 So good evening. Good evening. It's now 5 34. So we'll get ourselves started. Today is Monday, February 26, 2024. My how the year is flying by. Um, thank you for joining us both in person, um, in conjoice auditorium and those of you who are joining us online for the Burlington City Council meeting. The time is 5 34. Uh, we'll begin our evening with item 1.1, which is a motion to adopt the agenda. Um, not too much reading. I will go to Councilor Barlow for a motion. Thank you, President Paul. I move to amend adopt agenda as follows. Add to the consent agenda item 8.18 communication, CAO Catherine Shad, re creation of mayor transition fund add to the consent agenda item 8.19 communication, Jackie Madalino re support the neighborhood code as it is written add to the consent agenda item 8.20 communication Marty Gillies, uh, re public comment for 226 2024 Council meeting add to the consent agenda item number 8.21 communication, Solvegg Overby re 226 City Council agenda item 5 gateway block RFP no no RFP no 50 year ground lease commitment from Eric Farrell and Joe Larkin and add to the consent agenda item number 8.22 communication Solvegg Overby re 226 City Council agenda item 9.17 Burlington FY 23 audit management letter missing second recommendation from FY 22 management letter removed from the consent agenda item 8.8 parking management sub lease agreement with unified parking partners DPW and place it on the deliberative agenda as item 8 9.9 per Councilor McGee add to the consent agenda item 8.23 communication Grace Palmer re please support neighborhood code add to the consent agenda item 8.24 communication Benjamin Cooley re support the neighbor support for neighborhood code add to the consent agenda item 8.25 communication Todd DeLuca re neighborhood code and inclusionary zoning public comment add to the consent agenda item 8.26 communication Karen Long re 11 Weston Street add to the consent agenda item 8.27 communication Taylor Adams re neighborhood code comment add to the consent agenda item 8.28 communication Sequoia Young re neighborhood code add to the consent agenda item 8.29 communication Paul Bierman re neighborhood code update for Monday City Council meeting add to the consent agenda item 8.30 communication Nicholas Percentieri re City Council meeting 226 24 agenda items 9.2 and 9.3 neighborhood code and climate policy review note proposed amendments regarding 9.4 per Councilor King add to the consent agenda item 8.31 communication Rose Dumas re vote for the neighborhood code add to the consent agenda item 8.32 communication Evan Gould re parking management sub lease agreement with unified parking partners add to the consent agenda item 8.33 communication Peter Wyman re neighborhood code add to the consent agenda item 8.34 communication Julia Randall re comment on wildlife corridors and neighborhood code add to the consent agenda 8 item 8.35 Jack Tiano re neighborhood code and finally add to the consent agenda item 8.36 communication Jack Tiano re inclusionary zoning resolution thank you so much Councilor Barlow the easy part is the second seconded by Councilor King is there any discussion on the motion seeing none all those in favor of the motion as read off by Councilor Barlow please say aye aye any opposed please say no we have a we have our agenda also wanted to note that Councillor Jang is on as a participant there's an attendee just if you might be able to just simply promote him so I can continue so we do have and we also have Councillor Burtman also joining us at the top of the screen who is joining us remotely the second item on our agenda is 2.1 which is a work session regarding Decker Towers we're pleased to have with us this evening Steve Murray who is the executive director of the Burlington Housing Authority Kathy Foley who is the president of the Decker Towers resident council Jane O'Dell who is a Burlington Housing Authority board member and as well we have Jeff Metcalf who is the director of asset management for a Burlington Housing Authority welcome to all of you thanks so much for being with us we have we have we have an hour even though we're starting at 540 we will go for an hour so not to take any time away from this presentation the four of you if you can limit your presentation to about 20 minutes that'll give us time for I know that Cito director Pine would like to offer some comments and then to go to the full council so I'll leave it up to you how you want to structure your 20 minutes the floor is yours okay great so I'm gonna lead off and it's good to be here with you tonight I've been on the board of the Burlington Housing Authority for about a year and I'm here just as an individual board member we will be having our annual meeting tomorrow at which at which our leadership will be elected and we can as a newly refreshed board be able to really start doing business as a board again I wanted to just mention the other members of the board Brian Lowe who is here tonight and Kirby Dunn were recently appointed and continuing commissioners are Bill Shrecker who works at Ever North and also Tony Lewis who is a section 8 8 holder who served my brilliant the authority so we are a board in transition and we but even though we've been kind of in beat in this kind of limbo for a couple weeks we've been working hard on the problems at Decker Towers and we had a slight visit a week ago with the staff and you know we're getting deeper and deeper understanding of the way that the building works and the way that the building doesn't work is quite clear that we're all very concerned about the conditions in which people are living they are not they aren't safe and they don't feel safe and we need to really start a thing coming together as a community as we're doing here to elevate and the resources into the building I want to appreciate that the council's care and concern around this issue and your devotion of an hour to understanding the challenges at Checker Towers the experiences of the residents there and to kind of share with us your ideas for you know how we could work together the authority and the city council to do a better job I also want to appreciate the engagement of the mayor and the CEDA office in this issue in this very challenging issue and the new ideas that you brought forward that I can assure you the board will be looking at very carefully we are not here tonight with a with a plan because the board will be diving into it as a revitalized board tomorrow but we want to hear your ideas we are really coming getting up to speed very quickly and we will have you know by the end of this week I think a plan that's funded that we're prepared to go out to the community with and start to really ramp up the the the response that said I also want to acknowledge that the staff at BHA has been very active and Jeff is going to talk tell you a bit about the steps that have been taken to secure the building to date that it's also clear that we need additional resources additional work but we I think it's important for us to acknowledge that people have been working hard in this problem and you're going to hear more about that from Jeff so I want to turn over to Kathy and I just want to note that we do have some residents from Decker Towers here tonight it's good to see you and thank you for being here President Paul I want to thank you for all the work you've done over the last two weeks I think everyone except for Ali has had a chance to come and visit Decker Tower personally so you put a lot more hours in than just an hour in this evening and we appreciate it you've taken the time to talk to the residents listen to the residents and you've gone through the building to see for yourself some of the issues that we're facing when I first had spoke to Karen a week ago all I wanted to do is come and get my two minutes of public speaking time and that was really as a board so earlier this month we formed the first ever elected resident council in Burlington housing authorities history to my knowledge elected and and in doing that it's been several months of the residents getting together to do that we've seen the hard work that Steve Murray has done he's only been here for 18 months and there without the resources there's no way that Decker Towers can be fixed overnight and I sent each of you a letter about 10 days ago or a week ago outlining just a few of the things that Steve Murray's been responsible for personally in making the changes that have made things more safe for us at Decker Tower that being said until the front doors are secured and we stop the onslaught of homeless people drug dealers criminals that come through the door daily and you saw some of them some of you saw fights while you were there some of you saw the absolute abhorrent hygiene within the hallways within the stairways and again that's not something that can be blamed on BHA or Steve Murray and as a resident council we strongly support him he's worked with us throughout the year a year ago we gave a list of 10 residents that we thought were the major problem in Decker Tower to date nine of those have been evicted the other the tenth is in court right now and there are other people targeted that continue the problems and again going back without securing the front doors there can be no security at Decker Towers and the resources aren't there you can't do something where there's no money and so we're asking as residents the city and Burlington housing to find a way to come up with the money that it's going to take to secure those front doors and I'm talking about a doorman or security guards one of the things we've done as our first order of business as a resident council is to form a neighborhood watch and when we say that all of a sudden everybody gets scared oh my god what is that going to be it's not going to be a vigilante group it's going to be residents who will work at the front door to stop the people who are just surfing in behind residents because the doors have to stay open a certain number of seconds to allow handicap access and these people just push their way in and if you're a 30 year old man who's strong and you just push your way past a 70 year old woman there's not much she can do to stop you from coming in and there's really not much as a neighborhood watch that we're going to be able to do to stop them from coming in what we do feel and very much in accordance with the mayor's proposal the six points that he laid out laid out in his letter is very much what we're looking for as residents and that's a guard at the door and a change in policy of how people come into the building they have to come in with and sign in we as residents have to take responsibility for our guests and that should be a requirement policy it actually is in our lease right now it's in the HUD regulations it's simply not enforced because there's no way to enforce it and the neighborhood watch for a short period of time we're going to stem the flow of people coming if we stop them at the door and they know that they're not going to come into the building they will not walk all the way across town to get there and I'm not blaming the people who come in those doors they're desperate it's cold out they need a place to stay but we don't want them in our home you wouldn't want them in your home most of you that were at the meeting in the last couple nights heard me talk about having a unwanted guest come into your home that you weren't expecting it wouldn't be acceptable to you it's not acceptable to us and just the last week we had a resident who because there's only one elevator available decided to walk down one flight of stairs from his apartment to the ground floor and he was stabbed four times by a homeless person that was reported to the police there is a police record of it thankfully he's not injured seriously but that's just in the last week there have been other violent crimes there's been armed robberies in the stairways people are afraid and so those policy changes need to happen as well as a doorman to make it work at Decker tower the evictions that Steve Murray has committed to and that the staff of BHA are working very hard have been effective and they've got to continue because until the sixth problem people that still let these criminals and I'm talking criminals people with felony convictions walk through the door daily and they're armed make no mistake about that the first month I lived at Decker tower one of these people walked in the door and an automatic pistol fell out of his coat onto the floor so when they come in these aren't just people walking in off the street they're drug dealers they're dangerous the last thing I want to talk about is as part of the resident council one of the things the residents aren't looking for give us give us give us we just want to save home the buildings in pretty bad shape we as residents want to take on projects that can improve the inside of the building painting the building ourselves if we have some stake in the building we're gonna rebuild the pride that the residents should have in their home and so we will be looking and you'll be hearing in the future of a lot of projects that we want to have and plan to do but we need to secure the building first it makes no sense to paint the building to get it clean on the inside only to have the people come in night after night after night and you know defecate in the floors smear it on the floors destroy washing machines because they want the quarters or they want to hot wire the dryers for heat and so there's a lot of things that we're gonna do and you'll be hearing about that and as I've said to all of you we have community dinners every month that are important to the residents it gives them a sense of community we want you to come to the dinners okay we'll be inviting you they're fun the food is outstanding and you'll see the improvements that are happening thank you thank you Kathy and thank you all for the time I'm just gonna try to keep it brief and just go through a few of the high-level just if you can get close to a microphone I'm just gonna go through some of the high-level improvements and projects that we've done to try to address this problem which has been moving target over the last year we've we had a security camera system in place and we put many thousands of dollars into additional cameras at the property both inside and out and we can more or less track every part of that building except for inside units and inside the stairwells so we have a really good understanding of how people are getting in the building and what they're doing and where they're going we've we've spent time trying to remove overgrown vegetation to stop squatting and drug use on the exterior of the building we've locked down all of our exterior gates and locations where you could hide we've installed new lighting to include new pole lights on the exterior of the building to illuminate the pocket lot in the outer skirts of the building and the property we've had a tremendous problem with people finding nooks and crannies within the building where they can sleep and use drugs and we realized that Dekker Towers was built in 1971 and it was built for the purpose of housing and the elderly and disabled and it really is an open concept build so it was a challenge for us to try to close off spaces that were normally meant for people to go and use and enjoy so we have community spaces that we've had to lock we've added doors and locks to otherwise open community spaces we've had to secure trash rooms laundry rooms storage rooms mechanical rooms in ways that we've never done before we've had to put latch protectors new locks where there are no locks and just really change the infrastructure within the building so that is less appealing to go in there and and stay for the night and utilize drugs so it's been a challenge on that end all of these improvements have been unbudgeted because like I said this was a moving target we were reacting to what was happening at the moment and most of this was not planned we had to and continue to have to repair entry doors and entry door systems that get broken because of forced entry we're continuing to have to replace and repair building components such as laundry at least laundry machines that are being broken into that will likely have to pay for as a result of that we've changed some protocol around how we operate we perform with staff on a daily basis sweeps of the stairwells with PPE and we remove needles we try to clean up biohazards and we try to move people along and that in and of itself is a difficult task especially when it's 20 degrees out and you know that some of these people experiencing homelessness have nowhere to go and so our compassion and empathy towards their situation is real but we don't know where to tell them to go they the ones that do communicate with us tell us of waiting in line to try to have one of the spots at a warming shelter only to be turned away at the last minute because there is no beds we understand that and we wish we could help beyond that but we also are responsible for 161 apartments and the well-being of the residents that currently live there so it's a challenging situation nonetheless we've installed Narcan dispensers on every single floor recognizing that without them we're missing the opportunity to save some lives we're looking into additional resources that we can we can extend and we have a housing retention team that goes through and offers services and we'll speak to a lot of the people that are there and essentially we are looking into what we can do to to what we can afford to do to add more security we have three security sweeps that go through between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 a.m. in the morning or 4 a.m. in the morning and that's all that's currently available with the company that we're using and that has proven to be very effective in moving people along because there's only three per night they they do tend to find their way back or they outmaneuver the security so we recognize that that is probably the most effective solution is to increase those patrols but we also recognize that there may be other security measures that we can employ the entry door system that we have is called dorking and it does limit entry to people who have a key card and people who have a passcode so we do have a secure building but as we will we will likely discuss and I'm sure there will be questions asked we can get into more about how that system works and where there may be some flaws with that system but we have put probably over a hundred thousand dollars worth of work physically into the property to just try to secure it make it function better and limit the places that people can go and lawyer that's it for our presentation president Paul okay thank you thanks so much we will before we go to the council I will go to mayor Weinberger if you wish to if you want to speak and then if there's any members of your administration who do all leave that to you thank you president Paul and we do have seated director Brian Payne here who I think will offer some additional comments I want to thank you all for being here tonight and thank Kathy for all the communication with with counselors with me for hosting the meetings at the building and I appreciate the Jane you being here and the board's engagement with these issues and I appreciate the the meetings that we've had with BHA management as well I have been increasingly concerned about the conditions at Decker towers and these concerns have escalated over the winter months with reports from residents our chiefs and I'm confident as we discuss this tonight that there is broad agreement that the public safety issues at Decker despite clearly a great deal of work already happening as has been noted are the more needs to be done and that the conditions in the building have to be reversed as quickly as possible the I the city is very interested in being a partner to BHA through this through this challenge both with the immediate and acute needs in the building as well as medium and longer term efforts that may be needed to properly resource the building in the organization and I am looking forward to further communications from BHA following the board meetings that are planned for for later this week and looking forward to being a supportive and responsive partner to you in the days ahead so with that Brian I don't know if you want to add more just for the record it's Brian Pine the director of the Community and Economic Development Office and I want to really thank the the management team the board the residents who've taken it upon themselves to try and reverse the situation which has gotten to the point where placing the residents and and staff I think at risk that is unacceptable and none of us would expect or tolerate that level of risk where we live and so I just want to just say I spent some time there last week with with the staff team and the board and at the at the entrance to the building and it was it was clear to me that really what Decker is seeing day in and day out and night in and night out is really some of the failures of our of really our society and our social safety net it's really quite striking when you stand there for a little while and staff says there's six people who just came through here half of them don't have a legitimate reason to be here other than hoping that they can engage in some illegal unlawful activity and the the resources facing BHA are very constrained and are defined by federal government as far as revenue for the for the building for the property in terms of rent restrictions which really make it a very challenging property to generate enough resources to to make the take the steps that are needed to protect the residents from safety threats really and as Steven has pointed out that the current rent which is roughly about 750 a month per unit that comes to the housing authority tenants pay based on their income so that's not what the tenant pays I would just share that in Burlington the cost to operate housing just to operate without any other is about seven between seven and seven fifty a month so just the basic operations not setting aside any money for a to borrow a phrase all hands on deck I think are is the phrase for what Decker needs and I would say that we are committing resources short term to deal with some of these challenges if we for instance were to use the city's housing trust fund to cover some of BHA's needs for capital improvements on the property that were set aside to make capital improvements those dollars could be freed up to support increased security measures or increased security at the door which is really the key thing is as Kathy mentioned the door is really the place where folks are gaining access and causing causing problems so we want to just express that you know for folks out loud that that is a resource that is available to affordable housing organizations and in my 30 plus years affiliate with the city BHA has been able to do its work without having to come to the city for this type of assistance so it's really this is a we're at a really different and unusual time for the organization and for for this community we also want to make it clear that we're in it for the long haul to find a solution to restructure Decker so that it doesn't face this problem on a periodic or perennial basis and we have a partner in the housing and urban development U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Sean Thomas is with us tonight he's not going to come and speak but we have the support of our of our HUD staff to work to work in concert with BHA and in our office and freeing up some resources again from the housing trust fund along with the resources that Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust Fund has available to hire someone who has the expertise in doing these types of conversions from after you've gone through a process that BHA has already gone through but you're kind of stuck in this place where the rents don't cover the cost of really operating a property safely you know there are some there are some options for how to raise the capital needed to make the improvements and to build a sustainable revenue model so that BHA has the revenue to to ensure the safety and security of residents and that's about it but I want to just close by saying that I think we all would probably agree that housing is a human right and ought to be a human right you've got a long ways to go as a society but it's it's certainly important that we not just provide housing but that that housing really must be safe enough and secure enough so that residents of affordable housing enjoy the same level of peace and and enjoyment of their homes as all of us would expect so thank you so much thank you mayor and thank you director Cedar director pine we will now go to counselors who may have comments questions one of our guests so the floor is open counselor Jang thank you very much counselor Paul and thank you everyone for the presentation Murray and your board members I just feel like we needed to thank you also because a lot has been happening lately second I also would like to thank really the administration me me or wine burger and his team alongside Cedar for also hold the efforts since the news broke I have couple of questions and the first one is how long has this problem by Decatur been going on how long approximately I came on board March 7th of two years ago and we were struggling with issues but nothing like anything like we have it was basically I would say February of last year that we had town hall meeting with the residents where it really became apparent that we were headed in a very bad direction and during that meeting as Kathy referred to we made a bunch of promises to the residents that a we would have zero tolerance for drug where in prior years we might have tried to determine whether or not we could save their housing or are they dealing just for their own amount and we decided that the only way we can really move forward with the tools we have was evictions and Steve my apologies if you don't speak into the microphone then channel 17 can't hear you so that being said it was February of last year that really was the epiphany or whatever word you want to use and we did make a lot of promises to the residents at that time and we we've been engaging with the residents ever since but I would say two years ago we we could handle it now it's it's out of control and it's kind of like a frog in a pot of water being turned up we we we had issues and they just started getting worse and worse and worse and we did try to address everything we possibly could and like I said engaging with the residents was was one of our number one concerns I said a year ago security guards weren't an option because I had calculated to be about three hundred thousand dollars a year for one guard and with the property that makes that is budgeted a ninety thousand dollar a year positive cash flow that's just you can't get blood out of the stone but other than that Kathy may mention the other day that they had requested ten things from us one was the security guard but we have accomplished the other nine so it's been a year it's been a very long year but thank you thank you and why couldn't you implement the mayoral six point plan in order to change the course about the issue we can we had some concrete disagreements on it I remind you all that we have a hundred years worth of property management experience on our leadership team and some of the suggestions we weren't comfortable with some of the suggestions we didn't feel with work and we we we have no problem implementing anything but we need to make sure that was vetted by a lawyer that it doesn't involve any always mispronounce this word disparate impact any decision we make we have to make sure since especially since it's a building of elderly and disabled that that decision wouldn't fall extremely heavily on one portion of the people in the building so it's not a case we don't want to it's a case we just we had a disagreement and we're willing to look at that disagreement but we do ask that if the mayor's office or the city council have anything I just want to add Councillor Jang sorry Councillor Jang just wanted to add that the have that the board is meeting in the morning and we're going to be looking at all of the ideas that came forward from mayor's office and also hear from staff about you know other ideas or variations on those ideas so those ideas are not dead they are still under review we just ask that if you do come up with suggestions that you you've done your due diligence on it and that's all we've ever really asked but we are willing to change our narrative I don't have we don't have a problem with that do we just can't change it unless we're confident that the lawyers and the experts agree that it's a very good transition council general yeah professor general thank you and now how is the staff model at Burlington housing authority you know over the past couple of three weeks we have an amazing staff turnover this year has has been under control not not we're not losing people left and right but we are now offering hazard pay for certain of our buildings we are very much focused on the mental health issues you know when your property manager has someone walk up to them and tell them their their child's name and where they live that's tough when you're throwing people out of the building that have nowhere to go my apologies there it doesn't appear as though both of those microphones are working so only one seems to be working I'm sorry I'll just have to share so so that thank you you'll ask us I'm loud so I'll tell you the stress in the anxiety is palpable in the building we have lost two employees one who witnessed an assault in Decker tower hallways where a gentleman was beating a woman and then dragged her into the stairwell and that was she couldn't handle it another one had his car broken into and that was the last straw and we did have our our resident manager at Decker towers we did we did terminate her prior to her overdose but that's just semantics she was still our staff and she died of overdose at Decker towers this is this is very much these are great people no one's at Decker no one's at BHA trying to get rich they're there to help people and we're stuck between a group of people that desperately need help that we can't help and our residents who need to be protected and nobody should be put in that spot I am very afraid that that if a major incident more major than we've already discussed happens at Decker whether it be a murder or or whatnot that the dominoes will start falling because you know hazard pay doesn't address the issues all it does is is is make is you're mitigating a risk you can't you're paying for a risk you can't mitigate and so I do suspect if we can't get a grasp on this I do suspect we'll see more people quitting just for their own personal safety so one more question and then I will bring my ideas forward I think this question is specific to what do you need from the Burlington City Council because it seemed that the problem the Council guess was aware like a couple weeks ago and it's been going on for quite some time there was a lack of communication between Burlington Housing Authority and the City Council but we appreciated that you've been communicating with the mayor's office which we really do appreciate and what do you need from the Council knowing that you are meeting tomorrow or it's premature to say this is exactly what you that's a loaded question how we we want support I I've spoken with Karen Paul it's time to put our disagreements behind us if you read the document that HUD sends out about police and security guards site which I sent to y'all it says in there that if you don't if you can't get the patrols or you can't get the necessary policing you shouldn't just go right to security guards you should go and vigorously and that's first time I've ever seen vigorously used in a HUD document you should vigorously go talk to every politician you can in order to secure that funding so I'm not going to talk about how we got here but I'd like to talk about let's protect our residents everything that we've done has been about our residents it's nothing personal it's nothing but I'm I said at the Senate hearing I'm ashamed of what's going on Decker no one no one in BHA is is trying to skirt any responsibility for we just we would like the City Council in the city to come in and help us we do firmly believe that security guards will have a huge impact huge impact but as we've stated you can't get blood out of stone we we just don't have the cash flow in that building to to pay for security guards so if we leave with anything we would like to partner with the city on providing third-party security at the building thank you yes so I mean I think the burning term city council including myself Decker Tower is not in my world Decker Tower is in world five if I'm not wrong and what I remember is a war three city council is actually the person who brought it forward on a city council meeting couple weeks ago and when I followed up I grew I have to Google where Dr. Tower is in order to know exactly where it is and I am appalled that this issue been going on for a year at least and it is just right now that we are trying to find a solution right I think what I am content is just that the city council could have known soon maybe those word city councils were aware but I was not aware but what I'm aware of is the issues that happening in world at Decker Towers similar issues also are happening at Franklin Square Riverside Avenue not at the same level right but they are also happening elsewhere and from my perspective we need to step back a little bit just like what the mayor said the what are the temporary solution but what is also the long-term solution and what I'm interested is about the long-term solution and in terms of long-term solution we need how do we support and strengthen the relationship between the Burlington Housing Authority and the city of Burlington with the lens of ensuring the safety and well-being of all the residents of Burlington Housing Authority within the city's geographic area from my perspective it would be imperative that we build a task force or an ad hoc committee where city councils are council councillor Jang you're sort of breaking up a little bit so we're having a little trouble following you Franklin Square Riverside yes I know I know I'm sorry it's just my internet I'm not in town today but what I was saying is specific to look into long-term solution are you hearing me well still yes we can hear you now better okay so what I was saying is we needed long-term solution while you guys work on the short-term solution for Degas Town the solution should not only speak only suddenly the other Burlington Housing Authority complex housing within the city of Burlington that task force need to include members of the police department members of residents of some of those complex in order to look into the safety of well-being of those people right and what I just said I will put it also in writing me and said it I want my departing city council and I would love to help as a resident of the city of Burlington to look into the solution as we move this forward thank you all so much for your time right thank you so much councillor Jang are there other councillors who wish to speak to this item councillor carpenter thanks I just want to I'm sorry that I haven't met Steve earlier but I'm I'm really pleased to hear that you are going to take some steps in terms of the long term we financially restructuring it has always sort of struck me since I've known about when Decker went to rad the need for capital and I know that some of the previous board members and and leaders were not as thrilled about some of the structures that you might need to look into and I'm hopeful that you can do that I happen just I had a career in affordable housing and I was executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency for 20 years and so I still keep up in some publications and I know that you're not the only rad project that's been struggling actually a former acquaintance of mine that's her job now was restructuring rad so I just seems like a project so desperately in need you've never you BHA have never had to struggle so much financially you've always been actually one of the better funded housing authorities in the state and so I'm hopeful we can get some mileage I appreciate Mr. Thomas coming and I know that Brian is working with you on making some connections with consultants so I hopefully there's some relief down the road in that because you cannot sustain that model and I think that's really just important for people to understand that the current model of ownership not Burlington Housing Authority in particular the HUD program that you operate under is just sort of an impossible program and and I just think that's important for the public to understand that you know you you can't magically raise your rents which is probably what you need to do and pay for the staff that you need to operate the project as you really need to be so I'm here to help as well and I'm hopeful we have a new strong board member I know actually all of them and they'll come to the table for you with some some fresh new ideas can I respond of course um financially we're we're not in dire straits with the exception of Decker yes the the other rad buildings yeah the rents are low but we're not facing the amount of damages we're not facing the amount of vacancies we're not facing the amount of evictions so a building like Bishop Place which is Tenor Champlain has the same rents the same ideas but it financially it's actually doing okay its reserves are fine so I don't want to scare everyone to think that BHA Decker Towers just doesn't have the cash flow for the security guards and to cover all of the we're not filling it right now we have 10 vacancies we expect by the end of the month to have another five the last two people we moved into Decker Towers died of overdoses so we are taking that financial hit not moving anyone in until the point but I do want to make it clear that Riverside Apartments and Hillside Terrace and the majority of our other properties in our portfolio are not at any way shape or form on the verge of receivership or whatever cliche