 for being here. Absolutely. You are making it hard for us for your successor, you know. I'm trying. This is a pretty good consecutive streak going. Yep. We did our best to get rid of that streak, but we tried as we might. Well, I'm not trying to jinx it because I know it isn't in black and white yet, so I won't speak too much more to it until I say it in black and white. All right, Charlie, I hope you're back around. I think we have enough noses. Do we not? Did you count our noses? I can't hear you, but he's counting. Yeah, I'm doing a quick count. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, you are good. All right, so we'll call the November 15th meeting of the CCRPC. To order here, it's 6-0-oh, 6-0-0. And we'll see if there are any changes to the agenda. I'm going to bring your attention. Well, first, I want to welcome the auditors, Cal Connors and Andrew Koopa, if you're wondering, I hope I pronounced your name correctly. So if you're wondering who those faces are that are popping up. But I want to draw your attention to the fact that we have on the consent agenda three items, the minor tip of amendment for South Burlington's Heinsberg Road, it looks like a path, a Winooski tactical basin letter, and that it's in conformance and the minutes of October 18th. So since we've put the minutes now on the consent agenda, if anybody would like to make any edits to those minutes, we would have to take it off the consent agenda and then hear about that separately. So we had agreed to that last month at our meeting. And with that in mind, I'm going to ask for any changes to the agenda. Hearing and seeing none, we'll move on to item two, public comment. Is anyone here from the public who would like to speak to a matter that is not on the agenda? Hearing and seeing none, we will move to action on the consent agenda. We actually have three A first, a minor tip amendment. And as we were hearing in our training this past hour from five to six o'clock, it's an MPO action. So as an MPO action, we need votes from, I believe, all the municipalities and V-trans, but not fuel scores. Is that correct, Charlie? All right, so our regional partners, and I'm trying to find the right language for the other representatives. Yeah, the other regional members also don't have a vote on MPO. The other transportation members don't have a vote on it either. But we do have the other large members. Okay, great. So with that in mind, can we, how do we group this? So do we just three A and then three B and C together, Charlie? All right, so that would work. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so I'll need a motion for three A on the consent agenda. Thank you, Andy. And second from? Second. Thank you, Elaine. So three A, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed or abstaining, please speak up. I'm abstaining. Thank you, Karen. Anyone else? Okay, we're going to move to three B and C, so we'll need a motion to approve three B and three C on the consent agenda. Thank you, Garrett. And a second from Catherine, was it? Yep, that sounds good. All those in favor, please say aye. I do have a change to request. We have to remove whatever you want to change off the consent agenda. We have to move that. Is it to the minutes, Garrett? No, to the tactical basin, just that missed a community in the letter saying that. So that would be important. Let's back up again. I move, remove the letter to the tactical basin plan, conformance with the eco plan item, which is on the consent agenda, off the consent agenda. Is that okay with you, Garrett? Sure. Thank you. And Catherine? Okay, so all those in favor, all those in favor, removal of the B, three B, please say aye. Aye. Anyone opposed, abstaining, please speak up. All right. Before we get to three B, we're going to move to three C, where your motion I believe is still in order, Garrett, and your second is still in order, Catherine. So all those in favor of the minutes of October 18th, although in the agendas listed as 2024, I hope I didn't check the title a little bit on our thing, but it should be 2023. We haven't gotten that far ahead. Yes, it is 2023. So good. All those in favor, please say aye or raise your hand. Aye. And anyone opposed or abstaining, please speak up. I'm abstaining. Thank you, Karen. Okay, so let's move to item three B, and I'll need to hear what the issue, and I need a motion to approve it, but you apparently want to amend it, Garrett. I would approve with, I would move to approve with the addition of Buell's gore. Huntington's included because the Huntington flows in, Huntington River flows into the Winooski, and half the headwaters of the Huntington start in the gore. So anyone have second that? They will. Thank you, Catherine. Benjamin was first, actually. What's that? I said Benjamin was first. Perfectly fine. Chivalry, not chauvinism. All right. Anyone wish to discuss this further? Okay. All those in favor, please say aye or raise your hand. And anyone opposed or abstaining, please speak up. Okay. We will move on to... Thank you. Thank you, Garrett. Point that out. The number four, item number four, the draft fiscal year 2023 audit, and I assume that will be Forrest and Missers Connors and Cooper. Yeah, indeed. I'd like to introduce Kyle Connors and Andrew Cooper from Markham LLP. This is our first year of engagement with them after a long stint with our previous auditor. And I'd like to thank them for being here tonight and for having a draft of the audit report to present to us. And yeah, thanks a lot, gentlemen. And I'll turn it over to you. Fantastic. Thanks for having us. Kyle Connors, I'm a partner with Markham out of our Providence office. And Andrew Cooper, who's here with me today, is a supervisor out of our office. So as Forrest noted, this is our first year working with the commission. Happy to have a draft available today to share with you. But really, that's a byproduct of starting with your prior year auditors who were more than friendly with us, worked great with us, provided us with everything we needed. So thank you to them. And then to Forrest, entirely for being unbelievably responsive, getting us the requests that we asked for. Certainly, this financial statement draft being available is just a byproduct of their hard work and responsiveness. So a big thank you to the two of them as well. So I'm happy to walk through the financial statements. I'm going to go over some of the areas that I think are important and key for you as the commission board members. Certainly, if there's an area that I skip over or if there's something that you want to bring up, or any questions along the way, I'm happy to help answer them. And Forrest, do I have the ability to share my screen for this? I hope so. Let's find out. It appears that you do, Kyle. Fantastic. So everyone can see my screen before I start diving into things. Yes. Yeah. Okay, great. So the first thing that you'll read as you get into these financial statements is that we are, well, we certainly have an issued, but upon approval and then through our quality control process are issuing a clean audit opinion. What that means is that, oh, you know what, I shared the wrong screen. Let me try that again. I was showing you last year's financial statements. You don't want to see those. You want to see this year's moving on. All right. So yeah, issuing a clean opinion, we really only had an entry or two, very limited. So hopefully what that means is on a month-to-month basis when you're receiving financial packages for your board meetings that they're reliable. So I'll jump right into the finances and the results. So the commission finished the year with a very small deficit of just over $3,000. But that's really a byproduct of a couple of GASB standards that don't directly impact your operations, the lease standard which was put into play last year, as well as the GASB 68 pension plan, the VMware's plan, that I'll get into plenty of detail on as we get through this. So excluding those items, the commission had a surplus in operating income of just over $91,000 in the current year. It's a byproduct of a couple of things, specifically the financial performance, staff hitting revenue targets, grants increasing a bit year over year as well as the ability to retain your membership dues year over year as well. Also, I think when budgets are being put together year over year, it's really a challenging thing to predict what the indirect cost rate is going to inevitably be. And so for fiscal 23, that rate was budgeted for at 76.8% and ended up coming in at 76.95%, which is incredible. And I think in a testament to clean financial reporting and focusing on areas that are important during the budget process. Commission has a goal to maintain a reserve of 3x your non-project operating expenses. That reserve was maintained at a little over $410,000 at June 30, 2023. 3x your operating costs are about $633,000. So while it's certainly not 100% at the goal and with the goal post, always moving as those monthly expenses go up over time, certainly good to have a reserve. Ultimately, your budget model is set up for grand reimbursements and not necessarily to to grow a significant net position, but you never know what's going to happen. And having that reserve is critical for the commission's long-term success. This is a comparison of the statement in that position, also known as the balance sheet. And ultimately, the commission ended with $131,000 of total net position. Forrest had to let me know that it's important for the board to understand what that means pre and post the Gatsby 68 year pension of your Vemur's activities for the year. And so we've included a balance sheet of what that would look like without the Vemur's plan involved. And ultimately, it has an impact on your total net position of about $688,000. And why I think it's really important for you to understand the difference between the two is that the liability that's associated with that net pension plan was a little bit over $1.1 million. And while there are benefits that are being paid out to retirees under that plan, that liability is not going to come to fruition within the next year. That's just a projected number that's going to be paid out over the next 30 years or so. And it's always shifting based off of investment activity, it's shifting based off of the state's estimates, what they think the market's going to work at, life expectancy. So there's a multitude of factors that go into that Vemur's plan. And I think it's critical to note that it's not going to come to fruition and the commission's not going to have to shell out that $1.1 million next year. It's more of a projection. Also, Vemur's is going to tell you what the commission's liability is. There's not really an ability to overfund it. They tell you what your liability is, they tell you what your contribution is. It's the commission's responsibility to make that contribution. But if you wanted to contribute more to reduce that liability, that's just not how the state plan works. So you're kind of at the mercy of the plan and whatever liability figure they provide at your end is what you end up with. And I'll kind of go through and show you what that looks like year over year as we get further into the financial statements. Focusing on operating revenues and expenses, both of them went up quite a bit. Those are typically going up hand in hand with the project revenue, grants in grant match revenue compared to the project costs. I think project costs out of the $585,000 increase year over year, about $400,000 of that made up project expenditures. The rest of that is increases in salary and related payroll and some other items. These guys left some notes for myself, but I can't seem to find them. Overall, the commission had about $4.7 million in grants. And I think it's important that this note gets shown in the financial statements while it's not necessarily required under GASB statements to share this. The commission does choose to. And I think it's great for the reader of the financial statements to get an understanding of whether the grant funding is coming in direct federal, whether it's passed through the state and through what programs. And so this is an