 He sent me a text earlier telling me to get started. So get started, we will. Happy new year, happy first board of finance of the new year to everyone. Sorry for the confusion, especially in these COVID days, we have been adjusting the time of this meeting based on what we have before city council and how much we have to do at this meeting. So it is confusing and we should perhaps better draw attention to it when it's not 5.30. But thanks for rolling with it everyone. So I'm officially calling the board of finance to order at 5.12. A motion to adopt the agenda is in order. I would like to suggest, if I can do that as the board chair temporarily, that we amend that. I did notice the draft minutes that were linked are the sort of very first minutes that just record board motions, not the discussion. I have the better draft, the more thorough draft in my inbox. And it just was delayed because of the holidays. So I would suggest we don't adopt the consent agenda this evening. Otherwise I will look for a motion on the agenda. And I'm not sure if there's any other amendments, but I don't believe so. Councilor Paul. Thank you. So I'll make a motion to adopt the agenda with a following change that we remove on item three. Well, there is only one item on the consent agenda that we remove item three, 3.01, 3.02. And put those on for our next agenda. We have posted draft minutes, so we've met the open meeting law. We just simply haven't voted on them. So with that change, I'll make a motion to move the agenda. Excellent. Is there a second? Then thank you, Councillor Zheng. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Great. And with that, I am pleased to turn it over to perhaps Dr. Spencer, well, maybe, Director Spencer and Assistant Director Megan Moore, who are going to give us a presentation regarding water resources and the rate restructuring that was put on hold after COVID. I also want to acknowledge there was a little bit of a last minute snafu regarding whether we were going to be able to proceed with this. And I just want to thank you and hopefully our consultant who's hopefully on the line for flexibility regarding that. And with that, I will turn it over to Team DPW for that presentation. Just have a quick point of order. Just wanted to say the public forum. I skipped the public forum. I'm so sorry because you told me. I always want to do that anyway, President Tracy. No, no, it's totally fine. So I just wanted to clarify that I did check the public forum inbox and did not see anyone in the public forum inbox now that we're actually in the meeting. So it's fine that we didn't go clear that there was no one who had signed up who was waiting. Thank you. I'm just always getting ahead of myself. Yes, Councillor Paul. This is another point of order. When I did make the motion to adopt the agenda, it appears as though item 5.04, even though there are items on there, it says that it would be on the 119 agenda, but we are voting on this now. I mean, I just want to make sure that- Yes. And what exactly is going on. Was it supposed to be concurrent? No, so this is just confusing. We've been doing so many things concurrent. That's become sort of our normal operation. And because this was just something we thought may need a little bit more time, we didn't make this one concurrent. So this was just a note from Lori of we're doing this here tonight, but you aren't going to see it on the city council agenda tonight. And so that's what the asterisk is, but it is a little confusing. Thanks for asking, Councillor. Give the interruption. I'll let you get onto item 4. No, no problem. Anybody else? I am moving fast as I do. Okay, good. Thank you, Megan. That's right. I'm going to just calm down and learn about the water restructuring and really turn it over to you now. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Team Water. We're going to turn it over to the women of water. We've got a great team today and our consultant from Rough Tells. Presentation one. So it looks like the presentation. Okay, awesome. Presentation mode. Okay, then let me try a different one. If not, we'll just make that one work. I think it's this one then. How's that? That's perfect, Megan. And your voice is a little quiet, so make sure to speak up. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay. Let me know. I'll look up and you can give me a thumbs up if I'm or thumbs down, if I'm not speaking loudly enough. So yes, as Catherine said, we are coming back to you to hopefully launch the continuation of the postpone project. I believe most of you were there almost 10 months ago, March 9th, 2020, when we all knew about a thing called COVID, but it hadn't quite fully hit us. That happened the next week. And we had come to you with our initial proposals based on the open house and stakeholder involvement that we had done in fall of 2019. And based on all the work that Raftelis had done to come up with a number of rate proposals, which we're trying to meet some of the goals given to us by the council, as well as some of our internal goals. We had developed rate fees and assistant program recommendations and had presented those to you from what I recall, they were well received. And then we COVID hit and we did end up postponing the project due to the sort of uncertainties associated with COVID as well as because we were able to muster a very tight FY21 budget without a rate increase. So tonight, we'll just super quick overview. I know we don't have a lot of time talking about again who we are and why we're doing this. Dave will get into Dave Fox from Raftelis. We'll get into the rate and policy recommendations and our affordability program recommendations, including what's changed and what hasn't changed because we have made a few tweaks. And then we'll look at a couple of customer impact examples as well as talk to you about what our next steps are to try to get this project back on track. One of the things, because we don't have a lot of time, we're certainly welcome any questions with the time that we do have, but we strongly encourage you to reach out to me or chape in with any specific questions you have because the devil is sort of in the details and we wanna have the ability in the time to talk to you about those specific details because there's a lot of data involved and it really depends on which customer you're talking about and how their usage may have changed over the course of since last time we looked at the data. So I think you all know this, like BED, water resources, the water resources utility, water waste, water and storm water are three separate enterprise funds being that each fund is independently responsible for the recovery of their annual revenue requirements. So if we're collecting money from the water on the water part of the bill, we can't be shifting that over to storm water or wastewater unless they're legitimate cost allocations. Most importantly, there is no reliance on property taxes. Our programs are entirely funded by the ratepayers and we have a total budget of approximately just over 17 million. So this all started in, I believe, April 2019 when the council has been really great about supporting some of the rate increases that we've brought forward in order to reinvest in our infrastructure, our aging infrastructure and they charged the water resources division with coming up with some rate strategies and affordability programs to make sure that we really maintain access to clean water. Married with that from our perspective, it's there's a little bit of attention, right? Maintaining access to clean water in order to have clean water, we ultimately have to have enough money to reinvest in our infrastructure and to provide all of the services that we provide. And that isn't a little bit of tension or can be in tension with the affordability of those services. We wanna make sure, though, that all of our customers have the ability to maintain that access to that essential life water that enables them to cook, clean and bathe themselves and their children. And so with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Dave who's gonna talk a little bit about why it is we're here, what our financial needs are and then we'll get into the wave tops of where our proposal is now. And Dave, just let me know when you want me to advance the slides. Thanks. Can you let me know, you can hear me okay? Not or something great. Thank you. Good evening, everybody. It's great to be back in front of you all. Unfortunately, virtually, it's interesting. The last on-site client meeting that I had was with you all back in March and everything shut down. So here we are almost a year later. It's crazy that we're still dealing with this but hopefully we'll be back in front of you in person sometime soon. Like Megan said, this is a great segue into this slide here. Unfortunately, it costs money to run the water sewer and stormwater utilities of Burlington, Vermont. And as such, we need to raise funds to be able to pay for ongoing operating expenses, future operating expenses, capital reinvestment, infrastructure needs such that the city can continue to provide good, clean, safe service to its customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, not just today, but well into the future. So we're constantly going through a robust financial planning analysis to understand exactly how much money needs to be generated on annual basis to support those needs. Again, operating costs annually and into the future. Financial policies like maintaining debt service coverage and having enough money and reserves for a rainy day fund if a pandemic hits and consumption declines. Hopefully this is the only one we're gonna deal with in our lifetime, but things happen, capital infrastructure, capital needs pop up that we were not planning for. And as such, a rainy day fund is good. It also looks favorably to rating agencies, getting a better bond rating, better interest rates on debt to be able to pay for those capital infrastructure needs. So there's some, all this goes into our robust financial planning. Megan and I are working through right now financial planning model and thinking about budgeting for fiscal year 2022 and what the across-the-board revenue needs are gonna be for each of the three utilities. Right now, we're looking at about 6%, 7 and 5 for water, wastewater and stormwater, respectively. And those are early on projections and they're absolutely the kind of the upper bound of what we think is going to be necessary for fiscal year 2022. And if you remember in fiscal year 2021, we had a level budget, no increase in revenues. And now we're talking about these revenue needs again to support our financial policies going forward. We'll talk about how we're looking to mitigate some of those impacts on additional slides. Go to the next one, Megan, please. One thing I will mention before while she's changing that, if we did nothing in terms of rate structural or rate changes, rate design changes, the typical customer would see about a 6.4% increase in their combined water, wastewater and stormwater bill. And you'll see how that compares to a typical customer under our proposed new rate structure. So we have all those costs that need to be generated on an annual basis. They're incurred for various reasons. And let's just focus on the water side as a good example. If you only needed to provide base level demand, just a normal level of water, your system could be sized very small or smaller than it is designed for, both the piping, the pumping, your electrical needs, all that could be sized there. But if we look at all the other needs of the system where customers are peaking, customers are using water at the same time at seven o'clock in the morning and seven o'clock at night when they're washing dishes at the same time. And giving their kids baths and showering and cooking, you're peaking at different times. Even seasonal peaking can take, we have to take that in consideration for sizing your system. Irrigation providing the capacity necessary to provide irrigation consumption. And then if we expand that a little bit further, fire protection is absolutely critical for the city, for the livelihood and the safety of the city. And in order to provide that level of service and be able to have that readiness to serve and the capacity to be able to provide fire protection, it shouldn't be necessary in a fire event, that infrastructure needs to be sized even further. So there's additional costs that are associated with coming outside of that ring there of that base level demand for irrigation purposes, from peaking, providing peak level demand for different customer classes. And of course, for providing that fire protection. And we've tried to reflect that as best as we possibly could while attempting to achieve some of our other pricing objectives, some of which council set us out to do with this race structure that we're gonna talk about. And Dave, I'm realizing that the next slide, I think does have animations in it. So I'm gonna quickly try to get through them so that they're all showing. Perfect. There we go, boom, boom. That's great, thanks. So I'm gonna quickly go over, this is not the first time you've heard this. I know we're short on time. So I'm going to just at a high level touch on all these different rate proposals and really focus on what has changed since last March when we talked last. So we had kind of six different rate proposals. The one is to establish a fixed charge by meter size. This is a charge that is not going to change based on a customer's usage. It's gonna be contingent upon their meter size. They're going to pay this charge monthly, whether they use water or not. It's an industry best practice. It reflects the capacity and the costs associated with having the readiness to serve those customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It also is great from a revenue stability standpoint as consumption decreases, or potentially decreases as volatility in consumption. Your revenues aren't gonna change as much by having some of your revenues coming from fixed charges. It's encouraged by your bond rating agencies. Again, for that revenue stability purposes, bond rating agencies love stable revenue streams. One thing that has changed since the last time we came to you is we've done a little tinkering of that fixed charge by changing the percentage of revenues coming from fixed charges. And also the differentials between the different meter sizes to try to alleviate some of the concerns. Really just, all these are, when we talked in March, we knew that COVID was around, but we didn't know the impact that it was going to have on everyone. Residential customers and businesses alike. And since that point, we've kind of come back to the drawing board and said, are there some changes we need to make to maybe smooth out some of the impacts to not have as much gone on businesses and maybe smooth that out a little bit, provide a little bit more relief to low volume customers or that lowest volume customer. And this is where all these kind of additional changes or modifications from last March came from. One thing that has not changed is the lifeline rate. Right now, your customers pay just a uniform rate, no matter how much they're using. They pay the same rate per 100 cubic feet and 100 cubic feet is about 748 gallons. This proposal, it will provide essential level of water consumption to single family residential homes at a lower per unit rate. All single family residential customers for the first 400 cubic feet are going to pay a lower volumetric rate. And then once they get above that for every 100 cubic foot above that 400 threshold, they would pay a higher per unit rate. This is going to give us again, that essential level of usage at a low, very economical rate and costs. And also in incentivizes the efficient use of water was something that was important to the city as well is recognizing that, you know, by sending that pricing signal, customers can have that incentive to cut back and not be as wasteful with water usage. Building on the volumetric rates, we're also proposing having different class-based rates. It doesn't make sense to have a single family residential customer have that same rate structure as say a commercial customers. It doesn't make sense for two reasons. One, those different customers place different demands on the system. Like I talked about on the prior slide about that the cost of service of different costs and providing service to customers. It also doesn't make sense because many of your commercial customers would automatically fall into that tier two just by the amount of water they're using. And it does not make sense. It would be unfairly penalizing them, putting them in that highest tier when that really is not applicable to them. So we're gonna have class-based or we're proposing to have class-based rates. We'll talk about that in a few slides where we actually look at the rates. But to note, I mean, just sorry, something changed my PC there, there we go, sorry. One notable change that we had from when we came back, when we were with you in March and where we are now, we actually had commercial customers broken out differently from multi-family residential customers. And one of the things we tried to do along the way, recognizing that commercial customers and some businesses were being negatively affected, maybe more so the residential customers over the course of the pandemic, we said, let's maybe back off of that a little bit. And now we're kind of smoothing out those rates and having commercial properties charged the same as multi-family residential properties. Again, just having your single-family residential and then non-single-family residential and irrigation rates, which is a nice segue into our other rate proposal, having a separate higher volumetric rate for customers using water for irrigation purposes or putting good, clean, safe drinking water on dirt. We recognize that there are some customers like the community guarding initiatives where they will be exempt from this higher irrigation rate. This higher irrigation rate is going to, again, send a good pricing signal, pricing incentive to use the city's resources wisely and also reflect the additional cost, like I talked about on the prior slide, that additional cost associated with providing those customers with the peaking and additional level of service. Fire protection charges. The city does not currently assess fire protection charges. It's a very common practice in the water industry. There's absolutely a cost associated with having the ability to provide fire protection to private customers and businesses and having the ability to address if there is a fire event. And as such, we're proposing to have a standalone fixed monthly charge for fire protection. This is going to be based on the size of the connection. One thing we talked about back in March, we were going to go to the full cost of service. So we go through a robust analysis to determine all those revenue requirements that we talked about earlier, how many of them are associated with providing fire protection and specifically private fire protection. Our proposal back in March was to recover 100% of the cost associated with the private fire protection because that resulted in some significant impacts for commercial customers and recognizing again some of the negative impacts associated with COVID-19 to businesses. We decided to, with our proposal to smooth those impacts out and to phase in. We still think that we are absolutely justified in proposing private fire protection charges and justified charging them with the 100% of cost of service. But we decided trying to limit the rate shock associated with that, especially now when a lot of businesses are struggling, we're deciding to phase that in over five years and you'll see the impacts of that in the next couple of slides. And then one thing I'm super excited about is the customer assistance program, which the Water Ladies as Chapin put it, came up with the RAP program. I think it's great, it's a wonderful name. We're gonna wrap up those customers as economically disadvantaged customers that need it most and provide assistance to them. So right now, that program is going to, if adopted would provide under the system that we have, it would provide a waving of the fixed monthly charge for both the water and the wastewater bill for customers at 185% or lower of the federal quality level. And we have an entire slide dedicated to this. So I'm gonna just leave it at that for now and we can talk about that in the next couple of slides. Dave, I'm just gonna give you a time check. We are at 22 minutes. So we'll probably need to go a little faster. I don't know what the total amount of time allotted for us is, but probably have to get through the other ones. And again, any questions on any of the material on this or the memo, please just contact us and we'll set up a whole meeting for you. Yeah, could we wrap this up in the next, to how many slides do we have left here? I think, I mean, I think the data sort of speaks to itself. Can we wrap this up in the next two minutes, Megan? Dave? I'll wrap up quick. Okay. Here are the, you've seen these before, the structure is no different. We've made some modifications since last March. The structure is exactly the same, the rates are just different based on the changes that we've made since March. Go to the next slide, Megan, please. Our customer assistance program that we're proposing, we've expanded this to also include non-profit affordable and senior housing, not just single-family residential customers. I think that's the biggest change. You've heard all this before, it's gonna be a great program that provides relief to those customers that absolutely need it most. Who are gonna see lower bills? Customers who are using less water are gonna see lower bills. Customers who can serve are going to see lower bills. Customers right about that median level. And here we go. So we look at that, that third row down, the median volume for CCF customer. That's your typical single-family residential customer. They're going to see almost no change to their bill at all between what they're paying now and what they would be paying now, paying in fiscal year 2022 with all these changes, recognizing that we're getting about 6.4% total more revenue and that customer's not gonna see any change to their bill. And if that customer were to be eligible for the RAP program, the customer assistance program, that customer's actually gonna see close to a 16% decrease in their bill. You can look up at that low-volume customer, two CCF, you don't have many of those customers. I know that 15.2% sounds scary, but if you look at that, that's a $52 change over the course of an entire year. It's pretty negligible. And for those low-volume customers that really are economically disadvantaged and can take advantage of the great RAP program, that customer's gonna see a reduction of $44 in their total water and sewer storm water bill. And if you look down to some of the multifamily residential, both of those low-income housing example and a senior housing example are either negative or below or across the board, 6.4% increase. Some of those commercial and institutional are gonna see above that 6.4%, but it's because they're paying for fire protection for the first time. They have not been historically paying for fire protection. And now they are, we're trying to remedy that and get back to some semblance of cost of service. Here, it's just a distribution of, if we ran a distribution based on calendar year 2019 data, the impacts, you can see the vast majority of the customers are going to see between a zero and a 10% change in their bill, where the vast majority of those that's 6,200 are going to see between a zero and 5%. So those are gonna be your typical residential customers, the folks that you asked us when you set us out on this journey to try to provide relief to, we're doing that year in this proposal. And I think this last slide, we were gonna have Jenna who's running our outreach go over this last slide, but I think it speaks for itself and it's in the memo. So with that, maybe we have time for like one, two questions. Okay, thank you. If anybody has any initial questions, yeah. Does Max run the reflection of the people raising their hands, I assume? Nope, sorry, it is me and I cannot find my unmute. Yes, counselor Tracy, a president Tracy, excuse me. I appreciate that. And thank you for this presentation. Really appreciate all your hard work. The outreach was incredible that we got to see. Just, I saw you at numerous different places on church street, at our MPA. So really appreciate you doing all that stakeholder outreach that's been really exciting to see. One thing that I just wanted to clarify is that one issue that we had had was what this will mean for renters. Cause I'm not, I know you broke down different categories, but I didn't see necessarily in the presentation like the renters called out explicitly and we had identified a split, a kind of cost split cause most landlords will cover that, that water piece. And so how do you create that balance there? Cause a lot of times those costs just end up getting passed on to tenants. And then there's also the conservation issue as well that plays in there. So I just wanted to understand how renters fit into this whole puzzle. I think, and David speak to this, but the renters are still the tricky wicket across the entire nation when it comes to affordability programs because it's hard to ensure. And I think when our response is largely what it was when we spoke to you last time, which is it is still on our radar. And I think some of the tweaks we've made certainly with trying to decrease the overall bill for affordable multifamily units. We've, we're kind of cracking into how we may be able to get some of those costs to pass on to renters. But I don't think we or Raftelis or anybody in the country actually has a specific answer unless you're going to get into rent control type situations. I think New York is the only one who may be going in that direction. Maybe Dave can just validate. Validate it. Yeah, you hit the nail on the other. Yeah. It's the hard problem of affordability programs is providing relief to renters. And I think we've taken a small step towards there providing relief to the nonprofit affordables. I think that's great. We're going to continue to research this and try to come up with something, but it's not just you. It's it's across the country. And Megan's right. And New York City is the only one that I know of that is getting into rent control. And I'm not sure that's something we want to get into here, but we're going to keep analyzing it. And, you know, the, the Raft program hopefully is going to continue to expand and we can get more and more customers involved in that. This is our, the best we can do right now though with the information that we have. Okay, great. Thank you. I think the mayors joined us, but we'll just maybe wrap up this agenda item. Are there any other, maybe one more question before we move on? I can't see everyone actually, which is a problem. Okay, it doesn't look like it though. There's counselor Pine and counselor Carpenter, which I am also happy to spend so much time with you to answer all of your questions. I appreciate your engagement. Yes, I can't see everyone. I'm so sorry, counselor Carpenter. I am going to prioritize counselor Pine because he's on the board of finance and that's going to be the final question, but please follow up with Megan. She's so knowledgeable and passionate. In the meantime, counselor Pine, quick question, and then we will move on to item 5.01. I just wanted to put the idea into the public realm that I mentioned to staff today it was to shift away from poverty as the guideline and instead use the HUD median income. And if you look at the chart, 50% of HUD median is for certain households is pretty close to this number. But what it does is for single person households, it will expand the number of households that benefit. And I think we ought to be using that as poverty is a horrible indicator. It hasn't been adjusted in 58 years. It's a terrible way to define benefits. So I'd rather go with the HUD median. It's a much more real, vibrant piece of data. So hopefully we can do that. Thanks. And Jess has actually already reached out to CBOEO to see when and where they use that indicator. So it's something we will definitely explore and probably circle back to you with some additional questions. Our main thing is that we water resources are not prepared to do income verification. And so we want to make sure to keep the administrative costs low by leveraging other programs, but we definitely appreciate the idea being brought forward. And I think we could at least come up with a couple of different approaches to try to hit some of those things on the head. And lastly, if you're using another agency, CEDO does it for their programs as well. So that's, I put in my email was CEDO was the entity that within the city that does this every day for eligibility. So it's, yeah, thanks. All right, excellent. Thank you so much, Team DPW. And I am going to turn it over to the mayor and mayor, we are ready to move forward with item 5.01, the BEDIT Forward Software Systems that I believe Director Chapin and Assistant Director Wheelock are ready to present. Great, thank you, Catherine. Good to see everyone. Happy New Year. Let's move to, sorry, you just said 5.01, the BEDIT Forward Software Systems. Thank you, Darren, for being here. And why don't we turn to the board? How would the board like to proceed on this item? Would you like a short summary? Yeah, okay, Darren, why don't you kick this off? This is, there's some complexity with this. Excellent. Good evening. Joined by Emily Stone's Wheelock Director, or sorry, Manager for Strategy and Innovation. And what we're here tonight for is part of our IT Forward process. And this has been a multi-year process, really dating back, even before I started at BED in January of 2017, there was work that had started on this. And so this has been an effort to look at our various technology systems, our critical technology systems that serve our financial needs, our customer information needs, our reliability needs, and how they all connect and what we need to do to update them and keep them functioning. We had consultants involved in helping us form a roadmap, a technology roadmap, back several years ago with the heavy involvement of dozens and dozens of members of the BED team. Frontline technology users, folks who are managing these systems day to day, taking their feedback in terms of what functionality they need to be able to do their jobs. And the challenge has been that our systems, our current systems are reaching end of life in many cases, they're reaching the end of the vendor support in many cases. And the current setup that we have involves multiple vendors is not an enterprise system with one vendor, but involves multiple vendors and requires having various interoperabilities between different systems in order to function. And so what we had done over the past several years following that roadmap, we've gone through lean process training with the Vermont Manufacturing Extension Center to try to make our processes more efficient as we moved to upgrade technology. We issued a request for information from various vendors in this space to see what types of technology systems and functionality would be there and had extensive presentations during that phase. And then we issued an RFP with very rigorous and objective criteria around what our team had determined is needed to carry BED into the future. And we're talking about here is everything from how do we manage outage response? How do we manage our billing systems? How do we help customers get access to their energy data in a usable way? How do we have the ability to implement dynamic rates that support our net zero energy efforts? And how do we manage things like net metering? The complex billing that accounts for customers that have solar feeding it into the grid and taking energy in their own homes or businesses from their solar panels as well. So that brings us to today and Emily has really led the effort to conduct scoping with our selected vendor and has been a key member of the team along with Sue Fritz, our director of technology in really shaping this process. Emily and I are happy to answer questions on the materials presented. We're looking for your authorization recommendation to the city council and ultimately authorization to proceed with our selected vendor and our electric commission has given their approval and recommended this item to you. It Emily has more information we can provide but I'll pause there and see if there's questions from any members of the board of finance. Great, thank you, Darren. Floor is open for questions or a motion. Councilor Putt. It wasn't clear to me why the process was that you notified them in November of 2019 and here we are 13 months later. What happened in that period that took so long? I guess it wasn't clear. Sure, Emily probably is better suited to speak to that. I'm gonna turn it to Emily. Yeah, certainly. So, Councilor Pine, you're right. Negotiations did take a year. Part of that was due to the interruptions of COVID and both our team and the selected vendors team adjusting to that. But I think more importantly as a sort of source of the time was the effort our team put in into reviewing and negotiating six separate statements of work for software implementation. So these are, we reviewed dozens of pages of statements of work, right? Be sure that the functionality we needed was included, that we understood the effort and resources that we at BED would need to dedicate to ensure that the representations made in the statement of work were consistent with the representations made in the RFP response. And then concurrent with that, we have four legal documents that we would, if proved by you and the city council, would execute subject to city attorney review and approval. So there's a license agreement, a hosting agreement, a maintenance and support contract and an implementation services agreement. So there were many, many discussions between us and the vendor and their legal team. And also we engaged Bill Ellis, BED's regulatory council in supporting us through those negotiations. So many documents and many discussions as well as price was a third thing that we negotiated hard over the past year to result in the fees that were included and sent to you in exhibit one. It's helpful, I just wanna make sure that the time period didn't necessarily relate to a difficult relationship. That's what my worry was, is 12 months of negotiation suggests something's going on there. So I just wanna make sure, thank you. Are there any other Councilor questions? Yeah, quick one. Go ahead, Councilor Chang. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I think the only thing is missing and it seems you said you already sent us the costs associated with this, right? Is it through a different memo or as part of this memo in front of us? I believe the pricing is confidential and subject to a nondisclosure agreement. And as such, it was distributed to you, I believe by city attorney Blackwood December 31st, I believe. Okay. Okay, are there further questions or are we ready for a motion on this item? Councilor Bynum. I would move to recommend the city council authorized general manager of BED to execute with and Harris Computer Corporation, a software license agreement, a software implementation services agreement, a master's support and maintenance agreement and a hosting service agreement that grant BED the option to purchase and receive associated services for software systems at fixed prices, good June 30, 2023, subject to review and approval by the city attorney's office and to appropriations for each relevant fiscal year. Okay, thank you. Seconded by Councilor Powell. Further discussion, questions? All right, seeing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Darren, Emily, thank you and good luck with this. Thank you. Great, this brings us to 5.02, which is a presentation from Superintendent Tom Flanagan and the rest of the BSD team. It's good to see you all here. Good to see you, Nate and Joe, welcome. This is regarding the approval of financing guarantee for construction loan from Burlington High School move to the Macy's building. And Marty, nice to see you as well. And why don't, this is a somewhat unusual item. Let's make sure we kind of laid out what's going on here. And I'm pleased we're at this point and we're able to, the city's able to play a productive role, helping move towards addressing this terrible community challenge of having no high school right now. So that's what this is about. And I turn it over to you all to take it from here. Thank you very much, Mayor. This is Joe McNeil. I served as council to the district during this transaction. So I'll take the first part. Tom had a unavoidable conflict and had to not be available. But Nathan is available on financing aspects and Marty is available on the technical aspects. As you know, surprising to the BSD. We'll never complain, Joe, about getting to hear a presentation straight from you. We don't get to hear from you enough these days. So although we miss the superintendent, we're welcome having you here. It's nice to have you back with us. Thank you very much. So as I'm sure you know, came as quite a surprise to the school district and to the students when the first day of school in September, we learned that as a result of PCB, as a result of testing for the $70 million bond issue, PCBs were discovered first at the exterior and then on air quality testing on the interior and the department of health recommendation was that the building be closed for in student education. BHS have been remote since that time, except for more recently, it has been able to utilize the Edmunds complex on Wednesdays, dividing the school half and half. The fix is not ideal, was not ideal, and we looked around for alternatives, speaking generally for the crew that worked on this, including the school board. It came down to two alternatives. Number one alternative was the placement of custom designed trailers, if you will, on the BHS campus, mostly utilizing the athletic fields. There were advantages and distinct disadvantages of that, including the anticipated increase, a higher cost than what turned out to be the option that manifested itself to utilize the former Macy's building. When we identified that as a location, potentially we commenced a significant negotiation with the owners of the Macy's building, which are Don Sinex, Al Seneca, the Ireland Company and Barrington Construction. And to make a long story short, we were able to reach an agreement that involved BSD being responsible for the initial fit up of the space, which is estimated at $3.5 million, and that's what this evening relates to, and also the rental for three and a half years at $100,000 a month. So it's somewhere around a $10 million project over the three and a half years. The anticipation is that the fit up will be completed in mid-February to allow the move in during the February break and the commencement of educational services to begin at the Macy's location downtown right after the February break. Northfield Savings Bank is providing financing to Barrington Construction and the school department has agreed to cover that cost. It can cover it upfront or it can cover it through financing. The Nathan can go into greater detail but the school district has been working with the governor's administration to hopefully receive a significant contribution towards the fit up cost of three and a half million dollars but that will be dependent upon legislative action and the governor's budget adjustment recommendation which will come out shortly. So that's not firm and fixed at this point but we're hopeful. Northfield Savings Bank indicated that it would like, it would insist upon the guarantee from the city of Barrington of the school department's financial obligation to pay for the fit up, not the 10 million but the 3.5 million. The school department in turn indicated that it was prepared to back up any commitment that the city would have to make so that at the end of the day the school department will own the entirety of this obligation and hold the city entirely harmless. In talking with the mayor and with attorney Blackwood, we also agreed that because of the requirement of separation of municipal and educational finances that it was important to receive a determination from the state agency of education, Secretary Dan French, that this agreement, this guarantee would not cause a violation of those standards. We received that today, a positive declaration. So what we're hoping for is a motion to approve a backup guarantee of the fit up cost and subject to the city attorney's review of the entire document flow, the guarantee agreement and subject to the school department's commitment that any dollar you all expend, we will make up for. With that as a quick backdrop of a long story, I would turn it over to Nathan and or Marty. Marty is available to answer any sort of fit up question as to what's happening, how quickly it's happening, where it's happening, et cetera. And Nathan on the financial opportunities here and alternatives. So Mayor, that would be the opening of state. Okay, excellent. Why don't we, yeah, why don't we pause there and see how much more detail the board would like? Councilor Pine and then President Tracey. You want a motion now, Mr. Mayor, do you want to wait on that? I think let's get a motion on the floor if you're ready to do that sounds good. And then I'd like the floor back, I'd recommend the city council approve the attached resolution. Excellent, is there, sorry. Councilor President Tracey seconded it, I think. No, you just want to make it nice, okay. I can be the second, that's cool. Okay, sorry. Okay, go ahead back to you, Councilor Pine. Thank you, President Tracey. My question is really, it's blunt, I don't mean to be rude, but it's a bit like having your uncle guarantee your mortgage, but your uncle is, it's like this family thing. So we're guaranteeing the school district's ability to pay the debt service. And yet the school district saying, oh, but if you have to pay it, we'll cover it. Is that really what is being proposed, Joe? Is that? That is a good summary, Brian. Councilor Pine, and it's accurate, except that the reason the bank is looking for this guarantee is because the school district, although an independent Vermont school district is also a department of the city of Burlington. And because of that, as it was making its loan commitment, it wanted this backup. The city in turn wanted to, the city attorney's office and the mayor's office wanted to make sure that if that was called upon, that ultimately this would be an educational expense. So it is indeed sort of like a closed loop, Brian, but the end result I think is protection to the city and exposure to the school district. I see, so if there were ever an instance where the school district was unable to make those debt service payments, the city would essentially front the money and recoup it perhaps in installment payments over time or something of that sort. Yes, and the hope would be that the city would not even have an upfront dollar outlay that by, and Nathan, you might wanna come in and just speak a little bit about the financing plan of the school department if indeed that was required. Yeah, so we are, I mean, first of all, we've been doing some outreach and having great communication with the governor's office and we are optimistic that we will be, that an allocation and appropriation in the budget adjustment bill that will be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks will go a long way toward covering the fit up costs. So that's like our plan A in this whole thing. And but of course we need a plan B for obvious reasons and we are already incorporating into our budget consideration of what it would take if we were to pay these costs over the term of the lease. So we are not gonna be in a position where we have to come up with $3.5 million at one time to pay this down. If we have the money such as the estate support, we would probably do that and that would reduce our ongoing monthly costs. But in the absence of that, the financing would be pretty straightforward in that it would be a poor, it would be folded into our monthly rent and we would pay it on a monthly basis. So we shouldn't have a problem, frankly, in either case we shouldn't have a problem but we should be able to manage, we'll have plenty of time obviously we're not gonna be paying the whole three and a half million upfront. So we would be able to pay it on a monthly basis and make necessary adjustments in our budget to ensure that we could continue to make the full payment each month. Okay, thanks. And lastly, is this a triple net lease where you're having to cover everything? Well, how's that structure? It's a hybrid, Brian. It's not a pure triple net. For example, in addition to structural and roof responsibilities, they have continuing responsibilities to make sure that we have functionality of like the elevators and the escalators and the basic systems in the building. We're expected to pay like normal utility cost, insurance, that sort of thing. But so it's a bit of a hybrid. And the probably the most important element in that equation that we are planning to seek is the fact that the property taxes, because it would be educational use, we'd be looking for it to have those deferred. Well, we'll have to come to you for that. And the state will approve that, do you believe? We think that we're hopeful. We obviously have both the municipal side and an educational side to deal with there. Thank you. It's a great work around here. Thanks. Councilor Jain. Oh, sorry. President Tracey was next. Thank you, Councilor Jain. Thank you, Mayor. Appreciate that. So I was curious as to the relationship that this has to the city's overall debt policy and specifically also our credit rating. We had noted that we were reaching sort of the upper levels of that debt policy with some of the bonding that we've recently done. And I'm curious as to how this interacts with that policy. Does that take us even close? Does this take us even closer to the edge or is this something that's separate and apart from that? Cause that's certainly something that's just a concern, just overall with the city taking on quite a bit of debt recently with bonding and that's starting to hit in coming years. Yeah. Thank you, President Tracey. Catherine, did you, were you looking to speak to that or would you like me to? Go for it. So the debt policy is certainly a critical policy that we have to be mindful about when we're taking on major obligations. I do think that there, this whole episode may well create challenges that the district and the city are gonna have to talk about in the future. You know, what this whole need to utilize, you know, this was not part of the plan that went to the voters to have to spend millions of dollars on this interim site. I think we're all, our fingers are crossed that the plan that Nate laid out there does succeed here and that this doesn't sort of end up dramatically impacting the already approved high school rebuilding project in some way. I think it's too soon to know exactly what the implications of this temporary space and the PFCs, PCBs that were found will ultimately mean. Certainly you're correct, President Tracey. We with the bonding approved for the high school combine, you know, with Bonnie approved for the high school combined with the bonding that we plan to do in our sort of 10 year plan, if you will. The last time we looked at the debt policy, assuming you know, major another round of significant infrastructure spending investment as well as investment in Memorial Auditorium, that would take us up near the limits of the debt policy. We are currently tens of millions of dollars below that and certainly there's nothing about taking this action. I mean, first of all, there's a bunch of belts and suspenders here that we've heard that should keep this from impacting the city's debt and hopefully even the school's debt situation. That said, even if some kind of worst case scenario happened here, we would still be well within our debt policies is my sense of it. Okay, thank you for that. And is there a protection and how might this impact the city's credit rating? I think this will have no, I mean, I don't believe this Catherine Rich, if you see this differently, please weigh in. You guys know I'm a total hawk on the credit rating. I don't think this will have any material impact on the credit rating, you know, certainly with all the indemnification from the district, which is really at the end of the day, I see it as this kind of an indemnification from the state, the state ultimately has responsibility for school finances. So I think this is a tiny risk financially for the city and I don't think it's gonna, I don't know that we've talked directly to Moody's about it. It's come up quickly. I don't think we've had that opportunity, but I would be shocked if they had any significant negative reaction to this. And I would just point out that one of the reasons why the secretary of education approved the transaction in their deliberation and declaration today is that it would not represent a cushioning of the state's educational funding obligation by the city, which actually is, their concern is the reverse, but the mayor's observation is correct. Okay, thank you for that. Two other questions were, how was the $100,000 a month figure arrived at? Given that this is a building that wasn't in use, how did that figure get negotiated? And then the other piece was just the timeframe for reimbursement, because that's not entirely clear in the resolution, like an absolute end date by which the city would be, if the city had been extending funds when they would ultimately, and finally be at the very least or at the very most kind of extended on a timeframe. Good, good questions, both president Tracy. The negotiation, it was an intense negotiation. I would just say that our starting point was zero on rent. Their starting point was quite a bit higher. Won't go into the precise amount, but it was substantially higher. This was less than a halfway point between where we were starting and where they were starting. And on the basis of the, we checked with the commercial realtors in the area of some experience to get a feel for where we should end up and the $8 a square foot was where we were able to land that was tolerable to the school board and acceptable to the owners. I would just say that it was, that was probably where most of the time was spent in negotiations. But the guarantee I would point out President Tracy, again, the guarantee does not apply to the rent, it only applies to the fit up. And I'll let Nathan deal with the question of the duration of the financing. Yeah, I don't think that we have any, you're right, I don't think I've seen anything kind of specific about that process, but again, our expectation would be that in the event that we would be, that we do go through with financing, which is the interest that Northfield has that we'd be making a monthly payment. And so under any circumstance where somehow the city, it's hard for me to envision a circumstance where the city would have to step in on the monthly basis to make that payment. But I think the point is that if for some reason that happened, there wouldn't be any hesitation on our part. So if, yeah, I don't have any more specific answer than that, I guess, or know how to enter it more specifically other than to say that you would do it as quickly as we could. And we are accustomed on occasion to wiring funds to the city and likewise. So that's not a problem. We certainly have the mechanisms in place to do that promptly. And the de-amortization potentially would be right over three and a half years, the duration of the leasehold President Tracy. Okay, thank you very much. Kester Paul. Thank you. So President Tracy addressed one of my questions, although I would imagine he, he may feel the same way, but I'll just speak for myself that I do think the rent should have been zero. And I am disappointed that there wasn't an appetite for doing that, given the fact of all the other things that are going on with this project that could not have been done for the sake of children being able to finally go back to school and just to do something that would be good for the community. So I'm disappointed, but I'll take your word for it, show that you did the best you could. And then the other thing I just wanted to just say is that, you know, throughout the last couple of months, I have heard from a number of people, as I'm sure we all have, about just the upheaval that has befallen our high school kids and not being able to have a high school and a number of people who have really pleaded with me about the fact that this is not a school issue, that this is really a city crisis and one that we should all be working towards. And so I think for that reason, amongst the people that have been working with us, so I think for that reason, amongst others, that this is a very, probably one of the easier votes that we'll have this evening and I'm happy to support this. So thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks for all your effort. Thank you. Okay. Looks like with that, we might be ready. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. So the first question is for you, Mr. Mayor, I think at our last meeting, I believe requesting an update around the debt policy and was wondering if our next meeting, we can have an update about where we are. We will have to look into, I mean, just to be clear about when you say an update to the policy, the policy, there's no planned change to the policy. If you're looking for an update on where we stand with respect to how much capacity we have, in both the city and the school under that policy, we have typically done that at the moment of incurring, incurring new debt. If you would like, if the board would like that sooner, we, we can, we can work on doing that. It takes a fair amount of work to update, you know, to make that fully accurate. There has not been. So I would, I guess I would welcome further thoughts on, on how the board would like to handle that. I can certainly get you a written communication. Councillor Jang that kind of reiterates where that basically restates where we were last time. We formally reviewed it and there has been no material change since then. But for this, as we've discussed fairly, you know, minor additional indebtedness and emerge, you know, urgent additional indebtedness by, by the district. If you would, if what you're requesting is that we have a kind of presentation with updated figures that, you know, I'll have to talk to Catherine and Rich on how long we take us to, to pull that together. So which, what, what. It would be helpful if I understood which you were seeking. Okay. So just like my last question and I'm glad that I did not cut you off. My last question was, can we have an update about our debt policy? And I think I was very specific. How much do we have to borrow? What is left? The capacity that we have to borrow. It seemed as if I seen this coming. I seen the reason why I asked it before. I knew that this conversation will. And it's occurring in front of us with no details, but no problem. Looking forward to anything you can provide on that. Okay. I am happy. We will update the figures. The last time we reviewed this, I believe we had something in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 million dollars of capacity. So I think you can act. And there has been no material change to that. You can act on this with great confidence that. That we are, you know, that we are no way. Really. Cutting into that. Especially given that the district has. You know, something approaching 70 million dollars of capacity that. You know, because of the uncertainty with the renovations project, you know, it's unclear that. When and how that's going to be drawn down. So if that's the question, I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that when and how that's going to be drawn down. So if that's the question. I would say the city. Has in excess of 30 million. Go ahead, Catherine. It's desired. I know that. Rich has been working on this in recent weeks. And I don't personally have an update, but I would like to invite him to give a very brief update. I can absolutely provide an update on. A debt capacity. And I can do that for our next quarter finance meeting. That is scheduled. And I do confirm with what the mayor stated in my quick. Glance at the debt is that we have significant. Capacity for debt. Without having any impact on our credit rate. And we will provide a memo in projection. On the debt. As you requested. With our next Bola. Thank you. Thank you so much. That's good. The older question that I have, maybe Mr. Superintendent come from again is here. No. Superintendent was unable. Had a conflict. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Nate, you can speak to this. When would you. When do you think you will have a confirmation from the state that would they will actually provide some financial support about this? That's a good question. So what we currently anticipate is that the governor will include a recommendation to support in some level. And we think that. And we think and hope that that's going to be. A little more timely. And but it is that, you know, just as you folks do the, the governor has to make a budget adjustment proposal that balances a lot of competing interests. And we will, you know, will the proof will be in, in what is released, but that typically comes out in the first couple of weeks of the legislative session. And the question is how long will it take to move from a proposal to actual law? That can be a much less certain timeline. It often, it depends on how controversial elements of that proposal are sometimes there are a few that offer really any, any fodder for discussion and the budget adjustment moves very quickly. I saw that when I worked for the legislative staff and other times there are more items that are more. More closely resemble major policy changes that the legislature wants to debate more fully. So it's not clear. We won't know the answer definitively, but I think that we will have a good sense of whether that issue is being viewed with skepticism. From the legislative branch pretty quickly after it is released, because I imagine it will be one of the most high profile elements of what is often a relatively low profile budget adjustment bill. So my, my, in my head when I think about it, I'm thinking to myself, we should have a pretty good sense of where this is headed by the end of January, but I would be surprised if it's actually law by that time. Just, just in addition to Nathan's comment. As he indicated, this is, we're hopeful that this will be a part of the governor's budget adjustment. Recommendation. This will come and be dealt with in advance of the budget recommendation, which follows later in the session, the so-called big bill. So we're hopeful that this will be dealt with. In the early part rather than the later part of the session. Wonderful. Mr. Joe. And I am sure, you know, and guess I need a confirmation that you also have been including our legislative delegation around this discussion. I have talked to a couple of them and was just need some reassurance here so that they would be pushing. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Be assured, be assured that we will be. Yeah. And we did have a formal briefing with the governor's staff for where, where the, our local delegation was invited. We didn't get a hundred percent attendance. As you can imagine, we have a pretty large delegation when you factor in senators and representatives, but, but that was made available and shared with them. And I would say that by and large. So I think that there's broad support at this, at this time. Absolutely. And you know, I think we are talking about seven in seven million so far. And it seemed this project is around 10 millions or more. Is that correct? 3.5 million borrowing 3.5 million you expecting from the state. But I just wanted to also hear about a plan B. What is playing B. So I would, yeah, just to clarify there. So really what we are looking at potentially is the three and a half million dollars. Covering the fit up costs, which would then. Eliminate the need for any of this longer extended financing from Northfield savings bank. If we get that state money, we will in all likelihood put it all toward covering the portion of the fit up costs that we would pay to the construction company. And then there would be essentially no debt associated with this project. Our law, our obligation on a month monthly basis would be the rent, as well as the related costs, utilities, insurance, and so forth. And that is money that we are factoring into the development of our FY 22 budget right now. In fact, it, I don't know if it's posted yet, but I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. And then at the meeting at the school board meeting, we all share as I've done before, some of the estimates of what I have in the budget for the downtown BHS project and also kind of show how if we get the relief from the state that will allow me to reduce the estimated costs next year as well, because we won't be paying back that fit up costs in a month until we can get the budget back. So that's a good point. And then we'll also have a long term temporary solution to the issue so that our students will have a physical location to learn. But now the long term, let's talk about the Wellington high school. Do you think then in four years from now, and that house school will be built. And then the kids will just transition from maces to their new high school. How does it all enter points? I don't know. But I think at this point, it's kind of premature to speculate too, too deeply on this. We're doing, as you know, additional testing on the PCBs and are going to be doing some work to determine whether there are affordable efforts that would reduce the indoor air. Concentration of PCBs that are already planned for a renovation. That is to say, does the work that we already have planned and budgeted to do, will it solve the problem? Or is it likely to solve the problem or not? I don't think it's going to solve the problem. I don't think that that I think is going to be critical in determining how we move forward because if it turns out that. The project as it's currently envisioned will not resolve the indoor air issues. Then there's going to be some really difficult decisions to make about how we, how we proceed. So I don't, I don't think we have the answer yet, but we're taking the steps so that our school board and our community has the information that they will need to, to make those decisions. Yeah. Yeah. Further questions from the board. Are we ready. For action here. Thank you. Looks like we're ready for action. Good. I. Before the vote, I just want to say I fully, I fully support this. I. Appreciate the urgency that the district has acted with to find an alternative plan given this. I think it's been very, very unexpected and unwelcome loss of the use of the high school. I'm pleased the city was able to play a legal and helpful role here. I appreciate the team working on this from the district. Appreciate Joe that when there was some confusion in the negotiations where suddenly it seemed that even, you know, something that I think would have been very challenging for the city to do was being requested that you were able to resolve the issue. So thank you for, for your negotiation and, and getting at this point. And I fully support it. And with that, all those in favor of the motion, please say I. I. Any opposed. The motion carries unanimously, I believe. And. Thank you all for, for your input on this. Good to see you all you again. Thank you very much. I appreciate it and forgot to your marks reminded me, Mayor, to thank guy lean significantly because. She was a great help to us getting through these challenges. Here on the board of finance, we know that that is a given for virtually every item. And we appreciate her too. So thank you for saying that, Joe. We'll see you all again soon. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We are down now to 5.04. Revenue airport revenue bonds. Sorry. Has this been. I'm confused. Yeah. Sorry. This is, this is for action tonight, but we are. As we use in the old days, do things. Or regularly, this is not. This is not a concurrent item. This is, this is on for the boards review tonight. It would be acted on the plan is on the 21st. Assuming that we can get to a place where the board can be supportive. So welcome gene. We've got a big team from the airport here tonight. Why don't, how would the board like to proceed? Would it be? Well, you know what, let's, let's, let's tee this up just again. This is a pretty significant item with some complexity to it. Gene or rich, who would like to just summarize what, what we are proposing to do here. Okay. Rich can go ahead and summarize that and then I'll answer any questions. Okay. Great. Thank you, Gene. What I'd like to do is very similar to what. Joe McNeil did is I'd like Thomas Maloney. To just give a quick overview of. The legalities of this refunding and then based on. His overview. I will provide some insight to the actual financing. Okay. The impacts of COVID-19 on air travel. Thomas, we're having a little trouble. At least I'm having a little trouble hearing you can. Get a little closer to my microphone. Okay. That's, that's an improvement. It's slightly better. Still a little faint, but if you could just project, we can all turn up our volumes, I guess. Okay. Go ahead. We'll try now. Okay. That's good. Due to the, due to the impacts of COVID-19 on air travel and the financial impact on Burlington airport in. Specifically. The airport has been looking at ways to restructure. Some of its outstanding revenue bonds that have principal payments coming due with the, within the next few years. So with. The city solicited proposals from different underwriting firms. Qualified to underwrite bonds. The structure is looking at some of the 2012 and 2014 bonds that, that are coming due within the next few years. And pushing out those debt service payments out until the future. Under the city charter and under the general bond resolution for all airport general revenue bonds. The city does without additional voter approval. City council does have the authority to issue these. Revenue refunding bonds. They do not constitute a general debt of the city, but are payable solely from airport revenues. The process of doing it is to adopt a supplemental resolution under the general bond resolution that was applicable. And constitutes a pledge of all airport revenues for, for the indebtedness. So what is, is being presented for consideration by the board of finance and ultimately for the city council. Authorizes the issuance of up to $32 million of these revenue refunding bonds. As I said, they won't constitute the general indebtedness of the city, but are payable solely from the revenues of the airport. The resolution also authorizes and delegates, certain duties to the chief administrative officer and the director for financial operations of the city. To complete and authorize the ultimate terms and provisions for, for this financing. The ultimate goal is to give a breathing room for the airport. So to wait for, you know, with COVID-19 and improvement in the, in the travel industry for it, then to be able to, to service its, its debt. Okay. Thank you, Thomas. Okay. How, I think that teases up pretty well with Councillor Pine. And then Councillor Paul, we'll go from there. Okay. Either rich or, or Thomas, would you help us understand if the current outstanding indebtedness on these, on these bonds, this is the 32 million, or is that just a, the aggregate amount of, of all the bonds that were approved for issuance for the airport. That's a total of the aggregate principal amount of bonds that, that would be issued to constitute the refunding. So if it was in federal tax law, specifically the, the, the tax cut in jobs act past. These would need to be issued as taxable bonds. And so some of the money that will, will be borrowed will effectively have to fund an escrow sufficient to pay off a couple of the, the maturities that are coming due within 2021, 2022 and perhaps 2023 or 2024. The, the covenants that the city has undertaken, including setting its rates sufficient to have a 1.25 debt service coverage would still apply. The city airport has engaged. The city airport will be able to meet that, that service coverage. So what we are doing essentially is, are we capitalizing a sinking fund to pay off those maturities as they come up? That's, that's correct. And restructuring it to, to extend the ultimate principal payment off into the future. When the, when the travel industry and, and. The airport is expected to be in a better financial condition after the impacts of COVID-19 have, have softened. And then lastly, are we just, are we, are we projecting a cost of this capital rich? Do you have a way of the PFM, giving an idea of how to forecast that because I didn't see anything in there about what you project to be the interest rate. Yeah, so we've done some preliminary numbers on what that interest rate would be. The biggest challenge that we have is that we are going to go into this deal looking at what's going to make sense for the airport. So we're looking at all the debt. And we wanted to be very careful that we didn't cap what we would predict. Ultimately our goal is that, as, as Thomas had stated, is in the financial world. This is called what's, it's called a scoop. And it's called a dump. And you're scooping up debt that you won't pay over the next two years. And you will pay that at a later date. And this provides us, you know, the effort being more proactive. You know, the flexibility that's needed with the unknown of COVID improves liquidity of the effort. And it basically ensures us that our debt coverage ratios that need to be obtained are, are achievable. So again, the strategy is to, based on the market conditions, at the time we're going to look at the existing debt and we're going to make a decision on what we will refund. So that will be the actual strategy, the rate on the, the loan, which you did ask. It's very difficult to determine. The challenges that we have is, you know, the airport industry is unique in the sense that the rates in that market are higher than what you see in, you know, the general fund where there's a little bit more predictability. I would also like to add real quickly that, you know, we had a review from Moody's city-wide credit. We had a review from Moody's city-wide credit. That took place December 18th. We shared the idea on this refund date. It was well received. In addition, we will be reviewed the second week. Of February. By Moody's on, you know, providing them an update on the actual amount that we plan on reflash. So they've been part of this conversation. They do agree that it is a, these are good steps that, you know, the airport in the city collectively is working on. Thank you. And then, sorry, lastly, Mr. Murphy, the rating agencies, they, they don't anticipate making any adjustments to the airport's credit rating. Is that right? Brian, I can answer that. We, we would hope not. You know, last time we met with them, they, uh, kept us where we were at. We had a very good meeting. But, uh, at this point we, nothing has changed. And this actually, if anything, should be looked at as a proactive. And thoughtful. Move. A lot of people who start doing this when they're in trouble. And, um, we're not going to get in trouble. We still have a fair amount of cash. Um, we still have another, you know, money in our carers package. We have another carers package coming. Um, but what we're seeing is we know our industry. Isn't going to rebound quickly. And we know it's going to take time. And we really want to make the necessary steps to move forward. So I think if anything, they'll look at as a very proactive and thoughtful move. A lot of people start doing this when they're in trouble. And we're seeing that look at as very proactive and thoughtful. Move. Thank you. So I was wondering what is then missing for us to, in order for us to take action tonight. What else are we waiting for? In order to put the motion on the floor. Um, Councillor Jang. Um, just. We are, we are hoping that the board of fine, just in case it's not clear the board of finance. Um, if we're going to take action and make a recommendation tonight, we just simply, um, have not, uh, scheduled the