it's just Decker's just the the hundreds of thousands of dollars we're spending is just not sustainable but everything else is is very much in good shape our reserves are good and our operating reserves are good and our vacancies are low thank you and I do understand that I just Decker is the second oldest housing project in the city and so has had a long history and and I want to acknowledge what Councillor Jang said as well as I talked to my housing colleagues you are not the only Decker is not the only project and you have knowledge of yourself and I was the former director of Cathedral Square which is they're having problems ten point housing trust is having problems I just spoke to an acquaintance in Brattleboro they're having huge problems so it is a fundamental issue where you have all these folks that are vulnerable in one spot easily easily targeted and so I think it will take we need to deal with Decker right this minute but we sort of more broadly need to figure out how to not let this drift too far along with some of the other projects we've got particularly in Burlington but all over the state thank you so much thank you so much Councillor Carpenter we'll go to Councillor Travers thank you President Paul and thank you all for being here and thanks as well I see many residents from the Decker Towers community as well who came out and I suspect maybe some of your neighbors are tuned in via zoom too so that would be great first of all let me say I think all of us here in the City Council are deeply saddened by the current living conditions in Decker Towers I'm so glad that seven days and other news outlets have done the reports to shine a light on this and look forward to our working in the council in partnership with the Marist administration to do everything we can to assist Burlington Housing Authority and you all as residents in the building in response to a comment made by Councillor Chang Decker Towers currently in Ward 6 as of town meeting day we will be welcoming Decker Towers into Ward 5 I know many councillors have been in contact and communication with members of the Decker Towers community I know that Councillor Paul as a representative from Ward 6 and that Councillor Shannon as the South District councillors as well as myself have visited the building and again for a number of months have in one part or another been in communications with members of the Decker Towers community which at least in part is why on some of the bigger questions I mean we have been taking initiatives to try to address recruitment and retention issues within our police department and improve the state of public safety it's why right now before the ordinance committee is their local trespass ordinance where I think we can continue to make some improvements there that will hopefully provide you all more tools to address unwanted visitors into the building but those are I think bigger picture type issues that will certainly improve things and should improve things at Decker Towers but as well as other folks around the community that are struggling with similar issues and I also recognize that there's smaller issues smaller issues that may require a smaller investment but might have a really big impact on the building and so I'm hopeful that we can continue to keep an open channel of communication here where to the extent the city has resources where they may be able to assist you all in some initiatives within the building you know I know for example the building has just installed a package cage for example right which relatively small investment that seems like it's had a big impact of quality of life for folks in the building we've heard from other folks in the building about beautification and so on I certainly understand the sentiment about wanting to get the building in order before you beautify it you don't want to do that just to see it ruin but to the extent the council and the city can partner with you all in some of those relatively smaller investment type things that may have a really big impact on quality of life in the building I'm hopeful that we can continue that open channel of communication I guess a couple just questions for you Steve one is I appreciate the current vacancies and and not wanting to bring additional folks into this environment right now but can you speak a little bit more as to what are the metrics that you all are trying to meet in order to say okay now is the time when we would feel comfortable to get folks back in here when we feel it's relatively safe again I can't we we can't keep these vacancies forever because I'm already complaining I don't have enough money so but we also have a moral and ethical duty the last two people we moved in died of overdoses I'm we're not allowed to steer so if we open up decker towers to let's say people coming in and they tell us they're in recovery or they have a they're they're suffering from substance abuse disorder putting them in decker right now would be a horrible moral ethical decision but it's not our decision it's theirs and so it puts us in a situation where we're steering which is against the law so if we open up decker towers and we say I only want people that aren't in recovery or that aren't dealing with substance abuse disorder we can't do that so we're just blanketing trying to give the residents a break right now when we're going to open that up well is if if we get security guards and it turns out to be very effective we will start immediately but until we are in a situation where we have a better grasp on on the amount of drug dealers in the building or the people seeking to purchase drugs we're struggling with the ethical or moral dilemma of putting anyone in there so I don't have a a set decision yet it's going to be soon just from a financial standpoint but we did feel that we needed to at least get a grip on the the just dodge city for lack of a better word before we risk any more people moving in so I don't have an a set date or a specific trigger but when we evicted and I can't say to our dealers they would be very careful they were alleged because none of the people we evicted from my understanding have been convicted of dealing yet we we had a moment of beautiful late what do you think Kathy late August where residents were coming up to us saying oh my god what a difference I'm not afraid to be in the lobby and then the the the dealers from wherever Springfield mass or Pennsylvania came in and found their new victims etc so it really I don't have the exact answer to your question it's going to be when the residents feel that the building is is safer and when my staff feels the building will be safer but down the road you know what she's 15 empty apartments is is going to hit us with about $150,000 worth of vacancy that we obviously can't budget so we're just trying to give everyone a breather right now it's that bad and I do expect that if we do get security guards and if we have better luck with the eviction of those dealing drugs that that we will that we will be able to let people move in sooner than later and when the building is safer and you are ready to act immediately to fill those vacancies can you speak to what your current waiting list is I mean how many folks are out there who are looking for a space in a BHA property right now that's another loaded question we have we have gotten us how many wait lists we have wait lists for multi-family wait lists for Decker towers Decker towers has a elderly preference so if you are elderly and applying for Decker towers you you jump the list above anyone else who might be on the list so our eventual goal we were hoping is that we would open up our we call it a homeless preference or a local preference for the building which allows you to not wait on the wait list due to your circumstances we were hoping to open that up to any elderly person in the in Vermont in order to try to try to uh eventually turn the building into uh elderly uh an elderly rad much like our our 101 College Street and our 10 North Shamp Plain that's that's really one of the thoughts that we we are are thinking about the problem with that is is we still have to house our non-elderly disabled but but the it's already been proven with Decker towers that we have to be very careful having um just 160 people in one building which with that much struggles without any uh without any services whether it be you know uh mental health services or addiction services etc but that is our our our eventual goal at this point in time whether we can accomplish that that and whether the community is going to allow us to uh extend our preferences for elderly statewide as opposed to addressing the needs locally that's that's a that's a whole another discussion and i think uh i think that really is going to fall on uh ourself and the board to make that decision down the road but right now our goal is to try to turn Decker back into the elderly rad it was that everyone refers to back in the day how Decker used to be great well it was elderly at the time but we are very cognizant that we still need to house uh this large population of non-elderly disabled so that's uh that's not the perfect answer present but may i ask just one more what i think is probably brief question here which is um i know you have very able legal counsel that's been assisting you with some of the evictions of the bad tenants in the building um but i also know that legal counsel is not cheap um and wondering if you can speak to sort of looking at your budget and legal expenses here um how those legal expenses have increased recently as compared to past years and um is that another expense that's that's coming off of your bottom line here okay uh nadine uh cybeck is our our attorney i told the other day she needs to take us on a on our new yacht she's buying with all the money we're spending um it's actually we budget up up until right right before covid we budget about uh um $80,000 a year and unpaid rent and damages to an apartment that's what we would budget um year to date and fiscal year our year starts in in uh july we're at $350,000 right now in unpaid rents and damages um what we're seeing is just beyond comprehension where you know we don't i had mentioned earlier we don't have crystal ball we're not here to decide whether bob is going to to be the good tenant it's our mission but one is up happening what's happening now is um the amount of damages the apartments uh is staggering uh we we can use the alleged fentanyl dealer uh on king street right next to king street center it took us eight months to evict that person it cost us uh about $2,700 in legal fees uh the apartment was trashed uh just removing the junk from the apartment was about uh 1600 i think uh and then we're going to have to of course do all the work to repair the damages the apartment including you know broken doors etc so after the legal fees after the non-payment of rent because when we went after the eviction of course we didn't we don't get our portion of rent nor do they pay their portion of rent uh that one eviction of that alleged dealer we're probably hovering around $20,000 worth of damages and legal fees and that's low we had the the alleged drug dealer at 185 pine street that had the execution style murder in his apartment we're at over $60,000 for that uh that eviction and damages etc uh it's just mind-boggling uh a lot of some of it is before covid it cost $1,200 to paint a two-bedroom apartment now it cost $2,100 so a lot of that is the increase in fees but we are seeing damages that historically bha is just never seen um and uh uh we don't we can't budget for that you can't you really can't budget for um someone doing $30,000 worth of damage to an apartment did i answer your question you did and um you know i know that historically pro bono low bono legal services have been available to more tenants who are being evicted and that makes sense right if they're a party to an eviction proceeding they certainly deserve fair representation but i think when we're talking about evicting drug dealers when we're talking about folks who are clearly doing harm to other folks in the building from from my perspective as a member of the legal community i think that changes the dynamic and i wouldn't be surprised if there are members of our legal community who would be willing and wanting to um provide you all with assistance um as you continue to address this so just to put it out there you know i would look forward to talking to you steve and talking to members of the board as well to see you know what sort of support can we find from the vermont and burlington legal community to help you in uh in in addressing some of your legal expenses you're having to face i believe or i i believe and and there's so many numbers in my head but i believe we're roughly over budget about $90,000 on on professional service uh professional services the majority of that's going to be legal fees and i'll forget every time we make a decision at decker to do something we're also contacting our lawyers to make sure that uh that whatever decision not everything but the the big ones like locking down the common areas we're making sure that uh we're not going to be making a mistake so uh our other attorneys are also getting some some added work uh for the uh just the general counseling as opposed to just evictions thanks very much councillor travers are there any other councillors councillor shannon thank you all so much for taking the time to be here and really special congratulations for the resident board for stepping up and really shining a light on what's happening uh i do think that the same thing is happening in in other buildings and i don't want to draw unwanted attention anywhere but um i just wondered steven if you can speak to that because now we're trying to address this thing that has a light shined on it shined on it but what about what's lying underneath and other buildings where the light's not shining yet and the problems maybe are smaller only because of the number of units and residents is it is it actually different or is it the same I always wondered why uh we were getting beaten up all the time and no one else was uh you know there's the the problem is city-wide we run the section 8 program uh not we do have some uh wunuski housing and some romont state housing vouchers in town but the majority of the vouchers in burlington are run by us and and some of those vouchers are project-based vouchers that you'll see at like kotz or cathedral square or cht and some of them are private landlords and what we're seeing across the board is evictions are through the roof um not just us but everybody uh i think sheriff gamblin uh says that uh you know he's he's often doing 10 evictions a week um we we're all struggling i i forward uh rebecca from uh cito's office uh had a meeting i i call us jokingly the big five but you know uh we had a meeting and i forwarded you all uh john ferrell's uh email john ferrell's the executive director from kotz where he where he wrote down our discussion and i i shared that with the city council because uh it does need to be made clear that um i said a year ago burlington doesn't have a decker tower problem it has an opiate problem i feel kind of uh i got beat up very badly for that but i i feel a little vindicated at this point because what we're seeing as the section eight providers we're seeing lots and lots of evictions for alleged drug dealing evictions for non-payment of rent um and and it's across the whole board right now i'm not going to comment but on uh specifics um but uh we do get to see the reasons for the terminations and we do get in a lot of cases we'll pull the voucher and there's a hearing involved on whether the person keeps a voucher and the uh amount of of of evictions and section eight vouchers being pulled that are tied to the drugs and the drug dealing is is really staggering significantly more than we had when i first started um two years ago and so uh it's everywhere uh i'm not gonna make any i'm not gonna put any other executive director under the gun it's not pleasant to have people tell you that your building is horrid but we are seeing across the board that um a lot of the buildings are suffering i will tell you though buildings that do not have interior hallways or interior spaces are not suffering the way buildings like decker towers are um if the communal spaces and uh the the inside hallways just exacerbate the problem uh significantly but it's it's across the board and uh i suggest you reach out uh i did send you that uh letter and um that email from john ferrell and it it's spells it out pretty solid that it's not just a bha issue it's across the board we're all struggling um we're struggling with people just breaking windows we're struggling with people kicking doors and follow up on yeah you know me i talk i'm sorry so you identified 10 people that were really a problem and making the community in decker towers unsafe nine of the 10 of them were evicted and we have evictions all over the city and probably the state in similar kind of ways but you're kind of the lowest rung on the housing ladder uh so where are people going it sounds like if people are making your community unsafe they're going to then make all the rest of the community unsafe and that they should be arrested for these behaviors and there needs to be some consequences and why is it are we not just pushing this problem someplace else um what's happening do you know what's happening to folks who are being evicted because they're causing harm to people uh bha can't affect change as far as the laws go and and as far as the the issues with the no trespass the issues with the long evictions we can ask but but we're not a political organization so i i can't really comment on that side of it but when we evict people um i'd say about third cases they just uh decker as an example they just go down the hall to another apartment and hang out there for a while until they're unwelcome uh or they're back on the streets and they are homeless uh i we at bha have a fiduciary duty to our residents um and that duty is that we will we will do everything our power to remove people that are um that are making the building dangerous what what they do and where they go after that is is really um a uh i'm gonna get killed for this aren't i is really a city or state issue it's not ours um all all i can do is look my residents in the eye and say we're going to do our gondas to to get rid of this person and i did not mean to imply that you should do otherwise i only to point out that these problems aren't going away they may go away from decker but they're not going away under the current system um you've talked a lot about the financial struggles that you have that you're being required to spend money there is no other option than spending money you don't have here and i don't completely understand the financial structure of your organization and at the end of the day who is left holding this holding this debt and ultimately what happens when you're um spending a lot more than you're bringing in we as i stated uh we one one thing that um we are very adamant about us we don't uh rob peter to pay paul so some of our other buildings might have uh decent operating expenses we do have a reserve strategic reserve but um hud and us i can't even explain our finances i i i it's like wizard of Oz each we have what are called buckets in each building each program has money that has to be reserved money that has to be held and then money that is operating money that we can spend um we i my estimate is we're probably about two hundred thousand dollars we have spent out of our reserves towards and operating money towards security upgrades uh i can't get that money back um we are facing a our five-year capital needs assessment is actually very good our 20 years not and so we need to save every penny we have the elevator decor has been brought up numerous times we clearly have to replace it however that's going to be about a million dollars um so we have to build the reserves up for that and if i if we spend money today uh from our reserves on security guards when that elevator finally dies 10 years or five years or whatever from now uh the city's not going to say oh i'm sorry you spent that money on security guards we're we have a fiduciary duty to repair it and so that's our concern is that we're starting to rob peter to pay paul we're starting to use money that's been set aside for replacing roofs for replacing boilers for replacing hot water heaters etc and of course that's not where we want to be um but we have no choice uh we have to make these changes and we have to try to spend the money but when it when it came up to security guards that would have crippled uh decker towers for a decade to pay for that money out um so yes we are robbing peter to pay paul right now and we will end up having to pay for that down the road uh whether it be struggling with you know capital needs in 20 years but the organization has been run for the last 25 years very conservatively uh we don't just throw money at things and if we can get past this hump we should be able to we should be able to rebuild those reserves and uh and not be in that situation that sounded like a very non-answer but i'm sorry all right we'll leave it at that thank you uh thank you so much councillor shannon um are there councillor uh councillor grant and then we'll close up this item thank you um where to start thank you for being here um thank you for the information that you provided uh last night that was more than i received during my first visit which was the early a.m. of january 16th where i really for the first time had a had an understanding it's one thing to hear that things are bad it's a completely different thing to go in and see what the residents are experiencing um so i'm going to do what i usually do is talk about things that people don't like to talk about and that's things that involve um issues of equity because i believe we have here issue of equity uh for this what's happening in this building and um to coin a phrase all hands have not been on deck and they haven't been on deck because of the people that live in this building and the fact that it's um affordable and low-cost housing we we continue in this city to have these issues of class that interfere with how people are serviced through different areas of the city and i think this is a glaring example um i want to thank steve murray for his his work on behalf of the residents uh who who were very thankful for his assistance um i'm i'm going to apologize to to you mr murray on behalf of the city um i uh was deeply offended by an email that was sent to you i felt that it lacked empathy um it lacked full information and uh we can do better we can do so so so much better um i appreciate the courage of the residents of this building i appreciate their sense of community i don't think people really understand the diversity of the community there and the sense of the community and the love of the community is really beautiful um and uh we want to preserve that we really want to preserve that okay so going to ideas um decker towers needs to be a meeting agenda on a regular basis we need updates because how we deal with what's going on in this building will also um um it will also inform us in terms of how to keep this happening from other locations or how to deal with what's happening in other locations i know what it's like to say that something bad is happening and that something's going to get worse because in 2022 as a police commissioner i talked about the fact that the city had no plan to deal with the drug crisis that we were seeing and i got accused to be a negative i got accused of not giving a police department a break etc etc then i recently sent someone a copy of a meeting from 2023 police commision right before i became a city counselor where once again i said hey back in 2022 i said it was getting worse and early 2023 i said it was getting worse and here we are and we're still in a position where it can still get infinitely worse so we need to have this as an agenda item we need to decide do we have an agenda item on the city council or do we have it as a regular agenda item on the public safety committee meeting and that was one of the reasons why i gladly accepted the uh invitation from the fire chief chief lachance to go in and see what was happening because i'm on the public safety committee and it wasn't a matter of is it out of my ward out of my district it was it was a public safety matter affecting all of the city of burlington in particular the residents of decker towers i think we need to have a plan one of the things that concerned me about the current building manager i have a sense that that person is very scared by some of the things that are going on but the idea that was put forth for incident reports i think bha does need to work with this individual and they need to to make that happen that is crucial and then there needs to be communication with the police department in terms of how those incident reports will be received and if not acted upon at least acknowledge we've had a chronic problem with the online incident reporting and still trying to get information about that i don't want to see any incident reports that are being reported in the future from decker towers going into a black hole somewhere so there's going to need to be that coordination with the police department i'd like to see a mutual aid project in the old north end we have something called the one mutual aid project and it is something where people make they they make requests for help they're having a situation it started during covid sometimes people are working but they don't have sick time or and and they don't if they get covid they can't work they find themselves in a situation where they don't have the sick time to cover their lost income so this organization started to say okay so and so needs five hundred dollars to make their rent because they couldn't work during this period of time or so and so has the money for the rent but they need some help with food so and so needs presents and a cake for the for their kids birthday i think it would be great for the south end so to my south end peeps having a mutual aid that can assist people in this building and it can be something from um financial aid where it could be something like giving someone a ride to the laundromat because the issue with the broken uh machines because people trying to get in there and get the coins that causes someone have to take a ride share to go to a laundromat which makes it much more expensive to clean their clothes so there's there's a lot of different things and i think a mutual aid project is something that could be um something can be put together pretty quickly and could include the idea about um reaching out to uh lawyers who'd be willing to do um pro bono work uh for them uh adjusting the flea market there's like i want to get a bullhorn like someone texts me when the flea market's in there and i'm just going with a bullhorn i think we need to have if the police can't show it because that's one of these things why aren't people being arrested well the police aren't always showing up when they're called there are a couple of officers that were mentioned and i'm actually going to put in some accommodations for them because i appreciated hearing about specific officers but they're not available all the time we have these issues where people can't be held for nonviolent quote-unquote nonviolent crimes um but we you know we want we want the neighborhood watch to be safe so we have to figure that out with the money for a guard so i i know the board's going to be meeting tomorrow but you definitely have to make a guard happen with the watch so the people that are part of the watch are saved and trained i got a few more things i got a few more things i've got a few more things and i other people went over five minutes and i just got a couple more things um and now i lost my train of thought hold on students uvm students the fact that uvm students or champlain students the fact that it was clearly students coming in the building to buy drugs is absolutely unacceptable so we need to film these kids and we need to put them on blast and we also need to reach out to the colleges and speak to them because the colleges really need to be aware that this is happening and they need to be communicating with their student bodies that this type of behavior is completely unacceptable um so if you're catching them on film they this they need to be put on blast we do we need to put put the film of them on wit it and saying who are these kids and they need to have their academic discipline due to their behavior just dealt with i found that really alarming um i am dear thank you you and then i just i just want to be it's been seven minutes uh you know what i think that i i i don't want to i have one more thing to say and then i'll be done i did not and i'm sorry i'm sorry everyone if you feel i'm taking too much time of one more thing to say i want to say that i also found this um term the lowest rung i found that to be offensive and i apologize for that statement because i think that's something that should have been avoided um i apologize to anyone who felt i went on too long thank you very much thank you and if you have a response to anything i've just said i'd love to hear it thank you you're all set uh seeing no other counselors in the queue um counselor high tower great um i just wanted to express um my sympathy and agree with counselor travers that's certainly anything that we can do to strengthen trespass ordinances or anything that would help you all long term we're happy to do and then of course anything that um we can do in the short term um we know that security guards are hard they're expensive everybody wants one right now and um it doesn't address the root causes right it just means they're gonna there's going to be a homeless person looking for somewhere to sleep and there's going to be i do think the issues at decker tower i mean i think this is like we're said we're seeing it across vermont we're seeing it across buildings we're seeing it across um different places and yet um i think you're certainly become canary in the coal mine for lack of a better expression and to make sure that we address the issues there um in a way that supports decker towers but also supports the rest of the city i think is going to be incredibly important and then kathy and just everyone i just want to say i'm so flabbergasted by both um how you can mean that i just can't i also live in a building that has similar hallways and we've also had issues with folks um staying on after they've been evicted and having nowhere else to go and um i just can't and we've and not even close not even a fraction of the degree of what you all are dealing with and to hear you still speak with empathy for the folks who kind of we've failed but then also need to deal with every day folks that it's really really really impossible to have empathy for um i'm incredibly sorry i'm incredibly um just flabbergasted by how you all are talking about the situation and really hope that the city can step in and be a collaborative partner um both long term and short term and in any ways that you all need thanks thank you so much councilor hightower before we close out this item just wanted to ask so that you know usually with work sessions we we hear information and then there's a next step so just looking to either either to you jane or to you steve or to the mayor in your opinion so that we we have a feeling we have a sense of you know that we that we've spoken and we we discussed this at length but what is that what are the next steps and how is the council going to continue to be informed well we'll have a little more after we have there are extensive discussion at our board meeting tomorrow and we'll follow up with some kind of communication to the city council and to the mayor um so you will you will hear from us and i think that idea of having more regular appearances of bha personnel here in this room is is a very good one and something that we should and can start doing and residents of course yes kathy just one very last comment again our thanks to everybody on the council this is a very serious topic it really has impact on our life but uh to end on a lighter note steve uh i can guarantee you representing the resident council we're not going to ask for hazard pay thank you thank you so much just before before you leave just also wanted to acknowledge not only um jane you i've mentioned that uh brian lowe is here there are two other board members that i was able to find who are joining us online that is steve norman and curbie dunn couldn't find the fifth but perhaps he's here with you sorry so curbie dunn and bill shrecker okay well steve norman is also steve norman is not on the board but we're very happy that he was here okay i thought i was looking at your website so okay okay my apologies thank you very much um and uh so yes thank you thank you all so much chef to the burlington housing team to the board to the decker towers resident council and to all of the residents there are a lot of residents that are here that we saw just this weekend thank you all so much for being here if you wish to speak during public forum yourselves you're more than welcome to stay public forum won't start until about seven fifteen but we are we would welcome the opportunity for you to stay if you would like um thank you again for being here we'll look forward to further updates the next item on our agenda is three point one which is a work session on the south end coordinated um or pre redevelopment and the draft pre development agreement uh for this item we do have cito director brian pine uh samantha dunn the assistant director for community works with cito and also our planning director megan tuttle and principal planner charles charles dillard joining us so if you want to if you want to take a seat at the table we have we have allotted 45 minutes for this presentation i don't know if you have a presentation um this is the for the public uh we did have an executive session on this pre development agreement uh at our last meeting and the work session is an opportunity for discussion to inform the greater community and any presentation that you have um but again we would like to try to limit this to 45 minutes allowing time as well for the council to be heard um so if you might be able to limit your presentation to about 15 that would be that would be great and i'll i'll leave it to you to determine that 15 minutes okay thank you thank you very much president paul um we will be giving a brief presentation and happy to be here tonight primarily to answer questions um we are bringing this item forward to you tonight to share an update on an mo u that was executed between the city shamplain college and ride your bike back in january of last year to advance coordinated planning with the parties that own property in the central portion of the south end innovation district the area that was rezoned last summer um so we were planning to present to you tonight an update on that planning work and some of the high level takeaways from studies that we have been doing over the last year um and to propose the outlines to you of a draft pre development agreement that would allow us to continue to move forward with additional planning together in the hopes that we could come to you later this year with a draft development agreement to consider next steps for this area um my job here is just to introduce everyone and turn it over to them so um thank you president paul for introducing staff i won't repeat that um we also have with us tonight john collo and online will fly sig who are both representing ride your bike we have also been working with todd um serandos from ride your bike as well in this work and we also have on zoom jennifer nickles who's the chief of staff at shamplain college and we've been working closely with nick anderson who's the assistant vice president for planning and operations at shamplain um so i'll turn it over to samantha who's going to start us off on our presentation thank you beggin unfortunately one only one is working this evening so my apologies okay thank you um i think i was working on technology so i'm not sure if i heard beggin say but also um we've been working closely with chape and spencer from dpw on this work who wasn't able to be here this evening um because he's traveling um but just wanted to make sure that was clear um we do have a set of slides they're also available i'm going to go through them as quickly as possible to keep us on schedule um this one that is up now is just orienting people to the site that we're talking about um there's three parcels in particular 68 seers lane owned by the city of burlington 125 lakeside avenue owned by ride your bike llc which is the large um surface parking lot and then 175 lakeside avenue owned by shamplain college so we've been working together um looking at these three parcels uh for just over a year um and this is a little bit of the timeline um to show you where we started uh we've talked about this already a little bit tonight or i've heard it come up housing as a human right action plan put forth by the mayor um which identified rezoning of this area um as one of the important components of that work that um zoning amendment was passed this past summer um and we've been working uh knowing that that was moving forward under a collaborative mo u these these three parties and are proposing with this pre-development agreement to continue working together the current um mo u that we're working under um had three phases released trying to understand the feasibility of of working on these three parcels together um and what the um different infrastructure challenges and opportunities would be just back up the goal of that mo u was to get us to where we are today um to a pre-development agreement um we had four um sort of foundation that's come out of that work again over the past 12 to 15 months uh one is a mobility framework which is a network we're going to show um a couple of diagrams later um that really focuses on active mobility and accessibility but it's about a street and pedestrian network that crosses all three parcels um but we've come to agreement on a