 Welcome to ongoing election coverage from town meeting television. This is one of many forums we are bringing in advance of local elections and town meeting on the first Tuesday in March, March 1st, 2022. Town meeting is traditionally where voters weigh in on local government representation, municipal budgets, school budgets, and local ballot items. All candidates on the ballot are invited to participate in town meeting television election forums. Town meeting television election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with the issues that shape your community. If you're watching this live, we welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. And you can watch town meeting television on your Comcast channel 1087, Burlington telecom channel 17 and 217, as well as online at town meeting televisions YouTube page. My name is Elaine Haney and I'm here this evening to go over the FY23 budget for the city of Winooski with Mayor Christine Lott and the interim manager, Wendy Harrison. Thank you for hosting us this evening and thank you to town meeting TV as always. So tonight we are presenting Winooski's proposed municipal budget for FY23, fiscal year 23, which voters will see on their ballot this town meeting day. So I wanna start with what you get for your tax dollars in Winooski. And this table shows a breakdown of how much the average Winooski home paid over the past year for each of our municipal services. Police tends to be the highest expense since we staffed that department 24 seven. These numbers also account for revenue allocated to specific use. So for example, the $6 video Brian Community Center building at the bottom, we offset some of the costs of operating that building with the rent that's collected. So the average bill would have been about $2,600 this past year for the next year FY23. It's going up about $75 a year, which we project to be a 2.89% increase to the tax rate. We are also proposing a 4.5% increase to the water and wastewater utility rates as well, which is about $39 for the average house in Winooski over last year. So I wanted to get those important numbers out there quickly at the outset. For folks who really wanna dig in, you can visit the city website, WinooskiVT.gov slash FY23 for our full budget and I will work through the highlights here. So we like to start by grounding everything in Winooski's community values of being a small and connected city that's welcoming to newcomers. It is a place where we can all participate in the success of our families, our local government and our community. Those values drove a community conversation that created a strategic vision. So we use these sort of these four areas that residents want us to invest in in Winooski to drive our local policies and our municipal budget and decision making. Over the past several years, a lot of effort went into community listening and strategic planning for how to get from that vision to the future that folks wanna see here. We have a number of planning documents that guide these efforts. For example, we have a housing needs assessment and a transportation master plan that prioritize our most needed housing and street improvements. We have an eight year master plan that outlines high level goals across all of this. And so we use this to make sure it's like our guiding light to make sure the decisions are supporting that community vision. Also wanna note that voters supported some really big projects to achieve this vision over the last several years, including the Myers pool rebuild and Main Street revitalization project. So with these commitments in place, we haven't been focusing on big new projects in Winooski, we've really been working to carry out our existing vision and commitments and focus our new efforts on affordability and equity. So a few small highlights of progress over the past year. We've been engaged in a really large collaborative effort with partners to respond to the pandemic and different needs across our community. Our Main Street and downtown projects are moving forward to bring more economic opportunity and housing to the city. We've expanded youth programming and reopened the pool. Very exciting this summer. And we're in the midst of an equity audit to help identify where to prioritize changes and resources in the future. We'll also have our first all resident election this town meeting day where voters supported and the state supported us to allow all residents of Winooski regardless of citizenship status to vote in our local elections. I'm gonna turn it to Wendy now to speak a little bit to our budget goals. Thank you, Mayor. As part of the preparation of the budget, the staff talks to the council and gets overall guidance before the budget is prepared. And that guidance this year was to maintain current staffing and services. So no new big asks or requirements and to keep the tax rate increased below the cost of living adjustment, also known as COLA. Now our largest challenge this year rather than COVID was the CPI. And we still won't know the most relevant CPI for the city until after the budget is presented. So the CPI when we began was at 6% and that is used to determine the increase in salaries and supplies. And when salaries go up, there are benefits that increase at the same rate. We had to pick a number to prepare the budget. And so the number that we chose was 3.4% as a cost of living increase. So we'll have some work to do if the COLA comes in higher than that but we will be able to manage without throughout. The grand list growth, we assumed a 0.08% increase. And that brings without changing anything else that brings $48,760 of new tax revenue. And