important detailed note for the board to review. So we were talking about the VMware's plan. And it's very interesting to look at the liability that's associated with the commission at $1.1 million at year end. They are anticipating that the state's plan assets will work at 7% year over year. That's what's called the discount rate. But if you note if the assets work a little better, right, better investments of a better year of the market, just by 1%, it drastically changes what the commission's liability is in the same in reverse. So we see big swings in what this number ends up being just based off of investment performance year over year. So I actually found an error in this as I was reviewing it prior to our presentation. So this proportionate share of net pension liability is not $338,000. It's $1.1 million as we just reviewed. But you can see that, you know, the way that the market's gone, the plan was funded at 86% last year. It dropped down to a four year economically to 73% funded. And so you would see that liability jump up from $550,000 to the $1.1. And that's really what drives the number. That correction will be made prior to issuance. Again, VMware is going to tell you what your contribution requirement is. You can see based on this, the last nine years, the commission has been given a required contribution and has made that required contribution fully. I think one of the more critical areas to look at, and I apologize if it's small text on your screen. Hopefully everyone's had an opportunity to at least take a look at your budget versus actual. Obviously, pretty significant swings in two areas, project income, grant income, and the contract services. For the most part, these really net to zero and are challenging to budget for on a year to year basis without fully knowing exactly what projects are going to come to fruition, what grants are going to be available. But we would not expect to see revenue significantly higher than what the variance would be higher or lower than this line here. They really do go on a cost reimbursement basis. So even if revenue didn't come in line with what was budgeted, the correlating contract services also didn't. So they wash out. For the most part though, everything else was relatively close to what was budgeted for. I don't really have anything material to note that was an outlier. We talked about the calculated indirect cost rate, what was budgeted for, and what came in. This is a nice schedule that provides a little bit more detail for those interested in seeing what those projections looked like versus what they came to be. That's really all I had for as far as presentation goes, but I'm more than happy to answer any questions that you might have for us. Folks, anyone want to bubble up? Doesn't sound like anybody wants to dig into the numbers yet, Kyle. And this is a draft, correct? Yeah, so this is a draft. We've been working pretty hard for the last three, three and a half, four weeks to have this available. But as Forrest alluded to before we jumped on, what this is not including is the single audit section. The single audit section, we'll discuss two important areas. It'll discuss our internal controls review, which is part of the yellow book report. We've spent significant amount of time pouring through the commission's internal controls over payroll, over cash receipts, disbursements, and significant transaction cycles. And we would include in that single audit report findings if we had any. I'm happy to note that we don't have any internal control findings to report. However, we've not gone through the single audit, the compliance piece yet. So we can't say one way or another if there's going to be a compliance issue. The compliance piece is due March 31st, whereas the financial statement piece I believe is due by year end. So we wanted to make sure we focused on issuing the one report, the financial statements in time for their deadline. And we're going to move right into the single audit as soon as we get an opportunity to. If as far as recommendations go, I think the one thing we would focus on is cybersecurity, making sure that the commission does have a formal cybersecurity plan in place. We've seen a lot of entities reach out to cybersecurity insurance providers and having them perform penetration tests to make sure that you're covered. You see it all the time, towns, entities like yourselves who feel like they're comfortable with their RT systems. They don't feel there's any vulnerability. Next thing you know, there's a malware or ransomware attack. So it's just something we're seeing a lot. We did walk through the internal controls of the IT department and felt there were no findings to bring to your attention, but always recommending additional layers for cybersecurity in this day and age. And I did see a couple of hands come up. Yeah, Charlie was up and then Jeff, but Charlie, I guess you drew back. Yes. Okay. So Jeff, go ahead. Had to get off mute, which is hard for me sometimes. This new fictitious calculation that you have to explain, I mean, these new GASB accounting standards, just for a point of information, could you let us know what the feeling was, what we're showing by making this implied interest calculation for amortizing the entire length of time for our lease, even though the only thing that's applicable to what's going on is the next 12 months in terms of our budgeting and in terms of our financial statements. It seems like it's the GASB suggested change du jour or du year, I guess. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's a good point. They've really been putting me through the ringer these last few years. And there was a new one this year for GASB 96, which ended up not being applicable for the commission, but that was nearly one that we had to implement as well. Yeah, they've really been following. So FASB, which is a for-profit accounting, came out with 842, which is their lease standard. And GASB seems to want to follow what FASB is doing. And so they came out with 87 last year and made you accrue your entire what would have been an operating lease for your office space. And so I know that added a layer of difficulty when it came time to reviewing and understanding the financial ramifications. Is there a specific question on 87? What are they trying to transmit to the consumers of our financial statements? If we've got to spend half the time that you're presenting the audit explaining why it really doesn't apply and why the number that appears in our audit needs to be interpreted a different way than a normal person would interpret it. Yeah, right. We're all sort of at the mercy. We're at the mercy of GASB. I think their intention was because the lease standard was two sides. Only one side was applicable to the commission. The other side is if you have like a cell tower lease or something like that that you're making revenue off of, you should capture that receivable and show to the reader what you're going to get over time. So the flip side of that, which I think is a little bit less helpful, is the right abuse asset, which you're depreciating, you're amortizing that office space over the life of your lease. To answer your questions, I wish it wasn't a thing, but we are at the mercy of 87 and showing it in the financial statements, where I think it's really critical for the board to focus on. While I understand your question and I understand the frustration, is this budget to actual, which I think is really the year-to-year focus that you're talking about? I mean, in some cases, I could make an argument that it's good to have a long-term lease, that we don't get jerked around. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. But right, rather than going month, you know, or year-to-year in not knowing what your rent is going to be, but as soon as that long-term event triggers, the standard kind of sucks it up and makes you account for it. I understand. It's the same thing with you having to go through the explanation on our pension liability when it changes every year based on what the actuaries say. And the only thing that really is of material to what it is that we're doing here is we recognize we have a long-term liability, but we also have a funding stream that can be tapped to do that, which we don't know what it is right now, yet we're trying to estimate the next 20-some-odd or 30 years of our liability without even considering the fact that there will be some source of revenue there. And so it makes us look worse than what we really are. And I just, I don't get the point. You could do a footnote without gumming it up with made-up numbers, to be honest with you. And that's what we have to do. I understand under this, but it just, you know, when does the governing accounting board stop pulling everybody through not holes when all we do is explain to everybody how, well, don't really pay attention to that. It's just what they're making us do. Sure. No, I can sense and understand the frustration, believe me. I mean, we did try to add some flavor to the management's discussion and analysis to kind of show what it looks like without the plan, but I understand the frustration of having to do that in the first place. And the finance committee and the executive committee have heard me bang the table over this for the last two years. Sure. And let's hear from Charlie then and hope that you guys can have a beer afterwards and go deeper on the subject. I get three things. One, first, my great appreciation to Forrest and Amy and Mackenzie for getting us to this place and for the auditors. Thank you, Kyle and Adam, for reviewing all of our work. Appreciate it. Secondly, just a process point to highlight for the board. Note that this is, this is kind of a draft action item, but it's not fully and Kyle, if I understood, this isn't really the final version of the audit, right? So we're going to get a final version sometime in the next week or two. That's the plan, correct. Yeah. And so, traditionally, we've had the executive committee and finance committee review this out of meeting, draft, and then you see the final. Given the timing this year, I'm hoping that the board is okay, kind of deferring acceptance of the audit to the executive committee on your behalf. And with the finance committee meeting in their first early I can't remember what day that it, maybe December 6th or something like that. So I'm hoping you're okay and maybe that would be the action to recommend to the board that you're authorizing the executive committee to accept the audit on the full board's behalf. So that's a placeholder there. And then third, I just, and this is a little bit longer term, but looking forward into FY25, you know, I think it's pretty striking to note that like about $2.5 million that was in our budget, but has not come through in FY23. That is telling me that there's got a $2.5 million worth of work that is kind of on our plate in FY24, in addition to the FY24 money, right? And so this is a little bit of a heads up for the spring time. And for those of you on the UPWP committee, thank you, Bard, for leading that. But I think for the first time that we're probably going to have to take a harder look at how many projects we're able to fund more realistically for next year, just to try to give ourselves a little bit of capacity to chew through, but feels like now it's like a $2.5 million. I'm afraid to call it backlog, but or just amount of work that's on our plate. So just a heads up that we may not be able to be as accommodating as we have really tried to be over the past years, in order to kind of work through some of the work that's on our plate. Sorry, not necessarily audit related, but that $2.5 million of under budget was kind of striking. And is hanging over us for next year. Right. It's this year, right? And we don't want to compound it by making more promises than we can deliver in FY25. So the action item again, Charlie? So I will make a motion. I will move that the commission accept the audit, contingent upon final approval by the executive committee and the finance committee on the single audit language, and that there be no material differences reported between the draft audit and the final audit that we've reviewed tonight as a commission. And a second. I'll take Garrett. Thank you. And any further discussion? Any thoughts from Forrest? Just hopefully I'm not muted. I'm not. Just big thanks again to Kyle and Andrew, and yeah, looking forward to getting the final draft. And thanks to the staff, those of you who know I say this a lot, but this is another apparently clean audit pending the final audit. And it wasn't always this way. So thanks to our financial team. And Kyle and Andrew, the only reason you heard me whining about that stuff is you guys are part of a big organization that can have an impact on some of this stuff. I think GASB needs to understand the practical effects of when they come send something down from the mountain, what it does to small organizations like this. You're tasked with taking those thoughts back to the tower and launching at them. Well, all those in favor, please raise your hand or say aye. Aye. And anyone opposed or abstaining, please speak up. Okay, thank you. We're going to move on to item five. Thank you, Mezers Conner and Kupa, and enjoy your evening. Thanks you too. The transit performance measures and targets. Yeah, so I'm just going to just say a few words. I want to welcome John Moore and Matt Kimball, GMT. They're going to be talking about the transit performance measures and targets. This is part of our coordination. John and Matt talked to the talk about all of this, like the beginning of the month, and now they're coming to the board. And again, this is part of our kind of requirements from FTA and FHWA to coordinate on setting up measures and targets on established measures. So, John and Matt, take it over. I think, Matt, are you going to just share your screen? Yes, that was the plan. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Good evening, everybody. Can you see my screen, the PowerPoint presentation? Okay. Yes. So this is our presentation. Thank you for that introduction, Eleni, on our transit asset management and public transportation agency safety plans. So we'll start with transit asset management and to start a broad overview on what transit asset management is. So that is how we outline our practice of assessing, monitoring, and reporting the condition of our assets that we use in the provision of public transportation services. It's a FTA requirement for us to adopt and maintain a transit asset management plan. Additionally, it also helps us with informing our strategic planning of the replacement of our assets, which includes the procurement operation and maintenance of those assets, which aids us in managing costs and performance over the life cycles of all of our assets in our mission to provide safe, cost-effective, and reliable public transportation. So a bit on what transit asset management can offer us. It helps us with reducing our risk and improving safety. We, by keeping our assets in a state of good repair, that helps us with reducing the risk of catastrophic failures, which can lead to accidents and injuries. Also, it helps us support more effective operations. The increased breakdowns of critical equipment will lead to backlogs in maintenance needs, as well as delays in meeting our service obligations. And the proactive replacement of our assets keeps them in, which support our critical business functions, keep them in good working order, which helps us with improving the efficiency of our operations. Additionally, it helps us with improving reliability of our operations, as well as customer service. So by the increased volume and frequency of asset breakdowns would lead to service delays and lost trips. So by having a more proactive replacement approach, we can reduce those frequencies and improve our service model. And also by improving the condition and cleanliness of our stations and vehicles, that will help with improving the customer experience while accessing our transportation system. And finally, it helps us with saving time, money and resources. The operation and maintenance costs of assets increase significantly when assets are extended beyond their expected life cycles. And sustainable replacement of our assets aid us in future planning and balancing our capital investment needs in each year. And reducing the life cycle costs. We see a reduction of life cycle costs when asset replacements are aligned with their expected use cycles. Some of the requirements of TAM as governed by the FTA, first and foremost, we're required to create, maintain and update a compliant TAM plan in compliance with FTA requirements. As a lady said, we coordinate the adoption of this TAM plan and the development of performance targets with state and regional planning agencies. We self-certify our compliance during our annual certifications and assurances and the development of our federal and state grant agreements. We submit data to the FTA through the NTD reporting process and the data that we report on our performance targets, the performance status, which includes our condition assessments and our inventory of our assets. And we also submit an annual narrative report on how well we meet our performance targets in a given year as part of that NTD reporting process. And then finally, we participate in oversight of our transit, of our TAM plan during triennial review and state management reviews. The performance targets that are set in our TAM plan are in three overarching categories, rolling stock, which is our primarily buses, but any revenue service vehicle that is used primarily in passenger transport, which can include smaller paratransit vans and mini vans used in demand response transportation services. And the performance target for that category is primarily set by age. Additionally, we have equipment, which are primarily non-revenue vehicles and maintenance vehicles used for our maintenance operations, as well as driver relief and our operation supervisors, also dictated or targets set by age. And then finally, our facilities, which are broken into two subgroups. We have our administrative and operation facilities, which we have two of in the Burlington area, as well as a passenger facility, which is our downtown transit center on Cherry Street in Burlington. And performance targets are set by a condition rating using the term scale, which I will define on the next slide. And there's a set process for evaluating condition for facilities dictated by the FTA, which I'll also go into in more detail. So on this slide, we have a few charts here. I'll explain each one. We have our performance targets and measures from between 2023 and 2026, which is the performance period of our current TAM plan. And as you'll see, we have these broken up into the categories I mentioned earlier, as well as a deeper dive in the different types of revenue vehicles that we have. The percentages that you see here are the percentage of assets in each category that are at or in exceeding their useful life. So the lower the number, the better in our performance, or in meeting our performance obligations. And as I said, our targets currently are set by age, and we use the FTA standard useful life for the age of our assets. So our larger transit buses that you see on the road in Burlington, the 35 and 40 foot buses, those have a 12 year useful life. Our smaller cutaway vehicles, such as the ones that we lease to SSTA for paratransit service, those have a five year or seven year useful life. And then bands and mini bands have a four year useful life. There are some leeway in determining the useful life, but those are mandatory minimums set by the FTA. Because of the climate in Vermont, we do not expect to be able to, and in past prior experience, extending beyond those useful life benchmarks is infeasible and leads to those increased maintenance and reliability issues that I outlined in previous slides. And in the lower right, you'll see a table there. That is what I refer to when I say the term rating scale. It's a rating scale developed by the FTA, one point to five point rating scale. And our performance target for our facilities is to have all of them be at least a 3.0 on the term rating scale. And the way that facilities are evaluated are by breaking down the facility into different sub components, such as the foundation, the shell, structure, major systems such as your HVAC, conveyances like elevators, looking at all of those, rating them separately, and then having a weighted rating system to develop the scoring there. And so you'll see we have one facility, our storage and maintenance building next to our main facility that is below a 3.0 on our term rating scale at the moment. That was it on the TAM plan. I can turn it over to John for the safety plan, but if there are any questions at this time on the TAM performance measures, I'd be happy to field those now. Hearing none, John, are you ready to jump in? Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Matt. So I'm going to discuss our agency safety plan which is another FTA requirement and very closely related to the transit asset management requirements, especially when we think about system safety and reliability. And so the general requirement is that GMT has a safety plan that includes a safety management system. And I will go over some details of what that actually means from an FTA perspective. And there's really two primary goals of a agency safety plan. Number one, to help us manage our safety risks. And then number two, help us prioritize our capital investments through a data-driven process and make sure that we're making objective decisions when it comes to buses and facilities and safety. Next slide, Matt. So there's really four primary components. And so our safety plan is built around these four components. And then there's some subcomponents for each one as well. But the first one is the safety management policy. And that's where we set our safety objectives. We are required to have a confidential employee reporting program. And so that's primarily for near-miss events or safety events that may not rise to the level of a formal report or a police investigation. But things we want to track for data so we can proactively manage our safety risks. That is an anonymous program. It's not meant to be punitive. It's really meant to provide us the data in a confidential way so we can analyze that data and then make proactive decisions. We are required to have organizational accountabilities and responsibilities. So Clayton Clark, who's on the board and on the meeting tonight, he's our accountable executive. Our board is required to approve this plan. And then we're also required to have a chief safety officer. And I act in that capacity and truly my job in that role to implement the plan. In terms of safety risk management, that is how we identify safety risks and how we develop mitigation planning to minimize any impacts from those. The safety assurance piece and that's what we'll talk about the next few slides. That's the data-driven process and that's the safety performance measurement. We'll talk about how those are developed, the coordination with the RPC, and then what the actual targets are based on our existing conditions. And then lastly, and probably most importantly in terms of making this a successful plan, is the safety promotion. And that includes both our comprehensive safety training program, which is both for new hires, and depending if they're a bus driver or mechanic or other position in the company, that kind of dictates that program. But also reoccurring training. So we've recently done hazardous material communication training for all of our maintenance staff, for example, and really providing that refresher training to make sure that we're as safe as possible. And then safety communication, always reminding our staff of ways to be safe and what our procedures and protocols are in terms of safety management. Next slide, Matt. So this is just an overview of what the requirements are from the EFTA, and that's essentially that we work with the Regional Planning Commission as the MPO on developing these safety targets. So we've presented to the TAC and we've met with the staff on what our current targets are and how they were developed. And then we've formalized that