as we've telegraphed the last couple of years, replacing to our free at marketplace and replacing it with a validation program. We would look to keep to our free parking at College Street and Lakeview Garage. And happy to talk about that. And that change would, of course, need significant counsel and commission deliberation. Next. Drivers on expenses and revenues. We're happy to talk in more detail, but I'd say, here we're seeing more revenue come in for meter hood fees. There's a lot of construction downtown. So we're getting more of the meter revenue in through encumbrances and meter hood fees than people paying the meters. These are short-term disruptions, but we make sure to capture the lost revenue with the developers. And there's an increase in capital project support as you're seeing here to support Great Streets. Next. On the parking facilities side, we are projecting a slight increase in monthly parkers. Jeff and his team have done a good job in getting more monthly parkers into our garages, even with Macy's out of business next to the College and Lakeview Garage. We have been able to keep those garages full with monthly parkers. Next. So looking beyond, rates are held flat. The park system is our main focus, capital reinvestment preparing for a major marketplace reinvestment in the coming years. And a continued focus on asset management so that we're stewarding our assets responsibly. Next. Questions? President Wright. Thank you. Jayme, can you remind me what the commission has authority over and what the council has a say in in regard to the? So, largely the council has delegated to the commission the authority to set rates on street and off street. There has been a recent resolution by the city council that if there are gonna be changes in rates to explicitly notify the council, there is some language in charter such as around the two hour free parking program that is in charter is not able to be adjusted by the commission, though it says that there shall be a two hour free parking program it doesn't prescribe where. So that's a quick summary of where the response is. What about things like Sunday parking or enforcing hours, eight, nine o'clock at night, whatever? Commission sets the hours and the rates. And so the council has requested the council be notified before the commission deliberates or acts on any change like that. But that just says notify us. It doesn't mean they tell us and then they can still do whatever. Yes, I don't recall the exact language of the motion but I think it was more around notification than it was around seeking a recommendation from the council. So just for the record, I have thought for some time that the council should have more say in these things that I don't think there's probably support in the charter change committee for that. I probably will try one more time in the charter change committee. If there's not, I may start some kind of a petition to take a charter change to the voters because I strongly believe that on some of these issues the people who are elected and accountable to voters should be having at least some kind of a say at the end of the process than just people that aren't accountable at the polls on some of these bigger decisions. Not that we make all the decisions or but that at the end, if it's just controversial issue we have the ability to change it at the end at the end of it if we want to. So just throwing that out there. Thanks for having more flexibility in the right structures. Right now it's baked into ordinance what our rates shall be. Like in summary, Chippen has the ability to do a pilot program on the streets. So that's like all of these meters that came in. Remember we set the meters to go to 10 and then we backed to nine. It's because we have that flexibility in the garages. The rates are baked into ordinance and there's no piloting authority. So we need some, we need more business controls over these garages so that we can adjust the rates and see what happens, push them up, push them down. Be a little more creative here, be a little more creative today. So I agree with your sense of the system. Chairman, isn't there still a conflict where the council could do something in terms of the money within the budget? The council does approve the budget. So absolutely, if you made a change to the budget that forced a management change to achieve the budget objectives then that's in your prerogative to do so. I'd prefer not to do it that way though, I mean in all honesty because I think that leaves the department scrambling and that's not really the intent. I agree, I just was pointing that out. So anyways, I have a couple of comments and so just, I guess I'll start with the parking. The hours, I'm glad you're looking at them again. I don't know where that's gonna take you but I'm glad you're looking at them again. I'd prefer to see them roll back to eight o'clock. But I'm really glad that you're looking at them again to figure out just what is happening out there. I'm really concerned about the Sunday opportunity. I think what would happen is even if you did something like a pilot, I can tell you that I now, if I'm coming down and I've been able to use my parking pass because I'm here doing city business, I might stop and grab a sandwich before I go back to my car, full disclosure. But I wouldn't come down to have a sandwich because I'd have to pay for parking. And that's really true. I look for alternate places and I think what you're not factoring in is that I think a number of residents in Burlington, if they are not with them walking and if they're not young enough to bike, may make that same choice, going somewhere else where they can have free parking in order to grab a bite and that means go to a movie or even shop. And I always say like when the church street marketplace, I do my fair share on buying downtown but I have to think about that now. I really do and I always have. And so I'm certainly hoping that you won't go to Sunday. You have been spotted in Target though, why don't you? Once. But anyways, so anyways, that's my thought on that. I am concerned about that and I know it's a delicate balance. I wasn't excited about using the traffic fund to support infrastructure parking garages. I thought we should be bonding for those. I have a different philosophy than what has happened but I'm living with that but I am concerned about how we charge people, residents specifically. I think that the out of towners wouldn't know a difference. They're used to paying for parking all the time when you're visiting but anyways. I really hope that this year Brookfield will contribute again to the holiday parking. I think that was a really important piece and so I'm hoping that, I don't