 Welcome everybody, I will call the meeting to order. I'm hearing some echo from somewhere. Yeah, Donna, showing you still being unmuted, but. Huh. And you, Bill. Council chambers once. Okay, I'm going to start talking. So, oh, your speaker. That's not you, Donna. All right. All right. Welcome everybody. I'm going to call the meeting to order. A note to anyone who's. Joining us remotely. If you are participating remotely, we'd appreciate it if you would. Enter your first and last name as your participant name on your screen. Anyone who wishes to speak. You would need, you'll need to be recognized by the chair. And please start by stating your name and where you live. We ask. You to keep all your comments to a total of three minutes and counselor bait will. Be giving a one minute warning and that will be at two minutes. And then at, when we get to three minutes, you will be out of time. We asked to, uh, to discontinue. We asked you to keep all your comments germane to the topic at hand. And, uh, If you have multiple comments or questions, please get them all out at one time so the council can listen to your thoughts and, uh, and then have a discussion, whatever discussion we see, uh, see fit. Um, First item on the agenda is to approve the agenda. Everybody satisfied with the agenda. The agenda is approved. Next item on the agenda is, uh, general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public. To address the council on an item, any matter that is not. On the agenda. And, uh, again, uh, we will. Limit comments to two minutes to three minutes and, uh, Please, uh, raise your hand and indicate, uh, Uh, Either in, uh, in person or on online. If you. Wish to be recognized and I will, uh, I've seen, I first saw a hand on online. So we'll start there with, uh, Elaine ball. Hi. Thank you. Um, my name is Elaine ball. And I am. Here's to ask, uh, To declare this June pride month in Montpelier. We are going to be hosting our second annual Montpelier pride festival. The first weekend in June, um, With a celebration on the state house lawn on June 3rd. From one to four and other events sort of throughout the week. Leading up to and following that weekend. So, um, I would appreciate greatly if we could include, um. Montpelier's declaration at some point in our festivities. If that might be an option or at least to be able to share. Out to the community on front porch forum. Facebook and all of that. Um. The city support. Thank you. Thanks Elaine. Um, do you have. Uh, or could you get us, uh. Draft language that would go into, uh, A proclamation, I'm sure we would be. Uh, supportive of doing that. Yes. Thank you. I can get some draft language to you. Is there a good time or who should I send it to? To me. City hall and then we can, um, we'll put it on the next agenda. Thank you for June. Great. Thanks. Anybody else online looking to be recognized. I'm not seeing anyone, but if I miss someone, I'm sure someone will point it out to me. Okay. Steve MacArthur. Here you say that the questions. They're on the agenda. I just need to make sure that the state is here. Uh, and we'll be talking to each other. And if there will be an opportunity after that discussion. Or there to be questions coming forward. If not, I want to make some comments now. Well, there's, so I, we invited the state. And is there someone from, yep, state is here. Okay. Great. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else in the room wishes to be heard at this point. Okay. We will move on to the, uh, Next item, which is the consent agenda. Um, I believe we had a request to. Uh, take the Barry street feasibility study. Good agreement off the consent agenda. I'm not sure if that's still a live, uh, request. Okay. And is, uh, everyone happy with the consent agenda then. Uh, can I just mention, can I ask that you all approve the minutes with a, uh, a modification on them? I used one set of letters for the consent agenda. There were two sets out there. And I guess I picked the wrong one. So I would just ask that you all approve the minutes, uh, without the, the letters. Um, I'm not sure how to put this, but without the, uh, letter notations on the consent agenda. And that would solve the problem. Oh, right. There were two different versions and they had different letters. Okay. But to avoid confusion, I'm just saying take them out completely. And I'll just leave the descriptions in. Okay. I moved the consent agenda with the minutes. Second. All right. Any discussion on the consent agenda. Hearing none all those. Oh, sorry, Peter. I. Was just told you have your hand up, Peter Kellman. Just a clarification. Did you take the barry street item off the consent agenda? We did not. We have, we've had some, uh, emails and I believe that that, uh, request is. Um, no longer alive request is, are you still requesting that it be off the consent agenda? Yes. Okay. Um, I'm, I'm happy with that. Do you want to amend your motion to do that? Street feasibility study agreement from. And that's seconded also. All right. Um, rather than move. Vote on that proposed amendment. Let's just. Vote on the consent agenda. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Anyone opposed. Okay. Next we have item E. The 55 Barry street is feasibility study agreement. Could you give us a little. I, I can, I guess I would ask the person who requested that it be pulled off. I think for the short version is the council had. Asked us to get a price to take a look at the building. What code improvements it might need. Uh, and in to look at it, not only for potential short term upgrades for shelter purposes, potential shelter purposes, but also to understand. Larger code issues with that building we received. We talked to three architects. We received. One, um, Proposal and that is on your consent agenda from GBA here in. Maupillier, uh, Chris lumber, our facilities directors here. If you need more detail about the proposal. Um, I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. And our view is pretty straightforward to do what the council had asked. Okay. Thank you, Peter. Do you want to be heard? Uh, yes. Peter Kellman. Maupillier. Um, I asked us to be taken off because the language of. What was posted. As the proposal from Tom backman. I don't think reflected. What was intended. Um, I don't think it was specified that the, what he called the original, um, um, Proposal, uh, did. Let's state the, um, The, um, Goal correctly. But the way it was stated in the, what you're being asked to vote on, which is the letter of, uh, uh, uh, The final thing is that there's a possibility of converting. The Montpelier recreation building of 55 Barry speak into a nighttime facility for the unhoused during the winter months. And I've sent to all of you my concerns about this. I think that's not accurate. It's not. And Chris, Chris. Chris's clarification of what was in the original is accurate. So. Um, and, and, but finally, besides what Chris clarified. I'm not objecting to using the term the unhoused. We're not talking about. An abstraction here. We're talking about people who. At this time happened to be on house. That is not a category of people. I'm not objecting to on house as an adjective. You want to say people who are unhoused, people who might be on house. That's fine. I'm not objecting to the unhoused. The poor. The criminal. Mind that is not an appropriate way to refer to people. And this is a matter of diversity, inclusion. Really, you have to be very careful about the language, but more importantly, if you guys are going to vote on this, you should be voting on what Chris clarified. That was the original intent, not on this wording. And I reworded it. I said, you could say repairs and improvements needed to permit dual use of the Montpelier recreation building at 55. Baristry as a nighttime facility for people who are unhoused during cold weather, not winter months. It's cold weather because it goes from November to April while continuing current recreational programs at other times. I think that's what it should say. Thank you. Thank you. Is it clear to you, Bill, from. The knowledge of the, of the letter that it encompasses what Mr. Kellerman is requesting. It does. And I think we don't have any concerns about it. We also don't have any concerns if you want to amend it as per the plan. I think either way is accurate. I think also point out that it is 55 Berry street, not 58 Berry street. That was another typo that got in there. But I think we're all pretty clear that the. Person walk through the building knows what we've had very clear conversation about how are then Chris. Yeah. This one working. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Do introduce yourself, please. I'm Chris Lombra. I'm the city facilities and sustainability coordinator. I've been working with. GB architects on this project. And so the, the document that I may have incorrectly referred to as the original proposal. Matter of wording there is included as part of the scope of work. And part of the scope of work is that, you know, you know, the city's wants and needs as this project and the early stages of this project moving forward. If that's helpful information. And it's clear that what we're talking about is not a conversion of the building, but the ability to. Have two uses at different times of the day. Absolutely. Okay. Karen. Yeah, I appreciate the clarification. Thank you. I think it's good that we had the opportunity to talk about this and I have no concerns that the city staff understands what we're talking about and the people who are going to do the work understand what it is. So that's great. I'm glad that's clarified. I am just noting that in the original letter that they sent of interest, I think it was, they talked about the timeline being extremely short and concerns about the ability to get any kind of work done in time for people to actually be staying there by the time the weather gets cold enough that we need it. And so that's not that that's not a question about whether we should approve this. I think we should approve this and go ahead and do this, but I just wanted to take the opportunity since we don't have other time on the agenda to talk about this to, to note that and to note that as far as I'm concerned, the priority is to have a place for people to be sheltered in cold weather when it comes around again. And if it's the rec center. Great. If it's not the rec center, then it needs to be somewhere else. And we really need to be committed to finding some place, whether or not this is it. Come a few months from now. And the conversation that simply said, we agree with you and are actively looking not only at this site, but options. Okay. Anybody else? Are there any other real options? Because if there aren't, we really should move ahead with this one. I got feeling that we should do. Right. Well, I mean, I mean, I think we would all agree at least as far as city on facilities that is probably the preference. The question is just, you know, can we get the work done? Or can we get variances that we need in time? So, yeah. I mean, the only other city facility, city facility that we have that we control would be the Elks Club. The location is great, but the facility. So that's one fallback and we've floated that. And then we've been talking to other locations in the community that are not city owned and having conversations with the owners of those properties and those organizations to see if those can work. I'm not ready to. Yeah. Talk with them public. It carries right. I mean, we need to make a choice by the next meeting. I would think we have any chance of having a facility ready in November. Lauren. Blagging that Peter. Can you not hear me? No, you're not audible. Question I have is. Is there a parallel effort happening? I know it was brought up that like staffing and operations is going to be the other challenge. Like, is that happening in parallel? Just because we need to get that all lined up as well as the buildings. Yes. In fact, we had, you know, meeting last night of all the provide, many of the providers in the other two communities. Here in this room, we're meeting again next week. I think there's a commitment to provide shelter services if we can find a location. And, you know, obviously we're also looking. Regionally and as well as in the city with our partners. So to see what's out there. And, you know, as far as the rec center goes, I mean, I, there's no desire to hold this up. It's just some of the improvements like sprinklers or other things. If we can't get variants is just, it's just the question of getting contractors to do the work. It's not a desire to. Do it. So it's, we're trying to move as fast as we can, but in today's environment, things can take a year or plus to get. We may have to find at least for one winter, a different location. I'm ready for a motion. As it's in the packet. That's in the packet. Is there a second. Oh, second. Any discussion. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. Okay. Thank you. I'm moving to item number six and update from our assessor. I'm Marty Ligers that I'm the assessor of the city assessor. And I just want to give a brief update on the party. You'll probably want to be a lot closer to the microphone. A brief update on the project that's been going for the last two years. Can you hear in the back for the reappraisal? Okay. Okay. Thank you. Is that better? Can you hear me now? The first thing I gave everybody a handout is a letter. Addressed from the city assessor's office. This is going to go in the mail starting tomorrow. And this is going to be mailed to every, every property owner. Talks about who we contracted with. The process. And what the next steps are going to be for the homeowners. As you'll see on the top, everybody's, you know, it's going to have it. It's going to be individualized to every property owner. We're going to have on the city's website. We're going to have a quick link. That will bring people. Right to the assessor's page. And it's going to have a print out of the grand list that anybody can print. They can look at. And then what the next steps are. If anyone feels aggrieved by the new numbers. Towards the end, you'll see the informal hearings. We're going to have. Approximately 355 slots available for people to come in. It's kind of, it's an informal. Informational people come in, ask questions. Sometimes people don't understand their, their appraises. It's a quick 10 minute. Meeting with anybody that wants to come in. That will go for about a week. And then formal grievances will follow after that. It's got all our contact information on there and how to get a hold of us. Schedule it. Any questions about the letter? Yeah, Marty will. Will people be getting. A hard copy of the entire grand list in the whale. In the mail, the way we have in previous years. We will not. So the reason we're going to, we're going to have it available on the website. For people to download. We're still kind of up in the air, whether we're going to print a couple and have them here on site. For people to look at. So we can go either way with that. I would encourage you to do that. I think. You will want that. Okay. Sorry. Any other questions before. There's one, one more handout. So this is. This is from the, the company that did the, the reappraisal force. It's statistics of what we've seen in the growth of the grand list. I'm sure you're going to have questions. People are going to ask you. In the next couple of days. The, the grand list as proposed right now. Is a billion. 314 million 678,600. It's going to change a little bit as we get through the grievance process. Of course. And that's a 456 million dollar growth over last year's grand list. That's a 456 million dollar growth over last year's grand list. That's a 456 million dollar growth over last year's grand list. It talks about why this is a good appraisal. The state does a three prong test to make sure that any. Citywide reappraisal meets their requirements. This meets all the other requirements. All this, the CODs are right in line. The medians are right where they should be. The list of these. Yeah. Coefficient of dispersion. That just means that everybody's being treated equally. That means that everybody's being treated equally. That means that everybody's being treated equally. That means that everybody's being reassessed. Everybody falls in line. The COD is something that triggers. When you need a reappraisal, if you get to be too high, that means you're not treating everybody equitably. So that can cause. A reappraisal order from the state. Can you being louder, please? I think we're still. Having trouble in the back. Yeah. What part. No, just, just talk about it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So in the listing, some, some people may want to know how many people get into over 72% internal inspections in the homes, which was, it's up a little bit more than it was back in 2010. So they had great cooperation from, from the public. And then, and then like it says here, the informal hearings, they'll be coming up in. Two weeks grievances will follow after that. And there's also a couple of. This is statistically, this is, this is what tells us that we have a great appraisal. The next handout is there's. There's about 10 different categories. And it's gives the parcel count. Old values, new values, the differences in the percentage that they grew up grew. So if you look to the far right of it, you'll see 1.58. So. Our one homestead are homes under six acres. And they're up 58%. So you can, you can kind of go down the list there and you can see anything over six acres. That's up 54%. So this shows the increase in value of the grand list from this year to last, the last grand list. And then the last page. Those are sales. Whenever we do a citywide reappraisal, we have to do a sales study of the previous three years of sales. So the smaller handout, that's an analysis of all the sales from the last. There was a cat using the study and they fall right in line. The, the ratio, the percentages, those, those match right up with the entire grand list the way they're supposed to. So I'm 100% confident in turning out the grand list. Thank you. Go ahead, Lauren. Sure. Like, do you anticipate that these are numbers that are going to be. Good for a while or was we catching it in a weird market? Yeah, it's a funny question. We did get a lot of pushback, but the way, the way that the real estate market seems to be going and I know Tim will vouch for this, it doesn't, it's not going backwards. You know, these numbers are going to last us for probably for eight or 10 years, I would guess the way it's going now, maybe less. The state's contemplating taking over the reappraisal and making it mandatory to go every four to six years anyhow. So, but I have confidence that this is going to last for, for quite a while. Was there, you said, you have a second question too. That's a great question because that's, you're going to get that a lot. Everyone's going to look at this and say, you know, if values are up 58%, my taxes are going to go up 58% and that's, that's not true. So what happens now is the tax rate will be adjusted. We have, we just came up today with a temporary tax rate, which we're going to put on the website also. So people can plug their assessment, their new assessments into a calculator and it will give them an estimate. It's just going to be a really rough estimate because we don't have, you know, post grievance numbers yet for the tax rate, but that'll get them a pretty good idea of where they should be. So one of the analogies I've been giving people is like filling a bathtub up with, you know, when you have a bathtub full of toys, you fill it with water, everybody kind of rises at the same level. So we'll adjust the tax rate. I mean, I think, you know, one, one way to look at that, just to help help out on that is, you know, sometimes there's a misperception that this grand list, you know, we have 58, 55% growth in the grand list, we're going to get 55% more dollars, but that's not true. The budgets were approved in March. That's, it's just going to be redistributed differently. So if there were no increase at all in the budget, if it was strictly, if it was strictly the same, then the tax rate would go down by the 58% or fricking 5% that the grand list goes up now, there will, it won't be exact because our budgets and the school budgets went up a little bit, but it will be in that ballpark in terms of tax rate. And then when the final grand list is set, then the actual tax rate. So I think you can tell people that, you know, roughly tax rate will be about half of what it was. And I think that'll be pretty close. Well, I could, I'll, I'll get to you, Carrie. I can just tell you and everyone in city government that this is a question that is, or this is an explanation that's going to have to go out many times and be very clear because with all my years on the board of civil authority, I know that people don't get it when we explain it. So that's just going to be a major effort. Yeah, we have a letter on our, on the assessors page and we'll update it also as, as questions come in for sure. Carrie. Yeah, thank you very much. I really appreciate all this. So I wanted to follow up on the question that Lauren asked about this being a kind of a tricky time in the market. And if you could clarify what are the triggers for another reassessment, if it turns out that something really crazy does happen in the market in the next few years. So right now there's, there's two triggers, the CLA, which is a common level of appraisal. If that gets below 85%, the state comes in and says you need to do a reappraisal or the coefficients of dispersion. As I said, if with the COD, that's how is everybody being, you know, you have a level line here and if you have some people that are over assessed, some that are under assessed and everybody's not being treated equally. So if that gets over 20, that triggers. And these are well, I mean, we just barely got to 74% CLA in the last reval was 13 years ago. And the market has been pretty steady up until the last two years. So that CLA, you know, the way things are going now, it's, I don't see it lasting another 13 years. If that answers your question. Yeah. And another piece to that. The reality is that getting this work done is a good, just like other work right now is good two to three years out. So even if we hit these markers and get the, one of the reasons we were right on time is we, our former assessor saw this coming and we, we booked our folks a couple of years in advance. So they'd be ready once we got the notice. But, you know, they're booking two or three years in advance. So, and, and like I said, as Marty mentioned, the state is really, they see this as a crisis around the state because there's only so many appraisal for them. So they're trying to, they're looking at putting everybody on a rotating schedule so that the reappraisal rooms can schedule their work and cities in the small town. So that just every six years or so, you get every appraisal plan. So we'll see how it goes. So a question in the back. Why don't you come out to the microphone, please. I'm sorry, Scott Mueller, Montpelier. I think it is important what you're saying about the tax, effective tax rate not being changed. There's another important consideration because there is a major change in Montpelier. If you pull the census data from 2015 to 2020, the renter occupied homes in Montpelier increased almost 25% without changing the housing stock. Other states phrase that as investor owned housing has increased by 20 plus percent in five year delta, that was in 2020 before the pandemic. So I would intuit that's probably changed. So it's just an important data point to consider the property value question and the shift in owner to renter ratios. It's more complicated than tax rates. Thanks. Anybody else. Thanks for coming in. This is a start for those of us on the board of civil authority. This could be the start of a long summer and fall. Thank you. You're all on the board of civil authority. Don't forget. Thank you, John. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that was actually, that was someone's mailing. So I left that on the list. I didn't want to go without a person. So. Actually kind of why. All right. Item number seven, water and sewer budgets. So as people know, we have a lot of. So our main discussion tonight is about water and sewer. The first part is to go through the budget and the water, the water to our budgets and water sewer rates and then discuss the. Issues with the. The lines that people have raised. I think many people are here for this conversation. So our consultant will be here to talk about their report. The state will be here to talk about their issues and certainly there will be public comment at that time. Okay. Step right up. Are you sharing? Good evening. I'm Kurt Modica, director of public works with Sarah LaCroix finance director from Montpellier. We're here to talk to you tonight about the water and sewer budgets and proposed rates. The next fiscal year. Just a brief overview of the makeup of the water and sewer divisions. Within public works. We currently have. Five administrative staff. We are losing one of our engineers will be down to four. There are now seven in our water and sewer. Division as well as three water plan operators and four waste water plan operators. And the major functions. Of these divisions is water and sewer treatment and distribution. Collection in the sewer. Permitting project management and financial planning. And just briefly on the financial planning piece tonight. So we're mostly here to talk about. The city adopted a water and sewer master plan originally in 2016. And that's really the basis of the rates that we propose annually. And that is essentially structured as the increase of inflation plus 1%. And that 1% goes to infrastructure improvements annually. And we also updated the master plan 2021. We plan to update that every five years as conditions change and in construction and construction costs. As well as new projects and new. Permit requirements come up. So the chart that you can see here is the expenditures by fund for what's budgeted. I gave this just to give some perspective as to. The percentage that is water fund and sewer fund. You can see water fund is 11.7% of total expenditures. Sewer is 17.1 for a total of 28.8% of total budgeted expenditures. Here we'll give a water fund overview. The proposed budget is $3,447,672. This is an increase of $484,000 or 16.37% over the prior year. The original budget that was proposed was an 8.7% increase. After we reviewed the budget and the master plan, we were able to shift 2 cents of the CSR benefit charge from the sewer fund to the water fund to align with the plan. This also increases funding for infrastructure improvements. It is nearly half of the increase you see above. The remainder of the increases in line with the CPI plus 1% at the time of budget development, which was in October, at approximately 8.7%. At this time, consumption is returning to pre-pandemic levels. This increased consumption will allow us to propose a rate increase of only 6.6% to cover this increase in spending for infrastructure. To the right of the slide, you can see the breakdown of the expenses such as water supply and treatment, water distribution system, and water administration, along with a few other smaller items. I wanted to point out that in the water administration, 672,000 of this or 47% of that green chunk is related to debt payments for capital improvements. I just wanted to call that out as it's under administration. I would like to move on to the sewer fund. At this time, we've proposed a $5,065,902 budget. That is a $296,000 increase or 6.2% over the prior year. The original proposed budget had an 8.7% increase. After we were able to review this, we were and shifted the two cents of the benefit charge to water. We were able to forecast the increase in revenue from the acceptance of septage and leachate, and were able to reduce the budget for fuel based on the use of biogas at the plant in the heating process, which has allowed for the 6.2% increase. This will result in a 6.6% rate increase to users. Again, on the right, you can see the breakout of water treatment, sewer collection, water administration, and the other components that make up the budget. Here we provided you with the rate change, the proposed rate increase is consistent with the master plan and the prior year's rate setting methodology. When we reviewed this, CPI in March was 5.6%. We added the 1% and were able to reduce what we'd originally proposed at the 8.7% down to 6.6%, just to make sure we were considering the burden on rate payers and we're using this recommended CPI at the lower rate increase. On this slide, you can see the rate changes. When I reference the CPI portion, it primarily relates to the metered and the readiness to serve fees, but the other rate increases were in line and were to cover the cost of labor for those services. In this slide, I would like to provide the last five years worth of rate history and note that our policy is to increase rates at CPI plus one annually, and that began in fiscal year 2018. As Kurt mentioned, that 1% is for infrastructure improvements and reserve. Per policy, each budget in FY24 should have 7% of budgeted revenue allocated to capital improvements. As you can see, the water budget has 484,000 or 14%, and the sewer budget has 392,000 or 7.7%. And some history around capital outlay between FY18 and 22, based on this 1%, we needed to allocate $450,000 to infrastructure improvements in the water fund. We were actually able to do $3.5 million worth of capital outlay and as far as capitalized infrastructure, there would be other grant funding and potentially related debt to allow for that big of an amount, but to show that we have done significant capital improvements in the water fund. And the same can be said for the sewer fund, at that 1%, we would have had to put $658,000 into capital improvements and between the sewer plant Phase 1 and additional line improvements, we have capitalized $20 million worth of improvements. This slide is just to show what the combined impact on rate payers would be. The average family, single family home, uses about 10,000 gallons of water and this rate increase overall is $7.41 per month or $88.92 annually, which is less than $100 increase annually. While you're on this slide, could you say a word about what the readiness to serve charge is? Yep. So the readiness to serve charge is the fixed fee to cover fixed costs that is spread over the four quarters. Thank you. And so I just a summary overview. This would be effective July 1. For FY24, for the billing period ending September 30th and due December 15th. As I noted before, this is 5.6% CPI plus 1%. So a 6.6 rate increase. This funds operational expenses, infrastructure improvements and stabilizes funding for future years. My recommendation is that you approve the water and sewer budgets and utility rates for FY24 and execute the resolution. But I'd like to let Kurt wrap this up and talk about what we have done for capital improvements and what we have upcoming. Okay. This slide may be a little bit hard to see, but. So we have targets. Annually outlined in the master plan. So the goal is to replace all of the infrastructure, all the utility pipes. Over a hundred year period. And there's, it's broken up into basically two phases of funding, you know, the first 50 years, slightly the lower level and then it increases as debt. Some of the earlier debt. Drops off. We're able to put more money into infrastructure. So the goal in through the master plan. Annually for sewer is 2,300 feet. And for water, it's 2,750. 2,750 feet. And, you know, there's a lot of streets here listed that we've replaced since 2016. That's when this was started. It started to retract when the master plan went into place. And so the totals at the end of this year, you know, the target in and sewer is 1,600 feet. And we'll have our 16,000 feet. Sorry. And we help will have 10,000 feet replaced. And in water, it's 19,000 feet and we'll have 16,000 feet. But the one other aspect that's, that's not accounted for looking at straight pipe replacement is, is how many pipes we've eliminated. So if there's a lot of, a lot of streets in Montpelier that have multiple water mains. And so our approach is what we call asset divestment. So if we can, you know, size the new water main appropriately or sewer to handle all the demands on the street, which we do through our hydraulic model that we'll be talking about shortly. And then we can actually go from two mains on that street to one, which is one less length of pipe that will ultimately have to be replaced. So if you factor in the, the pipes that we've eliminated as assets within the system, then that brings us to 18,000 feet of net replacement as opposed to the 16,000 and sewer goal. So we're actually ahead of that and 25,000 feet replaced in water as opposed to the 19,000 foot goal and, and the water fund or water pipes. So we're actually doing really well. As far as, you know, hitting our targets for a pipe replacement, we did have a slowdown during the pandemic. Essentially all construction was shut down. We were right in the middle of a large utility replacement project. And there are some challenges that we're facing with pipe replacement projects. One is, is urban soils. So that's a new regulation where there's really a much tighter restriction on, on how soils are managed that are removed from a downtown site. They have to be tested and quantified as far as where they can be replaced. If you can put it back in the trench, then that's fine, but generally you have a waste material, you know, from select backfill around the pipe and road based materials. So you end up with a waste. And then if that hits a certain threshold or like arsenic or other minerals within the soil, then it has to be brought to a landfill. So it's just an extra design step. That's a little bit challenging as far as the design end of getting this, this work done. And then the other pieces is stormwater. There's a lot of new stormwater rigs, East States project that we have coming up. We'll require a fairly extensive stormwater treatment practices, which is again a fair amount of engineering and costs for the overall project. And then moving on to what we have upcoming for pipe replacement projects. So this list is primarily areas that are deficient as far as the pipe, the pipe being sized adequately to provide fire protection without impacting the rest of the water system without dropping the pressure on the rest of the water system. So there are a number of through the hydraulic model again that we'll be talking about shortly. There are several areas where we have hydrants, but the line is too small to support those hydrants. So in order to maintain fire protection in those areas, we have to upsize the piping or potentially we'll have to abandon those hydrants. And the other component to the upcoming project list is just the areas that we have a lot of failures on. So we're trying to take a mixed approach of meeting compliance with our permit as well as reducing the frequency of water breaks and leaks for those areas that are prone to failure. Just one other thing that on the sewer side, talking a lot about water, but the sewer side, these projects are geared primarily around combined sewer overflow reduction. So a lot of the siphons, for instance, is a restriction point. So those are pipes that convey sewage from one side of the river to the other through gravity. And that's a restriction in our system that results in sewer overflowing to the river. So increasing those capacities as well as the project we're doing right now on State Street, which is sort of a siphon, but not really designed that way. But there's a low point in the sewer main. We're correcting that, which will have a big impact. So again, the sewer side is also really geared around compliance meeting our permit requirements, which CSO reduction is one of our permit requirements, as well as there are some areas where there are problems with the sewer main. That's the terror street line, which we had a failure this winter. So we're planning to do that this year. That's it for us. I guess if you have questions, we're ready. Okay. So far, what we're talking about is just the budget. Yeah. Okay, great. And then questions relating to physical structure, physical operations, repairs and improvements. Those will be on the item number nine. Okay. All right. Any questions from members of the council? So I noticed on the historical budget charts for water and sewer. There were excesses in some years. What happens to that money? Is it going to capital improvement or? What we didn't expend. So, right. The budget was, was above the actual cost. Yeah. So in the years we haven't expended those funds, it sits in an unrestricted fund balance, which is reserved for capital improvements. So at the end of FY 22, the water fund had an unrestricted fund balance of 360,000. And the sewer fund had an unrestricted fund balance of 930,000. So that's available for emergencies and for future capital improvements. Okay. Yeah. I figured there would be. This is my first water budget. So. Mine too. There you go. All right. So we're in the same boat. Okay. So what is the plan? Is there a plan to. To expend those funds when the city had, this is no, this capacity to, to do the work or is it, there's a plan to keep it there for contingencies. So I, you know, it depends on the projects we do. And of course we don't know what the bid prices come in. So we anticipate that. I think, you know, water, that's going to be in that amount of money that the sewer. I would imagine we'll be redirected into projects. We haven't made a formal decision yet, but, you know, 900,000, we probably could reuse some, but we also have a huge sewer treatment plant project coming. So the contingencies on that are much larger than normal. Like replacement. They could reduce the bond ring. Yep. Any other questions from the council, Lauren. I'm just curious. I'm curious about the funding available for water projects. Like that plan was made before that was available. Are we setting ourselves up to take full advantage? I know that he's been doing a great job going under grants and stuff, but just, you know, we've got this kind of moment in time where there's money. In the state that's never been there before. Like hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated for water projects. So just, is this setting us up to take full advantage or is that more kind of dismisses usual? Like what we thought we'd want to do in 2016. So this would be, this is our budget based on our water rates, what we would do, anything that we could do with grant funding. And we'll probably talk about that in the next. The, you know, the study that we have now is established priority. So that is useful in applying for grants. So that would be work. It would either accelerate work on this list. Or, you know, addition, but assuming there was none of that, this is how we would continue proceeding. But yes, all of that is fair game. And we'll be going after it aggressively. Tim, did you have a question? Okay. And this is a big one. I guess I just have to say I'm really uncomfortable with the rate of increase. I mean, I'm using CPIs our. Policy. I've never participated in a budget where that's how you did it. It would seem like usually we use revenues and expenses. And, and work it through that way. And just arbitrarily saying, well, it's 8.7 this year. And we'll add one to that. But we're going to be nice and we'll make it 6.6. I'm really uneasy with this in a community where people are worried about affordability and being able to live here. I mean, the budget's here sheet after sheet. There's a lot to take in. I don't think this is a real, is this our policy to do a CPI driven budget? City council said this is a great policy in 2018, I think. And we followed that ever since. So essentially then we look at that and then figure out the budget that fits within that. Obviously we're going to be where we were working on a rate study. I don't know if that's going to be delayed as a result of. Staff capacity, but I mean, certainly the council could revisit its policy and you mean, you could now, if you wanted, but typically you could do that in anticipation of another year, but that, that is not a staff set policy. It's a council set policy. And it's been a number of years now we followed it. Things are not driven by CPI. And it's just really not the right way to do it. I don't think. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. Fine. Let's set my concern. I was on council at the time. It seemed to me there were times when we weren't doing that. And we got behind because of revenue and expenses. And then we had to make a huge increase. And so we were trying to make steady increases that were more proportional. And it's just really not the right way to do it. I don't think. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. Fine. Let's set my concern. I'm going to read back to that. I was on council at the time. It seemed to me there were times when we weren't doing that. And we were trying to make steady increases that were more proportional. Do I not remember that right? Yeah. So that's why we, we did it. And so far it's worked out well. You know, reactions, looking at the slide showing a 16.37% increase over the prior year. That's really big. I mean, and these percentages, it's, to say it's a game, but it gives everybody's trying to choose how they convey information, and it's like, you know, you know, you know, you hear the presentations and think, Oh, it's only a couple of percent or whatever it used to be in the old days. And then then I get my bills and it's like, this isn't a couple of percent. You know, it's like all the fees and everything builds up. And when you get your bill, it's quite a bit higher. And that's why I look at such high starting percentages and go, if you start adding their fixed fees and the other pieces on, and the increases in those. Well, I don't think you're really adding those things onto the percentage because each one is a percentage of a piece of it. Right. Yeah. Do you have, you guys have anything to come up about that? I'll just make it a comment. I forgot to mention earlier on construction costs increases. So, you know, with a lot of federal money coming into infrastructure, the contracting environment has gotten a lot more competitive. And so we have seen dramatic increases in mid prices much higher than the CPI increase. That's also true for the chemicals at the treatment plant, as well as construction materials, such as PVC have gone up. I think it's like 60% in the last two years. So we really do need a fairly, you know, substantial increase, at least what we've proposed to sort of maintain replacing in the infrastructure like, like we really need to. So, you know, I think, you know, we obviously could go more and we'd support that, but we're trying to, you know, the goal is to try to make it manageable for folks through, like Donna said, through sort of slow and steady increases rather than small and then a big jump. As I think about this, you know, we've got a whole bunch of different components of the costs of operating the system, whether it's the personnel or pipe that we buy or valves, all those things, all of those things are within, are affected by the consumer price index. So we need to be able to address that in our, in our pricing, right? I saw a couple of hands in the back and Mr. Muller first to Councilor Heaney. And why don't you say your name? Scott Muller, Montpelier to Councilor Heaney is insightful. He's reading in the accounting, what the engineers are reading in the data. The pipes are breaking every five, six, seven days. You're talking about an increase in construction costs. So I guess to keep this in the budget conversation, my question is, you know, looking at all the data from the leak replacements and whatnot, what do you actually estimate is the system leakage? How is that changing over time? And what is that in lost revenue? In lost water revenue, because it's significant. Have you done those calculations? Thanks. So not recently we have done, and historically we used to do metered versus produced calculations has been a few years since we've done that. It's a little different. The lost water doesn't translate directly into revenue. Because you're looking at the cost of production rather than the overall cost of the system for all the personnel and everything else. So it's certainly something, you know, that is worth looking at. It's not something that we've recently looked at. Okay, thanks. Yes, sir. Mike Shader, Montpelier. Questions, a couple of questions. One, I'd like to know if there's comparable data that, that exists that compares us with communities of like size and population. And also data about the, the effectiveness of our system. And we, as all of us know, there's been lots of problems. Is that something that we have looked at? Are we worse than others? Better. And if not, I, I view water as the fundamental level of infrastructure. We talk about housing. You don't build houses unless you've got water. You don't do anything else to get water streets. We talk about fixing streets. I live on terrace street. We've rebuilt territory a couple of times and we still got water problems. I, I think we ought to know how we're doing. Cause. I don't think we do now. Thank you. Thanks. Do we have an answer? Is there an answer? I mean, we do have data on water quality. Testing. That other people and we have in the past on rates studies and we're on the higher end, but not the highest. And I don't know about. You know, sort of pipe quality. If we have a metric for that. No, if anything. Yeah, I don't know that there's, um, that there's a public study available for, you know, the age of pipes compared to other communities. Um, you know, Mont Blere is an, is an older system. I think everybody's aware of that. Um, and like Bill said, there is, there are, um, there's some information that I haven't seen one recently, but in other presentations, we have looked at the rates compared to other communities. And like Bill said, um, we are not the highest, but, you know, then rates are relatively high in Mont Blere. And we are about to embark on a rate study to take a look at that. Sorry. One, one thing that Mont Blere does not do that most other communities do charge for is allocation fees. So, um, whenever there's a new housing development, um, they need a certain amount of gallons per day of water and sewer allocated to serve that property. Um, the city charges a connection fee like other communities do, but there is no fee for allocations. Um, so that's something that is going to be looked at as part of the rate study that we currently have, um, going on. Um, and that may be an opportunity to offset some of the rates, um, through that, through that revenue stream. And what's the timeline on the rate study? Um, well, we had hope to have it July 1st. That's not, that's not going to happen at this point because we are short staffed in our engineering division. Um, you know, it'll be, uh, we're looking at either January, um, hopefully of next year or July next year at the latest. Okay. Thanks. There's a hand in the back. Hi, my name is Lisa Burns. I'm district one Montpelier. Um, I was going to ask this later, but I think since we're on the topic now is a good time. I wonder if there's any database or, um, if anyone can give any information about the cost of our water main breaks to people, um, either in their homes by high pressures going through or businesses that have to close. Um, is there any information on the financial impact to those of us who pay the water and sewer bills in the city? Thank you. So that's really more relevant to the next discussion about, um, the pressure issues within the system. Um, do frame group or a consultant, um, has sort of tried to quantify that it's really, um, subjective. It's hard to put, um, an actual dollar value to those impacts. Um, because it varies so much. But you were recovering that, but yes, I'll let, I'll let do frame group talk about that, um, when the, uh, on the next presentation. Okay. I don't see any other hand. Oh, yes. Mr. Muller again. This will be frequently. Um, well, my pillar, um, general practices. Speaking once on a topic. So. But try to thank you. Uh, it's for the common good. Um, so the point here is you're asking about metrics for systems compared to other systems. Yes. The American Water Works Association, all the cities talk about this, all the countries talk about this, the cost of the system, the cost of water. It's more important than oil. It's more expensive than oil. This is a very well studied subject. You do have data and it's pressure in the system. 