under a written agreement with CCRPC and VTRANS on what the process is essentially to share that information around performance targets. Matt, next slide. So GMT is required to have four different performance targets. So this chart is a little confusing because those targets have to be reported by mode. And so GMT operates three primary modes of public transportation service. MV is motor bus, that's the traditional fixed route city bus system. CB is commuter bus. So those are our link services and our commuter services to Milton and Hinesburg and Jeffersonville. And then the DR is demand response. And there's two subcategories of that. We directly operate our own demand response system in our rural service areas, which are essentially Montpelier and St. Albans. In Chittenden County, we subcontract out the ADA paratransit service to SSTA as well as the older adults and disability program. So that last row is the SSTA data. And then so each one of those modes we are required under the National Public Transit Safety Plan to report on fatalities, injuries, safety events and system reliability. The first three categories, we have to have targets for actual number of occurrences, but also have targets for rate of occurrence. So we use a 100,000 vehicle revenue miles, so essentially the number of miles that buses are in service open to the public. So that's how we base our rate threshold. So for example, fatalities, our target is to have no fatalities in our system. And so again, zero per 100,000 miles. The injuries, our target is 0.67 injuries per fiscal year. And that injury definition is one that basically someone needs to be hospitalized for 48 hours or have a broken bone, for example. It's not somebody gets a bruise. And that is less than a full person because these targets were developed using a three-year rolling average of actual reportable incidents. Safety events, 0.33 per year is our target. That's kind of a wide category, but that's things like evacuations due to fire. That could be sabotage. It could be cyber security events. And then the last category is system reliability. And the numbers shown are essentially the average number of miles that we operate in between breakdowns, which require us to remove that vehicle from service. So we want the highest possible number there because that means we're doing fewer road calls and breakdowns. So for that motor bus category, it's essentially our goal that we can operate for 18,000 miles before there's a breakdown that would impact service. So those are the targets that we strive for. Again, these are based on rolling averages. So we will update these each year as we go. Matt, next slide. John, quick question on that slide. The third line, DRDO, demand response. We don't qualify for that. What's the DO? Well, so great question, Chris. So GMT is a unique transit organization because we do operate both in the urban area of Chittenden County but also Montpelier and St. Albans area, as I mentioned. So this public transit safety plan requirement is relatively new. And because we operate both an urban system and a rural system, there was some uncertainty from GMT and truthfully the FTA what were required to report on the rural side because if we were just a standalone rural system, none of these requirements apply to rural systems. But because GMT operates both urban and rural, this is essentially our rural demand response. We're still trying to get some clarity if we need to report on that or not. So it's in our plan. We just don't have the targets populated. So the DO is what I'm just trying to unpack the acronym mainly. Yep, the DO is directly operated. The PT is purchase transportation. That's the SSTA. That's an urban program for the complimentary paratransit. That definitely needs to be reported. And then you mentioned on the motor bus, the safety events, possibly something with cyber, how does that impact a motor bus? Well, it doesn't necessarily, I guess it could depending on what the situation was. But so all this data were required to report to the National Transit Database, which is another FTA requirement. And so for each one of these categories, there's pretty strict reporting thresholds and definitions. So for the safety events, I think that's more intended for physical injuries and safety possibilities. You had just mentioned that two examples were fire evacuation and cyber or something. And I had thought how curious it was that cyber would impact a motor bus, but maybe it's management. I'll let you go on. I'm sorry to delve into it. That's one of many in that category for the safety events. Matt, next slide. And then so just that close out and kind of tie it together. So clearly both the agency safety plan and the asset management plan focus on both safety and reliability. So we use both of these plans when we're considering the condition assessments and then what we need to do for our safety management process based on those condition assessments. And then lastly again, really using the condition assessments and our safety management analysis to help us identify where we need to invest in either bus purchases or facility safety upgrades to make sure that we're operating as safely as possible. And that is the end of our presentation. And we're certainly happy to answer any questions as needed. Folks, any thoughts on vehicle replacement reliability? Go ahead, Garrett. One thing I thought I noticed in one of the first charts is that it looked as though you were going to have to replace every motor bus by next year. Is that true? No, so under percent. Matt, do you want to speak to that? Yes. So I believe I believe the section. I apologize. I just stopped sharing the screen. I can probably get back to that slide. We have a commuter bus or a motor coach bus section. Let me get back to that performance measures as I'm still stuck on the. So we have a I believe what you might be referring to is the over the road coach that's 100 percent shown in 2025. So this is MCI or MCI buses that we purchase for the link for the mob failure link. These are like the larger premier buses, the inner city coach buses that you'll see. That entire fleet reaches the end of its useful life in 2025. But we're actually phasing this bus from our fleet. Unfortunately, we just do not have the demand on that commuter service anymore that requires that type of bus. So we're going to be switching back to the 35 and 40 foot transit bus for the full service there. Thank you. That only represents seven of our buses out of our, you know, roughly 70 bus fleet. So it's a small percentage of our overall fleet number. And if you know of anyone that would like to buy seven motor coach buses, let us know. This is the price of remote work. I think it's reduced the need for those commuter buses. I'll hope we can find a partridge family of this new Sanctuary that can retrofit it into a touring bus. Probably sell it to some of the high schools around here. They're doing fairly well, you know, for the traveling teams. Anyone else have questions for the crew from Green Mountain Transit? This has been very comprehensive and wide-ranging, but it's nice to know that they're keeping targets and measures. Thank you, John. When do we start paying our fare again, folks? And it'll probably be March 6th, the day after town meeting day. Bart, I want to get your question of thought in. Yeah, you know, I've been contemplating this and, you know, it doesn't really fit in tonight's agenda. But, you know, I appreciate the challenge that public transit is facing both in Green Mountain Transit and nationwide. You know, it might be worth at some point a review. And this may already be in the plan of what's going on with ridership and cost revenues for GMT. Yeah, there is work that's currently going on. There's a study that was included in the T-Build this year, the Transportation Bill, that's looking at how to find local match. And it's very much on people's minds. Good to see you, Bart. It is an invaluable service. I just hope that we could continue the fare-free operation, because these are the type of things that become the backbone of, or should become more of our backbone for our transportation system, rather than creating a whole new fleet of electric cars to supplement the gas cars that we've done for the last 100 odd years. So thank you, folks. Thank you very much. We're going to move on. Thanks, Mike. Oh, good night. Thank you. We're going to pick up with, I believe, its items, I lost my thread here, six, the appropriately titled FTA, title six program update. And you have a draft that was a tenant to your packet, all 50 odd pages, I believe, and 52 pages. Who would like to take us through that? We are going to need to approve this. So we're going to be an MPO action on this. Yes, that's me. I'll just give a quick overview. Hi, everyone. I'm Emma, the communications manager here at the RPC. So as Chris mentioned, you all received the draft 2023 FTA title six program with your packet, as well as a memo describing the program and the updates that were made since this was last prepared and approved way back in 2020. So it's a three-year program. So just as a quick refresher, so everyone's on the same page, title six is a federal law that prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs and activities that receive federal funds. So this particular title six program is required by and prepared for the Federal Transit Administration or FTA. So our FTA funds are largely passed through to Green Mountain Transit, but we're still required to update this program every three years as a recipient of those funds. So even though the FTA program, all 50 some odd pages of it, as Chris mentioned, is pretty transit oriented, it's really specific to the projects that we work on. So since so many of them do have a transit connection. So this is really a CCRPC program and GMT and VTRANS both have their own as well. So just a couple of quick notes about this update process. This program was last updated in 2020, as I mentioned. So through an existing contract that VTRANS has for their own title six program, we were able to work with their consultant who is the consultant GMT uses as well, which was super helpful. He worked with us to update all the information throughout, large updates to the data. And he did multiple reviews as well of the full program to ensure that we're including all the necessary information that FTA requires. So that was really helpful. And so this this three year program reviews things like our title six policy statement, complete procedure. So if someone does have a complaint, what do they do? How do they go about that? It also looks back on our work over the last three years in terms of the projects that we do, the public engagement efforts that we make in our communities and looks at projects with specific outreach to marginalized communities included, including limited English proficient individuals. And it also has a lot of updated data and maps throughout it. So it's a lot of information. And yeah, I'll sort of I'll pause there. So the executive committee at their November first meeting sent this to the board for approval as presented. So following a, I guess, MPO vote, if it is approved at that point, it would be submitted to VTRANS and FTA and uploaded on our website. So I will truly pause there. I'm happy to take any comments or questions if anyone has them. Does anyone have any thoughts immediately for Emma? This was seen at our executive committee and staff had worked on it as she's pointed out to update it from 2020 with the latest and the greatest. And it's an MPO action. So we're going to be looking for votes from all the municipalities VTRANS and I believe Absent fuels core, correct? So anyone questions? If not, I would accept the motion to approve the FTA Title VI program as presented. So moved. Thank you, Elaine. And was that a second, Andy? Yes. Thank you. Any further discussion for folks? Any further questions for Emma? If not, please raise your hand or say aye. In favor? Aye. And anyone opposed or abstaining, please speak up. Thank you, MPO folks and VTRANS. And thank you, Emma. Thanks everyone. Great. We're going to move on now to item seven, which would be the ECOS