matters concurrently, which used to be our sort of. Pre pandemic. I would see say best practice in case if there was not a need to, uh, take action from the full council. Um, there was often, you know, there were times there were complications that arose from having concurrent issues on, especially on issues with some complexity and significance like this, um, if there were changes that the board of finance recommended, that could be challenging. So this time, the schedule allowed us to spread it out and, and that's, that's why. Okay. Wonderful. So, uh, uh, thank you, uh, Jean Richard yesterday for taking the time to call me on the session. Really always appreciate that from department ads, um, to give people heads up and discuss this in details. Since we do not most of the time have time in here. I appreciate that. And was wondering if you can, uh, maybe go back two, three years before COVID and how much of a debt would, uh, accumulated by the Burlington airport. And also what is the total, um, the asset of the airport? What is it in on top of your head? Cause I just want to see the percentage of the debt and also the asset itself. So Marie, do you want to just tap on that a little bit and also hit, uh, how much we've paid down? Sure. So annually we pay about $3.6 million in debt. Principal and interest. That's combined. About 1.2 is interest alone. And the remainder is the principal. So every year we've been reducing the amount by about $2.4 million. So we've been reducing the amount of principal each and every year. So it's continued. This is debt that we refinanced, uh, in 2012 and in 2014, the airport, um, also had some refinanced debt as well. And this is, so we've, we've been making very good progress reducing that each and every year. Yeah, I think we've had a lot of money back in the past year. And I think we've had a lot of money back in the past year. Marie, can you also just talk about days of cash on hand that when we started and what we had. Yeah. His, would you like me to talk a little historically as well? Really, really quick. I know they're out of time. Okay. So historically from we'll say back in 2011, uh, 2012, the airport hadn't. Zero days cash on hand, effectively. They didn't have any cash. as of the end of June of this current fiscal year 2020, we had about 450 days cash on hand that did include the RAND, the Revenue Anticipation Note. The airport has been very prudent and thoughtful in increasing those days cash on hand. Okay, Nick, what's the value of the airport? Yep, so we did a recent study back in May 2019 associated with our master planning study, which valued the airport assets. As you requested, Councillor Jang, and that came in at about 600 million dollars on the asset value of the airport, including depreciation. It also went into some details of the economic impact of the airport as well, but the asset value came in at about that. Wonderful, guys. Thank you so much. Thank you. Further questions? Sorry. Go ahead, Councillor Mayne. I have one more. I just want to clarify the, this debt is not general obligation debt. This is revenue bond debt and does not pledge the full faith and credit of the city in issuance or does it? I'll answer that if I may. Yeah, thanks, Thomas. It does not. This is revenue debt. This is payable solely from the revenues of the airport after payment of operating expenses. So it does not pledge the full faith and credit of the city. Thank you. Just wanted to clarify. Thanks a lot. Thank you all. Okay. I'm not seeing further questions. So we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion. Sorry. We have a motion on the floor. Anybody moved it? No motion. No motion. Okay. Thank you, Councillor Jang. Councillor Powell, you'd like to move it? Yeah, sure. I'm happy to, I'll take the recommend, in the interest of time to move the recommended action. Okay. Thank you, Councillor Powell. Second from Councillor Pine. Again, any further debate? If not, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion. That is now properly on the floor. Please say aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you, airport team. Thank you for joining us. Thomas has been a while since we've had you. Good to see you. Okay. Thank you all. Have a good night. You too. Thank you. All right. That brings us to 5.05. Increase in the calendar year, 19 street reconstruction project budget. We have Laura Wheelock here and how the board like to proceed on this one. I'm going to have Chairman Spencer here as well. Councillor Pund. I would move to approve and recommend the city council authorize an increase in the calendar year, 19 street reconstruction project budget in the amount of 827,000. I think we're missing some decimal points there. We're not. 827 dollars? Is that really what it is? And 23 cents. Okay. For a new total project budget amount of 2,189,715 dollars and 78 cents with funding coming from the same FY 21 street capital fund. And secondly, to approve and recommend the city council authorize the director of DPW to execute the final change order with WITCOM construction up to a maximum limiting amount of 2,189,715 dollars and 78 cents to pay for the final expense. Okay. Councillor Pine, is there a second for that motion? Thank you, Councillor Jang. Discussion? President Tracy. Just wondering if we can get an explanation of like what happened here in terms of the overage in this and why and where it happened like what streets were talking about here that caused this to happen and what the challenge was that made it more expensive. Yep. So this contract as well as our sidewalk contract are a little bit different when we think about the use of contingency because they're reinvesting basically in a maintenance program for our infrastructure. So they are two contracts that we actually do try to use all of our contingency on to make best use of the funds that have been approved by you guys for this work type. So for the calendar year 19 contract late in the season we chose to use some of the contingency towards Batch Elder and the intersection of Maple Street and Union Street to fix some of the profiles, the grades and some drainage in that area. It was a unit priced contract. And so while it's advantage that the city generally gets a lower price bid on these it struggles from the fact that we don't have a true maximum cap. We kind of play a little bit of a game with estimating how much work is remaining how much is going to be billed versus how much is remaining fund-wise. So unfortunately the way that this contract ended which was back in 2019 there was some pavement markings that were still left to be done in the spring of 2020 which carried into the summer of 2020 with the pandemic and other closeout items in the contract. The pavement markings unfortunately was a bust in our estimating. We estimated for the existing markings on the street and we needed to estimate for the increase in the bike markings that were going down on our repaved streets. And so while we purposely chose to use all of our contingency to maximize our paving before winter we also are unfortunately suffering from some bad estimating on DPW's part in the contract. Okay. And one question that this raised for me is looking ahead to the next construction season how do you then plan for, I understand that construction costs are pretty volatile right now especially materials costs given supply chain issues. And so how do you plan for contingency in these circumstances? Like I guess how are you thinking of the next year's some of these investments and the costs associated in the coming year, recognizing that some of these typical models are really not necessarily as relevant as they once were. It is definitely an interesting guess I would say at this point in time there's not been a lot of bid projects to be able to understand how the market has changed. The only indication that I have so far is the late season bid that we had for Queen City Park Road was really very competitive and both of the bids that came in were below engineer's estimates. So despite materials being somewhat volatile we're also seeing really hungry contractors because they don't have as much private work. So on all honesty I'm not quite sure where our bid for paving and sidewalks and this work will come in this spring. We will be probably proposing add alternates so that we can make the most use of the funds that we are approved for for the fiscal year and do as much work as possible but not have to rebid any work ideally. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for all your work on this. Thank you, President Trissie. Excuse me. Further questions? Councilor Jang. Yeah, no further question but maybe a comment. And since this amour was so minimal I was just wondering why even we should have it as an agenda item. Could have just been a communication. Yeah, the original approval for the contract was more than $100,000 and as such any budget overages as our current Board of Finance and City Council approvals is written would have to come back to you. Thank you. But actually, I mean maybe City Attorney if we can should also put a cap if there are a little changes that is over 1,000 or 10,000 then it need to come back to us because how about it's like $59 should it come back to the council here again? I mean, there are two issues Councilor Jang that's one of them and I mean to understand this is over your contingency. So you already had a cushion in order to work with and this is going over that cushion. So I would hesitate for us to say you grant a cushion plus something in addition to that but that's a little hard but the big problem in this one is that it was spent before getting any approval and that's really not okay and that's why it has to come to you all and for you to say, okay, we've looked at this and we're making sure that city officials are doing what they're supposed to do and that they have as Councilor Tracy asked a good explanation for what happened and how they're gonna avoid it in the future. Okay, thank you. Okay. Okay. Good. If there are no further questions, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. There are any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Laura and Chapin. There is a communication regarding a donation that was made for the end of the year. If there's no desire to discuss that further, I think we've reached the end of the agenda and if there's no objection, I will adjourn the Board of Finance. Go ahead, Councilor Pine. Sorry, Mr. Mayor. I was looking at the accountability list because I know that the Community Development Committee has a number of items on that list and I noticed that there's an item on there about seniors that we probably should be coming back to. So seeing this note from Megan Humphrey just reminded me that we as a Council went on record saying we wanted to look at senior issues and plan more proactively around senior issues. It seems like it was about a year and a half ago, perhaps so a lot has happened and we've been busy a lot of other issues. We should definitely, we'll circle back on that but I just wanted to highlight this was a good reminder as well as looking at the accountability list for our committee. So we will be bringing up some senior issues here soon. Thank you. Is there anything else related to this final item? Seeing none, we are adjourned as a Board of Finance at 6.55 p.m. And see everybody shortly. And if I could just please be made host just so that we get to public forum, enable folks' mics. That would be awesome. And for members of the public who have already signed on, I see quite a few people. We'll be getting the Council meeting started in about five or so minutes. I'm trying to give councillors some time to get on there and then we'll start with some of the non-deliberative items first, moving then into our public forum closer to 7.30. We may get into that a little bit early given that we do have quite a few folks signed up. But yeah, I just wanted to give folks a chance for that but we'll take a short little break here. Folks are on this meeting, please stay on this meeting. This is the link that we'll use for the regular City Council meeting as well. So let's call to order the regular City Council meeting for January 4th at 7.03. I think we have everybody on who we're expecting to have on. So let's dive into the meeting. First item is the pledge. So let's go ahead and do the pledge. Okay, that brings us into our next item, our first item on the agenda, which is the agenda. May I please have a motion on the agenda, Councillor Stromberg. I move to amend and adopt the agenda as follows, add councillors Carpenter and Paul as co-sponsors of agenda item 5.02, resolution advisory ballot item, garden climate justice and building decarbonization, councillors Hanson, Stromberg, Pine, Tracy, per councilor Hanson, note revised version title change and add councillor Carpenter to agenda item 5.03, resolution ballot question authors, authorizing retail cannabis sales while addressing systemic racism and other equity concerns revised. Remove from the agenda item 5.04, resolution allowing state licensed cannabis retailers and integrated licensees to operate within the city of Burlington, Councillor Carpenter per Councillor Carpenter, note recommended action for agenda item 5.05, communication Mayor Murrow Weinberger regarding veto of charter change, regarding police community control board to reconsider the resolution pursuant to charter section 46, per city attorney Blackwood, no email from Peter Clavel regarding transforming police services for this agenda item per COS Riddell. Thank you, Councillor Stromberg. We have a motion on the agenda. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Mason. Any discussion of our agenda this evening? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of adopting the agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, hearing none, that passes unanimously and we now have our agenda. Our next item on the agenda is the public forum. However, we usually try to get to that closer to 730. As I said before, we may get to that a few minutes early but I did just want to also go to some of the non-deliberative items first and take care of those and then once we get through those I'll can circle back to public forum. So I'll move to item number three which are the climate emergency reports. Did any Councillors have a climate emergency report that they'd like to offer? Okay, seeing none, I will move past that item and then move down to our item number six which is committee reports. Are there any committee chairs interested in offering a report on their committee's business? Councillor Paul, go ahead. Thanks very much and happy new year to everyone. Just wanted to update the council on the fact the Park, Parks, Art and Culture Committee has not had a meeting in a couple of months mostly due to the tremendous amount of workload that has befallen a couple of the committee members and but we will be scheduling a meeting in mid January. Don't have the date quite yet but we'll be able to pass that along at the next council meeting. One will be reviewing highlight and also do have a further update on the mural going into the spring. So be able to give that further information in a couple of weeks. Thanks so much. Excellent. Any other committee chairs interested in giving a committee report? Okay. Oh, Councillor Pine, go ahead. Sure, I just wanted to mention that I was looking through our list to do list as Lori Olberg keeps us on task with the accountability list that's on our agenda and notice that our committee community development neighborhood revitalization has several items that have been on there for some time and so we'll be tackling them. One of them I just wanted to call your attention to is about a year ago a group of citizens including some counselors and some folks from senior organizations that serve seniors got together and suggested that the city place greater emphasis on the needs of our aging population in Burlington. So it's an issue that there's not a lot of detail or specificity to what we should do although it did say we should create a senior advisory council. I'm not sure if that's the path we'll take but I just want to at least let you all know that that wasn't forgotten. It was nearly off the list for a little while but not due to it not being important just because we had other business we were attending to and we'll be bringing that back after the committee gets a chance to talk about that. Thank you. Great thank you very much Councillor Pine. Any additional committee reports? Okay seeing none let's drop down to city council general city affairs. Anyone interested in commenting on general city affairs? Councillor Hanson go ahead. Great thanks I maybe could have done this one in committee reports too. It's a little bit ward one specific perhaps but there is going to be a meeting regarding potential changes on Colchester Avenue. That's going to be next Monday, 6.30 to 8.30 p.m. over Zoom. It's the Colchester Ave. Bikeways, parking and intersection safety group that's going to be meeting and I'm the council representative on that group and Councillor Hightower is the Councillor alternate on that and we're working with some public works commissioners and residents on that if anyone's interested. Thanks. Thank you Councillor Hanson. Anyone else wishing to speak to general city affairs? Okay seeing none. Oh Councillor Pine go ahead. Thank you I was going to wait and see if either any of the councillors who organized the food distribution event last week were going to speak up but I would just say thank you very much to councillors Paul and Mason and I believe I don't know if Shannon was involved but I would say everybody who was involved I know I saw no review there. It was actually kind of remarkable and also quite sad to me in a sense because the number of cars that were queued up went to Flynn Avenue and beyond and they had to be told you know if you have a child in the school system you can come back to the meals program the high school and if you don't there is the food shelf and there's other resources but just the degree of need and the degree of folks who are feeling and experiencing incredible economic insecurity was very sobering and it just made me feel that we have a lot of work to do we have to redouble our efforts and our commitments to trying to move the trajectory and move the narrative and the needle on these issues so thank you, just wanted to thank folks for that. Thank you so much, I agree with was a wonderful event and I'll recognize councillor Paul next go ahead councillor Paul. Thanks very much, so you know we've done these we've been having these food distribution events just about every month since the pandemic began and chose to go a new route with this one we had it during the week the other ones have all been on Saturdays and in between Christmas and New Year's the councillor Pine is absolutely correct the response was beyond overwhelming we had the most bags of groceries that we have had in doing all of these food events and it was nowhere near enough to meet the demand and our planning are already planning for January and hoping to increase that at least 50% in order to be able to accommodate a greater need. I just wanted to not only to thank councillor Mason who has been a tireless councillor involved in these efforts from the beginning but also councillor Carpenter who came out of the new North end to come to the South end when asked and has been tremendously instrumental in bringing these to life and then also just wanted to recognize ward six resident and someone that I would imagine many of you are familiar with Shannon Jackson who came into this effort at the second food distribution and we could not do these events without him. So just also wanted to thank that. Also councillor Pine, President Tracy and Mayor Weinberger who were also at the event. Thank you to all of you and to the many volunteers. We had a record number of volunteers. I think one of the things I also wanted to mention it didn't come to my attention until someone alerted me to the fact that in talking about how broken our system is and how incredibly dire food insecurity is that our Senator Bernie Sanders on the floor of the Senate actually mentioned the food distribution event at Champlain Elementary as yet sadly as yet another example of how much work we have left to do. So thanks very much. Very much appreciate that councillor Paul, councillor Jane, go ahead. Thank you. On top of the food distribution I think in the new North end too there is this particular individual. His name is Thomas Fleury who is doing an incredible job. And every Saturday this is ongoing. This is every single day and we have a food pantry here and with his leadership I think councillor Paulino and also carpenter has been instrumental in supporting the people in need here and it's ongoing. I don't know how he's doing it but he needs a great wonderful thank you from the city. I think also all the community members such as Melissa Kane is doing an amazing job supporting people during COVID-19 in terms of food distribution, winter closing drive for new Americans and low income families. I think those are incredible people that we all need to at least send a card to say thank you for the great work you've been doing behind the scenes. That's one. And the second thing, I think we are city council's elected officials and we were all divided in committees. Some of them we are interested in. And I think what councillor Paul was talking about the PAC has not met for months now and highlight has passed and we have no idea. I think we need to be really mindful for these committees to keep on going. Doesn't matter what, we all stay from home, we can meet from home, get regular updates from department heads about what's going on. I think it is unacceptable and we need to be mindful as we move forward to have these committees keep on going and also do the great work. Just wanted to put that out there. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else wishing to speak to city council general affairs? Okay, seeing none. We'll move on to city council president update. One thing that I did want to just cover and remind folks about because I do see some confusion around the public forum email that we use sometimes. So if folks are interested in signing up for public forum, that's not the way you do it. You sign up for public forum by going to burlingtonvt.gov slash city council slash public forum both city council and public forum are one word. And that will take you to a forum that you fill out that feeds into a Google sheet that I then use to organize and call off the public forum. So that's how you sign up for public forum itself. If you are interested in sending a message to the entire city council, the best way to do that is to send an email to the email city council. So city council one word at burlingtonvt.gov. So I just want folks to be clear on that if you're wishing to send a message easily to all counselors without having to put all their emails in. That's a really easy way to do it. So just wanted to clarify that because sometimes I see a little confusion around that there. So with that, I will now go to mayor Weinberger if you are ready, mayor, for your update. Otherwise, if you'd like to give it later on in the meeting, you're welcome to do that as well. Looks like, okay, you're ready. Go ahead. Yes, thank you, president Tracy. I just really would like to speak to two items at this point. One, I want to congratulate the Burlington city arts team and the many hundreds of partners really that they worked with to arrange a New Year's Eve. Unlike any other, from everything I've heard and witnessed myself, highlight was a resounding success. In fact, I've had some constituent request suggesting that we should do something like this every Friday night and that it really created a real sense of community and ability to see many other Burlingtonians and Vermonters in action and their element in a really unique way. It was a treat for me to see some of my 14 year old daughters. One of her friends performing in front of hundreds of people. It was great. So thank you to everyone who worked on that. If the council or the public does have any feedback, further feedback on it as we kind of debrief from this and figure out where to go from here with highlight, that would be awesome to get that. I should have started by saying happy New Year to you all and to everyone who's tuned in with us tonight. It's this 2021, I'm certainly hopeful we'll have much better year than the one we are closing. And I started with a lot of optimism about where we're headed. That said, right now, I think we really can't miss any opportunity but to remind ourselves and to be clear with each other that we are still in what is probably gonna be the toughest month of this pandemic from a public health perspective, virus cases continue to be rising or at a very high level, maybe slightly plateauing nationally. We've seen, we continue to be doing far better than just about any other community as a city, but we have infection levels at higher rates than we experienced until the beginning of November. And looming out there is this new strain of the virus which we are all still trying to figure out its implications and understand the science of it. But we are back in a period of some uncertainty of not really having good science on this new strain and it's dangers and what it exactly means. So I raise that and I will be speaking more later in the week on this to say that it is just a further indication that even as tired as we all are of these COVID provisions, we gotta stay vigilant in the month of January, continue to be mindful of all of the steps we have talked about for so many months. Any death at this point is particularly tragic given that the imminent arrival of the virus, of the vaccine really means that in a real way and a way that wasn't the case earlier in the pandemic, all deaths are potentially preventable now. But to prevent as many as we can, we've gotta continue to do the hard work, stay strong until the vaccine arrives. Hopefully we'll have more positive news on the vaccine front soon. And my office will continue to have COVID updates in the week's end. Thank you President Tracy. Thank you so much Mayor, I appreciate the updates from you and other counselors on General City Affairs, committee reports and all of that. We are a little ahead of 7.30, but I was just checking. I mean, we do have a lot of our first speakers already signed on to the meeting. So I am gonna just start public forum a little bit early if someone isn't on or we're not able to locate them, I will certainly go back to them. With this public forum, as has been our practice, I've prioritized BIPOC community members as well as Burlington residents. So if you're a non-Burlington resident, we are prioritizing Burlington residents first in this public forum. One of the things that I would ask is that people, please speak to the issues, keep it as focused on the issues on our agenda as possible or other issues that you wish to speak to, but please focus on issues in this meeting and we're gonna give two minutes as a time limit for folks. I do let folks finish their thoughts, but we do have quite a few people signed up for public forum tonight. So please just be mindful of that, wanting to make sure that we give as many people as possible the opportunity to comment this evening. So please just be mindful of that as you're speaking tonight. But again, I will let you finish your thought, but just please try and stay as close to that two minutes as you can. And with that, I'll ask if we could please get the timer up. I'll go into our public forum really quick. And thank you to Holly Bushnell, who's gonna be operating our timer this evening. Very much appreciate that. Let me get into the sheet really quickly, just to read off the first 10 or so commenters, just so that folks know who is coming up. So our first speaker will be Ashley LaPorte to be followed by Jessica LaPorte, Jada Bearden, C.D. Madison, Katarina Campbell, Infinite Cochleisure, Brian Chena, Deirdre Graham, Rhiannon, and Alyssa Chen. So I'm gonna locate Ashley LaPorte. I have found Ashley. Ashley, I'm gonna be, I've enabled your microphone, so you should be able to speak. Hello, President Tracy and the rest of city council. My name is Ashley LaPorte. I live in the south end in Ward 5 in Burlington. Calling tonight once again to ask this council to uphold your vote to pass community control of police and to push back against the mayor's most recent veto. At the core of it, we have hundreds of residents across Burlington who are engaging with our democracy and are looking to build a system of police accountability. And we're being kept from bringing this new system of accountability to a vote in March. It's really that simple. I thought it might be helpful to remind people of the facts, which is that over the summer, this council voted nine to three to pass the racial justice resolution and in the fall, passed a protesting and public safety resolution, both of which called for a revision to the city charter relating to police discipline. Over the past few months, some of us got to work on this. We engaged hundreds of community members to ask them what they wanted when it comes to holding the police accountable. We called into city council meetings, charter change committee meetings, joint committee meetings. We emailed and called and zoomed with city councilors. In short, we operated inside of our democracy. After a summer where we were all actually safely making good trouble out in the streets as inspired by John Lewis and others, we then turned and followed the other half of his example and got to work inside of the system. And many of us hadn't done that much before. We did it in good faith, hoping that the democracy would work for us. We talked to lawyers to the ACLU of Vermont. We did our own research on other models of community oversight of police in cities like Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin. And then we handed off the work to all of you, our elected officials, trusting you to take the next step in the process so that all of the residents of Brownington could vote on the policy this spring. But that's honestly when things started going off the rails. It's when people started coming out of the woodworks and I think we're honestly shocked that black and brown people had worked with elected officials to put a legal, viable solution on the table. A solution that both affords do process to police officers and puts the power of oversight and discipline into the hands of our community. And it's when the obstruction started. First, the rerouting of the policy that passed out of the Charter Change Committee to the Joint Committee. Then a resolution to get even more outside input from folks like Nacol. And then the misrepresentation of an opinion of a senior staff attorney at the ACLU. Then an unvetted memo from a couple of police commissioners attempting to speak on behalf of the entire joint committee. And even then the community continued to show up and fight for the policy that we created with counselor Freeman. We in fact got the backing from Nacol. Some brave members of the police commission publicly spoke out clarifying that they support community control of police. But most importantly, hundreds of us called into public forum and spoke through midnight to support the community control. And then this council passed the policy with a seven to five vote. But even after all of this, we are now facing a veto because the mayor believes that what? He personally knows better because what he doesn't believe that Burlington residents should be able to vote for what's best for us. That we should not be privy to participating in public panels to continue to discuss and revise a policy that will serve us. The massive tone shift coming from the mayor and the police chief as of late around public safety is so manipulative and it's so problematic. The people who should be afraid in this city are black and brown people. The data is telling us that, that we should be afraid of our own police department because the Burlington police department is harming us more. And the people who are experiencing houselessness and those with mental illness and other marginalized folks. If you're gonna fear monger, do it with the facts. The mayor and those who represent his office have continuously pushed back on a completely independent board with investigatory and disciplinary power and specifically are calling for the police chief to be more involved. And the mayor's memo is published on New Year's Eve. He states, the removal of the police chief from having a role in all serious disciplinary decisions is unique within all models we have reviewed and it impacts the operations of the department. That to me states that he's interested in a policy that gives the chief more power than the one that was originally passed through this council. My conversations with the mayor's police transformation director have only further solidified this. How is it that the mayor thinks we would trust in the police chief, this one, or the four interim ones before him or the social media harassing police chiefs before that? All the data shows us that these people, these policemen are the ones and the ones leading the department are the one disproportionately harming black residents. This old system is decidedly not serving us. And in the memo, the mayor asks that he himself have more power in overseeing the police. It is he says, and I quote, it is so problematic that the proposal does not increase the ability of the mayor to formally weigh in on disciplinary matters, despite the concerns about this that I raised repeatedly for a year. The mayor wants more power because why? He's done such a good job building trust in the community. He's pushed back on our efforts to reduce police funding. He brought his own guy to do police transformation work that has zero prior experience and is being paid by the police. And we know that now that the mayor had a really problematic role in the del pozo debacle. I know I am way over time, but I wanted to make sure that we're starting this conversation tonight with the facts clearly laid out. And these facts are stated above, not among not any of the political storytelling and propaganda during the mayor election year will change the facts. The fact is that the people are speaking and the mayor is willing to silence us to defend the status quo. But I deserve better than the status quo. My community deserves better than the status quo. In the end, all we have is us. We know that. We feed each other by a mutual aid. We hear each other and love each other with unconditional love. We inspire and nourish each other with our divine gifts of poetry and art. We're peaceful. We are brilliant and we're resilient. So I hope you'll choose to be with us and stand up to this veto. Thank you, Councillor Freeman, for creating this with us and for always standing with us. To the Councillors who already voted yes, Councillor Hightower, Tracy, Hanson, Strongberg, Pine, and Dang, thank you for taking part in our collective liberation. To the rest of you, I hope you choose to be in community with us. I promise you, it's much more fun and fulfilling and healthy than maintaining this current toxic status quo. We welcome you. Thank you. Thank you for that. And again, if folks can please really try and keep to the two minutes so that we can get to as many speakers as possible. Jess Laporte is our next speaker to be followed by Jada Bearden. Jess, I've enabled your microphone. Hi, would you be able to put me after CD Madison or a couple down the list? Sure, yeah, I'm happy to do that. That's okay. I'm gonna go to Jada Bearden next to be followed by CD Madison. So Jada, I have enabled your microphone. Thank you, President Maxx. My name is Jada Bearden. I use they them pronouns, excuse me. I would first like to share a quote from author Ajiomolua when we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else's oppression will find our opportunities to make real change. To the five counselors who previously voted no, tonight is your opportunity. I see you. I understand the discomfort you may feel regarding the charter change. And I hope you can hear me when I tell you that there is a huge difference between being uncomfortable and being traumatized. The possibility of you five sustaining the mayor's veto traumatizes me. The cognitive dissonance of declaring racism as a public health crisis, while simultaneously hindering anti-racist progress traumatizes me. Living in Burlington without community control of police traumatizes me. Having only two minutes to convey the overwhelming anxiety I feel when I think of a potential increase in police presence traumatizes me. Right now I'm considering moving back to Texas, but this is not just a Burlington issue. This was never about politics for me. This is about staying alive. Tonight you five have the opportunity to choose democracy. Tonight you can vote to sustain BIPOC lives. Your move counselors. Thank you. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. Our next speaker will be CD Madison. CD, I'm enabling your microphone. Good evening everyone. There is no question that transformative change of policing is required to save lives and deliver racial justice for a BIPOC community for whom the dignity of equal justice and recognition of our humanity have been denied for far too long. Doing nothing is untenable and is not an option. Mayor Weinberger made clear in his memo that he would not veto the charter change over his request to increase the ability of the mayor to formally weigh in on major disciplinary matters despite his concern that the public holds and we are accountable for police disciplinary decisions. This specific request is not about Mayor Weinberger. This is about the success of the oversight policy in and of itself. Regarding NACOL, National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. They make clear that the most important factor for the success of the oversight system is involving all stakeholders. Specifically, the rapport between the chief players, oversight director, chief elected official, for example, the mayor, police chief or sheriff and union president can be far more important to the success of the oversight system than the system structure. My concern is that all stakeholders have not been invited to the table or heard. The charter change on the table is outside of NACOL's recommendations and model. For NACOL, within the current oversight landscape, few existing oversight agencies have the authority to make final determinations as to the outcome of an investigation. Excuse me for a second. My frustration and hope is that there's an opportunity to do right by the people and deliver a charter change framework for oversight with ordinances that allow policy to adjust as needed. Creating an overly detailed and flexible charter change will create unintended public safety consequences regarding the city's ability to be nimble and responsive as the policy impact plays out. Mayor Weinberger and city council members who voted against the charter change as it stands have reached out and initiated several opportunities to amend the proposed policy so that it can protect black and brown people against disproportionate policing. Their asks promote an extensible flexible framework that can respond and adjust as needed via ordinance changes, which unlike a charter change do not require a citywide vote. Every city council member and the mayor agree on this point. Doing nothing is not an option. Compromise is needed. Flexibility is needed. The gap in my reading of the mayor's memo is bridgeable between the mayor's ask regarding his policy concerns and the charter change as it now stands. My ask as a community member is that all parties recognize the shared position and find a way to get to yes. This charter change will be put to a citywide vote. I want it to deliver a substantive change and I want it to pass. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Katarina Campbell to be followed by Infinite Co-Cleasure. Katarina, I've found you and have enabled your microphone. Good evening, beloved community. I'm here to discuss the mayor's December 31st memo about his decision to veto the proposed charter change. I too noticed the statement that, quote, removal of the chief of police from having a role in all serious disciplinary decisions, end quote, is a cause for, quote, deep concern, end quote. While the charter change would require the chief of police to focus more on prevention, accountability and culture change over force and discipline to claim that this would entirely remove their role and power in the disciplinary process is unfounded. There's a framework for understanding within the anti-violence movement and advocacy that those who create harm tend to believe that they are powerless when denied unmitigated power explicitly on their terms. This is an emergent theme within the memo. It is important that we recognize the tactics used against us. I do not argue that the mayor is consciously malicious. First, the obvious, bait and switch. The mayor shares his difficulty to reach agreement on the, quote, remaining differences, end quote. He posits an alternative plan that could be enacted immediately through existing channels. In short, the memo communicates that the work up to this point could not bring forth an actionable proposal. The mayor's alternative plan manages to evade the core demands of our people and reinstates power and authority of those already with disproportionate control who are key participants in past harm. So what are we talking about here? We are talking about putting the will of the people to ballot. I am so proud of our people for all the ways we show up and continue to build toward our freedom. The will of the people has been collaboratively captured in this charter change and deserves to be put to vote within our community. I yield my time, thank you. Our next speaker is infinite co-cleanser to be followed by representative China, infinite or enabling your microphone. Thank you, Councillor Tracy. And thank you, Mayor Wonberger for the second veto in just about two months in showing all the peasants who the boss is. It kind of reminds me of all the signatures that were rejected by the city council when concerned voters came forward with a different proposal for City Park. And so I really hope that this might be the signal for Brawleton voters to move in the same direction of just about every other city, a town in Vermont where the voters have the power and authority to pass or reject referendums and increase civic participation across the city. Today, police accountability might be the central issue but tomorrow in the next year, in the next generation, the underlying issue will be a small number of people who are not representative of the larger community making decisions for everybody. We need another path to democracy that doesn't rest on one person's veto. Please check out propositionzero.org and sign our petition. We need 3,000 signatures in order to have referendums in the city of Burlington, like Winooski, like Essex, like Colchester and a whole lot of other towns across Vermont. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Brian Cina to be followed by Deirdre Graham. Brian, I've enabled your microphone and you should be able to speak. All right, I think it's working. So I would like to respond to the mayor's memo regarding the veto and ask the city council to override the veto. In the memo, the mayor says that in the short term, placing the charter change on the ballot is likely to accelerate the departures of sworn officers from the department. Well, this departure is already happening and it isn't gonna stop unless we move forward with reimagining public safety. The police officers need to see how they fit into a system that truly takes care of the people instead of being used as pawns to protect the property in interest of those with the most money, property and power in the city. And let's look at the numbers of what the police are actually doing. They're responding to overdoses and mental health crises, housing crisis. We don't need more police. We need mental health services, universal housing, economic opportunity for people. We need to take care of each other better not to police each other more. And the mayor mentions that over the medium and long-term, the charter change if adopted will have an even greater impact on the city's ability to field and effective police department. Well, why would we want police officers who are afraid of community oversight? Why would we want a police chief who's unwilling to accept community control of the police? We need to recruit workers in leadership of the police department who are willing to embrace the reimagining of public safety that's needed at this moment in history. And the mayor says, while getting police discipline right is critical, we must expand our focus if we truly seek to secure different policing outcomes. I do agree. Let's expand our focus. Let's reimagine public safety. 10 years ago, mayor, you came and visited us on Isham Street to see what we were doing with community gardening. And over the last 10 years, crime rates on our street have dropped 30 to 60% due to our mutual aid without any changes to policing. All the changes that have happened to policing didn't have an impact. It was the mutual aid. It got to the point that the police wanted to work with us to expand the smile around the city, but we didn't get the grant. Why not continue this work to explore alternatives to the police? Ultimately, I'd just like to thank all of the activists, especially the BIPOC activists and extra, especially the Blackfems and gender non-conforming leaders. I just want you all to remember that although we may lose a battle tonight, this is only one moment in time in a war against us that has gone on for 400 years. Remember that the ancestors are standing here with us tonight and we will continue to fight for collective liberation and their footsteps. Regardless of the outcome tonight, we all have to live together in the city and we're all gonna have to figure this out together. So please override the mayor's veto and let's move forward with reimagining public safety for the city. Thank you. Thank you, Representative China. Our next speaker, I couldn't find Deirdre Graham, so I'm gonna go to Rhiannon. I believe I've located you. So I'm gonna enable your mic and Rhiannon is to be followed by Alyssa Chen. Can you hear me? Yes, I can, go ahead. Hi, I'm Rhiannon Wiley. I'm a resident of Ward 6. So I guess councillors Karen Paul and Joan Shannon pay special attention. So I wanna speak today on that revote for the charter change in light of the mayor's veto. I just wanna say, my understanding is that this charter change is meant to give us as a community a way of holding our public servants accountable after years of them brutalizing our residents of color without recourse. And now we can't even vote on it as a community because of this veto. That's, it's incredibly paternalistic and to be honest, that's fundamentally undemocratic. The mayor said in his memo that this charter change is divisive and that it'll compromise public safety because it's gonna lead to decrease in the number of police officers. Who's public safety is he talking about? Did you see that recent use of force data that just came out that said like 28% of those that the Burlington Police Department used force on in the last year were black? Like, have you seen that graph, the graph in Vermont Digger showing how the disproportionate rate at which the police have been using force on black people in our community has been increasing steadily over the last few years. Saying that you're not going to allow community accountability of the police department because it's quote unquote detrimental to public safety is just coded language for saying, I prioritize the anxieties of white residents over the rights of black Burlingtonians to live here without being assaulted by police officers. The mayor says that he wants to work on a resolution to address disciplinary authority over the police. He's had every opportunity to champion concrete policy to ameliorate racism in the city and he's dragged his feet. How can any of us trust him to actually do that? Counselors, I call on you to vote and provide a veto proof majority to allow this charter change on the ballot because I know you genuinely do care about this community. And we live in a democracy so we should act like it. Don't allow him to override this charter change with his veto. I'm done. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Alyssa Chen to be followed by Adam. So Alyssa, I have located you and have enabled your microphone. Hello, this is Alyssa Chen speaking. You see her pronouns and I live in Ward 2 and I'm a biracial Asian white resident of Burlington and I've read through Murrow's memo and I just have a few comments to give on it. And I just really want to encourage either Murrow not to veto or for the city council to override that veto. Murrow, I find it interesting that you state in the first line of the memo that you're vetoing primarily because it compromises the city's ability to ensure public safety. I think that the real thing compromising the ability of the city to do public safety is a lack of public oversight that has allowed officers under your watch over the past several years in your mayorship to act with impunity as we've seen in many of the cases of police brutality. The only accountability that took place was through countless hours of BIPOC-led protests. What we were trying to do here is systematize this accountability. Murrow, in your memo, you bring up the concern of police leaving the force at a quick rate. I want to build on what Brian Cheena said and that this to us should not be a concern. It should be an opportunity to door for transformation. Videoing this charter change is putting the brakes on the transforming public safety that's taking place in Burlington. And it's putting our values into the police instead of the transformative systems of mutual aid, affordable housing, mental health and civic engagement that can actually keep us safe. Murrow, at the end of your statement, you stated a hope to reconcile between the police and the BIPOC community. What you need to recognize is that in order to reconcile a situation, what you need is accountability. Accountability that can ensure that the harm that has occurred is not going to continue to occur. And that accountability is the goal of this charter change. In videoing this charter change, you're overriding the city council and also the overwhelming movement of our nation and our city. In choosing to veto this charter change, you're acting in a paternalistic way of thinking that you and your elite class of people know better than the mass. Please let us practice and use our democracy and stop hoarding your power all to yourself. Thank you. Our next speaker is Adam. And I appreciate you identifying yourself, Adam. I will enable your microphone, but just wanted to read off a few more speakers who to follow just so that folks have a little bit of an idea if they're coming up. So I have following Adam, Luis Rosario, Zanavia W, Jess Laporte, Zoe Keninger, or Zoe Keninger, I'm sorry, Tia Hunt, Daniel Muntianu, Grace Field, Marissa, James Lent, Maxwell Solter, Lauren Akin, William Keaton, Dana Keys Gibbons, Rachel Gallus, Nell Carpenter, William Emmons. So Adam, I'm gonna come to you and enable your microphone. Hi, my name is Adam. I'm a resident of Ward 2 and I'm here to voice my support for charter change around police control. The first generation American who grew up in a state as white as this, Burlington initially seemed like a place where issues like police accountability are taken seriously. This does not reflect in the city's government. The Bakery Park Movement has shown what change the community stands for. This charter change could reflect that. Mayor Murrow expresses concern about public safety with a reduced police department. However, police use of force against black individuals is not only disproportionately high, but also increased this last year. The public safety concern that I have is when my friends, members of my community are unsafe from the police and there is still no change. Putting this charter change to public hearing will allow this issue to be solved out and democratically. Thank you. I yield my time. Thank you. I have Luis Rosario next to be followed by Xenavia W. Luis, I have enabled your microphone. Yep, go ahead. Two seconds. All right. My name is Luis Rosario. I live in the south end of Burlington in Ward 5. I've lived in Vermont for the past seven years. I've lived in Wanooski and Burlington. I'm originally from New York City and I grew up in a strong Dominican family. I was raised by my mother, my grandmother and sister. I typically don't engage in local politics, but I've been getting more involved in Burlington since the lynching of George Floyd and the passing of the racial justice resolution this summer. I'm still having to be in community with BIPOC in Burlington. This movement has brought us all together and made us brave enough to raise our voices against the status quo and systems of power, which is why I'm appalled, but not shocked at the blatant fear-mongering misinformation and backdoor politics that occur among some of you. Meryl's attempt to pander to his base by spreading of substantiated claims of that community control of police will cause police officers to quit in an ability to secure public safety and it's designed to be, quote, hostile to the police, is absurd. The mayor's memo never takes into account that community control of police will bring the type of officers that know that they're not above the law and truly want to help everyone in the community and not just be the king's guard and hopefully avoid another deposal situation. That public safety is already ensured by the people, good citizens all over Burlington keep each other safe way before ever calling a cop and as far as for community control of police being hostile to the police, that's just a statement of a fragile man projecting while punching downward. I call on the council to override this unjust veto from the mayor beyond the side of the people. Thank you. Okay, our next speaker will be Xenavia Wilcox to be followed by Jess Laporte. Hi. Before I start, just real quick, wanting to give another heads up just to look for Deirdre. I think it's very important that we get all the BIPOC voices on this call tonight. Hey, my name's Xenavia and the movement they call me Z. Assuming that you haven't been listening, we've made sure that you could see that the people have spoken to the unjust system yet we agree is broken. I talked to many of you, a clear opportunity to hear exactly what we need. What to do for this community to ensure black life can exceed and proceed in an environment historically we were never meant to. This isn't a speech about police discipline refuted by all the things that I've been through. You choose whether we get a seat at the table. Maybe I got to switch to my tone with police. I acknowledge I may speak with too much in my chest for black bodies being hunted, a white hobby for white bodies in blue vests. This feeling is familiar, generational even, for centuries past. This idea that even your heroes were told no, fighting for what's right will obviously make you feel like an outcast. But like the Audrey Lords and Nicky Giovanni's, I have my community. If you keep looking for the perfect and good, your morale and intention will be left lonely. As far as the police chief, I just want to know how do you sleep? With zero regard for your hypocrisy, beating and collecting black bodies, politics starts to feel like a game of monopoly. Every day we lose trust. Knowing you don't protect us like you do your property, probably I'm writing you all off. As council Shannon says, we're in this together, whether we like it or not. We can agree to disagree, but when the city shouting justice for Z, where will you be? Just sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner. And remember you are what you eat. Veto this proposal and you may lose our trust, but just know that you didn't believe in people power, the voice of majority on behalf of the minority. However tonight goes, however this unfolds, we define defeat. We've made our moves in public with no need to be discreet. Max Holder chaired with my name on it, because in 2021 I'm taking my seat. Tonight, we've spoken all we've needed to. You've heard us, our voices from the top of the hills and mountains, I'm not asking for a yes today. I don't care if you say no, because I'm still gonna be doing what the fuck I'm doing today, tomorrow. I'm asking you for once, let me take my seat. Thank you. I do appreciate the location of Deirdre. I was able to find Deirdre. I'll come to you right after Jessica LaPorte, who I also have in the queue, to go back to you. So Jessica, I'm gonna come to you and then I'll go to Deirdre Graham. So Jessica, I've enabled your microphone. My name is Jessica LaPorte and I know all the city councillors are familiar with me. I use she, her pronouns. I'm a biracial black femme that lives in Burlington. I recently moved back to Vermont and I've been highly engaged in racial equity work in the city and informing myself at a statewide level since I returned and honestly, before that, I remember being in Haiti, reading about the Bella Vance case and Bella Vance and Coro and Campbell, actually each in their own turn, but I remember specifically the Bella Vance case, reading about it from a distance and asking myself like who's fighting this and wanting to know who the warriors were that were going to stand up to power and ask for change. And then I remember reading about Douglas Kilburn's murder and I remember thinking like, where is the accountability gonna be? That this is my home city and my home state and honestly, growing up here, I wasn't always aware of these dynamics. I wasn't educated to be. I was in socialized to be. I was told that Vermont is different and that these things don't happen here. And it took being an adult and following really history and current events to understand that these pervasive tenants of white supremacy are really everywhere. Even in a black nation like Haiti, which I've called my second home for over six years. They're everywhere. They're so pervasive. They're a part of what makes it so hard to participate in the public process as somebody who is not white. So I know I'm going to go over my time, but I just wanna address what the experience of bringing this proposal forward to the city council and the hope of bringing it forward to the public has meant to me. When we were calling for the firing of these three officers time and time again, the mayor and the city council came back to one thing, which was the city charter that gave sole hiring and firing power to the police chief. And now somehow we're having a conversation about how this should be solved in ordinances, changing the rules every single day and every single week. When we knew that it was the charter change that had to happen, many of us diligently worked to understand what that even meant. Many of us sent around a definition, first asked what it was, and then sent around a definition to our comrades is this is what the city charter is. We've been informing ourselves and researching. One of our comrades put together a review of similar policies around the country that was strikingly similar to what attorney Blackwood put together. It called for many of the same cities. It summarized many of the same parts. It was purely out of a desire to understand how we could create a better system. And then we engaged in a public process, in public forum, and yes, we dominated. Our movement in Burlington and our supporters across the city dominated the charter change meetings, participated in multiple committees, and came back to the city council, each and every meeting with our demands. What I didn't hear was overwhelming dissent for the position that we were bringing forward. There were always a few dissenting voices that would speak up, and they were honestly drowned out by the support for what we were proposing. And I asked myself, why weren't they there? Like when this was in the charter change and maybe Joan Shannon as the lone Democrat on that committee was maybe drowning in opposition, like where were the other four dissenting voters on this final proposal? Why didn't they engage? Why weren't they involved? Why weren't they speaking up or maybe even supporting their own team member? I would hate to be as lonely as Councillor Shannon was. Then we move on and we go into and we go to the city council for this to be voted on. And yet again, there were a couple of dissenting voices and I asked myself, why weren't they there? And the answer is clear. They don't have to show up and put their names on public record. They don't have to waste their Monday evenings and their Tuesdays and their Wednesdays and their Thursdays coming to these meetings because they already have the ear of people in power. They're having offline conversations. They're texting, they're having phone calls. They already have access to the very ears that we are diligently raising our demands to. And so when I am faced over and over and over again with there isn't popular support for this, then where are they in the public process? The public process from here, from the passing vote in December, should be that we go to public hearings, which are another opportunity for any dissenting voice to show up. It's an opportunity to get educated and informed. Our movement held public webinars, trying to inform people in the public of what a charter change was, of what community control of police meant, of why different tenants are important. We brought in experts and we shared the information widely. We have not done anything in hiding from this proposal. I just wanna end by saying that I am particularly dismayed by the mayor's last-minute interventions twice in the past month. One, on the very night that this proposal was intended to be voted on when the public was ready to speak on this item, added his own memo and his own counter proposal for the public to somehow digest and react to live when we wouldn't have another opportunity before the actual vote. And second, on the 31st of December, with very limited ability to engage before this meeting on the 4th of January, that is not due public process. That is knowing that you want to circumvent the process and using whatever power you already have to get your way. Please allow this to be a public process. I would like to see this go to public hearing and then hopefully to the ballot after multiple revisions. Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna go to Deirdre Graham next. Deirdre, I've enabled your microphone. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Hi, my name's Deirdre Graham. I'm a chair pronoun. I'm a Ward 3-5 Park resident. I've been broke for the past year and a half. I've been a Vermont resident for eight years and I'm a frontline essential worker. To the counselors who opposed the community control police for the first time, Shannon, Paul, Julieno, Mason, Carpenter, and Miramira, my comments tonight are specifically for you. I was heartbroken and extremely frustrated when I heard about the marriage plan to Guido that's a proposal. And I can't say I was surprised, especially after the past two weeks of rhetoric describing walking back and details of the racial justice resolution past the summer. And especially since it's now been also seen deliberately hidden from public eye, conveniently pushed in the middle of holidays, almost missed this process with knowingly and chain-free, undemocratic, we would just say I was very upset. Based on what I've read in the marriage, a number of those responses from fellow counselors seemed to support with far too radical to get behind. Particularly this model, there's no role for a chief of police, which is hard for me to understand as this model clearly describes impartial constitutional due process for police officers who have committed offenses. It's become clear that many people have forgotten why so many community members with support from credible organizations have been advocating for community controlled police. Systemic violence against our community has been committed at the hands of BPD. People have died, people have been abused, people continue to suffer, especially Black people. And violent racist officers remain on the force in the streets. All this amidst the backdrop of new empirical evidence demonstrating that Black people continue to be disproportionately affected by use of force in BPD. And I've not heard one person who disagrees with the hard fact that there is ramp and distrust of the police in the community, particularly historically marginalized groups, Black, Indigenous, other people of color, unhoused community members, LGBTQ folks, people with disabilities, migrant workers, just to name some. You cannot continue your attempts to gaslight us from the utterly valid reasons. We continue to seek path forward from these outdated racist systems. This has never been about politics. We see through what you're doing. We see you performing with supremacy. And at the end of the day, we just want true public safety for everyone. This charter change should be a democratic process and they urge you to support the current proposal for community controlled police. Even if you don't, we will never give up. Black lives matter. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Zoe Keninger to be followed by Tia Hunt. Zoe, I've enabled your microphone. My name is Zoe Keninger and I'm a resident of Ward 4. I'm white and I use they them pronouns and I've been a resident of Burlington since June 2015 when I moved here from Toledo, Ohio. I'm here tonight to voice my strong opposition against Mayor Weinberger's decision to veto the charter change for the creation of an independent community control board of the Burlington police department and the renaissance he cites for this veto. Mayor Weinberger expresses his concerns that the creation of this control board would cause police officers to leave the Burlington police department and make it more difficult to hire more officers. My question for the mayor and the council then is this. If the officers are so against being held accountable for their actions, why would we want them serving in our community in the first place? As Councillor Hanson said at the December 14th meeting and Representative Chien has said earlier this evening, this charter change would allow Burlington to make sure that the officers that make up its police force match the values of the community they serve. Since the creation of the charter change committee and Councillor Freeman's work on creating the charter change proposal, hundreds of Burlingtonians have called into meetings offering support, feedback and suggestions. At the December 7th meeting alone, you the council listen for hours as over 100 people spoke in favor of the proposal. This proposal has received extensive input from the community, especially BIPOC members and widespread support in general. An officer that is so against police accountability, ideas that people in the city have widely endorsed that they would resign in protest is not an officer who should be serving in this community or in any community. I want to remind you all of the purpose of the creation of this board is not being created for fun or just to cause disruption. It is being created to save lives, lives that are currently threatened by the police force as it stands now, with the city council being forced to make $300,000 buyouts in order to create any semblance of accountability. Therefore, I believe that the mayor's argument offers a far too narrow view of the future. As those before me have said, creating a board for greater police accountability, we could take the first step towards a massive public safety transformation. We could look towards a future where decisions about public safety are not overruled by a racist violent arm of white supremacy. If the city government wants to uphold the promises of the racial justice resolution and the declaration of racism as a public health crisis, you need to think bigger and more creatively. If this charter change would lead to a decrease in the police force, then it's time to reshape public safety further. Imagine public safety without violence and punishment as the overruling ideology. Imagine a world where people feel truly safe in their community. And this can only be accomplished with movement away from reliance on the police department. And by allowing for the public to vote on community control of police. Thank you. Okay, our next speaker will be Tia Hunt. And Tia is to be followed by Daniel Muntianu. Tia, I've found you and I'm enabling your microphone. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Hi, my name's Tia Hunt. I'm a white woman. I use she, her pronouns and I'm a four year resident of ward two. I grew up on a dairy farm in Southern Vermont and I've called Vermont home for almost 24 years now. I'm a UVM graduate and a nurse in the UVMMC emergency department. I'm calling to express my continued support for community control of police. After reading Mayor Weinberger's veto of community control of police, I was incredibly frustrated but unfortunately not surprised whatsoever that it focuses intently on the effect this charter change will make on the police department and mentions very little about the community members. He is actually elected to serve an all too common theme during his term. BPD continues to show a pattern of abuse of power and assaulted behavior. And as mentioned before, recent data shows that they have used force against our black community members at a record rate this past year. 28% of the individuals who BPD used force against were black or as black community members only make up 6% of the Burlington population an issue to discuss at another time. Even after the publishing of this data our mayor continues to dismiss the imminent safety of our BIPOC community members by vetoing this charter change. Hundreds of community members have continued to show up each city council meeting to express the needs of the people to take care of each other to prioritize the safety of our BIPOC community members when others will not. Thank you for your time. Thank you to councilor Freeman, BIPOC leadership and so many others who have put infinite hours of work to create this charter change. Please vote yes to community control of police and let our community decide in March. Thank you and I yield my time. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Daniel Muntianu to be followed by Grace Field. Daniel, I've located you and have enabled your microphone. Hey guys, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. All right. I wasn't sure if I wanted to speak tonight so I also made a written comment but I'm just gonna read off of that. My name is Daniel Muntianu and I'm a white resident of ward one. I've lived in Burlington for four months now and I'm proud to consider this place my new home. I work at UVM and I study biology there and one thing I'm interested in is sociobiology which is the explanation of social behavior and what I like about that is you can see the great communities that sociability creates and this social behavior is permeated by an inborn bias towards one's own group and against others. We see that time and again in nature but at the same time this same ability could forge lasting integrated communities through the principles of mutual aid and the case of humans mutual respect and understanding of one another. It frankly doesn't surprise me that BPD uses force so disproportionately against people of color. This is the trend everywhere and we know that it will require major structural change to undo. The city committed to just taking the first steps with July's racial justice resolution but it's obviously just the beginning. As it stands, the Burlington Police Department is not accountable to the citizens of Burlington. If this is passed, the community control police would grant that meaningful, disciplinary and investigatory authority to the people of Burlington and will be the vehicle for continued change within this city. We know incremental changes are gonna cut it and I encourage you to vote yes to override the veto. We're all in this together and I'm sure our community is gonna prevail. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker is Grace Field to be followed by Marissa. Grace, I've located you and have enabled your microphone. Hi, Max. Thanks. My name is Grace Bile. I was born in Randolph and I've lived here for about six years and I'm calling in once again to ask you to support this charter change and to override the mayor's veto of community control of police. I was just thinking about this memory I have from about six years ago where I was standing in my kitchen with my roommate and he walked in and told me that he got pulled over while he was walking down the street and he's black and I didn't understand. I couldn't comprehend that something like that could happen and that's a huge privilege to be able to realize that and to not have that be the material reality of your life all the time. We know that our friends and our neighbors and our siblings have these experiences and you hear from BIPOC community members on this call every single time and we also have 10 years of data that demonstrates that black people in our city are targeted by BPD and disproportionately harmed by police. This charter change is the only proposal that has been shaped by and centers by BIPOC folks in our community and is endorsed by the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance. This charter change proposal ensures that when violence occurs at the hands of police it will be impartially investigated and that officers will be disciplined. And I just wanna say I think too that's my written part and now I'm just gonna say there are so many people who show up on these calls. There are so many of us who show up who have never been involved with local politics who maybe haven't been civically engaged. And I think that is so beautiful and that is so wonderful. And I'm so grateful to be part of this community that continues to show up for each other every single day on and off these calls to care for each other and to dismantle white supremacy. And I'm here tonight with my community to ask you to join us and to take this opportunity once again to pass community control of police and let us vote on it in March. Thank you. Thank you, I was not able to locate the person who signed up is just Marissa. So I'm gonna go to James Lent to be followed by Max Solter and I'll read off a couple other names just so that folks know that they're coming up. I have Lauren Akin after Maxwell Solter and then William Keaton, Dana Keyes Gibbons, Rachel Gallis, Nell Carpenter, William Emmons, Phoebe Perrin, Jake Van Wolvelier, Maggie Chadwell, Alex Sturges, Rob Reeves, Sophie Castle, Sarah Brooks, Rachel Siegel. So I'm gonna go to James Lent right now. James, I'm enabling your microphone. James, I'm not able to hear you. Still not hearing anything, James. Looks like you are unmuted on your end, so I'm not sure. Okay, I am gonna I will, we can come back to you and try it again at a different point. I'm gonna go to our next speaker who will be Maxwell Solter to be followed by Lauren Akin. Max, I've enabled your mic and you should be able to speak now. Hello, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Awesome. Yeah, I just wanted, I'm Max Solter. I live in Ward 8. I just wanted to call in to voice my support for the city council to overturn Mayor Miro's veto of the community commission. Pretty much just basically, from everything that I've learned about the situation here, it seems that the rest of Vermont is really nervous about this and Vermont police departments across Vermont are very interested in this situation as they have the impression that what happens in Burlington will then spread throughout the state and then possibly we'll have this radical reform. I strongly want to push against this idea and the fact that we have all these eyes on us is just a bigger opportunity for the city itself to really address issues that have been going on for a very long time here in Vermont. We have years and years worth of data to show that what we are doing is not working. It is ridiculous that we have pretty much voiced all this support and still the mayor decides to go against pretty much what the people want in the city and will not allow us an actual vote. Yeah, I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. Lauren Akin, I'm gonna enable your microphone and Lauren is to be followed by William Keaton. Go ahead Lauren. Hello, my name is Lauren Akin and I'm a white resident of Ward 2. Our community has largely handed over our responsibility to care for each other and navigate conflict to armed officers. This indicates a deep lack of trust in each other and trust in ourselves. It indicates that our muscles in this regard have atrophied. It's time to start building them up again but we need space to practice this. Police have become equally dependent on the sense of power gained from arbitrating conflict while armed and delivering individuals to judgment and punishment. Why would anyone dependent on power choose to seed power? They would be willing only if they had come to a turning point of realization that the ongoing practice of domination ultimately harms themselves. Only if they became more interested in supporting collective healing than controlling populations of people. First, I have faith that policing can and will become obsolete. But in the interim, I have faith that there are individuals who would be proud members of a police department that prioritized the self-determination of the people to decide when, where, and how the power of police can be used. I have faith that there is an individual who would be proud to be the chief of this kind of police department. If you build it, they will come. Our current police department, what kind of chief has it attracted? The brilliant heart of this charter change is that it actually requires the police to seed power to the community. And what a noble choice for a police officer to make. Blocking this change is a demonstration of such little faith in the possibility that there exists those who would be inspired and proud to contribute to a police department that courageously seeds power to the people. A demonstration of such little faith that a police chief could courageously abstain from deciding how much power he and his department possess. And such little faith that the people of Burlington could choose to vote this change into law driven by anything but ignorance. The brilliance of those most marginalized by our systems crafted this charter change. Blocking this also indicates little faith in the intelligence foresight and rigor of people who have managed to survive and thrive within a system designed to kill them. This doubt is blindness to the very intelligence foresight and rigor that our entire species will need in order to survive the next 100 years. What are we building and who might it attract? Courageously seed power to the people and let us vote on this. Only one of you has to change your mind. Just one of you be the one person who changes their mind. Thank you. Thank you, Lauren. Our next speaker will be Will Keaton to be followed by Dana Key's Gibbons. Will, I'm enabling your microphone. Yeah. My name is Will. I grew up in Burlington. I went to BHS. BHS, a school where the presence of cops threatened the well-being of BIPOC teenagers. A school where students were divided and segregated by race. A school where the education safety of white students was prioritized by our racist education system. BHS was one of the first high schools in Vermont to raise the Black Lives Matter flag, which only happened because BIPOC students organized the student body in support of anti-racist action. The raising of the BLM flag at BHS cannot be reduced to white liberal virtue signaling like so many things are in Vermont. Black Lives Matter is a fundamental truth. It is not an abstract concept for politicians, bureaucrats and white people to argue about and debate over. The violence and brutality of white supremacy in our public institutions is not up for debate. So Morose says that the language and the charge change is too harsh on the police. When he says he's worried police will leave the department because community demands have been put into action. I hear a betrayal of the hopes and dreams of the BHS students who raised the flag. I hear the words of a man more concerned of protecting his own white male privilege. But true anti-racist action cannot be vetoed by a white man. We together, the public are fighting for collective liberation. Hundreds of people from all different walks of life showed up at Battery Park. This is not just a charge change. This is not just a police reform. Community control of the police is a transformative change that will have a direct impact on the safety and wellbeing of the BIPOC community. Morose worried that this charge change proposal will push the city towards dismantling and abolishing the police. But what we're asking for right now in the moment is to make it possible to fire cops in a city where police accountability does not exist on a systematic level. In a city where firing corrupt cops is almost impossible and the police are only held accountable by the people by the public consensus. So it's common sense. Create an independent community control board that centers the voices of the BIPOC community which makes me wonder what is Morose so afraid of? Make this board happen because we will not sit around and wait for you to take action. Yep, thanks. Thank you. Have Dana Keys Gibbons to be coming up next to be followed by Rachel Gallis. Dana, I have enabled your microphone. Hi there, my name is Dana and I'm a white healthcare worker living in Ward 8. It's been really stressful and tiring to be a full-time essential worker during the pandemic but I'm taking the time to call in tonight because my co-workers and I know that racism is a public health crisis and I'm concerned that Mayor Murrow is not doing everything he can to ensure the safety of my BIPOC neighbors and community members. In the mayor's New Year's Eve memo, he called the proposed charter change divisive and controversial. I'm confused by this because I have heard broad support for Councillor Freeman's proposal from the community at this meeting tonight and in these meetings that have been occurring since September. It seems like Murrow is actually being divisive himself by trying to use his power and his position to override the decision of a majority undermining the role of the council. The mayor cannot claim to support racial justice while stalling progress on an issue that is so vital for BIPOC, people with mental illnesses, houseless folks and others who are targeted by policing. And I just also wanted to say to address the proposal that Murrow brought up with his veto. This is a really watered down proposal that suggests change through ordinances and that doesn't really work because it would make any disciplinary actions subject to challenge by the police union and he also suggests again that we could delegate this disciplinary power to the police commission but we've heard time and time again that that commission is already at capacity. It's also not independent from the Burlington Police Department. Diversity isn't a requirement or a guarantee for membership. It's an unpaid position and really to make sure that this work gets done well we need a new independent board. So I hope you really listen to the consensus tonight and think about if you are gonna go through with this veto, what are you gonna do to protect BIPOC or are you just showing up here to shut this down? Thank you. Okay, I have Rachel Gallis to be followed by Nell Carpenter. Rachel, I have enabled your microphone. Can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. My name is Rachel Gallis. I'm white, I use she, her pronouns and I've been a resident of board too for four years. I wanted to call in to voice my continued support for the community control police and my strong disagreement with the mayor's veto. To put simply, I think it's absurd that our community members, especially marginalized community members have had to jump through so many hoops to try and get this onto the ballot. When you all aren't even voting on adopting the charter change, you all are simply voting to let the people vote on the charter change. I'll remind you that your jobs as city councilors and as the mayor of the city are to listen to the people, not abuse your power. If you all are not willing to let people vote on this that truly isn't democracy. You've declared racism as a public health crisis yet won't even let people vote on protecting our BIPOC community members. Please put this on the ballot in March and do your job of listening to the people. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. I was not able to locate Nell. I'm gonna go back to James Lent. We were not able to get audio on James. I'm gonna enable your microphone again. See if we can get you on. Hi there, can you hear me now? Yes, go ahead. Okay, thank you. I'd just like to respond to Mayor's first concern about community control police. He stated that he was concerned that we'd bring down that this new change would bring down staffing levels. The thing is our target staffing levels that we set were based on reaching reaching proportional values to those of similarly sized cities, similarly sized college towns, et cetera for their police departments. And if they can manage it, then our police force should be able to manage with those same numbers. And if they can't manage it, then that's all the more reason why we need community control over the police because they're doing something wrong. I believe that we can do this all together. I believe that we can do this with similar budgets and similar sizes to that that other cities have managed, particularly in this time of financial strife when lots of different departments around the city are being asked to cut their budgets back. It seems only fair that the police would do a due diligence and try their best to do the same here. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna go to Suki now. Suki, I've enabled your microphone. Suki. Can you hear me now? Go ahead. All right. This is Suki, a BIPOC who lived in Vermont all my life. Again, not a Burlington resident, but watching how everything has unfolded it makes me want to move up there and become a resident just so that I can get more involved. I'm here about an hour away to urge you that we need this proposed community control board. It is reasonable, is compromisable, and is far from radical or hostile. It is a creative opportunity with the whole state watching. The mayor's sudden swivel on the racial justice resolution is a betrayal. His very action is divisive. All we want is to be given the chance to get this proposal on the ballot in March just so that the community has a chance to even see their options on how to improve the overdue racial justice. This enables and engages the community. It gives them a voice, a choice, and the power to vote on whether or not they agree with our proposed community control board. For the mayor and a few of the counselors to connive within closed doors, excluding the community and withholding that power from the community is an obstruction to an impartial democratic process. I'm not as involved as I love to be, so I will leave the strategy, data, and quick to others, but I'll say this, a lot of this. I'm severely upset that our peaceful protests, our whole movement, our very presence in the city, and on the public forum, our very protest signs were viewed as hostile, but not the counter protesters who walked around with BB guns or real guns or drove around in their trucks confronting BIPOC protesters. Stop weaponizing our anger. What some of you consider what you have been promoting as hostility to the public is actually derivative from hurt. We are hurting. Please discourage the public from inspiring hurt against generations of the modernized. And then the public scoffs us for trying to defend ourselves. When we fight back, we're suddenly seen as the bullies that started the fight or something. We appear to be a bunch of angry kids with nothing better to do, asking for attention, shouting at empty streets that just stare back, silently, but the media doesn't portray our efforts behind the scenes. They don't see that we are educating ourselves in tandem via online crash courses, endless Zoom meetings, or in-person workshops. We are learning, not just on politics, but how to question, scrutinize, address, and reform an issue. If we can educate ourselves in politics, surely you can educate yourselves on racial disparities and day-to-day racism. This understanding of the core of racism is what needs to be initiated on your end. We need you to educate yourselves on daily racism to encourage the public to do the same. I'm not talking about your favorite local newspaper or typical news channel. I'm talking about actual classes. Growing up, I took classes on how slavery existed in the past, but was never taught. It was very current in its own modern adaptations. Me, a BIPOC, wasn't aware of this. If I'm learning this now, so can you. Treat it like school, because right now you're getting an F plus, plus, plus, plus. So to see us as a mob, rather than the individuals of intersectionality, unique stories of unique oppressions, is mocking our pain. Additionally, mocking our ability to communicate and organize is unnecessary barbed wire, considering the inconsistent vague indoor politics that some of you marinate in. Our lives are not politics. We're not statistics in the margins of your pile of notes to be rewritten, paraphrased, scratched out, or whited out. This is our story, our narrative, in which you are a guest. However, we're not just another news headline with your morning coffee either. We don't want your indifference, judgment, nor your sympathy. We want your empathy. Or else, winter loose will be forced to make empathy a symphony until you can hear us. And I yield my time. Thank you. Our next speaker will be I think I'm able. I'm not able to find Neil Carpenter. So I'm gonna go to Will Emmons. Will, William Emmons, I've been able to your microphone. Yep, go ahead. Okay, I wrote at least two pages just while listening to everybody speak. And I'd like to commend everybody on what they've said. Wellington was going out of business before the pandemic. With social gatherings being shut down by design to prevent congregating, Jazz Fest, Mardi Gras, et cetera. It all started to crumble and go downhill even if it was still put on. When I was arrested in September 2019, our phony charges that were later dropped on the wall in the police station, there were questions. Most importantly, who is doing the kidnappings? Which is different than asking, are there any kidnappings taking place? So my question is, who is doing the kidnappings and why hasn't any of this been reported? It has been reported across the country that former chief of police, Brandon Del Pozo, resigned. About a month ago, I saw him driving in a black unit with no carriage lights being followed by two cruisers in the same pattern he used to harass myself and others prior to his alleged resignation. Why is Del Pozo back in city vehicles? And at what point were the citizens made aware of this? Has he been rehired? Since I testified in a racial profiling case stemming from Jazz Fest 2017 in June, I leafleted the community with the essay. I was placed on lockstep surveillance and harassment. The charges were dragged out and a year later, they were dropped. Currently, I have never breathed fresher air. Shame, though, between a crooked mayor and chief combo, my son was taken away. The fact that the Burlington Police and the Department of Child Services withheld the fact that while I was caring for the child full-time, his mother's house was raided and heroin was found. The Burlington Police instead made up a story that I claimed to the school's police officer, Norris, that I was a quote minister while I was coaching youth basketball and baseball. The principal of Champlain Elementary made up a story that I threatened his staff. And the school bullying psychologist, Mr. Rudder, accosted my son who was over made-up accusations that he threatened to kill another nine-year-old student. We were out protesting in 2019 class warfare, racial discrimination, lockstep surveillance and harassment, whistleblower suppression. In 2019, I was partial leader to protesting the kleptocracy of Burlington in front of City Hall. We were approached by municipal employees on a couple of occasions. On one occasion, the Burlington Police approached and asked the attending military veterans, how long have you been on active duty? And are you on active duty? Why would city leadership be concerned with a U.S. military presence in the city of Burlington if nothing is wrong? Had it back out of voter for infinite after I saw the work he put into his signs and campaign? Burlington has Walmart syndrome. In other words, the cameras are not to catch speeders and people running red lights. They are to patrol and control. I'm not the type of person to say defund the police, but definitely need a plateau of police spending because I'm neighbors with Jeremy Mele. Approximately six times I've ensued because of a corrupt mayor going after everything from my mental health to my freedom. And moving around, the city-placed construction site has become an eyesore in the city of Burlington for many years. The business site is or was tied to Gerard Kushner in the Trump administration. Meanwhile, leadership has announced Trump in his numerous times within the same time frame in those business dealings, which is it? Are we denouncing Trump or are we reaching around to do business with him? Because it seems to see both ways. Yeah, give me a second. The steal that was moved from the city-placed job site was rusted and dilapidated when it was moved to the job site a couple of years back. This was done as a publicity stunt. It was not intended to be used. It was rotting away on another construction site prior to being moved. The newspapers reported progress on the job site yet this was just smoke and mirrors. Recently, it was posted again on the news that the steal, which was not intended to be used in the first place was removed. Who's paying for this? Why are we still watching phony city-placed 3D presentations on the news? Last page. Careful, given even videos can be digital imaging. Speaking of which, I remember feeling relieved after reaching out to activists about what was going on in Burlington from all over the country. That one night, the news showed a video of a black man beating up a white man on the bus stop on Cherry Street. In the next half hour block of time, the news headline was changed, quote, another race beats up white man at the bus stop. It's just funny how that stuff goes down. Again, I wanna commend everybody for what they've said tonight. Okay, our next speaker will be Phoebe Perrin to be followed by Jake and Wolf Lear. Phoebe, I'm gonna enable your microphone now. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, please. Hi, my name's Phoebe. I use she, her pronouns, and I'm a white resident of Ward 2. I've lived in Burlington for five years now and I'm currently working as a paraeducator. I went to UVM and decided to continue living in Burlington because I deeply care about the city and I'm dedicated to being a part of change and supporting positive change here. I'm calling to talk about the mayor's veto of the police charter change because in my time here, I've learned that Burlington isn't the progressive forward-thinking place I once thought it was. Burlington is not immune to racism and therefore it needs to change. And in any changes that claim to be working to end racism, they must center the voices of BIPOC individuals. I'm extremely disappointed with the mayor's decision to veto the proposed charter change for the community oversight of the police board. To be candid, I'm feeling discouraged. I've been involved in this process since November and many people have been showing up in this process long before that. It seems clear that the public who have been showing up to charter change, joint committee, city council and city council meetings are an overwhelming support of this community oversight of the police board. And because the city council is supposed to represent the people, it seems clear that this charter change should be supported and put on the ballot in March. I'm sure that there are counselors and citizens who do not support this proposal, but are they majority? If they're not, then why are the voices of the invisible dissenters being valued over these who are showing up to these meetings, engaging in the charter change process and engaging in the charter change process? Why are those who are paying attention and working towards changes, especially the voices of people who have been historically marginalized by the police being ignored? This charter change has been in the making since September as someone who values democracy and has been a part of this democratic process a little bit. It's scary that after all this time and opportunity that was offered for deliberation and collaboration, that this charter change has been vetoed by one person only a few days ago. A few days is not enough time to compromise on such a complex issue, and it does not invite opportunity to create the change we need in Burlington. I would also like to highlight that shifting the disciplinary power to the police commission as the mayor suggested is inherently changing this proposal because it would keep the power within the police department, which is not finding common ground. Finally, to the white city counselors, please look outside of your own perspective and not only listen to but center the voices of people who are historically marginalized by the police because their right to safety in their own city is more important than our own comfort with the matter. So please, please, please listen to and center the experiences of individuals who have been marginalized by the police and vote to override this veto. Thank you. Thank you. So before I go to the next speaker, just really wanna encourage folks to please stick within as close as you can within the two minutes. I'm really trying to make sure that we get to as many people as possible. So staying to that timeline allows us to get to more people. So just please be mindful of that and try and speak within that timeframe. So our next speaker will be Jake Van Wolvelier to be followed by Maggie Chadwell. Jake, I'm enabling your microphone. My name is Jake Van Wolvelier. I'm a white resident of board two. First off, I wanna recognize that every member on this council recognizes the reality of systemic racism. This council unanimously agreeing to paint the words Black Lives Matter on Main Street outside City Hall tells me that each of you believe we have work to be done in dismantling the festering evil of white supremacy that has oppressed Black Americans from the founding of this country. So we aren't in disagreement about the need to address systemic racism. Clearly there is a great deal of disagreement about how to actually do that. Personally, I firmly believe the charter change proposal that has been passed by a majority of council members last month, the result of months of incredible organizing, activism, research and hard work from local BIPOC leaders is the most meaningful step we as a city can take in alleviating racist violence stemming from the Burlington Police Department. However, I recognize that councilor Shannon Mason, Paul Polino and Carpentry disagree. You all have a right to believe this proposal isn't what's best for the city and for our BIPOC neighbors and that there are better solutions to address the problem. That being said, even if you adamantly disagree with this charter change proposal and believe the majority of Burlington voters will agree with you and vote it down in March, you should still vote to override Mero's veto. If voters side with you and vote no on the proposal, your position will be vindicated and democracy will have worked. If the majority of voters side with the seven council members who passed the proposal and the hundreds of residents who've been consistently calling into these meetings, then our position will be vindicated. And again, democracy will have worked. Either way, we as a diverse array of residents of the city of Burlington deserve the right to democratically decide what we think is the best solution to addressing systemic racism. Allowing Mero to take this right away from voters because he disagrees with the proposal is anti-democratic and unjust. Let the voters decide whether we want this charter change. Counselor Shannon, Mason, Paul, Paulino and Carpenter, vote to override the mayor's veto. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Maggie Chadwell to be followed by Alex Sturgis. Maggie, I've enabled your microphone. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Hi, everyone. My name is Maggie and I'm a white resident of Ward 2. In mid-December, a report was released showing once again that Burlington police used force against black people at a disproportionate rate. And in 2020, it reached a record high. The report showed that in the first 10 months of 2020 of the 149 people who were subjected to police force, 42 people or 28% were black. Well, black people only make up about 6% of the Burlington population. Action needs to be taken to change the current system that perpetuates violence against black people. To make meaningful change, the system needs to be reimagined. This starts with community control of police. In order to hold officers accountable, the power to investigate and discipline police misconduct must be put in the hands of the community through creating a community control board that operates independently from the police department. It is critical that this board be made up of members of our community who are most impacted by policing, centering Viapok, LGBTQ folks, those who've experienced houselessness and other historically marginalized groups. Councilor Bremen's proposal has not only received resounding support and input from Burlington residents, many of whom are here tonight, but has also been publicly supported by the ACLU Vermont and vehicle. I am speaking today to urge Councilors Paul, Carpenter Mason, Shannon and Paulino to reconsider their vote against the charter change back in December in order to override the mayor's disappointing yet predictable decision to veto it. This veto is a continuation of his efforts to obstruct necessary change in this community for the safety of Viapok and other historically marginalized groups. Councilors, please do not follow the mayor's lead. The time for community control of police is now. Please let the people vote on this in March. Thank you. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. I was able to locate now Carpenter. So now I'm going to come to you and enable your microphone. And if my name is showing up as my employer, I'll just say that my views don't reflect those of my employer or whatever. Good evening, Council. My name is Nell Carpenter and I'm a white resident of Ward 4. Can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Cool. I'll talk a little louder. I've been closely engaged with the issue of community control police for over a month now. And in doing so have heard countless stories from my Viapok neighbors and friends about the impact of the police on their lives. At best there's a complete lack of trust in police and at worst there are lives just proportionally black and brown lives being lost at the hands of police. I'm hearing this loud and clear and you should too if you are listening. This is urgent. This is the city-wide election in March, not a special election next year or 2022. Tonight I urge you all, especially the white councilors to de-self and to de-center the politics of this and earnestly center the lives of Viapok and others who are particularly vulnerable to police violence. There have been tons of sidetracking throughout this process of this proposal being introduced and deliberated on which is unacceptable because there are lives on the line. To remind you of the 149 people who were subjected to police force in 2020 more than 28% were black. Black residents make up only 6% of Wellington's population. Additionally, this past year about 37% of incidents where an officer drew their gun was directed at a black individual. The police will survive accountability but not everyone will survive an encounter with the police as long as they're not being held accountable. A system that is police policing themselves that is subject to negotiation with the police union that is directly tied to the police department that does not have representation requirements is not a system that will hold police accountable. Mayor says he has known for a long time that it is wrong for the chief to hold all these powers that he has not been a part of taking action until community members took it into their own hands. Many of you say that you wish you could support this but for some reason or other you can't. I'm asking you to trust and listen to those, trust and listen to those with proximity to police violence who are telling you that this is what Burlington needs an investigatory and disciplinary body completely independent from police with meticulous measures to ensure that it is diverse and representative. Please overturn the mayor's veto tonight and let the city decide what the future of police accountability looks like in Burlington. Thank you. Thank you. I believe I was able to locate Alex Sturgis. Alex will be followed by Rob Reeves. Alex, I've enabled your microphone. Hi, can you hear me? Hi, can you hear me? My name's Alex. I'm a white cis woman and a lifelong resident of this area. I work in downtown Burlington at a law firm where I'm deeply involved in criminal justice system and I'm calling to ask the council to vote to override the mayor's veto of Councilor Freeman's proposal. In the work, I hear the folks say that like system, the system is broken which really makes it sound like we used to have an equitable and fair system that has since disintegrated but this couldn't be further from the truth. The system that us white folks love to talk about and point to and shrug at is working exactly as it was designed to. The marginalization and disenfranchisement of BIPOC folks is inextricably woven into policing and criminal justice in this country. So when we as white folks point to the system and say that we wanna change it but fail to see our own culpability within the system, we do our BIPOC friends and neighbors a great disservice. White counselors and mayor Mara, you are the system. We as white folks are the system. Look in the mirror and confront yourself before you open your mouth to oppose this and ask yourself why you continue to hold your hands over your ears when the people are speaking. I look around and I can see the data is telling me that black folks in Burlington are far more likely to be harmed by the police. I hear my BIPOC friends and neighbors tell me that they feel unsafe in their own community. Enshrined in the opposition that I've heard including a mayor's veto to Councilor Freeman's draft is an inherent assertion that the lives and safety of wealthy white Burlingtonians are more important than the lives and safety of BIPOC folks. And this assertion reflects a deeply problematic reality in the city and the people of Burlington have spoken up to say that they want the system cracked wide open with community control. They want this changed and you've received countless hours of input in support of this proposal, including the priceless input and perspective of BIPOC fems and gender not informing folks. This draft is the only proposal that centers BIPOC life and safety. And while it's not perfect, it's better than the echoing chasm of the white apathy that you uphold every time you oppose this policy without proposing any negotiable alternatives. Counselors, we are involved. The people are involved. We are engaged. We're telling you what you want. Isn't that, we're telling you what we want. Isn't that what you want? Join us. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Black lives matter. Our next speaker will be Rob Reeves to be followed by Sophie Castle. Enabled your microphone. Hello, can you? You just cut out for a second. Try again. Can you hear me now? Yep, go ahead. Great, thank you. Hi everyone. My name is Rob Reeves. I'm a Burlington resident award one and I'm not the greatest speaker in the world. So I don't have much to add to what has been said by the much more talented writers and speakers who came before me tonight, but I do echo their call to override this veto and allow the approved charter change to be on the ballot in March. I think we are all very much like to vote on it. Thank you. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Sophie Castle. Castle to be followed by Sarah Brooks. Sophie, I've enabled your microphone. Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. Hi, my name is Sophie. I'm a 10 year resident of ward two. I continue to stand in support of the creation of the community control board despite Mayor Morose Vito. And I urge all city counselors to stand together on this. When we talk about creating equal seats at the table and the importance of community building in regard to police reform and citizen safety, we have to understand that as long as the police chief and the police union are part of the sole body that addresses police force in our community, that their discretion and opinion will always have outsized influence. An independent body passed through charter change is crucial because that is how we actually get to a quality of influence that cannot be undone the way that a city ordinance can. The mayor's counter proposal does not bring in more community voices or engagement. It simply punts the ball back into bureaucracy and continues to stall the need for real accountability and change in our community. I respect the tremendous amount of work and thought that Councilor Freeman, the Charter Change Committee and community members put into creating this charter change language specifically for our Burlington Community Control Board. And I recognize the approval of organizations such as ACLU of Vermont, NACOL, Migrant Justice, the Racial Justice Alliance, and so many others. Those who are most affected by structurally racist political arguments have spoken and we need to look into them over the police union whose sole goal is to maintain as much of their power and status quo as possible and who view any oversight that is transferred from the police chief to the citizens as quote, hostile. I recall a specific incident at a former meeting where someone was concerned about language regarding the ability of them to hire in fire and it was simply language that used to be given to the police chief that had just been transferred over. It was not different language. It was not hostile language. Thank you to all counselors for your work and know that there is much more to do in 2021. Thank you. Thank you. I see a number, I don't see as Sarah Brooks and I see a number of people as just Sarah. So if you are Sarah Brooks, if you could just use the raise hand function so that I can just identify you and okay, there you go. Thank you so much. I will promote you to panelists or I mean to enable your microphone. So should be able to speak and Sarah will be followed by Rachel Siegel. Go ahead, Sarah. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Go ahead. My name is Sarah Brooks and I am a Burlington resident in Ward two and I'm also a social worker and I am a member of the party for socialism and liberation. I wanna urge city counselors to allow your constituents to vote on this issue of charter change towards the creation of a police oversight committee. The mayor's veto of this change is a baseless attack on the working people and people of color of Burlington and it's also a slap in the face to the history of progressive politics in Vermont. The mayor's message is very clear to me. He doesn't want citizens to be able to vote on this issue. The mayor very clearly does not have faith that the citizens of Burlington know what's best for ourselves and our communities. The people of Burlington have kept the city running through a global pandemic and through the beginning phases of an economic crisis. And I feel as though we should be able to decide what is best for our own communities, comrades and families. Burlington wants the right to vote on this issue. We want real police accountability and we want real justice for the victims of police violence and abuse of power. Again, the council override of this mayoral veto is the only democratic decision to be made. The alternative is authoritarian. I yield my time. Thank you. Our next speaker is Rachel Siegel to be followed by Emily Wanzer. Rachel, I've enabled your microphone. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, I can, go ahead. Great, thanks. Hi everybody, I'm Rachel Siegel. I use she, her pronouns. I'm a white cis woman. I live in Ward three. I grew up in Burlington, right down the street from where Murrow lives now. And I now live in the Old North End raising my kids who are both in marginalized groups that are at higher risk of police violence. And I am so upset right now and like incredibly emotional about this, Murrow. I'm so deeply disappointed. I thought you were gonna be on the right side of history on this. You and I were elected the first year, the same time when you were first elected and you have obstructed police reform work before when I was on the council seven years ago, you just are coming across as being in the pocket of the police at this point. Like you could do the right thing. You could let the voters vote on the matter regardless of how you feel about it. I will share that a past police chief told me in confidence that he knew there were officers that were problematic that he wanted to fire. And he knew that if he fired them or took hard lines with them disciplinary, he would lose the faith of the rest of his force and not be able to rule them. That he couldn't do it. That he wanted to do it and he didn't. He felt like it would create so much. I'm losing my words, but I mean, it's just exactly what everyone's saying. Like the police can't police themselves. This guy even wanted to do more and felt like his hands were tied. Also, I'll speak to you again, Murrow. We worked together, you and I on Charter Changes that lots of people were saying, they didn't want those Charter Changes to go through, but you and I at that point were in agreement that the people should get to weigh in. It shouldn't just be the council or you deciding, like the city of Burlington, the people of Burlington want to vote on this. I also want to speak to the counselors who I served with years ago who are still there because one of you told me that you don't care what people say at public forum. God, I hope you have changed your way. This is so upsetting tonight. I hate that you're vetoing this so much. I hope you've changed your mind. I hope the counselors are listening and might change their minds and that there's a prayer that we can still override the veto. Thank you. Thank you. I just want to remind folks, please direct your comments to the chair and focus on the issue. The issue's on our agenda, I'm sorry. Our next speaker will be Emily Wanzer to be followed by Lilla Fortunoff. Emily, I've enabled your microphone. Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for everybody you spoke before and thanks, Rachel, for those powerful words. My name is Emily. I'm a white resident board too. I also am speaking tonight in opposition to the mayor's veto and I'm urging my city counselors to override this. I mostly want to emphasize the speakers who've come before me, all of whom spoke really beautifully and powerfully, especially our BIPOC friends, neighbors and siblings. Those are the voices that are pointing us towards a more beautiful future and we need to include and center them as well as others marginalized by the police in models for community oversight and control of police, which is exactly what this proposal does. I also want to say that it's really hard to speak on these calls. It's really nerve-wracking and time-consuming and it's not particularly fun, which makes it all the more amazing that supporters of this charter change have continued to show up in huge numbers for these public forums and to vote incredible amounts of time to this process on, you know, during these calls and also behind the scenes. Know that we are here and we are listening and behind every one single speaker are many more friends and neighbors with the same energy and really similar views who just might not be able to participate. I want to locate myself in this fight for justice safety in the lives of our neighbors while also holding a knowledge that as a white person is not the place to center myself. It's the time to work thoughtfully to understand my power as a white person, especially that which I have to work to understand and also actively dismantle the systems that uphold it. This charter change would do that. I really urge you to really thoughtfully uphold it and I'm really disappointed by veto. Thanks so much. Okay, our next speaker will be, sorry, Lilla Fortunoff to be followed by William Dunkley and I'll read off a few more. After that, we have another Alex, Kenneth Martel, Steven, Andrew Giggler, M. Bauer, Trish O'Kane, Lydia Kern, Taylor Gensenberger, Traffriar, Silas, I have Mark Hughes who asked to be put further down, Colin Birch, Sarah Ciritino, Alexandra Carambelis and Abby Hodson. So I'm going to Lilla Fortunoff and Lilla, I've enabled your microphone. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, I can, go ahead. Hi, my name is Lilla Fortunoff. I'm white, I'm 25 years old. I use she, her pronouns and I live in Ward three. I have lived in Burlington since 2015 when I started college at UVM and have chosen to stay and live in Burlington afterward. I have spoken at many public forums since June and before that I was not very active in city politics. But when the Vermont racial justice alliance and BIPOC community members put out a call for people to speak up in the face of violence and police brutality against black people that was happening around the United States as it has been happening since the beginning of this country, I joined it, I naively did not think that similar violence would be happening in Burlington. I was wrong. Despite the fact that since 2005 the Burlington police department has conducted over 46 training modules designed to quote, reduce bias and build cultural competency. In the first 10 months of 2020, there were 149 cases of excessive use of force perpetrated by police officers and 42 of those cases were against black people. That's 28% of the cases were against black people even though black people only make up about five to 6% of the population of Burlington. This is unacceptable. And yet when police use excessive force they are not held accountable. We calling in do not think it's okay for police to be able to brutalize community members. It is very important for you all to remember that that is all we are calling in about essentially. Yes, the public can file complaints against the police officers to the police commission which is part of the police department. Can you imagine trying to report your abuse to your abusers? Even if the police commission does find fault with the police officers conduct, the commission has no power to discipline the officers but can only make recommendations. At first glance it makes sense that the counselors and the mayor would be inclined to change the police commission but I and those who are speaking against the mayor's veto tonight very firmly believe that what we need is a body that from its conception is entirely separate from the police department. The proposed charter changed by counselor Freeman is the only proposal that we have seen that allows for complete separation of the police department and prioritizes the ideas and lives of BIPOC and other community members who are marginalized. It is not acceptable to use our ordinances for police reform because the police union will potentially be able to override. It's not powerful enough. The current modes of operations of the Burlington police department are not working. Please override the mayor's veto and allow the democratic process to happen by letting the people of Burlington vote on the proposed charter change in March. If counselors do not override this veto you will be allowing, you will not be allowing democracy to take place. Black Lives Matter. You are next speaker will be William Dunkley to be followed by Alex. William I've located you and have enabled your microphone. Hey, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Thank you. My name is William Dunkley. I'm a white man. I use he and pronouns. I live in Ward three and I presided in the city for five years. I grew up just outside of Burlington. Recently I had a traumatizing experience with the BPD and felt firsthand the powerlessness and fear that accompanies police interactions in the city. On November 14th, I was creating a street painting in the old North end when Burlington police department arrived. An unmasked officer jumped from the car, yelled aggressively, stop walking away and moved quickly towards me while continuing to yell. I stopped moving and followed his requests as he approached me. And he asked, sorry, I stopped moving and I followed his requests. And as he approached me, I asked, am I being detained? He yelled, yes, you're being detained. Then he violently grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to him, nearly causing me to fall though I had already stopped moving. It was only today that I learned that this officer, Connor Palmatier, used force more than any other officer on Burlington police department in 2019. Aware of my rights during this incident, I respectfully remain silent to some of his questions, wanting to cooperate but not giving away personal information. At this point, he said, I was just gonna give you $100 fine for vandalism but since you're being rude, I'm going to arrest you. While patting me down, he dehumanized me making rude and hurtful comments in front of the people I was with. I was processed, charged with unlawful mischief and released. A few days later, I looked for my license only to discover the officer had lost it. So I called BPD requesting it, was told they didn't have it. And then two weeks later, they called saying they did in fact have it. BPD held onto my license for a month and a half. My story only shows the routine ways the police operate in the city with little critical oversight. I never thought to make a complaint because I knew nothing would happen to the officer. I know, I knew BPD's history of violence towards black people. This was before the 2019 use of force report as I was being arrested. And my main thought during and after the arrest was of my race and what may have happened if a black friend had been in my shoes. To the counselors who voted against Freeman's draft and stand with the mayor's veto. Have you also been seeking community input for months and creating proposals that centered the wellbeing of BIPOC? Are you matching the efforts of counselor Freeman and BIPOC community members? Will you create something better than what lies before us? I've watched a strong BIPOC led community effort to create a literally life-saving charter change only to see city council members stumble into the path of liberation at the last minute along with the mayor. This has been happening for centuries and is the exact way in which power holders uphold white supremacist systems. I feel sick thinking about what is happening here in this council. Please center BIPOC, please center equality. Please remember that big changes are needed to fix the system. Please vote to override the mayor's veto and let the city's residents decide the fate of this charter change. Counselor Shannon, Paulina, Mason, Paul and Carpenter, please override the mayor's veto. Thank you. Okay, our next. I was not able to locate the person who just signed up as Alex. However, was able to find Kenneth Martell. So Kenneth, I'm enabling your microphone. Hey, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. My name's Ken Martell. I'm a white man. I'm 28 and I've lived in downtown Burlington for the past three years. And I wanted to start by sharing a couple of quick anecdotes. Back in June, I was driving home one night and I stopped at a gas station just over the border in South Burlington. And when I went in, I found four Burlington police officers standing in there chatting. None of them were wearing masks. So I just calmly confronted them about it and asked for their names and badge numbers. One of the officers refused to tell me his name or his badge number and said I was being an asshole. They all walked away maskless. Again, last month I went to the police station to get fingerprinted for a new job. In the 20 minutes I was waiting in the lobby, all but one of the officers and employees entering and exiting the building were maskless. I bring this up not because I was particularly concerned for my health or safety in those situations but to remind the council how fundamentally unaccountable the police force in Burlington is. They know that the rules that apply to the rest of us do not apply to them. Even when it comes to something as simple as wearing a mask during a global pandemic. More importantly, we all know that police officers in Burlington operate with so little accountability that they feel comfortable violently assaulting Albin, Charlie and Jeremy Mulay, Mabor Jock, Muhammad Luso and killing Douglas Kilburn with no fear that they will be held responsible for their actions. The breadth of this department's impunity is wide and deep and dangerous. If Councillor Paul, if Councillor Carpenter, if Councillor Mason, if Councillor Polina, if Councillor Channing and if the mayor truly understand how fearlessly reckless this department is and if they truly believe that racism is a public health crisis and I urge them to treat it as such by taking the action that meets the magnitude of this crisis of accountability and to move this charter change forward. If they do not, then the voters of Burlington will know how they truly feel. Thank you. Thank you, our next speaker. I was able to locate Alex. So Alex, I'm going to enable your microphone. Thank you. Hey, can you hear me? Go ahead. All right. Thanks for letting me speak tonight. My name is Alex Ferdin. I use he and pronouns. I'm a cis-gendered white male. I have lived in Burlington for a decade. This is for those of you who are on the fence tonight. I want to read a couple of lines that I stumbled upon about a month ago. This really struck a chord with me and if you listen to the words I'm reading, maybe they'll resonate with you as well. Nurses and licensed doctors are insured because even though they've attended years of intense training, they can still ruin your life and we want to make sure that if they are consistently bad at their job, they won't be able to stay employed. Now, why wouldn't we do that for a profession that involves exercising deadly force and enforcing complex laws? A police officer doesn't have to shoot you to ruin your life. All they have to do is arrest the wrong person and you've got a record. We see it all the time. You can lose your kids, your job, you're standing in your community all because someone who was trained on average 21 weeks got it wrong. 21 weeks. How are we okay with letting the police investigate themselves? How are we okay with letting them get rehired when they are let go? You have such a great opportunity to build a board with diverse and representative board membership with criteria and a selection process ensuring the historically marginalized have a seat at the table. We just want to make this city safer for all. Let's do what we all know is the right thing. Let's be the leader and get this on the ballot in March. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Steven Maher to be followed by Andrew Giggler. Steven, I have located you and enabled your microphone. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Hi, yeah. Tonight I'd like to propose the argument for why this charge of change should be supported and the veto should be rejected. And I'd like to start by framing it at the national level. We've seen unprecedented movements against racial violence and towards equity this past year. And if that's not large enough, let's talk about how this charge of change falls in line with those we've seen in Madison, Wisconsin. If that's still too large, let's get even more local. The ACLU of Vermont also supports this. And I mean, if you disagree with the ACLU, you're basically on the wrong side of history. But perhaps Vermont's a bit too large, so let's dive in closer. Burlington, this charge of change has been voted by the BIPOC community in Burlington and those who represent the Battery Park movement and contains the best interests of our citizens in it. If that doesn't get to you, let's get even smaller. Let's talk about the city council. The fact that you allow the mayor to just veto, to walk all over the power that you're supposed to hold. If you care about the civic duty that you elected for, that you ran and hold so dearly, then you should not allow the mayor to veto this decision. And finally, I'd like to address you personally on a human-to-human level if everything else is a bit too large. Racism hurts the oppressor. I cannot be a complete human being if I dehumanize and do not recognize the inherent rights and values of those around me. So I ask you tonight, stop the mayor's veto and become the best human being you can be. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Andrew Giggler to be followed by M. Bauer. Andrew, I've enabled your microphone. Hello, my name is Andrew Giggler. I am a white cisgender man. You see him pronouns in a resident of Ward 1. I am a student at UVM, have lived in Burlington for over three years and currently work as a peer mentor at UVM. I'm calling in to voice my support for the proposed charter change on community control of police. This is not a political issue. This is a racial justice issue. This is not something that should be able to be voted down by one person. The truth is that the charter change could save lives simply by giving real power to BIPOC and other historically marginalized people. The longer that real police reform initiatives are pushed back, the longer that BIPOC will continue to live in a city with officers that are known to target people that look like that. There was a strong and indisputable trend of BPD officers targeting black people at a disproportionate rate. And some of you do not want citizens to hold these cops accountable. To Mayor Weinberger and the counselors who have voted against the charter change, this is not about your opinions. It is necessary to center the concerns of black community members in your decision because it is about their safety. In addition, are you going to put your opinion over the hundreds of people spoken up at city council meetings over the past few months? Do you wanna take away the voices of Burlington residents and prevent them from voting on the proposed charter change? For the sake of the democracy, Burlington residents should be able to vote on the charter change in March. Counselors, please listen to the people this time and vote to override the veto. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker will be M. Bauer to be followed by Trish O'Kane. I'll read off some others just so that folks know who's coming up. Lydia Kern, Talia Gensburger, Trav Friar, Silas and Mark Hughes. I will go to M now. Hi, my name is M. Bauer. I say he pronouns. I'm a white resident of Ward 2 and I'm a lifelong remuner. Over the past few months, you've all heard many arguments in favor of community control of police. Many of us have come to multiple of these meetings to state why we believe in this policy. In addition to these important remarks, I'd like to emphasize that this isn't a matter of politics. This is about protecting the members of our community who would be harmed by business as usual. I'm here because such folks are members of my community and they are members of your community as well. They're the people that you are sworn to serve. If you, like me, are able to choose to look the other way because this issue does not impact your daily life, I ask you to consider those in your community who cannot choose to walk away from this. If you choose to look the other way, you are part of the problem. We cannot look the other way. We must work with those who are impacted to work toward a solution. This policy has been formed in a way that centers those who are most impacted by our current systems of public safety. The data and our community are saying that BIPOC are disproportionately harmed by the police, which means that we must center them in forming policy, which is the case of this charter change. The community has come together over the past months to put forward this charter change and now the people have a right to vote on it and have their voices heard. The incredible public support that you have seen at these meetings and the endorsement of the proposed charter change language by many local groups and expert organizations indicates that this is a policy that the people believe in. Burlington voters have a right to express our opinion on this policy at the polls in March. Please vote to override the mayor's view so that Burlington voters can decide for ourselves whether to implement community control police. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Trish O'Kane. Trish, I've enabled your microphone. Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. Okay. Yes, my name is Trish O'Kane. I live in the New North End in Ward 7. I support putting charter change for the control of police on the ballot. Please override the mayor's veto. Do not delay taking action any longer. This is an urgent issue. For too many people, our streets feel like a war zone. Just since your December 7th vote on this resolution over a dozen people have been shot and killed by police across the country. These are just a few of the cases. Oklahoma City, December 11th, 2020. Benny Edwards, African American, 60 years old. Mr. Edwards was holding a knife when police shot him. He suffered from schizophrenia. Caropa Valley, California, December 13th, 2020. Ernie Serrano, 33, Native American. Mr. Serrano was held down by several sheriff deputies until he exfixiated inside a grocery store. Columbus, Ohio, December 22nd, 2020. Andrei Maurice Hill, 47, African American. Mr. Hill was shot by police as he walked towards them holding his cell phone. This was the second police shooting in just three weeks in Columbus, Ohio. Earlier in December, police shot and killed Casey Goodson, 23, an African American in front of his grandmother. He was holding a sandwich. Police thought it was a gun. Minneapolis, Minnesota, December 31st, 2020. Dolal Id, 23, Somalian. Police shot and killed Mr. Id in his car in a gas station parking lot. Thankfully, Burlington is not on this list. At least not this month. But there is another list we should be on. The growing list of cities that have already taken real action to get control of their security forces. Please put our city on that list and let us vote on this issue. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Talia. Talia, I've enabled your microphone. Hey, good evening, everyone. My name is Talia and I'm a resident of Ward 2 and I'm requesting that the city council override the mayor's veto of the vote on the community-controlled police oversight committee. Burlington residents have the right to real police accountability that works to end the violence that we know disproportionately impacts black and brown members of our community. We have a right to evaluate the performance of the public servants who are supposed to be serving us. By denying us the opportunity to vote on this issue, the mayor is preventing Burlington residents from gaining meaningful, tangible, and positive control over a force that profoundly shapes our community. This veto demonstrates shockingly little faith in the power of Burlington residents to know and do what's best for one another and for the community at large. Thanks, and I yield my time. Thank you. I was not able to locate Lydia Kern, so I'm gonna go to Trav Friar. Trav, I'm enabling your microphone. Oh, hi. Hello, everyone. I'm Trav. I've lived in Burlington most of the past 15 years. I'm a homeowner in Ward 2. Thanks for having me. I think this is just such an exciting charter change. It's a monumental evolution in the history of our city. We're finally gonna have community oversight of police. This is real progress. It's so awesome. And I'm really proud of the huge amount of work that we've all put in as a city over the past number of months. I think the mayor was misguided in be doling what has so far been an amazing democratic community engagement. Now is the time to reiterate the council's commitment to our democratic values. Listening to public comment tonight and so many other nights, it's clear the people are ready to vote on this. So I thank the council for all your hard work on this and I hope you will vote to counter the mayor's veto. Thanks, and I yield my time. Thank you. I have Silas Goldman to be followed by Mark Hughes. Silas, I've got enabled your microphone. Hello, can you hear me? Go ahead. Hi, my name is Silas. I'm a white cis man living in Ward two and I use he, him pronouns. I'd like to use my time tonight to express support for an independent community control board that will control the Burlington police department. This charter change is about BIPOC lives and far too often we lose sight of what is truly at the center of this work, which is the safety of BIPOC folks in Burlington. This is not a political game. I cannot fathom how someone whose passion in life used to be a leader can hear unanimous support for something and continue to push back in the way I've seen in these past months. As far as I can tell, the center of any opposition to councilor Freeman's proposal is a perpetuation of the system, the system that is functioning exactly as it was designed to disenfranchising and further marginalizing BIPOC folks, which is directly beneficial to white folks. By putting money over lives, you are cementing your place as a cog in the machine of white supremacy and systemic oppression. With no, there's no justification in my mind for that choice. The vibe I'm getting is that there's a sense of urgency felt by the community and this council to get something on the ballot quickly. Councilor Freeman's draft is the only one that currently centers BIPOC and that is the goal. I don't know how else to make black lives matter to you all. I care about this issue because I care about black lives. As a white person, I'm also on a path to accountability. It's a long process and I invite you all to join me on that process tonight by voting to override Mayor's veto. Voting to allow this issue on the ballot in March is a step toward necessary accountability. Thank you, Black Lives Matter. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Mark Hughes. Mark, I've enabled your microphone. Thanks, Mr. President. Override, just override. Where do I start? So, counselors, if you haven't made your decision by now, why are you wasting my time? We show up here consistently and we tell you about the work that we've done. And just to be clear, this is not a fad. This is a movement. So it really doesn't make any difference what you do. We're still gonna be here. And just to be really clear, because I think I heard some crosstalk, we don't really care to be white. We just wanna make sure that we're safe and we just want our stuff and it's our power that's gonna get that. So city counselors who voted for this hold your ground. Union members, we don't need your endorsement. As far as what we're really looking at here in history from use of force data collection, the REIB office, the REIB committee, Operation Phoenix Rise, the reparations task force, the racism, public health emergency, just all of this stuff that we're working on at the same time, all of this stuff also hangs in the balance because if you don't have trust, if you don't have community trust, then none of that works, which is why I looked the mayor in the eye a couple of weeks before the holiday and said, you've lost our trust, you are not a good faith partner in public safety restructuring, hard stop. Morales V. told the charter, the charter change, what it does is it's basically undermining and circumventing the efforts to transform and transparently hold police accountable. He pushed back on the initial resolution to reduce funding. He unilaterally brought the transformation director and implemented additional measures which further circumvented and undermined the ongoing process. He introduced an alternative resolution that further undermined the objective of transparent and effective oversight. He's supporting the police and their narrative that the June resolution was not thought out or somehow or another, it wasn't responsible or something like that. He and the department have never really shown any intention in working through this good faith process that was established in June. Now he's seeking to further dilute the first resolution that sought to implement this meaningful change. So it goes on and on. This is nothing more than just continued efforts to use the quote, strong powers to push back on all the efforts that are being made to transform policing and play to this political base. Yeah, I said it, political base. Somebody said earlier on, this is not politics. You damn right, this is politics. Why else would y'all be doing this? There's no other reason why you would be doing this. So just like I told you when I asked you not to hire Del Poso in July of 15, just like I told you, put on the brakes a little bit before you sign that contract in June of last year. I'm telling you now, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to help this community. I'm trying to help you, and instead of listening to all of the nonsense and the rhetoric, listen to black folks in this community, the folks that are doing this work. I've been doing this work from the time of the inception of the Faraday Parcel Police and Policy when I sat down with Jennifer Morrison and wrote that thing out in 15. I've worked through this process. I sat at the table when this thing was being pinned out with the outside attorneys, as well as the city council members and many, many, many activists. This stuff is really well thought out. How dangerous is this city? Ask yourself that. Do you really think that the charter change is gonna like upend and create all this upheaval that we're really hearing? Why are you going out of your way to hold on to your power? Is the question that I ask you. Again, the work that we've been doing, not just in this city but across this state, it is consistent with the approaches that we're taking now with our partners at the ACLU and so forth. One of you, Mr. President, if it could be Councillor Carpenter, Paul, Shannon, Mason, Polino, why is it that at least one of you can't have the compassion? This is not really even about intestinal fortitude as much as it about political will, okay? This needs to not be about that because if you make it about that, then that's what it will be about all the way until March. So I thank you for your time. Please do the right thing here. I mean, right now what we're doing is is you've heard from so many people across this city, each one of you represents somewhere around 3,500 people from each one of your districts and I can't believe that you would have the gall to sit up there after hearing from all of these people consistently and continuously and still hold out on this. You need to make a move tonight. You need to do the right thing. Why? Because it's the right thing to do because it's not the political thing to do. It's the thing that we need to do to protect bodies in this city. The last thing I'll leave you with, and this is really directed to the chair but maybe it'll reflect over to the mayor but I'm just saying that I think the fifth item on the social determinants list, this group that I sit with on a regular basis on the social determinants list of this group that is supposedly the so-called the racism as a public health emergency in Chittenden County, the entire county, that fifth item on those determinants says safety, protection and security. This whole thing is about the safety and protection and security of black and brown bodies, okay? If you don't mean it here, then you don't mean it out there. And oh, by the way, we do need to have this conversation there, okay? So thank you for your time. I hope everybody has a great evening. And again, Mr. Chairman, I wish Consular Paul, Consular Carpenter, Consular Shannon and Consular Mason and Polino would hear this message tonight because it's on them, it's their role. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so it is 9.30, which is the end of our public forum period. So if we could go out of the screen mode, okay? We will go into our next item, which is having already done the climate emergency reports. We'll go into the consent agenda. Counselor Stromberg, may I please have a motion on the consent agenda? I move to adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated. Thank you. Is there a second? Seconded by Counselor Freeman. Any discussion of our consent agenda? Okay, hearing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, that passes unanimously. So that brings us into our deliberative agenda, which starts with item 5.01, an ordinance on responsible contractors. I'll go to Counselor Pine for a motion on that. I would move to waive the reading and have the floor back after a second. Can we have a motion from Counselor Pine? Is there a second? Seconded by Counselor Stromberg. Go ahead, Counselor Pine. Thank you, Mr. President. As you know, this resolution has been a product of work together. Counselor Tracy and myself have been working with a number of stakeholders for some time on this proposal and essentially what we're really looking to do is to bring the city's existing ordinance that is called the pre-qualification of construction contractors ordinance, which essentially was developed almost 20 years ago by then Counselor Phil Fremonti, really as a way to ensure that when public funds are spent on construction projects that those funds be awarded to contractors that follow basic procedures around fair wages, benefits and protections for their workers. We've evolved communities that have passed similar ordinances have developed some new models really that take that concept to a whole new level and essentially that any contractor or subcontractor working on publicly funded projects would be required to show that they are providing, again, fair wages, benefits and protection for their workers. It's pretty clear that in order to protect the public broadly that adequately compensated and trained workers deliver both the best end product, the best services and have better job site safety outcomes. And so this proposal is intended to ensure that those benefits to both the workers, our taxpayers and the entire community that we expand upon those as we seek to do undertake projects construction and building renovation and restoration projects that are publicly funded. I would just note that the city attorney has reviewed this draft and it's a first reading tonight. So the process, I'll explain just a little bit in a minute for those who aren't familiar with it, but there may be some provisions that need to be tweaked, but let me just also acknowledge the, and appreciate the work of members of the Vermont Building and Construction Traits Council for their tireless advocacy for this policy. Daniel Bombardier from IBEW, Alex Potman from the Plumbers and Pipefitters, Tim LaBombard from IBEW and Larry Mokwin from the Laborers have all been really active in advocating and crafting this policy and helping us move it forward. It is based on what the city of Montpelier did but a little over a year ago, they passed a local ordinance very similar to this. And I'm hoping that sometimes we're the first as a community in Vermont and sometimes we're not. And in this case, we should be looking to our capital city and adopting a policy that makes clear that when we spend public funds, that we want companies that guarantee, again, fair wages, benefits and all the protections that should be afforded to working people. So I hope you'll all support this tonight as well as through the process when it goes to the ordinance committee, which it will begin that process when that committee has an opening in its calendar, but hopefully soon enough. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Pine. I have Councillor Mason. Yeah, thank you, President Tracy. I'm not sure if this is a point of order or point of information. The motion I heard Councillor Pine make was to waive the reading. I believe based on his public statement, he was intending to then refer this to the ordinance committee for further consideration. So I offer that as a point of information, I guess, and then I do have a minor comment after if he wants to answer that. Okay, would you like him to speak to that? Yes, please. Okay, Councillor Pine, are you able to speak to your attention? Yeah, that was the intention, that this serve as the first reading, but to be referred to to ordinance. Yeah. Thank you. I thought so. That's not what I heard and I wasn't sure if I just missed it. So I just, as the chair of the Ordinance Committee, I did the city attorney's office did reach out as Councillor Pine alluded to, indicating that they had some thoughts they would like to share with the committee. So certainly we will try to work as quickly as we can to bring in and hear from the city attorney's office with their thoughts. And I appreciate the work that's gone into this and we will try to move this forward consistent with our schedule. So thank you. Okay, thank you, Councillor Mason. I don't have, and Councillor Paul, go ahead. Thanks. Thank you, President Tracy. I just have a question. There was a constituent of mine who read this and don't know who would be best to answer this, President Tracy, but my question is about, and again, I know this is only a first reading, but forgive me, I'm just gonna ask the question anyway. The 2170 and then 2173, which has got a D and E the question that I had was, do we currently audit these clauses? I mean, do we audit contractors in terms of whether they have a responsible safety program, whether they have the applicants OSHA incidence rate for reported injuries is reasonable? I mean, do we do that? Should we do that now? Councillor Pine, are you able to answer that? And if not, we can. Not with any level of specificity. I think the city attorney should answer that. Yeah. Okay, city attorney Blackwood. It is my understanding that staff attempts to do everything that is in the current statute that they do have, they sit down, they look at a lot of this information and do look through it. The one issue they have raised is that they don't really have the expertise to determine financial stability, which is one of those elements of the company, but otherwise they do look at other information. So thank you. I mean, I guess the reason I'm asking is because, I mean, I'm all for making this in line with standards, et cetera. But we do need to do the work. If we're going to make the ordinance, I think that we have to commit to actually doing the work. Now, we did this with the livable wage ordinance when we found that there were people who had contracts with the city who were not being monitored and were probably not doing what the ordinance says. And so I think if we're going to do all of this that we should have in place when we do this a way of actually auditing the work. So that's just my two cents. I realize, as I say, it's only a first read, but I did wanna put that out there. Thanks very much. Thank you, Councillor Paul. That's a great, that's the reason why we do first reading. So appreciate that. If folks don't know you have a first reading, it gets referred to the ordinance committee. This is a time to, if there are questions like that, and then hopefully the ordinance committee is able to work through issues like that highlighted by counselors before it comes back for final passage. Councillor Pine, did you wanna speak again? Just real quickly, the typically one thing that serves as a proxy for sort of financial capacity is the ability of a contractor to get sufficient bonding capacity. So if you don't have financial capacity, you're not gonna get it, but it's not a failsafe. It's not, I mean, it's not entirely 100%, but it's a pretty good indicator in the industry. So that is a bit of a proxy for financial capability or capacity, but I just wanted to add that. And all this information will be discussed in great, much more detail in the ordinance committee. Okay, any further comments from counselors? Okay, Councillor Hanson, go ahead. Yeah, just thanks to Councillor Pine and President Tracey and others who have worked on this. I'm excited to work on this in the ordinance committee. And I think, yeah, often labor issues might get overlooked or neglected, but they really are just so fundamental to economic justice is supporting labor and the rights of workers. So thank you so much and glad to be working on this. Appreciate that. Any further comments from counselors? Well, ready to vote? Okay, all right, let's go to a vote. All those in favor of passing this as a first reading onto the ordinance committee, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, that passes unanimously and we'll go on to the ordinance committee for further review. That brings us into our next item, which is a resolution on an advisory ballot item regarding climate justice and building decarbonization. I'll go to Councillor Hanson for a motion on that. Sure, yeah, I will move to waive the reading and adopt the resolution and ask for the floor back after a second, please. Okay, we have a motion from Councillor Hanson. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Stromberg. Go ahead, Councillor Hanson. Great, thanks. So we continue to be living in this climate emergency that really demands that we get off of fossil fuels and eliminate emissions as quickly as possible. Letting the planet become uninhabitable really is not an option. And so getting off of fossil fuels is not optional at this point, it's what the science demands that we do. And similar to COVID-19, if we ignore the science and if we delay action, it's really going to be just at our own peril. And it's always going to be the most vulnerable who are gonna suffer the most. Relying on the market, relying on individual behavior change that has been failing us for decades. And so we need policy solutions at all levels, including the local level to ensure that this transition happens. And the city of Burlington has made a lot of progress on decarbonization using local policy, but we still do have a really long way to go. Over 90% of our buildings are still heated by fossil fuels. So this is, it's a climate issue, it's a health issue, an economic issue, justice and equity issue. I'm really proud that we've given voters the opportunity to vote on a charter change this March that would allow our local government to play a key role in transitioning buildings off of fossil fuels. And I like so many in our community and so many on this call tonight, want to make sure that that transition doesn't create additional burden for those that are already struggling to get by. And so that is really why we're proposing this additional ballot item in this language to make it crystal clear that if the city does get that additional authority in our charter to regulate buildings, that we would create policies that focus on supporting and prioritizing low to moderate income residents and BIPOC residents in the transition so that they're not burdened or left behind in the necessary and really hopeful transition to a more localized, clean energy economy. So I hope that you all can join me in allowing our voters to weigh in on that. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Hansen. Is there discussion from councillors? Councillor Carpenter, go ahead. I appreciate Councillor Hansen's work on this and just I think it's important there's been some misinformation, I think, related to the charter change that's being proposed, a little bit of our own fake news. And I think people don't understand the goals and don't understand the process. And I believe this advisory question just helps sort of lay that out. The intent of the city is to plan for movement away from fossil fuels. It is not to burden somebody overnight. The citizens will be able to vote if there's a major tax or a fee initiative. And I think this just clarifies that we're committed to working even further. I mean, anything we do will have to have incentives. We already have a great deal of incentives, but I think this holds us to continue the kinds of incentives we wanna reach as we move along. So while it may not seem like necessary, I think it really states the city's policies and holds us accountable to doing some of that work. Thank you, Councillor Carpenter. I got Councillor Stromberg, go ahead. Thanks so much, I'll be quick. Yeah, I'm calling to no one's surprise. I'm very, very supportive of this. I think it's a really crucial step in a long process that we're constantly living in. And the idea that human beings can fundamentally change our climate and our earth is still new to many folks. And it just kind of proves that wide range of progress that we still need to make, to even just catch up to what maybe this council understands. So I think this is a really wonderful opportunity for us to move forward on this front and really be as inclusive and truly progressive in the meaning of it as we grow as a population. And one of the main reasons I ever got involved with divestment and climate justice is because it truly is one of those things that incorporates economic and racial justice because so many people are disproportionately affected by climate change. And we see that everywhere, everywhere, nowhere is immune. So I really appreciate Councillor Hanson's work on this and I'm proudly supporting this. Thank you. Thank you. Any further comments from councillors? Councillor Hanson. Sorry, just very quickly, President Tracey. I just wanted to shout out and thank Councillor Carpenter for her collaboration and work on this item. And I should have probably connected with her sooner, but she was very gracious when we did connect and she was able to help me strengthen the resolution and really make it clear for the community what we're aiming to do, so I really appreciate it. Thanks for that. Thank you for that collaboration. Any further comments? Okay, seeing none, let's go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Call the roll, no. Are you gonna call the roll? Okay, sorry about that. Okay, so with the city clerk, please call the roll. Carpenter. Aye. Councillor Jang. No. Councillor Freeman. Yes. Councillor Hanson. Yes. Councillor Hightower. Yes. Councillor Mason. Yes. Councillor Paul. Yes. Councillor Paulino. Yes. Councillor Pine. Yes. Councillor Shannon. Yes. Councillor Strongberg. Yes. City Council President Tracy. Yes. 11 ayes, one nay. Okay, that resolution passes. And brings us to our next item on the deliberative agenda, which is item 5.03, a ballot question authorizing retail cannabis sales. Councillor Hanson. If I could defer the floor to Councillor Carpenter. Okay. I'd like to do that. Okay, all right. Councillor Carpenter, go ahead. Thank you for that. Another collaboration. Councillor Hanson and I sort of independently introduced resolutions on this topic, and I'll try to frame it as best I can, but as many of you have followed the state legislature, finally moved legislation this last year to allow the state of Vermont to have a cannabis industry that would be active and would follow a lot of guidelines, but I think would be a plus to the state. It's a tax and regulated model. I think it's forward thinking, although there's flaws in the state legislation. As part of the legislation, they are requiring that if communities want to be open to having cannabis retail in their community, that we need to opt in. So we need to have a public vote that says we agree to allow retail cannabis establishments in the city of Burlington. So that's what this proposal is intending to do. There is surrounding this like lots of other issues, baggage and history and bad history with some of the drug policies in the United States and particularly how those policies have affected BIPOC communities. So we want to make sure that that in addition is front and center and reflected in the words we have in the resolution. It's a fairly straightforward resolution. In one sense, there's a couple of components to it, but we want to make sure that we are involving those communities who have been adversely affected by our national drug policies that small entrepreneurs, BIPOC entrepreneurs are welcomed in and supported as this new industry grows. So that was something we've tried to weave into the resolution itself. There's really actually three kind of components of the resolution. One is that we, the city of Burlington would approve the opening of retail shops under the state law. And I want to be clear that the state law really is governing the city itself has little authority to monitor the operations. And this is somewhat of a work in progress. There are numerous kinds of licenses being given out. The only one the city has authority to approve is twofold. One is the retail licenses, which would I think be what you would expect. The other is allowing a category of licensee called an integrated license, which allows people to do all of the operations under one organization or one corporation. And there are five of those in the state. One of the things that Councillor Hanson and I have realized when we sort of in a more straightforward way thought we would introduce this is the concept of the timing and the staggering of these licenses is complicated. And in our attempt to make sure that small entrepreneurs, BIPOC entrepreneurs were given a level playing field, we have recommended that the larger licensee of the integrated licensee be delayed because there was a concern, there has been a concern statewide that they will really beat everybody to the market. The state for whatever reasons gives those licenses about a six months head start. And so that's an issue that we want to try to resolve equitably in the future. I may be jumping the gun here, but Councillor Hanson and I have talked about perhaps recommending delaying or postponing a decision on this particular resolution because we all need to get a little better educated in all of the categories of licenses. And we've been educating ourselves this last week, but we thought perhaps by postponing it, we would have the opportunity to do a work session in the next 10 days and educate everybody on the board how these various staggered licenses work and the impacts of when they come online and who would be affected and the reason or rationale for perhaps delaying the integrated licensee. So I'm sort of preempting ourselves and I'll let Councillor Hanson talk. The one other part of the resolution at the result of not a ballot advisory issue is that we're recommending that this city council as we receive additional local option tax revenue through the cannabis industry. And I think we're all somewhat hopeful like our wonderful craft beer industry that our craft cannabis industry will bring some economic development to the city. But given the history behind all of this, I think it's really critical that we target or try to target some of that revenue to really provide economic support and social supports to the BIPOC community as we come into that over the next few years. I should just point out that this is not gonna happen tomorrow. The state licenses don't even begin until May of 22. And then as I said, there's this sort of staggered period beyond that, which is one of the things we need to better understand. Councillor Carpenter, are you gonna make a motion to postpone it? But I- I want to, if Councillor Hanson wants to speak first, but I will be making that motion. Okay. Well, if you make the motion, I'll just repeat here, but I would just- I would move that we postpone this and hopefully I'm saying it properly till our next meeting on the- On the 19th, I believe? Yes. Okay. And Councillor Carpenter, just for clarity's sake, do you mean both, are you moving to postpone both items 5.03 and 5.04? 5.04 was pulled from the agenda. Okay. Should be pulled. So again, I said we had two and Councillor Hanson and I worked together to have one and that should be on our agenda as the revised. Yes. Sorry, I missed that in the motion and so we'll put it on Board Ducks. Okay. So you're moving to postpone to time certain, which would be our next City Council meeting on January 19th. Yes. Okay. So we have a motion on the floor. Is there a second to that? Councillor Hanson has moved. Councillor Carpenter, did you want the floor back? No, I don't. None at this point. Okay. I see Councillor Mason and then I'll go to Councillor Hanson. Thank you, President Tracy. I just want to note for the record my recusal from consideration of anything relating to this matter to do a professional conflict of interest. Thank you. Thank you very much for letting us know. Councillor Hanson. Great. And thanks Councillor Carpenter for the overview. It's more, you know, initially when folks kind of brought this item to our attention, people who had been working at the statewide level, it seemed somewhat straightforward of basically the state statute requires this opt-in language from municipalities for retail and integrated licenses. And here's the language. But there's, it's obviously a lot more complicated than that. And we need to try to do anything that we can at the local level to go above and beyond and in terms of equity. And this is an opportunity to do that. The state statute doesn't actually give a ton of leeway to the municipalities in terms of regulation and policy around cannabis. This is really the main component that it does give to the municipality is this opt-in aspect specifically for retail and integrated as well as for Burlington and other municipalities that use local option taxes, the ability to collect 1% local option. So, but we wanna, yeah, like I said, we wanna make sure that we're doing this equitably. And part of that does have to do with the timing of when the various types of licenses are allowed to move forward. So that's something that we've been grappling with. I think it's a really good move to push this back a few weeks so that we can all dig in a little bit deeper and try to get this right. I will say though, there is a reason why we're trying to do this year rather than next year because I'm sure some of you are thinking, well, why are we rushing this at all? Why don't we just do it in a year? The reason to do it this year is that if we get that voter approval, we would have a much longer lead time in order to develop any local policy around this. Whereas if we wait till next year, we would only have a very short window to try to set up any local regulation and policy and around this. And there's a variety of things that that could entail in terms of what we could do at the local level, but it's hard to start on that when we don't actually know if the voters even want to opt in to retail and integrate it. And so we really do wanna get that voter signal this year and also ideally create that signal and start that process of building a restorative and race-centric, racial equity, racial justice-centric policy and framework in Burlington. So that's why we do wanna try to get this to the voters this year rather than next year. And yeah, I just wanna thank everyone who's been helping to educate Councillor Carpenter and I and to all and has made themselves available to help out with developing this policy and also to the REIB director, Taisha Green for helping out and providing input as well to this. So I'm hoping that together as a council, we can dig into this issue over the next two weeks and get to a really strong place to be able to put this before voters. Thanks. Thank you, Councillor Hanson. Any other councillors wishing to speak to this, the motion to postpone this item until the 19th? Okay, seeing none. We will go to a vote on the motion to postpone. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, that passes unanimously and we will take that item up at our next meeting. Thank you for introducing the topic councillors and for your work to collaborate on this item. This brings us to our with 5.04 having been taken off of the agenda. We have item 5.05, which is a communication from Mayor Weinberger regarding a veto of the Charter Change of the Police Community Control Board. Will Mayor Weinberger, are you with us? Yes, President Tracey, I'm here just struggling with the technology for a moment. So thank you for the opportunity to start the discussion tonight. Following the release of my letter on Thursday, City Council President Max Tracey reached out to me on Sunday morning and invited me to discuss my veto with several progressive city councillors. I met with them at noon that day for approximately 90 minutes. Director of Police Transformation, Kyle Dodson and Chief of Staff Jordan Redell also attended that meeting. The meeting was productive, detailed and from my perspective, appeared to be conducted in good faith by all participants. I left the meeting optimistic that there is much common ground between us on the issue of reforming police discipline, hopeful of achieving a compromise, either now or in the months to come and awaiting a response from the councillors as to whether they were interested in continuing the talks and attempting to negotiate changes to the proposed charter change before tonight. No further progress or material communications took place until early this afternoon when councillors were back in touch with me and shared some proposed new charter language, charter change language. I appreciate that over the last two days the progressive councillors showed willingness to find compromise. Unfortunately, however, the changes transmitted this afternoon fell well short of addressing my fundamental concern that the current charter change proposal will undermine the city's ability to ensure public safety, specifically undermine our ability to ensure that when the public calls we are able to respond with professional public employees who are trained for the full range of emergencies and needs that the public expects us to address. Further, following additional consultations with the city attorney, it has become more clear to me than it was at the time of my Thursday veto letter that the legally prescribed process for making charter changes does not lend itself to compromise at this stage. Indeed, it is clear that there are no options to make binding changes to the charter language at this point. It would provide adequate transparency and opportunity for the thorough vetting and review needed by councillors, the administration and the public. Specifically, all options for making changes to the charter change language at this point would require last minute amendments of tonight's city council agenda, language to be negotiated and acted upon by the council without any public review and some kind of non-binding council vote at tonight's meeting. Therefore, I will not be rescinding my veto and I urge the city council to sustain it tonight. It is very unfortunate that a clear opportunity for consensus and progress on this important policing and racial justice issue was missed. Prior to the key vote on this charter change, on December 14th, I made repeated requests for the city councilors who have led this effort to engage the administration. Unfortunately, they declined to collaborate sooner. I believe that had we been able to have those discussions earlier before that vote, we would now have a charter change with broad support heading to the ballot for Burlington voters to decide in March. While we will not have that consensus, we will not have that consensus for this March, I am still committed to achieving that goal as soon as possible. If my veto is sustained, the work to improve our police discipline system and build trust with Burlington's BIPOC residents on this issue must continue with urgency. As detailed in my veto letter, there is much that we can and should do immediately to continue making progress in our current disciplinary system while working at the same time towards necessary structural change. I'm committed to continuing this work and I hope my city council colleagues will be as well. Finally, I wanna address the many Burlington residents who have advocated for this charter change. I respect and am grateful for the work you have put into this process. Though I do not feel I can responsibly do what you want me to tonight. I believe you have shaped Burlington's discussions, raised critical ideas and advanced policy goals in recent months dramatically. I hope that on another future day, not far ahead of us, we will be able to find compromise and common ground on this issue and achieve the enduring progress for policing and racial justice. Thank you, President Tracy, for the chance to start with that statement. Thank you, Mayor. I will now recognize Councillor Hightower for a motion. Thanks, President Tracy. I'd like to move to try to overwrite the veto and reconsider the resolution pursuant to charter section 46. Okay, so we have a motion. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Freeman. Councillor Hightower, you have the floor. Thanks. This charter change is not perfect and I don't think that's the bar. I would venture to say that no charter change that this body has ever passed and its entire history has been perfect and I challenge anyone who thinks that the status quo that we have today is better for our city than the proposed charter change as written. I think most of the councillors, certainly the ones who have worked with me know that I hate getting things wrong and I hate failing. At 11, I moved as a poor black femme to small town, made infamous by the release of a black man from death row. Turns out he'd been framed for murder by both police and prosecutors. My parents, the entire time I lived in that town, never let me forget that I had to work three times as hard as anyone else and always, always be above suspicion. I carefully read the mayor's veto and I spent, as he said, time with him yesterday and three of my fellow progressives who took him up on his offer of compromise. The compromises that we discussed verbally seemed surmountable, at least certainly to myself and to the mayor and I left with optimism. The differences, in my opinion, were not veto worthy but I am biased. I also didn't think that they were not worth compromising on, but again, maybe I'm biased. For the sake of transparency, I want folks to know that the three buckets that we got wanted to compromise on were removing the chief from the board's disciplinary authority first to giving administration in chief a more formal role in providing a recommendation to the board and three, clarifying that this board will be fair and impartial and have standards for what levels of discipline would warrant what levels of miscontact. From there, the onus was on us to interpret what the mayor wanted, draft language embedded with the community, which I did. I had the chance to talk to just two people beyond my caucus, just two to think through this proposal before advocating for it, both to my caucus and to the broader community. I drafted and we sent across compromises, including all three of the ones listed above within 24 hours of a conversation, less than 24 hours. I have cried more than I care to admit over the passionate and valid pushback from those who disagreed with me, both substantively and process-wise, over this quick change compromise. And I just have to say that as the only Black Femme on this council, I'm unsurprisingly bending over backwards to make this proposal as palatable as possible to my fellow politicians and getting heat from both sides in order to get what we all know is a very real need in this community. It was also primarily by Pop Femme and non-binary folks who did the extra research and engaged councilor Freeman engaged attorneys to get this language in front of us all. Keisla has made clear that our police department and every police department across the country has no legal obligation to protect us or serve us, me or anyone in the city, no matter what is painted on their cars. Our officers also have qualified immunity, which means they can brutalize members of our community and still be called reasonable. My understanding and our community's understanding of what is reasonable is so far from what the legal definition and the prevailing practices of our police forces are. Our police department in mail are like to talk about how progressive our police force is and it is progressive. But my guess is that the most of the impactful changes came from expectations that came from outside the department. This change to me is no different and this charter change is past due. How many of the tragedies across the country that my black siblings have faced were an officer's first reasonable mistake? Maybe in a police department's first reasonable tragedy, why do we think we are immune when we know systemic racism is embedded in every part of this city, including this council? I really strongly believe that this is not the time to uphold the status quo. I hope that my fellow counselors will join me in attempting to override this veto. Thank you, Councillor Hightower. I don't have anyone else in the queue to speak to the motion to override. Councillor Paul. Thanks, President Tracy. I had all sorts of things prepared about what I was gonna say tonight. Those of you who have sat on the council with me know that I'm rarely not prepared in what I say. And tonight was no different, although now that I'm sort of sitting here, I'm not really sure if this is good, bad, or indifferent. I think that we're living in a world right now with less and less certainty over the past year. And we've witnessed a lot of uncommon loss, death, struggle, reckoning with social justice this past year. And I do think that there is one certainty and that is that we do need meaningful and authentic, not around the edges reform. We need broad and responsible change. And we need to make sure that it's sustainable and that it is adaptive and that it addresses the issues that I think we all know exist. I think that the bottom line on this charter change is that we are all struggling to figure out the best path forward because we know that we live in a community with members who do not feel safe. And while the majority, I among them take for granted this comfort, other struggle with it every day. And I think that their struggle has to become the struggle of every person in the majority. The time for free passes, for saying we don't get it, the time for blind ignorance is over. And I do believe that police reform is imperative that it's essential and that it is our moral obligation. I'd like to say that I would like to share that I believe that the sponsors of this resolution and the many people who have worked so hard to support it, I really truly believe. I know that they believe that this charter change is what Burlington needs to move towards greater police accountability and building community trust. And they may very well be right. For me, the question is, what are the unintended consequences? What are the challenges yet to overcome? And perhaps most importantly, can we find a path forward that needs all our needs? A lot of people point to NACOL as an authority on police oversight. And I think that NACOL is an authority on police oversight. They're a national authority. If you look on their website, there's a report by a man named Peter Finn who wrote a report called Citizen Review of Police. And he talked about a lot of oversight models and his report is still held by NACOL and others as very important benchmark document on crafting Citizen Review of Police. And there are a couple of things that he notes in his report, a report that had an advisory committee that was made up of sociologists, criminologists, a person actually from Plattsburg State. What he says in his report is that he points out that citizen oversight can be a win, win, win for a community. And he refers to those wins as people who are complainants have reported, his research shows that complainants have reported that they feel that they have the opportunity to be heard by an independent overseer, regardless of the outcome that citizens are satisfied being able to express their concerns in a safe space. And police department administrators have reported that citizen oversight improves their relationship and image with the community and has strengthened the quality of a department's internal investigations and reassured the public that the process is thorough and fair. But one of the other things that it also points out to and I sort of have to read this because I don't wanna get it wrong is that he says the talent, fairness, dedication and flexibility of the key participants