 I will call to order the liquor control board. But first, I will lead the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. So first up, we have regular items. Is Jenny in the? Yes. The chambers. Wonderful. So we have approval for Pratton, messed this up, Pratton, Bacata and Maya, AAsian market with a tobacco substitute endorsement and a second-class license that was approved December 4th, 2023, or item A. Yes, good evening. So their second-class license was approved earlier on December 4th. Their tobacco substitute endorsement license was, they did not receive that initially. So that is up for renewal. Wonderful. Council, do you have any questions? All right, hearing no questions, I will look for a motion. We move. Second. Motion by Councilor Oakley, second by Councilor Hurd. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. All right, motion has passed. And then the second establishment is for Fusion, their first, third-class and restaurant application. Anything we should know about this approval, Jenny? Council, do you have any questions? All right, so I will look for a motion, please. I move. Second. Motion by Councilor Oakley, second by Councilor Judge. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you. Wonderful. But Jenny, it looks like there's one more thing on here. There is. The special approval to authorize the city clerk to authorize any permits received prior to April 1st, 2024. Correct. So seeking approval permission to approve these sidewalk permits. So these... Do you have any questions? So these are just any that we have previously approved. These are coinciding with the liquor establishments, right? Gotcha. I've just received a couple more today, just waiting for some final completion of these establishments for their liquor license and their annual inspection. Okay. Any other questions from Council? No. All right, I will seek a motion for approval. So moved. Second. All right, motion by Councilor Hurd, second by Councilor Judge. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Perfect. Well, that was all of our items for the liquor control board. I will seek to adjourn. Do I have a motion? So moved. Second. All right. Motion by Councilor Oakley, second by Councilor Judge. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Wonderful. All right. So I will now call to order at 6.05 p.m., a regular meeting of the Winooski City Council. First up is a gender review. Council, do you have any concerns with the agenda of tonight's meeting? No. No. All right. I'll move on to public comment. John, I believe there's still nobody in the chambers. Correct, no one in the chambers. Correct. There are some people on Zoom. Does anybody in Zoom have any public comment that they would like to make? If you do, please raise your hand. Give it just a minute. It does not look like there is any public comment. So we'll move on to our consent agenda, which is the approval of the city council and Lucker control board meetings from March 11th. The approval of accounts payable as of March 13th, 2024. Do I have a motion for those two consent agenda items? So moved. I believe that was a motion by Councillor Hurd and a second by Councillor Judge. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Wonderful. Thank you. So we are on to council reports. I'm going to go and how I see you all on my screen. So Councillor Hurd, you are up. I don't have anything. Well, I guess we didn't end up having our safe, healthy, connected people meeting last week due to an unexpected lack of quorum, but we are going to try and reschedule that some time before April. So keep an eye out on the city news section for more on that. Thank you. Councillor Oakley. Sure. The airport commission met this past Wednesday on the 13th. The next noise exposure map, technical advisory committee meeting will be on April 11th. Details should be on the BTV sound website in the near future that is open for public attendance online or in person for those that have interest. The Municipal Infrastructure Commission is meeting this Thursday at 6.30 hybrid. So it will be in the community room at the pool as well as online. Looking forward to getting an update to the work plan as well as other status on capital improvement projects, public meetings and hearings for the capital prod, various capital projects and a recap of what the FY25 budget outcome was for town meeting day. Don't have any other updates than that at the moment. Great, thank you very much. Councillor Judge. So tomorrow evening at 6 p.m. the Wynuski Housing Commission and the Planning Commission have a joint meeting that's been in the works for a few months now. There's a hybrid option in as well. So people can attend on Zoom or come see us in City Hall in like the main chambers. I think that's it for me. That is great. Thank you, Councillor Judge. And as far as my items, downtown Wynuski has not met yet. We meet later this week. However, I will just remind folks about the campaign that downtown Wynuski is running to try to get some state local match, the Better Places Project. So if you are interested in learning more about what the city is, downtown Wynuski, sorry, is looking to do with that fundraising goal, just head over to downtownwynuski.org. All right, we're moving on to city updates. John. Great, thanks. Just one update to share. Just an invitation that Wednesday we'll be having the Main Street Revitalization construction update public meeting at the Wynuski School. That's Wednesday at 6.30. So there are a couple ways to attend. You can, Paul, if you could throw a link in the chat. You can attend either virtually by phone or in person. The construction team, design team, city staff will be there to provide information about the upcoming construction of the Main Street Project starting this spring. And that's it on my end. All right, John, thank you very much. So we are now on to our regular items. For the first item, we have a discussion approval of the Transgender Day of Visibility Resolution. Councilor Hurd, you worked diligently on this. So I don't know if you'd like to speak about it. Yeah, just to share a bit of what I had on the memorandum, we had the same resolution last March 31st, but I felt it was important to bring it back and recognize International Transgender Day of Visibility because of our diversity and our historic council makeup, but also because the national narrative has continued to really focus on restricting human rights and transgender people as well as book bans around trans stories. So I wanted to bring this back to you all. Thank you so much for bringing this back, Councilor Hurd. Council, do you have any questions on the resolution? All right, seeing no questions, I will seek a motion for approval of the resolution. So moved. Second. Motion by Councilor Judge, second by Councilor Oakley. All those in favor, please say aye. All right, aye. Wonderful. Well, that passes. Thank you so much for that work, Councilor Hurd. Now to our next item, discussion approval of resolution to the sale of Main Street Revitalization Bonds for Interim Financing. Is the finance director available to speak about this? I am here as is Chris Perlitz and Thomas Maloney who have been highly involved in this process. So City Council approved the issuance