plan. And where am I? I am completely back up to the top here. ECOS plan update on ECOS place review. Hey, folks, how are you doing tonight? Can you see my shared screen? Yes. Excellent. All right. And can you see, let's swap that. Can you see the presentation view? Yes. Thank you, Elaine. So last two months, we've talked about ECOS prosperity and we've talked about ECOS people tonight. We're going to talk about ECOS place, a lot of big media topics, but I will do my best to move quickly. These are the three themes of the ECOS plan, prosperity people in place. Under place, you'll see we'll be talking about land use, transportation, housing, climate change, and ecological systems, water quality. As a reminder, the second draft of the ECOS plan that you have in your packet, edits have been made to this document related to just data updates, particularly around the enhanced energy plan. So your energy section, the climate change section is going to have a bunch of data updated around that. We also wanted to better address issues related to equity inclusion throughout the entire document. And then we also wanted to address comments from the Long Range Planning Committee and the Planning Advisory Committee. They had commented on a first draft of the plan way back in 2022. And so the draft that we've developed here in 2023 tries to address those comments. And the intent of talking to you folks about these three distinct elements of the ECOS plan this fall is just to give you a general sense of what's been added, what's been deleted, and to provide a forum for folks to ask questions or provide comments. Any questions there? So I've removed a bunch of the information about how we've organized the ECOS plan because I'm hoping you remember it after two months. But to quickly summarize, we're really going to review changes here in two different categories. First category is goals and key issues. And the second category is strategies and actions. And so we have a land use section that is where we have a land use goal. And we talk about specific key issues in the world of land use under that goal. And so there we've reorganized that key issue section to the multiple subtopics just to provide a better readability to that section. We've provided additional context in terms of the history of land use planning in Chittin County and nationally and how that kind of led to suburbanization and led to our current issues with sprawl and that sort of thing. And then we specifically talk about commuting patterns. And one of the things that really struck me in making those last revision was that I think back in 2002 about 75% of Chittin County workers lived in Chittin County and that's now down under 65%. And so pretty clear trend in terms of people commuting into the county from outside to work. There's obviously some pretty big land use implications there and climate implications. There is a new housing goal. And there we talk about a bunch of new data related to homelessness, related to rental vacancy rate, which is very, very low. We talk about short-term rentals and the impact of the housing market. And then we specifically can talk about our building homes campaign, building homes together campaign, building homes together 2.0. And the goal that we've set there is to create 1,000 new housing units per year in Chittin County, 250 of which are especially affordable. We also talk about the Home Act and the still under development for month zoning outlets that we hope will be complete by the time we adopt the plan in 2025. In the transportation section, we've really updated it to reflect the NDP that was passed by the board this past year. We revised data related to transit ridership, vehicle miles traveled and emissions. Any questions there before I move on? Climate goal, we've just really reorganized and expanded to get more specific about the impacts that we'll see here in Chittin County and specifically the impacts on vulnerable populations. In the energy and greenhouse gas and emissions goal and key issues section, we use updated LEAP data, so that updated energy target data that were provided is provided to us by the Department of Public Service. And so we've updated targets related to how many EVs we want to have here by 2050 to meet our state energy goals, how many new heat pumps, how do we want to reduce VMT, that sort of thing. And also revised target for electricity generation within the region. Ecological systems, goals and key issues, again a bunch of reorganization under subtopics and more detail on the impacts of climate change. And more discussion about what the TNDL is and what it means for us and our specific work here at Chittin County in terms of the the road aversion inventories that we do, a miscellaneous roads general permit and some of the work about the quack and the quick on non-regulatory water quality topics. We also talked specifically about the passage of Act 59 last year and the state's conservation goals, the 30 by 30 and 50 by 50 goals, and just provides some context about how our work and our land use workers are going to fit into that goal. Lastly in the infrastructure facilities, a goal and key issues, we just update information on all the public facilities that exist in Chittin County. And then we talked specifically about our broadband efforts to the creation of the Chittin County Communications Union District this past year. Any questions here? Okay, strategies and actions. What are we going to do? So land use strategy has been changed to align with the MTP. The MTP for a while 2019, 2018, 2019 has had a goal of 90% of new development, new housing units in areas planned for growth. The cost plan has been 80%, and so we're just getting into alignment with the MTP now. We've also just really reworded the actions to be much more direct. And we've added some actions related to broadband in our work in terms of the CCUD, CCUD. Housing now has a specific strategy. It used to be underneath land use. So we have its own standalone strategy, and that strategy is really based on that. Building comes together, 2.0 campaign. Joe, go ahead. Taylor, thanks. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but my question about land use was a couple of meetings ago, Charlie talked about the potentially some common land use categories that the RPCs are working through. And I know it's, I think it's a study that's underway. But is that something that you guys are thinking about as part of this plan? And, you know, or is the timing just off to kind of use whatever might come out of that initiative? Good question. Charlie is going to give you the details of that study here under his executive director report in a second. But Joe, I think, you know, we've adjusted our timeline to make sure that we're, we have time to respond to any legislation that's happened this year. And so, you know, the future land use map you see in this plan here, probably will be different when we start the adoption process next fall, if legislation passes. So we, yeah, we've pushed in our timeline to be to, yeah, to be flexible and to react. Okay, thank you. Transportation strategy. Again, based on the MTP, a lot of actions were taken just from the MTP, just to integrate the two plans together. So nothing too, too exciting there. It is a new strategy because transportation used to be under land use just like housing. Same with climate and energy. So we have separate strategy just for that. We've updated our strategy related to greenhouse gas emission and energy reduction targets. I do want to call out that our, we had an energy subcommittee to our long range planning committee this past summer. And one of the things that they, or the actions they've recommended is to recommend the PUC, they reassess the sound rule related to wind generation. They felt really strongly about that. Their, their justification really being that our rules are very restrictive even in comparison to other New England states. And so they're not asking for anything specific, they're just asking for the PUC to reassess what the rule says specifically about sound and about all the data that needs to be collected related to the sound rules. Moving on to water quality. We do make a recommendation about having river corridors be state administered instead of locally administered. So that is a, another maybe mildly controversial recommendation. And we did add an action to, this is a little misnomer of this language here, but to just to bring light to the fact that there is some, now some confusion in the stormwater world where some of our MS4 communities that have an MS4 permit related to their stormwater systems have to do essentially some monitoring of how stormwater is managed on sites, but they don't do the actual permitting that state does. And there's some confusion over that topic. And so our MS4 committee has raised that issue. We wanted to address it in the plan. Lastly, in the ecological systems working land section, just wanted to reference the statewide farm to play plan and the statewide climate action plan, because there's a whole bunch of very specific actions in those plans that are very relevant to Chittenden County that we just want to adopt by reference. Chris, go ahead. Yes, in relation to the water quality state administered river corridor regulation in light of our flooding four months ago, what was the thrust and who was asking for that? Is it the result of not enough local control or too much? So staff is really the one that has proposed such to the LRPC. And so, I think staff's perspective and, you know, having our ear to the ground a little bit in terms of what's happening in Montpelier, you know, the thought is that municipalities haven't really locally adopted river border regulations as in our, I've been asking municipalities to do since about 2012. And so, you know, these areas that are subject to fluvial erosion are really not being protected locally. Got you. All right. So the idea is to get ahead of any hodgepodge of local control or lack of local control along those things. Got you. Really just to recognize the fact too that there hasn't been as much municipal adoption as anticipated 10 years ago, and that if we truly want to protect these areas from the impacts of erosion, there probably needs to be state regulation of this, not local regulation of this specific area. Thank you. Any other questions for me? So I know it's a lot, and so I'll just say that, you know, if you have a half hour of your Thanksgiving holiday that you want to read the ECOS plan, you have it. You have a draft. And if you want to talk to me about any comments, questions you have on that draft, I am more than willing to have a phone conversation, teams meeting, not to any, any which way, you know, through at least the end of November, then the draft goes off the copy editor, and we won't have it for a couple months. We can still talk certainly in January and February, but I'm happy to have those conversations for the rest of the month. Thanks, Chris. Great. And thank you, Taylor. So the three categories again are place and back us up to the other two. Prosperity, people place. Prosperity, people place, the three P's. Three P's. You may see a slightly reorganized ECOS plan the next time you see it next summer. Sure. But we're going to have to fit the subtopics under each of the place, prosperity and people. And again, our target deadline is October or February, October 2024 or February 2025. Good question. It's a moving target. I think now we've somewhere in between. We've officially set June 2025 as the date of adoption. Thank you. Anything else? All right. Thank you. Thank you, Taylor. And we're going to move on to item eight, equity update and Nelson. Hey, it's nice to see you all. Can you all hear me? Okay. Yeah. Okay. I'm actually going to share my screen, even though I'm just doing a normal brief equity update. I figured it might be helpful for you to visualize this instead of me just listing them out. Okay. Nothing major for you all since last time we met. This is just kind of an overview of, you know, my time is split between all of these things. Internally, still working on developing a code of conducts that will come your way in the final will