50% is over 200 PSI. That's unheard of no cities in the world run their water systems at that. Nobody. It's an extreme outlier. That's why the pipes are breaking. Okay. Okay. Anyone else on the council have any questions? Appreciate all the charts and you going over it, both of you. Really. Thank you. Is there, is there a motion. The topic here is to approve the. The budget. Is there a motion to approve the budget? I'll second it. Any discussion. May I. So what would it, what would it take to change the. Method that we use the CPI method, for example. I mean, ultimately. We're not going to do it tonight, but what would it take a vote of the council. It's a policy decision of the council. So presumably you'd look at information. Come up with a different system that you feel more comfortable with. And I think one of that was one of the basis for the rate study was to. Yeah, not only because, you know, you can also look at how, you know. We have a system that the more you use the more. You get charged. So the idea is, is to. To incentivize conservation of water. So, you know, all those different kind of factors can be looked at as parts of rate study and how that works and big customers. And for example, the allocation fee that Kurt mentioned that we don't charge was a policy decision by the city council to try to. Encourage more development. So that it was one less cost that somebody had to incur to do a project in my pillar that they have to do another community is to try to offset rate cuts and those kinds of things. So, you know, all of that is something that you look at and then you can make a decision. You know, like I said, this. We've just we've, I'm not only just because obviously we're responsible people, but we've. Followed the council policy for several years based on that. I think Tim's right that, you know, for several years, it wasn't a large increase. It's the last two years that, you know, inflation has been significantly different. And I think Don is right that we had. There have been many years we had no rate change and then would find that we were, you know, behind and then it would be a 15% or something like that to try to catch up. And so the council said, hey, let's just let's make it a policy that will go up by the cost of living and then add a percent for the capital improvements. And the adopted policy. We followed it if in it takes you folks to change it. Just one other thing is there a. I haven't seen the actual budget is there a, we have the unrestricted fund, which can be used for. To make repairs, I assume unanticipated repairs is there a line item also for that. In other words, is the unrestricted fund actually. In excess of what we have historically needed. And do we ever use it to reduce rates. Or to. Or to pay the inflated prices that contractors want to charge us to fix our pipes. So there is a line item for other purchase services and the budget for water line repairs. As far as we haven't, you know, historically we haven't had a large fund balance in these funds. So that's a relatively new occurrence and have a lot of history with it. You know, I think, I think like Sarah mentioned, primarily we would like to maintain some contingency within the fund because unexpected things happen. That you can't predict whether it's like the school street line that really failed rather quickly. Or something at a treatment plant. A piece of equipment, like expensive piece of equipment that really has to be replaced in order to maintain operations. I think it's wise to maintain some contingency level within the fund. Yeah, and I noticed that it hasn't been there hasn't been much excess. Up until the last couple of years 2021. Was that partly because we budget more than we were able to do it at the same time? And was it more than because of the COVID. Staffing shortages. I think a lot of it has to do with some a lot of the grant money the city's gotten. We've gotten a lot of our programs for like the state street project. That we weren't really anticipating. So I would say it's more related to that than staff capacity as far as outside funding. But no, you know, the staff capacity issues is more of an issue. I think it's more of an issue. I think it's more of an issue now than it was the last couple years. Okay. I'd also add a historic. Wasn't that long ago that we were having conversations about the deficits in both of those funds. And so we were on a pretty active deficit reduction. Plan, which also. Health expenses down, but also we were trying to raise that. I think that's also part of where the inflation rate came from to get. You know, I think it's been a long time for a long time until the last couple of years. We finally caught up. Maybe two or three years ago. So. It is. But to your question, council member Alfano, you could. I mean. Can use surpluses to reduce rates. If you choose. You could use it too. For as Kurt mentioned, unexpected. Expenses. You can use it for. You know, as I said, we have as cost estimates for projects. We're seeing is across the board where there's water sewer. Really any of our projects, we have. What are good cost? I miss this estimates and it's still coming in 2025% higher. So we can budget a certain amount if we. We can either use the surplus to do the work we had planned or we've got to reduce the amount of work that we do within the budget. So I mean, it's always. You know, it's always what's, I think this is one of the great policy questions. You know, you can use it to reduce the amount of work that you do. You can use it to reduce the amount of work that you do. Any government is, if you have extra money, you know, so what's the best use to use it to reduce your rates or do you have better protecting the public by having your contingency plan for an emergency? I think they're all good answers. It's really kind of. Decide to. You're pale. Thank you for your presentation and hard work. I just want to ask. I'm not an engineer so I don't know all the details, but on my day to day job when I propose a budget for my department at the college, I produce alternative ones like all the things we are talking if you use this system, then it will affect the budget that much and we will have lesser budget or if you use this, it will affect the budget and we will have higher budgets. So it is. For me. A little bit challenging to decide because we have only one budget. Right. I don't know the alternatives. So if I say yes, I don't know. What are other alternatives? Or if I say no, again, same thing. So. Has it been done like all the time, like one budget because all the. You know, water system or can we do it like alternative. Budgets and we can use the most reasonable and feasible one and will help presidents. To pay their bills. Thank you. So from a process perspective, I can tell you that given those. The great policy of the council. And so, you know, we start with that. So that has. Essentially, we've estimated the revenue available through that rate policy and then made a budget that fit that. So there, you know, there would be more things that we would include if there were unlimited funds. And then. In part because you should. Doing the budget and then cut another couple sent out of it to fit it in with this, but seeing off setting revenues. Again, like. Others have sent. We didn't think that was fair. So. To put on the residents. And otherwise I think in water and sewer. You know, there's, I mean, obviously, I think there's always things you can change, but it's pretty. It's set number of employees to fix the water and sewer lines and do the maintenance and that kind of thing that employees to run the plants. And the chemicals and operating costs of the plants. And then. I mean, really trying to emphasize the improvement in the line improvements, make sure there's sufficient capital funding there to deal with that and to deal with leaks and other things. So there's, you know, I think it becomes a question of. What service area do we want to do less of? Do we want to be less responsive to the line maintenance? Do we want to do less projects? Do we want to. Somehow short change our plans and, you know. Could be trim around the edges, probably, but, you know, really, I think. We're just trying to deliver. Someone said it. The water is the most important thing, right? It's the most fundamental thing. So having safe, clean drinking water and reliable is really important. So can I assume that this is the most conservative. Budget. We can receive. To vote on. I mean, I know it is hard to ask this question. I mean, I think. You know, I. If you remember that, that, you know, I think it's, if the council wanted to see a lower budget, we could provide it. Then you can make a decision whether that was sufficient. I mean, we can always do that with anything. I just, you know, there are impacts. And as I said, you know. And again, not to simplify it, but we, we, we presented this is, we think the best combination of budget within the current rate policy. And so if you were to change how you wanted to do rates, then we could look at that. But I don't know what we did figure out what would happen if there was no rates. How much we'd have to cut is that we had that number. So we held the rates even. Yeah. If we held the rates even, we would have to reduce the water budget by $191,000 and the sewer budget by $160,000. And what would that result in, in terms of operations? I mean, I think it would, it would come down to the capital project. So in the water fund, for example, we have, I think 150,000 to complete. The service line transfers to eliminate the second water main on school street. So it would come down to projects because you don't, you know, you can't cut chemical costs or usage or anything like that. The plants or staff. So, you know, you could conceivably in the sewers and, you know, take that out of the reserve. The $900,000 reserve. Yeah. Just, I just got word that the folks out in zoom land or not. I mean, you know, you could, you know, you could get that word that the folks out in zoom land are not getting anything. Okay. It's not, I see that the screen is not matching what's on our screen. So. Okay. Let's pause while we work on that. Okay. I'm told that we are back in business with zoom connectivity. So we could seize conversation in the room. Carrie, did you have another thing to say? Okay. Donna and then Sal. I think there's a surplus. I wouldn't use that word because I feel that our infrastructure and water and sewage, we could always do more. And hence, I feel it's important that. Shift whatever money we haven't spent in the given year. That we hold steady state. I mean, I was on council when national, I went to last water usage toilets. And it was very, very significant. We want to conserve water. But guess what? The infrastructure for water and sewage stays the same. So we had less water that we were getting paid for. So everybody was paying more. One of the reasons we went after and sought bar, hill was they use our water. So we come back to the fact that we have an infrastructure and a federal standards for our water sewage. And we're going to find out more about storm water that we want to follow and have been following. And hence it costs. And our infrastructure is not caught up with all those new standards. They're getting there, but they're not caught up. So I feel like one, we definitely need to have a bigger population. Again, back to that 10,000 people that our infrastructure could support. So we're all paying less. But I don't feel this is the time to get cheap on our water and infrastructure. And that you can say that maybe the CPI is not the way to go. We need something besides just what it costs in one year. We need to plan ahead. We need to have a steady approach. And because the staff has been so good getting grants, we have some money that we could put in something we didn't expect to be able to do. So I come from a whole different level of looking at the water and sewage rate. We even have a committee that looks at this. I believe some council members on it. I'm not on that committee, but I really respect when they come back with a water rate that they really explored it. But that's where I'm at. I don't think it's unreasonable. And I would vote to support this rate proposed. So. I actually agree with, with all of that. I, I don't see an advantage in, in cutting the budget. What I would like to see though, I mean. We lost time on our schedule. It seems to me during the pandemic, we lost a couple of years. We lost people. We've lost an opportunity to, we've lost our place in the schedule, essentially. And, and if we, if we have an excess, I think we ought to not just hold steady at the moment. I think we need to have a plan to catch up. I know it's hard because you're down. You're down people and you're in a very competitive. But I don't think we can afford to lose two years replacing. Pipes because we're ending up, you know, doing a lot of repairs that we're not expecting. You know, this is better than anyone. So I, I guess I, I'm, I'm in support of the budget, but I'm also in support of. Of more than a steady state for the next. Whatever it takes a couple of years. That we do what. You know, we, we, we brainstorm and find a way to do more than, than we think we're able to do, whether it's using subcontractors more or. I mean, I don't know the answer. I just think we need to catch up or we're, we're going to be forever behind. So. Thank you. I just for probably for your benefit, but also everyone else's listening time we did. We didn't lose some work, but as you saw, we're still ahead of the targets that we established. And just to be clear, we did put 500,000, the council put $500,000 for water and sewer improvements of ARPA money into the system out of the 2 million we got. So 25% of the money we got was put toward water. And then another batch was part of a, we did fund the delayed the projects that have been delayed projects and equipment have been delayed to a tune of about two million. Those were included roads and other, not just water and sewer, but so, you know, about 1.7 million of the, now I'm probably rounding one, about 1.5 million of the two went to those kinds of infrastructure to try to make up for the lost time. So it wasn't, it wasn't all totally lost money. One question and this isn't, isn't really a question for this year's budget, but I know that part of the discussion for the last couple of years has been where are we going to become able to come up with more money to replace the capital system? And we've talked about the retiring the bonds for the, for the water plant. And I wonder if we could mention that a little bit. And that will fall off and that will allow for another $290,000 annually to be towards capital, whether that be debt related capital or other straight capital improvements. Okay. Any other discussion before we are ready to vote on the motion. Okay. The motion is to approve the budget is proposed. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. Okay. Thank you. That motion did not include the rates. So now we're up to water and sewer rates. And again, take it away. Presentation. Just approve the rates, please. Okay. I move we approve the water sewer rates as presented by staff. Any discussion. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. Okay. Well. Guess Kurt, you don't get to go anywhere. Next. Thanks, Sarah. Next up we have water and sewer infrastructure plan. So while they're getting set up, I think our plan was to. You know, hear from our consultant outlaying their work and then hear comments from the state. And I know we've recently replied back to the state. I don't know if they've had a chance to process that yet, but we'll look forward to hearing their comments and then. Obviously take public comments and then have a discussion. Okay. All right. Kurt Monica. Sorry. Interesting. It's not on the screen. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Kurt. Monica, public works director. And with me tonight is Stan Welch project manager for do frame group. That's a consultant that has developed our hydraulic model and their preliminary engineering report on the water distribution system. So just a little background on. You know how we got here into this project. The city among players issued a permit to operate for our on January 7th, 2022. And as part of that permit, we were asked to evaluate high-pressure transient events and strategies for mediating locally elevated pressures within the system. And that permit is issued by the Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection Division. We do have two representatives here tonight to help answer questions. This meeting is also intended to be an opportunity for public comment. And so the Dufresne Group has prepared a 90% draft report which addresses those items in the permit to operate that I mentioned as well as identifying areas in the distribution system where the hydrants are on undersized lines that can result in pressure issues within the system. So that 90% draft report was submitted to the state of Vermont. They provided comment back and asked for some additional analysis to be evaluated, alternatives to be evaluated. Dufresne Group has provided written responses to those comments, but they have not finalized the preliminary engineering report to incorporate those responses or the state comments. So that's just kind of where we're at. And I will turn it over to Stan sort of talk about the report and what went into it. All right. As Kurt said, I'm Stan Welch. I'm from Dufresne Group, one of the project managers and co-authors of the report. As Kurt mentioned, at 90% stage, this is a really good opportunity to get public feedback. It seems like there is quite a few people who want to speak, which is great. We want to hear that feedback. To kind of echo what Kurt said, I'm going to try and do a crash course of kind of the status of the system now and some of the alternatives we considered, review the report and touch on the financials, at least preliminary cost estimates associated with the consideration of a few of these alternatives. But the permit to operate included the special condition to evaluate in general the pressures, elevated pressure conditions. What's viewed as generally high pressure and high pressure transient events throughout the system. It also includes two violations that are listed, which are associated with the inability to provide 500 gallons a minute at all hydrants while maintaining 20 PSI throughout the system. So this report tries to address the special condition as well as the violations. See if I can. There we go. So this is figure two one from the report. This is just generally an overview of your water system right now. I don't know how easy that is to see for everybody in terms of color, but you basically have the large blue areas, your main pressure zone, which is supported from pumps at the water treatment facility. You have this pink area up here, which is your town hill pressure zone, which is a separate pump station and tank that supports that area. You have the terrace street pressure zone, which is sort of the same situation. You have a pump station in the tank, and then you have a small hydropneumatic booster station serving the highest elevation homes in Murray Hill and kind of attached on their own system as the CVMC water system, which is also pumped from the treatment plant to their own storage tank. Um, average day demand of the plant is about 960,000 gallons per day. On average, it's what the plant produces and sends to the distribution system. It's about 56 miles of distribution and transmission main throughout the city in terms of linear footage of pipe. There's roughly 3,015 m connections on the water system, 233 in the town hill zone and 168 in the terrace street zone. So it's about 400 and including the 12 on the Murray Hill zone in their own boosted zone year mid 400s and, you know, low 400s rather in terms of connections and dedicated pressure zones. There's approximately 2,800 customers that have service pressures in excess of 80 psi. That 80 psi number is significant because that is the threshold for the international plumbing code where the pressure needs to be reduced within the building. So that's everybody who has a local PRV, a PRV in their basement, which I'm sure you've all heard about that 80 psi is the is the plumbing code threshold. The fire flow established for the system, the minimum fire flow criteria is the water spy minimum criteria, which is 500 gallons per minute for two hours will maintain 20 psi in the system. So that's what we use as our basis of fire flow when we were evaluating these alternatives. And we to get started on this, we did around a calibration testing. We did fire flow testing throughout the city and monitored pressures along with reviewing the skated data for pressures of the city monitors on a regular basis, which are pressures at the town, home pump station, terrace street pump station, the water treatment plant and right here at city hall. So we had pretty good data sets. In addition to that, we put pressure recorders out for seven days at three different spots throughout the city and log that data as well. This I think Scott kind of touched on this earlier with his comment, this is the breakdown of pressure using 150 psi as the as the threshold throughout the system. So the blue areas are areas where service pressure is below 150 psi and the red areas are areas where the service pressure is above 150 psi. And that breaks down to approximately 51% of the system is has pressures delivered at above 150 psi. The 200 psi number was thrown around earlier. That's the maximum pressure in the system. And there are about 175 connections that are between 190 and 200 psi that are served currently by the system. Is there a way to tell like where those are to those tend to be like really low parts of the city? Yeah, it's all based on static elevations. That's your lowest elevation within your main pressure zone. So that's there's about 175 connections that are in your downtown area. So you can you can kind of see based on elevation, it's really the river and the low points. You've got West of the city on route to east of the city on route to 302 and then north on Elm Street. Thanks. Sure. So to get started, we really took the approach to understand that pressure is kind of the central cog here. That's what people want to hear about. That's what we want to talk about is looking at what can we do to manage our pressures with that special condition of the permit to operate being addressing high pressure transient events or generally elevated pressures that are routinely present in the system. So we calibrated our model and took an iterative approach to looking at basically what's the best bang for the buck? How much pressure can we what's the most amount of pressure we can pull out of the system and maintain a reasonable level of capital investment? And through a few different processes, we basically came up with anywhere between 20 and the 88 pounds where we landed is roughly the same amount of capital investment in terms of order of magnitude. So the alternative that we flushed out in the report is pulling as the most amount of pressure as we could will maintaining that order of magnitude level investment. If we go beyond the 88 psi reduction that we're looking at, the issues become a lot more widespread. And so this figure four one kind of represents the issues when you pull out the 88 psi from the central pressure zone and roughly 80 psi from this 302 in Gallison Hill Spur. These are where your issues develop in a average day condition. So this is not a fire flow condition. This is just areas of the system that become deficient for the water supply rule with normal pressures. So you have this Northfield Street area, this upper and a main street, Emond Street College Street, the upper and a North North Street, I believe some of the higher elevation areas near Territory. And then these are, this is Hubbard Park and this is the top of its core street. Correct? Core street. There are some kind of centrally elevated positions or services there that also go deficient. So when we flushed out the alternative to that's considered in the report, we were looking at the level of investment to address these pressure deficiencies that develop when we reduce the pressure. Those are deficient for the for the hydrants or no, that's normal. That's service. Yeah, that's issues that are services that fall below 35 psi under normal average day conditions, which is the minimum criteria 35 psi under average day under normal conditions for the water supply rule and 20 psi under a high flow event. And what's the impact of the homeowner in it in one of these places if the if it's it's efficient pressure? Oh, and that would become a violation of the water supply rule. So that would end up on your permit to operate to address and you would have to come up with a strategy to boost pressure or address that deficiency one way or another, which is basically what we've what we've flushed out with our alternative is okay, we've reduced the pressure we've developed these other areas that are now deficiencies. What do we need to invest to address those deficiencies and maintain our system? Now continue to serve our our user base. And that's what this figure 412 represents. We we looked at a few different alternatives. Sorry, a few different alternatives that are considered in the report to address each of these. But basically, we developed two additional pressure zones, the reduced main pressure zone and this galson hill pressure zone. And to address those deficiencies that developed at the top of Main Street, we have to relocate the easy street pump station which now serves the town hill zone. That's what gets the water into the tank. When we reduce the pressure 88 pounds that pump station can no longer operate. So it needs to be real relocated where it has adequate suction pressure. So we move it down the hill or build a new pump station rather down the hill along Main Street, and then extend this pressure zone further down the hill to address those deficiencies that developed at the top end of Main Street. To address the National Life Area Northfield Street, we looked at a dedicated water main that would bypass the reduced pressure and would basically reconnect to that area of the system back to the normal pressure zone that is now the main pressures on. So the Northfield Street National Life Area would be returned to return to its current status in terms of pressure on the Terrace Street area. The pumps would need to be replaced and the programming redone, and then those high elevation areas in the Territory Zone could be pretty easily connected to the zone. There's not a huge amount of cost in terms of infrastructure to get them transitioned into that zone. And then locally, the developed high pressures on like Hubbard Park, the Tavacore Street, and North Street, those were not sufficient in number for us to contemplate significant