 Okay, so good evening. Sorry about the delay today is July 25, 2022. And thank you for joining us for this, this special meeting of the Burlington City Council the time is 630. For those community members that are watching we have a brief, but important agenda. And this is how the order will go after calling the meeting to order and adopting our agenda will have an executive session regarding the BPO a contract. Once we're out of executive session, as with all public meetings will have a public forum and community members are welcome and encouraged to participate. The public forum will have one item on on our deliberative agenda and that is the resolution ratification of the tentative agreement and authorization to execute collective bargaining agreement between the city of Burlington and the BPO a. And then after this vote, we will adjourn our meeting. So we'll begin our meeting this evening with a motion to adopt the agenda. Councilor hightower. Move to adopt the agenda. Councilor hightower is there a second to that motion. Seconded by Councilor Bergman is there any discussion on the motion to adopt our agenda. Seeing none. All those in favor of the motion please say aye. All those opposed, please say no. We have an agenda. That was unanimous. The second item is 2.01 which is a communication with an executive expected executive session. And that is regarding collective bargaining with the BPO a before we go, we, before we make motions to go into executive session. I would move to the administration or council if they feel that there's any way if there's anything that you wanted to say to the public by way of an update or any information. Okay, thank you. So with that we'll go into the first motion to go into executive session. Councillor carpenter. I would move that the council find that premature general public knowledge and information concerning labor relations agreements with employees would currently place the city at a substantial disadvantage with such negotiations. Thank you Councillor carpenter. Is a second to that motion. Seconded by Councilor Barlow. Any discussion on the motion. All those in favor of the motion please say aye. Aye. Opposed please say no. That motion passes and to the second motion Councillor carpenter. I would move based on that finding moves that the council go into executive session to receive confidential in updates on labor relations agreements with employees according to one VSA 313 a one B. Thank you Councillor carpenter. Seconded by Council seconded counts by Councilor Berkman and this executive and part of the motion is the executive session will include the mayor, Mayor staff attorney John Maitland HR director Karen derpy CAO Catherine Shad city attorney, Jared Pelerin. All those in favor of the motion please say aye. Any opposed please say no. That motion passes and we will go into executive session based on those motions. It was sort of difficult to anticipate exactly how long this will take the agenda called for an hour and a half we don't I don't know that it will actually take that long. I think we'll come back to the agenda as soon as we're able to we will come back to open session. Thanks. And the next item on our agenda is item 3.0 one which is the public forum. Before we we have one person who has signed up remotely to speak in public forum. That is Jane Nodell. And the next person I'm not going to go on and sign into zoom we do have others that are connected is do you see Jane Nodell on on zoom. Okay, so we'll wait for a second and see if she comes on and there are no speakers in con choice. So going once going twice doesn't appear as though Jane is on zoom so we'll close the public forum at 720 and we will go on to our deliberative agenda. There's only one item on the deliberative agenda it's item 4.01 which is a resolution ratification of the tentative agreement and authorization to execute the collective bargaining agreement between the city of Burlington and the BPO a July 1 2022 to June 30 2025. If I could have a motion on that Councillor Shannon. Thank you President Paul. I moved to waive the reading and adopt the resolution and ask for the floor back briefly after a second. Great. Thanks. Thank you. Councillor Shannon is there a second to that motion. Seconded by Councillor Barlow. Councillor Shannon you have the floor. Thank you President Paul. I just want to briefly thank our negotiating team, including our HR director Karen Durfee, our CAO Catherine Chad, City Attorney Jared Pellerin, the mayor, and especially John Maitland who really led this charge and I think really moved this in the direction that the citizens of Burlington as well as the City Council have been hoping to go in. I just want to know I also want to thank the BPO a for their cooperation in our efforts to make changes and and move issues forward for the benefit of Burlingtonians. There's more work to do and I think that we're all committed to doing that and I also want to recognize and appreciate my colleagues here at the Council table and at the Board of Finance who have gone through really a very rigorous process to understand this contract to understand what's in it, what is not in it, why and and how how we're moving forward, why we're moving forward and it has been a really rigorous process for this Council. And I think everybody who has participated in this, who has asked questions, who has challenged really deserves the respect for all of their efforts. So I thank my colleagues. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Are there other Councillors that wish to, Councillor Hightower? Great, yes. Thank you also to our bargaining team. I think that of course this contract doesn't include everything that I want. I hear that's the way negotiating is supposed to work. But I think more importantly, maybe it doesn't have everything that we need to restore community trust. So I'm personally committing to this being the start of something as Councillor Bergman has said many times and committing to doing more work and also working, especially with the administration and HR director Karen Durfee and her capable next steps and making sure that that work is also done. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Hightower. Councillor Bergman. Well, I want to add my voice to the thanks to, of course, the BPOA who negotiated in good faith but to our team who spent hours with me. And I appreciate the work from the mayor down, well, and all, not down, but down on to all the other people who spent some time with me. Because we've got a function which is not a rubber stamp. And so I'm appreciative of taking the hours that we did to make sure that I could make sure that I was not just rubber stamping something. I think that this process reveals that we still have work to do with the process itself. And I have communicated that and the details on that going forward. And I believe that I have gotten the commitment of the administration to do that. I believe that this process was better than in years past. So I want to acknowledge that I do not think it was good enough. And I believe that we can and we will do better. I also believe that as Councillor Hightower said, that there is a commitment to continuing the hard work. This is a long march that we are on. And this is one step on that. And I have heard from the administration a willingness to walk with us on that. And we did not get everything that we asked for, of course, that is bargaining as well as the political nature of political bodies like ours. So I look forward to the next few years because this is just one piece of public safety. And the public safety questions hang over us tonight as I think all of us are aware of. My ward has gotten hit significantly in the last couple of weeks. My neighborhood where I pass every day has been hit hard. So, you know, this contract is a piece, but it is only one piece of the transformation that we need to make. Let me just, I mean, I got a laundry list, but I won't go through it. I just want to say that we have gun control legislation that the people of Burlington passed overwhelmingly and has been languishing in the State House. Some things that may have, I don't know the details in terms of the domestic violence incident, but that should help in those and they are languishing. We need our partners to stand with us to protect the people of Burlington, to protect the people of the State of Vermont. I look forward to working with the administration. I look forward to working with the BPOA. I look forward to working with all you so that we can do this complex work. No silver bullets to use a bad metaphor, but it's really true. And I will be voting yes on this contract. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. I see Councillor McKee. Please go ahead. Thank you, President Paul. And I just want to extend my thanks as well to the bargaining team. This is not a perfect contract by any stretch, but we have made some progress. And I'm certainly committed to making sure that we move forward with this other CNA recommendations that we have yet to address that are very important and that we need to move forward on quickly. So I'm committed to doing that work over the next several months and hope to find willing partners and the acting chief and the BPOA and the administration to ensure that we're making these changes to restore trust within the community. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor McKee. Are there any other councillors? Councillor Freeman, please go ahead. Thank you, President Paul. I just wanted to speak quickly. I think I might likely be the only no vote tonight. So I just wanted to speak quickly on that. You know, I can't go into specifics at this point, but I agree with other councillors points around there being some discernible improvements with the contract. I think there are just some points that don't meet the threshold for some of the main things that I was particularly concerned about. I did want to also, as many have extend gratitude to the bargaining team. This was a hard thing to do. I personally asked a lot of questions and put forward a lot of recommendations and was able to work with them really easily and I really appreciated that. I agree with Councillor Bergman that there were some other process points that I think can be approved. I think especially going forward for me, wondering about how to bring in the public more. I think that was something that became very evident towards, you know, sort of this last final stretch of it is, you know, how do we actually get feedback in real time, given that it's really the complications around it being an executive bargaining. Process. So that was just something that I was trying to think about and wondering about how to be creative about going forward. But yeah, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Freeman. Are there any other councillors that you want? Yes. It doesn't appear as though there's other councillors, so we'll go to the mayor. Thank you, President Paul. So I first just want to clarify for folks who are watching that might find the conversation