come your way in January, but I'm going to send out a draft to all of you all staff equity advisory committee members to review in the next couple of weeks. I'm we're hoping to partner with Burlington's restorative justice center. I met with that director today to kind of flesh out some more language and process content. Other internal work the equity action plan is still in process. I'm working with an intern on that and staff are going to review that content the week after Thanksgiving. Recently, I've been doing some kind of professional development stuff. I went to the government alliance on race and equity conference, which was virtual and the Northern New England's American Planning Association conference was last week in New Hampshire. Externally, still equity advisory committee meetings are still happening every month. Relationship building meeting with different folks, getting to know people, ECOS plan. I've been working with Taylor and Sarah and Darren and all the other ECOS staff on starting to develop a community engagement plan. So the next equity advisory committee meeting this month will dig into kind of figuring out how they want to be involved in the community engagement for updating that plan. And then starting I'm kind of in conversation with CVOEO, Burlington's RAIB office and a Winooski based group that works with new Americans called Winooski parents and students just kind of starting to figure out ways we could potentially partner with CVOEO would be around housing, Burlington's RAIB office around kind of community engagement and public participation plan. And then Winooski parents and students would be community engagement hopefully with this ECOS plan. So anyways, lots of things that on any given day I'm doing something related to one of these things, but any questions about can you unpack anything in this list on Burlington's RAIB office? Again, I might have missed it. Sorry, no, I shouldn't have put that acronym there. It's the Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Office for the City of Burlington. Oh, okay, thank you. Yeah. I might point out I was pleased and honored to be able to go to an equity advisory committee meeting at the end of October. So I was happy because they were working on the Code of Conduct at that time. And I saw the paper from the previous meeting where if you look in your minutes for this month's packet, you'll see the recap of the whole meeting, but it was nice. I think they were coming up with the ideas and then trying to, you know, narrow it down. But it's an undertaking. And that's the second chapter in the three things that they've been working on. Go ahead, Bard. Chris, I don't know if this makes sense to put this on Anne's radar, as well as mentioned in a couple of venues, what I think is a plausible need to perhaps do a little better with onboarding of new commission members. And I put it, frankly, kind of in the context of recruiting and onboarding people from traditionally underrepresented communities, where perhaps we made it easier to join the commission as a member, you know, in terms of an onboarding plan. And clear it might help with that in terms of recruiting new members of the commission. I don't know if that makes sense. Anne, do you have any comments on this? Yeah, it's definitely come up in multiple settings, both this question of how do we, who gets to be a part of different committees? How do we decide? How do we prioritize if we get to a point where we need to prioritize membership? And we outline a process for that because we don't, we don't really have one right now, at least certainly not for the Equity Advisory Committee. So that's come up and then your onboarding question. Yes, I think as a part of this code of conduct, which is only one piece of onboarding, we'll have to kind of decide what implementation of this looks like. So is there, you know, do we want to kind of revisit this annually when somebody joins a committee or the board? What does the process look like to kind of learn and review and reflect on what's going to be in that code of conduct, whether it's training, signing it, you know, casually reviewing it, whatever that might look like. So if anybody has idea, I mean, a draft will come your way and you'll get to submit comments and feedback that way with, you know, content on a page. But if you have thoughts around that or know of examples from elsewhere that work well, definitely let me know. Well, I was taking that specifically about diversity and code of conduct itself. But if we were trying to recruit somebody who is not adequately familiar, perhaps didn't know what is this Regional Planning Commission, and how would I become comfortable and competent in onboarding as a member of the commission itself? Not about the diversity, equity, inclusion policy, but like, what's this UPWP thing? How would I know what that is? That's, I'm taking content specific to sort of the roles and activities of the commission itself. I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, at some point, maybe putting together like some kind of training, or we talked about like a residence guide at some point, like this kind of graphic booklet that explains in really simple terms what we are, what we do, you know, explains all the jargon and the acronyms and to make it more accessible because it's not right now. Ben. Yeah, during the October 25th meeting, there was some discussion about arriving at some sort of a vote to have an individual from the member or an attendee, one of the groups that individuals, members of the advisory committee to be chosen to get some training and conflict resolution with respect to, you know, handling or to address complaints or issues of discrimination or harassment and the like. Could you elucidate and let us know, tell us a bit more about that? Is that, was that a firm proposal? Yeah. Where is that going? It's not a firm proposal. So this came up in the meeting around this question of like who manages conflict, whether it's in within the equity advisory committee or between staff members or board members. And so an equity advisory committee member throughout the idea of maybe there is kind of a designated individual on the committee or maybe two or three individuals on the committee who are kind of responsible for managing conflict and they could go through some kind of training prior to doing so and then take the lead on that. I don't have a firm answer yet. Then I, that's part of the reason that I met with Rachel Jolly from Burlington's restorative justice center to kind of pick her brain a little bit about that. And I think what's going to end up happening is we will partner with the restorative justice center and use them as an external contact to do that mediation and management work. So it's not happening from if we get to that point. Yeah. How does that fit in with the authority that, for example, the executive director or the chair of the commission has to actually be the point and authorized in as much as, for example, there's federal funding and the like. And therefore responsibilities and authorities are set out for this organization to process such complaints and situations. Yeah, I think for the federally mandated language, like when it reaches that point of, you know, legal harassment or legal discrimination, that process is going to look different than the, you know, the 95% of maybe 99% of the time that it doesn't reach that point. And maybe there is, you know, there is somebody that you report to that is designated to receive complaints, but as far as managing and organizing and a conflict resolution process, when the outcome is not formal suspension or resignation or even formal reprimand, that that process can happen a little bit more. Thank you. Through dialogue. Yeah. Hopefully I'll have clearer answers for you, Ben, by the time we send this draft down. So yeah, I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts. Yeah, I think it was sort of like our Supreme Court new code of ethics, you know, we've got these great ideas and the code of conduct, but we don't yet have a way to enforce it. So this is a work in progress. You're correct, Benjamin. Anything else, Ann Nelson? That's it for me. Okay. So hot off the presses would be item number nine, draft municipal delegation S 100 report and literally hot off the presses. So I'm sure we'll all be interested to hear more about this. Is this Charlie? Yeah, I got this. And I was just going to say goodbye to Elaine, but she's gone. Now, so apologies for the lateness of this getting to you. It just came out to you, I think this morning, Amy. But I don't know. I don't know if you want me to walk you through it. I think maybe first would make sense. I'll just I'll share my screen and yeah, if you want a high spot, I don't think we, you know, I think it's got the four main pieces, but I think you know what they're saying is very good. Yeah, I'll just give you an overview and then if anybody wants to dive deeper, let me know. This is one of the reports in summer studies that S 100 required. And it was required of Vapta to produce this report about the delegate possibilities or a framework for delegating act 250 permits to or the administration back to 50 permits to municipalities. And if you read through the document, you'll see, yes, the legislature asked for that specific thing. And this was really something that particularly the city of Burlington asked the legislature to consider as part of S 100. It was actually in S 100 for a little bit, like actual legislation to allow that delegation. It came out during the process and the study resulted. At some point, it was going to be just a CCRPC required study, but it became all of the RPCs through Vapta, our statewide association. Nonetheless, I have had responsibility for working on this and facilitating this process. And you'll note if you read through it that this has primarily been an interest for our more urban municipalities, Burlington, Winooski, maybe South Burlington, St. Albans City have been the four municipalities that have been working with me on this. And the idea is not exactly what the legislature asked, which is a municipality administering act 250 permits. It's more showing the NRB that the municipality has regulations in place and processes in place that are functionally equivalent to act 250. And therefore they could enter into a delegation agreement with the NRB, where the NRB would review what they have. The RPC would be involved in recommending to the NRB that their regulations are high enough standards, that act 250 probably isn't adding a lot of additional value in that municipality or that portion of the municipality. And so they could enter into this delegation agreement. So that's the major gist of this. And this is a little companion study to the other three studies that are going on around act 250, the designation program, and the future land use mapping that Joe asked about earlier, but that I reviewed with you last month. And frankly, this is maybe somewhat of an alternative if there aren't, if the municipality can't get exemptions through those other legislation doesn't move forward and provide exemptions for those tier one plan growth areas that are being talked about in those other studies. This could be an alternate route for our most sophisticated municipalities to have a route to have delegation from act 250 and get out from under act 250 regulation in their municipality. So that's the gist of this. There's a lot, it's not a real long report, frankly, it's only I think like really substantively six or seven pages. Most of it's about process. We weren't trying to figure out exactly what every regulation lines up with every of the, I think there's 32 criteria and sub criteria in act 250. We weren't trying to go line by line because every town has different regulations in place. And so, but what we were trying to do was kind of outline a process for this happening that would involve the RPC and try to be kind of the highest level of municipal planning and regulation. And sorry, Dana, did you want to jump in? I was just thinking about the UPWP and if housing is going to be a priority in terms of providing technical assistance to municipalities