capital investment in terms of big booster stations, new tanks. So we carried costs to develop or to address those on a more individual level, maybe a smaller hydropneumatic pump station to serve the North Street homes or disconnection of some of the higher elevation places exploring drilling wells that would be feasible. So there are some, this would get everybody down to the highest pressure in the zone would be 112 PSI, which is now the 200 PSI. So you are looking at an 88 pound reduction. There are some other drawbacks that when you reduce this pressure zone, that significantly the infrastructure basically needs to be built out and developed before that pressure reduction can take place. There really is no great way to phase this, what could happen in chunks. So from a capital investment standpoint and an implementation this all needs to be planned, the land needs to be acquired, everything needs to be permitted, infrastructure constructed, permitted design constructed before the reduction can take place. So the implementation schedule is extended. This doesn't address necessarily, I know that everybody's associating pressure with breaks, which there's definitely a correlation intuitively. I think everybody understands that, but it is important to note that breaks don't go away with a reduction in pressure. There are a lot of other considerations primarily in this system age of the mains is huge. There's roughly 46% of the distribution system is either beyond its expected useful life in terms of age or is expected to exceed its useful life in the next 20 years. So a huge chunk, almost half of the distribution network that really needs to be replaced based on an age condition. That was kind of backed up by our fire flow testing. We saw friction values that would make sense associated with those ages. So that investment, 46% replacement is still there. The reduction in pressure doesn't mitigate the need to have to invest in distribution system. There are fire flow implications, which I will touch on. I've got another figure in here, which talks about the reduction in firefighting capacity and fire protection. That's a significant issue. Additionally, anybody who has a sprinkler system, whether it's a commercial industrial building or a residence, if you adjust their pressure, that system would need to be reevaluated, redesigned, possibly reconstructed. So that's something to consider as well. This alternative of reducing pressure flushes out the special condition of the permit, but this alone without investment in the distribution system does not address the violations in the permit to operate, which we're associated with the 500 gallons per minute 20 psi flow. In comparison to this, we reviewed alternative three, which I don't have a figure for, but alternative three in short is replacing the distribution system through phased capital investment planning with adequately sized mains and proper construction methods and different materials. I know that the city has transitioned more to HDPE as kind of a primary water main material, one of the benefits of HDPE or PVC plastic pipe in general is that it's flexible in comparison to ductile iron or cast iron. And so when you're considering transient events, water hammer or surges, that pipe will actually buffer that surge because it will expand and contract. And that is significant. The other aspect is velocity in the pipe. So if you have undersized mains that you're trying to get fire flow through, upsizing those mains to be more adequately sized significantly reduces the velocity, which also improves the or would reduce the impacts of surge or water hammer that would be felt. And we kind of, we didn't necessarily flush that out so well in this 90% draft, our comment responses really touch on that back to the state and kind of review the hydraulics. In addition, any sort of low pressures, if people have experienced low pressures during firefighting events or flushing, that also goes away with improvements to the distribution systems. So right now that's all associated with flow and the condition of the pipe. So without improving the condition of the pipe or reducing the velocity in the pipe through upsizing the pipe, you still get significant pressure reductions with any sort of fire flow. So high flow events, you still see big pressure fluctuations. I think it is important to note, and I think I would be interested to get feedback from the public, which I think we will, but our data recorders and SCADA data and chart recorders that we put out, we didn't know any operational transient events. That's associated with a sudden change in demand, a rapid change in velocity within the pipe. We didn't have anything that picked up anything that we could tie to a normal operation in the water system, including our calibration testing, which was fire flow testing or flushing. We didn't see any significant spikes that were developed from that. We did see significant reductions in pressure, which were friction related, but we didn't see spikes develop because of a rapid change in velocity. I think that that phenomenon is probably experienced with water main breaks. If a water main is disturbed and breaks rapidly, that's a rapid change in velocity. So if there are areas that are experiencing significant amounts of breaks, that may be occurring there locally. And if it just didn't overlap with our chart recorders, we didn't see it, but we also didn't see it in the SCADA data, which goes back pretty far. So if there's more data out there or available, we would be happy to continue to process that. I touched on this in comparison to the alternatives. This is a figure basically illustrating graphically where your fire flow violations are. These are the actual violations for the permit to operate. There are areas in the system where hydrants cannot provide 500 gallons per minute without reducing distribution systems or distribution system pressure below 20 psi. So technically per your permit, these hydrants need to be made unavailable to the fire department. When you consider this in comparison, so this is current pressure situation, and this is, if you reduce the pressure, 88 pounds, you develop a significant amount of additional hydrants that would become deficiencies. Overlying this with the hydrant locations, it's roughly 32 hydrants. You get some areas that are really grouped this northern end of Elm Street, this area east of the town. And national life building. And I think it's a metal view, I believe, it's up the right street. Mountain view, sorry, mountain view. This is Mountain View Street, national life in here. This is Quesnell Drive and that neighborhood out there. Additionally, there's some hydrants gathered throughout downtown. This is the Heaton Woods residences up here. Shaw's is in here. So there's a couple of hydrants on Berry Street as well as a hydrant at the dead end of Berry Street that basically would need to be made unavailable. So this is one of those things that it was touched on when you talked about the budget is damages, reductions in pressure or costs associated with firefighting. The unavailability of hydrant, those are tough to nail down in terms of an economic comparison. That's something that we definitely want to try to do. We're going to try and work with the state on coming to terms on metrics and agreeing on water losses was another thing that came out. If you reduce the pressure, if you have leakage, that is an actual reduction in water that you're producing. There is a real cost associated with that. So we do want to flush those out a little bit further. This is the lifecycle cost that was included in the report. The big takeaway is it's a significant capital investment to reduce the pressure. It adds O&M. There is opportunity for additional revenue, primarily through connecting the Town Hall Zone to Gallison Health. There are some residences up there that could be connected to the system. This is all maintenance associated with new infrastructure. And then down here, this distribution system main replacements basically means that you can't reduce pressure and also eliminate the need to replace your distribution system assets. So those assets still age out, still fail, still need to be replaced. So it's basically an addition of those two costs, whereas alternative three is looking at proper design and hydraulic of water main materials to more effectively convey fire flows and design flows and demands with pipe materials that are necessarily or are resistant to corrosion, which is an issue that's developed in the city, corrosive soils, eating away at pipes. Also, we explored the use of flexible pipe materials, which as I mentioned before, will significantly buffer any transient events if there are transient events that are developing the system. This last table is appendix G in the report. This is current system, current fire flow deficiencies, and recommendations to address those deficiencies. So this is the construction that needs to happen to get those hydrants that need to be taken offline now back in service and the associated estimated construction costs with those recommendations. We reviewed these along with some priority projects with the city and that was ultimately what was presented as the recommended project and the 90% draft to the report is addressing the highest priority fire flow projects to consider the violations of the permit to operate as well as some of the areas in the city that have experienced high levels of breaks or are aged or undersized. That's everything I have for presentation materials, presentation slides. Happy to try and answer questions as best I can. Okay, thank you. I know there are a lot of people who want to be heard on that. We'll start with members of the council if you have any. Oh, you want to hear from this? Why don't we hear from the state before we and then we will be ready to take our break. They're installing it, right? Let's get that. You have direct questions. Okay, that's surprising. But you just went up and just... Come on down. You can sit to it, is it, Mike? Hi, my name is Dan and Aggie. I am with the state of Vermont. I am the operation section supervisor for the drinking water program. I signed the permit for the city. I guess my concern is we're still... We don't have a final product here. So we don't have... We don't have a final product. So if you have direct questions that you'd like us to talk about, that we'd be happy to do that. But without a final product, I'm not sure. I guess I'm not... I don't understand what you might want us to speak on without a direct question. So fair enough. All right. All right. Thanks. Donna. No, you may get some... You may get questions anyway. Go ahead, Donna. So my understanding... You came back with a lot of questions. You were not satisfied with the initial response. And my understanding was that initial response came from an RFP or some such thing. The P.E.R. I knew they had different initials. That's 60%. A bid. A bid for services is a scope of work. Did you not approve the scope of work? I thought you saw that scope of work. So the P.E.R. is a preliminary engineering report. This is what we asked for them to do. The hydraulic analysis of P.E.R. And what we commented on was a 60% completion of that document. Right. So they came in with the 60%. We... This is a normal process with a preliminary engineering report. They came in with a document. We, as a program, we evaluated the... We had our engineers. I'm not an engineer, by the way. I do have an engineer here. I'm not going to answer technical questions. She will. And we reviewed that. And then this is a normal... This is what normally happens in these situations. We had questions. We sent questions back to her and into their engineers. And it's sort of a back and forth. So we come to a sort of agreement. And that's kind of where we're at right now. So we have a... As they alluded to, there's a nine... This is sort of a 90% meeting. And then we're going to have further discussions and further... What would you say, Kurt? We're going to have further discussions to come up with something that works for the state and that works for the city. And that aligns with our water supply rule. Well, I can't tell you how valuable your statements are. This is typical. This is a back and forth interface with getting what you want. Thank you. Because, as you know, things hit the paper, then they hit social media, and suddenly it looked like the state was very unhappy with what Montague was doing. So thank you. That's what I need to clarify. It's something that I guess it's not usually debated in the public setting. This is a larger question about a level of service that the city wants. And the city and the residents want from their watersheds, though. So I think that's where it's getting to be in the public field. Thank you. Anybody else? And I don't know if that's you or if you're here. I guess just trying to look for... What is the... Brock says, we're trying to do it. That's what's being presented to us. The public's trying to sip through a lot of technical information, as much in lay terms as possible. Like, what is missing from what is being proposed to us that you would like to see or that you're continuing to work through? What are the issues that are raising flags that you're continuing in the normal course of process to just resolve? I'll let one option. That's the first question you should answer. Alison Murphy, Division Engineer for the Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection Division. Most of the questions that I... And comments that I put forward were trying to get to some of the logic that happened in the middle. There was data presented and a recommendation. And I think it's really easy when you're down in the weeds to not realize that you may have not provided some context or some connecting thought process that happened. And so a lot of my comments were about, was this thought about? It seems like maybe it was, but it wasn't talked about. So that's... And that's like Dana said, it's a normal process because you have city staff and engineers that are really in the weeds. And then they send it to me. And I'm not as much in the weeds. So I ask for that connecting information and a real drive for transparency on how the decisions are being made and that way I can say, yes, this meets the standards, the state regulations, the federal regulations. And then it moves into Dana's department and yours or your field. So I have a question for either one of you and you certainly can decline to answer it if you wish. But as this process is going through, would you characterize that we are to get the state and city are working or I mean, there is a solution that could be reached or is this, is there some gap that can't be crossed or something in between there? I don't know if I'm said that the right way, but... I don't think there's an end. We're not at an end. That's for sure. There's definitely, there's ground for a solution. And I think we're working towards that. And that's kind of, and that's where my hesitation is to start talking about something that's not finalized. And then, and kind of muddying the waters that way. No, I appreciate that. And I wasn't trying to say, yep, I just, as Donna mentioned, when things hit the paper, it comes off as though there's sort of competing sides or there's a conflict and I have not, this is the first time I've met you folks, I haven't been involved in this at all. So I'm just curious how you characterize the progress that's being made. Yeah, there's been a lot of, there's been a lot of public input. There's been a lot of public concern. So it kind of, it heightens things. So thank you. Yep, you're welcome. Anybody else want to up here? Lauren. All right. And I guess just following up on that. So I mean, we've heard even tonight from some members of the public, like the water pressure we have is just unbelievable international even. And like, so what I'm hearing in the sense as well, we're still working at the details, like the plan that we're being presented is headed in the direction that the draft can't wait at the state. Ultimately, I mean, not to prejudge, but like, we're addressing the issues in a way that you know, we're going to get to a resolution that the state's going to be comfortable with. And like, we're not way off base, which is why certainly the newspaper has conveyed it as like way out of wax. Or is that unfair and it's really safe. Let's say we have alternatives to to to look out further. And I believe there is a there's a path forward. I think we're going to come to what there's a solution here. And we're going to get to it. Brands who own very city council and was told that they also have high water burns pressure and they also have old pipes like Montpelier. So for cities that have infrastructure underground as old as ours, are we that out of whack with problems with our leakage and breakage? Allison Murphy again. So the frequency and number of breaks in the past few years have been higher than what I am familiar with. But do you are not alone in having high pressures? That's about as clear as I can do without querying databases. One of the points is there have been a handful of system wide failures in the state in the past years. And two of them have happened here in Montpelier. So something to think about. If that's all the questions people have of the state people right now, I think this is a good time for us to take our break since we are. Yes, is there anyone in the public who wants to ask questions directed to the state? Then we've got a couple. Steve, Dan, Chris, Stan, okay. Steven MacArthur from Montpelier. And I've been following the water issue for a while since probably a couple of two, three years now. And I've learned some things in the past six to 12 months. And I apologize to Donna for being a burr in the saddle, so to speak. I know that there are a lot of people who have been concerned about it and have spoken up and have written things in social media and have written things in the newspaper and have written things on the front porch forum because those are the places that we are able to speak publicly about those concerns. So I apologize if that has bothered you. I'm curious to know whether in any of these conversations any of the folks involved, the state, Dufresne, and even Kurt, looking at the city's current 50-year plan, the so-called 50-year plan for our water system was evaluated. Whether that was taken into consideration in the preliminary engineering report in answers to the state and whether the state has seen that plan in terms of its being able to respond to the preliminary engineering report. Now, as far as I'm concerned, having read the 52 items that the state responded to the city on, it was critical. It wasn't as if it was, oh, a lotty die, everything's fine. Let's just go ahead and fix all of this. It was critical. It had some very serious criticisms and demands of the city. And I don't think it's just a matter of sloughing that off. And I'm really interested in what the so-called final preliminary engineering report is going to look like in response to the state and perhaps what it ought to have been in the first place so that we didn't get 52 serious questions about our preliminary plan. That's, those are my comments. So I'd like to know if there was any analysis of the 50-year plan that the city has in place spending money into the 2050s. I don't think we have until the 2050s to fix our water system. We did not review as part of this report the existing capital improvement master plan. We did, we referenced it a few times and note that the city has a plan to invest in the water system and has put energy and effort into that. But we tried to take a separate approach to really quantifying the level of investment based on age and condition of the distribution system assets. And that's really what you see in that alternative three is that 46% of the distribution system that is either exceeded its useful life or will exceed its useful life in roughly 20 years. So I think that this is a good opportunity to try and take this data and continue to collect data that the city is doing a really good job of with GIS and reevaluate some of the capital improvement infrastructure investments and planning. And also as people have touched on, there's opportunity right now with funds available through a state. And that's really one of the big takeaways from this report is that this report will hopefully serve as the PER that will be the basis of funding applications for some of the short-term, the most critical infrastructure investment opportunities, which is what's outlined in the last couple sections of the report. That investment or that short-term window we see as I think his five-year capital plan that's actually flushed out, the rest of it will be in the appendix with cost, but we see that as an opportunity to continue to collect data, review break histories, review pressure data, if there's areas that are identified as there are transients developed in this area and we can tie them to a specific user or specific flows. And maybe we drill down and look at more localized infrastructure investment and those priorities reshift. So I think as part of any asset management plan and maintenance of a distribution system, those data and processing collection needs to be happening continuously. As far as the state comments, we did address the comments and responded to the comments. We haven't finalized the report and part of that was based on this meeting. We wanted to have the opportunity to review from council and from the public and collect any other additional data and then open the door to more dialogue with the state. The biggest piece being quantifying and the biggest piece in the comments that kept coming up was how are you quantifying costs associated with residential PRVs or water losses or breaks associated specifically with pressure and how are we quantifying the reduction in firefighting capacity? So those are some things that are not necessarily easy to just quantify. So we're going to have some back and forth and some dialogue to really flush those out, make sure that we do quantify some costs. I missed a point that I did want to touch on. In comparison to the alternatives, reducing 88 pounds from the system in the central zone, that number that I talked about, the 80 PSI, you get about an additional 485 customers that fall below that 80 PSI. So that private savings of PRV maintenance, PRV installation is spread across 485 customers. So that's another piece to consider is in terms of investment in physical infrastructure that's required for some sort of code that's like a rigid piece of paper that could be referenced. That's a regulation. That savings is spread across 485 customers with a user base of 3,015. So it's tough to make an equitable comparison on savings versus cost when you're comparing different user bases. So there's a lot that needs to go into looking at the costs and we're going to try really hard to square up with the state. Have some back and forth and make sure we're all on the same plan on what we're carrying for numbers and that it makes sense. And that's the biggest thing is we want the solution that we recommend to be the best fit for the community. And it should be data driven and based in fact. And so to be clear about what you're talking about, if the total cost of that additional ADPSI reduction would be borne by all the users in the system, but the financial benefit would flow to 485 customers, is that report? Just that portion of the financial benefit. So if you're looking at this, these 485 customers no longer have to own or maintain PRV. So just that specific piece. But if you're talking about water losses or breaks that are overhead line items in the overall budget, that's something that's spread across the entire user base. But that specific savings and infrastructure that goes into somebody's home is compared to a capital investment that's burdened by the entire user base. Thanks. Dan, I think I've got you next. Hi, I'm Dan Jones. My pleasure. I work more of a candy store mentality. So I'm going to only look at big numbers that kind of step out of me. So it seemed to me I saw an 80 million plus number that did the 45% of the infrastructure that needs to be replaced plus the pressure changes. Would that be a correct number if I'm looking at what's I? Yeah, that alternative to is the present day worth 82 million. OK. Now, and so I heard in the original report that you'd had an option three, which was a much cheaper number, but was I think the bridge crap quantified it as status quo maintenance. And I was curious because the state comments basically said that was not a viable option. If I understood that correctly. Yeah, I think I can address that. So that was that comment was specifically viewed through the lens of, like you said, status quo. And I want to be clear that alternative three is considered in the report is not replacing these mains with not replacing four inch mains with hydrants on it with four inch mains with hydrants on it or six inch mains with hydrants on it with six inch or replacing with updated pipe materials and reevaluating sizes. So the the system would be hydraulically designed for the flows that that it should be including fire flow. So it isn't