conceptual development program that we're using for analysis that helps us understand what we think the intensity of development could be on these three parcels um that looks at including 1,100 homes and over 200,000 square feet of non residential space um and we've started to explore what a wastewater budget um and a car trip budget across the three parcels would look like what what can the infrastructure bear and what are some of the opportunities for addressing those challenges right so as Samantha said there are quite a few technical details built into these next few slides so I'll be brief but fully expect that you'll have some great questions on them so what you see here is the first of two slides addressing the mobility framework and this specific image depicts how cars will move to and through the site so the the pink lines the solid pink lines are how cars are the streets where cars will be able to move you'll notice there's a central north south street in the western half of the development uh that is depicted as mostly car free so I think something akin to church street uh cars in the morning certain times emergency vehicles but otherwise a sort of world-class car free street um you'll notice in that slide in this next one a pair of mobility hubs these orange boxes so these are these are not just parking structures they're also indoor bike parking facilities transit amenities other sort of TDM related or transportation demand related amenities to help people move around and within the site and within the south then and not in a car um so you'll see here a thick green line that's going to be a great connection from the existing bike path to the Champlain Parkway and Pine Street generally this mobility framework is consistent with plan BDP south end and the south end innovation zoning district to do the wastewater and traffic and parking analysis that we need to do to understand that this can be a permittable development we had to sort of come up with the conceptual development framework or program that depicts you know a likely development scenario that meets the sort of collective goals of all of the parties and so that is about 1,000 uh a little over 1,000 residences between Champlain College City's property and Ride Your Bikes property as well as about 200 230,000 square feet of non-residential space so we have all these very complicated models that we plug these numbers into and then they spit spit back out you know how much wastewater uh are we going to be generating how many parking spaces do we need and how much traffic is this development gonna put on the city's streets and so these are the numbers that we've been using and these next few slides sort of just are a snapshot of how that analysis looks we do know that in the south end uh the wastewater infrastructure uh is improving thanks to DPW's water resources division but there's still serious constraints uh primary goal here is to eliminate combined sewer outfalls and protect the public and ecological health in the area um so this wastewater study will sort of help us understand how much we need to increase the capacity of the wastewater system in the area we already know that DPW was in the process of implementing a storage tank at Callahan Park and so this study uh will allow us to know how much bigger that tank needs to be it will also tell us if we need to build storage tanks on the site themselves on itself and these are all things I think the development parties are prepared to undertake uh regarding parking you know we're envisioning a car light district but the reality is that folks need spaces to put their cars now and so all of the models that we've drawn up uh envision something about 1000 parking spaces you can see in a couple spots this red line um uh is a little bit below the parking demand so we're working on calibrating this in the next few months as we continue this study to get that to right size the parking and the development and finally traffic analysis permitting this for DPW is going to be a really important piece we need to make sure that we're not overburdening the the sort of immediate traffic uh infrastructure but also the largest out then and so we're going to be continuing this traffic analysis as we go um and finally public engagement uh in addition to the sort of south and innovation zoning district public engagement process which was extensive we've done uh a couple public open houses in person events and a couple virtual events and some ongoing uh surveying we've also been taking this out on the road show at sort of city markets and uh food food um excuse me uh farmers mark that's the word farmers markets and other places but the point here is that we are committed to continuing to do public engagement and we will be doing engagement in the spring and the summer and into the fall so folks be on the lookout for opportunities to continue to chime in great and before I go off the slide just a reminder that on the um CDO website there's a a web page for this work called south end coordinated redevelopment and there's currently an active survey link available where you can um look at some of what's being um envisioned and um provide feedback on what you think is the right fit for this location so the um reason that we're here um was to give you this update and also to talk about how we're hoping to move forward um in this uh packet of materials site was also a draft uh pre-development agreement what's in that pre-development agreement um has the foundational elements and objectives so what have the city shambling college and ride your bike all collectively um agreed on and I think the most important one is this one in bold at the top this is a very unique opportunity to develop a new sustainable walkable mixed income neighborhood across these three parcels um the mobility framework that Charles talked about is something that we have um worked hard on arriving at um and in agreement as a base point we know it will continue to evolve um we're really in agreement on maximizing um the number of new homes that can be developed on this site and incorporating the non-residential uses that make sense in this district um and that project phasing and design um will be informed by infrastructure constraints strategies um and financial feasibility and that we want want to look at those items together because uh working together we think we'll have a better chance of overcoming some of the challenges um there's a agreed upon set of design goals again that we're all agreed on as we move forward um and we're making a few um commitments besides just working together um one is to over the next six months develop a housing plan that achieves a minimum of 20 affordable housing on the site so exceeding um what's required by IZ in partnership with um our housing partners in in Burlington um and at the state a public realm conceptual design this is a grant the city has gotten through ACCD um to fund the um design of the public realm so it'll have a look and feel across all three sites um that is inviting and and works for everything that we're trying to pursue um the plan is to enter into a joint um plan unit development application again across the three parcels um this summer um you notice that the next one here is exploration of future interventions into the Champlain Parkway um if you look closely at the mobility framework diagram that Charles was discussing you'll see that we're um we're recommending that there are intersections made with the parkway through these sites to create the type of neighborhood we want right now that those interventions aren't possible so we'll take collaboration with our state and federal partners on the parkway um and again ensuring that we can use 68 Sears Lane in a way that best serves the goals of the city it um there's a portion of that site that has some deed restrictions related to the parkway um and then we're committing to ongoing study of our wastewater infrastructure um what the funding sources and uses uh might be for this coordinated redevelopment um as Charles mentioned continuing the traffic analysis um and transportation demand management opportunities and then how does it make sense um if it doesn't make sense for land swaps or parcel modifications um within these three sites um the first that one at the top of this into the first anticipated next step is to bring this pre-development agreement um back to council for action um hopefully at the March 11th meeting and then we've got work laid out over the next nine months to to meet the goals in the development um in the pre-development agreement and to get us to a development agreement ideally um I want to make sure we have chance for questions but also to invite John Collo who's here from Ryderbike to to say a few words and my apologies to John I was supposed to introduce him at the beginning but I was flustered with all the commotion and forgot so thank you for your patience hi everyone um I'm John Collo representing Ryderbike LLC which is the ownership entity for 125 uh Lakeside Avenue um also with me remotely is Will Fleissig uh on the screen and uh Will is a planning and development consultant who's uh we become acquainted with um his vast experience in working on mixed use initiatives in larger markets uh resume includes uh being president CEO of Waterfront Toronto and he's a former planning director of Boulder Colorado and will be available for for comments later on um I just wanted to just to say a few things one I want to thank the the council for um its unanimous support in supporting this initiative what was uh you know which was you know what last summer I believe yeah okay and and and along the way I also want to acknowledge the work of Meg and and Charles and and uh Chapin Spencer and Samantha um it's you know this is a really kind of a forward-looking uh initiative and with a lot of parts and pieces and having you know I think the the council and the community is lucky to have people with forward-looking professionals at their caliber on the staff so just want to know that so uh you know what what I think is is important is that we've got you know I think it begs the question what what's why would we enter into a an agreement like this I mean we've got a private entity owning a six-acre parking lot and a new set of regulations what life is complicated enough why would you really want to enter into having partners and but I think that that what was just shown on the screen I think provides a bit of an answer there there's first we've got three different property owners that even though they are different there's more similarities than differences and I think they share a lot of long-range interests but perhaps more importantly I think that there is there's an opportunity through collaboration to create a unified development plan that can exceed if you know basically yield a result where the the outcome will be greater than the sum of the parts so I think that that's that's something that's really kind of driving uh rider bikes interest but but having said that entering into a development or pre-development agreement is no guarantee that we're going to get to the end I mean I think despite all our best intentions um any of the partners including the city may elect to make a decision that they'd be better off pursuing their own agenda or programmatic objectives and and meet it individually but if if that's the case it's not because we haven't tried and tried our hardest I think that there's a really a committed and passionate team that really want to get this done so I just really kind of wanted to share that perspective will um have I forgotten anything or is there anything you'd like to add yep you got to turn your mic on all right I thank you so much I I just wanted to tell the council I am convinced having looked at other projects around the country uh that Burlington can figure this out that we can transform this district into a vibrant mixed income community um you've got all the right ingredients and I would just encourage the council to encourage the departments and the staff to be you know we got to think a little bit outside the box and be innovation makers and and I know that you know we can do this and and come back to you with a viable set of options um and and think about it so we can get out of this urgent housing crisis we've got to find some new ways to fund and design and come up with these solutions so I just wanted to stop and say uh very pleased to be working with the community and and and with Ride Your Bike and Champlain College and the city staff available for other questions later thank you thank you very much um I I feel badly I apologize we are past 7 15 so um we'll come to the council but after public forum so if you could make a little bit of space for anyone who wishes to speak during public forum I do have a a fairly extensive uh group of people that wish to speak during public forum just wanted to explain um because I know there are a number of you that are here to talk about the neighborhood code so the neighborhood code is going to be on the deliberative agenda as a public hearing if you filled out if you filled out one of these in pink it says public hearing on it so those are for the public hearing on the neighborhood code if you filled this out unless you want to speak during the public forum time which will start now I will call on you when we get to this item on the deliberative agenda which is going to be a little while from now if you want to speak if you if you if you prefer not to um you know if you want to just come forward over here we'll try to maneuver that but it will be a little bit of time until we get to the public hearing if you signed up with this and you're a Burlington resident then these are the people that will be called on to speak during public forum so I apologize it is a little bit confusing there also were some because we ran out of forms there also also were people who used a white form and if you said neighborhood code on here when I get to you if you want to speak during public forum you're more than welcome if you wish to speak at the time of the public hearing you have that option as well um so um and if they're um okay so it is now 725 uh the public forum was set for 715 so we're gonna get started with the public forum but before we do um just want to note that we do have a process and for those of you who are new to our process um I just want to let you know that the full council joins me in speaking about this process uh because we all share a strong commitment to an orderly process and one that honors all voices including a very respectful discourse um for those who are in con toys we have a timer system that is on the table in front of me it has three lights there's a green light that will shine when you start speaking there is a yellow light that will shine when you have 30 seconds left and then there is a red light that will shine when your time is up please complete your sentence when the sound and the light indicate that your time is up so that everyone has the same amount of time to speak and we can keep the public forum moving along uh if you're joining us online and there are a number of people who are uh the same applies if you wish to speak during the public hearing um you have that option I will call on you if you wish to speak later you're welcome to do so um there is a there will be a clock that will come up on the uh on the screen when that clock winds down to zero uh please complete your sentence so we can move on to the next community member we do have a hybrid system for public forum if you wish to speak in person there are forms and there will continue to be forms in the back corner of the room to my right uh please bring them you can just leave them on the table and we will collect them it's been our practice that burlington residents have first priority to speak we will go to burlington residents who are joining us in con toys who have submitted a form that I have um and you must come you must submit a form um and then we will go to burlington residents online who have completed the online form we will go back to con toys for burlington property owners or representatives of burlington based organizations that are joining us in person then online and then we will go back to non burlington residents joining us in person and then uh finish public forum with online non burlington residents um we do have a large number of people who wish to speak so please honor the two minute time uh during public forum um and also during the public hearing we um ask that you please use respectful language I'd like to remind everyone who's here and everyone who's joining us online that there are families who watch our council meetings it's their connection to civic engagement and to our community uh parents use this forum to teach our cities children about city government and we expect that everyone will refrain from using profanity um as well it's important to remember that our language reflects a presumption that everyone here is interested in what's best for burlington not for themselves or for their neighbors but for all of burlington and we all understand that everyone is going to have different ways of defining those interests but it's crucial that we not presume or know the motives in anyone and do not impugn the motives of others to that end um the only other rule that we have is that when you are speaking that you please face me direct your comments to me as the chair and not to anyone else at this table and not to the audience that is gathered behind you please do not personalize your comments this rule will be strictly enforced again we want to hear what you have to say and we will listen more intently if you if you speak respectfully uh the first person who wishes to speak is david fos to be followed by abby wolf and you're welcome to join us right here we only have one microphone that's working so you'll you can move it back and forth if you wish right here good evening if you're just speaking great thank you thank you mayor thank you this council thank you all residents that are here i want to really support bha but steve murray i want to support all our resident board members that are here i want to support and thank miss melo bringing up the idea of a maybe a permanent agenda for decker towers bha for further meetings and public safety i've been for i started out as homeless i was homeless for over a year i've lived in decker towers now for eight and a half years the first five years were pretty good ups and downs and then the last especially the last year and a half it's been really horrible well due to evictions we have had a number of evictions in our building but at least half of those people evicted have managed to work their way back in a lot of these people we unprecedented we've had covid then all these people that have the addictions and all these homeless at the same time at least 50 to 60 people that are on the streets and these situations end up in our stairwells every day and because that happens our stairwells are every time something is fixed it has to be refixed and all that money that could go to supports or something else is not used you i invite every one of you to come spend a weekend especially weekend of the first to visit decker towers you guys will get a whole new meeting what we're trying to say i brought this up almost two years ago i warned people it's coming and thanks to you folks you're starting to listen i want to thank the folks from seven days because that without derrick and james no all this stuff would not be as prominent as it is now thank you thank you so much abby good evening good evening i live at decker towers you can just get a little bit closer to the microphone sorry i'm nervous i live at decker towers and i'm secretary of the resident council board with dave i want to express gratitude and hope because we're making progress when i told my aunt that what's happening in my apartment building she said this fred rogers quote when i was a boy and i would see scary things in the news my mother would say to me look for the helpers you will always find people helping so i want to thank the helpers for their tireless work and what we're going through that's kathy foley the dtrc board president who was speaking to you earlier my uncle our decker resident manager steve murray the dha director derrick brower as dave mentioned and many other journalists at seven days and vt digger for bringing light to our darkness andrew listurgeon who's right there he's our neighbor and he's an unsung hero of our community for on a volunteer basis the residents and staff at decker who are banding together supporting one another and building community in spite of all this and in reaction to all of this and recently i want to thank you the city council and the mayor for listening to us for coming and showing up many hours this week to try to get a comprehensive understanding and empathy and background and taking steps to make changes you're really hearing us and i appreciate that i don't want that to go unnoticed also um a lot of community members have been reaching out to us in burlington and in the state um especially after reading the seven days article offering empathy and help so um we've been feeling kind of hopeless exhausted and trapped and um it's really nice to have some hope and feel like there's steps taken so thank you thank you very much our next speaker is susan miller to be followed by solbig overbie good evening good evening thank you miss paul um i came here to support my other residents and um board members i i'm the newly elected treasurer of the board down there the people that i see here that have come and the smiles and and it made the world of difference to us and i but i do i i am going to share something that that i think that the people outside of and many of you heard it from me um i i felt like mr murray got thrown under the bus he's the best thing that's ever happened to us he's the first ceo that could show his humanity and interest and yet maintain his professionalism and whenever we go to him with a problem with his staff he takes responsibility he says he's the leader and so he's responsible for what his staff does and we don't hear any discipline because he doesn't bring that to us but we do see the changes that he makes among his staff i think the thing that i want to make clear and i think i see so many people that were with us and understood the hope that we have now that we didn't have a while ago and i have a concern about three employees at bha a serious concern and i'm here to say i want them resigned i want them out of there and one of them sat here and that's jeff metcalf and i know you don't want to hear disparaging comments but jeff and susan karp we plan i cook i cook the meals down there is meant so few of you have joined us but um that's just what i do and they knew that we had this christmas meal planned and they locked the entire damn building down excuse my language without saying anything and they stuck a thing on the wall that said because of the homeless population in here we're shutting everything down people couldn't get their christmas presents out of the package and if you don't have enough compassion to understand just that these people there don't most of them don't have families that don't live near them my immediate family is 26 people i went off and spent the day and had a great time but when i got home and saw the people that i cared about they were devastated and they thought their christmas wasn't going to happen thanks somebody chased mr murray down and made it happen but i think that's a concern to look at thank you thank you so much uh so our next speaker is um solveig overbie to be followed by brit yates for the record my name is solvei overbie brian pine was good about reminding me to do that i just wanted to quickly say i've provided a couple extensive long communications to you all last friday and i appreciate any of the amount of that that you were able to read because i think they're important items that are on your agenda for tonight um so i'm just going to remind you of those two topics i'm very concerned that the gateway project the gateway block did not go through an rfp project it was it was so that was basically derailed and i have the concern about the fact that there has been no commitment to actually doing a 50-year long-term land lease uh ground lease that was sort of like what you all did with the airport so i hope you had a chance to read some of that material that i provided with you the second thing that i communicated with you about is my concern that the the fiscal year 23 audit which is on your agenda for today also did not refer to a particular recommendation from last year um that was that the cdo the way that it was worded that actually resilient recommendation number two related to whether or not the cdo um uh i'm going to say this it's not the capital project accounting it's not grant accounting but capital project accounting was on the uh it was item number three last year it has not been referred to and i was i was discovered earlier at the board of finance that there was a misunderstanding that my concern about that was that potentially the ceo was not doing her job that is absolutely not the impression i am i'm trying to make i i am making the impression i'm i'm concerned that that was taken off we've had serious problems with capital project accounting for the last 10 years which is a document i provided however that was not referred to at all and that there should have been some sort of statement that explained that and i i'm sorry that it had nothing to do with accusing ceo shad of doing something inappropriate thank you thank you so much our next speaker is jake shuman oh my apologies brett um to be followed by uh jake shuman and kathy olwell good evening brett hi um i um didn't notice the different colored papers when i signed up earlier so i apologize i did come to talk about the neighborhood code and i guess since i'm already here i'll i'll do you're welcome to do that now yeah i'll do it later i'll do it now um so uh hello um so given the severity of berlington's housing shortage i believe that the neighborhood code is a very modest plan i'm here to urge city council to pass it without finding various ways to reduce its impact to near zero first um i live in ward six in what is currently an rl zone and i want to highlight that because sometimes during discussions about upzonings i hear people talk about which neighborhoods should have to shoulder the burden of absorbing new residential units for the greater good of making housing more available for others um to be clear i think the rl i think the rl zone should be eliminated everywhere in the city but i disagree with this framing which implies that residents of rl zones all share a preference for slow paced exclusionary car-centric communities um i like density i'd prefer to have more places to walk to for my home and more people to say hello to as i'm walking um i'm glad that my street is is going to become an rm zone if the neighborhood code passes and in which city council would go further uh ultimately i don't think my own lifestyle preferences are all that important uh burlington should become a city because people want to live here and burlington must find space for them if it wants to be able to afford the public services that its existing residents already need city councils refusal over the decades to allow burlington's built environment to evolve has had disastrous consequences ecologically economically socially and politically uh most of all now we need to make burlington more affordable creating a livelier streetscape in a more interesting culture which would come with allowing more people to live here is just a bonus at least it is for me um again i don't think what i want in this respect matters very much but i think you're going to hear from a lot of other burlingtonians who believe that their anti-social quality of life concerns are extremely important and i just think you should know that quality of life means different things to different people thank you next speaker is jake shuman and once again i'll just simply remind you we want to hear what you have to say in speaking to the issue that you care about and the way that you care about it we don't need for anybody to call out anybody else or impugn the motives of anyone else hi jake hello good evening um i seek to impugn the motives of others um when we suffer trauma we need closure in order to move on from that trauma uh our community has not had closure from the trauma that we suffered on november 25th to speak nothing of the trauma that three individuals suffered um there's there's an election before the next council meeting so uh you've missed your opportunity you needed to put some political capital on the line and you didn't so i would like to submit for the record a resolution that i submitted um on december 12th after the division on december 11th um it was agreeable to all parties um seemingly and would get a consensus vote but then a key stakeholder withdrew because that's not what they wanted um what happened on december 11th was division it was clearly calculated to be that um because we had no action because it was a six six deadlock vote every single one of the 12 of you had the power to affect any different uh result so i impugn the motives of individuals on this council the whole council you all collectively have failed you all individually have failed to stand up and say that we as a community are opposed to hate i hate that you couldn't do that i would like to submit for the record a statement from palestinian members of the national leadership of standing together because our community is united we all want an end to this war on january 22nd we were divided again unnecessarily i asked the one of the key leaders of the 8.2 community supporters what in the apartheid free city resolution would you like to see they said thank you so much i'm gonna finish they said something from the city of cambridge thank you so much i would like to submit that resolution from the city of cambridge your time your time is up and then i would like to submit a resolution that i wrote and submitted to you your time is up these are the things i submit for the record your time is up so is yours nobody vote for anyone who is currently on this council this council is what has divided our community your time is up so the next the next speaker is cat the all well to be followed by uh jane mcdukel would you prefer during the public hearing yes okay um the next speaker is jane mcdukel um to be followed by evan gould evan do you wish to speak during the public forum or the public hearing so you speak now yes okay good evening how are you i'm good how about you well you know what i heard that um i heard something about the monitor auditorium and i was at the auditorium hearing about getting it fixed appropriate they the women said what would you like to use it for and i looked at all the other rooms there was a basketball court there was a place where you can have lunch there was a place whatever and i said well why don't we use it for um using it for what the heck was it using it for different things and um i heard that you're going to use it for something and break it down or something it was on the news it was on the news tuesday night last thursday or thursday night what are you going to do with the auditorium well this isn't an opportunity for back and forth but our next agenda item we'll be talking about the gateway block about the memorial block so you're welcome to stay in until that time no we'll be talking well i have a ride catching um you know the reason why i just questioned that is because i've worked at that place in um dealing with it and i just was thinking that um i hope to get some sense to it and that's what i heard about it and what about the food shelf how come they're not getting any money thank you so much for those comments our next speaker is evan ghoul to be followed by uh gordon dragoon my name is evan i live in ward five with my wife and our newborn i was going to come today to voice my support for the neighborhood code without amendment but over the wet uh over the weekend two amendments were added to this proposal which changes substantially one lowers the lot coverage in rm to 55 percent in the number of units to four while the other even worse amendment keeps a single neighborhood rl despite it having the highest median lot coverage of all the neighborhoods being up zoned we're in a housing crisis and burlington can't afford to make compromises i think the scale of this is lost on some of you um so forgive the numbers but here we go the median household income in burlington is 55 461 i'm going to be very generous and say these two people pay a combined total of $7700 for health insurance well below the national average of $8000 per person if they invest six percent in retirement into a 401k that leaves $44433.34 after taxes this means 3702 dollars in take home pay groceries for two people in vermont cost $994.82 the second highest in the country um let's say these two people rent a one bedroom apartment the average cost of which is 1700 here then if they choose to drive a car and are prudent and by used and try to live car light the average used car payment is $533 that leaves just $474 the average home price here is $500 thousand that means it would take the average burlingtonian 17 and a half years to save the down payment for their first house 17 and a half years a college grad today would be 38 before they could pay a down payment for a home here never going out traveling not counting incidentals no vacation no money calculated for gas 17 and a half years is the best case scenario this isn't the time for a five percent reduction here here or a two unit reduction there or a walk back of a data driven decision to placate a small group of people this is time for action thank you thank you so much our next speaker is gordon dragoon to be followed by an vivian and again if you wish to speak during the public hearing you're welcome to do so i don't have a newborn so i'll wait for the hearing you'll wait okay so the next person is nick persampieri believe that you're here to speak for a couple of items if you want to speak now that probably would be best good evening thank you nick persampieri ward three i submitted something in writing expressing my opposition to the climate policy review i saw late this afternoon that an amendment was submitted which is a a bit of an improvement because it provides some took oversight over the process but it still doesn't address my fundamental concern that the scope of the study does not include fixing the defect with the existing ordinance by going back out to voters to authorize imposition of a fee on all thermal energy systems and fuels that emit greenhouse gases so for that reason i continue to oppose the climate policy review i urge you to adopt the neighborhood code without amendment this is needed for a number of reasons first and foremost it's a critical step that's needed to address our serious housing shortage and in particular the lack of affordable housing you just heard from a prior speaker that the average burlingtonian cannot afford a single family home so most of our new development needs to be multi-unit structures increasing density and allowing more housing will also help support struggling local businesses and art organizations and it's also critical to addressing the climate crisis by allowing more people to live in car bike and transit family neighborhoods thank you thank you so much our next speaker is nolyn rogers to be followed by alec collins hello there my name is nolyn rogers i live over on north street first of all thank you for holding this forum really appreciate it i wanted to talk a little bit about the climate emergency report and our general climate emergency so first of all i think people should know this kind of goes under the radar sometimes i think that we commissioned a report in i believe it was either 2018 2019 um either way the report came out in 2019 to talk about burlington's net zero energy goals for 2030 that means net zero emissions in the city um by 2030 and so we paid money to do that and now we're trying to follow it so currently the city is not meeting the goals of commission the net zero commitment hinges heavily on incentivizing a change from gas heating to electric heat pumps as well as a transition to an 80 fully ev fleet for everyone in burlington currently the vast majority of buildings burlington use gas and gas use has been relatively constant the last three years so the question is when are we actually going to move towards heat pumps we're not doing it now we need to have installed over 10 000 total heat pumps in burlington as of this point in 2024 to meet our goals um we're very very far short um and 10 000 is over half of residential properties so we're nowhere near that mark um so people need a little bit more urgency uh we talk about it we celebrate it we need to actually do something um burlington needs to be more of a leader um so basically we're very far far short of current goals and we need to press our city to actually act on research that we commissioned we paid for the atmosphere in our climate emergency doesn't care about whether emissions come from waste from trees or coal the world is getting hot right now if all electricity was generated by a power plant like mcneill we would still be in a climate emergency that doesn't really change anything um it's still emissions in the atmosphere let's start treating this like what we call it and actually take action so it'll be 55 degrees plus um tomorrow and wednesday and raining and it's february so we need to actually do something thank you thank you so much our next speaker is alex collins to be followed by josephine brunel good evening good evening my name is alex collins i'm a resident of ward three here to urge the council to adopt the original neighborhood code as conceived um i was born you know here in burlington a graduate of shampoam valley union high school and the university of vermont and i still live here i like living here um and i'm lucky enough to have a you know a job that allows me to actually afford to live here um you know the price i pay for where i live given the quality of the unit um is tough to