know who has that conversation but I'm hoping that happens again. I had a question about in your line by line and sometimes because there's so many budgets within budgets, I'm sorry. So you may tell me I just haven't seen the full picture but on page 11 you talked about school crossing guards and you talked about part time and also temps. You reduced the amount of revenue or not revenue amount you're paying people. Does that mean you've got, I couldn't figure that out. Was it an expense or was it revenue and is that money that's transferred in? I thought this was what you were salaries. I thought these were the salaries so it was an expense and so does that mean you have fewer of them? It does not. One of the items that we noticed doing our due diligence was that one we had not budgeted as accurately as we had thought in past years and there was also a bit of a recalibration as to how the assistant director's costs are allocated between the programs. So it is more that than we have raised the crossing guard wages last year or two years ago. We do struggle with filling those positions. There's 33 crossing guards that we support. We may need to do another increase to ensure that we fill these valuable part time positions. They're difficult positions to fill. So I was concerned about that line of item being reduced that's my point there. No reduction in level of service. And the other thing was that I did have a bit of difficulty because like just for example on page one through three you've got, well a lot of scenarios in here you've got a lot of zeros in your budget and I couldn't figure out whether that's because there and because this system that we use doesn't allow you to say it was transferred or whatever. I couldn't figure out where it went or and so I had difficulty following this budget. Yeah and that is because of the split between the parking facilities and the traffic budgets and the way New World Runs a report. You'll see expenses in 17 and 18 for something that in 19 and 20 was split out to the parking facilities budget. And some of them are just zero. Like there's just no money anywhere. That's right because things like the marketplace garage in the old budget don't no expenses show up there. It's moved into the traffic facilities fund and the marketplace garage expenses and revenues show up in an entirely different area. And that was because of the charter change and the attorneys close read of how the parking revenue for the garages and lots should remain distinct and should not be used for any other purpose and that's charter language. So we wanted to make sure to have a fund where we knew we were not using any parking lots or garages for any other use than those. So just so you know, I may need to have a little bit of help either from you or from Beth to make sure I really understand this. Happy to. Anyways, thank you. All right, I can try. My lineup is Roof Hansen and Pine. Two questions. First on on street meters and then a little bit about parks, the park system. So I'm just trying to just help me out here. The 2017 actual for the, I'm on, this is 4335 on street meter revenues. 2017 actual is a little bit over 2 million. And then 2018 actual, even more so 2.33 million. We had a dip though in 2019 actual on the 1.5 million and about a $736,000 dip. And we also budgeted at that little over 2 million point. So I'm just curious and we're also budgeted again at this little over 2 million for this fiscal year. But I'm just curious about this dip and what could be, what's the reason? Where, what are you seeing the dip in in terms of where is that showing up? So the 2019 actual 1.595 million. Okay, yeah. Okay. And you know that's a year to date, right? So is that, is that the purpose that we're gonna finish off? That's a year to date number in New World. I mean, we haven't finished FY19. I don't know where that's through until. Whatever dip is kind of at the bottom of the page. Okay, so March, or excuse me, May 17th. So we expect to be, so there's no, there's no issue out there that we're losing revenue or for whatever reason not bringing in the typical degree of revenue. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lag in a couple things. Park Mobile, we've transitioned our pay, a lot of people are paying not with cash anymore. Cash was really instant. We take the cash, we put it in the bank. With other ways of paying, there's a lag. And so with Park Mobile, we get a monthly reconciliation from them once all the payments have been made. So that's part of it. We are seeing some decrease on the actual meter revenue, but we are making it up in the encumbrances on the meters where the construction is occurring. So thank you for that clarity of sources to a data thing. When we shifted from the coin operated meters in the core shift over to the smart meters, there was an assumption on my part that we would actually see a net increase because there was some melt from what was, for a couple of reasons, there was a melt. Are we seeing that or no, because I'm not sure I can't see past 2017. Right. If you were to go back past 2017, you would notice that there has been significant revenue growth on meters. We were at about 1.2 million when I came on and FY 13. And we are now around 2.2, 2.3. So that yield is not good. Onto the park system, which I know is as you said a few times, the primary focus, you just sit a little bit more in a light as to what the hiccups are here and what the steps are gonna be to rectify it. Yeah, so we went in with a joint procurement with the airport and the airport has certain type of need and then downtown is another type of need. Obviously for efficiencies of the city and reporting and contracting, we went and walked together and we selected a vendor. The vendor has delivered very well for the airport. Unfortunately, there were two separate installs and between the airport install being done and our install, there was a corporate consolidation and a takeover and a manufacturing plant that got closed down. And we got the last equipment from the manufacturing plant that closed down. So you can imagine the workers were probably really excited to be putting the last equipment together that they would ever put together. And so not only have we had equipment challenges, we've also had operational challenges because the needs of downtown are much more complex than the needs of the airport. There's one garage at the airport with a certain rate structure. With one exit. With one exit and we have multiple different garages with multiple exits and multiple types of customers, hotel customers, monthly partners, transient partners and the like. Unfortunately, we have not had the same positive experience the airport's had. Just