 We're looking for the facilitators to take two minutes maximum, give us the nutshell of what the conversation was, and the four priorities. Remember though, everybody listening? Remember, nothing is lost. We're building a bit of a pyramid here. We started last month with a lot of brainstormed ideas. We focused those brainstorms into these concentrated conversations. We're still brainstorming. There's a lot of mixed-up thinking going on as we look at this. A lot of chaos in it. That's okay. The next stage is to take the priorities from tonight, line them up, look at the granular stuff that didn't make it into that priority, and how things were said in all the different rooms that mean something important for us to remember. Line those up to bring those back on the 7th, either here or some other building in town. We'll do a lot of mourning on this. We hope you'll come back, line up, make choices in these ideas for the hard priorities for action that will look to the city, will look to the existing nonprofits, and will look to what needs to happen in terms of citizen engagement and leadership to drive the work forward. So thank you all for being here. I want to start real quick, and we'll start with emergency planning and the warning system with Christine Halifax. I was up here. So we definitely had Sarah's words bringing in our mind about how we need to be open to doing things differently, and we had to work as one team. We had a really good conversation, and what was most gratifying is that the folks who were interested in this topic were really focused on solutions of what we can do right now. Here's a flavor of what we talked about. We had three sort of name buckets and underneath it, so number one was adequate warning and notice so people can help each other in businesses. One of our main ideas was coordinate and mobilize volunteer responses ahead of time. Have a trained group of volunteers with a paid person who can help and get notification out. We talked about the critical way of getting notification in various ways. Leveraging systems already in place. Think meals on wheels. All of us who have school-aged children get those calls from Libby Bond Steel about all the updates. How can we leverage systems like that? We talked about having a siren, which could also be good for other crises like fires. And also, there was a really big focus on the next bucket, which was accessibility of info and notifications. I knew that word was going to get me. Greater specifics in what action to take for what emergency. So resources and info is ready to go before an event strikes. What can we do to plan now so that when a crisis strikes, we have the resources to communicate with people in a way that's accessible to all with handouts, making sure that they are available to everybody. Also, we talked about Vermont Alert. We also talked about more frequent communication. And we wanted to think a lot about elderly populations with the door-to-door work. Also, people experiencing homelessness and how to have a really robust system to support them. The last bucket is having dedicated resources with professional support with training and finances is critical. So folks may remember CAN, re-envigorating or evolving CAN, which was really dividing our neighborhoods into 26 communities, and then having some really hyper-geotargeted local information to people so that instead of giving broad alerts, people may have gotten that might not be relevant if you live on Berlin Street versus Elm Street, but creating really geotargeted, specific, actionable information for people. The other idea which was great was pivoting city resources who maybe do with the parks or the trees to have them pivot into emergency personnel who could go door-to-door and perhaps evacuate folks on Elm Street. The overarching theme was needing to educate, practice, and get more connected to bring everyone along. I really liked our group. We were pretty jazzed. Thank you. They were quite wordy, though. Okay, let's go to the next group. Are we aware of our food systems and food security? If that wasn't a message. Oh, it's called. All right. So I had a chance to facilitate the group on food systems and food security. We came up with a few ideas to bring to all of you this evening. The first is a short-term idea to put a Montpelier liaison on the Farm to Plate Steering Committee to incorporate longer-term food resilience and feeding ourselves into our local city planning processes. The second is to support the Feast Program in the short term with more money and resources and in the long term to identify a permanent location for a permanent city farm. The next one is to create a public media campaign to tell the stories of what's happened to our farmers and how vulnerable they are in disasters to raise awareness and raise donations across the state. And then finally, we had a political one starting at Grassroots Political Campaign to change our state's agricultural budget with an eye and an emphasis toward small-scale community-based farm operations that await for... A leadership for recovery and resilience. Hi. We had an excellent conversation on leadership, and I think it really starts with the idea... First of all, I'm showing up. Thank all of you for being leaders and for being here tonight. We talked about the idea that leadership is really a reflection of our values and that processes like this can help us clarify our values and what are our share values and we shouldn't take for granted that we know what they are, that we should continue the conversation and figure out what it is that we believe and what we want to stand up for and that the leadership will come from that. The one thing we did agree on, though, a number one kind of value is an idea of colossal inclusion, meaning that everybody needs to be a part of this process and everybody's voice needs to be heard. In terms of specific action steps for leadership, the kind of leadership that we're going to meet moving on to the future, there was real interest in the creation of a non-governmental hub of leadership that would really take two tracks. One, the short-term recovery. What are the resources available to everyone that needs help right now in kind of navigating that? With the expectation that short-term is two to three years, right? And then the other track would be a long-term vision towards resiliency, so that there would be this one entity that would be responsible outside of the city that would remember working collaboratively to move those two tracks forward. Another action that we had was really fostering and empowering the things that worked, things like neighborhood connections or mutual aid societies. And then the last thing was just really leadership is going to require coordinated communication so that there's a single story that we're all apart. Thanks. Like health and well-being, Joe Ramon? So we looked at what community is, and we started with the definition that well-being and health is creating personal attributes within the individual and conditions within the community that