stomach but i like living here enough that i put up with the honestly terrible housing market that currently exists in burlington um and so few of my friends who i went to high school and even college with still live here in burlington and it's exactly because of this issue and this issue has a very simple cause there is simply not enough housing for everyone who wants to live here in burlington and the housing that does exist is low quality and the price is high because of this demand it's a simple issue of supply and demand and the solution is also simple to adopt a zoning code that allows as much new construction of as much high quality housing i don't care which of it is designated as affordable and which isn't because the simple fact is even the highest pricing priced housing expands our housing supply and will bring down prices um and and you know create incentives for landlords to improve the quality of their housing if they want to retain tenants um and you know the young people uh you know my peers who are here to speak we are the future of this city and we are the renters uh who are affected by this crisis so homeowners may feel one way but you know they're really failing their children and their children's peers by you know basically saying that they want to live in the same burlington want to keep burlington the same as it's always been but the future generations of burlington need to be a priority for this council thank you thank you very much uh our next speaker is josephine brunel to be followed by uh jack tiano jack did you want to speak now or during the public hearing now okay hi um my name is josey i'm a resident of ward three i live and work here in burlington i do not own a home and i currently cannot afford to buy a house in the city i am speaking today to remind you of the housing crisis in burlington and to voice my support for neighborhood code as this is a step though small towards creating a more affordable and equitable city i've been hearing and reading many campaign promises to prioritize housing i hope to see all of our city representatives especially those running for office act honestly on these promises if there are any changes to neighborhood code it should be to increase housing density such as eliminating residential low zones in favor of residential medium as the city baseline otherwise the code needs to be passed along as is not diluted as quickly as possible we urgently need to be taking steps to create more housing i just went to the bathroom downstairs and noticed there was a chart where people can mark which issue is greatest in burlington affordable housing had the most marks followed by homelessness this is a climate issue an affordability issue and though this is only a small step we need to take the step and continue working to create a more livable city thank you thank you very much our next speaker is jack tiano to be followed by uh ryan frank good evening hello um jack tiano word five um so two minutes is an awfully short amount of time to try and advocate for critical housing policy in burlington um instead i wrote and sent you all an 11 page document that still really just scratches the surface on the history of housing in burlington what we need to do to end the housing crisis how we measure our progress and how it all relates to neighborhood code i hope some of you at least had a chance to skim it and we'll read it in full before a final vote in it i recommend that you reject both councilor amendments to neighborhood code on the table tonight to optionally amend it to eliminate rl and use rm as a baseline to otherwise pass the neighborhood code as written as soon as you can and after passing it to immediately pass a resolution asking the planning commission to investigate zoning policies that will enable burlington to achieve a 1000 unit per year development pace the rest of my time i just want to make some comments in that longer document i walk through the math that shows that burlington needs housing policies that target a 1000 new unit per year development pace to end the housing crisis within a decade the neighborhood code is projected to only give us about 10 units per year or 1% of our goal my point being that this is not a transformational change but a recalibration we cannot let a 1% increment be a battleground we must forcefully and unanimously pass this code as a promise to a future burlington with abundant and affordable housing we have to effectively use data and not just general vibes to make our decisions if we're serious about moving forward finally there's going to be a lot of opposition here tonight but there's also going to be a lot of support too i ask you to look at the faces of who is here to support this and who is here to oppose it and consider who represents the future of this city i ask you to consider how quickly and easily one person can so doubt in a process that dozens if not hundreds of people have painstakingly crafted through analysis outreach and deliberation some people just hate development and there's no room for those voices in this city and there hasn't been for a long time thank you our next speaker is ryan frank to be followed by philip keifer keifer ryan you will okay um and as well uh philip uh do you wish to wait or do you want to speak now okay hi my name is philip keifer i live in ward two i'm here to ask you to pass the neighborhood code without any amendments to roll it back um i'm an apprentice carpenter i hear elected officials in vermont talk all the time about the need for more young people in the trades the reality is that i can barely afford to rent in burlington without my partners higher paying jobs subsidizing our rent i'm not sure how long i could be here people want to live in burlington and they want to work here and if the city doesn't build more housing to accommodate that people like me who maintain your homes are never going to be able to stick around and again i'm lucky i can afford to be here but that's saying nothing of all of the people who've lost their homes last year to rising rents or floods i'm not a supply absolutist i want rent control i want stronger eviction protections i want more affordable housing but anyone who thinks that there are enough homes in burlington isn't paying attention burlington needs to take big decisive action to address our housing needs but instead it seems like this tiny first incremental step could be derailed by and i'm not impugning here this is a quote from front porch forum saying that building new apartments in our neighborhoods would be dystopian a neighborhood's character comes from the people who live there not the size of its buildings please pass the neighborhood code is written without carve outs for specific neighborhoods and then go further thank you thank you so much our next speaker uh doesn't have great penmanship i believe it is uh carlos escua i don't know the last four letters um does that sound familiar to someone yes do you uh it says here you wish to speak during the to the neighborhood code do you want to speak now okay by all means so you'll tell me you'll tell me your full name hi yes it is carlos esquivel okay thank you um hey um so my name is carlos um i've been living in burlington for around four years now um i wanted to support a neighborhood code also without any amendments um i also do a rapid rehousing for burlington housing authority which is pretty interesting um i just can't believe that we're putting limits on how much development we can build also just to put this clear like it's not develop developments or new buildings are going to be built it's just putting a restriction if they can be built or not and so that's pretty crazy that we and i've been hearing this from a lot of like like politicians that we just need more housing we want more housing and we keep talking about housing but we keep putting barriers to it we keep putting legal barriers to it i just can't believe that we are keep doing this over and over so i just want to encourage all of you to like vote the same way that you speak about housing and please pass it um it's just gonna allow more density and that's fine that's what we need it we already have the density we just need a place where to put people that's basically my job i've been also telling people that i feel like sisi food sometimes like trying to like um house people without that don't have like any income don't have any housing history and of course they there's no places for me to put them um just being a very hard task that i've been that i have but i just want like any possible chance to make it easier for me and obviously for them also they deserve a place where to live thank you thank you so much our next speaker is sandi win sandi do you want to speak now or do you want to wait for the public hearing now okay uh to be followed by richard hilliard and the same for you richard do you want to speak now or now okay welcome hi my name is sandi win and i live on mansfield avenue i want to make sure that you all are clear on the details and the ramifications before passing the neighborhood code it's something we all agree needs to be done but let's make sure we do it correctly so everybody benefits what specific historic development patterns does the code want to bring back and relegalize changing one area with small lots close to uvm from rl to rm but leaving larger lots in areas for rl seems like inequality and discrimination we want to make sure we have all the facts exactly how many uvm students do live off campus how many rental units are in the city if i hope you are aware that the possible legal nightmare that some parts of this code might cause could be extremely tragic for some folks little things like streets or corridors well are all the corridors the same let's get it clear what we mean and the details and what makes them different do we have sufficient infrastructure to handle the increased housing we all need and want do we have sufficient resources to enforce and oversee increased rental units so that they are safe what about our fire and rescue capacity and please don't rely only on computer generated data for things like lot coverage without confirming what is actually on the ground please just slow it down so we do get it correctly there are no unintended consequences and we can make it right for everybody thank you thank you so much our next speaker is richard hillier to be followed by uh cathleen donahue and cathleen the same thing for you if you wish to speak now or during the public hearing now okay thanks for a much good evening uh richard hillyard ward one keep on having to amend my notes here but i'm here to talk briefly about three items all related that apparently under a city pressure to approve by this mayor and city council mandate one is the neighborhood code but we can't review the neighborhood code in isolation second is the uvm proposed uvm memorandum of understanding the third is only found out about this a couple of weeks ago the uvm medical center memorandum of understanding uh so please defer your final deliberation until the newly elected administration all of these affect ward one comprehensively and disproportionately the mo u with uvm is too short and unenforceable the mo u with the medical center planning wasn't even aware of it until a couple of weeks ago these should dovetail with the neighborhood code they shouldn't be all dealt with in isolation they should be dealt with um as as i've described in the previous public hearing as part of the jigsaw ward one yes i live there represents 12 and a half percent of the city yet the benefits of each item neighborhood code and the two mo use accrue to one accrue to the benefit of 100 percent of the city this is not nimby ism the nimby ism is already taken place so i would ask the city council to defer this until as sandy just said we can get it right at the moment it's not right it's not serving the community that is so close to the institutions and doesn't represent anything to uh other than to jeopardize owner-occupied neighborhoods that are invested in the city thank you thank you very much uh so our next speaker is Kathleen donahue to be followed by lana greenberg and lana i wasn't sure if you wanted to speak now or yes okay good evening hi hi my name is Kathleen donahue and i own a home on henry street in ward one as a home owner i care a lot about historic architecture the character the quality and the stability of our neighborhoods however i'm not detached from the housing crisis i have two children in their 20s who both have had a hard time finding good quality and affordable housing in burlington in recent years my nephew currently attends uvm and has felt the stress of not being able to find affordable available off-campus housing for his junior and senior years i want these younger family members and others to find affordable places to rent and buy and i acknowledge the housing shortage and know that we need to build housing and yet i have many questions about the way the neighborhood code is currently crafted and how hastily it's being decided i urge the counselors to slow it down um so that we can think long term and address the sincere concerns longtime residents do have some of my concerns boil down to parking with new units will come added parking pressures even if people walk or cycle to work in downtown they will still have cars what is the parking plan green space as we infill and increase locked coverage and units per lot we will reduce green space how will that impact stormwater runoff and the urban heat island effect how will it impact community health and safe places for young children to run and play in their neighborhoods student rental pressure our ward one neighborhood is diversely settled but uniquely vulnerable to the pressure and quality of life costs of student rentals are areas attractive to investors who want to buy a home for the uvm student and or create rental units there is a degradation of neighborhoods when you increase student rentals at the expense of home ownership and there's no guarantee of affordability that goes with either the rental or single family home equity i'm concerned that our neighborhood is scheduled to be doubly up zoned to medium density when other areas of the city with a lot more green space larger lots and more parking space are to remain low density this does not seem quite fair for all of the reasons above and more i ask you just to slow down the process and send this current code back to the committee for some amendments and i thank you very much thank you very much um for some reason we seem to have lost the the system on the table so we'll just have to keep track of the timer um lana welcome hey everyone uh lana you're followed by uh chris gish and then uh claire bradley good evening good evening thanks for having me my name is lana greenberg i live in ward five in the king maple neighborhood take a moment and imagine that the room is empty we are already losing people in burlington whether it is to the high cost of property taxes or the fact that there's nowhere to live except for in the sprawl or in a tent on battery street we need to stop losing people we need to tell my generation and those that come after me that we are welcome here if we do not act on the housing crisis we will also be um negligent in acting on other crises all of these crises from affordability to public safety to the drug crisis are intertwined with our severe lack of housing so when we don't act on the housing crisis we are leaving some of our most vulnerable housed community members to bear the brunt our friends who live in decker towers are seeing people in their hallways because there's nowhere else for those people to go and then you have to step over people who are sleeping in your hallway when you're trying to get out of your apartment building that's just that's unacceptable on neighborhood code and on this crazy delay policy that we're calling climate policy we're faced with this question of who the city is for and when we make decisions we are always choosing who our city is for are we gonna prioritize the ease of people who already have it pretty good now over the ability for those of us to survive in the future are we saying oh it's your view and your view over everybody else's ability to have a home i am so lucky to own my home i was able to spend every last cent of my savings um on a 450 square foot apartment for which i will have a mortgage that i have to live my entire life over to pay off and i am still so lucky we must change conditions please act on the neighborhood code please pass it please go further we need rm everywhere to address the equity issue and we need real climate policy if you want this room to stay full thank you thank you so much uh so our next speaker is chris gish did you wish to speak now or yes great um to be followed by claire bradley um i wanted to start by saying a sentence um in support of the neighborhood code and the higher increasing payments in lieu of fulfilling the inclusionary zoning requirements um we know you've heard how serious the housing crisis is especially for young people and these would both be steps in the right direction to make it easier to have more affordable housing and i wanted direct to direct most of my time to the quote climate policy review resolution that's on the agenda um please vote no on this this is not climate policy this is like a really frustrating gambit to delay and further confuse climate policy in burlington it asks bd along with dpi to do a study finished in eight months from now and then to follow that up with another study that we don't really need um this counselors had a chance just recently to do something concrete on climate you could have let voters close a really straightforward and obvious loopholes that allow that incentivizes polluting biofuels you fail to do that there's other concrete things that you could do you can ban combustion based heat in all new buildings you can improve building codes to make to mandate highly efficient new buildings you can do much more to promote energy conservation think about demand management for electricity so we're not dramatically increasing our electricity use as we transition to things like heat pumps there's a lot you can do there's been many many many studies just since 2019 i can think of many there's even been some before that um but bd i want to say has zero credibility to lead this quote review they're the ones who put us in the place where we are right now they promoted promoted the nze roadmap that confusingly wrongly defined net zero as reducing fossil fuels rather than eliminating greenhouse gases emissions they drafted most of the subsequent ordinances and resolutions and the whole progression of ballot items and they're the reason we're in the fix right we are right now so please put someone independent in charge of any reviews or studies you're going to do and vote no tonight thank you thank you so much our next speaker is uh claire bradley and then we will go to speakers that are joining us uh online good evening good evening council people i'm claire i'm resident of ward three i'm here tonight to urge you to vote no on the climate policy review i know that it's the safe thing to do and it's creative report by some time and i know it makes a great talking point to say that you're taking on the climate climate crisis by making sure we know exactly what to do and how but it's really not the safer option the climate crisis is here there is nothing the report will find out that's not already known we need these next nine months to become more serious about meeting our city climate goals and we can't let our electric department run the changes we make by definition there are some conflicts there let us make these changes and do them with urgency it's an issue of safety sustainability equity and every other priority this city and its individuals have so please vote no on 9.4 thank you so much uh so we will go to residents burlington residents that are joining us online and there are a number of people um just just so you're aware i i do see that there are people have their hand raised um that are joining us online i'm going to go to the those people who have registered to speak online during public forum we will start with them and um if you have not completed a an online form i can't i can't recognize you so if you're waiting to speak you do you did have to have spoke um have registered for public forum the first person is romeo von herman and uh romeo i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now thank thank you can you hear me yes we can thank you madam president mr mayor counselor city administrative team fellow burlingtonians and uh the wonderful folks from decker towers uh so i welcome today's city council work session regarding the ongoing safety issue of decker towers and i do understand that the decker tower residents neighbors feel that their quality of life is eroding due to ongoing safety issues illicit activities in and around the city and most municipal centers are becoming a common occurrence in our city they are happening in plain sight well while the focus on decker towers is crucial and i welcome it it's imperative that the city equally takes a keen interest in other key locations such as the downtown transit center where similar problems uh do persist i thank counselor burlow for visiting the downtown transit center and seeing firsthand on how emerging issues are dealt with with vigor and compassion thank you madam president thank you so much uh our next speaker is uh sharon busher and and sharon i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now okay thank you president i'm also going to speak at the public hearing but on code but not not now um my comments have to do with the presentation that's coming up regarding memorial and that block and one of the things that i wanted to point out was the history part of the slide presentation there's a statement that in 2021 uh bond that dealt with memorial failed um that's true but only one million dollars was part of that bond for memorial it was a broader bond and i feel like there should be clarity that it wasn't a vote against memorial it was a vote against the entire bond um the second thing that is stated in the um in that slide presentation has to do with the cost of the of the ravine sewer which is being dealt with with the great streets so i feel like that sort of is there but it's also being dealt with the third piece has to do with the fire station and that whole block and i understand this is still going to be evaluated but it concerns me a lot that city place is going to add housing in a hotel and we have other housing potentially going to be slated for this memorial block and we're going to move the fire station farther away i really hope people look at that and the transit time between where the station is and when to get to hopefully never a fire the last piece has to do with public input on the timeline there's no comp there's no place for public input and i feel like public input is really relegated to or curtailed because it's actually after the council has already taken a decisive vote so i'm concerned about that also i really wish the public had more input before decisions were made thank you very much thank you so much our next speaker is jack hanson and jack i have found you and enabled your microphone please go ahead hi al thank you hopefully you can hear me i'm on a train so it might be a bad connection um i emailed the council hopefully you all got that um there's a few important items uh tonight that have to do with the climate crisis but also every other issue that we face as everything is interconnected as you all know um as far as decarbonizing buildings there's a growing numbers of growing number of cold climate cities that have taken strong action we took a small step in november although it was flawed you know we did take a small step to start to regulate buildings there's so much more that we can do we don't need to reinvent the wheel we can look at what other cities have done learn from that and improve it and adapt it to burlington it's extremely disappointing that you all voted no to do that um recently but this option would put us on a path that would really get in the way of making further progress um this 9.4 i urge you to vote no there's going to be a new council and a new mayor coming in very soon and the work can continue but to simply kick this over to be ed and you know not not work actively on the nine months and then go off of recommendations from our electric utility is not the path forward the council needs to play an active role and keep moving this policy forward and do it as boldly as possible um we need to stop being conservative on climate action same goes parking the city should not saying pub comes into storage for people's vehicles we should really be supporting sustainable modes of transit and affordable and accessible modes of transit and transportation in our city and i also do support the neighborhood code i think it's critical that we um allow for more density and more housing thank you very much our next speaker is nick um atherton and nick i've enabled your microphone don't know if you wish to speak now or during the public hearing uh yeah i'll speak now thank you okay please go ahead uh thanks everybody um so uh i live in ward six in the south end where the hill section kind of blends into the champlain college campus um i live in an apartment building it's got about a dozen units uh it's it's not a lot about the same size as many single family dwellings down our block it is ample parking for those who need it myself included so i live close enough that i can walk to work or bike to work most days and this apartment building was built in 1946 um it's substantially older than a lot of single family homes and down on the same block we have the ability to build these these houses these buildings in a way that works with our neighborhoods that is part of our neighborhoods that's been a part of our neighborhoods for decades and they provide the dwelling units that we need for a population that is looking to stay in ronington and is finding that's not very difficult you know i'm 33 with the age when a lot of my friends are looking at buying property um most of them have given up on burlington entirely and are looking at places in melton um heinsberg places where they would have to double or even triple their commutes if i wanted to buy property with the salary that i have uh i would have to do the same and i would have to give up a walking commute but that i very much enjoy and that takes the vehicle off the road every day um i'll yield the balance of my time i think i made my point and i just hope that the neighborhood code passes as amended or with greater additions for that density thank you thank you so much our next speaker is rye sherman and rye have found you and enabled your microphone um and if you want to speak during the public hear me you're welcome to do so or you can speak now wonderful can you hear me yes we can awesome thank you um hello city council my name is rye sherman and i'm a resident of burlington as a young person i have to deal with the effects of climate change for the rest of my life burlington has the potential to enact really positive climate action but just has not taken strong enough action or leadership yet i want to see real climate action from my elected leaders i'm here today to speak on three different issues first i'm asking you to please vote no on the resolution to request that b e d spend nine months completing a study this resolution completely avoids climate action by using a valuable time to come up with light to come up with a likely weak building decarbonization policy we don't have time to postpone action climate change is a threat that demands effective policies as soon as possible next i want to ask you to please vote yes on the burlington neighborhood code it's crucial that we increase housing density in burlington to ease the current housing crisis and create more affordable housing communities as a student at uvm i fear of not being able to find affordable and convenient housing in this city and i know that that fear is reciprocal among many other students finally please vote no on item 9.9 which would use public money to incentivize parking we do not need more parking spaces and car infrastructure instead we need to invest in biking and public transit this is another way that you can take valuable climate action in burlington and demonstrate the leadership and progress that we actually need thank you for your time thank you so much our next speaker is um scott mason and scott i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now yeah if you could just if you could just speak up just a tad is that any better that is great perfect perfect so um i wanted to speak about uh a couple issues i'm not i'm not waiting for the public hearing so i i believe this is the right time for non-agenda correct uh if you don't want to speak to the neighborhood code um then that that's yeah yeah not that not that item okay all right all right awesome so i wanted to start with um with a quote that um that i've heard it's from steven wise and it's um some may call it communism but i call it what it is judaism so every single aspect of communism is uh the next speaker is um wiley dolmage and uh wiley i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now hello can you hear me all right yes we can all right thank you very much thank you everybody for uh hearing us out my name is wiley dolmage i live um on north willard and ward three i'm speaking in support of the neighborhood code um i work in alternative transportation advocacy i'm personally obsessed with leaving the world better off than how i found it i believe that i have lived in burlington more than long enough to assert myself regarding this particular issue um it's my opinion that the vitality uh and livability of burlington is in great peril um the truth is that burlington is growing whether we want it to or not and in order for us to accommodate this growth um and the needs for the future we have to embrace more dense housing everywhere here in burlington um this is not a bitter pill for us to swallow because it'll make life much easier upon burlington residents um one good example is right now it's pretty much impossible to start a business here because no one can afford to live here how are you gonna staff it you're gonna have a heck of a time um the people who work in burlington and make up our service industry are being financially crushed in a housing crisis that is not being addressed the only way we can move forward and make our city as good as it can be is to embrace density it is a city that is growing fast and it's stopped it's time to stop living in denial and act like it time to stop messing around stop pretending burlington's growing thank you uh thank you so much our next speaker is um amy melanoski and amy i have found you and enabled your microphone please go ahead amy hello can you hear me uh yes if you can just get a little bit closer okay great um hi my name is amy melanoski i'm living in the part of ward one that will soon be ward eight uh my partner and i are new homeowners of a townhouse in burlington we're very very very grateful and extremely privileged to be able to have this little home and so my promise to myself that is if i get to have this security of a home then i have to keep fighting for others to have access to that too um keeping a low intensity residential zone serves no real purpose other than to maintain economic segregation in the city and cater to the preferences of those who already have the most wealth and stable housing folks being unhoused is a direct consequence of not having enough homes to meet regional demand we can't humanely make progress on housing done house with without without meeting that demand and we should we should use all possible avenues to increase housing production so tonight i'm adami voice to the chorus that is asking for the following one eliminate the residential low zone and to use the residential medium as the baseline citywide in order to more equitably share the burden of new development and simplify the code uh two while i support the neighborhood code as is without any amendments i think it's just a small first step and i'm asking that our city pass this as it is and then move swiftly to bigger and more transformative upzoning changes and then three lastly please vote yes on the resolution to update our inclusionary zoning thank you thank you so much our next speaker is paul bierman and i found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now can you hear me okay we can hear you great great thanks so um i want to take the time to urge the council to take up the amendments that are proposed to the neighborhood code and to refer the entirety of the code back to committee um i ask you not to be swayed by any vocal minority with particular agendas be those people protecting specific neighborhoods for those encouraging housing production at any cost i think changes to zoning are critical right now in order to increase the number of housing units in burlington but those changes must be considered in the broader context of first equity and second lake water quality and third climate change and in my view this version of code does none of these well the need for housing in burlington is really clear but the current proposal does not consider unintended but i think really critical consequences so i ask you to consider the data first off that the lot coverage um that many of these judgments are being made on is based on demonstrably incorrect data derived from remote sensing models and not ground truths it's wrong for our house it's wrong for most of the home nearby that i've looked at and it almost always overestimates lot coverage second in in terms of equity the wealthiest neighborhoods are left as lowest density i don't see how that can be right and third there's been no consideration of the storm water runoff increases that will follow these infills and the reduction of permeable grass and trees the element in the room that a couple people have talked about but not much is uvm our students take up more than 5 000 veterans in this city and that keeps working people out of those homes and out of those apartments so i ask the city government to step up and demand uvm house those students and free up those units for others it will go so far toward adding more housing units and provide a huge opportunity with renovation to improve energy efficiency and potentially reduce costs so in summary i think we need to get this code right so it encourages responsible development that equity provides affordable housing while protecting the environment slowing the process down and listening to citizens will not only generate a better outcome but it will generate more public support the current versions of neighborhood code is really well intentioned but i believe it's flawed and i know we can and must do better thank you thank you so much um and the last speaker burlington resident is joining us online is bob duncan and bob i have found you and enabled your microphone please go ahead thank you councillor paul for the opportunity to speak i want to go on record as supporting the neighborhood code as it was originally written but i also want to say that i'm really very impressed with the level of support and passion particularly the younger people in the audience have expressed tonight i moved here 50 years ago and participated in my first zoning amendment maybe a year or two after i moved here it was uncommon for a young person to to be heard or to be listened to by the city council at that time when it seemed as though you needed to have been a member of the community for 50 years to be heard so i really encourage i'm very impressed with it with the people that are speaking out and i really encourage you to listen to them they are they are our future and they have a lot of good things to say thank you thank you so much um we will go back those people who are joining us in con toys um and there are two that wanted to speak during public forum uh the first is kyle blake to be followed by karen sida i'm coming so you've changed your mind yes and we don't allow that oh i'm only kidding i'm only kidding go ahead kyle will wait for you thanks so much hi everyone uh good evening my name is gordon dragoon and i am a resident of ward four i would like to speak to keeping the neighborhood code in its current form or expanding it and how the core arguments on the high tower and dockerty amendment are flawed i'll note that the falling points are based on the determination that we must build drastically more dwelling units in order to meet the demand in order in which your offices have stated is necessary if we are concerned with wildlife corridors then we must be focusing on increasing the amount of dwelling units per lot as much as possible watering down the code will not fix corridors it will push sprawl outwards for those truly concerned with wildlife and not merely weaponizing it to keep the status quo the ideal state for vermont's wildlife would be to allow burlington to handle the burden of density and to prevent sprawl from spreading outwards the environmental benefits do not stop there according to the epa multifamily homes result in a 50 percent reduction in home energy usage compared to their single family detached counterparts increased density enables walkable and bikeable communities which further reduces transportation energy usage you must accept that anything that reduces housing density results in worst outcomes for our planet based on data from vhfa burlington needs 350 to 1,000 new units per year to stabilize housing costs and to get to a healthy vacancy rate in the past 29 years we have built less than 2,500 homes only 407 of those were iz units the status quo is not enough and the proposal in its current form is a step in the right direction but not enough you must accept that the only real solution to our housing crisis is to build more housing and anything that prohibits that is actively making the problem worse there is a lot more to say in very little time so i'll just leave you with a question how many homeless people in burlington is the right amount to see a deer in your backyard from time to time thank you thank you