to give you an insight. I had meetings with them on Tuesdays and Thursdays and they are very frank and we're working through a lot of issues. Just to give you some context, just this week I got confidence that they're able to count the cars. This is a system where the gate goes up, the car goes in, goes down, gate goes up, car goes out, goes down. And as of this morning, I thought that we had the cars counting. I checked the marketplace this afternoon and we were again at 175% capacity. Still not working. So these are the challenges that's fundamental basic things. And then speaking to the setup in the beginning, there's just, there's a pretty robust computer software behind all of this, right? It's a big database. And a lot of the data as it's imported in is just a little scrambled. And like if you've ever worked in a big database like this that it's a little scrambled, it might as well be totally scrambled because it's just a little scrambled, it's just it's been. So we're wrestling with a lot of just minutiae. But we're getting there, we're making progress and now it's sitting on these calls on Thursday so we can get here. Yeah, and I know this is an unfair question. So let's get going. I'm sorry, but I said that the upside is we do see light at the end of the time and we will get to a point where the gates are down all the time. And when the gates are down all the time, then we can start capturing those people that come on Saturday morning and leave on Sunday and they don't pay. And start doing things like over night parking. We can have a 24 hour silo, which is a lot of parking to ride though it is. Is there, so like you can see the light within the tunnel when you think we'll get there. And that's the unfair question that I know I'm asking. It's always slightly unfair. We're gonna need some time. I would say you should check back in with us regularly. My hope is that by the end of the summer or early fall, we will have a system that is either fully functioning or we will have a strategy involving others in the city to figure out a different path forward. We're working on two paths right now. One path is get this thing that you sold us working, gosh darn it. And the other path is, okay, what are the other options? And what does that path work like? So that's what we're working on and we're going to, actually there's two or three other paths, but for the sake of the discussion, I'm just gonna put the five questions on this. What was the total dollar amount for the contract for this entire system between the airport and the downtown? Yeah, for us, it's around 1.1 million for TPW. That includes a five-year service contract with the airport that was a little bit less. So I think we're talking about a total of around 2 million. Thank you. I take this place, all right. You mentioned that there may go to a validation for the marketplace garage. Explain how that works with the did that we have that says they're paying for two hours of free parking. How would that line up? It seems like there's a misalignment there. Right, and we've been working with BBA and the churching marketplace kind of flesh out what this would look like. There would still be a two-hour parking program in the city if there's still two-hour free parking at Lakeview and College. The validation program that we've been talking about would have the did support some portion of a validation. So validations would be paid for by the did and then in part by the businesses who wanted the validation. So that there'd be a shared investment and then the business could provide it to the customers or the organization. It could be a nonprofit downtown. It could be a business downtown. And the did would support a portion of the value as part of the $300,000 that the did raises for a parking program. The parking program says it includes two-hour free. It doesn't say it's exclusively two-hour free. Does that fee that the businesses pay now, does it cover the cost of the program? No word here, no? It does not cost, if one looks at what two-hour free parking costs the city, it does not cover the full cost of two-hour free. That said, we have had this benefit in place, this incentive for 20 years. And at some level, I think there's interest among stakeholders to try new ways of serving the public. And so the discounted bus passes that we're exploring, the nighttime leases, the validation are all ways that we're looking at trying to provide a different service to the public. Okay, let me just, actually let me finish with my questions. I'll ask yours in a minute, no. Um, the uh. I wanted to just go think of it. I think, and I could be ahead of it or behind it, but there's a move to eliminate parking requirements in the, what we used to call the central business district. Is that something that is advancing at the Planning Commission, does anybody know? There's been discussion, I believe it's going to be discussed in concept at the housing summit, but there is no, to my knowledge, there's- Nothing proposed yet. I would float the idea that if we do that, which may be the right way to go, that we collect some payment from developers who are no longer required to provide parking into the, into some fund to do with transportation. I'm not sure what it is, but they will not have the ongoing obligation. They will not have the initial capital investment that goes with parking, and the public will be presumably bearing some of that cost. I think we ought to capture that activity when it's happening. So I'm just throwing that out there as a concept so that if you're there when they're discussing it, I hope you'll point that concept out. It could go to public transit, it could go to bike share, it could go to anything other than you know, automobile dependent transportation. It is a concept we haven't been discussing and I'm glad to hear your interest in it and they'll certainly be on the table as we advance the conversation. Sharon, what's an all about Easter eggs? No, I don't. No, no, no. No, I'm sorry, we had that, Councillor Gingway. I will give you a turn, I promise, but. Thank you. So the Burlington schools, they open from eight to five thirty. And you go around the city, there are only a couple of schools that have crosswalks. Some schools, all they have is just cross guards, right? But the Burlington school, they open until five thirty. After school from three to five thirty every day. Kids cross, no crosswalk. So I was just wondering why some schools such as Sustainability Academy, Integrated Arts Academy, C.P. Smith, they do not have any type of crosswalk to help students cross when school is over at five thirty. And why don't we have also crosswalks to help kids cross the streets? And some of the streets such