just for the public's knowledge, a penny raises $50,689. That's a good number to know when you're looking at increases in tax rate. Health insurance is always a challenge. We were fortunate this past year that it will be decreasing 7% for the calendar year of 2022. But because we budget for a fiscal year which overlaps two calendar years, we're projecting a 10% increase for 2023. And we expect health insurance to not go down again. We do have the local option tax which is a relatively new tax. And that was voted by the residents, by the voters of Winooski on themselves. They chose to pay this tax. And that has performed very well and we're budgeting 450,000 which mitigates some of the increase in property taxes. So what is included in this budget proposal? As we said, the council goal was to continue the existing staff size and services. And services have improved over the last few years. And so one of the most important programs that has been initiated recently is the grant funded equity and inclusion efforts and federally funded youth programming. So what those are made up of is the working communities challenge grant and Winooski was one of very few communities to get that grant. And it speaks highly of the city. And then ESSER, those are funds that are through the school district, their federal relief funds from COVID. And the school district has contracted essentially with the city to provide programming for youth who have been impacted by COVID. This next summer we'll be bringing staffing of the pool in-house. The Y is not able to provide that anymore. So that's a change that is coming. The school district chose to continue the school resource officer for another year. So we do have that as part of our police department budget. And then we have regular capital improvements, annual street resurfacing, sidewalk maintenance. And we'll talk about that later on in the presentation. So the specifics on the amounts of items that are increasing in the budget. The city has planned for a number of years to have an annual increase to funding its capital improvement program, which is very important. So that annual 5% increase is in this budget. It's $23,759. There are also incremental increases that have happened over the past few years that are scheduled to continue, which are to fund the Winooski Valley Parks District and town meeting TV, because we want you to be successful. And that is $2,000 of an increase. Something new this year was to share the revenue from the local options taxes with downtown Winooski. And the thought process behind that was because downtown Winooski serves and promotes the businesses. And the local option tax is from the businesses, essentially, that there's a connection there and that they'll be able to do their job better with a portion of this tax revenue. This year, that will be $22,500. And then something that came upon us late in the process was a mandatory assessment for the transit service provided by Green Mountain Transit. And that's a 16% increase. That was more than we have had in the past. Hopefully it won't continue at that level. That was responsible for the largest single increase, which is $35,800. And then the pool services that I spoke of earlier, increased costs to have those as staffers is $25,000. And that's in the budget. And there are offsetting revenues to that expense. Thanks for that breakdown, Wendy. And here is just a sort of a visual aid of our expense and revenue numbers. So these charts are showing how costs break down across the general fund budget. And I wanna reiterate what you were getting at, Wendy, that in large part due to inflation and the consumer price index, expenses are up 6%. So the budget, the expenses have grown 6%, but we're able to increase the tax rate by less than 3% because we've been able to increase non-tax revenue through grants and through local options tax. And here you can see expenses by type, just visually showing how so much of what the city provides is staff. And so salaries, benefits, as those increase, that drives increasing the tax rate. And then finally, we have our utility funds, our water and wastewater rates. So for a number of years, these utility rates were stagnant and did not keep up with operating and capital costs. A few years ago, we put a plan in place to do some rate increases over several years to get those funds back to being balanced so we can keep up with not just operations, but be able to invest in our aging water infrastructure. We had another pipe issue just yesterday over on East Allen Street. We wanna have the resources to be able to avoid those incidents and keep our infrastructure in good shape. So this four and a half percent rate increase is part of that plan. And in 2024 or FY24, we should have these funds balanced and then see smaller increases moving forward because we'll be able to keep up with operations and capital. So here's some of our tax rate history. And I wanna show this to illustrate that I often hear about how high the taxes are in East Allen Street. And on average, our rate increases, over the last eight years you see here, our rate increase has been about 2% a year, which is pretty in line with inflation and cost of living adjustments. That is as costs go up, as cost of living increases, so do the costs that the city is paying for with tax revenue. So that is why there is an increase every year because of the costs to keep doing what we're doing, increases every year. But while some of these spikes have been larger, you see in FY19 and 20, that's when voters supported the pool and Main Street. So there were some higher needs there, but on average, our rate increase has been