in our next round. Yeah, no, I think that continues to be a priority. Yep. And I think, of course, the priorities are also defined by the towns. So we'll see how many of them we've already had some requests for towns that are working on housing issues or housing needs assessments that we've helped towns with or reviewing housing bylaws, which I think we did for Essex maybe before you left there, right? It was great. Yeah. So yeah, that work is continuing. Yeah. And that could be some of the supportive work that we can help with getting municipality up to this kind of bar. But this is a very intense process, frankly, for a municipality. It's, I'm not sure, the feedback I'm getting from other parts of the state. There aren't a lot of municipalities interested in this level of work to try to get delegation. But we certainly have some here in Chittany County, which is hence why I'm in this position with regards to the study. And I should mention one other thing, which is as part of the charge to do this report, the legislature required us to have a public meeting in every region. And here you are. This is a public meeting in Chittany County on this topic. So appreciate any feedback and taking feedback at least for the next few weeks. I think probably December 11th is probably as far out as could take any comments on this. We have to get this finalized by December 31st. Charlie, do you see this working similar to some of our conformance letters on municipal plans so that we would tell the NRB that Colchester's planning and zoning conforms with the Act 250 criteria that they set out or so. And that we would then be reviewing and signing off on that? Is that where our charge would work? And we'd have to do that maybe yearly or something? Well, I think there would be probably a more intense review than we do for some of those permitting Act 250 or Section 248 right now. Because I think we would have to do a deeper dive into municipal regulations and kind of go criterion by criterion. All 400 pages of their land development regulations. And if the municipality is applying for it, they have a self-interest in showing us where in their regs they feel like they're meeting or exceeding the how well they address the issues compared to Act 250. So I think this can be kind of, it is definitely would be a deeper dive with the municipality and probably much more detailed than our normal two-page conformance letters that we've been doing. Sounds like a lot of work. I'll let Joe get his question in here. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, Charlie, I did have a chance to kind of look through it. And I really like this as just the policy of it. And just from my own experience, on traffic issues at the local level and then going to testify to get an Act 250, it always felt like being tried twice for the same crime and without really adding a lot of extra value maybe. And maybe it is a pretty tough process for a municipality to go through, but it seems like it would be worth it, worth the effort. But I had just a couple of quick, this is maybe down the weeds a little bit, but it noted that RPCs might be designated as an interested party in the local new process. And I was thinking, well, what does that really mean? And is it really necessary? Because it's not like at the local level, you need to be, you need to have party status like an Act 250, right? I think anybody can kind of show up at the local level and provide testimony and challenge things. So did that mean something beyond that? And if it is some sort of special designation, maybe the adjacent communities should have a similar role if it's a regional, really large project where the impacts might spill out over municipal boundaries. Yeah. So that's one and the other one is sort of quick, which is looks like the natural resources board would be sort of the final decision maker on whether or not a municipality is approved for this. And is there any thought about an appeal process to that? If a municipality gets rejected by the natural resources board but feels like, hey, we really did a good job addressing all the 10 criteria, or someone else might even challenge it, they might say, gosh, we don't think the municipality should have been given that delegation. And I'm not sure there should be an appeal process, but it's just something to think about a little bit. And just a couple of comments there. Yeah, thanks for that. And I think that the appeal option we did kind of talk about and obviously the legislature will do what they're going to do. At this point with the municipalities we were working with, I think they kind of, we kind of came to the conclusion like the NRB should kind of own this process for better or worse and be the final decision maker. But that appeal question probably is going to come up. And yeah, I think that's a possibility that there might be an appeal process. And then the interested party thing, I don't think it's so much about like the traditional lack to 50 party status, all that kind of stuff. It's really more about and this is really much more about the rest of the state, because we do substantial regional impact a little differently than the rest of the state, right? Most of the state RPCs have all kinds of thresholds, depending on different kinds of uses, you know, I don't know 100 housing units or 50,000 square foot of retail or something right that triggers statement of regional impact or substantial regional impact. And it was more about just getting notice that there was a project of that scale going through the municipality, because otherwise we don't really see anything about municipal permits or municipal permit applications and wouldn't have an easy way to know that it was going on. Yeah. And maybe so maybe that should apply to adjacent municipalities. Yeah, that's I think that's a friendly amendment. And, you know, and there's a similar issue, I think, I think that we tried to point out in here about, you know, state agencies, like, you know, typically, state agencies were able to comment through Act 250. If Act 250 is not there, you know, but there's an impact on a state highway or a natural resource that DC cares about, how do they hear about it? So I think there is something to think about there. I'm not sure we haven't fully figured out, but yeah, so thank you for that. And the neighboring town is good. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Mayor Lott. Thanks. Just to make sure I'm following, the NRB makes the final decision, but the RPC is facilitating the application process. So the municipality would say, you know, we want to apply for this delegation and probably do most of the work to show what they have in their regs. And the RPC would review it with the municipality and kind of be in partnership going to the NRB of saying the municipality requests and the RPC supports and has reviewed their regs and do believe that they're meeting, you know, similar types of standards as the Act 250 criteria. So it's more of a partnership. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. Yeah, and that really came about, I think mostly from the legislature, you know, I think seemed to want us, when they were talking about it this past, you know, early in 23, seemed to feel more comfortable with having, you know, some other third party in the mix beyond the town and the NRB. And we were kind of the natural kind of party to include in that. And Christine, thank you to Eric for all of his contributions. He's put a lot of effort into this. I'll pass that on. Thank you. Yeah, no, really appreciate it. Any other feedback for me? Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Well, you can keep rolling on the other S 100 reports and then remind us of what we're doing in two weeks on the legislative breakfast on a Tuesday, December 5th. Yeah. Other S 100 reports. The future land use draft. Thank you for your comments last month is out for public review right now. And actually, Taylor, I don't know, while I'm talking, are you able to put that the link to the VAPTA page where that is out there for folks? And we're trying to get comments on the future land use draft report by December 1st. So that's got an earlier timeline. We are awaiting patiently almost the draft reports from active 50 group and the designation study. But there's, if you were to read them side by side, there's slightly different term. Well, no, there's different terminology being used in the three studies. But we're all kind of talking about the same ideas, which is in our most built environment areas. The active 50s call studies calling it tier one. The designation study is calling it, you know, neighborhood areas or build ready areas and we're calling it plan growth areas. But the whole idea is, let's try to get to a place where municipality has decent bylaws and water and sewer that they could get exempt from active 50. And in the active 50 study, you'll see there's more language around what they've been calling tier three, which is the other end of the spectrum, the natural resource areas, and trying to do more to protect those in exchange for this exemption in our more urban areas to promote housing growth. So I'm waiting for those other studies to come out. We'll share those, try to get those out and links to those studies out to the board and alternates as soon as we see them. And to probably to our planning advisory committee as well to the town planners for folks to look at. But I'm still fairly encouraged that this seems to be coming together and folks seem to be wrong in the same direction. I don't know any quick feedback. Sorry, I feel like I've been telling you the same thing every month for six months now. So all right, no questions, no quick reactions there. Well, let me ask the link that was just posted and I try to do the other ones. Was there a future land use map? I was visually quickly scrolling through it looking for a map. There is no map. Okay, we were just trying to get to common terminology and definitions and criteria. I'm used to our town's future land use map, which has the fuzzy colors and the numbers, but they aren't paint by numbers. They're not to be taken literally. But it gets everybody excited. Yeah, our future land use map is over my right shoulder here. And you know, I think this is our map is largely based on your municipal zoning and also where there's infrastructure. So I'm at least not a tailor can argue with me if you want. But I don't think we're anticipating huge changes in our map other than terminology to line up with the consistent terminology. And are you telling? Well, we'll see. We get a super secret, you know, first cut today, PAN did kind of translating our existing future land use map into these new categories. And if there's going to be some geographic areas we're going to have to take a closer look at. But I think generally you're right, Charlie, that that for most of the county, it should be a pretty smooth transition. And we'll probably have to talk to some of this out as a little bit more in detail. Yeah, I think the challenging places and I know you can't see the map really behind me, but the village areas that towns have defined that don't have water and sewer, you know, I think are maybe a little bit of a discussion point for sure that we need to have with some towns. Am I guessing right at the areas that are mostly? I don't want to name names. But yeah, the village areas with maybe with just water or just sewer or neither but planned and how do we quite do it, you know, map future land use areas there. Yeah, that's that's one of my areas of concern. Yeah. So and Chris, to your point, you know, there will be people are going to want to see the map soon. I think the RPCs are kind of wrestling with like, you know, we don't want to waste a lot of time mapping before we kind of get to final definitions and criteria. So we're kind of playing around and doing some iterations right now. But the other big part about this is trying to be as inclusive as possible around the whole state with towns being able to participate, you know, in active 50 exemptions or just participate in having housing growth, right. So yeah, I'm kind of curious to see how it plays out myself, Chris. The