as North Street is super busy. Etonala Parkway is also very busy. And how do we make sure, especially when the day saving light, what will it take to have crosswalks at least in some of the schools? So if there's a desire, there are crosswalks at these schools. Some crosswalks do not have activation. They do not have either a stoplight or they do not have an R or FB, the rectangular rapid flashing beacons. When there are crossing guards, crossing guards cross students in crosswalks. We don't cross students outside of crosswalks. But you know what I mean, what I mean. I'm just making sure I understand that you're talking about either more traffic lights or more R or FBs. Well, you know, yes, go ahead. Okay. If there's a request for those types of items, those requests come in through DPW and we evaluate them through our engineering team. We are installing a number of rapid flashing beacons this year. We are continuing to look at additional developments. There are 33 crossing guard stations. Should the school district or there be another entity that wants to kind of fund an expansion of that program? We're also open to that. The challenges, the traffic fund is currently bearing the full cost of the crossing guard program. So as it relates to either additional signals or RFBs, the requests come to us and we are happy to look at additional control. And if it's one more crossing guards, that's a conversation we'd love to have with you and the schools about how the schools participate in that program, which currently, there is no financial participation. So basically you're saying that it's the school who have to come to you and make the request or residents who live around them or parents. Who should make the request? In terms of additional crossing guards or crossing guards in different locations. I haven't talked about flashing beacons. Okay, anything that needs can, yeah. The school can, a resident can, a city counselor can. We will take any request from the public. Before CP Smith, I did make a request to you. Okay. And also to Rob. Okay, I don't recall that conversation. It's possible that that has happened. I'm happy to look at where that request stands. I just wanted to pick up on what Councillor Pyn was asking about the voucher. And you were talking about the DID. The validation, rather the validation. So am I to understand that would it be just for certain merchants or if you parked in the marketplace garage and you went anywhere in any store, would any of the merchants give you this validation? Jeff and Alex, do you want to? Any merchant that pays into the DID would be eligible to purchase or, this is what, these are the DDGD details. How do we actually give them the token? So my concern, my concern is that I'm, as a person parking in that garage, how am I going to know which merchant paid into the DID and which one didn't? Or is it all merchants, all of them? Okay, that's what I wanted to make sure. That so that no matter where a person went, they would still be able to get the two hours or whatever, pre-parking. All right, thank you. I just misunderstood that when you were explaining that before. So, all right, thanks. I just wanted to just put a plug in as I have, on many occasions, check them that I still am getting emails, phone calls, or having to see somebody who still feels that we need to do more with the marketplace garage in terms of safety and cleanliness. I won't go into all the issues that are surrounding cleanliness. You know what they are. People just don't feel good about walking in the stairwells. And... To the stairwells in particular, we just had to watch them and just get that appeal last week by all the paint, the interiors that start painting the interiors of the stairwells. So they should have the pressure to make this. I mean, I think... That's just the beginning, because I know, I see it. I mean, I think that, you know, I think that certainly will, you know... I mean, that's good. There's no question that that's good. It only takes a week for a lot of that tremendously great effort that you put in to fall, to fall in terms of people feeling good about going into one of those stairwells. And, you know, just like the airport is one gateway into the city that people, we want it to be the best that it can be, so to the downtown. And, you know, the majority of people who, particularly people who don't come, who aren't local, although local people obviously use them too, but particularly people who are not local don't really know the lay of the land in terms of where you can park. They're gonna go to a garage because if they live somewhere where there are garages, that's the first place they're gonna go. So that's... And as far as not only the cleanliness issue, but the fact that particularly once it gets dark out and obviously in the case of the winter, and we've had this conversation about people who work downtown, the added enforcement does mean that people who work downtown can no longer park their car in front of their place of where they are working at five o'clock because they're gonna be paying a lot more in parking than they were before when they literally were paying probably very, very little. And where are they going? They're going into parking garages. Those are people that are walking into them late at night. And so I just think, as I said, I mean, it probably sounds like a broken record, but I feel like I need to say that. But it's critical, and I agree with you. And from my perspective as a culture thing, there are some cultural problems in the garage. And I said that to a lot of people. And we're changing that. And one of the ways that we're changing it is, I don't know if you've seen Bruce, our creator guy, the guy that the Bank Steward entrance. He used to be out there in a construction vest at a Napa Hack. And I'm like, let's say a construction worker saying welcome to Burlington. So we got him a nice vest that's a bright blue with a bright blue head. It's a part of Burlington on it says for the meter on the side. And now we're getting the same vests for all the ambassadors, but in black. And it says ambassador on it with a black hat. And then the next step is to get the same vest but all yellow for the maintenance staff. So we're starting to build a team. So it's not just the maintenance people, the ambassadors, and then this greeter guy out front. They're all the garage. That was the thing that I did with Ron Redmond too because he was desperate to have a greeter. So he would have a greeter standing in the road. And we would have a greeter standing in the entrance. And it was like, this is silly, Ron. So we worked together. Now we have one greeter. We worked with Ron and with Alex so they make a map of