of a notice to sale solicit bids for the purchase and sale of short-term debt related to the construction of Main Street. As you know, we have secured financing from USDA. However, they only fund once the project is complete. So we're going to need financing during this construction timeframe to be able to pay our vendors as their completing work. Once we reach the end of the project, we will close out the interim borrowing that we're authorizing and pay that back with USDA funding. Chris Perlitz has been doing a lot of diligent work on our behalf to solicit bids for us. We did get a rating from Moody's recently to try and secure some better interest rates while soliciting those bids. And I think we received a few different options that Chris is going to outline. We have discussed with him, but he's definitely reviewed those most in-depth. Thank you, Angela. So we, first of all, USDA terms that you've received are very unique. And going through the extra steps that I know Angela and John have gone through are usually painful, but it ends up saving an immense amount of interest and benefit from working with Rural Development. I do a lot of work with Rural Development in DC and try to bring those to fruition when we can. As the requirement of the interim loan, we took advantage of leveraging the USDA role by obtaining a double-a-rated credit from the city, which is great because that means moving forward, you can issue debt or maybe refinance some of your existing debt and not have to rely on the bond bank. You can be a standalone, which is really one of the first steps that I think was a win-win. And I'll tell you, Angela crushed it. So that's not an easy thing to get a double-a-credit for smaller communities. So we took advantage of leveraging the USDA for that. I spoke with nine different lenders all the way across the spectrum, from Bank of America being the biggest of all, the JP Morgan Chase, to TD Bank, and then TD Northfield, which is your local bank. It's important to try to bring them into the mix we can. And then Huntington Bank, which worked with public schools recently and a similar thing, that new project. It started, I think, a couple of years ago and they just finished project recently. So, and also talked to Raymond James and Beard Securities, Northland Securities, nine different potential lenders. It was quite the effort of just cold calling Dian for dollars, trying to figure out who could participate. And so we ended on Huntington Bank. They came in with a draw structure, which means it won't accrue interest until you make draws. And the rate that they've locked in is at 4.92%, which is great. The only cost of issuance is illegal cost, which is roughly $3,000, which again is a great cost from a bank. And yeah, so that was the resolution, so to speak, that we came to was the best value for the city and also allowing some potential benefit with the rating here moving forward. Are there any questions? And we're hoping to close in the next few weeks. That was another factor that went into the decision process was that they were gonna move quickly, where Bank of America said they would take close to a month, and the rate was only roughly 10 basis points difference. So it was sort of a nine and a little, so it kind of was an easy decision in that regard from a time of perspective. Huntington is hungry, and like I said, they've worked with the community. So that's what we're highlighting, but we can flex whatever makes sense if the board decides, we can do more analysis or we can prolong and we wait longer, it might be better or worse, I don't know, but that's where we're at currently. We do have a construction schedule where our vendor that the council has approved, I think we'll be planning to break ground by April 15th. So before that one month timeframe for Bank of America. And just to be really very clear, Huntington Bank financed the Winooski school district project. So they are very familiar with this specific community. And the USGA as well, they work with USGA, which is another key component. Bank of America wasn't comfortable. Didn't know the USGA, G.P. Morgan didn't even understand what I was talking about. So it's just a few, there's a niche within a niche. So it's, I think we did a great job of finding a good player here, yeah. And Thomas Maloney is our bond council with Paul Frank and Collins. He drafted the bond resolution that was included in your packet. You'll note that there was one space that was left blank and that is for where we would fill in the Huntington Bank name, if you were to approve that tonight and we would finalize that and make it ready for signature when we can all be in person. All right, looks like Council Oakley has a question. Go ahead. Thanks, Angela, looking at the agreed upon amount in the proposed resolution, can you remind me what, if that's the equivalent of what we will be expecting from the USDA? The 16820, yes, we did make sure that those were matching. There was actually a question mark at one point where the amount we were requesting from the USDA was higher than the amount we were gonna do through interim financing, but it was not needed. We were able to reduce it down. So that is our final financing from USDA. And where will the funding come from to cover the interest? There is actually an allocation that the USDA has provided and it's obligation of funds, which will cover, and I can give you the actual amount, which will cover roughly 35,000 or so. So it's in the existing obligation, but there'll be, the assumption is that that interest that will accrue will be paid in a seminal basis when the draws are made. And so that'll come. In addition, we have set aside funding for the Main Street project since we increased the tax rate for this project in anticipation of taking on some costs in advance. So we do have Main Street funding set aside for this. Okay, thank you. All right, are there any more questions from council? All right, seeing no further questions, I'll be seeking approval for the award of sale in terms of financing bond utilizing Continting Bank. Do I have a motion? No, moved. Second. Motion by councilor Judge, second by councilor Hurd. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Wonderful, motion passes. Thank you, everybody. I will notify council president when we have the final bond resolution so that you are able to come in and sign that. Great. Thank you, Angela. All right, and with that, we have amazingly very quickly come to the end of today's meeting. I do wanna give anybody else a chance if there's anything else they needed to say. Seems it was such a short meeting. If not, I will look for a motion to adjourn. I was on time today. I just need to say that. I went to say home and couldn't get in and then got in my car and panicked and was like, I need Wi-Fi. I just, for my own defense, I was on time. Councilor Judge, that is noted. Thank you. That's all I've got, though. Thanks, guys. Well, with that, I seek a motion to adjourn this meeting. Second. All right, a motion by councilor Oakley, second by councilor Judge. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. The meeting is adjourned. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you all. Thank you. Good evening. Have a good evening.