it's not like kind of replacement. It's not status quo. It's stepping back and looking at what are our demands? What are our fire flow? And let's size these water mains appropriately. Specifically, but then the larger issue about the pressure throughout the system, which causes the regular breaks, the geysers on various streets, et cetera, would not be addressed by that system. By that those fixes that that would be something that continued and an increasing cost to the city because as far as I understand it, the longer we go on with high pressure on this old system, the more damage we're going to see on a yearly basis. So because that's constantly now pounding at the system creating increasing damage. Am I wrong in that? I don't say that you're holistically wrong. I think there are definitely you have great perspectives the key here is that I think just because you go from 200 PSI to 112 PSI 150 PSI 160, whatever number you pick that's some reduction, if you have a hundred year old cast iron water main, it's reducing the pressure isn't kind of mean that that doesn't fail, but the break doesn't exist. The leak doesn't happen. No, but continuing with the high pressure as we'll increase with the old system, the number. And maybe Kurt can touch on this areas that you've replaced water main. What are you saying for break history with updated materials and sizes? Right. So I do have that table, but we've moved to HTPE probably about five years ago. Clarendon Avenue, Northfield Street was PVC. We had a lot of breaks. I don't remember on Northfield Street before we rebuilt it. But essentially, since we've been replacing pipes, the streets with new pipes, they don't fail anymore, regardless of our current pressures. So there is a major shift in break frequency from line replacement. Oh, I'm not doubting that. It's more of a continuation because the limit of the area, that's what I was trying to hear. And so it seems like the more limited option that you were trying to propose, which is in terms of the fire thing, was a much lower or smaller frame for reconstruction rather than the system needs throughout the system, right? No, that cost that's carried in that alternative is the cost to replace the 46% of the system that we expect to age out within the next 20 years. The 60 million. Yeah, that's like very significant infrastructure investment in the distribution. Okay. Well, that's what I was trying. Okay. Thank you. It is absolutely not the same thing as doing nothing. Okay. Thanks, Dan. Chris, Mike, and Tina. Chris Lombra, city employee. I'm currently the facility sustainability coordinator. But previously for about 10 years, I was a city building inspector and Stan's comment. It was already fresh in my mind before it came out of his mouth is the impact of this pressure reduction on existing fire protection systems in buildings. I think it's significant that the fire protection sprinkler systems in buildings are designed based on the local pressure and local flow that's available to them. And there are systems in the city that are 100 or more years old that were designed based on the pressures. All the systems were based on the pressures that exist now. The majority of the large commercial sprinkler systems I think maybe Tim would echo this as well are located in the lower elevations, the downtown areas of the city where the pressure reduction is going to be the greatest. One thing that's also crossed my mind, a great number of those systems on state street, lower state street are state systems in all the state buildings. Almost all the state buildings have fire sprinklers in them. I think upgrading the sprinklers could be a great expense for individual building owners. The state BGS I think could very well be very impacted by this. And I think the city has some level of partnership with our state-owned buildings here. I would encourage engagement with BGS and with the state division of fire safety specifically around the impact of this pressure reduction on state buildings. National Life is another huge sprinkler system, three sprinkler systems up at National Life that also will be impacted. And again, out River Street that way, tractor supply, lots of large sprinkler systems and potential costs. So let's not gloss over this as a detail and make sure that we really kind of do some due diligence. Thank you. Okay, before I call on anyone else, I know there's a lot of discussion that we have yet to have on this topic. But I think this is an opportunity to give people here in the building and at home a chance to interact with our domestic water system and take a 10-minute break. I'd trade him up here. First, a comment, something I know having worked for the state for 32 years that, but I often forget, is that the state, the city really want the same thing here. Everybody wants the same thing, that quality, high quality, good water system. As I said before, I view water as a fundamental infrastructure and we have to have it. And as I understood the presentation, it looked to me like other than option three, we were talking band-aids. We're talking, we're talking putting a, stopping a band-aid on a pretty open wound. And I certainly, the question, that there's a question and a comment, the question is, how long does a band-aid last? You know, we're in a bad situation and we're not alone. I was just over here in conversation that there are many other communities in the same situation. But I noticed that option three, it looked like to me, all the money was up front, that we had to do major changes to our infrastructure that was, and, but in the long run that might save us money. And I think that's something that I think, I hope you'll consider when you make any kind of decision like this. I don't have a lot of hope for our current water system. I mean, I just, you look at the potholes in the streets, you don't have to look hard to see that. And I hope you'll think about the idea that, let's fix it. I mean, putting in new pipe that won't break and a flow level that is maintainable and functional is something that's worthy of our investment. And it is an investment, a long-term investment. And I don't want to pay more tax than anybody else, but I recognize the fact that the costs of getting nickel and dime for problems, and I worry somebody brought up earlier will worry about the costs of our problems. We don't, we really don't do a good analysis of the costs of the weaknesses in our system. And we should have, we pay a lot of taxes and we should have a system that works. And I worry about, people talk about 50 year plans. In 50 years, the technology is going to be so much different. And what we do now will almost seem irrelevant, but I think what we have to do now is look as far down the road as we can and invest in that. Because if we don't do that, we're gonna be, well, I won't be here forever, but I'll be here for a while, hopefully. Anyway, thank you. Thanks, Mike. Tina. Tina Muncie, and I live in Montpelier. And what I'd like now is to know, what's the process now? So you've explained you're halfway there, then you're 90% there. You're negotiating, you're negotiating. So as a citizen, I wanna know how I know what's happening. So thank you for tonight and listening. So now what happens next? What's the process? What can I expect to see or hear about before somebody just says it's done or you have, let's vote on it now process? So could you explain to me the process? Don't wrestle each other for the microphone. Yeah, we're all looking at each other here. All right, so right now we have a 90% draft plan and the state has reviewed that plan and provided comments and our engineer has provided responses to those comments. So the next step, and now we're going to end then tonight, we also received public comment. So we're gonna take all that information and we are going to develop 100% complete report. And that will take place through a lot of discussion interaction with the state of Vermont water supply and ground water protection division. And then we will come back to council with the recommended alternative. So that will be, like I said, in conjunction with the state and city and our consultant. And then council will have an opportunity to weigh in on the alternative that we're proposing to move forward with. And that would be the goal, yep. Will the consultant will draft what is considered 100% plan, then submit it to the state who will then, and then at some point, you know, presumably they will have talked it through before it's submitted, but then we'll get back and approved plan. Is that right? Once it's been submitted, am I wrong about that? Alison, I will draft, assuming we agree, then I will draft an approval letter. And at that point, then it would be an approved 100% plan that we, then it would be on us to figure out how to implement the plan. The question for people who didn't hear that is what happens if there's not agreement between the city and the state? I don't really see that as an option. I think we'll work to come to terms and we'll process the data enough to get on the same page. I've never had a PER that we've written that the state has just flat out said, nope, we don't agree and we're all done. So I think this is a partnership. We'll see it through and we'll come to a conclusion that we're all on the same page with. And I think we're well on the way. Thanks. Now, we haven't had any questions from council yet or very few. And so I want to give council members a chance to ask questions because I have a bunch and I think probably others do also. Lauren. Thank you for sharing your microphone. Apologies that mine isn't working tonight. Two issues I just wanted to name and they might be more comments than questions. But if you have information, one, just with climate change and knowing that precipitation patterns and erosion and everything that we anticipate, I just I'm assuming the plan is being written with climate resilience in mind that might be bigger pipes than were previously necessary. So just naming that, that I hope that's part of the calculation and that we're building to the future and not to the past. And then also I've been seeing increasing reports coming out around the potential risks around plastic pipes. And the more we learn about petrochemical plastics, the more concerns. So I think HDPE seems better than PBC in terms of potential toxicity and leaching. But I know there's been a number of reports coming out and it's still not very well studied. So I could see, you know, right now being like, this is the cheapest best option. I just don't want us to get in a place where in 10 years we're like, ah, we invested in a bunch of plastic pipes that now are a public health concern. So just putting that out. Those are good comments. A section of the whole report is based on future planning, expansion, growth, and environmental impacts. So all those climate change criteria and what your flow needs will be in the future versus what they are now is all something that we consider and evaluate in terms of data. We're also, as a consultant, we're familiar with the reports on PBC pipe that have come out and are eager to see the responses from the other players, the plastic pipe companies. And we're going to, you know, keep our finger on the pulse of this situation because it impacts definitely much more than just the city of Montpelier. So we want to see that through. Then that's certainly something to be considering. So that's a good comment. Is the main issue of climate change, the sewer and the groundwater runoff? Yeah, most of the changes in the public utility infrastructure investment is probably going to be around stormwater, where you're seeing significantly more storm events and your design storm. In terms of wastewater infrastructure or water infrastructure, the design standard used to be the 100-year flood. That was the elevation that you could have to your critical infrastructure above that's shifting now to the 500-year flood. So where, you know, that design is made, that storm maybe isn't every 500 years anymore with the climate change. And so investing in resiliency, the infrastructure is something that's happening industry-wide to try and protect from those types of events. But in terms of water system, it's really more about evaluating future needs for fire flow, which is kind of the design criteria for your water system. So I know we're talking about the minimum here and addressing violations and deficiencies, which is at 500 gallons per minute, maintain 20 PSI. But there are places where that's not necessarily recommended or appropriate schools or elderly homes where maybe you want more flow. And so that's all when you go into design of a significant hydraulic improvement right now where you have a six-inch main that you cannot get 500 gallons a minute out of that's serving some an area that should have 1,500 gallons a minute. We want it's prudent to invest in that infrastructure to support that recommended fire flow and not necessarily meet the minimum of the water supply rule. So that's all stuff that needs to be considered with the investment. Okay. Anybody else over this side have any questions? Anyone over here? I just wanted to make sure that I understood alternative two. I think you said at one point that it could not be phased that it had to be done. All the work had to be done before it was actually turned on. The existing system would stay in place. All the new stuff would go in presumably over a period of years. I mean, it's not something you do in a weekend. And then the existing system would need to be replaced anyway. Is that and we would lose hydrants? Yes. Is that even a feasible thing? I mean, how long would it take to do all that work before you could actually flip the switch? That's a great question. And Kurt's already touched on some of the stuff with issues with contractor availability. And you're talking about them on some of the other issues here. That's an industry-wide thing. Costs are going up and construction is getting more competitive. It's harder to get people there on time. So it's pretty tough to really iron out what a real schedule is. Coupling that with the fact that the city doesn't own property in all these key infrastructure investment areas. And so we would have to explore acquiring property or rights to property to actually construct this infrastructure. And I don't, it's tough to say how long that would take. We would have to do a revision to this report to qualify for funding to drill down those alternatives. So if this alternative too becomes, everybody says, this is what we want to do, this feasible, this direction we want to head and we want to make this a basis of our funding applications, there's a lot more work to do, which was touched on in the state comments that we would have to issue amendments to look at these specific alternatives in more detail and their specific environmental impacts at the individual sites that we're looking at. Once that's all done, you go into design and permitting, get your funding through federal or state funds or locally if you can come up with the capacity to do so, and then the construction phase. So in terms of what we're talking about for this little investment in these pieces of infrastructures, five years will be really aggressive, 10 years probably achievable. That's just off the top of my head. And then it comes down to one day where you turn it on. Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, there's a, everybody else has mentioned this need to be significant interaction with the higher stakeholders you're talking about when you go turn that on without significant investment in the distribution system, you lose hydrants and your sprinkler systems develop issues. So interacting with those people who would be privately impacted in terms of the cost would be critical. And coming up with a plan and working through, this is the date we're going to cycle the valves and the pressure is going to be reduced and we need to be prepared for that. So it's heading down this pressure reduction alternative. We reviewed it as feasible because it was specifically targeted in the permit to operate application or the permit to operate that came out. It was very much angled to you need to look at reducing your pressures and we tried to do that with the most, like I said, the best bang for your buck. How much pressure can we pull out of here for an optimized level of investment? But there are a lot of complexities in here beyond just capital investment that really would need to be explored significantly for this would come to fruition. Well, that's one of the things that really, I was really struck by, especially alternative two, it seems like it's very, I don't want to say Rube Goldberg but it seems like it's very complicated because we're places where we need to knock the pressure down and then after we knock the pressure down, we have to pump it up again. And it seems like that's a lot to have to design into the system. Is that a fair comment? It is and I should highlight that what we recommend it isn't the only way to do this. There are, you can dice this up into as many pressure zones as you want and booster stations and cut the zones however you want. If there are key areas where you're seeing a lot of breaks and you believe that you have pressure related transient issues, you could drill that down and look at, we're only going to look at this one street and look at a more localized pressure reduction because it's specific. If we had that data to evaluate specific areas of the system where we're seeing phenomenon happen, we could explore that for sure. But when you're talking about a system-wide adjustment to pressure, regardless of how you do it with dedicated fill lines to the tanks or however you reduce your pressure zones, it's just a very complex and significant investment in critical infrastructure. Now, I've got a bunch of questions. It's okay. I've got a bunch of questions, some of which are like the most elementary concrete questions that I think come out of comments I've heard from members of the public. We hear people talk about problems they've had in their homes with pipes breaking and water heater blowing up because of pressure and that kind of thing was would every homeowner who has a pressure relief valve in their home know that they have it? I don't know. I would if it were my home, but I live and breathe this stuff. So yeah, it's different. Maybe not. Maybe you don't know. And maybe that's an effort that we need to make is how are we getting this message out to the public? Can we provide some education on here's what a PRV looks like. Check and see if you have one. If you do, maybe have somebody come in and check it, make sure it's new or functional or operable and then try and make a schedule to get it maintained or replaced. They're typically protected by strainers or screens if you have issues with sediment. I know I've heard some feedback about breaks and sediment or debris from tuberculation within the pipe getting into the PRVs and causing issues. You want to invest in a homehouse filter, cartridge filter to help protect from sediment. It's also an option inside your home. There are a lot of things you can do, but if you're connected to a high pressure system or what's viewed generally is a high pressure system. If I have over 150 PSI and I know my pressure needs to be reduced, I would want to explore that. What can I do to protect myself and getting that message out to the public on what sort of things to be looking for and what kind of maintenance to perform is I think something that we want to flush out a little further and find a way to document that in the next provision of the report. I assume the city doesn't know who has pressure relief valves and who doesn't. There's not part of the information we have about the system as a whole. No, we do not have records on that. Is the same thing true of sprinkler systems? That would fall more in the fire. The fire department, I believe we do have records of all that. We have records of everybody who's applied for the sprinkler credit. And even if you have, and you have to have a permit to have a sprinkler system. Okay, so is it possible to quantify the contribution of the water pressure in the system to main brakes as opposed to other causes of water main brakes? Not very easily. The best way to do that specifically for the system would be to maintain records of the brakes and track that back to if there was anything else going on in the system that caused some sort of pressure-related phenomenon, some sort of change in pressure, and then the actual failure method of the pipe or the fitting or whatever happened. Like a lot of the failures that you're seeing on East State Street and some of these areas where you have corrosive soils are galvanic in nature. And you can visibly tell that there are pinhole-specific areas that have had material pulled away through an electrical current over the course of time. And maybe you could say that the pressure would, if it was a lower pressure, wouldn't have broken that day. Maybe it would have broken if you were 150 psi versus 200 psi two months later. But it would be really difficult to say that that never would have happened if we were a lower pressure. And that being able to quantify how many brakes necessarily per year we could say are associated with pressure is something that we want to try and flush out. And we're going to try and do some research and look at AWWA reports and see if anybody's trended statistics, it's difficult because when you're looking at reports like that, they're just applied industry-wide and they're really broad. They're not necessarily specific to what's going on here. And trying to recoil that back into what costs are feel appropriate for this community is what we want to do. And that's something that we're going to work with the state on back and forth, what costs feel appropriate. So I can tell you that I looked at a, just for preliminary ballpark numbers, I figured four breaks a year, you could say you would reduce by pressure when I was playing with numbers. And that's like a 30-ish, 33%-ish reduction on what you've seen over the past five years or so. I think that's reasonable to assume and flush out with costs, but we're going to explore that. We're going to continue to explore that. And electricity is a contributing factor because people's water or electric systems are basically grounded to the plumbing system. That could definitely be a contributing factor. The combination of acidity, so your soil materials and your pipe materials, dissimilar materials, acidity, and the electrical properties of the material to resist current all come into play. And basically you could build a battery without any current really generated and start to develop passive current if the conditions were correct. But I suspect that grounding electrical systems to the water mains or in the area of water mains and getting that straight current to hop onto the water main is a phenomenon that you're seeing here. And is there a way to address that? Like, can we tell people you can't ground to the water system? You just have to drive a spike into the ground? But I think that already is not a thing. I don't think you can do that, but I don't know as far as demanding home inspections and sending the electrical inspector into everybody's home and forcing them to remove. I don't know about that. It's outside of my realm of expertise. Yeah. Oh, Chief. You have to fill the code. Yeah. You have to ground to a grounding rod in your footings, in the footings of the home. So, yeah, so the new code does not allow that. But that only applies to what's filled. Yep. Yep. Donna. Have an estimate of how many you think might do that now? Yeah. You know, before the rule. When did the code go into place, Tim? Three years, four years ago? Whatever's been built in that is like, so the majority are still on water banks. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I thought. Thank you. Yeah. When we have breaks and water mains and we have to devote money to doing those repairs, does that set us back in the scheduled or projected replacement of water mains that we're supposed to be doing? So, yeah, I mean, it's all the same fund, the same user base that's paying for the repairs versus the replacement. So, yeah, if we had less costs associated with water repairs, that would be more that we could invest in new infrastructure. But we are, like I said, still hitting our targets, but, you know, we could accelerate the replacement. And the targets are built based on knowing that we're also going to have a certain level of repairs, right? Right. We have repairs built into the operating budget and a line item. Uh-huh. Now, I have heard people claim that we don't know where water mains are, that we had a project that was being done just the other day that the contractor missed the water main by two feet and it caused a delay in the system, in the work for a whole day. And I, it sounds absurd in the face of it, but I, since you're here, I thought, well, let's address that. Is that an accurate statement? So, we have a very old system. Most of our utilities are well marked and documented. We have a GIS database that we maintain that is kind of a, you know, a high level of view of where all the pipes are in the ground. There are cases where our maps are off. It does happen. So, I can't say that they're all 100% accurate. And some of the older infrastructure, there's no, you know, construction plan available for it. So, you know, there are some areas that are not well mapped, but I would say as a whole, the system is well documented. Okay, thanks. There was a question raised about how to get at economic losses occasioned by water main breaks. So, is it possible or we thought about going around to talk to the neighboring property owners when there's a break to see if they can report what the effect on them was? And would that even be the way to do it? Well, that's not something that we have done. It is something that we're going to try to quantify in the final P.E.R. Put some numbers to that. That's not a discussion we've had with the state yet. Dufrang Group has developed sort of a preliminary estimate of some numbers. We just haven't met with them and reviewed that yet. It's certainly something we could entertain. We are working on, back to an earlier question about sort of documenting the break type, the cause of failure in the mains. We're implementing a new asset management program that will really enhance the way we're able to document things in the field with our staff. A tablet where they can take a photo of the failure and they'll automatically log in a GIS map, put the location in with the photo so you can determine the type of failure. So we're working on better data collection. It's fairly rare that there's really a documented loss unless it's a business. It's hard to document impacts to a homeowner because it's more of an inconvenience than a monetary value that's lost. So I think maybe for the bigger breaks in the downtown, we could look into that, but it's hard to quantify on the homeowner basis. And maybe the last question for right now. We knew Mayor, but still a lot of questions coming from the seat. Another question. What's the effect of abandoning the fire hydrants that we're talking about? It seems like if that were my neighborhood and I wasn't going to have a fire hydrant next to close to my house, I'd be pretty concerned. Yeah, I think the chief's here too. Yeah, and maybe the chief would like the way in, but I think that that's a good perspective to be considering and something that the council should be thinking about is that there's the ISO rates and the impact actual insurance rates that people will be paying if there's a reduction in the ISO rate or your home is no longer near an available hydrant. And then there's the actual, how would I quantify a fire taking place and my inability or my reduction, my ability to fight that fire in an area where I lost a hydrant or hydrant cut or moved from service because it was deficient. And that's tough to put numbers to and that's something we're going to try and work on, but definitely something to be considering. Thanks. Yeah. I was glad Scott mentioned the ISO rating because that will affect everyone. Not just, it won't just affect your street, it'll affect the entire city. Additionally though, your individual insurance rates will go up because you're now living in a neighborhood without fire protection. But the entire city's ISO rating will be significantly impacted by that. 34 hydrants, some of those hydrants, some of those 34 that Scott mentioned earn the downtown area where we need them the most, national life, the Heaton Woods area. So areas where we need to hydrants the most is where those 34 have been identified. So that would have a significant impact. And on this drawing each one of these x's is in separate hydrant. No, these are nodes from our water models. We overlaid these on to the GIS data from the city to actually try and quantify the hydrants. So this better articulates the areas and the number of hydrants is roughly 32. Okay, thanks. Okay, to best stimulate any questions for members of the council. Mr. Muller. Just some quick comments for insights. Scott Muller, Montpelier. I'm a civil environmental engineer. I'm not licensed PE in Vermont. I've been working 25 years with the largest and fastest growing cities in the world. I'm familiar with a lot of these issues. First is local governments, the hero of the planet and the work you're doing is admirable. It's really hard to immerse yourself in these technical subjects, talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. That's tough to do in one evening. I've interacted with the city on this issue for a number of years due to money from blown pressure zone, pressure valves on our house from blown out water bladders on the hydrotanks, static tanks, and also a noise nuisance, which the city has lots of data that's measured from the consultants they've hired, including one person selling their home because of the noise nuisance. So this is more than water breaks. One comment. I don't really have any comments to the state plan. It's a slow burn. You made some great comments today. It's great to see the progress. And also the state's oversight is very welcome. It's an important mandate and their technical skills are top-notch. I do have one comment on the maps, though, and you mentioned are the maps accurate. Just yesterday across Main Street, they broke a three-inch pipe that was not on the maps going across the intersection there, which sprayed water three floors up onto the bank and they couldn't shut it off. When they called the municipal department of public works, took them three and a half hours to find the valve to turn it off. Yeah. And then by coincidence, unfortunately, in the disarray later that day, a bus on the corner hit one of the workers right at that site this past weekend. So what I am surprised about in this whole process has been the city's response to what are basic engineering norms. These aren't state guidelines. These are American waterworks engineering norms you're taught as a freshman, 60 to 90 PSI in a city because it destroys the municipal water system if it's not. That's pretty blanket engineering. So I was really surprised to see in these comments going back and forth in some of the permit state's reaction was, well, it says shall not should. Some of, I think, the unseemly emails that came out from the diggers reporting about this means war and that kind of thing. Is just odd and I want to highlight that this water issue is complicated. But I'm here to advocate for the $80 million fix. This is a 50 year infrastructure that needs to be done right, flat, bang, bang, boom, get it out of the way, move on to other subjects. There's experts in the room who can do this. It has a fix. It's been done before. Fix it right the first time. One of the issues we have here is that what seems to be manifesting in this issue has manifested before in other major issues in the city is, and it's a governance challenge. It comes up all the time in these urban soft and hard infrastructure things. It's a governance challenge. And you can break that down, especially with the TIF, you know, the gerrymandered TIF fiasco. There were governance challenges there that were really important to fix to get a proper engineered solution in the end. Part of that is participation. Good governance depends on participation. Section 1.2 in the report talks about public participation. I think this is the first time I've been involved with this or I've been informed of it. So I was happy to be here. I would encourage more participation from engineers in the city, finding out whose water pressure valves have broke, who has suffered damage, who's actually bothered by the nuisance noise. That's really important. Second is transparency. Transparency is an also important tenant of good governance. When we were trying to get the reports about breakages in the streets, took a long time. The costs on those, they're not that hard to figure out. The indirect costs are hard. The cost of the frost heaves from all the water freezing under the streets. The other indirect costs to the city are significant. But the direct costs, this is not a new problem in cities. Transparency is really important. The third is not a... What are we doing on time, Donna? Thanks. The third and last point is accountability. The city's needs aren't the same as they were 20 years ago. This project hasn't been addressed for 25 years since the water treatment plant was built in 94, something like that. At that time, the Department of Public Works was calling for a revamp of the pressure systems in the city. It hasn't been attended to. So city council accountable, please. Thank you. Make the investment now. Yeah, thanks. Thank you. Thanks. This has been very informative. I don't see anyone on either side of this saying that we're... This is war between the city and the state. And I don't think anyone can review the reports from Dufresne Group and from DPW would say this has not been being taken seriously. Can you give us a timeline on what to expect next? And if you can't, that's fine. I think we want to come back to the table with Dana and Allison at the state and really flesh out these costs associated with some of these more subjective issues and see if we can come up with a sharper life cycle cost analysis. And I think that will kind of drive where the conversation goes. Maintaining perspective of the actual violation in the water supply repair in the permit to operate and addressing those existing deficiencies with hydrants, I think is important. But I guess all I can really say is that it's a priority for us it's a priority for me. It's clearly a priority for the city. And I know that Allison and Dana are also on board with maintaining progress on this. I don't think we want to see this just stay stagnant. That being said, if new data becomes available that we can consider and look at specific areas or if anything happens that would update how we want to take a look at this, we're flexible to doing that. So considering public comment, this meeting was important to us. I think it was important to the whole team and the state getting council up to speed and hearing your thoughts. So I guess we'll keep our foot on the gas, but I'm not sure if I can promise any real timeline. Totally fair. Thanks. All right. Thanks a lot. Great work. This is a very worthwhile conversation. Thank you. Thanks again to Dana and Allison for coming joining us. I appreciate it. I'm sure you had better things to do tonight. How is that possible? All right. We are up to item number 10, the resolution on homelessness. Is that Kelly? So basically the homelessness task force has been discussing a lot of issues. As you know, we had a press conference last night in a work session, but they did pass a resolution that they'd like the council to consider and it's in your packet. I don't know if I have much more to add to it than that. Okay. What do we want to do here? We have the draft resolution. I think everyone on the council has had the opportunity to review it. Gary? I move that we approve the resolution as presented by the homelessness task force. I'll second the motion. Is there any discussion? All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. Next up. I just really want to thank them for taking the time to do it. I think it's really important. All right. Thanks for coming out folks. I know it's the long night. Next up item 11, Chapter 11, Ordnance Amendment. So Chief Dordson is on his way up and start noting there are a couple of discrepancies in the information that you were sent. We're not calling for repeal of the entire ordinance. We're talking about the penalty section. And we fabricated a section of the not fabricated. We created out of nowhere a section of the ordinance that probably isn't the right place. Section 11-1103 is not where this should go. So we'll get those straight down. But just so we're clear, this is actually a discussion of the potential policy with something you want to go forward with. We would then warn it for first reading and second reading at upcoming council meetings. And we will be sure to make sure that all the citations are where they're supposed to be and have it legally reviewed. This is really to get in front of you and have the chief explain his thinking and in a bigger picture, talking about some of these issues with homelessness and others is we've been trying to work with our neighboring communities to be more consistent with one another with Bering City and Berlin as to how we address that they're looking at our encampment policy. And we're looking at kind of how they're dealing with these types of infractions. So that'll turn over to Chief Nords. Great, thank you. Real quick, just a little background on this. We're going through quite a bit of the police review committee recommendations that we haven't addressed and ordinances has been one of them. The police review committee recommended a complete abolishment of this ordinance. And as a way to kind of address it, we tried to find a different way. We keep the ordinance, but have a different penalty structure, which included a restorative process and also a referral to our turning point peer support outreach workers. So we thought that was a pretty good balance for what they were recommending, gave us a handle on what was happening in the community, got us to have an enforcement piece that also focused on them, the person who was the offender, given them a chance to right the wrong and also getting them help if they needed help. So the other thing we learned was it mirrors what Bering City is doing. And a lot of our responses were trying to, like Bill said, try to mirror what they're doing. There was no change in any of the actual wording of the ordinance itself. And again, I made the mistake of putting the penalty at section 11.05 or 11.03. I didn't know where to put that. So the number really doesn't mean much other than the words. So anyways, the idea would be instead of the current practice now is that if we deal with an open container violation, which walking downtown, the merchants has been a big complaint for us. Our only option right now is to issue a citation, which is basically an invitation into court. And that is prosecuted by the city attorney. So if you know you have to hire the attorney, the attorney gets pretty expensive. What we're finding, it goes to court, it gets dismissed. So it's been expensive and there's not really any benefit to the city. So the solution that we propose is very similar to a traffic ticket. It's called a municipal ordinance ticket. It has a fee structure and the cases are prosecuted by the police officer off to themselves at the judicial bureau. So less intrusive. The first option would be restorative justice. And talking to Carol at the Justice Center, there was some concern if we referred everybody to the Justice Center, the success rates might be pretty hard to achieve. So there would be a self-referral component. So someone who is willing to participate in the program would have the option to do that. Otherwise, they'd go through the civil process of the ticket. So as you can see, there's some penalties involved for the first offense, second offense, then the third offense. And there's always the option if we're having a repeat offender, three, four, five, six, and it's just not working, that we can then send it to the city attorney. So just kind of get the ball going. This would also be pretty valuable for noise complaints and things like that, where we're sending them in front of Superior Court for a judge when we could just do a municipal penalty. You see that in a lot of college towns where they just issue a ticket for noise complaints. It's less intrusive. And again, you'd have a restorative component. So that's something I'll probably talk about later on. But the alcohol one was the one that had the most impact downtown when I'm meeting with the merchants. How do we handle this and the way we're doing it right now, quite frankly, it's not working. So this was the best I could come up with. Thanks. Questions? Anybody? Harry? I have a lot of questions, but I won't ask them all right off. So can you clarify, if you know where in the ordinances, maybe Bill can answer this, it currently talks about penalties and enforcement for this stuff? So that's the tricky part. It's not overly clear, but it has the general. In chapter one, there's some mention of certain things. And I'm trying to make it really clear. And I think that's been one of our hurdles with a lot of the ordinances to get some clarity. And so in chapter one, it talks about general provisions, but it's also not. It's just not super called out. But then we did an alternate approach with dog violations, which I believe is seven. And so in chapter one, it specifically calls out the dog section by number and says, these will be through the justice, you know, restorative justice and other PEP. You know, so this would somehow be put in here and just saying this section, anything under this section and maybe others or maybe even all of them. And your intention, as I understand it, is that this would apply to everything under chapter 11. So we initially discussed the alcohol and then, you know, as I kept digging into the review committee's recommendations, they would like an overview of the entire ordinance structure. You know, so I see some value in having that discussion at some point, but the focus right now is the merchants downtown are having a hard time with the open container consumption. We're having a hard time dealing with it because the penalties are non-existent and it's expensive for us to do. So what do we do? So we try to come up with a solution that is somewhat manageable. Is this a be all end all to the problem? Probably not. Does it help a little bit? The feedback I got from Berry City is it's helped just writing a ticket. So if it helps, great. If it helps one person with a referral to turning point, is it worth it? I would say yes, it is. So yeah, are we going to solve the entire problem? Probably not. Okay. So then my next question is about people actually paying these fines to people actually pay them. And especially, you know, seeing them escalate pretty quickly. It gets to a point where I think a lot of the people you're writing these tickets to will be like, well, I can't pay $250. I can't pay $500. It just starts to become abstract. You know, they're not going to pay. And so if the goal is to reduce public drinking, how does this accomplish that goal? Sure. Sure. So that penalty is whatever you folks would like it to be. This just mirrored what Berry City was doing. It was a norm that I could say, hey, this is what our neighbor and community has done a lawful review of. So it could be a dollar. It could be whatever you want it to be. The idea is that we have a tool to stop the ongoing problem that we have and then offer a solution through restorative justice or peer support. And if they don't take those, there's the penalty here. So we open the door for a free solution. And if they don't accept that, then this is the penalty. Go ahead. Stop for now. For now. Lauren. Yeah. Wow. Slightly awkward. So thank you, Chief, and really appreciate that the police review committee recommendations that you all are continuing to work through them. And I think generally moving in the direction, I was trying to remember back to the process and the conversation. And as you framed it, the issue had come to us in part with knowing that citations were just getting thrown out. And so it was just this big waste. And a lot of our conversation revolved around what we're really trying to prevent our behaviors associated with people who then are intoxicated, as opposed to the fact of just having an open container isn't inherently a problem unless it's leading to behaviors that then become problematic. So we had focused more on is there a way or are there gaps in how we're able to address problem behaviors as opposed to the container itself? And I know we had a lot of conversation about do you have the right tools to be able to prevent problem behavior? Some of the conversation had been around this has been used sometimes to target certain people or are there equity considerations around who ends up getting cited for this and who doesn't. And there's people paying a lot of money to sit in the street and have a glass of wine, but you walk by and you don't have housing or the money to do that and you could get fined, but you can be sitting there having a drink and open container on the street. So that was a lot of the conversation that we had at the police review committee around, how are we treating people and what is this accomplishing? So I guess if we're pursuing this first, I would just love to get some of the folks who have been part of the committee engage. I'm sure they would be in the next, if we decide we want to move forward with this. Just to refresh, because there was lots of robust conversation and I know you were there for a long time. So just was just trying to share some of that for the other folks who weren't part of it. And I think this is like, again, I think moving in the right direction of keeping people out of the court system and having the restorative justice that was a specific piece of what we wanted to see too. So great to see both of those and just I guess just still thinking through that piece of, what are we trying to solve here and how do we address equity issues that arise by approaching it this way and are there other paths to avoid those potential pitfalls? Yeah, no, thank you for those questions and that feedback. I've been spending a lot of time downtown and the merchants are wanting that addressed. So while I'm sympathetic to that, I think we still need to address some of the root causes which are substance abuse here and if we can get those people through either restorative justice or through turning points and get them the help, like let's do that while waiting until the behavior such that now I have to deal with them and typically the only way I can deal with them is take them to jail. Like that doesn't make a lot of sense. So why can't I stop it beforehand before they're too drunk? I got to take them in protected custody and then I have to take them to jail. That's my only option and it just doesn't make that much sense to me. Thank you. Are you planning to put signs at downtown because you mentioned the parking ticket and people know that when they will get the ticket, right? There's a maximum like two hours parking. So are you planning to do something about drinking too? You know, like, oh, if you drink that much and make that noise, this will be... How people know that there will be like a ticket in system or something. And how will this, like, if you are planning to put signs up then, how will it affect our downtown environment? Sure. Thank you. There's a whole wave of sign pollution and light pollution. So I'm very sympathetic to all those things. I don't think there's any intention to put a sign of every city ordinance that's there. But I can tell you that like our staff, typically the ticket isn't the first option. We try to deal with the issue. Just get them help. Also to respond to that. It's already against our ordinances to drink in public unless you're in a licensed area. So you can't walk down the street drinking a beer now and there's not signs. The only difference is what you get cited for. It should you do that. So instead of being cited into court for a violation of municipal ordinance, you'd be given a ticket like you could just pay in or do the other options. The common question I get from the merchants is, why can't I just walk downtown and drink? Okay. It's not an unreasonable question. And just trying to have the tools to kind of keep some order downtown if that's what you'd like. That point that we now have a citation that goes to court and then we're proposing a ticket, that seems a good change. And definitely having the restorative process here. But just in how it's written, it's sort of hidden. So if indeed we were going to pass this, I guess I would, I definitely would suggest some change in the headings and numbering because I had to really had to hunt for it. So I think that's really important too is how we present it within the ordinance. Yeah. Can't keep you in mind that this is what tonight is. Are we deciding to proceed with the conversation and staple what you're after? Carrie. Yeah. So I like this. I think it's a good idea. I'm kind of thinking of it as two separate issues here, which I know you're not. That's not where it's coming from. But in my mind, there's a question about enforcement and penalties for our violations of our ordinances. And I think that having a citation that doesn't really mean anything is not a good idea. And so I think it's great to have it spelled out. This is what's going to happen. I think it should apply to other things, not just the public drinking. So I think this would be a great addition to our ordinances. They could be, and I can see how it would be really helpful and what you're doing. The question about addressing the recommendation that came from the police review committee, that feels like it needs more attention still, I guess. I don't want to put this into our ordinances and then say, we took care of that recommendation. We addressed it because I think, as Lauren talked about, the real problems that we're facing are behavioral problems. And there are, I'm sure, that