downtown. So when fans get backed up, they have a map to give them to send people down to the college. So the point is not all this, the point is culture. We're trying to change the culture in the garage. So they take pride in the garage. I mean, go in the stairwells and they've got the grates covered up with sheet metal and shears. It's ridiculous. So that's what I'm trying to change. Great, well thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thanks, that's all. I was just, I was gonna bring up the ambassador piece and how shifting from attendants to ambassadors was a big step and a huge step. But I think it just goes to show because I still get these same complaints like others do and like I'm sure you do, where it's, there really is a need to shift the culture amongst our existing team and then also grow that team. Knowing also that in that situation where we had the marketplace and others working on an ambassador program. You know, it's union, there's a union piece here as well where non-city union staff can't go and work in the garages they need to be out on the street to be doing that sort of greeting and so forth. It's complexity to this, but an ambassador program, I think throughout the entire downtown including integrating with the parking garages. I think there is the direction we should and I think are in trying to build a 24 hour city. It's a huge sea change and there's people that are working in the garages who've been cashiers for 15 or 18 years. Cashiers sitting in the booth. Now for me to tell them do not go in the booth. Your job is not in the booth. Your job is to walk around and so it pushes the help button, your cell phone rings. That's like blowing their mind and I get it because their job is to smile and take money. Now it's to walk around with a very different, very different job. So it's getting to the justice. Thanks for your efforts. Thank you. Hopefully we didn't take too much of your time, Beth. Thank you. He's apparently not coming. He's not coming. I'm happy to answer any questions about regional programs. We are funding regional programs in the same way that we did in FY19. Big change, just because you made a question to the GMT kind of allocation. Could I just ask, because I didn't see this until I saw it. It appears as though there's two regional programs by Jets. There's one that was done on the 17th, one on the 22nd. Maybe I missed it. What are the differences? Actually, I think the only difference is the new counselor's names were not on the counselor list. I think that might be the difference. There's not a dollar difference. So I guess I'm, you mean like somewhere down below? Where is it? Because I did not see. Like lines 29 and maybe, I mean. Oh, it's funny to see. I don't see a different, line 29. Like line 29 on where the individual counselors are. No, line 29 is sister cities. Oh, okay. So that is what the difference was. The old one had the counselor, the counselor lines on it and the new one just has the regional programs to be more clear. Sorry. The numbers didn't change in regional programs between the two versions. The dollar bills. I didn't see that there was a change in the totals. You are absolutely right. But I didn't know, maybe I missed that there was a change somewhere else. Honestly, I think it was just confusion of two versions being in the share drive and one only should have been posted. But no changes. Okay. So the only thing I wanted to just mention and I did let the mayor know about this, although I'm sorry that he's not here today is, you know, when we had the conversation, when was it now? Probably about six months ago or so about the NPAs. You know, I had the chance about a week and a half ago to go and spend about an hour and a half with the NPA Steering Committee on Word 6 and go over their budget, which right now is $400 a year. And I think that what they told me is that, you know, they, I mean, obviously they can do a lot more with $1,250. But I think there really is a strong appetite to be able to do a lot more in terms of some of the other NPAs. I mean, like I spent about two weeks ago, I try once or twice a year to go to every NPA. And I went to the two, three NPA, which is like the, I'll admit, is like one of the envies of the city. They have a wonderful dinner. Who said the barbecue? I know, you do, you do. And in fact, I even tell people, we should go to the NPA meeting in two, three. And I think there is an appetite to be able to do that in other parts of the city. And so I don't know if there is a place that that figure could be increased to what the NPAs had originally wanted. If there is, for example, like, and again, this is just, I'm just throwing something out. If it turned out that, you know, I don't know what the cost is of like, say the special election for the TIF. I don't know. I mean, $40,000 sounded like a lot to me. I had always heard that a special election was not that costly. And wondered if there would be any sort of ability to rejigger that so that we could have a larger number, even meeting it halfway at 15. If there is something that we could do about that. I think that because traditionally, the NPAs haven't spent their full budget allotment, we're proposing that in this first year of increasing the budget for the NPAs, it would be at $10,000. And let's see how it goes. Let's see how many, how the NPAs are able to use that increased cost. It seemed like such a large leap to go from where they are now to a full 20,000 to starting at 10,000 to see how it goes in the first year seems like reasonable compromise. Another thing that we had discussed with Beth in putting these increased funds for the NPAs as part of this budget was that we could create a fund for unspent NPA dollars. So that right now the NPA doesn't spend their full budget line. They kind of use it or lose it. So creating a fund so that if the NPA doesn't spend their full budget line using kind of putting that money aside for NPA projects that NPAs could apply for small neighborhood projects in a way that an NPA might ask like a counselor to use a counselor. So I guess I'm not sure I quite understand because obviously it's a budget and so are you talking about rolling over money or are you talking, I mean, how are you doing that? So that's not really how you do a budget. Then it would be like an untaught fund balance. So I think what Jordan's saying is we would budget the $10,000 for them but any of that 10,000 not spent at the end of the year we put into a reserve fund that they could then use in future needs. So I mean, I don't know because I only can speak to one ward because I asked. They're actually running a deficit right now because they've spent more than the $400 this year and I would