so much so our next speaker is kyle blake to um and we will conclude the public forum with uh karen sida hey kyle hello good evening good evening um my name is kyle blake i'm the president of the burlington firefighters association uh two items on the agenda tonight brought me in today i'm going to speak to one of them really quick uh now hopefully the other one in a little bit later and that's decker towers i know it was talked about fully here you've all toured decker towers decker towers is uh a building that the members of my association are very familiar with and i just wanted to echo the concerns that were brought forward by the community the residents applaud the fact that they're standing up and and talking about this but it's something that really does need to get addressed the crime is one thing we're starting to see it affect our ability to provide emergency medical and fire services within that building as well i've responded to a call within the last month where an individual who was not a resident of that building was tampering with the standpipe system uh for those of you that don't know what that is that's how we get water up to the elevated floor so if there is a fire uh that's a critical piece of the fire protection system that someone who was trespassing decided they just wanted to open it up and mess with it that's a problem that's a huge problem that's a life safety problem additionally i've been to a call where we were responding for difficulty breathing uh chest pain we could not enter the building because at the same time there was a report of an individual with a firearm wandering the hallways so we had to stage we had to put on our bulletproof vests our kevlar helmets and we had to wait for pd to clear that building that's a delay in a critical emergency medical service for that community something needs to change the elevator that's been spoken about a lot this evening uh i'll echo that as well that elevator is the larger of the two elevators that safely fits our stretcher that we utilize to take people who are sick injured have mobility issues in and out of that building um so whatever needs to be done to get that fixed i think is is critical uh the residents have put up with far too much for far too long it's great to see it being focused on um and my membership fully supports any initiatives that you guys are trying to take to to solve that crisis thank you thank you very much uh so our next speaker is uh karen seda to be followed by karen long did you miss me sure you did i didn't show up last week because um i wanted to see who would speak about black people on black history month and nobody did uh once again i continuously fight for black people i'm continuously mostly only the black person here constantly the reason why they don't want to label me as a black leader is because i don't go around making white people feel guilty so they can donate thousands of dollars for my organization i just speak the truth and i just want citizens to recognize harm that's being done to all citizens black white asians whatever i do want to speak that a lot of people are now claiming that i'm against the homosexual community and that's wrong to my homosexual community i love you more than you'll ever know i am against emma because she's not a real one i support people who are okay we're not gonna we're not gonna get into that okay well i'm allowed to speak the truth okay then i'll say something i'm sorry no i'm sorry no we're gonna end me once again one is allowed to speak in free speech one is allowed to okay then section 83 of the from our lawsuit expect that because once again one has the right to speak the truth and people come here talking about um their elections all the time i'm just saying that i'm not against emma i'm just saying that i want an honest person no i'm allowed to file a 1983 lawsuit a black person came here last time and yelled at the mayor's face and she wasn't told to leave didn't anyone tell her to leave in august when a black woman came and yelled at our very handsome very good-looking mayor's face no one told him to leave so why can i not speak the truth i'm just saying we want honest people honest people me and jom don't always get along but i want she's honest and i'm allowed to tell the Vermont public she's an honest person so that's excuse me i'm allowed to speak the truth well i my time is let up my time is interrupted this is what you guys want you don't want the truth and you don't want black people to speak the truth on black history month that's again it's unfair a black leader once against me you let a black woman yell at our mayor but i can't speak the truth your time is up this is wrong and you need to know that 1983 expect that 1983 expect that your time under the first amendment constitutional right that is the law just expect the lawsuit just expect the law your time is up union karen hi okay so i'm sorry to like jump in at this but i just want to understand with this parking thing i went to a board of finance meeting and my understanding is that because we had to get rid of a parking lot at because of the big dig with the thing that we're going to subsidize parking and what i had heard is that for every five dollar charge we're paying 350 and i think that that's against our whole philosophy that burlington says we don't need parking so if that's what this is at 99 or the exit or item 99 i don't understand why we are saying we don't need parking we got rid of the parking garage we you know whatever but then we're going to pay a large amount of money and again maybe i'm wrong maybe it's not this thing but is that it the five dollars we're paying 350 and the person that uses the parking i know you can answer me pays 150 so i don't i don't think we should be subsidizing that thank you thank you so much uh so that is the last person who wishes to speak during public forum for those who saw um for those who filled out the pink form or asked me to skip and come back to them i haven't forgotten about you i will come back to you um that will conclude our public forum at uh 846 and um we will go back to where we left off thank you also as well to everyone who who is here to speak during public forum we greatly appreciate what you had to say um we will go back to the work session that we interrupted on the south end coordinated redevelopment draft pre-development agreement um i believe we had uh planning director makin tuttle charl principal charles dillard and samantha dunn assistant director of community works for cito um and i i apologize i think you had given your presentation and we were going to get to questions from the council is there anything that um is there anything that you uh didn't get the opportunity to say before we open the florida counselors no i think we're ready to take questions from council wonderful president paul i was hoping to uh i'm sorry what i've been trying to get recognized on this i was hoping to say of course yeah great thank you um and uh thank you to the team for um the presentation tonight and our partners here i just want to say briefly and make kind of give a high level point for the public um as to you know what we're doing both with this and i'll give similar comments when we speak about the agreement before the council with the gateway block the um we've been working for a couple years now on what i think is one of the largest housing opportunities the city has to redevelop these acres and acres of underutilized parking lots in the south end as as a new neighborhood we don't have many opportunities like this in the city this is one that we we can't miss this opportunity we've taken one very large step to make sure that we do capitalize on this by rezoning this section of the south end after a lot of debate and a lot of work and some of the pro housing voices that we're hearing from tonight we're also critical in in that uh key decision and i welcome that but with this particular opportunity that is only part of the city's job we have done our job to put the right regulations in place for there to be major investment and and hundreds more than a thousand new homes potentially to be created we now have to get an agreement right um in our role as a significant property owner in this part of the city and in our with with respect to our responsibility to make sure that the city's infrastructure is sufficient to handle this kind of investment in this part of town and that's what fundamentally um we are are trying to do with this agreement i want to amplify the point that the opportunity here is um maybe in some ways in addition to making sure we we meet the basic responsibilities of those roles as a property owner and as an infrastructure provider there is an opportunity we think as the other partners think to uh have an outcome that is more than the sum of the individual parts if we can get to some kind of master plan and if we can have uh at some level of coordination amongst these three property owners so um this is work that is not going to be done in my limited remaining time in this role but it is my hope that um we can work with the council to approve a preliminary agreement in the next couple of meetings after tonight's work session uh that while not um locking in city commitments and while certainly not doing all the work that is going to need to be done uh in the months and years to come to actualize this does serve as a key checkpoint with the council where we confirm that we have consensus about how we are moving forward and that does um by having a formal agreement to mark this moment serve as a good handoff from one administration to the next in terms of how we pursue this critical uh important um and uh very optimistic project that if we get it right we'll address some of the uh some of the serious issues that we have been debating week after week and heard again tonight about our current housing and and related challenges right now so thank you president paul and uh look forward to the councilors uh questions uh thank you mayor um thank you for flagging laying down i sometimes a little bit understood a little bit and thank you for recognizing um so with that we'll go to the council are there counselors who have any questions or comments particularly to ask of those who are present regarding this agenda item which will be coming back to us uh presumably for a vote at the next meeting on the 11th of march uh councilor travers thanks president paul and thanks very much for this presentation obviously and the ordinance committee were very involved in seeing through the zoning amendments to the south end innovation district and so excited to see this moving forward and thanks to all the partners uh who who have been uh participating in this um the one specific question that i have and i know you've heard it come up is um from individuals who are concerned about not just the um capacity of our of our wastewater infrastructure but also what the built environment in this space will do with respect to stormwater and lake health and you spoke about it briefly but i was just wondering if you could expand upon it a bit more i mean my understanding is that pretty much the entire area that we're designating here is is surface parking lots at the moment and just wondering if you could speak a little bit more as to what we're thinking about in terms of a future state and in your mind how a future built environment would compare to sort of existing surface parking lots in terms of specifically stormwater and lake health thank you uh yeah this is a this is a good question and one that we got a lot in the creation of the south end innovation um district zoning so the the seid is far and away the most aggressive zoning district in the city with regards to stormwater infrastructure it requires pretty extensive green stormwater infrastructure on the site so yes these sites that today are primarily surface parking lots will be vastly more pervious than you know than they are today um so how does that impact uh lake water quality so there is in and a stormwater pipe that leads into the area around the barge canal um to the south of the site there's also Inglesby brook most of the stormwater on the site will will sort of be retained in the in the green stormwater infrastructure of course in heavy stormwater events that water mostly goes to the north into the barge canal so what this gsi will do it will it will help sort of clean some of that water before it gets into the barge canal in the lake but it will ultimately you know improve the quality of water coming from the site today all of that water sort of just like um drains in a sheet uh into the barge canal area and sort of accentuates the the sort of negative ecological conditions there today so um yes I think we can anticipate and I think our development partners are with us on this that there will be large amounts of greens to water infrastructure on the site um I don't know John if you want to add anything to that well the state uh law act 64 I believe it is which is a new stormwater act and acted a couple of years ago basically will require us all for a project like this that the treatment to occur on site before stormwater exits the site especially in the key watersheds lake Champlain lake meant for mega Connecticut river valley um that's my understanding of it and you know as Charles said you know there's sort of a lava flow of pavement on this site that has very minimal stormwater treatment even catch basis so really doing you know there's going to be a vast improvement just anyway but there will be because of local and state regulations um you know a market improvement and just I just want to quickly add that the work that we're going to be doing in the coming months um that is funded by a state grant will include looking at how exactly to sort of implement some of this GSI in the streetscape and some of the open spaces so more information to come Samantha was probably going to answer the first part of your question too which is about wastewater infrastructure it's a big part of the work that we've been doing over the last year in collaboration with DPW Chapin Spencer and the team at the water division have been involved in this work you may know that a couple of years ago there was work done to design a storage tank under a part of Callahan park that is intended to help us with some of the particularly the wet weather condition that exists in the pipe that goes up main street to the main wastewater treatment plant so we're currently working to better understand the capacity of wastewater that may result from the sort of development projections that Charles shared earlier understanding that in dry weather we need to make some improvements to that pipe but particularly we're looking at what happens in the wet weather condition and so we've been talking a lot about the potential to either expand that storage tank or find other onsite solutions that would help not only for this project but help improve the overall condition in the broader south end area and I think to that point alternate solutions I think we need collectively to be imaginative I mean the existing wastewater system in the city is aged and and not functioning well you know one option in the south end might be instead of basically having to construct temporary holding tanks perhaps we should consider something like a forest main underneath the bike path a straight shot decoupling the proposed flows from the existing flows and and and taking another another route and and that we're starting to look into that thanks very much I appreciate how mindful you have been of all these issues I think it's very important to point out that growth does not necessarily have to mean something negative for something like stormwater especially in the case of a project like this so I'm looking forward to moving this forward to tearing up those parking lots and getting forward get moving forward with this this new neighborhood this new community thank you thank you thank you councillor travers will go to councillor shannon thank you president paul and thank you for this presentation and all the work that you've all done together to to get us to this point it's actually very exciting and I hope that we can continue I don't I don't take what john said lightly I know that it is hard it's going to be hard to bring this to fruition I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of exactly where the storm water is going but was just a little bit concerned by what you just said about the tank under callahan and rerouting water from main street over there if I understood no okay I that's good I misunderstood that I was just concerned because we have so much water coming down the hill there into what some call lake cumbie and I've called lake public works to make sure that if there's capacity there it addresses the problem that's right there at that intersection that's correct great thank you thank you councillor shannon we'll go to councillor hightower great probably nobody will be surprised that my questions are about parking I'm a little bit I guess confused because it says toll spaces is 1005 but then when you add up the spaces in the diagram it's 1115 is the 1005 non-street parking and the 1115 is yes so there's there's multiple parking and I just want to be happy to answer your question just like the numbers we're using are very conceptual right now because we have to use actual numbers to do analysis so the exact numbers are not are not final and anyway right well I will say that the vision of having 1100 homes and 1100 to 1200 parking spaces is not a vision I'm excited about especially I think I think it assumes too much that people will continue to use cars like they are now as opposed to it doesn't really follow the more homes fewer cars model that we're promising for it's still you know one car plus per household and I know Karen long really likes to rag on me because I bought a car last year and now I can't say that I don't have a car anymore but I do think that for those of us who don't go skiing or maybe I guess I'd like to imagine a future where we can get to the mountain without a car so I would just strongly encourage us to not go for the peak one hour parking space that we may need and to have this be a much more walkable which is what we envisioned when we supported passing the south end rezoning and so I would want it to be envisioning much less parking especially with some of that transportation modality so I'm excited by the city taking a joint approach to making sure that there isn't parking on every single lot I'm supportive of that but I think that our vision of the total amount is out of line with where we want to be in 20 30 years thank you for those comments and I think you know one of the things that we have talked a lot about in the planning for this area so far is about the timeline for implementation and the fact that the pieces like parking will be able to be implemented in increments as well as the site is developing and will help us to actually be able to ground truth how much parking is demanded is being provided will help us to develop the TDM solutions that we want to support the development that's happening in this area and ultimately will help us explore in those future phases how to right size some of the future parking especially those modal hubs that we're talking about and I don't know if anybody else wants to weigh in on that I would just add that the parking spaces are not designated just to serve the housing we talked about over 200,000 square feet of other uses like makerspace daycare all different kinds of uses and there is some existing parking on that lot that serves the hula development which was why that lot was purchased that you know needs to be used so your your point is well taken and I think we're all thinking about what is the minimum amount of parking we could reasonably build on that site that's a goal shared by all three parties so you're in you're in good company you all set great seeing no others I am looking over seeing no others I would like yes of course please go ahead sorry thank you so much and thank you for the presentation CD team you know I'm just very polite maybe um CD team thank you for um the presentation here I was just wondering about you know the underground infrastructure about storm water wastewater and we know that the south end has had you know negative outcome about those issues you know pipe broke the breasting you know and also we know that there are at least two breweries in there in the south end I was just wondering what has been the input of Megan Moore water division director about the plan of this planned development coming up and also if you have received input from also experts about how do we move forward with this thank you yes I think I had mentioned this earlier but not made totally clear we've been working closely with DPW on this work for over a year including Megan Moore and her team at the water division to help us understand from their perspective what the challenges are and and they'll be really closely engaged with working with us to identify what those what the solutions are going to be for development of this neighborhood right um thank you okay great thanks councillor Jang um if there are no other councillors we will close out this item move on to our next agenda item and again the plan for this pre development agreement is to come back to us at our next meeting on March 11th for a vote and then in the meantime if there are questions concerns about the agreement there is time for the council to reach out to you for clarification in advance of the vote so we'll see you in a couple of weeks in the meantime several of you are probably going to be staying for the next item which is item 5.1 a work session on the memorial block update and for this item we have um cedar director brian pine um Samantha you're you're going to be staying with us and then we also have consultant jeff glasberg and um very fortunate to have also the developers of this proposed project joe larkin and eric ferrell who are joining us as well um we've allotted 45 minutes for this that doesn't mean you have to use it but we have allotted that amount of time and brian my understanding is you wanted to make some initial remarks and then samantha you wanted to speak to you have a series of slides and then thank you jeff for being here and then joe and eric are also available if there are questions correct perfect thank you the floor is yours thank you it's brian pine the director of the community and economic development office and you just saved me some time by sharing that information so i'm really glad we did that um you may recall early november we brought to you a resolution seeking your approval to engage in a letter of intent and that letter was signed on shortly thereafter and so after nearly four months of um work due diligence negotiation we are here to discuss tonight another sort of preliminary step and it was envisioned then it continues to be the plan that we're bringing forward the pre-development agreement which i've described to co co-workers and others who've been interested um is really a pledge to work in good faith to try to reach an agreement it is not in and of itself a binding document that that ensures or guarantees that this idea is going to come to fruition i think it's really important um i think there'll be some folks who who don't share that view but that is entirely what we intend and we believe that's what the agreement as proposed will accomplish doesn't obligate the city to approve a future agreement or contract really what it does it spells out the roles and responsibilities of all the parties and puts us on the same page from the from the beginning to endeavor to reach a mutually beneficial outcome so it's also been raised is is this the gateway block is this a memorial block and i'll just say this council several of you and the public has said let's move more towards the memorial block so we've just started using that term if you will as a memorial as a way to you know really commemorate what it is um that has has been defining much of this block since the county jail burned well before my time in burlington which was on the corner that's now a parking lot um there um we're going to go through some slides just to orient folks that when we refer to the memorial block it's primarily the properties that face main street so starting where the auditorium is listed here on the corner of south union and main street adjacent to that it are two privately held parcels that are shaded in what i think is purple a municipal parking lot and the central fire station that is labeled fire station there there are also certain visions if you will that include work that would take place at the at the adjacent properties which will get into a little bit more involving the church in the library so it really does in one way or another include the entire block and we'll go to the next slide so just to hit some quick background as you know i don't like to do these types of presentations that a little bit of history so i'll go back to the 90s and um we failed as a community to support the bond there was a million dollars to do all the improvements that were needed um in um 1994 to shore up memorial auditorium it did not secure enough votes so it did not go forward and we've continued to struggle with that property both before that and really ever since we are also looking at you know some more recent processes the plan btv which really laid the groundwork for notions of of creating a more urban downtown and not having properties especially city-owned properties continue to host surface parking lots and so that's been a priority to move away from that and really focus on redevelopment of underutilized sites in addition to some private properties like the vfw and and various others there was an initial look at whether the ymca could could basically take over memorial and literally put the pool down in the basement and put all the other programs in the building they looked at that concept with a student housing developer and they determined it was not feasible that actually included the entire the block going down to the parking lot as well uvm arena was explored for with a hotel on the gateway block um as you know that didn't come to fruition um and memorial was then closed in 2016 due to serious um code violations life safety issues that really meant that it was uh no longer a building that was safe for use and occupancy a public process and began in 2018 that laid out a number of adaptive reuse concepts and priorities were identified and a community hub was the concept and a rfp was developed in 2019 to find a private operator for that community hub as you all know the pandemic that hit us in early 2020 put many things on hold and this was one of the projects that got put on hold and didn't move forward coming out of the pandemic in 2021 we asked the voters for 10 million dollars to upgrade the building knowing that it was going to cost probably three times that to really do it properly that was included in a bond question that didn't had other city capital needs that did not win approval by the voters um at that in that same year that fall the high school of the school board and the school district were looking at potentially looking the high school at the gateway block did not move forward viewed largely as a extremely difficult challenging project to pull off we did get voter approval in 2022 to invest about a million dollars into stabilizing the memorial so that we could in fact have a building still standing that could possibly be reused and repurposed um as we all know the voters have brought in approved a 160 field five million dollar bond for a new high school therefore using up the city's bond capacity which does impact some of the decisions that we're talking about regarding how to finance and how to how to put together a viable project for this so um we then put out an rfp in uh 2022 and in 2023 a conceptual idea the idea that was the concept that was most um inconsistent with with the community um priorities and values for what people wanted to see in memorial was a project known as barbarusa they worked on it for a few months and then withdrew their proposal as well because they were not able to make the numbers work we then began working with the um adjacent property um not the owners necessarily but the developers who are here tonight have a um have what's called in real estate site control they don't necessarily they don't own the property yet but they have an agreement to purchase the property if they decide to proceed so that's that's where we're at right now and we've worked through the loi and i'm going to pass the mic to samantha and she's going to walk through some slides thanks brian and um a lot of this information should look familiar so i'm going to i'm going to go as quickly as i can um just a reminder i think brian uh spoke to a number of the projects that were not successful this is a list of of some of those barriers um and we're sharing these because the proposal that we're bringing forward um this evening is really we have an opportunity to address all of these barriers with this proposal so it's important to understand these um as we move forward again this is a repeat we these are the key priorities the city administration has put forward this is the shortlist um as you'll remember in the loi there was quite a long list of values and important priorities associated with the project that city counselors had a chance to speak to and were amended and those are repeated in the pre-development agreement but these are kind of the big picture priorities creating a welcoming entrance in this location to the downtown making sure we're adding mixed income housing preserving of course the memorials to the veterans that exist in the building making sure there's a civic substantial civic space on the block even if it's not the same civic space that was being offered by memorial auditorium that there continues to be some public parking as currently provided in the parking lot and then we are increasing our grand list and our property tax revenue for the city and and bringing long-term economic benefit to the community another item that we heard when we were speaking with council about the loi was the importance for community engagement we following that meeting uh invited ourselves to all of the npa meetings and were able to meet with four of them over the past couple of months to share this proposal and this project the common themes that we heard you see here on the right there's a lot of support for taking a comprehensive approach so looking at the whole block not just one building a recognition that we do need to address the liability of memorial auditorium the support for maintaining the memorial on site and and for having the civic space on site the two main questions that we heard were about the burlington fire department relocation that's alluded to in these documents and how the public will have an opportunity to continue to make comments which we'll get to tonight and this is just a reminder it's sort of the the short history of of how we got here so we were the administration was approached by the developer in the summer we came to city council in october an executive session to talk about this opportunity and then quickly moved forward into a public session where we received report support for entering into the letter of intent we did those npa meetings and have been working closely with our development consultant and the and the developer to make sure we continue to be on the same page about how we move forward and now we are back here tonight to answer questions and like the last item hope to be bringing this pre-development agreement for action at the march 11th meeting what is in this pre-development agreement i think brian said it's an agreement to agree there's pretty there's a lot of limitation on on what is binding at this point because we don't know enough we the primary thing that we're agreeing to that is binding is giving the developer a period of nine months to conduct additional due diligence and present the city with a proposal that's written we the city also need to be doing our own due diligence during that nine months as well and while the city is obligated to act in good faith under this agreement it's not obligated to accept the developer's proposal or to proceed beyond this due diligence phase so i think this is what brian was alluding to in the beginning so what's what's in here what's in this document an opportunity to do physical due diligence i think this is something we thought would maybe get further along before this time but hasn't happened so there's more physical due diligence that needs to happen and then the programmatic due diligence on the part of the developer to determine more clearly what the the program will be and develop conceptual plans of the program actually existing on that block looking at the regulatory feasibility and coming up with the preliminary budget sources and uses there's appraisals identified in this area as well to help the city and the developer determine through a third party current land values and the value of the proposed development and then to confirm the capacity to implement the development plan the central fire station relocation feasibility this is something i think we've heard the most comments about we did have a chance to meet with representatives of the fire department this morning to make sure that we were on the same page and i think we'll be making some recommending some changes to the language in this document to make sure their concerns and questions are incorporated we had alluded to a fire station relocation taking place on pine street and that was based on a 2018 fire station consolidation study we've heard from the fire department that there needs to be additional work done 2024 is not 2018 to make sure that the results of that study are still valid so we'll be removing the the pine street location specifically from the language in this document and making it more clear that what the city is committing to is assessing the feasibility of fire station relocation during this time so that we can make a clear commitment at the end of this nine months to the developer that that is feasible or not we're also agreeing to as we move through that due diligence to start to generate the additional documents that would be necessary to actually move forward with development on the site and then committing to additional public engagement so cedo will be working with the public to understand priorities for new civic spaces that will be incorporated into the redevelopment will be providing regular updates to city council and the developer has committed to a design process that engages public participation which will really happen as we move not in this next nine months because this is really about feasibility but in the in the nine months following that this is the proposed timeline you can see where we are where we've got a few specific milestones to hit over the next nine months but really the goal is by the end of 2024 to determine the viability of the project and then enter into a development agreement in the first half of 2025 at which time the developer will move forward with more intense design and financing and permitting of the project and we anticipate at this even this aggressive pace that construction would start at the end of 2026 and with that I'd like to well first ask Jeff if we missed anything that you wanted to mention I wanted to offer a couple of thoughts that put this in context for the city the property has been an an opportunity and a burden and at this point is certainly falling on the burden side the opportunity that's in front of the city now to work with parties that control the in holding privately held properties that are right in the middle of the block that those party the parties are known entities with a track record of responsible development in Burlington performance under development agreements with the city places this in a way that this is a low risk endeavor for the city and is a highly responsible action to take at this point it engages the private developers to expend their time and money proving the feasibility of a plan that has been called out in plan BTV and will be subject to other public input I think it's also important to acknowledge that there has been significant public process including RFP processes within the last six years or so as Brian ran through those bullet points the point being that RFPs have occurred a broad variety of parties have had an opportunity to respond and in the words of Chip Hart whom some of you know the market is never more eloquent than in its silence there was not overwhelming demand to deal with these properties so what we have in front of us now is an opportunity to engage in the kind of master planning that's comprehensive for the whole block that does include the privately held properties and is based on working with known parties with established relationships thank you so with that I would like to invite Eric Farrell and Joe Larkin otherwise known as the developer in this document to join us good evening so are you looking for me to say something about why are we doing this so y'all know me and know Joe I was born and raised in Burlington and as was Joe although I think he was born in a different century than me and I you know I've lived um 66 of my 76 years here I took a little hiatus in south Burlington came back home living in north end um in my office is in Burlington and if I hadn't grown up in Burlington and up on College Street I probably would not have the level of interest that I have in Memorial I like a lot of people who lived here and grew up here have a lot of experiences in that facility and I think it would be great if we could figure out as a couple of local folks who have roots in our community we could figure out a way to make it happen this is I would echo what Brian said this is aspirational at this point we we tried to get to a point where we're all sort of thinking and have the same you know vision or more or less the same vision but it's going to take a lot of work going forward to see if we can figure out how to make it financially feasible so it's I think it's a leap of faith on our part it's probably a leap of faith on the city's part as