promote well-being. Generally, looking at community connections, love, compassion, empathy, the more of that, the more we will be well. We came up with three priorities. One was housing. Short-term, nimble, quick homes for all before winter. That would take a real concentration, but we can do it. The longer term is more housing that everybody eventually has housing and with the spectrum of accessibility. Second priority, mental health. Recognizing and understanding mental health, the trauma that we all are either affected by personally or among our friends and family. And being educated and knowing the services is a lot that's going on and we want to keep that up for the long term. And the first responders are doing a great job. And then for long-term mental health, we want to create more third, they call it third spaces, where peers and people can go to connect in all areas, in all parts of the people in Montpelier and the surrounding communities. And our last priority was big. It had to do with water, air, and we want our community detoxified. Cleaning, the short-term is cleaning. Testing, becoming aware as a community and individuals on how to do things, not just, I do one way, you do the other, but that there's a standard. And the long-term is that we work with the Department of Health to set up clear goals and standards for testing our buildings, our homes, and our streets. And resilience. Well, thank you, Paul, and good evening, everyone. In our group, we talked a lot about some specific ideas on how to bring financing to the challenges that we're going to face. But ultimately, we came up with sort of two broad areas of consensus. One was on simply quantifying the cost of the flooding. And I think of that, or we thought about in both the recovery aspect, which was more immediate, and then the resiliency aspect of it, which was more long-term. And obviously, some of that work is being done at the state level, but thinking about how can that work be done at the local level, and coming up with a big dollar amount in terms of the quantification we think will help mobilize efforts to achieve that big, audacious fall that potentially we established for ourselves. So both that recovery and that resiliency, understanding that one is much quicker than the other, but that both are important to quantify and to respond to. And then on the financing side, thinking about opportunities for advocacy both at the federal level for more funds for the state and for the city. Thinking of advocacy with FEMA so that there's more flexibility in the way that a federal disaster money is going to be used, both for cities but also for individuals. And then advocacy for the state level as well, that funds that have already been allocated for certain projects or certain programs potentially be reallocated to flood recovery and flood resilience. And then the potential for additional revenues, whether through some sort of financing mechanism like bonding or other revenues that have come into the state, thinking about state level addition as well. So those are the big, big broad themes of our discussion. The river corridor, Alyssa Sherry. Okay, so we, our conversation was very broad, very much like our watershed, I would say. It ranged from understanding the data, what we should expect from the future with rainfall and climate change to where our flood plains are and what that means for flooding, to other models from wet areas like the Netherlands and learning from those models. To living with the river and looking at natural options related to giving the river some more room to move around so that the water would be absorbed, to taking a regional approach to looking at the watershed. And we've talked about engineering options as well related to removing or adding dams or other engineering structures. We talked about economic incentives and giving folks incentives to create areas where perhaps on farms where the water would be able to be used to seep into the ground and leaving those spaces open and undeveloped or untouched. And we talked about looking at considering how to fund the actions we need to take, which will take short-term and long-term planning. But our top priority that we kept coming back to was how do we slow the river down and looking at short and long-term ways of doing that from wetlands to plantings to buyouts to removing concrete to being very strategic about the most important short-term and long-term options. We talked about a lot of things supporting downtowns There's a lot of things we need to do today and there's a lot of things we need to do over the next several years. We tried to kind of prioritize the short-term. The short-term is a little different than the way Ben defined it. Our short-term is really neat now, the next few weeks, the next few months and what we need to do in the longer term, which is going to take obviously more time. The priorities the group came up with were looking at organizational structures to add capacity like hired staff and harnessing all the volunteer power that we have in the community and where it's needed now. So trying to look at that structure and organizations like Monthly Alive and try to figure out how to put that staffing and volunteer spirits into place. The other short-term priority is organizing events and promotions in the downtown is kind of like a large, there's a lot of ideas around this from art projects to Oktoberfest to just celebrating our downtown once again, even though we're not fully open. So as we're going through this phase from where we're at right now to start to bring people back downtown and celebrate through music and events on the street. The longer-term priorities are looking at kind of the built environment and hardening buildings, elevating, mitigation and adaptation of the built environment and buildings downtown. And then finally, long-term priority is finding and advocating for more grant funding for downtown in general, which is inclusive of businesses and property owners and whatnot. Recognizing that loans was loudly clear that it was not going to be a solution for many of our business owners that they needed much more funding and so to kind of look into and investigate ways that we can provide additional funding so they don't have such a burden. That's it. City Infrastructure, John Popan. We had a robust discussion. Thank you to our team for that lively discussion and to our resource team members. This is not, I would say, an order of priority, but instead from sort of specific to broad ideas to address city infrastructure. You know, we have an eye-opening moment where someone from the city described how close the water came to coming over Dog River Road and infiltrating the wastewater treatment plant. And so that goes as a priority for the group is it would be catastrophic for our city financially and environmentally if water was to get over to that wastewater treatment plant. We've got to take steps to really protect the wastewater treatment plant out there on Dog River Road. Number two, we talked about the dam. Wrightsville