venture to guess that most of them it would seem that $400 is such a small amount of money. I don't know if either of you know in your particular wards if they have spent the $400 or not but it would seem as though that it would seem that they would have spent that money. I mean, it's such a small amount, but I don't know. You could tell us if you don't, do you know? We just looked at the past a five year history and they have not been spending it that line. Okay, so I think it's possible that maybe it's more just a fact that, I mean, again, as I say I can only speak to one ward but what I would ask is that if I understand what you're saying that this is the first year and it's obviously a significant leap from $400 a ward to what they had really wanted which was $2,500, what I would ask is that at the halfway through the fiscal year that we get a report that, I mean, I don't wanna do this by resolution or anything but just simply that we get a report halfway through the fiscal year so that we can see by ward how many of them have spent what would then be $600 and just have a running total so that we know whether or not the wards are spending this and if they are, and I don't know if they are but if they are and there is a way, I mean, for example, I mean, if it appears as though we're not spending our councilor initiative funds maybe we could advance that or maybe there's something else in the budget as the year evolves. I mean, I don't wanna speak on behalf of the councilor initiative only because obviously it's money that's available for 12 people but I just feel like if we can keep a close eye on that and then if people are spending it that we find a way to sort of meet that because I think there is, I mean, that was the, that was the conversation that I had with the five people on the steering committee was the number of things they feel that they could do and would increase attendance, you know. I mean, every ward is different. Well, it works in two, three for a community dinner. Two, three has that a strong sense of community in the way that you work that. That's not gonna work in every single ward but there are other things that'll work in other wards. So, thank you for listening. So, you know, wards one and eight someone came from the steering committee and during public forum and made a comment. I had asked them to reduce it to writing because the reason people don't spend $400 is that it's no money at all and we get our room for free and what we have to eat is leftover from some meeting that the hospital had so it's leftover food. Thank you very much. I mean, I'm appreciative, I guess, but not really. I mean, it's kind of odd, you know, it's been there for a while, okay, so it's there. But $400 really doesn't let you do anything and that is the problem. So, we were talking about being fully funded because then people who know their wards know small needs, know small needs in the wards in wards one and eight and we felt like we could then go through the process outside of CDBG which no longer allows you to do that to identify something that we could do to improve a section in our neighborhood that would be beneficial to the neighborhoods. We used to be able to combine if like wards, let's say wards one and six because we're neighbors, there's main street between us, but anyways, let's say we had something that we wanted to do for Edmonds or something, we've done that before, we could do that. I mean, with not big dollars, but so it empowers people, it makes them feel like they have a voice in making a difference. And so I really wanted to speak to fully funding what the NPA has asked for. I understand that there is no track record, but I think it's because, you know, if you give someone a penny and they don't spend the penny, are you gonna fault them? Cause they're asking cause they can't live on a penny, they want $100 a week, I hope not. So I think that's the issue here. And I don't think it was clearly articulated at the public forum and I was feeling very sad because it wasn't just the steering committee in wards one and eight, it was the whole meeting and we spent a dedicated chunk of time talking about it and trying to figure out how our voices could be added so that people would understand why it's not spent and what the intent was. So that people, and that, you know, I don't know, I don't necessarily feel like it needs to be rolled over if it's not spent, give people a chance to show what they can do with it and then let's revisit it. I mean, I'm not speaking, if you only partially fund it, I certainly would support what Councillor Powell said. I certainly would support that by looking at that halfway and seeing where everyone's at and see what we should do but I think it's a really important topic and I think we're missing the mark because we're talking about people who are active in the community, they're engaged, they want to be more engaged, give them a few dollars and I think they can make a difference. That's what we're really talking about and so I would speak strongly about that. I mean, so, anyways, I have some other stuff but if you want to continue with that, certainly, yeah. The only thing I want to mention is that you are fortunate in Ward 6, we do not get our space for free. And that's another thing, there's such a difference, yes. So we are paying for our space. Right. And so that's why we're running the deficit is because we can't afford $400 is our rent, so. That's a whole other difference, which needs to be factored in because the rent should be covered if you have to pay for it. So I think that this is deserving of a little more of a conversation because thank you for bringing that up because I think it's really important to know all of the ins and outs of all the different scenarios that go on in our city and some people have that full $400 and some people have nothing because you've spent it on rent. So it would be on this same subject for Sharon goes on to the next topic. I would be helpful to see maybe a print out of how the spending has gone, if we could, that'd be really helpful. Don't go back too far, but a few years. Yeah, I will have to pull it up. Okay, that'd be great. Because I lean towards fully funding that request at the amount of the $20,000. I lean toward that because it's a really small amount but the gesture and the goodwill and the citizen engagement that it encourages is so powerful that I think for such a small amount, it's really the least we can do to kind of boost our local democracy. So I think it's probably something we should be really focused on. I think we're all sort of on the same page. I think we would prefer to see the $20,000 fully funded. And when we sit here and talk about some of the very large figures that we talk about in terms of other issues and priorities and highlights that just seems as though $10,000 to empower people just seems like something that we should be able to find. I think that, okay, you've all spoken with your NPA steering committees and I hear the call for the additional funding and maybe what we haven't quite heard in our offices is precisely what the NPAs would plan to use that additional funding for. Is it like having a neighborhood block party and kind of those specific ideas maybe would help. Yeah, I get those. I have a list. We can all get a list. If possible, we'll get you a list. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure Adam would have some statements also. For example, in my conversations with Adam, I know at the World One A NPA meeting, he's suggested that there's a project someone's interested in pursuing. He'd be happy to try and coordinate counselor funds for that type of project and hadn't heard. But that's not what I want to spend counselor initiative funds on. I want to give money to the NPAs. I want to clearly delineate. Counselor money is counselor money, whether you know and I don't want to marry the two. They're separate funds. That's how I see it, so. And of course, the other thing also in fairness is that there's the counselor initiative, which admittedly, many of us work pretty hard to get that line. Pretty close. Two hundred bucks left. Yeah, two hundred dollars, but we worked hard to get it. And we have tried to do the best we can to spend it wisely. I think we've spent it all across the city and we've spent it wisely. The other issue, of course, is the money that counselors get individually. Now I know for myself, when I got closer to the end of the fiscal year, knowing what I had left, I've already given an allocation to the NPAs to finish their last meeting in June with something that will be much more special than they would be able to afford, given the fact that they're now running a deficit. Better than choosing crackers. Right, yes, right. And I'm excited about it. They're excited about it. It gives them the opportunity to plan and do something that we don't normally do. And they're planning a huge blowout for the amount of publicity. We've got some good speakers and things like that. So they're excited about that. I think it would be great if they were excited about it every month. And it really doesn't take hordes of money. And just the other thing also, because I know there's one member of our steering committee who's a former educator who has said that whereas in some words it is a little bit easier just because the community, the meeting space, and I speak more to two and three, not as much to one and eight, but certainly in one eight, you would have that opportunity too to find a place that would have childcare. Well, you've gotta pay people for childcare. They're not gonna do it for free. And that is another cost that I know people would, I know NPAs would do if they could, which would potentially necessitate another room. Now granted, the hospital always, obviously does this at no cost, but you've gotta pay people to have a presence there. So I know I'm getting off on a tangent, but having spent an hour and a half with the NPA and they said, gee, if we could have, we had $2,500 of things that we could do. But if you want a list, I'm happy to get that for you. We have some examples. Examples. That would be, we're happy to do that. So I'd like to think that we didn't put this to rest completely and that we could potentially before, and you're talking to three, fourth member of the Board of Finance or fifth, I guess there's five of us had to leave for their NPA meeting, I think it is. But in any event, I would hope that maybe with that Board of Finance meeting before we wrap this up that we might be able to have that conversation. You've got three eager people who would like to have that conversation. So I think changing the topic a little bit, but I think I must have, I didn't realize there were two versions. I got the packet version, which is really the numbers are not changed. Okay, so my version though has a first night allocation. It's highly, we had to, okay, all right, that's okay. I guess you don't like the account lines changing. I wanted to make sure. Okay, and then there's a fund, there's a $500 for a senior holiday dinner. That's the hands holiday dinner planned by Megan Humphrey. I'm sorry, what is that? The hands holiday dinner planned by Megan Humphrey. And is that adequate funding for that? Cause I really couldn't speak to it. It's not all they gets, it's just one of their sources, but yeah, she's pretty happy with it. Okay, okay, I just wanted to understand that. She gave it to her, but I know that she gets others. And then in this, which is, I know we'll have another conversation, but in this is the Heidenberg Senior Center, which is proposed to be funded at $58,000, which is good, but it's silent because we know about the additional request. And I forwarded that to the Board of Finance, so we'll have that conversation about whether or not additional dollars will be added to that. So you want that on the agenda? Well, it referred, I referred that communication. Oh, I'm sorry, everything you said in the email, yeah, I think we will have that conversation as to whether or not we're gonna adjust that line item or not for next year. That's my point. Okay, that's it. From the Mayor's position with regards to the Senior Center increased funding, I think that for FY20, we're proposing keeping the Senior Center funding at the $58,000 because really, as Jane characterized the proposal at the council meeting earlier this week, it's really a rough draft. And I think as your questions indicated, there are quite a few details to still iron out and that's gonna take some time. So this budget we're thinking will move forward with the $58,000 of funding. And then as we really sort out the proposal that the committee brought forward and put the administration lens to see if there are opportunities for efficiencies between the Senior Centers, we would potentially bring a budget amendment later on and potentially even think that this would be a use for the unassigned fund balance of the pilot project. Okay, okay. I mean, we'll have that conversation but thank you for that insight. I appreciate that. Great, that's it. Moving on from regional programs. Health. We also support health, let's keep going. Thank you everybody, thanks for showing up to work. Health is good. Excellent, I'm a favorite, I'm definitely a favorite. This is what happens when we're started. Done. It's time. This is what happens. I know, believe me, I totally understand. I am going to not take