in particular on elected officials, police chief, union representatives and the community are more important to the procedure success than is the system structure. And his report identifies places in which these individuals have all worked together cooperatively, noting that this is one of the really key ingredients in police oversight procedure thriving and being successful. I think that in order to be sustainable that this policy must be embrace a sound policy that has been vetted to be adaptable, flexible and to listen to all voices. And by all voices, Finn also says that a critical step in minimizing conflict and having a successful policy is for all parties to be valued and be at the table. I apologize for speaking, I'll try to wrap up. My decision to vote yes on the racial justice resolution and not only to vote yes, but to lend my support as a co-sponsor was not an easy lift. It was, I felt and I still feel the right thing to do and one that I think put us on the right course to having the challenging debates and votes that we're having right now. And as much as I humanly can, my vote on December 14th as some people have noted in emails that they've sent me really put me in a pretty dark place for a long time for a number of days as I wrestled with what to do to support others who deserve safety as much as I do. I said on December 14th that as much as I felt that they're really needed to be badly needed reform, that I don't think that this charter change is the path that I can support. And to some degree, it's based on my experience on the council. I believe that the best path forward is broad charter language like the language that I circulated to counselors in early December before the first council meeting on this change. I feel that I have been consistent about that and that I did try to offer an alternative on all the points about the oversight board, the investigative office were included in that much briefer charter and broader charter language. And I would have very much and did welcome additional input. I'd be happy to bring this back and think that it could gain broad community support with the details completed in an ordinance. And ordinance is not like charter. It doesn't take two years to implement. It's responsive and it's adaptive to our changing needs. I've looked at Boulder, Denver, Madison, Wisconsin and other cities. And that is how they are successfully doing this work. They're putting broad language in charter and they are doing the rest of it in ordinance. But what we're talking about tonight is a veto override. And I am grateful to counselors who tried to reconcile differences from the administration to the progressive counselors. I know that that was genuinely attempted. As written, I can't support the charter change. I've tried in my years on the council to be consistent as an elected official in that if I vote to put something on the ballot, I have to believe in bringing the language as it is to the people. And if I vote yes, I feel that I really should be supportive of it. I don't think that people in word six elect me. I do think people in word six elect me to make fair and judicious decisions, including what goes on the ballot. And I'm grateful to the many people who've consistently shown up at council meetings as well as the dozens of people who have emailed and called me over the past month. In closing, I just would say that I don't really think that there's a lot of difference that separates people on this critical issue. I really hope that after tonight that we can start to, can try to really talk together and talk with each other. I really believe that we can do that. I know that trust is paramount and building trust is hard work. I also feel that police officers need to own up to the fact that there isn't justice in policing, that racial prejudice does exist in policing and the data does prove that. I'm committed to learning and to fighting at the same time. I know that there are too many that have waited too long and I'm committed to try with anyone, we'll reach out to anyone and know that we must move forward, unite us and not divide us. I know that I've disappointed some people. I am more sorry than I can say. I do hope that after this evening that we can move forward. Sorry, you all cut out there for a second. I had a little glitch. So I had Councillor Pine to be followed by Councillor Carpenter and Stromberg. Go ahead, Councillor Pine. Thank you. I think I just wanna bring up a little bit of our own history as a community and really as a council. So I dug into that accountability list that we get on our agenda every meeting and I saw that in 2017, the council was debating a civilian oversight commission and perhaps a task force to look at this. And then I dug a little deeper and I saw that in 2015, March 23rd, 2015, the council adopted a resolution asking the Charter Change Committee to work in consultation with the Police Commission and the Police Department to consider the following. Expansion of the commission from five members to up to seven that was accomplished. Review of and possible additions to the Charter language concerning the role of the commission and possible formalization of the role of the commission in the review of officer discipline consisting of the goals of the diversity and equity strategic plan. That's a plan that was developed by the city with a consultant to really advance the ideas of racial equity, inclusion and belonging before we use those terms. So it was called the diversity and equity strategic plan. We then had discussions and debates that went on for some time and in almost exactly four years ago right now, the council was faced with a resolution to essentially create a task force looking at this issue. My point in bringing this up is that we have tried and we have discussed and we have talked and we have met and we have had groups meet on this topic for so long that if we have the desire to affect the type of change that we need to, there needs to be a much more focused and serious conversation by those who feel this goes too far, engage in a meaningful way throughout the entire process and bringing in all of your thoughts, your concerns, your fears, your hopes, your dreams. So in the end, more is not just, we don't just talk ourselves into feeling and reassuring ourselves that we're doing something and we're doing the right thing. We have spent years trying to figure out this issue. Many have said this is not a perfect proposal. It is not a perfect proposal but it does raise important issues about accountability, transparency and holding ourselves to a higher standard as both elected officials and as a city for how we care for each other, how we police ourselves, because that's really what we do and how we deal with those who take and use excessive force or who use brutality against citizens. We have to find the courage, the conviction to deal with that issue. And I think after all is said and done, again, more is said than done. And I'm really frustrated that we continue to kick the can down the road and say, let's convene, let's have more conversation, let's do that. Let's finally find the conviction to take action in a meaningful way that brings us to a place where we know many of us believe that's where we need to go. I think there's consensus that we need to do something totally different. I just don't get the sense tonight that there's a political will. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Pine. I have Councilor Carpenter to be followed by Councilor Stromberg. Thank you both, Councilor Paul and Councilor Pine. You've said some of what I was thinking this is very difficult for me as well. Like Councilor Paul, if I'm gonna vote to put something on a ballot, I really need to be behind it. And as much work and as much passion has gone into this in the last three months, we need more work on it. And I hate to say that in light of what Councilor Pine just said. And he's right. It is a matter of political will. We need to keep on working on this. This delay, if you wanna call it that, it's just that, there is so much we've all talked about the fact that the gut of reform has to happen. So whether this passes in March or November, all that work needs to be done. I have lots of comments and I've passed them on to some of the Councilors involved about how does this proposal interrelate with the other transformation and the police administration and all of that kind of stuff. We need to just keep working on that work now, not tomorrow now and get ourselves in a position so that we can come up with the proposal that we all support. I do fundamentally support the concept that in terms of charter, I mean, the single thing in the charter that moved us was, is the single statement that the police chief has sole authority for firing. We need to get rid of that. All of the rest of the proposal, whether it's a monitor or an investigative model, we need everybody at the table and we need to start those conversations and we need to set a deadline, be it a November election, if that's possible. I think as a practical matter from the state legislature point of view, the March election wasn't gonna speed us any faster in the first year of a biennium. That's just my personal experience. So we should take the time that's been given to us to do things right and get the consensus so that we can broadly, broadly pass something that we all desperately need. Thank you, Councilor Carpenter. I have Councilor Stromberg to be followed by Councilor Freeman. Yeah, I have a statement, but also should we suspend the rules? Yes, thank you for pointing that out. Councilor Stromberg, would you like to offer such a motion? Sure, I move to suspend the rules. Just to complete this item. I mean, this is the only item on the agenda, so okay. All right, so seconded by Councilor Freeman, the motion is non-debatable and requires two thirds. So are we go to a vote? All those in favor of suspending the rules, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Is there anyone opposed, I'm sorry. Okay, so we have suspended the rules to complete this item. Thank you for that reminder, Councilor Stromberg. I'm just, the floor is yours. Thank you, President Tracy. Yeah, man, this is heavy. Yeah, I just wanna say that I feel like we all know how the pieces are gonna fall this evening, but I do wanna say that I trust the organizers in our city. I trust the activists in our city. I trust the BIPOC people in our city. I trust the aging population in our city. I trust the LGBTQ community in our city. The students, I trust the residents of Burlington to make decisions for themselves. And I trust that the folks we represent are going to vote and make the right decision for them. That just is very obvious to me. You know, I trust the residents of Ward six. I trust the residents of Ward eight, Ward one, three, four, five, whatever. I'm increasingly getting a little scared because I'm seeing a lot of unilateral decisions being made more frequently by the administration and the mayor. And I feel like this is a very special type of abuse of power. And you might wonder, oh, well, why am I calling it that? But I think it's as simple as withholding the opportunity and voice of voters to vote on matters this large and this important is kind of abusing the power that we have as a body. And watching that happen in real time is really, it's just very disheartening. And, you know, I look at political change as a ratcheting effect, you know, like making change as a step in a steady process, it's slow and complex. But even if down the line at a state level, perhaps this charter chain doesn't ultimately yield anything or come to fruition or what have you, it's still beyond worth it to stand with the incredible people who have been on the front lines of this work. And, you know, I just wanna take the rest of this real quick to speak directly to the public, directly to the organizers, you know, regardless of what happens tonight, you know, I wanna say that during the hysterically long public forum we experienced over the summer, I took down maybe being ambitious and a new counselor, thought I could keep up with all the names and the notes, but I took down everyone's name and comment from every single person that spoke over that period of time. And, you know, that initial notebook is now totally full and, you know, pages front and back are filled. And I look at that from time to time because it's really, it really is so powerful. And I'm just, I'm really proud to share the space with you and live in this community alongside you and I want you to know that you are appreciated and amazing and inspiring in your existence and your safety matters. And I am so sorry for the pain that this process has caused because sitting during those charter change meetings and many city council meetings and other committee meetings and witnessing all of the time, capacity and emotion being lent to us, you know, and in this process has been tolling on levels that I will never be able to speak to because I am a privileged white person on this council. And I just, I want you to know that you are incredibly, incredibly important to our community and this fight and this effort does not stop tonight. It never stops, but it absolutely does not stop this evening. So I just wanna thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Stromberg. I have Councillor Freeman to be followed by Hanson and Jiang. Go ahead, Councillor Freeman. Thank you, President Tracey. I wanted to clear, well, from my perspective, clear the, make clear my feelings about the, about the process around engagement. There's been a lot of conversation around willingness to compromise and come to the table. It's pretty surprising to me that councillors were willing and have been willing to say that given, I just don't understand why you would say that because like I have the emails in my inbox that I sent to you. Like it's so easy for me to just come on here and say really quickly, like I sent an email to director Dotson on November 22nd. I had to email again two weeks later and say, hey, what are your thoughts on this? And that was a day before the next day we ended up connecting. And then within hours, the administration put out an entirely different proposal. I don't know what to say. I emailed every single councillor on November 22nd this proposal. The only people I heard from in terms of a back and forth conversation, some people did not respond at all for the councillors who voted to support this. I worked with everyone who reached out to me. We discussed our concerns. Some councillors I talked to for hours and I tried to incorporate them. We went back and forth. It's a negotiation. There has to be a back and forth in order to compromise. So I don't want to create more drama, but it's just when I have reporters reaching out to me saying, did you reach out to councillors? Was there any attempt on your part to engage? By this narrative that I didn't try to engage, I reached out to every single police commissioner in November and asked for their feedback. I've been reaching out for feedback. Someone emailed me and said, can you force other councillors to work with you? I cannot force anyone on this council to work with me. It goes against my principles. It goes against principles of consent. It is up to you. If you are passionate about this issue, then just come to the table. So it's just, I don't know. I feel frustrated about that aspect. In terms of the concerns around the level of specificity, it was just very clear from the beginning. I would have to look at those other models that were cited, but many of the powers such as subpoena powers and disciplinary powers, a lot of those things have to be written in specifically authorized at this stage of the charter. There are some aspects that could have been pulled, like the selection process could have probably been pulled and put later and et cetera and so forth, but some of the level of specificity was due to the degree to power, the powers and duties that we were attempting to put into the board to create independent investigation and discipline. I can't explain it, but it just, it had to be written to a level of specificity. It's not, and that's a one aspect in terms of the technicality of it. I think the other aspect, and I think this gets out what councillor Pine said, which is just, why kick the can down the road farther? Why? I mean, I get some of the aspects if we want some flexibility down the road to be able to work at it on an ordinance level, that's fine, but on some of these major issues, like subpoena powers holding hearings, independent investigation and discipline, why kick those down the road? Kick the can down the road. That's what we need. We need that for accountability. We need this change. It's just been, anyway, I have, let me see, I think there was one more. Yeah, my last comment was just, of course, I think it, I think at this point it's a bit odd to not just allow people to vote on it. It's very strange to me, but that is what it is. Yeah, I worked really hard on this process. I've been really passionate about it for years. I hope that we can take a deep breath after tonight and sort of regroup and try to reground ourselves on what our values are and what we really want to do as a city and as a community in terms of actually supporting people who are most likely not to feel unsafe but to be unsafe in their material reality. I think, I mean, Ashley started us off really well in this meeting by talking about the facts. The facts are just, they're here. I mean, people's feelings of discomfort or disempowerment or whatever, do not replace the actual material reality of being unsafe, of being more likely to experience violence, more likely to experience arrest. We can't equate the two. And I just, I don't want us to get so mired in the politics of this that we lose sight of actually making transformative change. So, I know there are other folks in the queue, so other people can speak, but yeah, I hope we continue to work through this and stop focusing on who's engaging and who's not engaging and actually just come to the table because I really think that we need to put forward a policy. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Freeman. I have Councilor Hanson to be followed by Councilors Chang and Mason. Thanks. And thanks again, everyone who spoke up tonight once again coming out and engaging in this and especially to the people of color and other marginalized people who spoke up despite the amount of just emotional labor that that really takes. And despite the ways that institutions like this one disappoint and fail you over and over and over again. We really have no choice, but to keep pushing and keep working on this. And I feel that we're really lucky to have so many amazing people in Burlington who are working in community and taking these issues on together. And that's gonna be here no matter what happens tonight and that's really inspiring and hopeful to me. There's been pretty enormous and unprecedented public participation in this process on this issue. We're really at a point now where we need to give this decision to the people of Burlington to the voters. It is a detailed policy. We're not gonna agree on every single detail of this. I think literally everyone who's been involved with us has aspects of it that they would want to change in one direction or another. Everyone, that's the nature of compromise. That's the nature of the amount of players that have been involved in this and the months of hard work and process that have gone into that. Passing something this consequential and controversial through the council, getting seven counselors on board with that requires a really large degree of compromise and collaboration. We all agree that action is needed and that the current system is untenable. At the end of the day, this is about asking our community after unprecedented outcry from our community if they want to move forward on creating this new independent board to ensure real oversight of our police. So in my mind, the question right now before the council is really after everything that's led up to this and not just this process around this proposal but Councillor Pine pointed out, we've been talking about this forever. We've been wanting to move on this forever. After all that, after more public comment and support of this proposal, then almost any item that we've ever passed in far more than anything else that we're putting on the ballot this March, far more public support and input and comment than anything that we're placing on the ballot for voters to decide. The question is after all that, are you gonna vote no and let this die tonight because there are aspects of it that you disagree with or are you going to say, okay, maybe I disagree with certain aspects. I don't agree with everything in this proposal but ultimately it's time to put this to the people and let them decide for themselves. I think Councillor Paul raised the fact that we need all voices at the table. Well, this is how we can hear all voices right now is to override the veto and put it to the people and hear directly from them on this. Democracy is messy, it's always a compromise. You're not gonna get exactly what you want. We all get frustrated, I get frustrated. We push hard for what we want. You don't always get it, right? And there's not every aspect of this proposal that we agree with. And change is uncomfortable but it's necessary and we all know it's necessary because the status quo can't go on. So I think it's, we've been grappling in city government this issue for so long. We've heard so much outcry from the community. We really need to get it to the people. It's always gonna be controversial. There's always gonna be disagreements but we have to put something to the voters. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Hanson. I have Councillor Jang to be followed by Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Tracy. This is like a question for members of the safety committee. I think it's Polino High Tower and I don't know. One more. And I was just wondering if the document in front of us was adopted by you, members of the police committee, the city of Polino. The role of the police commission, do you have you adopted this document? Is there a Councillor Freeman? Who do you like to speak to this? Sorry, which document? Burlington Police Commission policy, role of the Burlington Police Commission in reviving complaints against BPD employee. It was adopted August 25th, 2020 and was just wondering what body adopted it. That wouldn't have been. That wouldn't have been public safety. I don't think so. Sorry, I'm not recalling. Can you, can you, sorry, can you... It was the police commission, right? Yeah, okay. Yeah, it was a police commission and you see, and I think what we heard today, all of us is the police cannot police themselves. A group of people elected by the city council are adopting documents around how they review policies. It was not us. It did not come to the council, to this body. That's one fact right there, as to why we need an independent, oversight body. Despite that adoption August 25th, 2020, most recently, I helped someone submit a complaint. To submit a complaint. Someone, a black man in this community. The police commission has not seen its complaint. It was investigated. They just received a report. Do you think that's right? I don't think it's right. And I think what is right is the police department has been under microscope since June. All the topics, everything, we reduce their numbers. We don't respect them. The moral is down. This city council reduced it also without any say from the public. We did. And a smaller body is investigating. It's just complete mess. What is happening right now is our police department. And I think the being under a microscope, we could have been prevented, prevented it by showing leadership at its core value. At its real meaning, we fail to do that. And now we want the voters to have a say. And that say will not only about this oversight, they will also tell us what you have done in reducing the police. This is an opportunity for us to understand what the community is talking about. We all fail the city, all of us, starting with the mayor. Because if he has shown leadership back then when black boys were victimized here, we would not be having this conversation right now at 11 p.m. in 2021. Lack of leadership. And for the sake of working together, I'm asking you all to read this book. It is called Strong Towns. If you haven't read it yet, important rebuilding America's cities from the bottom up and credible book. Yeah, by Charles Brighard Jr., and credible. I am an independent. Democrats are here, progressives are here. They even have met to talk about a compromise. I was not aware. Why? Because I choose to not be involved in any party. I just choose to represent the residents of the city, to lead them and to make sure that their needs are met. They safe. I'm being punished because I'm an independent. And coming here today, what I had in mind is the mayor will bring proposal. The compromise was going to happen here tonight. That's what I thought it was going to happen. It already happened and it failed. Yeah, it happened, it failed. And I am here not knowing even what is happening because I don't do party politics. We failed the city, all of us. It is unfortunate. And this is not a surprise. The mayor refusing to put it on the ballot. It's not a surprise. And I don't know why. Anything about asking the electorate of the city is against it. It's very unfortunate. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang or Councillor Meese. Thank you, President Tracy. I've ripped my notes and crossed out what I was going to say about five different times because it is clear as an observer of all those who have spoken in addition to the public how much input and thought and emotion have gone into this. And even for those of us who are going to be voting to sustain the veto, it's with a very heavy heart. I think everyone that I'm seeing on this screen right now would vote or supports a civilian oversight body. I don't believe any of us think that the current model with the police chief as the sole arbiter of disciplinary matters is a good model or is the right model. And the devil is in the details of how we get there. My concerns that sort of formed my no vote on December 14th remain relating to whether this is the right model for the city of Burlington, an investigatory model with final decision in an oversight body. The role of the police chief, I respect and I've heard from many today who have differing views in terms of whether there would be an impact on managerial authority or how the chief controls the department that he has no say in any disciplinary matter. I also continue to have concerns relating to the makeup of the committee, specific makeup of the committee and its perception as being biased and the potential impact of any decisions that that body makes being impartial and the potential legal consequences of that if they were subject to challenge and placed in arbitration. Put all together, those to me still come down to negatively or concerns about negatively impacting public safety. And I respect and I've heard from many who may not have those same concerns or don't come to the same conclusion, but as an elected official, I have a hard time disregarding those warning bells that go off as we're hearing and I respect that some are calling it gaslighting, but very real concerns in terms of staffing and we're all getting the emails from constituents who don't wanna move to less than a 24-7 police presence. So in light of all of that, I'm in the same place I was on the 14th, which is voting to sustain the veto. I'm disappointed I did have some enthusiasm based on the mayor's communication Friday and what I heard very positive reports of there being attempts to come to some compromise that we would be sitting here 13 of us voting in favor of what was being proposed. I think we all need to face the political reality of, in order to get this through the legislature and signed by the governor is going to require 13 of us in an overwhelming majority vote by the citizens and I don't feel that this is the path that's gonna make that achievable. I also, I appreciated Councillor Freeman's comments relating to if this does not move forward, taking a deep breath, regrouping and moving forward and I don't know whether that's the path that the mayor has outlaid or a different path, but I am optimistic that as a collective body, we can do so on an expedited basis. And as not, Councillor Pine is legitimately pointing out this isn't another five-year project. The one last piece I wanted to speak to, there was a concern raised or a frustration about this being an abuse of power. I pushed back on that a little bit, the mayor's veto and our role is all laid out in our charter and in my 10 years of service on the council, I can count on a single hand the number of times we've had to deal with a veto. So I respect that some may not like the mayor vetoed it, but this is part of our charter process and we're moving through it. So with that, thank you, President Tracy. Thank you, Councillor Mason. I do not have anyone else in the queue. Councillor Shannon, go ahead. Thank you, President Tracy. I wanted to thank the many, many people that reached out to me. I met with a couple in person, actually, which I really never do these days, but I thought that this was really important and I also talked to many people on the phone and I was heartened by how many people came to that conversation in a really genuine way to consider how we can move forward to be thoughtful about the concerns that I raised and to look for compromises in that process. And I have to say that was not the reception that I got on the Charter Change Committee for my colleagues. And it was clear to me that my colleagues had the ability to outvote me and that they would did not value my opinion. And so there wasn't a lot of point in adding that to the debate because it was shut down very quickly. So I do think that there has been input from some people, but that's very different than bringing stakeholders to the table for a genuine conversation. And what counselor Hall pointed out about flushing out unintended consequences that only really happens by bringing different perspectives to the table, bringing 200 people who agree to speak about something is not how you flush out unintended consequences. You want people to challenge a proposal, but there didn't seem to be that desire. There was a desire to compromise to get enough votes, but not to really challenge the proposal. It was also clear that the input of the police chief was not valued in this process. I don't think that we have to agree with the chief, but I think we need to know what his perspective is and what his concerns are and think about that thoughtfully. And that did not happen in this process. I know that a lot of people feel that we should just put it on the ballot and let the voters decide and not deny the voters that opportunity, but this would never go on the ballot in whole. It's six pages of very detailed charter change language which you could not put on the ballot in whole. So the voters would be very reliant on our recommendation when we put that on the ballot. I have voted to put some things on the ballot that I think the voters should weigh in on and I'm not in full agreement with, but not something like this, which is so complex, really needs to be thoroughly vetted. And it's not easy to change. It's not an advisory question. This is a binding question. The charter change would then go to the legislature. And honestly, I think we all need to start looking at each other like we're playing on the same team because I think that everybody at this table actually wants the same thing. I think we all really do want meaningful change and I don't think that there's a fear of being uncomfortable here. I think that we're all ready to do the hard work that's required, but it does mean listening to everybody. And it does mean bringing opinions we don't agree with to the table and listening thoughtfully to those opinions. If we want to have a meaningful change, we can't go forward with something that we are told repeatedly it's unlikely to make it through the legislature. That sets us back years to bring that forward and then to fail. And if it makes it through the legislature and as counselor Mason points out, there are problems with due process and the discipline that is needed out by this group doesn't actually hold up on an appeal by an officer who's disciplined, we have failed. So I think we need to be really sure of what we're moving forward. And when we start something in November and want to decide on it in December, that is not a fully vetted proposal. And in fact, the police commission our BIPOC police commission who almost every member there, if not every member there got on that commission because they were so concerned about how their family and community members are treated by police. And they are not in the pocket of the police the way they have been described. But they are serving because of that specific interest and this proposal never went to them before it came to the council. They had to jump through all kinds of hoops to weigh in on this proposal in a meaningful way. It shouldn't be that hard. They should be invited to the table. I really look forward. I think that there is a lot that we can do. There's some that we can do without a charter change. I am not in full agreement with my colleagues that say that the charter change is too detailed. I mean, I agree in part with that. I don't think it has to be quite as detailed as it is but I do think that councilor Freeman is right. That with something like this there does need to be a fair amount of detail in the charter change. Not necessarily exactly what the makeup of the board is but there's a lot of details that need to be worked out for the charter change. It can't just be completely broad. So we have a lot of work to do and I look forward to in the coming year coming up with something that will have full consensus not something that we make compromises to just barely enough votes to do it because we're all on the same page. We all want this. Let's do something that the community can fully support. And I heard a lot of willingness to compromise from the people who were calling me to advocate for this. I think our community is willing to make compromises and they're willing to listen to different points of view and I hope that we are all willing to do the same. Thank you. Thank you, councilor Shannon and just a reminder to members of the public. I'm not sure what was happening there again but just reminder to the members of the public to please let counselors speak and to contact them when they're not speaking either through email or other forms but just please allow counselors to speak when they're on the floor of the city council they're obviously not going to be able to respond to you in any way. So just really hope that folks can respect counselors and give them the space that they need to express themselves in our meetings. I don't have anyone else in the queue. Are we ready to go to a vote on the motion? Okay. President Tracy, could you clarify the motion and how we're voting please? Yep. So the motion is to override the veto. So a yes vote is to override and a no vote is to sustain the veto. Tony Black put a left in that. Just want to make absolutely sure. That's correct. Okay. Is everybody clear on what we're voting on and what a yes and a no means? Okay. Will the city clerk please call the roll. Councilor Carpenter. Councilor Jang, I'm sorry. Yes. Councilor Freeman. Yes. Councilor Hanson. Yes. Councilor Hightower. Yes. Councilor Mason. No. Councilor Paul. Councilor Paulino. No. Councilor Pine. Yes. Councilor Shannon. No. Councilor Strongberg. Yes. City Council President Tracy. Yes. Seven ayes, five days. Okay, the motion to override fails. We need two thirds to override a mayoral veto. So it would have required eight votes. So the motion fails. That being the last item on our agenda is a motion to adjourn as an order. So moved. Moved by Councilor Strongberg, seconded by Councilor Jang. Discussion. Seeing none, all those in favor of adjourning please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously and we are adjourned at 1109. Thank you very much, Councillors and members of the public. We'll see you on 1119.