about 2%. It has been our goal to be at a sustainable level like that and just kind of keeping up with COLA. Unfortunately, this year with that being so high, it does necessitate a larger increase. I also wanna share, Wendy mentioned that a penny raise, that's only about $50,000 in new tax revenue. That's one employee salary. So a one cent raise to our rate doesn't buy a lot. If you compare us to our neighboring communities that are much larger, a one cent increase could get four or five times as much money to pay for services. So whatever we wanna add a new program or new facilities, it just costs us more because there are a few of us contributing to our shared pot of money. This is one reason why we wanna see some amount of steady growth and development in the city is when we increase overall the number of people with households paying into taxes, it spreads the cost out more across us. Not to mention that we have a housing shortage in our area. It's another factor. Mayor Lott, if I could pop in for just to let folks know if you're watching us live, you can call in with questions at 802-862-3966. Thank you for that. So this chart here is our top 10 largest taxpayers. Just wanted to share, we found this interesting at our council meeting. Combined, they pay about 48% of the total revenue collected. So enough about just taxes and tax rates, but what is coming up next year? We have a couple of emerging issues that are pretty important. So obviously we're gonna have to continue responding to the pandemic needs there continue to change. You're gonna see an item on the ballot for a bond or a new ladder truck for our fire department. The main street revitalization construction should begin this summer. We are working on a city-wide traffic calming policy and a parking study. I wanna talk a little bit about ARPA and TIF fund planning, some financial acronyms there, and then finally a state mandated city-wide reappraisal. So starting with the fire truck bond vote, you're gonna see an ask on the ballot for voter approval to take on debt up to a little over a million dollars to replace our aging ladder truck. The current truck that the department is using is nearly 25 years old, and it doesn't provide adequate reach to a lot of buildings in the city. We need to replace it anyhow, and this is an opportunity to do a replacement with a more versatile piece of equipment that will better serve the community's needs. So we actually can sell our old ladder truck and one of our engines to help subsidize the purchase of this new truck, and we'll be able to operate with two trucks instead of three. Staffing has been a challenge in fire services, not just in Winooski, but across the region to state. And so this will let us operate safely with a reduced amount of staff as well. There's a two-year backlog on orders for this kind of equipment. And so we would be asking for voter approval for a bond, but we wouldn't take that on right away. This would just allow us to place the order. And then so hopefully in 2024, we could get that new equipment here. And at that time, we would take on the payment and debt. The Main Street Violation Project, we've been talking about this for several years. We are finally almost, we're in like final design and right-of-way acquisitions. And hopefully we are on track to start construction in 2022. Just some designs here to refresh folks' memories about what that project entails. It goes from the bridge north of the rotary, from the top of the bridge, all the way to the town line at Colchester, adding in a bike lane on the uphill side, moving some of the parking around, putting in a tree belt and making some really great improvements to that important corridor in our city. We have initially voters approved a $23 million bond for this project. Costs are down to 21 million and we've received 4.7 million in grants to further reduce the burden to taxpayers. Wendy mentioned our annual street resurfacing earlier. This map shows our five-year plan. We do have some degraded street conditions in Lewinowski and this is the current schedule for how we hope to get caught up there. So you can see this summer, we plan to do work over around Florida, Gale, the east side of I-89. And then you can see in 2023, we plan to do some streets over here and then the next following years through 2026. And we also have some sidewalk plans. We are in this budget planning to add a sidewalk on Manso Street and that street currently has no sidewalk and it is a goal to have at least one sidewalk on every street in the city. So ARPA and TIFF, financial decisions coming up for 2024, it's gonna be a big year. So we have been awarded $2.2 million in COVID relief funding from the American Rescue Plan Act. We're working to launch some community listening sessions over the next several weeks and then a survey in March to learn how residents have been impacted by the pandemic and what gaps you hope we could address with these funds. It is kind of one-time money that we hope we can use to spur long-term improvements in addition to just addressing immediate concerns that COVID have caused. So that money has to be kind of allocated by 2024. In 2024, we also expect to pay off the debt that was used to revitalize our downtown for. So 20 years ago, voters supported taking on substantial debt to invest in our downtown with the hope that growth in the downtown would generate new tax revenue to mitigate increasing costs and help with our financial sustainability. When we pay that, sorry. So the tax revenue we've been collecting from the downtown for the past 20 years has been going to pay off that debt. When we finally pay off that debt in 