a lot of time, I'm happy to answer any questions so I don't feel like I'm trying to not answer your questions, I just don't want to belabor any points you don't want to belabor. You are not surprised to hear from me again. Health took a turn for the worst, I'm sorry, realized as I was saying it, the budget this year, we kind of picked up back on a better trend but we did budget up for claims a bit next year. This also reflects we've lost a number of employees with Burlington Telecom employees. So it was, believe it or not, that group of subset of employees, they were paying it more into the fund than they were using of the fund, so. Any other area? And you lost them? Well, we have other help to your mom. They went to your private company. Different company? We nearly are. It's not their books. Yeah, right, exactly. So that's the big change there, is nothing significant, the BT loss and slight increase in claims. Workers Comp is a worst story and you may see a little change in this budget with the next, the final version that you see. We budgeted up claims because we've had two years, not great. We budgeted up, I may want to push that budget up just a bit more in claims. We did reserve last year, so it does give us a cushion. And overall, in the insurance budget because Workers Comp is kind of booked with the other liabilities. We have another claims line in there which we rarely hit, so it kind of helps balance it out. But just so you know, you may see, it's claims. And as I've said, it's not that we're seeing a huge uptick in the number of claims. It's just old claims, settling, people having surgeries, things like that that are just costing money. So we're self-insured for both, right? For health insurance and Workers Comp? Yes, we do have stop-loss on the health insurance of 190,000, so except for a few employees who don't qualify under that plan, we are limited in our exposure for any one person, but a couple of, you know, 180,000 claims just slides out, yeah. So then that brings us to retirements. Actually, I want to ask about that. Do we have a person whose job includes a real focus on workplace safety issues? Yes, we hired a safety officer, this past this hour. Where are they housed? Are they in each one? PBW and Parks right now, because that's where, as you can imagine, the biggest risks are, BD has their own person. Right. Are you moving off from health? I don't have to, but I'm just handing you for the retirement, so, okay. We're called, whoa, what's the retirement? She's been doing some great work with them. We have great partners with our insurance. With Hickok and Boardman, we get some safety and consulting too, and they're starting to engage them more to do some training. So yeah, I think we are doing some good things. Before you move to retirement, I just ask you why the reduction in wellness? Where did you see reduction in wellness, I'm sorry? Expense, so what does that mean? I couldn't figure that out. Professional and consultant service health and wellness. Is that, I mean, can you tell me which line you're on, I'm sorry. It's 6500119, but on the page thing, it's 71. Oh, that's an expense, I understand that. Yeah, I couldn't figure this out though, what? It was just, actually, it was just to tie it to, so that is the, I'm sorry, GISC, who's our administrator, gives us a $50,000 grant every year to spend on wellness programs. That's remaining there. We had had another consulting charge that we just don't have again. So we're not taking away from the wellness. Okay, all right, okay, all right, thank you. All right, perfect, thank you. We do, we care about wellness, I promise. Did you want to speak to retirement before questions? Can I give you a two? Of course. Yeah, just because we do have a significant change to retirement, a couple of significant changes I would just like to point out. One, which is good news, although you're seeing the impacts of it is, we did, we are required to do every five years an experience study where the consultant's basically the actuary looks back and sees what kind of trends have actually happened with our population and then adjust the assumptions they use in their models to look at those trends. Biggest and some surprising changes where we're finding that the Class A, the public safety are living longer and the Class Bs aren't living as long as we expected. She. Right, I know. Which, so the adjustments are made in that model, but that shifted a lot of the retirement liability to the A's, which is all general fund as opposed to the B's, which are spattered more across the city. There are a couple of other small changes, but that was really the big impact. Where does that, where do you see that biggest difference you're talking about right here under the additional? You can see on line. The 10 million 856. Yeah, so if you look on actually line 25, you can see that's the participant charges. So that's what the city pays for retirement for the A's. So it went from about 4.3 million to 5.4. That's the big switch. What we, where we did get lucky, which is a really great thing. And if I'm going into too much detail, stop me. We, because of some other changes in the experience study, you'll notice though the shift in the liability significantly hit the general fund. The overall liability this year stayed pretty flat. But what we're able to do because of some of the changes in the experience study is to lower our assumed rate of return, which was at 8%, which is really high. So basically what that was saying is we thought every year we'd make 8% on our portfolio and we largely don't. And so you're just setting up problems going forward. So we were able to decrease the rate of, the return assumption to 7.5 now with, as you can see, again, shifted the, the rate of return didn't, it was the other changes, shifted the impact of the A's, but the overall liability was pretty similar. And the retirement board is going to, over the next three or four months, kind of set a plan to probably further reduce that rate. Should be closer to 7 or 8 probably. And so how are we going to make up that difference of money though? Between the, sorry, I didn't hear what, no, so what, the rate of return, I mean. So, because of the other changes in the, based upon the experience study, our liability, our cost for this year would have gone down, but because it went down, the decreasing the rate to 7.5 was an increase in cost. So that kind of kept us just, it was about $300,000. So they're here, but then next year we'll still, we'll have to. There will be a cost. There'll be a cost. I mean, cause we knew that when we did this, we were going to take it. We got lucky this year. We got really lucky this year. That's what, that's what you're.