depending on how you behave, if you're downtown and you're sitting on a park bench drinking a beer, you might or might not get attention from the police. So the problem is the behavior. And I think we can't give up on finding all the ways we can to address that. And law enforcement has only certain tools available to them. And you're, I think you're doing a great job at figuring out how to use those tools and how to improve on them. I think that we have a bigger conversation to have about how to address the cultural problems and the problems that folks in town are facing. So I just don't want to let that go. No, I appreciate that. And that's why I prefaced everything with the recommendations from the PRC. And this is not exactly what they wanted. So I think I have to be fair to what they asked for and I'm not delivering exactly what they asked for. I'm hoping that I get something that is a compromise and meets most of the needs that they were recommending. Anybody else? Okay. So what's your pleasure? Should we take a motion to, but or, I guess, just get a sense. Yeah. I mean, would you like us to come back with this? You don't want fleshed out or? Yeah, Lauren, let's see. One question I have for efficiency and knowing we have limited bandwidth as a council. Are there other pieces of the report or other ordinance changes? Like, to me, bundling changes to our ordinance to address PRC recommendations might make sense and seeing this as a step is great. So I guess it's just like, would there be more things coming and is there a way to just make it more efficient for us? And like, we're waiting to do it more as a package if that's kind of for coming. You know, I was, as Karen was talking about chapter 11, I pulled that up on my screen. See, well, what else is included in chapter 11? Perfume, litter, obstruction of streets and sidewalks, advertising, firearms, BB guns, guns, bows and arrows and similar weapons, morals and conduct, drinking it on licensed places, alarm systems, noise control, smoking within city parks. So, so there's kind of a lot in your right. It's all behavior stuff. So, so to answer some of those, I had some notes on those because I was hoping the curfew would be removed. I think that's pretty archaic if you look at the actual writing on that. I think gambling was already removed. I couldn't find that in there. And then I'd rather the police not be used for smoking in city parks. To be fair, I don't think that's something that we should be doing. You guys can tell me otherwise, but I think the morals and conduct at the top of my head, I can't remember exactly what that was, but the alarm systems would be very useful. We get a lot of alarms that are false alarms that there's a penalty for those if we keep going. It's a little tricky to use, but if we did it as a civil ticket, I think people would get a better handle on their alarms. And, you know, when you keep going and there's no financial penalty for the sixth or seventh time, they don't care. All of a sudden, if it's 200 bucks and they had to get out of bed at 2 o'clock in the morning to let us in the door to make sure it's okay, it changes things a little bit. So, I'm not saying we need to hammer people, but there should be some accountability piece for having multiple false alarms. So that and the noise, I think, was a really good one to lump in there. But you guys had asked, the police review committee had asked for an overall of that stuff. And our discussion in-house, just based on my flow patrols downtown, was the alcohol. And that's kind of what started this conversation. And I knew it would span, and I was just kind of said, let's just focus on the alcohol right now, but chapter 11 makes a lot of sense. Donna. With your review of all chapter 11, what are your recommendations? And then all of us can study it and have ours. Anybody next meeting? And part of what you're interested in is getting something in. So, we don't have a summer of people being obnoxious drunks on the street. Yes, it's a challenge to address some of the complaints that we have knowing the outcomes already. So, the sooner we can get something that might have a positive outcome, the better. I'm going to be out with Turning Point on Friday to try and make some positive inroads with some people already. We have a new outreach worker, and I'll have his name and contact information on the weekly report, but we'll try and continue to make those outreaches before it becomes a problem with us. Do I hear from Ramon, is that you'd like to have this pass now and then bundle the rest? No, I mean, to progress on, push this one forward with the idea that we're going to come back and do all of Chapter 11. If I may paraphrase what I think I'm hearing, is there's general support to move forward with this concept? We'd like to do as much as possible together, and we'll see how much we can get and the chief. Well, like all of them. Chapter 11, or the general penalty provision and in the noise perhaps. Yeah, I'm not sure why some parts of Chapter 11 wouldn't be covered by this or other things. So yeah, I'm interested in that kind of broader question about penalties and enforcement, and it seems like, I mean, you're writing a ticket, you know, it's like a parking ticket or something. It seems like a pretty reasonable way to go. So I'm not sure why we would exclude other parts of it. I agree. Yeah. No, we agree that quicker than... Yeah, I actually pretty much have it ready to go. But so we think what we'll do is we'll have another discussion with more fleshed out discussion at our next meeting and then be prepared to do the warning amendment. In a really good situation, we'd have a first reading next meeting and then we can always amend that before the second meeting. But that would keep it on the track to be done by June, whatever the first June is. And if we're way off base at first reading, you know, you know, it doesn't... But we didn't want to, you know, particularly with new people, we didn't want to just spring a first reading of a warning, you know, ordinance without a policy conversation to see if people were okay with it. So there's a little bit about the instruments. Does it take a vote to tell you to set a first reading? No, we often do that. Okay, sound good to everybody? You can if you want. We don't need to have a vote. I think you know what the people are saying. Okay. It's better to put it as a first reading than we have the option. And sometimes we have more than one first reading. Yes, that's been known to happen. All right. Next up, survey. Thank you. Thanks, Chief. Survey presentation. How are we doing for... So all we have left is this, the summer schedule, which I hope won't be terribly contentious and it counts. So everybody okay with staying on to hear the survey presentation? And this is not... We're not going through the line of every single survey. I'm Kelly as a presentation. Yeah, okay. And I will just tell you how this came about. We did the survey and I urge you all to take a look at it. And I can't remember if we gave you copies of it. The council member, yeah. Right. And but we did it, it finished up last fall and it was right about the time we were getting ready for budget. And we also knew that a couple of our members might be departing. And so I remember doing a really quick highlight of some of the key things, like a one pager. But then we realized we never actually debriefed the survey with the full council and Kelly did it for the leadership team a month or so ago. And we all said, hey, this is really concise. It was well done. And we have three new council members. Let's just walk through the highlights so everyone can see it. And while it's just a good snapshot of what our community responded to the questions they were asked. And we think it's a valuable tool that obviously we want to keep doing every couple of years. But with that, I'll turn it right to the boss. I'm through a quick overview of our national community survey. We did this last fall. That's when we had the results right before the budget. But we really wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some of the results of the survey because some of them are good and some of them are not so good. And so I think it's really an opportunity to kind of think about some of these things, especially as we proceed with decision making. So I'm just going to get into it. So just moving right along here, just to remind you all and for the folks in the audience of what our goals are. And so you'll see further on in the slides. And we've mentioned this as part of our strategic planning process. Some of the items that are associated with these items have also been called out in our benchmarking. So I won't go into detail there. And so just to see what the report looks like, you can also find this on our website. We also did post the Tableau data for people to take a look at. And there's a little bit more there in terms of functionality. So if you wanted to take a look at that or if you wanted to drill down in any of the categories based on demographics, then you can do that as well. So just in summary, this just is sort of the set standards of the survey. So the report provides opinions of the representative a sample of 745 people from 2,800 households sampled. And the margin of error was 4%. The response rate was 27%. I will note that we are working to make sure that we can do this in the recommended two-year cycle. So the next time we would do this would be in the fall of 2024. But we've got this really nice benchmark now. And then just to note, as we get into the results, everything is really reported as a positive percentage. So folks that sort of agreed with the general sentiment. And then just to note what sort of the meaning is between higher or lower. So the higher or lower benchmark meanings are a 10-point difference and then the much higher or much lower are 20-point difference. So you can kind of see the significance in that data. And then as we get on in the short presentation, we've got it sort of sliced and diced based on the report. The report is quite extensive. But just sort of the summary and introduction, survey responses, the open-ended response, and then some of the comparisons from the 2009 survey. So here, this is a little hard to see. So sorry about that. But you can kind of see what the demographics are here. And one of the things to point out is that the middle column is sort of the weighted totals against sort of the target. The unweighted or the actual responses, yes. Means I wasn't able to find that in the report and the difference link was nowhere. I have to, yes. And I actually wanted to identify that. And so I'm glad that you asked. So weighted is just to sort of weight to the composite of the demographics within the community. And so with the results that we got back, we might not have gotten sort of the targeted weight. And so that weighted middle column brings everything kind of up to that. So does that mean they count those responses enough to... So say there was one response and we should have had five, they counted five times to match the weighted so that it matches the person. Thank you. Yes, that's right. And to make sure that then the survey results are representative of what we'd see within the population. And so you can kind of see what the breakdown is for those that responded in the unweighted column. The weighted column is sort of how that kind of sugared off and what the target would be. So it's pretty close there. So then onto this slide, this is a summary of sort of the facets of livability and sort of gauging what things within a community we might want to reference. And so you can see in kind of the smaller section there it's economy, mobility, community design, utilities, safety, natural environment, parks and recreation, health and wellness, education, arts, culture, inclusivity and engagement. So there's a lot pretty much. That's what that means. There's a lot. And so you can kind of see on this slide that there are some areas where you've got the percentages here and so that's where we've ranked. And then you can see that versus the benchmark for the community survey. And a lot of instances were similar, but there are some instances where we're either lower, like for instance in our utility infrastructure or we're higher in our community engagement. And so we just wanted to call out some of those things. This next slide, I really like just being sort of how I am. But just looking at sort of this diagram, looking at the quality and the importance and then looking at the quadrants. So then seeing where things from those facets of community health land. And you can see if you look over, well, I guess this would be my right hand side lower quadrant, the scale of quality and importance. You can see that mobility and economy and utilities all are sort of in this area that really kind of need some attention. So it's just a visual representation of that. And so this is kind of the slide that has come through and the summary that Bill did when we did get the results of this survey, those items that are in bold. And again, apologies there, it's a little hard to see, but the bolded items are already sort of encapsulated in our current strategic plan and we're working on these items. So we wanted to call them out specifically because they're important. But then you can kind of get a sense of where things landed, generally, where we're lower, where we're higher. And so in this next slide here, what I did is I compared the 2009 and 2022 survey and you can kind of see in these categories and I picked out the items that really showed a significant change. So and usually you'll notice downward departure. So the trend is not as favorable as it was. And so I wanted to call these things out specifically so that as we're kind of thinking about how we're moving forward, we can take these things into consideration. And so there are things that we know sort of the variety of housing options, affordable housing, affordable quality child care, street repair, street cleaning, land use, recreation facilities. And then one of the other things that I wanted to call out specifically here is sort of where we stacked up in terms of City of Montpelier services versus the federal government. And I think that's important to kind of see as we get on and as we come out of the pandemic. And then on the bottom section of this table, there were some indicators that were in this survey that weren't in the last survey, but I thought were worth noting because for instance, the value of services for taxes you know is at 44%. So we just might want to consider that. Keep going here. So in the lower benchmark category, these are some of the things that I pulled out from the report. Economic development, we're at about 35% approval, which is sort of lower than the benchmark would indicate for other communities like ours. Same thing with the mobility and ease of public parking, community development and design, and residential growth. And then I pulled out some of these utility infrastructure items. Garbage collection was one of them, so that I just noted it, but it's not something that we necessarily do. But the infrastructure piece, I think is particularly important. And then parks and recreation is a piece here at 51%, and then education and affordable childcare. I didn't note anything around communication in the website, but I did want to call it out specifically because we're working to improve our communications and we also are I think making strides, but it's something that's important. It's one of the specific custom questions that we did ask as part of the survey to make sure that we can be more engaged. So then these are also other lower benchmarks, but these are the much lower category and worth noting. But if you're looking at sort of just the greatest hits here, but really looking at street repair, variety of housing and affordable housing, this is where if you wanted to drill down in the Tableau link, you can, then looking at income and some of the other demographic items that might be interesting. I was playing around with it a little bit to kind of present to you with some more detail here. And some of it is insightful in terms of the income or where people measure it up, especially around sort of the street repair. And so we can talk about that a little bit more as we get on, but for tonight, I'm just gonna keep it pretty simple with these items and just sort of noting where they are in comparison to other communities. And they're kind of low, but I also think that we are working on these things. They are sort of part of our planning. So then a little surprise, this kind of is a nice question, because it really kind of gives us a little bit of a roadmap in terms of what people see as the most significant issues facing Montpelier in the next five years. And I don't know that there are any surprises here, but it's good to kind of see. And so now just hustling along here to the last sort of slide here, which is just basically the say that like, it's really great to have done this survey to really take a look at the data, to look at where we stack up against other communities. And I think we really, I think need to consider as we move forward, are we achieving the desired outcomes? What are the next steps? How are we going to use this data? How can we better serve the community by data-driven analysis and taking a look at these surveys or using the tools that we have? And then I referenced the survey earlier, when we'll get sort of new data in terms of doing a statistically significant survey, which is the citizen community survey. But we are also, we've got a new tool coming online soon, which we're really excited about, which will be able to give us the ability to, I mean, Polko does this now in terms of polling folks, but this other platform through Zen City will give us the ability to do some project planning. And polling all in sort of one setup. So we're excited about what's to come. If you have specific questions about what's in the survey or anything noted here, let me know. But just more to sort of get you thinking. Thank you so much. I spent a lot of time reading the survey and getting into all the results. I didn't have a chance to really play around with the Tableau stuff. So I'm going to do that though. And I think you did a great job at kind of pulling out what we really need to know and highlighting the things that we need to be concerned about. I also loved that slide with the quadrants. That was my favorite part of the whole thing. And I felt like we could just take that when we start our strategic planning process and slap it up on the wall. And you know, but there's other things in here too that I think, so that's my big takeaway is that when we get into that strategic planning process, we want to be looking at this very seriously and using that to guide us so that we can have some accountability to the people who answer this and told us what they think. Any other comments up here? Helen? Thank you, Kelly. I wasn't here in 2009. I moved here 2017. But when I look at the comparison, you just show us every single item dropped. I know COVID is one of the reasons, but when I saw the 2009 response, I said, I wish I moved here back then, not later. So do you have any ideas why everything is suddenly down when you compare two different things? And the second one, are we planning to reach out the same people next time and ask them again instead of in addition to reaching out new participants? Because it is also to learn their perspective if anything has changed in a positive or negative way. So these are my two questions. Thank you. Yeah. I'll try to handle that because, you know, one interesting thing about this, and this was not planned, but in 2009, we were sort of in the throes of the huge recession and just coming out of it. And then in 2022, we were in COVID. So, you know, we're kind of looking forward to doing one of these when, well, who knows what normal will be, but that's something that's less calamitous. You know, my take, I mean, other than the fact that I think we need to pay attention to this, and it points out the value of doing these on a more regular basis because you can catch changes earlier and try to course correct. But some of it, I think, you know, even looking at the federal government thing, like, I think there's just more cynicism out there and in more ways of communicating and more negative energy and so people are viewing things. But certainly things like the housing is certainly, it was bad then, it's really acute now. I was actually going to comment about Kerry's comment, you know, about strategic planning. And I think that's true. And I, when you look at this and you say, you know, as a group of elected officials, you all basically set housing and infrastructure and added homelessness as the top issues. And, you know, I think you reflected your community pretty well, but it's good, you know, it's still helpful to see that. As I said, the recommended use of the tool was to do it every two years. And obviously it wasn't two years between 2009 and 2022. To your question about asking the same people, it is a random survey. We don't actually even administer it, you know, Polko does. And we just get their activated results. One of the changes, one of the nice changes that we got this time is in addition to the controlled survey, we also had an open-ended, people could take it online if they weren't picked. So we could get sort of the not controlled. And you know, the differences weren't that much. I mean, there were some differences, but pretty much even the self-select. But that way more people could participate as well and we got a larger team. Donna. As much as the numbers went down, I was impressed it didn't go down more because I find the climate just so much more demanding and challenging in everybody's mindset. So I take everything, no, but I'm glad we didn't score lower. Lauren. Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything. And I'm glad that we're, I think, very focused on the issues that really jumped out from the survey. I think part of it too, and I don't know, given the cynicism that's out there right now, but you know, some of it too is like, how do we better communicate, you know, just the meeting we had on roads and the water conversation tonight, and so on, like to demonstrate progress, even though it's not like any of these problems that you snap a finger and it's immediately fixed. But how are we being committed to addressing these issues that are high priority for people and demonstrating the value of the tax dollars that people are paying and knowing it's a lot of money because we have big problems and we are trying to put them to good use to fix them and address, you know, our community's needs. So I think that's part two of the overall, you know, what we need to be doing. Any other members? So I think this kind of exercise is really valuable. I come from a magazine background where after every issue we included, in every issue we included a survey from the readers and I wish I'd gotten results, you know, the number of results that you guys got, but they were all valuable because it told us, you know, what our audience was thinking of what we were doing, what their problems were, what we were not addressing as much as what we were addressing. So I wouldn't, I would do them as often as we could afford to. Send the money and we kept saying no because things were so tight. You got support here, Bill. You may get it every two years. You can put half in every year. Which I know we talked about doing before, but good idea. Tim, were you going to say, okay, Peter Kellman, maybe other public. Peter Kellman, Montpelier, Mountain View. I spent quite a bit of time with the report and actually I looked at the preliminary report when it was, when Bill first introduced it. I'm glad to hear all of you saying what you're saying, which is we need to look at users to look at the things that we can improve on. The report itself doesn't communicate that. The first 40 pages are all in terms of measuring positivity. Imagine if they had been in terms of reflecting the negative or the things that need to be looked at, which I did and I sent to all of you. The second thing is that this comparison to other communities, I think we need to be a little careful about that. And in some ways, who the heck cares how we compare to other communities? What matters is how we communicate our values here in Montpelier. So this benchmarking I think is a little not very useful. I'm sorry, what is it called? The Tableau, I couldn't find that and Bill sent me a link and I couldn't find it. That's where you can really find out some very important things where you can drill down into the data and say what groups, whether it's geographical or social class or income or renters are feeling what about the community because that's really one of the things that's missing. And I just want to refer back to a couple of things that happened at the meeting today. Carrie said, because I insisted that we look at the very rec center off the consent agenda and I pointed out and I sent to all of you some alternative language because I think the language in that was badly communicating. And then Carrie said, well, now the public knows. Oh, you mean all 20 people who are at this meeting now? The public record is what was in the agenda materials. And I think we need to be much more careful about what we say and say it in the right way. And so Lauren said, how do we better communicate? I think that is really the key to so many of the issues here. These don't forget these are attitudes that are being measured. These are what people perceive. This is what people feel and they may be feeling negative about something when in fact they don't understand it. And one of the reasons they don't understand it is, and I think I can't remember his name, was talking about good governance is participation. What do we do to get better participation in governance? How do we encourage people to come forward to these meetings and to listen and to talk? That's okay, Donna. I'm done. Thanks, Peter. Let's have one informational piece because I'm not going to respond to all that, but particularly about the benchmarking. One of the values of benchmarking, and I agree with it, it's not perfect, but typically, nationally, people rank certain services. Some services are more popular than others. So if you just look at yourself and say, for example, firefighting typically scores really high. Almost every place, 90% of the people who approve of the fire are the police, maybe 60%. So if you just look at it on your own, you're saying, well, people hate, they're down on our police, but they're really up on our fire department. But if you look at it compared to 600 communities, you say, okay, 600 communities rank 90 for your firefighter when we were 95, or our police was above the benchmark because there are just certain things that some people inherently just like more and are going to score higher. So you're getting to see it compared to how people, and I agree, this is not perfect, but it's like, to the extent that there's a standard approval rating, are you above it or below it? And it's a place to start. It is certainly not the be all and end all. And you could certainly, that's the value of doing this on a regular basis because then you can say, hey, the police got 60 last year, they're up to 65 this year, or did it go the other way? What happened? Why did it go down? And so that way, you're measuring against yourself. While at the same time saying, hey, are we above the standard? Because I bet if you looked at those same numbers across the benchmarks, they dropped every, that I don't know that we'd have to check that, but to see, or, and that's where you can check is, gee, is it just us that this trend is happening? Or is this just part of a national trend? And before we dismiss it as one or the other, we ought to get the data. Thanks, Kelly. Thank you. Thanks for listening. All right. Summer schedule. Where are you guys? Look at those dedicated people back there in the dust. We can. Yeah, we can. We can. You guys like being in the dark? You want light? Okay, let's talk about the summer schedule. Do you want to skip any meetings or add some extra meetings this summer? Well, yeah. So typically we've dropped at least one meeting, depending on what's on our plate, just because people are away and all of that. And, and just, I think everyone deserves a break at some point, you know, and we have staff away. It's a lot of times. So I was proposing some years we've dropped two meetings and only done one meeting, like in July and August and other years, we've, you know, so not knowing what your interests were, I just proposed dropping the first meeting in August with creating basically a month between July 26th and August 23rd, where we wouldn't have any meetings. And, you know, we, and I also noted that sometimes, depending on the timing, particularly with the reappraisal, sometimes we have to call a special meeting to set the tax rate in order to get tax bills out. But that's, that might even be later this year because, you know, it's, it's, I mean, it's televised. It's a public meeting, but it's, we don't have to bring it. You know, we do it all on Zoom and just it's a math computation. It is ministerial. Yeah. It's pretty much here's the calculation. You have to approve it. So, but nonetheless, so conversation. And then I, you know, I didn't put in here, but there had been some talk about us trying to have a workshop or a retreat meeting to talk about sort of operations and preferences and those kind of things separate from a policy content meeting. So if you want to add that in. Schedule looks good to me. I think it looks good, but I agree. Get going and having some kind of a board retreat, just to talk about how we all do business. It'd be nice to fit one in when summer is coming up really fast. And also I think the work session on operations, if there's a way to squeeze it in, it'd be helpful. I guess we also talked about some of us visiting different departments and doing tours. Kelly is supposed to be scheduling those to, not Kelly, excuse me, Mary is supposed to be scheduling those tours. Um, yeah. So if you haven't heard from Mary, I know she was working on dates. So she was great. So, yes, the workshop so that we could meet it as a council open to the public, but really as a council have a workshop with department heads. I feel there's a lot of background that it's missing for newer members. And it also gives us a chance to hear one another. But unfortunately, the one you have scheduled for a retreat workshop, I'm out of state from May 26th until June 10th. So I'd rather not have a retreat then. So it'd be better to do a different date. Yeah. I only picked that because it was a fifth Wednesday. So we had no rear. Maybe the only date you can do it. Terry. Yeah, I'm happy to stick with meeting. It's fine with me. And I love the idea of having some kind of a retreat workshop, sort of something or other where we talk about how we work together, whatever else we want to talk about. I am expecting for the foreseeable future to have an unpredictable schedule in terms of when I'm in town and when I'm not. So I can't promise at this point when I might be physically here to participate in that. That one feels like it would be a really good one if we were all in person for and not try to do over Zoom. But I would do my absolute best to be able to be there. So I'm just going to have it. I'm Martha's. And then we'll be on Zoom for people to watch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, done. Anyone else? No, Lauren. Totally agree. Scheduling the 31st does work for me, but love the idea of more of a work working together kind of conversation seems really helpful. The only date that I am going to be camping June 28th. There's a possibility for an island. It's lovely and they do have cell service. So I could zoom in, but it'd be really nice not to. Anyway, everything else works for me. That's proposed, but I might miss that one. I would point out for the newer council members too that it is, you know, occasionally, especially summertime, someone misses meeting for whatever, you know, thinking in addition to the regular one. So it sounds like there's general interest in having a workshop type meeting, non agenda thing. So we can, I was looking at Wednesday nights, but is that sacrosanct? You know, we don't have to have it in here. I mean, it has to be in a place that's accessible to the public, ideally where we can broadcast from, but I mean, there's other places. So it doesn't have to be Wednesday as far as I'm concerned. It will not be like presentations, right? It will be real workshop. Like we are doing hand on activities. So yes, it would be basically for us and what I would, we'll either get a facilitator or we'll work out. We'll talk with everybody about what they'd like to talk about. I think it'd be more about just nuts and bolts of how the council operates and expectations of each other and staff. I, you know, maybe I'm not, I'm going to, you know, may not be the best time to have all the team here to go over their topics. That might be a separate workshop, maybe pre budget or something. But I think we probably should just, you know, we just have so many new personalities to just get a sense of, you know, we had three of us, four of us talked on Monday. You know, what, what do you want to see on the consent agenda? What things do you want to get tipped off about? Just how can we work best as a group? What expectations we have of each other and building that working relationship and all that kind of stuff. And I think, you know, we haven't been able to do that for a while because it's COVID and we had a fairly stable group of people for a while and now it's changed. So we can get out of this room. Even the police community room, we use that a few times just out of this room. It's now like military central in there, right? Or something. No. So we rent a place at Capitol Plaza. We've done some of our council money. Yeah. I think so. So why don't we staff will send out some dates, figure out, give you a bit, get times. If you know, you're going to be away from block of time like Donna and I realized, you know, Kerry might be unpredictable. And we'll see if we can figure out a place and then a location that meets our because it is nice to do it. So, so our obligation is has to be open to the public. It has to be, you know, ADA compliant. So and now, you know, in in now we have the zoom technology. So presumably we would want to allow for that just because not that typically when we've done these, almost nobody comes, but it's still it's a it's a public discussion. And so we want to be as open and transparent as possible. So we'll have to figure that out where we could do that. I don't know. It's got to be someplace. We've had workshops where publics can be attending and present, but they really aren't part of the discussion. Correct. That's right. They don't have to be other than the public comment at the beginning of the meeting. This was really a council conversation, but people are welcome to sit and listen. Okay. Sounds like a plan. Jack, we'll back you on that then. Thanks. Um, council reports. That in this time, I think. Okay. I just want to say that I did several walks in the last couple of weeks and also on the shared path and I took pictures of some really some problems. I sent them to DPW. They called me back. It was really great. So if people are in communication, we can help all of us know where there are some problems that maybe it hasn't been noticed. Thank you. As I went through the emergency management plan, I know that there must be a process behind that. I mean, it looks like it's very sort of well organized and checklist and so on. But as I went through it, I, and particularly in light of recent events, like the motel exit and we're talking about cold weather, shelters and cooling centers and stuff. I looked on, I looked through all those forms and there's really what they're talking about. There are people who are displaced by, you know, property damage. They're talking about floods and hurricanes and earthquakes. They're not really, it doesn't seem to be focused on things like climate related incidents. And I just wonder if there's a way. I don't know who, I don't know who is responsible for the emergency management. I mean, it's a larger group. I don't know how we address it, but it seems to me it would make sense, particularly in light of recent events and even, even, you know, like the train, the chemical spills in Ohio and Indiana or wherever they were recently. I mean, there, there was one line that mentioned sort of hazardous stuff, but you know, I tried to find out what Vermont knows about hazardous materials passing through the state. And I couldn't find anything, maybe because they don't want people to know. I mean, it is sort of a security, well, I mean, they don't want the bad guys to know. But anyway, it was just something I noticed. And, and if, if you guys or no, or, you know, someone who has access to this kind of stuff, I'd be happy to talk with them about maybe engaging in, you know, looking, looking at those types of events for a future planning. No, it's just a question. I think you were looking at the hazard mitigation plan. One that was on the agenda. Yeah, the, the, the LEM. Okay. Okay. So yeah, so that's, that's kind of a state. Management plan look like, yeah, that's what it's for. So, so it's the process is controlled by the state level. Yeah. So what'll happen now is because you approved it tonight tomorrow that I'll go to central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, they'll review it. They'll then pass it on to Vermont emergency management. And that's where the plan stays. And it's, it's for like statewide emergencies. A lot of that's not an example of that. An example of that after Hurricane Irene, those plans were pulled out. And I believe we sent a couple of dump trucks and some drivers down to Bethel to work. And then Chief Fakis and myself both got called up and we spent time in the state emergency operations center. And it was based on that report. Yeah. So they pull those out and they look for available resources. So that's what that is for. If we were to have another hurricane come through Vermont and Montpellier's not affected, but other places there, they might tap into our public works department or the police chief or myself to fill in some of those positions. So it sounds like it makes sense then if we were to have, because if we were to have a heat event, let's say in the summer, it wouldn't be just Montpellier. It would be probably statewide or at least one half of the state or the other is other parts of New England. So it's really the perfect place to plan for that kind of event. It just seemed to me that that particular hurricanes were clearly something that was addressed cooling and heating events not so much. So. Right. Yeah. And we also have a hazard mitigation plan the city has. And you'll find that on the website. Okay. Might be interesting. A little harder. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't have a lot of time. We have one that started creating a flood. Yeah. It's another emergency operations. But that's really Montpellier. Right. I can help you get that information. Great. Yeah. Good to know. Thank you. And I'll pass your comments on the state about that, because that's a state form we fill out. Yeah. I'll pass it on to some from our regional planning and. Great. Super. Super. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Tim. I appreciate it for two things this last week. Came across as the first person to arrive at an accident scene. I can really shake you up. And it was interesting that eight or nine year old boy came across and said, do you need an adult to help and got his mom really quickly? But I was really thrilled and relieved to be in Montpellier where the emergency response team with EMTs arrived in minutes. And I think and hope it saved someone's life. So being there was pretty powerful for me. One thing though is the guy who uses my phone all day long as a broker. And I was having trouble to get a 911 call out because I had another business call coming in. I was trying to cancel that because I didn't want to answer. It's like a dial 911. And I get home and I go, all you got to do is just push the button. I'm going to Siri comes on, say dial 911. So for all of you, if you're ever one of those panic moments, do that. And the other things I wanted to just commend community members, green update was a huge success here. And it was so great to see everybody out with the green bags, making Montpellier look better. So thanks. I am attending justice center meetings as the city council representative. And they need board members. So it will be great if anyone interested in supporting them from public. They are looking for new members. So I think it will be great to work with them and give back something to our community. And another thing I want to mention just to learn the details. I know that we cannot meet like four of us, right? Because it is not, it is against the rules. But I was planning, I am planning to go to Burlington and visit their recreation center because some people in my district told that it's a good model to have a recreation in the middle of the town. So I was wondering if we can all go together and just like talk to them is, can it be like an official visit instead of me or a couple of us going? Is it possible to do that? Or we can also arrange other official visit to other things that we are like a shelter. Other things we are talking about. Is there any possibility? Thank you. So the easiest thing to do, first of all, if you want to go by yourself, that's fine. But if you want to just bring us a group or even contemplate it, the best thing to do is just warn at this meeting and just say that, you know, on whatever day, whatever time we're going to meet at this Burlington Rec or wherever it is and take a tour. And it's going to be, it's open to the public. I mean, just want to come up and watch, you know, so just say that's what we're doing. There's no voting action. The agenda is get the tour and that way you've wanted and the public knows you're doing it. So, you know, that's the easiest thing to do is just and then you can do it. It's the and, you know, I also just since we're on this, you know, there might, there will be times when there might be four or five of you or even all seven of you at an event or a thing like we had a press conference last night and there were five members of the Barry City Council here. And but, you know, they were not conducting business as a council. They weren't discussing themselves and voting and taking action. They just happened to be here. So, you know, you're all entitled to be together. If you attend something, it's if you then afterwards say, well, you know, what now let's discuss what we just heard. But if you don't, if you all went to the same school play or the same sporting event or just even green up day or march in the parade, you know, those kind of things. I mean, those you can do that. You just can't really discuss business like the quorum call after the meetings. You have to be careful of having those kind of things. Thank you for sharing your microphone tonight. Just quickly, first, I was just grateful that the city leadership, including Bill and our mayor were speaking out on the urgency of the people who are going to be put out of the shelter soon and the impact that's going to have on those people and our communities. So thank you for elevating that issue and hope we can continue speaking out as a community. And only other thing was it might be good to invite our delegation after they hopefully adjourn soon and we can get the download on what did and didn't happen from our policy agenda and any, you know, potential implications for the city that we should be aware of. And as the homelessness issue, we did have an event. I think probably Bill and Sue Minter were as responsible as anywhere else for putting it together with the leadership for the local municipalities, especially Montpelier, and in Berlin and also some service providers, including Capstone Community Action, Washington County Mental Health, Good Samaritan Haven, and Family Center. Yep. And then another way and it was very, very well attended, very, it got some, I thought, very good exposure. We got coverage on both WCAX and WPTZ and our city managers remarks were extensively covered on WPTZ, which was great because he was comprehensive, eloquent and professional as always. Where things stand now is that people have been, advocates have been working to try to get money into the budget to extend the emergency housing program, the conference committee on the budget adjourned without putting any more money back into the budget for this proposal. And there is now a group of, it's been expected for some weeks that the governor is going to veto the budget. And there's a group of now over 30 representatives who are saying that they are not going to vote to overturn the governor's veto as a way of putting pressure to to get this money back into the budget. And I don't know what's going to happen. I do know that both of our city's representatives, Connor Casey and Kate McCann have signed on to that list. And so it's a fight all the way to the end. And we don't know how it's going to come out. But meanwhile, we're also, and Bill will probably talk more about this working on continuing to meet to talk about ways to address the inevitable problem. Two, you may remember that a couple of meetings ago, a gentleman came to us in the council meeting to say, well, turkey hunting season is coming up. And what happens on country club road property? And Linda Berger, a member of the community, contacted me and Bill the other day saying, did you ever give that guy an answer about whether turkey hunting is going to be allowed? And it turns out that is something that we voted on last fall. It's not just deer hunting. Any hunting that was previously allowed is unchanged. So people can go out and hunt their turkeys on the country club road property if they want. And last, tomorrow, the annual event, the corporate cup race is going to be out there. It's looking like a beautiful day for a race. So I expect a lot of people will be out there and just pay attention to the traffic impacts. And that's it for me. City clerk, do you have anything from the other end of the internet? The other end of the universe. Yeah, I just mentioned that I'm away this week of a family health emergency. And unfortunately, my deputy, Sarah, who would have been there tonight, but she had to go away on an even more urgent health emergency. So that means for the rest of the week, the clerk's office is going to have limited services. So you can still do payments. You can still talk about your water and your tax bills, but there's not going to be a help available to do vault searches for land records or vital records. So I know most people who come in already know how to do it, but there won't be a lot of help available. There won't be licenses, vital records available for folks. And I hate to put people in that situation. But thank you all for your patience. I also just want to mention having one of those meetings sitting here again today, being glad that I'm not any of y'all. And last couple of years, it's been pretty easy on me because election administrators are hip these days. So I get a lot of people thanking me for being an election administrator. So I just want to give you all a clean thank you for what you all are doing. Thank you, but you're doing it wrong. Not a thank you. Now let me just, you know, whatever, just thank you and better you all than me. All right. Thanks, John. I hope things come out okay with your family issues. Bill? Yeah, I'll try to be brief. We had an event last night that the mayor referenced. I won't rehash that again. We are continuing to work with our neighboring communities and the nonprofit people. We have a meeting. A couple of us are meeting with the secretary of AHS on Friday to try to share with her some of the ideas that came out of this meeting to see what we get. And then the work group, we're not going to have another public event, but the work group has got a meeting scheduled for next week. So both the nonprofit service providers and the municipalities to continue talking about ideas that we can do. I think, you know, it's frustrating because we have such limited resources, including, you know, the urgency of finding a shelter place for this winter. But, you know, really what right now we're focused on what's going to happen in the next couple of weeks as people come out. So it's a big issue, obviously. Kelly mentioned this and I'll put more in the weekly memo, but we are excited. We did make a commitment. We're creating this new Zen, we're not creating, we're buying a new software package. It's relatively inexpensive. It's called ZenCity and it's a public engagement thing. And I can show you some of the, at some point we'll give you a demonstration, but it's really great. A lot of communities are using it and it's got project pages. You click on, it's got all the documents. It could, you know, you can, we can put surveys up, ask for, and you get the results in lifetime. You can have public comment on them. You can have even maps. People can drop, you know, where would you like such and such? And they can put on the map and you see where they want it. And it's going to be a great tool. We're really looking forward to it. And it can be any kind of project, whether it's the city master plan or the country club road project or paving a road. You know, it's just information to use. So looking forward to it. And it got the sign of approval from Evelyn, who's actually going to be doing it. So that was the real decision maker. So that's all I have for tonight. Thank you, Evelyn. Last week I suggested, you know, people are having a hard time dealing, interacting with the new agenda site. And so I suggested, well, why don't we put up a video so explaining it for people on how they can manage it. And Evelyn put it up and it's, hopefully, it's going to be very useful to people. And once you get into it once, it's manageable. But every time there's a new change to a new system, it's a challenge for people. So thanks, Evelyn. That's great. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Okay. And without objection, we'll be adjourned at 10.50 p.m. Thanks, everybody.