2024, that revenue will start coming into our general fund. And so we also wanna have some community conversation about what long-term financial sustainability looks like so we can direct that money into having long-term sustainability here in the new state. So at the same time in 2024, we also have some staff positions that are being funded through temporary dollars, the working communities challenge grant, the ESSER funding coming through the school district, as well as some allocation from the TIP district. And so here is a picture of the complete city staffing and I've highlighted the positions that have limited funding. So when we think about long-term financial planning and use of new revenue, we also need to be thinking about the value of these positions and how we might sustain them moving forward. Last, our state mandated reappraisal. Just want to let folks know we have our local assessor contracted to do this work for us. It should begin this summer. So we're using someone local. New assessments would be logged in 2024 and there will be more information shared out as we get closer to beginning this process. But I just want to make it clear that a reappraisal does not equal an increase to your tax bill. So when you vote at town meeting day, you vote for a budget, a total amount of money, and that gets distributed across everyone's tax bills. So the amount of money we're collecting doesn't change. If your home value goes up relative to the average home in Winooski, your share could be higher, your bill could go up. If your home value goes down compared to the average in Winooski, your bill could go down. And if you have an average home, you will not see any change. So just want to like allay some fears there. We are not expecting to have massive changes in what's, you should not be expecting to see something like what happened in Burlington is what I'm sort of getting at. We're using a local assessor. We will have, you'll have access. You'll be able to talk to us about it and we will be getting that information out closer to the summer. So going back to the basics, again, this is our proposed budget amounts, our 2.89% projected increase, $75 for the average home in Winooski. That's $18.84 a quarter. Reminder, while the tax rate increases 2.89%, the actual budget is going up 6%. So I just want to say thank you to staff for hard work in making that happen and also acknowledge how the grant funding we have sought has helped and the local options tax that voters supported has also helped to mitigate costs. So for town meeting day, we've got our city and school budgets. There are two council seats open for two year terms as well as two school board seats. I think we have seven candidates, which you should hear more from via town meeting TV in the near future. And then finally that bond vote for the fire truck. So as I mentioned earlier in this presentation, this election is our first to allow all resident voting where all legal residents of Winooski regardless of their citizenship status may vote in local elections. For voter registration form, you can visit the city clerk's office Monday through Friday, 730 a.m. to 430 p.m. Or visit our website for full details on how to vote in Winooski. That's WinooskiVT.gov slash vote. And in the state of Vermont, you can register right up until the day of the election. So do it sooner. But if you don't, you can still vote on town meeting day. We will also be able to distribute absentee ballots for those who wanna vote early or vote by mail. The deadline to make a request is February 25th. And you can vote early in person at city hall beginning February night. And then town meeting day, our election is at the Winooski Senior Center. That's 123 Barlow Street next to the St. Stephen's Church. Open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. And we will be enforcing a mask mandate and social distancing. And here is how to reach us if you have questions, if you're watching this after the fact and not able to call in live right now. All right. Thank you so much, Mayor Lott and Wendy Harrison for presenting the Winooski FY23 General Fund Budget. If you have any questions, you can call at 802-862-3966. And while we're waiting to see if anyone calls, I do have one question for you. In terms of the overall effect on the taxpayer, what will that impact be for the average homeowner in Winooski? So the average homeowner will see a $75 increase on the municipal tax bill. And I should be clear for folks that your property taxes include both a municipal and a school bill. So this is just the municipal side of things. This is not the state education piece. And then for water and wastewater bills for your utility bill, about $39 for the average household in Winooski will be the increase. And when you refer to the average household, what is the average household in Winooski for context? Yeah, that would be assessed at $225,000. And as a reminder, we're talking about your assessed value, what you see on your property tax bill. That is obviously not the market value of your home. That's why we've been mandated by the state to do a reappraisal. Right, right. Well, thank you very much, both of you for your presentation this evening. And thank you for tuning in to town meeting television, ongoing coverage of local community candidates, budget and ballot items. You can find this and more forums at www.ch17.tv. Don't forget to vote on or before the first Tuesday in March, town meeting day, March 1st, 2022. Early voting by mail is available by contacting your town clerk's office. Polls will also be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thank you very much for watching.