and the job that Wrightsville did and there is a sense that Wrightsville can actually even do a better job to protect bomb pillar. Some of that is about operations of the dam. Some of that is about investments in turbines to allow for more flow. It's also about managing the watershed above the dam to really just sort of slow the flow of water into that dam as well. So that's number two. Number three was about sort of the green infrastructure in downtown Montpelier. I think what really helped encapsulate that for folks was the description of the amount of water flowing in the Wienewski and the North Branch. Those two flows were simply more than the river could handle after the confluence. Obviously that's something that we have to figure out how to allow that river to have more room and more capacity to move when it comes together at that confluence here in Montpelier. Finally, we talked about re-envisioning our downtown, rethinking our downtown. There was some reference to the conversation we had maybe six or seven years ago in the net zero competition and those visions for our city. We need to have, pull those plans back and have that kind of conversation about re-envisioning Montpelier. And then finally, and I know some of these overlap with some of the other conversations tonight, but governance really came up as a topic and was prioritized. The government we have now is not probably equipped to deal with the circumstances we face now. So we need an agile governance that can adapt and it's probably not just about the city of Montpelier. That's about working across the lines. It's about working as a region and working with the state to really adapt to new circumstances. So thank you. Lauren Howard on Action in the Face of Climate Change. This is so exciting. So our group of solving the climate crisis, but we did come out with some really clear ideas, some big picture, but a lot of things that we can act on immediately. So four buckets that we identified. One, we talked about the city declaring a climate emergency. We thought this could be an organizing and education tool and also could be a place where we come together to identify urgent steps that the city could take and that the city could advocate that the state could take things like holding fossil fuel companies accountable for paying for the cleanup. We also talked about potentially creating a community carbon footprint assessment, a goal that we could build together as a community that would again be a way to educate and engage people and help us track progress and give everybody a stake and a way to participate in our climate action. And then we talked about our two biggest sources of carbon pollution in Vermont, which are transportation and our heating sector. And in transportation, we talked about some really immediate things we could take like painting our streets to make them more bike and pedestrian friendly, you know, up to state advocacy for improving our public transit system. So we have a suite of ideas there. And then finally, we were talking about how do we help people transition to non fossil fuel heating systems, especially people rebuilding now, incentive programs, education, regulations, expanding district heat. So, you know, how can we immediately be helping people rebuild and then also helping people longer term transition out of fossil fuel heating? Thanks. A huge round of applause for all these facilities and the work is going to be done tomorrow. It wasn't just a second. I want everybody to be thinking towards the seventh, but first I want to give Mark, Sam, Vance the opportunity to speak for just a second about what's going on with all of you. I can't be hoping you can hear me. I am here on behalf of the community Montpelier hub, the flood response hub downtown. Our whole team. Up here is thank you and ask for your help. So, time to thank everyone. Thank you for all you did. We were just sending you places. You did. Thanks very much. And we need your help. We're still here. We've been there every day since the flood happened and we're still open and we're looking for guidance on what we can do in the future to help in that long term recovery. Let us know what we can do. We're there at 12th Main Street and we're also online. We have a new resource for communication. Montpelierhub.com. You can volunteer there. You can request help. You can let us know what you need and how we can do it. But we've got so much energy. We've created something beautiful. Let's keep it going together. Thank you. This is Kate Eglis. Kate Eglis. The city of Montpelier for hosting this community dialogue. Sergeant and armed speaker of the house, Pro Tem, all of them were behind this and gave us the building. Orca for their tech support. Where's Chris? Thank you. Starting topics for conversation. We got a ton of work on the table. We learned so much tonight. There's a lot of detail in this that we're going to need to sit through and then try to aggregate, cluster, analyze some of the things that are partial priorities and extended priorities that maybe can be seen in a cohesive, more of a platform position. So we're going to do some of that work. But thank you to them. Thanks to the resource folks who came and the facilitators who lent their expertise through the topics tonight. And especially to say, thanks, go to all of you. Each person who's here is here because you're part of our democracy. Because you stand for something. That this experiment that we live in, of democracy, is still real here. You know, the Calvin Fulmage quote says, if it's gone everywhere else in the world, we'll lend them some, right? Let's keep that in our hearts. Let's not pretend that doesn't mean something to them all. So thank you for being on the line. It's easy in desperate times to lose faith that talking and planning and this kind of work in a community means it. Truth is the help comes to those who help themselves. Those who line up with common purpose and set collective direction succeed. Those who line up and advocate and push and drive powerful community responses to challenges win. We cannot wait here to be rescued by somebody else. Some say Montpelier is never going to be the same. And it won't. Let's recognize that many people are suffering right now in our community because of the truth. But we also need to know that we're going to go back better. That this dynamic place with its amazing and talented people, so many of, some of them are here, some of them are here right now. But this place and these people will build a better future. We're not going to be defeated as a community. We will recover. We will find creative new ways to be resilient in the face of the climate change era that we live in right now. It's going to take time, grit, suffering and sacrifices. But we can only will one direction. And that's the rebirth and renewal of our community. That's the task for our generation. It's always the task and we do it together. So thank you for being here and being part of it. Look to see you at the next event and let's line up for action. Thank you so much.