well and for the record my family thinks I need an intervention I don't know why I'm doing this but no I mean I like what I do I want to create housing and I was and I'm a Burlingtonian and I love this city and that's the long and the short of it hello Burlington hello council um like Eric I was born and raised in Burlington and you know I while my family is in real estate development has been for 40 years my interest in this is really I think it's a little to everybody else's let's just bring life back to that important corner of Burlington and I think I can help and Eric reached out and asked me if I'd want to be involved and I hesitated for a moment but then said yes and so here I am um you know I think like Eric said it's going to be there's a lot of challenges here a lot of unknowns but you know I think if we work together we build the right team we listen we get the right concept we we can do this you know I think we can do this that's the end of our presentation so we're happy to take questions great thank you um before we do go to questions um we do have with us uh Kyle Blake who is the president of the BFFA the Burlington firefighters association um Kyle did you want to um would welcome your thoughts if you wanted to speak at this time or um that might be good so thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak um when the news WCAX ran the story you can only imagine how quickly my phone blew up with all the members of the fire department being like where are we going what's happening um and I want to give credit where credit to do I reached out to director pine and assistant director Dunn and said hey uh can you fill me in and they did so and even today um sat down for 45 minutes and walked us through this so the union's concerns were obviously that the study was from 2018 um we had a really productive meeting about the fact that that is outdated data and we want to make sure that whatever moves forward is done so with the idea of public safety being important like former counselor uh busher said why are we moving a fire station from when you look at the heat map the central locations that doesn't mean it needs to stay there though right there are there are response times matrixes that we can still hit from being in different locations but we want to make sure that it's investigated thoroughly and that's that's really important to us the other thing that I think I wanted to speak to about this project is central is crumbling um I don't think it's a secret it's a very old fire station that is no longer really meeting the needs probably of the employees that work there the city and so this opportunity is one that as far as the union goes I can't speak for the chief of the department but we're really encouraged to see that we might be able to benefit from this unique public private partnership as well to enhance public safety for the community as a whole um so I just wanted to throw that out there as well because central is uh we were convinced that when they were digging up uh for the the ravine that we might lose the back wall of central it didn't happen uh thankfully and it's great to see that the sewer system is being taken care of but yeah this we're encouraged by it we're excited about it and the level of participation that director pine and assistant director done have offered for the fire department I think is very important for this process as well and it speaks to the concerns that the community had related to the fire department so I just wanted to offer that up thank you thank you very much and thanks for staying thanks for staying and being here with us uh mayor Weinberger thank you president paul um and thank you to everyone thank you kyle thank you to everyone who's uh spoken so far on this um and thank you to the council for taking this step four months ago as brian noted to endorse the loi that we've been working under in recent months and for uh considering taking this next step um again kind of where we are in the process the public is clear we had we have had executive session discussion about another agreement now we're having this work session it is our hope that the council will be ready to act in a march meeting to move move forward with this um the uh as director pines um history laid out this is a project this is a building and a part of the city that there have been many past attempts to redevelop there were many efforts before I became mayor and uh we have tried many times over the last 12 years I am encouraging us to try again first of all because you have to persistence there's really no other option but I do think there's a decent a real possibility that this effort may be different than I in in the past for for several reasons and some of them this is a similar list to what jeffrey glasberg just went through but I would I think it's worth the amplifying several of these points why why is this effort possibly going to be different um first of all unlike past efforts we have the possibility of site control for the entire site that has been a critical uh deficiency of some past efforts that has gotten in the way um our partners here have have addressed that secondly we haven't always had the right partners in the last efforts um as jeffrey pointed out we have in joe and eric two individuals who have deep roots here and who have uh delivered and gotten a lot built in this in this area and are getting a lot built right now and that's what we need here our problem solvers people who understand this community and are able to get things done um thirdly the zoning now is uh much better than it was at times during the long history here much more supportive of of um investment there may need to be as this agreement points out some additional tweaks to to the zoning it may not be everywhere that needs to get for this uh to happen but it is a it is now a form-based code it is a pro housing code it is a code similar to the code that we have seen make it possible to get uh buildings built at city place at the nest at city west this is now part of the downtown zoning district that is working and that encourages investment in the creation of new housing um fourth the tiff district that is in place there has already um it's happening right now you can see it up the street the infrastructure that is happening is fundamentally changing what the opportunity is on this site it is addressing this more than 100 year old issue of a ravine flowing through through the site uh making it very challenging to build on and creating a lot of risks that are going to be controlled and addressed and are you know are being uh done so right now and that might not be everything that we can get out of the tiff district uh we it certainly will take future work to get more infrastructure investment but I do think it should be something on everyone's mind who is continuing to work on this going forward that um even though our opportunity for investments from the downtown tiff district are currently over um there's you could look to city place as the precedent where if there was a clear development opportunity that was going to generate lots of future taxes that the legislature might be open to us going and revisiting whether on this particular parcel within the downtown tiff district some kind of extension might make sense for for both the the state as well as the city and the project and finally and this really goes to what our collective job is over the next couple weeks um I think in the loy uh in the draft that is before you now you see us as a city getting more disciplined and focused on what our goals are for redevelopment and more realistic about the situation we're in and what the possibilities are um at this at this moment uh we have tried the ambitious and we have tried uh making a massive public investment in this site work and it and it hasn't and um I think in the loy and the agreement there's a healthy recognition that um we need to be more focused in what our goals are we still have a very long and important list of public goals that is part of this agreement um but it is it is more focused and sharper than the past and I think that can make a difference as well so um I want to thank everyone for the work that's gone in so far I hope I know that I appreciate that some counselors have been in touch with specific uh feedback in the lead up till tonight we'll be trying our best to respond to that and we will welcome additional direct commentary tonight and the days that follows to make sure that we are able to attempt at least to put in front of you a development agreement uh pre-development agreement for passage in a couple weeks coming out tonight thank you great thank you mayor Weinberger so we will first uh we'll go to the council on the first speaker in the queue council in the queue is councillor berkman to be followed by councillor jang uh thank you very much uh I'm gonna have to talk lowly because I have babies sleeping upstairs so um I said I'm one of the ones who sent uh a list I think it is 16 questions um thank you brian um for the responses clearly um from what was brought today and what um was responded to to me um there is uh going to need to be a revision my request is that uh the document which I sent to everybody uh the answers get sent to everybody they become a public record I believe that uh they should be um subject to public scrutiny transparency um I am concerned about us um uh having to vote on what will clearly be an amended um uh pre-development agreement on the 11th considering that that's in two weeks we've got an election in between so I'm hoping that um either a revised um agreement can be put out into the public so everybody can see it and it not be something that comes out either late thursday or on friday uh before the the 11th or we maybe have a work session again and then vote on it um so that there's sufficient time so those are my um my two requests the one that the information is shared and then people get a chance to follow up and do their own I think that is what I have to say except once again thank you to everybody who's worked on this this project this is a tough nut to to crack thank you councillor bergman did you did you want to respond to anything in there or is that just simply we'll be revising it right away based on the feedback we have so far so I think uh I think we can meet a pretty aggressive timeline this is our one of our top priorities great thank you uh councillor chang thank you consulate president fall um my first question before the question I want to really say thank you so much mr mayor um and your administration for all the work that we have done because it's clear that you have never been discouraged about this rfp after rfp you know we have hopes and then it doesn't work out but you still continue to believe that something needs to be done I really want to say that thank you um and my first question is going to jeff glatzberg and was just wondering if you can let us know when was the first the last rfp closed when was it closed the um the last rfp that we ran was specifically for memorial auditorium i'm just um jeff glatzberg was not involved in that process as a consultant to the city um so it was um in uh well we um put it out in 2022 and at the end of 2022 and and selected a proposal early in 23 um and just as we were getting ready to to bring that proposal forward um as brian mentioned uh they they pulled their proposal back um due to financial infeasibility um thank you but the question was what was it officially closed at at a specific date or was it still open no it was it was closed um at the end of 2022 I don't I don't know the specific date off the top of my head but in December of 2022 okay so then um since it was closed a new rfp after then you know was not opened that's correct okay um yeah um so I mean now I I have a little bit of concern now because this is getting more and more clear and the fact that we have no rfp and it seemed that the city reached out to both uh mr larkin and um mr ferrell um and you know I think someone also mentioned during um public forum I I believe right that there is no rfp and yet the city is working on on LOI um what are the risks for example for you know inequities to come up like as we move forward if any yep I just want to clarify that the city did not reach out um to eric ferrell and joe larkin that eric and joe reached out to the city as they had secured site control um and asked to work with the city on um pursuing a public-private partnership on the site so we did not go and and identify them as while our their folks were happy to be working with we didn't pick them out to work with it was an opportunity that came to the city that the administration determined was one that was worth pursuing and and that was uh brought to council uh last year thank you and uh mr larkin and mr ferrell why didn't you respond initially to all the multiple activities that were opened in the past um I think it's pretty simple that um you know timing is everything Ali and and you know I've I've got a reasonable size project in on the avenue that I've been that's I've been consuming me so um but last summer it did occur to me as we're halfway through that project or a little more than halfway through that I approached the mayor and said look I'm you know that nothing's happening in this block and I I'd like to see something happen and I'd like to see if if a couple of local guys could do it I did ask Joe I will tell you I did ask Joe a few weeks ago whether he had any concerns about what's been going on downtown and he uh immediately responded that he did not have any concerns that we thought that he thought that um this would help and our expression of confidence and if we can make a project happen here that it would help uh the downtown and and if we could show support for the downtown uh at this critical time that it would be very important so it was kind of our idea to approach the city because nothing else was happening um and the timing is what the timing is wonderful thank you and this this is my somebody was saying go right ahead Councillor Chang perfect uh thank you um from my perspective I think it would be very wise for the city to still open an RFP right now because there is no development agreement on the table right now we on the considering exploring let's say um an LOI with these local developers and it would be very wise for the city to open an RFP leave it open as we continue to move work with the local developers just in case that this doesn't go to so at least we have an option of maybe encouraging all the people to to come in I think it would be very wise for us to to open an RFP and also continue to work on developing this but I my hope is definitely for this to work but at the same time and we've done we've been here before uh many times and it would be wise for the sake of the city to continue to have um you know to welcome all the opportunities as well in case this doesn't work out and I hope that it works out thank you thank you so much so we'll go to so I'd like to comment on that okay I would just say that um that we're going to put our heart and souls into this and if the city wants to put out an RFP then you can this is a good faith agreement we're going forward both parties in good faith if the city decides to put out an RFP then I think we would probably step back understood thank you for saying that yeah are there any other counselors who wish to add councilor grant I not really a question but um it it is a little it is a concern to some in the community about the lack of RFP and and when you were so gracious to to meet with me and kind of talk about the project um I don't know if you remembered I just said you know you want to be careful about looking like it's a back room deal because that that is a is a concern and when we first entered into this initial agreement it was kind of thrown upon us and and I I know I personally fell back into a corner because there hasn't been activity there and people want activity there and we're going to be losing that building because of the um condition that it's in and uh and we have to have something different we have to get away from all this blight that we have in the city that's affecting our um vitality um but I just want to say the more transparent um anytime you have an opportunity to be more transparent than less that would be greatly appreciated and just a quick question for um Kyle Blake uh so are you saying the first time you heard about the possible plans for the fire uh house down there on Winooski Avenue is from a news story I think I can answer that you can correct me if I'm wrong but it's not the first time we reached out to both Kyle and chief Lachance before we brought the letter of intent forward to let them know that this was something we were talking about okay just came back up in the news okay anything you want to add to that thank you very much and um I just the last thing I'd like to say is I just want to back up your statements about the fact that that building is quite literally crumbling at the public safety committee meetings reviewing chief chances reports about the condition of some of the firehouses and how you there's literally netting in there to capture falling concrete it's it's very alarming thank you thank you very much um Councillor Carpenter I just want want to comment about um Councillor James comment and just make sure we remember the city does not control the middle of that block we we cannot develop that whole block we could have two properties or three properties we could have a memorial a parking lot and something in the middle so if we want a comprehensive development we need to work with the owners who own the middle of the block and that's been the biggest impediment as I understand it in the past we just didn't control it and so I from um you know Joe and uh Eric's point of view they can't come up with a concept on the whole block unless we give them permission to develop it and we just got to respect that they did come to us I mean they probably could have come to you know not follow throughout on all but I think this is a great opportunity thanks thank you so much Councillor Carpenter uh Councillor Hightower I'm so sorry I feel like I may have misheard because I was just coming back from the bathroom but did you say that if the issue city were to issue an RFP you would no longer be interested I that's that's pretty accurate we would step back for sure because we're moving forward in good faith with the city and if the city uh wants to pursue multiple paths then I think we would step away I would say that I wasn't worried about that um the RFP process because the RFP was open we got two responses which is not a lot of enthusiasm for this block but I think it certainly gives it doesn't look good when we say oh but if we were to pursue a more transparent process um you wouldn't be interested that's not that's not ideal I would um that makes me worry a little um and so I would I would caution you to rethink that statement I don't think we're are going to pursue an RFP but I think that that sentiment of if we were it suddenly wouldn't be of interest to the developers that looks like a back I hope you see that to us on the side no I think I don't I don't think you understand the process we if we make in this agreement we have to we have to invest a considerable amount of time and money pursuing that block am I going to pursue that am I going to spend a lot of money in energy doing that if there's parallel tracks and the city's talking to every Tom Dick and Harry out there it's not going to happen right because because it's too high risk I don't I don't think that I don't think that us opening the RFP I guess would have done that I think the reason that I was okay moving forward with no RFP is because there is no Tom Dick and Harry right you're the only ones who are interested and so that's the reason we're excited to do this proposal but I don't I would just in order for us to do that I think we do have to say like hey we're moving this forward with you because you're the only one who's interested and I think if we were to say like hey we just want to make sure one more time that nobody else is interested before we move forward understand the no parallel that would be a lot of commitment I just would hope that a good faith partner wouldn't say well we would shut that down immediately and then you might not ever see us again no I then then go ahead and explore if there's anybody else out there and if you don't find anybody call me great thank you that's the long and the short of that that's I think that's a more reasonable response then okay thank you thank you councilor hightower are there any other counselors keeping in mind where we will be we'll be moving this forward to a vote on on the 11th of March and in the meantime if there are counselors who have questions Megan Brian you're Megan my apologies Samantha seen a lot of Megan tonight Samantha and Brian are here as well as thank you so much for taking the time Eric and Joe to be here with us this evening and as well to Jeff Glasberg and anyone else that I am missing what an amazing project this is we wish you the best thank you thank you so that moves us to the next item on our agenda which is item six the climate emergency reports is there any counselor or the administration who wishes to offer a climate emergency report seeing none we will move on we will close out that item and go to the next item which is number seven the public health and safety emergency reports is there any counselor or the administration who wishes to offer mayor Weinberger thank you President Paul I just want to again update the council and the public on what is happening in Montpelier now with respect to the hotel program as we have look back at the challenging year we had in 2023 I think it's there's consensus now that one of the most significant things that happened over the course of the year is that the state put 800 Vermonters out of shelter on June 1st without a plan for adding to the shelter in sufficient ways and the city of Burlington really bore the brunt of that for the rest of the summer we did various things to respond to that most successfully we advocated successfully to keep 2200 Vermonters housed through that program and not have them also turned out on July 1st which would make the problems even you know substantially worse but nonetheless that that was a a decision that was made at the state level that hurt us badly there and hurt many individuals badly there is a very real chance of that mistake being repeated on April 1st of this year the agency of human services has consistently advocated to remove to exit in their verb something like five to six hundred Vermonters statewide who remain in the hotel program and again the there is a talk of a shelter plan to house those folks it is it is hard to imagine that shelter plan that is being discussed coming together by April 1st which is now just you know weeks away the there's no reason for the state to pursue this plan with respect to Chittenden County residents perhaps there's a different justification in the rest of the state but as you've heard me say before we have presented an alternative plan to the state that keeps everyone housed and gets all of the 89 households who are still in this program in Chittenden County into permanent housing by July 1st by staying the course by continuing to use our coordinated entry plan and by continuing to work with housing agencies to get everyone housed and we'll do it at about half the cost of what the state has proposed for new shelters so it shouldn't happen and the legislature has responded to this both the senate and the house have now passed bills in a budget adjustment act which would seem to avoid this outcome but what I want to raise here and what I want the council to know and the public know that we have been communicating with the legislature about is that there we are very concerned about a kind of backdoor effort to bring this program to an end on April 4th first not through an explicit end which has been rejected by the legislature but through a very low per night cap on the amount of rent that the state will pay to keep this program going there is a cap of $75 currently in the legislation and if that is not raised there is reason to believe that most of the hotels that are participating in this program will no longer continue to participate and we have gathered and been part of working through the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance gathering this information getting input from the hotels as to what the status of this is and what the status of this negotiation is and we have raised this concern directly with the conferees who are making this decision probably this this week if there's not an adjustment to acknowledge that this negotiation needs to go on and that that if the current course may result in the program being ended we are going to see a repeat of the mistake of last June and I want you to know that we're fighting hard to keep that from happening thank you mayor Weinberger are there any counselors who wish to offer a public health and safety emergency report uh councilor grant thank you um just wanted to mention or I'm always encouraging people to adopt a meeting to help you stay informed about what's happening in the city especially around public safety um the police commission will be meeting tomorrow night at 6 p.m it will be a virtual meeting and once again to get access to the link for the meeting you would just go to the city of berlington's website click on calendar and then just go to tomorrow's date and click on police commission meeting encourage everyone again to kind of move around civic clerk so that even if you don't watch a meeting you at least read the minutes to the meeting there will be a it's actually already attached which is the chief of police's monthly report to the commission for people who are always wondering how many officers do we have are we rebuilding how's that going that information is always in the monthly report but I also found something kind of curious so we have um a couple of things first uh in 2023 this is on page eight of the report we hired 15 sworn officers more than we've ever had in any single year since at least the 1990s which is great it's great but we lost nine officers so our net gain was only six um and when we look at uh going back to 2014 much has been made about um a vote that supposedly magically made officers disappear but what we have is a very clear pattern so when we look at 2014 we had 12 and we had eight out which was a net of four 2015 we had nine in six out which was a net of three 2016 we had 13 in 13 out which was zero net uh 2017 nine in nine out which was a net of zero 2018 12 in 18 out which was a net of minus six 2019 12 in 12 out which was a net of zero and then 2020 and 21 and 22 um we had higher nets minus seven minus 16 then minus six so although they're highlighted in red but 2018 was an highlighted in red so I assume that is an oversight and then 2023 we're in net of six but my point is this department has had a history of not being able to retain officers and I've always maintained since going back to serving on the committee for replacing policies and then being a police commissioner that the city has not honestly looked at that problem and and what is what is going on um so I just want to uh also mention finally that uh there is information on the sworn assignments and kind of an estimate look at the future in terms of what we might have uh for authorized so we're looking at if we're authorized for we're authorized for 87 we're looking at possibly having an 81 by fy 26 we are budgeting for 77 so when people hear that we're budgeting only for 77 it's because of how slowly building back is going uh we only have one person who entered the academy for the February class um that just started this month and we lost a lateral transfer who only lasted a few months and apparently never even lived in Burlington he was living in Platsburg um I'm concerned about the side that talks about authorized for 100 and fy 27 we shouldn't even be talking about that right now because we are adding different profession professional positions and we need to see how all that fleshes out with data so I thought that was very premature to add a slide talking about authorizing even higher amounts when we can't get to what's currently authorized thank you very much thank you uh so if there are others who wish to offer a public health and safety report um we before we get to our consent and deliberative agendas we do have uh two other meetings that we need to attend to the board of civil authority and the board of tax abatement um so we will recess the council meeting at 1004 and I will those those two meetings are chaired by the mayor so I will pass the gavel to the mayor to preside over those two meetings mayor Weinberger thank you president paul I will call the board civil authority in to order at 1004 and would welcome a motion on the agenda so moved thank you president paul seconded by councilor McGee any discussion of the agenda seeing them we'll go to a vote all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye are there any opposed the motion carries unanimously the um full uh business on that agenda is the consent agenda I'd welcome motion on that motion to adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated thank you president paul again seconded by councilor McGee thank you any discussion of the consent agenda seeing none we'll go to a vote all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye are there any opposed the motion carries unanimously and that concludes the warned agenda so if there's no objection I will adjourn the board of civil authority at 1005 p.m. and if you could just give me one moment we will now call to order the board of the full board of abatement of taxes meeting and I would move the adoption of the agenda mr. mayor great thank you councillor bergman is there a second for that seconded by councillor travers any discussion of the agenda seeing none we'll go to a vote all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye are there any opposed the motion carries unanimously here we have three three items the consent agenda and then two items on the deliberate of agenda so uh can I have a motion regarding the consent agenda are we ready for I would move I would move the adoption of the consent agenda and to make the actions indicated thank you councillor bergman seconded by councillor dory discussion of the consent agenda seeing none we'll go to a vote all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye aye any opposed the motion carries unanimously and that brings us to item 3.1 which is a request for abatement of taxes for vermont house condo association 120 king street so I would move the approval of the recommended action of the subcommittee that recommended action was to deny the abatement request of penalties and interest in the amount of $1,373.12 and adopt the findings and reasons for this recommendation that were approved by the board of abatement and after a second just try to get back put a little bit of procedural posture in front of me thank you councillor bergman is there a second councillor dory and I will send it back to you in just one moment I just want to note that our still relatively new city assessor Joe Turner has joined us here as a member of the board and to provide additional context if if necessary but back to you councillor bergman great and I'll be brief on this because our committee and I believe the board's attorney on this attorney mclanahan is here and so I would really defer a lot to her but just to say that this and the next item were heard by the by the by the committee there was a split decision as the the information indicates and you have got two pieces of or two files one is the the the decision of the the subcommittee that we made with our findings and hearing and and and decision and then a recommended decision and you also have a second folder that has all of the information that we that we considered and I think that the the action speaks for itself um at least uh at the onset um and yes and we'll let other people uh speak um and if attorney mclanahan wants to uh to add anything I think that would be great sorry thank you councillor bergman um floor is open for discussion Mr mayor if you could just allow uh attorney mclanahan to speak if she has anything to say that okay very good go ahead thank you thank you mayor I I really don't have all that much to add I think the two decision letters speak for themselves it was a a two one split there is a dissent in there noted by councillor Shannon um we had extensive testimony at the subcommittee um level and certainly if either party wishes to be heard further before the full board of abatement I would recommend that opportunity tonight um if either party is is there and wishes to be heard further and then of course I'm able to answer um questions that the board may have okay thank you very much um now the floor is open for discussion councillor Shannon go ahead is the taxpayer here um I is the um owner uh management company the management company um president can you tell me who I'd be looking for and I will look does anyone know um maybe ask for there are a lot of it would be alex eaten apple tree um property management okay if there if there is anyone who's joining us by zoom if you just want to use the raise hand function I am looking at the the list of attendees thank you president paul for doing that since I don't I don't have that in front of me so I can speak to and while we're waiting if you want okay we'll I'll recognize you councillor shannon um but uh yes president paul please let me know if the the um tax the management company does arrive um the committee reviewed this a while ago and I don't remember all of the details and circumstances that this taxpayer was experiencing at the time but um the taxpayer did make this this happened during COVID during a time offices were shut down and they claimed that they had never um received this notice we did see um one notice that was sent but then it was like three years before a second notice was sent and all the while the taxpayer was making all of their payments um but didn't know that none of the payments got uh applied to this missed payment and it seemed to me that that that the city has a higher obligation than that to notify a taxpayer that that their payment hasn't been received for for three years and I won't speak to the second one that's on our deliberative agenda because it is the same case I mean it's the same circumstances with the same um same taxpayer and mr mayor I I'm having a hard time looking at my uh my race hand so if when if anybody else wants to speak but I would like to just address this a little bit myself um okay councillor bergman thank you uh let me see if there is there any other councillor would like to speak before we go back to councillor bergman or any other questions at this point go ahead councillor McGee I guess just a point of clarification in terms of the the tax bill would the tax bill that followed the uh that lack of payment in 2020 um would that not appear on subsequent tax bills um is anyone prepared to speak to that they only get they only get one tax bill at the beginning of the year and I don't uh we never saw any evidence that it was added to the next year's tax bill that there was anything like that and mr mayor um I would just point um to all the information that is in the second pdf um that we had and you'll look at the findings of fact which are based on the evidence and you'll notice that you know the tax bill um in our first finding a fact is references having been due and there's no dispute that it was received on uh June 12th and that there was a subsequent notice of delinquency that was sent on or about June 17 that was received um and um it's also I believe significant in that finding a fact is supported by the evidence that this um person uh who was the property manager did not uh was not at the office until um September I believe it was um and therefore um you know wouldn't have had any knowledge of you know what misplacement occurred um in her office so um and the there's more explanation in the committee's findings and reasons thank you thank you council bergman council shannon council bergman um I thought that the testimony we heard was that that notice was not received though we did see evidence that the city had produced such notice is that is that correct correct according to your understanding I was not aware that there was acknowledgement of receipt I I I believe that the evidence was that it was sent and um that the presumption is that they that there were received and we got no evidence that that indicated that it was not received and we did get evidence that the woman uh that the property manager who was bringing the um uh the appeal was not employed at that time so could not speak with any competency about that and uh if a councillor uh daugherty um has uh who joined in the my the majority decision um has anything to add that I think I still appreciate it too I do not I do not have anything hold on councillor daugherty it's the councillor shannon council has a floor come to you afterwards um what we saw was that there was a document produced that said that it was and it was one document produced just days after this was in arrears and there we didn't have evidence it was sent I think we might presume it was sent I don't know how a taxpayer would produce evidence that it was not received because how do you produce evidence of something that was not received but that was their testimony it was a tough time it may have arrived it may have not arrived but what was important to me um was what happened after that which was nothing on um on the on the city side and all of this time interest you know substantial interest is accruing councillor you're not wishing to be recognized at this point right the only thing the only thing I would add is that I think there was a finding that that the notice was sent to the correct address I don't think that that was in dispute and I think that that was a principal piece of our decision making here okay um go ahead Joe uh yes in my knowledge there was there was no um return mail on that so typically that means it made it to where it was going um we