so far a little bit confusing. There's been reference to it. Our collective bargaining contracts are a little different than just about anything we do. Else we do in this table where because of the kind of codified collective bargaining process until a contract is ratified, its terms are not supposed to become public. And while I am encouraged by what my colleagues at the table have already said and think we're on the cusp of doing that, everyone is speaking, respecting that and avoiding the details. I will say that my office will, first of all, we will be posting the contract upon its approval on board docs and my office is working to put out a summary of some of the major points of it later on tonight if in fact there is an affirmative vote. It's long been a real priority of this administration to attempt to negotiate our collective bargaining contracts at the bargaining table, get resolution of them there as opposed to having contracts resolved through a binding arbitration process, which is a right that the city has, is a right that our bargaining units have, but it's one that we have really sought to avoid. I do believe many past contracts were resolved this way. It's sort of before my time. I can't speak to the details, but I'll say if this contract is approved tonight it will be the 11th straight contract spanning three different bargaining sessions where we've been able to do that. We've been able to achieve that goal, to get to a negotiated outcome that both sides feel good enough to ratify and put their approval behind. And we will be working to make that complete and secure the firefighters agreement if possible in the coming months, which would be the final contract of this bargaining round. I must say going into this process, into this round, I had real concerns that we would not be able to achieve that with the police contract given the challenges that we are seeing in public safety, given the many concerns that have been at a, certainly a national level, have been articulated about police union contracts and rightful concern that some of those systematic problems were reflected in Burlington's contract. So that was, I thought we really had the possibility going into this process of ending up in a protracted dispute. Fortunately, I believe everyone involved recognized that that would be extraordinarily damaging and problematic in the Burlington context right now at a time when we are dramatically down in the number of officers we have at a time when we are seeking to move forward aggressively to rebuild the department. And at a time when we are facing, I think certainly from my perspective, a greater level of public safety challenge than at any point in the last decade, and at a time when there is a need to move forward on numerous police accountability measures. Everyone recognized that and when I, everyone, I certainly mean the Burlington Police Officer Association, the administration and, and the council. And as a result, it appears we are on the cusp of approving a contract that will work very much hand-in-hand with the rebuilding plan budget that the council approved last month that will give Chief Murad and the rest of the country. So the leadership team at the, at the Burlington Police Department, the tools that they need to move affirmatively towards rebuilding the department and that does as will be shown momentarily make important advancements in numerous areas of the contract language, as well as give the city the ability to consider further, further policy changes and further reform work in the future. All in all, if, if we do in fact have the ratification of this tonight, I think it's a major step forward for the city and I appreciate the partnership of this council. Thank you Mayor Weinberger and thank you so much to all councillors for your thoughtful comments this evening and all the work that we have all done to bring forward insightful questions during this process. Are there other, any other councillors who have any comments before we go to a vote? Oh, Councillor Bergman. I just want to thank you, Councillor, President Paul, because you gave us the time to do that and I really appreciate that. So I think it is worth saying thank you. Oh, well, thank you. That's very kind of you. Thank you. Seeing no other comments, we have a motion, we have a second, so we'll go to a vote and just once again the motion is to ratify the tentative agreement and the authorization to execute the collective bargaining agreement between the City of Burlington and the BPOA for the next three years starting, well actually starting on July 1 of 2022 and going to June 30 of 2025. If the clerk could please call the roll. Councillor Barlow. Yes. Councillor Bergman. Yes. Councillor Carpenter. Yes. Councillor Jang. Yes. Councillor Freeman. No. Councillor Hanson. Yes. Councillor Hightower. Yes. Councillor McGee. Yes. Councillor Shannon. Yes. Councillor Traverse. Yes. City Council President Paul. Yes. Ten ayes, one nay, one absent. So the motion passes. Would like to, I'd also like to add my thanks to the City Bargaining Team and the BPOA for their bargaining efforts resulting in this three-year contract. So that completes our deliberative agenda and our meeting. Given that I just asked for a motion to adjourn. So moved by Councillor Bergman and seconded by Councillor Carpenter. All those in favor of the motion to adjourn please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? We are adjourned at 7.38. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. Enjoy the rest of your month.