sparks will fly when the maps get displayed as always happens. So and and and to be transparent with you all, right, the legislature had their eyes wide open. And, you know, they I think as they did with the energy planning would prefer that we work with our municipalities and our citizenry locally to try to get to good maps rather than trying to do a state map that gets pushed down from the state on to all of us, right. So I think they're strategically being purposeful, like, let's try to do a little bit more bottoms up mapping rather than top down. So something to look forward to. And that's, you know, one of the reasons for sure that we wanted to extend the timeline on doing our ECOS plan. And Joe, this goes back to your question earlier, you know, so that if the legislature does do this, that you then we could have a few months to work with our towns and update the future land use maps to reflect the new legislation. So all right, well, I get legislative breakfast. Yes, I'm going to ask Bard I'm going to ask Bard to be there in my place because I'm going to be out of town. I'm afraid. Oh, thank you. That's right. Bard, congratulations. Thank you. I've won breakfast. Well, you have to speak for your breakfast. Yes. So I'm working on a draft. I was I've got I've tried to boil it down. Last year we had like 12 topics or something that we tried to review with them and it was just too much. So let me run this value and see how it sounds. I do have this kind of housing planning and permitting reform as one major issue. You know, we know these studies are coming. We know there's draft legislation being drafted. So that's one. Number two is climate resilience. Taylor kind of touched on this in his report about the ECOS plan. There's definitely going to be a bill about how do we do a better job as a state, you know, not just being prepared, but protecting people and property from flood damage in the future. That is going to be around, at least part of it is going to be around river corridor and floodplain regulation and getting more consistent statewide. Switching gears. A third one we've had the last couple of years been transit financing. The legislature asked GMT and Clay, I don't know if you want to jump in here, but or asked the Vermont Public Transit Association VPTA. I have that right to come back with recommendations on the transit financing. That is correct. And so part of the T bill this year was for a study to be looking at non federal match for local transit agencies. And so they're going to have a report for the legislature. One of the things that they're finding, which I think probably is not too surprising, is that the biggest gaps is in the GMT urban area. And so I think that that's going to highlight really the need for a different mechanism here in Chinden County. Congratulations to us all. Now, that should be interesting. Yeah. And yeah, that's a tough political conversation in the in the state house, right? Because it's so Chinden County centric and also popular. There is no doubt that looking at some of the discussions that we had last year, for example, the reason why folks did not want to add funds for extending zero fare was the concern about having folks outside of Chinden County subsidizing, you know, zero fare for for Chinden County. Yep. The the next one is also a municipal financing one. I think Michael, you brought this up, local options tax. This has been something VLCT has been asking for us to make it easier for municipalities to be able to apply the local options tax. And I'm not sure exactly what that looks like. If it's with some, I think maybe it's really asking the state to just allow municipalities to do that without having to go through individual state approval town by town every time. And then the fifth major, well, I don't know how major it is, but policy area legislation is opening meaning law. And this is maybe a little bit more of a small thing, but you know, this meeting, for instance, you know, is you're all virtual. And our ability to do this kind of meeting is going to expire early in 24. So there's kind of a discussion to can we keep extending this at least for organizations or committees that, you know, maybe aren't the select boards or the school boards, but you know, at least our committees and things like that where it's much easier to get people together virtually. And then so that was it. I just had those five kind of legislative topics. I don't know if anybody has any other one that's kind of things should we should emphasize. Let us let us know or any of the Is there I don't just maybe too late, maybe too big, but with all the public safety, the you know, like downtown Burlington is in pretty rough shape. And I know there are other areas as well. Is there anything in the legislative breakfast that we might be able to touch on that with? What? Yeah, I don't I have not heard too much about what might be getting pursued any but if there might be a way to get that conversation going. Yeah, gotcha. And I'm sorry, Jeff, Christine, did you want to jump on that? Yeah, I was just going to share that VLCT is is doing some effort around that to make some recommendations for public safety. I I find it harder to make a connection to the RPC's work in that area. Yeah. Jeff, we cannot forget, especially since a good chunk of our delegation is new, that we have to continue to beat the drum, that we can't have things that come after us to try to level the playing field between Northwest Vermont and the rest of the state, by trying to put impediments in the way of our producing the resources that are needed to carry the rest of the state. We just we have so many new members. And Chittenden County, and Chittenden County, Envy is all throughout parts of the legislature. And that, you know, obviously, when we were talking about how they don't want to subsidize zero fairs in Chittenden County, we have to make sure that, you know, public transit fairs in Chittenden County, we have to make sure that if you do stuff, which inhibits our ability to do what we need to do to keep the economy regenerating itself and, yes, growing, that it's to the detriment of the rest of the state. We just can't. These are our advocates. We have to arm them with the things that they need to do to address that issue when it comes up in their committees. And we are not doing ourselves a service if we do not equip them to do that. Maybe we don't have to do it at the breakfast. We have to mention it. And then we have to give them something that arms them from the resource perspective. Otherwise, we'll just be carving up a smaller overall pie between the same number of people. Yep. Yeah, thanks, Jeff. Yeah, we have been trying to make that point year after year. But we there's quite a quite a few new legislators turn over. And it's just a natural thing that flows out of people in the rest of the state. Well, Chittenden County gets all the Chittenden County gets all the veggie applications. Chittenden County gets all the the HUD money. Chittenden County gets all this. Chittenden County gets all that. And the fact of the matter is, the rest of the state hasn't even recovered from the recession in the late 2000s. And if it wasn't for Chittenden County generating the resources, we'd all be more up for and dividing up a much smaller pie. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for that. Any other thoughts? And I'm working on a presentation. I'll share, at least with the exec committee, we don't have a meeting before, before the breakfast, but I'll share with the exec committee members to take a look at before that that morning. Even though we can't have a meeting, but hopefully that will work. Charlie, I'm thinking that that part is contextual. Yep. Just as a context, you need just need to know this is our, this is a county, this is the region. This is what it contributes. It's disproportionately large. And we cannot forget that. And we have to have our representatives who are down there representing us make sure that they at least push back somewhat when these things come up. Yeah, and at least for the things that we're involved with, like the transportation funding and things like that, it's actually, I think there's kind of a PR issue, right? Like when there's a project in Chittenden County, it ends up in the media, but we don't actually get more than our fair share. Like we're not getting more than 25% of your transportation funding here. So, yeah, Jeff, I'll try to work on that, at least provide that context. It's a good point. And Emma is reminding folks to register for the legislative breakfast if you haven't. Thank you, Emma. And did I miss another comment there? No, okay. Yeah, Taylor was just reminding me that we have data in the SEDS that we can use to make that point, Jeff. Any other thoughts for the breakfast? We did ask a bunch of legislators about doing a different time of day. So apologies for doing first thing in the morning, but it was pretty overwhelming response from the legislators. And I think it's just they don't have other things scheduled at that time. So it turned out to be the easiest or best time for them, or at least ones that responded. We will try to make a little more of a push. Chris heads up. It seemed we got a little better response when we did letters that actually got mail to them. So probably going to ask you to sign some letters to go out to them. Not a problem. It would be great, especially if you can fill the room. It was a good venue. We aren't meeting on the 20th. The website for CCRPC, the front page says there's a meeting, but then when you drill down on it, it says no meeting on December 20th. So this is our next meeting is the breakfast on Tuesday morning. And then we jump until January 17th. That's right. Yep. And Emma just caught that. And she'll update that calendar. I saw her. She's probably already doing it. It's only on the face page. And then I do have one other topic to get your feedback. There's another RPC, two rivers out of Quiche, which is in the White River Junction area. They are involved in some litigation around Act 250. And particularly one criterion, 9L, which is kind of the strip development criterion. And they're in litigation. I don't know who's the appellant, frankly, at this point, but I'll say the developer's counsel is kind of arguing that 9L should not even really be a criterion. It's too vague. And so it would kind of really take one of the tools out of the tool box in terms of regulating development and trying to prevent a sprawl and strip development, or at least discourage it. They're asking if at no cost to us whether we would be willing to kind of sign on in support of their legal position in that. So sorry to not have sent you anything, but I just got this request a couple of days ago verbally. And I guess I got an email. But does anybody have an objection to us saying, yeah, you should try to preserve the authority that's in 9L there? I do. You think we should not support that? No, I think the existing language, I mean, it should be supported. Okay. And I was involved early on in this project and testimony before the Act 250 commission. And I think that the town has appealed the district commission's decision. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's a town or an applicant. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it's really complicated. Yeah, it's very nuanced and I don't want to get into the legal arguments because, I mean, we would just circle around. But if you're okay, we'll just at least add our name as supporting what Two Rivers is doing. Or if there's no objection. Okay. Thank you for that. Thank Chris. That's all I have for my report. And thank you for that feedback. I appreciate it. Well, great. And as I said, our next meeting is the December 5th breakfast. And then we jump to January 17th. They won't be at the 5th. So you'll see item 11, all your committee liaison activities and reports are in your packet. Other than that, I will ask for a move to adjourn. Garrett, thank you. And a second. Thank you, Jeff. And then I will bid you all happy holidays. And I will hope to see you in January. Happy holidays. Hope to see you at the breakfast. Thank you. All right. Good night.