were not required to certify these things or send them out to make sure they they they receive them you know under statute and charter so we I think we kind of did our due diligence here and getting these this bill out and the delinquent delinquent notice um and you know so there there is some responsibility on the taxpayer to pay their their taxes even you know we need to notify them and we did that but they do have some responsibility associated with paying their taxes um okay thank you um is there any further anyone else wishing to be recognized before we go to a vote on this uh motion uh seeing none um I think we will I believe this will not be a unanimous vote so we should call the roll um is that something you're able to do Jason Councillor Barlow point of information so we're voting um a no vote would be to deny the abatement correct so the the recommendation of the committee was to deny the abatement and I think that that's what is before the board today to confirm that recommendation of the the abatement committee so um and affirm that was the motion yes the affirmative vote is to um affirm the recommendation yes uh yes everyone's clear on that I see everyone nodding okay uh can you please repeat it wasn't here um the committee has recommended that the abatement requests be denied and the motion has been made to um for the full board of abatement taxes to confirm that that action so a yes vote denies the abatement request a no vote would result in granting the taxpayer their abatement request thank you okay with that back to you Jason okay I'll restart it uh Councillor Barlow yes Councillor Bergman yes Councillor Carpenter Councillor Jang yes Councillor Doherty yes yes Councillor Grant yes Councillor Hightower no Councillor King yes Councillor McGee yes Councillor Shannon no Councillor Travers yes Councillor President Paul uh yes I think in this case it may be confusing Jason I believe um I'm a voting member as well and I believe Joe is a voting member as well so I appreciate the debate on this and it's a challenging vote but I will vote yes as well I'll recuse myself from this since I did testify in front of the committee so that's 11 ayes and 2 nays okay so the motion passes um thank you and now we will go to back to you um I believe Councillor Bergman for the second item of business yes so I would um move to adopt the full the recommendation of the um of the subcommittee I think that's the short and quick way to uh to do that to deny that the abatement okay thank you do we have a second for that motion thank you Councillor Doherty and um floor's open for discussion Councillor Shannon um this this taxpayer has to pay two different tax bills so it was exactly the same um situation on this one and I'll I'll leave it at that okay thank you for that clarification Councillor Shannon any further discussion seeing none let's uh go to the role again and thank you Jason for stepping in a role that we don't often put you in so thank you Councillor Barlow yes Councillor Bergman yes Councillor carpenter yes yes Councillor Jing yes Councillor Doherty yes Councillor Grant Councillor Hightower no Councillor King yes Councillor McGee yes Councillor Shannon no Councillor Travers yes City Council President Paul yes Mayor Weinberger yes 11 years two noes I believe we should note the same recusal as well correct on that book and uh and again thank you Jason for stepping into this role in short notice um with that um we have completed the full agenda for the full board of abatement of taxes and without objection I will adjourn us at 10 24 p.m thank you very much Mayor Weinberger so we will reconvene the council meeting at 10 24 um the next item on the agenda is our consent agenda item number eight is there a motion to move our consent agenda as amended to take and take the actions indicated so moved thank you Councillor McGee seconded by Councillor King is there any discussion on that motion seeing none all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye any opposed please say no we have approved our consent agenda that brings us to our deliberative agenda um we do have a lengthy agenda with nine items this evening um and we have uh two two public hearings um just a reminder regarding the five minute rule um I will be following everyone and please self monitor and be mindful of the time and I will need to uh Councillor McGee yes thank you President Paul I given the hour I think it would be appropriate for a motion to suspend our rules to complete yeah what I would like to do before we do that because we do have a couple of minutes is um there are a number of items that may not be time sensitive if you are the sponsor of a resolution that is not time sensitive um I think maybe what we could do is just take a very brief three minute break please come to me and and let me know if you're willing to let that this roll to March 11th um so that we might be able to shorten up our agenda before before we make that motion um so we'll be right back in just a couple of minutes uh so Councillor Councillor McGee you would want to make a motion to suspend our rules and perhaps that motion could be to suspend our rules to complete our deliberative agenda um uh with a postponement to March 11th of 9.4 9.5 9.6 and 9.8 can you list those numbers one more time so I can write them down yes a motion to suspend our rules to complete our deliberative agenda um and postponing items 9.4 9.5 9.6 and 9.8 as they are deemed non-time sensitive to our March 11th meeting got that that feels like an adequate motion so I will just say so moved okay all right so why did I have to repeat it well I'm only kidding don't worry about it all right thank you very much um is there a second to that motion seconded by Councillor Carpenter this requires two-thirds motion to suspend our rules to complete our deliberative agenda um with the exception of 9.4 0.5 0.6 and 0.8 which will be postponed to the March 11th meeting all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye any opposed please say no we have suspended our rules to include the remaining items on our deliberative agenda so without further ado we will get on to the first item which is 9.1 the March 5 2024 annual city election public information hearing um this is um as per state statute the city council must hold a public hearing within 10 days of the election this hearing pertains to the three non-charter ballot items that are on the town meeting day ballot um that is the school budget the public safety tax and the BED item if there are members of the public who wish to speak to this to one of those ballot items ask questions get information now would be that time I will look online to see if there is anyone with their hand raised and do not see anyone are there any members of the public who wish to speak at this time going once I have to say it first we are going to open the public hearing now we have opened the public hearing are there any members of the public who wish to speak to these to any of these ballot items going once going twice uh we will close the public hearing and with that go to the second item on our deliberative agenda which is 9.2 the public hearing regarding the za 24-02 the neighborhood code and again pursuant to vsa this public hearing is called by the burlington city council to hear comments on the proposed amendments to the burl city of burlington's comprehensive development ordinance za 24-02 which is the neighborhood code um director tuttle did you want to speak before we'll just open the public hearing okay so there are a number of people who wish to speak during the public hearing and um we do have a we do have a timer just simply in the interest of time and hopefully being able to give everyone um everyone some time and there is one person online who wish to speak during this item um and uh uh that's Sharon busher Sharon I will I haven't forgotten about you I will come to you after we've done all those people that are present in con choice who wish to speak so the first is Colin Larson to be followed by Merrick Broderick thanks so much for your patience and waiting for us yeah I don't have the uh stamina that you all do for this I'll um I'll my brain's a little fried I'll do my best here um okay neighborhood code I spent a lot of time on it I really like it I do think we ended up in a good place personally I would have liked to see RM uh as the floor um for some of the reasons that were laid out I believe by counselor grant um at the last meeting we talked about this um I guess just to address um some of the the general tenor of of historic opposition to development in Burlington I guess I'll just remind you that uh NIMBY means not in my backyard and the the definition is usually that it's not that people are opposed to housing it's that they specifically don't want it where they live and they want to externalize all of the effects of housing elsewhere um and I think acquiescing to that attitude is counterproductive um um when we down zoned the city in 1973 and 92 I think those are the years um it was a historically bad policy and it's taken 30 years to rectify it now you have an opportunity to do that so please pass the neighborhood code additionally I would say that you should not pass the two amendments that are up for discussion now for the reasons that I stated earlier and I don't think weakening the code is productive um specifically you know a targeted um exemption to a specific neighborhood uh I don't that doesn't make a lot of sense to me um and then just you know logically UVM Medical Center and the university are the biggest employers in the city so if we were trying to design um you know a town that that worked well from a transportation and housing perspective the areas around those two employers would be the densest um instead they are not so historic development patterns not serving us now we can do better please pass the neighborhood code thank you for your patience thank you so much our next speaker is Merrick Broderick to be followed by uh Tim Steffen uh Tim Stevens good evening hey um my name's Merrick Broderick I'm a renter living in Moraday and I'm urging the council not to add any regressive amendments to the neighborhood code zoning ordinance I do not believe that the proposal as written is enough in the slightest which is why I also urge the council to amend it further so that residential medium is the baseline citywide as this opens up our city to equitably increase our housing supply and it creates a real starting point for a future in Burlington where we can house all of our residents and grow as a city instead of that council intends to present amendments that seek to weaken the current proposed changes and I simply do not understand anymore why council continues to ignore the urgency and severity of this housing crisis young people are leaving en masse because they cannot afford to stay here folks are commuting here for work or pleasure polluting our air with their cars and using our services but depriving us of tax dollars because we simply cannot house them residents must choose between leaving the city or being put on the street when their landlord skyrockets their rent in their next lease and many don't have that choice when will it stop when will we become a true city one that is capable of growth and evolution a city where those who govern have the political will to put the needs of the struggling first and foremost do not weaken the current proposal do not continue to let Burlington stagnate as it has for decades help lay the groundwork to create a city that thrives and works for everyone thank you thank you so much our next speaker is tim stevens to be followed by uh dan castragano good evening good evening um hi everyone my name is tim stevens i'm a new homeowner in ward six here to express my strong support for the neighborhood code is written and for more intense up zoning now or in the very near future such as residential medium zoning everywhere while i recognize the fears many of us have about our neighborhoods changing through zoning i'd like to remind everyone that vermont burlington and our neighborhoods are changing around us whether we pass this zoning ordinance or not vermont is experiencing the fastest growing rate of homelessness in the country businesses are leaving buildings are blighting people feel unsafe downtown we struggle to attract young professionals police officers nurses and service workers to our city in surrounding towns beautiful farmland and forest is being turned into car dependent inefficient suburbs regardless of what we do with our zoning people will want to move here from out of state students will be attracted to our universities families are into new phases of life and desire different housing styles what i mean to say is that burlington's housing demand is growing and will continue to grow whether we like it or not each time we choose not to address this we contribute to the exacerbation of burlington's housing ails with the neighborhood code we are given a choice to change burlington for the better the neighborhood code opens burlington's doors to these potential neighbors it promotes dense walkable developments that are better for our health the lake and the planet adding more homes here will slow the rate of development in vermont's wildlands and farmlands preserving wildlife habitats in the process building housing in burlington is the family-friendly thing to do as well suburban neighborhoods aren't very friendly if the if families can't afford to live in them choosing to support or choosing to oppose or water down the neighborhood code might prevent the built environment from changing but it will come at the substantial cost to the people of burlington and to vermont as a whole thank you thank you very much our next speaker is dan castragano to be felt by caren long hi city council my name is dan castragano i live in ward four i'm here to urge you to pass neighborhood code as it stands and to vote no on the proposed amendments and then to make neighborhood code stronger as soon as possible we should make r.m the floor and get rid of r.l and i agree with some people who i don't agree with on most things but that would make it equitable to make r.m the floor i urge you to think about the math that jack did to try to get to a thousand units per year this is just a one percent or so baby step and the math done by evan when he said 17 and a half years to save enough money to afford a down payment this is a climate issue we need urgency and action it was 94 degrees in fort worth texas today is a huge swath of our continent is just boiling in february as monthly records are falling in the 50s most of the next 10 days here in our city the best thing we can do for the climate in the city is up zoning and i know i talk and a lot of people talk about mcneil and the airport a lot but zoning is the best thing that we can do for the city because cars are our biggest source of pollution and buildings is number two so up zoning and making it mixed use that's the best thing we can do to get to zero emissions as fast as possible i want to give voice to the unhoused the housing insecure the people who don't have the privilege to be here or to stay this late the people who want to live here but don't the people who will live here in the future and then the climate migrants who have moved here are moving here and will move here because of the climate emergency like people who live in texas and regions of the states and the world that are becoming uninhabitable so we have to build housing please pass neighborhood code as is and make it stronger as soon as possible thank you thank you very much our next speaker is caren long to be followed by michael long good evening hi so this late meeting alone is a reason to postpone this these are ridiculous meetings i feel really sorry for you because it's not but anyway um i encourage i'm very thankful that zaria high tower came in with an amendment that softened this it has gone way too fast megan tuttle can't even respond to our emails i know they want more lot coverage i read that uh the goal would be 100 lock coverage in a two to three block radius in 10 unit apartment buildings around uvm now i like living in burlington myself and do not want to be displaced so i do not want that i know that's not on the agenda right now but that's the way they're thinking um and there are some people that left kathy nielsen and her husband and mags conan and her husband because they couldn't cope with this and they feel this is so inefficient and why are we doing this at whatever time it is but they feel and share with me that one this mapping is not accurate we said this my husband and i said this right after the meeting on january 29th we've talked to megan about it paul bierman mentioned it a lot of the zoning you've planned for ward one all i know about is the ward one area was you you use this and this is not accurate so that needs to be corrected please um the other thing that kathy asked me to say is about uvm the mou that is our big problem in at least ward one ward eight ward six ward three we are getting students taking the housing that people that are working and want to live here can do so uh basically we need more time on this it could be smaller one thing portland organ did when they up zoned four years ago they added four units per lot and six units if three were equitable and right now what we have on the table does nothing for affordability like absolutely zero so people that think new housing will make them be able to buy a house and fill with two units on a lot like mine will not be a house to buy thank you thank you uh so we'll continue with michael long and you had said that kathy had left kathy deals okay all right thank thank you thank you very much good evening density done well is what makes cities successful uh neighborhood code does not do density well seriously flood has currently drafted its substantial work the prudent course of action would be to return to committee and take the time required to get it right uh it needs a lot of work uh for a variety of reasons one the whole pud process which is all about citing multiple buildings on the same uh parcel that that was ignored and that is the most inequitable element in the cdo right now the the two-acre minimum in rl in every other residential zone you can do a pud no matter how small the lot is but an rl needs to be two acres that should have been the first thing the city dealt with if they were serious about citywide density increase eight or ten units in two structures on any law is extreme uh it's it's not been modeled uh as bob bob duncan suggested it doubles or more than doubles what a city like portland did in 2020 um and that was heralded as heralded as the best low density zoning reform in u.s history doesn't deal with storm water uh doesn't deal with parking impacts doesn't deal with affordability the maps are inaccurate uh and the campus the proximity to campus has not been dealt with the vulnerable vulnerable vulnerability of neighborhoods that are close to campus has been ignored uh the exclusionary and equity ramifications of maintaining or modifying the rl and rm zones have not been addressed the drawings that have been presented have been deceptive organizations like the aarp which endorse this were told that it would be gentle um gentle infill and the expansion of housing options without changing the physical character of the neighborhoods and and finally um the rush to get this over and get get it to the finish line is fueled in part by the mayor in part by v-pop and it's just been a nasty thing let's not impugn motives here okay okay thank you thanks so much thank you uh our next speaker is ryan thorton to be followed by ann vivian thank you uh ann good evening thanks for um getting us on eventually i should have taken you up on the order and the offer before um i do want to speak to this uh i am a homeowner on mensfield avenue in the rl district um i i do support the need for more housing in burlington i think 90 of the code is fine i just think that a severe burden has been placed on my particular neighborhood in in effect double zoning double up zoning i guess is the correct term if it would be totally different if we were just being up zoned within the same um uh rl district but to ask the rl district to up zone from where we are now all the way to the new rm puts a significant burden it almost doubles the allowable coverage um doubles the house of the size of units from two stories mostly to four stories there's another significant um task that we need to really think about is parking our neighborhood is completely overwhelmed as it is and uh to have absolutely no parking required with any new development and increasing the density is um something that really should be considered i think not providing parking is not the way to get cars off the road because cars will be there even if people are bicycling to school and back or wherever lastly please do uh correct the um data that your work that the the committee is working from clearly the satellite data does not show um uh coverage accurately it cannot discriminate between pervious pavement and impervious um pavement and uh and it does it it doesn't discern what's illegal parking versus what's um allowable so thank you very much thank you our next speaker is kathy all well to be followed by uh ryan frank good evening kathy thank you i'm here to say one first of all i have nothing against infill and up whatever it's called to to produce more housing in this city i know personally from my own family's experience how hard it was to find something and something they could even afford one son left and went to Rutland because he couldn't he couldn't live in this city so it's not it's something that's dear to my heart and i want us to work on it i like the four amendments that you put out there and i you know think that's wonderful but it says nothing about affordability and i've worked the whole 35 years or well 30 of those 35 with poor people and i have seen some of the housing that they live in and i know how unaffordable even that was for them and i truly beseech you to get something about affordability into this because all we're going to do is then have these outrageously expensive apartments that nobody that really needs housing can afford because if my kids can't afford it then someone coming into the someone who is poor in this city or working class is not going to be able to afford most of them so i and i would also beseech you to make it rm throughout the city because i think that is the equitable thing to do and it would open up a lot more options to build housing in the city thank you thank you very much uh so our next speaker is ryan frank uh to be followed by silvia overby good evening hi uh my name is ryan frank um i live in ward seven although i've lived in various other wards and been represented by quite a few of you over the years um i uh i want to talk personally about my support for uh passing this ordinance uh or passing the code without delay and without amendments um when i purchased my house it was because uh we were growing our family in all sorts of ways um i had a new baby and had an elderly parent who needed housing and uh we purchased in 2017 and our house cost 270 thousand dollars which is a lot of money uh but we managed to make it work with down payment assistance and all sorts of other things right now that same house is valued at over 500 thousand dollars uh that's six years later um we couldn't afford that house right now if we were in the same life circumstance and that's happening everywhere there is no affordable housing because there's too much competition for housing we need more housing now this this update to the code is the bare minimum it's just it's just like barely getting out of the way um so i would urge you to take this step now without trying to water it down without changing a six to a four or excluding one little neighborhood here um and then i'd encourage you to really go back very quickly after that and uh update the code to allow uh rm everywhere in the city and get rid of the low density regulations that prevent new housing from coming in um really preventing new housing seems like the the obvious thing to stop doing it's not even action in the right direction it's just slightly getting out of the way thank you thank you very much so our next speaker is solvay overby to be followed by uh tre cook and leah murphy for the record my name is solvay overby and i wasn't going to speak on this but when i listened to leena greenberg talk about having scraped together the money for a 400 square foot unit i was prompted that i really need to make a comment number one i want to just point out that this really there's no catastrophe going to happen if you do not make a vote on the neighborhood code right now um i i'm as as councillor bergman said um i'm no einstein on that code and i i admit that um i've been focused on a lot of other financial problems that the city's facing but i wanted i want to point out you really need to wait because number one you've had a lot of comments that people say well it should have this or shouldn't have that number two we the the university of vermont's mo u is not settled out and they really need to be cons you know considered together so that'll give you some time to do that the third thing is you're waiting for the the state auditor to come out with a report about the impact of uvm students on the housing pressures on berlington on berlington we we don't have that yet so you can't really make a good decision about that and frankly um i'm i'm really am concerned about you know affordable home ownership for young people like leena greenberg spoke about and and and nobody's building small square footage owner kind of units like she mentioned to me on mable street she got and there aren't anybody thinking about alternative forms of of home ownership as well so there's some real challenges to that um so no private developer is proposing a bunch of 400 square foot units and in fact so so that's that's a problem that's also should be thought about in the process of your evaluating the neighborhood code proposals but my real one of my big concerns is the predatory investors that come about with the 72 soul calm kind of businesses there's another one that's advertising i don't know if you see that what's going to happen when the tax bills come out and the elderly people who have large homes that are at risk of having their own problems keeping them up they get a big tax bill those predatory 72 soul calm and i can't remember the other one are going to come in and and be somebody's escape and what's going to happen is we already earlier down to what i think 38 percent home ownership so i feel the pain of young people can't afford to live here however i think we're going to make it worse by making these properties more investment attractive and we will not have really resolved the problem so i really really ask you to think about giving yourself the time to do it right thank you thank you very much uh so our our our next speaker is tray cook to be followed by liam murphy and then we will go online uh hello uh first off i want to express my displeasure with you guys having the hearing go this late in the evening there are a lot of people that really wanted to speak earlier and i don't know if there was something procedurally you could have done to move this up earlier in the agenda but that would have been preferable there are a lot of people a lot of students a lot of workers that don't have the time to stay here this late and uh voice their concerns on these issues and i appreciate some of the older members of the community who have spoken in support of uh changing the neighborhood code um i'm a student i'm very anxious about where i'm going to live next year or for the rest of my time in burlington because it's so hard to find housing we have a system that treats housing as a you know primary financial asset where you're expected to make money off of just owning a home we have the second highest equity rich housing market of any state in the country and you know if you look at the history of vermont we have a really long gross history of um land speculation and you know treating all of our property and all of our needs as something to gamble on like um stocks or something um you know for all the criticisms that i've given you before um i appreciate the administration's commitment to up zoning the city and trying to have a real density where housing is more available um i would urge you guys to vote no on any amendments that carve out sections of our community uh and prevent them from being up zoned because a um economically diverse neighborhood is one where um you know a lot of people can see different perspectives and uh mingle with each other um i don't think that we should be uh protecting land values i think we should be protecting uh people and doing anything that we can to help them so up zoning the city to make it accessible to everyone and welcome anyone that wants to be a burlingtonian um i think it's the right way forward so i urge you all to vote no on the amendments and vote yes on the changes to the neighborhood code thank you thank you very much our next speaker is leah murphy uh and then we will go to uh Sharon who's online good evening my name is leah murphy um i'm a lambshire's attorney who has practiced in the city for 40 years on uh college street and live downtown here on bill street uh in ward eight for the last five years i would encourage you to pass this ordinance now and not uh let the perfect be the enemy of the good at the same time i would encourage you after you pass it to um have the planning commission undertake a dialogue or a study on how this is administered um as a land-use lawyer the way it is written is very complicated it could be a lot simpler in how um uh the ordinance is undertaken the very simple things of measuring side yard setbacks by a percentage discourages development of those parcels that are the least undeveloped because you are taking making 10 percent setbacks in a place where maybe we should have very simple the setback on the side yard should be 10 percent the same with the frontage measuring your frontage based upon your four neighbors is another complication of how the ordinance is developed and so um the other thing is on the corridors having uh uh you you look at the maps and they're very convoluted the the ordinance could be simpler because it's going to be difficult for people to build the the properties the last thing i want to say is that um home ownership it's more than rental it's home ownership and there is another thing that you need to look at the conversion statute in burlington only exams conversions of single families and duplexes i think if the zoning up zoning gets done there may be a lot of four unit housing developments that could be developed for small for purchase condominiums um uh one of the problems we have is the market is stuck right now people can't downsize because there are no uh properties to buy um uh so i appreciate it and i recognize that it's a short amount of time but it's a much longer conversation that the apartment should have about not only developing rental housing but for sale housing i think if you looked at the statistic there has not been one condominium for sale condominium built in the city since 2008 that's one of the problems and hopefully that that's something you can look at the future but none of that should hold up the passage of the ordinance now thank you thank you so much so uh we don't have any more speakers in con choice we do have one person joining us who wishes to speak during this public hearing um and uh Sharon i have found you and enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now thank you very much president paul um i know that you all received a very lengthy communication from me and i'm obviously not going to read that but i really hope that you took the time to plow through it brevity is not my strong point as you all know um but what i wanted to say was that um i do support the neighborhood code i do support the increased lot coverage for rl and rm i support duplexes um on properties i support two structures on every property also what i have issue with is the number of units that are allowed in rl and rm in totality i think that those numbers are too high and what i asked the planning department to do was to take a section of burlington and map it out with those densities at 25 percent of the proposed potential 50 75 and full build out i think that that is something we want to understand what i was also enlightened by was the fact that rm at 10 units per um parcel translates to a density of over 100 units per acre and that's far greater than our rh which is our highest density currently in burlington so i think there's some value in knowing what this will look like and we haven't done that people spoke about the fact that the maps that are used the the the metrics that were used to determine what area should be up zoned were never actually no one ever actually went to the site to validate those findings and i think that's a very that's a flaw in the process and it needs to be remedied and so i wanted to speak to that and the last thing is and people have i think there was one common thread throughout almost everyone's comments tonight was affordability and i feel that people are being misled that they believe that more housing will translate to affordable housing and unless affordability is in is part of the plan that won't happen and i think that they're being misled and what we're going to have is with building materials so high it's going to be high cost to a rent an apartment and or own um a place and i don't think it's going to meet the needs of so many of those young professionals and young people who want to stay in burlington and work here so that's my synopsis and um thank you very much my um good luck tonight and i'll stay listening thank you very much um are there any members of the public either joining us online or in con toys who wish to speak uh during this public hearing before we close the public hearing did you speak during did you speak i mean i mean you can speak during you can speak during the public hearing if you wish really briefly just about affordability um one thing that i think a lot of people don't understand is that what makes um the market choose to build rentals is that land acquisition costs are so high when the cost of land is so high there's no way to finance a development that makes sense to sell it when we have a surplus of housing the cost of land um can go down and the cost of building can go down and so when the developer whether it's private public you know ma and pa developer whoever's developing the land can reduce the cost of development and there's a high vacancy rate it becomes more expensive to own that building in a environment with a higher vacancy rate which makes you more likely to build to sell um and so getting more ownership is directly related to the vacancy rate so just to establish that as that's how we get affordability that's how we get ownership is a higher vacancy rate there's no way around that thank you thank you very much um so i do see uh paul bierman that you have your hand raised as well to to speak during the public hearing and i've enabled your microphone you should be able to speak now okay thank you so much um i just wanted to say that i was really impressed with the diversity of opinions and some very heartfelt opinions that i heard tonight listening over these last couple hours and i think it is probably the single best reason to take the time to think more about this because i think many of those ideas are not expressed well in the current proposal um and i think they should be that's things like accessibility that the idea of equity and whether we should be zoning the entire city as a basis for rm and i think tonight could be an awesome kickoff to get people who disagree and some disagree really strongly um into the same room and talking and trying to figure out if there's a way to reconcile this um and i don't believe that waiting a month or two months or three months is going to kill this process in fact i think it's going to make it a whole lot richer and in the end could come out with a far better product so i just want to say thanks to everybody for all of their heartfelt opinions um i respect people even if i differ from their opinions and i again i think the council would be really wise to use this as a listening session and to think hard about how to improve this proposal so we come out with a compromise that will never make everybody happy but i think can include a lot of what the various people speaking tonight want um i'll yield the rest of my time okay thank you very much so are there any others who wish to speak during the public hearing uh going once going twice we will close the public hearing at 1107 and go to item 9.3 which is the ordinance um comprehensive development ordinance ca 24-02 the neighborhood code part one um and for this item um i'm going to go to the chair of the ordinance committee councilor travers for um a motion or if you have anything you wanted to add before that well i will note that posted to our agenda is the underlying amendment um that we had warned for the public hearing tonight uh also posted to our agenda are two additional amendments one offered by councilor hightower another offered by councillor doherty um i will limit my motion now to the underlying amendment understanding that um others may may also present their amendments um the motion that i will offer will be with respect to the amendment that we warned previously to waive the reading approve the technical amendments proposed by the office of city planning and warn uh that amendment for a public hearing on march 25th 2024 okay thank you so much councillor travers seconded by councillor hightower um councillor travers did you want the floor back um only to offer it to megan and sarah who i know are here at this very late hour and um may have a presentation lined up for us but certainly would uh if i see a shaking head which is fine there's lots of materials and presentations that we've seen i think what i'd personally like to hear i expect the council would like to hear is is since the last public hearing the work that your office has done to engage the public on this particular matter and perhaps even before you get to that it might be worth explaining in my motion talked about the technical amendments and what those technical amendments are uh would be helpful great thank you um councillor traverse since we were here uh at the end of january to introduce this amendment to you we have done some additional work as was requested at that time to communicate about the neighborhood code and to collect some additional questions and feedback about it we put in as a start a q and a form on our department's website related to the project we also were invited to attend the ward one npa meeting on valentine's day and held a q and a session just last week that was very well attended i think between 60 and 70 people were in attendance at that meeting i would say that in addition to those conversations and just kind of email communications that we've seen we while we've heard a lot of different things things in support questions or reservations about the code some folks that are just opposed in general to the code one a couple things have sort of risen to the top in terms of common themes we've heard most of the feedback about issues of building size and number of units some folks feel like that could use some more nuance others feel that it's you know as you heard tonight move forward as is and maybe even consider going further we have heard questions about the proposed chat the proposed changes to lot coverage i apologize very late both questions just clarifying how this relates to stormwater management and you know concerns that there still will be an opportunity to manage stormwater under the proposed changes we have heard some questions or concerns about the proposed changes being too aggressive in terms of that particular aspect and and as you heard tonight you heard some concerns about changing that aspect and i would say that many of the comments that we have heard both the comments and questions about both of these former points have really been focused on this impact of these proposed changes in this area of ward one that we've been calling the old north and east or north hill we have heard questions about how this would apply to other areas of the city particularly close to institutions but a lot of the feedback that we've heard has been from that area of ward one so to answer your question counselor traverse about the technical amendments the amendments that we offered as staff do two things the first is that it makes the depth of property the depth of property where the residential court or district would apply the same as our multimodal mixed-use parking district for those of you that maybe weren't on the council or deeply involved in that that applies to properties that front on certain corridors up to 200 feet of depth so we've made a technical correction to the map to make sure that that residential corridor district applies to the same depth of property this should have no impact because of the dynamics of the residential corridor district allowing one building and being limited in its footprint the other is that it strikes or it fixes an internal cross-reference that was just incorrect very much for that presentation I have some comments on the underlying ordinance but I suppose just to get the procedural lay of the land which I know can be complicated when we're dealing with some zoning bylaws here I know director title I had asked you about it I believe we have assistant I believe we have city attorney sturdivant and city attorney Peller in here and council high tower were you getting in the queue or did you have a question in the queue okay great so I'll make some comments with respect to the underlying ordinance the reason why I had moved it for another public hearing on March 25th is because my understanding of the lay of the land here is that the underlying ordinance perhaps does not have majority support of this council yet which is disappointing to me personally but it's important to me that we find a path forward here we have a couple paths forward that have been presented at least posted on the agenda by our colleagues here this evening and I've heard concerns from folks in the public and I share those concerns as well about our actually acting to amend the underlying ordinance at this late hour and so just procedurally I wanted to pose the question either to attorney Peller and our attorney sturdivant to you director title would if it would be appropriate to along with warning the underlying ordinance for a public hearing on March 25th to also warn separately any other amendments for the council to ultimately consider at that March 25th hearing I'll let city attorney sturdivant answer that question and we're just yes we're just basically been trying to figure that out it I believe you could in a single motion put in to suspend the rules for the ones that are potentially additional and have them also be part of a public hearing on the evening on the 25th thank you very much for that welcome so just before my comments I just have one quick question for you director title which is that can you explain sort of when you started the public engagement process with respect to the neighborhood code I mean looking back when were your first meetings with respect to this matter so we have been doing some of our work related to the neighborhood code as far back as the summer and fall of 2022 that was admittedly more of an educational phase of talking about housing issues and talking about some of the concepts related to the zoning ordinance that we are talking about today why they matter and what they are we started talking more specifically gaining feedback about preferences related to the neighborhood code in the summer of 2023 okay so I asked that question because you know I certainly understand that as folks key into and enter into the process of considering this matter that it can feel rushed like a decision is being made quickly but from my perspective this is by no means been a rushed process I've mentioned it multiple times before and I'll say it again this evening I think your office has really been the standard bearer in going through this process as to how to engage the public partnering with an organization like the AARP and beginning those discussions then doing the joint committee process where this ordinance committee sat with the planning commission over multiple meetings that were warned to the public doing community engagement sessions I mean how many times have you been to the neighborhood planning assemblies with respect to the neighborhood code we went to all of them in October and we have been back to word one a couple of times since and thank you for doing that I think that it's been very important that you've done that and appreciate as well the public engagement sessions that you did since our last meeting I agree with the comments that have been made by many that Burlington is currently in a housing crisis as I sat in the joint committee along with the planning commission you know I was among those who was pushing the neighborhood code to actually go even further I'm proud of the end product that we ended up with though I think that it struck the right balance of the members of that joint committee representing really all corners of the city I understand the concerns that many have with respect to the potential changes that may come to neighborhoods but I also believe that zoning will result in more gradual changes this isn't something that's going to turn the corner necessarily overnight and the reality here is that Burlington is becoming an increasingly unaffordable city for a number of folks to live in I'm mindful the fact that our city is is more than half renters right now and among those who have reached out to express concern about the neighborhood code I haven't heard a single renter to express concern about it and I think a good reason for that is because many of these renters are folks that are looking for a place to live in Burlington right now and don't have those opportunities available to them right now the neighborhood code allows for those opportunities in three plexus in four units buildings across the city and you know from my perspective we really can't delay much further in terms of opening up opportunities here and to the extent the zoning proposal doesn't speak specifically to affordability you know I'm mindful the fact that many of the affordable housing agencies in our community as well support the neighborhood code because in part those affordable housing agencies if they wanted to build a three-unit building or a four-unit building in areas that don't currently permit them this would open up opportunities for them as well to consider different structures so I will consider further amendments to this as necessary to the end of getting this across the line but I'm strong supporter of the version that we ended up with out of the joint committee and would prefer us to proceed with that version thank you thank you so much councillor travers we'll go to councillor hightower great thank you um I also was a complaint fan of neighborhood code and what we came up with and was and I'm still very proud of um what we passed out of the planning committee and it's definitely something that I could vote for if none of the amendments passed that said I do think that there's a few places that we got it wrong and one of them is kind of what everyone's been talking about which is home ownership and someone just said that the reason that there's no condos is because of land costs but the number one reason that we hear why there's no condos is because condos are just so difficult to finance once the projects get large and so I think the number one mistake that we made and I vehemently argued for having the number of buildings be higher um during the planning commission and not everyone agreed with me but they acquiesced and I got my 12 um 12 units um per per lot or six units per building but I think that I was wrong I don't think I should have argued for that because ultimately it is much much easier to finance for unit condos than it is to find like six unit condos and so if we want home ownership I actually think that incentivizing there being more four unit buildings or more four unit projects is going to be a good way to do that and so if we're talking about home ownership which both sides talked about a lot we want to see condos and so do the way I think the way to get condos is to reduce the number of units from six buildings from six units to four units because all the other there's one this isn't the only way to address our housing needs there's all their kinds of big developments happening in little skyscrapers across the city they're all going to be rentals or their most vast majority of them are going to be rentals and so if we want any additional home ownership in the city this is the place to do it and so I really really hope that if we pass any amendment on this that it's how many units there can be per building eight units per lot is still a lot of units that is still a lot of info that we're talking about on things that are currently single family homes but I think that's the number one thing that we got wrong that I got wrong um I think the next thing that we got wrong is wildlife corridors I don't think folks totally understand what we're talking about here so I'd really like if Megan could pull up um what that means because there's really only two we're talking about like two city blocks on the city where there's really really high data on wildlife passing through and the one in particular that we're worried about that I'm worried about is going from the inner vail to centennial woods which are two of our biggest green spaces the socialist in me doesn't want big backyards I want big public areas that everybody can access including the wildlife and so for me sacrificing in those little hot spots so right there on Colchester Avenue is the biggest one um a couple of meters of high corridor zoning is not um is not a loss to um neighborhood code or weakening it it's strengthening it by including conservation goals that we have in our zoning in ways that we didn't quite frankly think about we thought about housing zoning we didn't really think about parks or what that meant for wildlife and so I think considering that east block and making sure that there is a corridor that that wildlife can pass through is kind of the next mistake that we made and so the last mistake that we made in this one we did know is that rl didn't really get the up zoning that we wanted we increased the rl density percentage by 10 percent we increased rm by 20 percentage points I should say that's a little bit backwards to me we shouldn't go from 35 percent to 45 percent and one and then um 40 percent to 60 percent I think it's an rm I think it should be the opposite I think rl should have gotten a higher percentage point increase I think they should be much closer to each other um what I proposed because I thought it would get the most council support um and now I'm not so sure is to reduce rm to 55 percent I'm the only way that I would see moving this back to committee is if the council are not unanimously but by majority support wanted to reduce wanted to remove rl I think that is something that makes a lot of sense I think that is something that we probably don't want to do um at 11 30 at night um with a single vote so I think that would be a good reason to move into committee if the council is not ready to do that um then I think we stick with the underlying with some um tweaks to the proposal and so that said I will move forward my amendment if that's okay um which there's two amendments one of them is to move the max units in rm to eight um to eight units per lot four units per building um I think that's the most important one the second one is to remove it to 55 percent and so I'd like to move that amendment and just so folks know I will be dividing the question because I think one yes all right so emotion is made to yes only if you voted you voted in the majority you can't major in the majority then you can't why don't we go to councillor why don't we go to city attorney pelerin just a moment councillor jang can't hear me I'm I apologize my point being is I'm haven't fully thought out how supportive I am and I know there's another amendment and goodness knows we may get another one again so my question for city attorney is I don't want to defeat it tonight and then not be able to reconsider it I guess I don't you know if you understand what I'm meaning because I want to keep it on the table until we figure out what other amendments we've got if I'm just just a moment councillor jang we're just going to get an opinion from city attorney pelerin or if you want to go to assistant city attorney striven whichever you prefer here so kim and I have not conferred here and I I will say that she would be the the expert but in what I what we have talked about and I think would be the cleanest from what I'm understanding from councillor carpenter is if the city council wants to keep these amendments alive for further consideration and isn't quite prepared to move on any one particular one of them tonight then perhaps it's to amend councillor versus motion to warn all of the proposed amendments for further hearing at the 25th meeting and then that would allow you the opportunity to act on them at that time and sorry point of information just to make sure if we warn all of the amendments and then we make some of them we don't have to do another public hearing or we do have to do another public hearing you would be warning them for another public hearing yeah tonight yeah if we make those amendments that would be it we would pass them that night or we would warn them for another public hearing in april no if you so sorry no that's okay this is complicated and admittedly this is an area where we're working with state statute not your rules so this is not a familiar process for this piece but if you made the motion that councillor traverse introduced tonight it would incorporate the technical amendments from staff into the base ordinance which the city attorney has advised are significant enough that we would need to have another public hearing anyways so the outcome of your action tonight is to warn another hearing for the end of march if if you were to take that action if you would like to amend that motion to also warn additional potential amendments those could be warned alongside the technically amended base ordinance for the 25th and then that would give you the opportunity I believe and Kim can confirm this that would give you the opportunity to take action on any of those amendments on the 25th because they would have been introduced and warned also on the point of mass one other question we we have a march 11 meeting we have a motion oh sorry just a moment we have a motion are you making that motion you I seem to think you were and if I may I just think the attorney's servant should weigh in here for a second she was about to respond make sure I didn't miss speak and no I believe we have been talking about it and agree that that we could bring these forward and do a warning on them one suggestion would be to amend the if you want to do that to amend the motion and bring these forward as separate amendments so you potentially so you would amend the motion by adding on as well as waiving the reading and suspending the rules for the proposed amendments identified as um and I believe there would be the high tower and dowery amendments and one those for the march 25th 2024 uh meeting as well councilor high tower are you amenable to make it to allowing um councilor travers to amend that or do you want to amend that motion yes I would move to amend that motion but I would go ahead and divide the question now on my amendments and do you amend an amendment for the units and an amendment for the lot coverage and then the dowery amendment I think those are the only amendments so what you want to do is you want to amend councilor travers's motion and add three amendments correct that is an amendment to your motion and we do have friendly amendments are you friendly to that councilor track oh actually we do have what no oh I'm sorry we don't have a we do need a second and in fact yeah so that is a second by councillor councillor dory which by definition I'm assuming that that means that you're okay with both of those going forward you're the seconder to to councillor travers's main motion she was the seconder so between it's between councillor travers and all right councillor hightower to decide if it's a friendly amendment okay um and just for just for clarity councillor dory since this is your amendment as well this is amenable to you we'll vote on that but yes okay so that is friendly uh so we have a we have a motion that is amended to add three further amendments to uh the initial the original motion and that is okay to do that is that correct that is okay that's okay to do that just for clarity I think um sorry um the amendments that you're offering are to waive the reading on the amendments and warn them for the hearing the three separate amendments yes but I just realized that the corridor was a fourth amendment right so we have four friendly to the friendly to the uh the maker yes councillor travers is there a second okay so we have a we have a motion yes right and since councillor hightower is the seconder to the initial motion and you're the first if you're both friendly to that then we will incorporate that into the motion I'm assuming that's correct yes okay all right um councillor uh councillor hightower you have the floor are you all set I just don't know if the public actually got to see the second slide of the proposed changes so I think or any of the councillors actually so I think that might be worse that was my question I don't know I don't know if it's completely friendly because I I'm not entirely certain what the what the full scope of the proposed amendments are so um we pulled this up while councillor hightower was discussing um the question about wildlife corridors related to the proposed residential corridors and Sarah has done some great work in collaboration with BPRW's conservation field naturalist and the chair of the conservation board to better understand what available data we have right now about wildlife activity in the city which is the map that you saw originally I will say that I think somebody said this earlier in our department feels really strongly that this is true is that development along these corridors does not need to be in conflict with wildlife corridors in fact in the case of north avenue we already have many places where recreation conservation zoning districts meet at different points along the avenue in order to connect large areas of open space we also have areas of the city that are identified separate from our base zoning districts that are in what we call natural resource overlays that apply no matter what the underlying zoning is which do also reflect some of these areas that wildlife are using as corridors and we do have some standards in some parts of our zoning that require consideration of wildlife corridors that said this issue was flagged by the conservation board and I think some residents that live on Colchester Avenue just recognizing that in the case of Colchester Avenue there is not as strong a connection between the RCO areas in that part of the city and asking us to look at this more fully we what is represented here on the screen is a recommendation that really was developed by looking at that wildlife data and consulting with the conservation board chair we recognize that this if this is something that the council wants to do would be a sort of blunt way of addressing this situation based on what we think that we know about wildlife corridors but we also know that we are working on both neighborhood level plans for north av which we've talked about a lot in the joint committee process as well as an update to the open space plan and getting more up-to-date wildlife corridor data and proposing more targeted solutions for wildlife considerations within development is something that that process will look at so this was a map that we a couple of maps that we had produced in response to Councillor Hightower's questions about this so just a point of information to Councillor Hightower which is that your amendment with respect to the corridors and the wildlife corridors is it limited to this map and and the second map that you had up there on the screen or what is what is the scope of the amendment these two maps changing the zoning that's reflected between two maps here so I think because councillors in the public haven't had a chance to look at them I would probably recommend warning both of them it sounds like the most critical one is the Colchester Avenue one and that's certainly the one that I'm flagging because it is the highest as we don't have that much data but from the data that we do have it is the highest wildlife thing and one that doesn't have other kind of as many protections right now but I would so I would warrant both just so we have the option but I think I'm personally mostly interested in this one okay so just my point of information before I guess finally confirming if it's friendly is is amendment one are the two maps that are reflected here which I suppose we will need to post to Civic Clerk because I don't necessarily see it on the agenda right now amendment two would be the portion of the proposal that is posted as the amendment high tower draft to um in the residential medium neighborhood take the maximum number of units down from six to four is that right and then amendment three is the second page or it's actually the first page of that which is to take lot coverage and RM down from 60 percent to 55 percent and then amendment four is councillor Doherty's amendment to take what we're referring to as the North Hill section from RM to RL and so just to confirm the question is whether we're friendly to amending my motion to warning all four of those amendments along with the underlying amendment I am friendly to that point of information throw a wrench in it since we're talking about amendments um there has been a lot of talk about the issue of equity around RM not being the floor for the entire city would that also have to be an amendment because are are you open to changing that like how would that work if there was an interest in changing the structure of the ordinance so that the standards associated with RM applied to the whole city that would need to be an amendment okay so if I don't have an amendment written but will do one can that be added to be warned how would that because we definitely need a vote on that due to the interest in it and the equity issues at hand clean director title isn't it also the case that there can be further amendments made after this evening I'm going to ask city attorney Sturtivant to speak to that I think this we were hoping for tonight is for major substantive items to be raised we do have some flexibility to offer more technical amendments after this point but major substantive things do need to be raised and all that can expand on that issue like yeah so under the state statute four revisions to an amendment uh a proposed amendment um basically any substantive change really has to be made 14 days prior to the final public hearing um and available and sent back to the planning commission for comment and available um to the public to review so in other words what you're saying is that um the point of order that um the point of information that councilor grant made that this could that could be that could be done this evening it could be voted on this evening or it could be done up to 14 days or no less than 14 days before presumably the 25th of March correct the substance yes a change could happen 14 days beforehand okay all right so there's your there's your answer councilor grant it doesn't need to be done this evening it could be done um there is a window of time that would put us to the uh the 11th or 10th of March 10th yeah yeah councilor paul um well councilor uh councilor grant euro are you all set yes okay all right councilor carpenter it's just a clarification because we do have a meeting on the 11th right yes we do so that does that give us the window of time to add amendments no it's one day short okay that's thank you so is yes uh city attorney sir devan yes i thank you uh president paul but also just to clarify i mean the difficulty is that there's a substantial change you know it does need to be done ahead and part of the warning okay so in other words the best way approach if councilor grant wanted to pursue this would be to take care of it this week that's correct we're happy to work with her okay well there you go you've got your answer um okay so uh i think we've got uh we have a emotion we have an emotion amended we have a second um if there's no further discussion on that don't really know i we probably should just simply go to a roll call vote if you could do a roll call vote and then um if you could just change the screen i'm sorry did you oh count this is just to clarify this is a roll call vote on the full action or this is yes this is a roll call vote on the motion um the motion is to waive the reading approve the technical amendments and warn the additional four amendments um for a public hearing on march 25th so i would appreciate the opportunity just to to weigh in on that thank you president paul um i fully support the council taking this action tonight i think it's very exciting that we're on the cusp of doing this and appreciate all the collaboration amongst counselors to uh to make the motion as it's coming forward now as i understand it that uh keeps this process on track and um and us on track collectively to make these decisions um i would be this council amongst this group that has uh so many of you who have worked hard on this for for many months or or in some cases more more than a year um i i want to thank the staff uh for and you know megan for her longstanding commitment the full team for the longstanding commitment i also just really want to just know what a remarkable um public hearing this has been um the voices that have come out and spoken to this subsequently on both sides i'm very much appreciated uh i i do want to say that it is um remarkable the way in which this public hearing has differed from past important housing votes you know the the opinions that were expressed so well and powerfully tonight were not made back in the 70s when we started down this uh restrictive path with our neighborhoods they weren't made in the 90s um they are being made tonight and i think you guys that are are changing the trajectory of this city and putting it in towards a direction that of housing abundance and i am moved by uh the way in which it was pointed out explicitly again and again that um this direction will address so many of our uh challenges that we're struggling with in at the moment whether you care about homelessness whether you care about home ownership whether you care about the climate emergency whether you care about the economic development in this region and our businesses being able to um uh employ workforce and grow we need a lot more homes we need to make good on the idea that housing should be a human right um when we started down this path two years ago i really uh did not um imagine it would have the breath of support that it clearly uh has in this moment and i'm very grateful you both all come out and i hope you'll you'll stick with it thank you mayor weinberger uh let's give this a try um perhaps is it actually a unanimous vote um so everyone understands this is a motion to um to waive the reading approve the technical amendments um and warn the four additional amendments um uh and the underlying and the underlying motion uh for a public hearing on march 25th uh all those in favor of that motion please say aye aye any opposed please say no great that passes unanimously so we will return to this on the 25th that moves us thank you we have now we have postponed items nine four nine five and nine six which brings us to nine seven a resolution acceptance and approval of the f y 23 audit um uh mayor weinberger i don't know if you or cao shat had any comments or if you want to just simply we can go to a uh a motion certainly we're here to answer questions and uh i believe i do see alina our auditor still here if there are questions as is uh catherine um from uh from vacation um i uh the council should know that the board of finance unanimously recommended the acceptance of the audit earlier tonight um i do encourage counselors who um have not been on the board of finance if you have not done so um please uh take a close look at the management letter that is uh always prudent it's uh the reason we do these management letters uh i do want to note the board of finance and president paul in particular um work to ensure that the city's response to the management letter for uh in in particular the first recommendation is robust and detailed and um uh will i think help ensure that this continues to have the attention of the uh financial office and ensure that um we continue to keep this city's finances strong going into the future so happy to answer further questions thank you very much mayor weinberger um before we go to the council i will recognize councillor barlow for a motion please i move to waive the reading and adopt the resolution uh thank you councillor barlow seconded by um councillor uh mickey is there the floor is now open for questions or comments from the council before we would go to a vote are there any counselors who have questions or comments on the audit uh seeing none we will go to a vote all those in favor of the motion uh to waive the reading and adopt the resolution please say aye aye any opposed please say no uh we have we have uh passed that resolution unanimously thank you very much elena for hanging in there with us at this hour and also catherine as always and great job um that will bring us to item eight nine point eight which we have postponed the last deliberative item is nine point nine which is the parking management sublease agreement with unified parking partners this was um agenda item eight point eight councillor mickey you had asked to remove this from consent so i will go to you if you have any comments and i do i do believe that we have someone from dpw who i think oh we have two people from dpw who are joining us on uh if there are any questions count councillor mickey thank you president paul i sincerely apologize to you both for making you wait to this late hour i received an email from a constituent uh representing a group of folks that were concerned about the the climate implications of the city allocating additional resources to um uh parking for single occupancy vehicles and so i i just i think it was worth us having additional debate although i didn't expect it to be at midnight um about uh the the need for us to enter into this agreement and the current utilization of the parking structures that exist in the city already and um why we need to rent these additional 85 spaces and kind of what steps we're going to take if we don't see full utilization of those so that was my reason for asking for this to be taken off of consent great so laura wheelock with public works um i have been the project manager for main street since it uh it started way back in 2016 as a concept back in that time frame um the change in parking was a much larger conversation um than it has been in the recent project but it's still a very prominent topic about being able to provide proximate available parking for those folks that are mobility challenged and maybe have other challenges in their life um to do provide vehicle parking in a reasonable distance the concept generally has gone through successfully with the notion that there is still parking on each side of the street throughout the corridor where we face this challenge is during construction where entire blocks of parking will be removed for long periods of time and in the section nearest to this structure there is use of the adjacent parking lot for construction support services which the council will hear that ideally in march as well as the on-street spaces as they move through construction over the next three years and so this is not new parking it is parking in lieu of the spaces on the street that will be occupied and otherwise unavailable thank you i there are no other questions i'd be happy to make the motion uh and let us all go home uh i would move that we authorize the director of public works to execute attachment a parking management sub lease agreement with unified parking partners and courthouse plaza in an amount not to exceed 142,715 dollars per year thank you so much councillor mcgee second seconded by seconded by councillor doherty um councillor grant thank you um the document referenced apart uh traffic fund what exactly is that and where does the money come from um that is uh 264 which the revenue from that comes from all the metered parking spaces thank you and so we've negotiated access to lots that uh i'm not talking about the cost yet but we've negotiated access to lots for certain periods of time that would otherwise be unavailable to the public we've negotiated access to a private lot that is available to the public but we are subsidizing the cost so that's the same as the city the city rate at main street lot i guess i um i appreciate negotiating access to other lots i don't believe the city should be subsidizing it i think with the deficit coming up and where we're going to need money in other areas i just don't believe we should be subsidizing this thank you thank you councillor grant if there's a councillor i'm sorry mayor weinberger i'm given uh the last councillor comment i think it just might be worth knowing the traffic fund is a restricted fund where um the those revenues could not be used for non parking related activities just in case that matters to how anyone's thinking about it thank you so much mayor weinberger um it appears as though we may have a we we do have a motion we have a second um as this may not be a unanimous vote we'll need to go to a roll call jason councillor barlow uh yes councillor bergman yes councillor carpenter yes councillor jane yes councillor doherty uh yes excuse me councillor grant no councillor hightower yes councillor king yes councillor mcgee yes councillor shana yes councillor traverse yes city council president yes 11 ayes one nay uh 11 ayes one nay the motion passes um that concludes our deliberative agenda we do have just two brief items um hope you'll indulge me the before we make a motion to adjourn just want to because i just couldn't leave this meeting without saying that sadly this is our last meeting with acting city attorney jared pellerin uh now you don't get that we not everybody gets that right um uh and uh just want to say that south burlington's lot gain is sadly our loss um and as you'll be working with the son of our former former former probably more former city city attorney joe mcneill i'm not sure who that we who we should buy who we should be holding responsible for this loss but of course we wish you well you will be missed you will be missed by all of us it has been a pleasure truly a pleasure working with you um just wanted to remind everyone um who might be watching at this late hour our next meeting is monday march 11th between now and then please remember town meeting day next tuesday march 5th voting is already underway you can vote in person in city hall during business hours up until monday next monday at 1 p.m you can drop off your ballot in a drop box until next monday at 4 p.m and of course you can vote next tuesday 7 a.m to 7 p.m at your polling place if you are wondering because of particularly because of redistricting where you will be voting just go to the city website and follow the green banner on the top of the home page for all the information about the exciting town meeting day elections with that that brings us to the end of our agenda um and i would just ask for a motion to adjourn so moved thank you councillor barlow seconded by councillor mcgee all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed please say no we're adjourned at 11 57 p.m have a good evening