 Being six o'clock on Monday, October the 15th, 2018, we'll call the order of the City of Winooski regular city council meeting. Last that everybody first, please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Nicole Mace. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, first up tonight is gender review. This is an opportunity for council to make any adjustments to tonight's agenda. We have a relatively in comparison to past year, really, compact agenda, so I think there's a lot to move. In terms of the sheer cap about it, I was out there. Out there, I knocked on this time. Okay, any items for gender review? Okay, so seeing none, we'll move on to public comment. Put a comment, it's an opportunity for members of the public to address the council on anything that's not on tonight's agenda. You'll find tonight's agenda in the back. We also appreciate everybody who's visiting this evening, taking the time to sign in on your way out. If you didn't on your way in, we appreciate that. It's a nice way for us to log everybody in attendance. Make sure we spell your name right in the minutes. Any items for public comment this evening? So seeing and hearing none, we'll move on to tonight's consent agenda. We have two items on tonight's consent agenda. First up, we have the city council minutes from October 1st, 2018. And we also have the approval of warrant for the payroll period from 9, 23, 18, and October the 6th, 2018, in the words ending for October the 12th, 2018. Sure. So I will take separate motions in regards to the agenda splitting off item A first. Any questions or concerns on behalf of the council? Any questions or concerns on behalf of the public? The move that we approve the minutes. Second. Motion by Eric, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please. Aye. Aye. Those opposed? Those abstaining? Yes. Motion carries. I now maintain a motion for approval of the warrants, the warrants item B. So moved. Second. Motion by Nicole, second by Eric. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. The agenda is approved. That's presented. City update. Great, thank you. So number of updates tonight. First, we wanna start by thinking the Winooski Natural Resources Conservation District for the stormwater murals that went in last week about rethinking runoff. So we have two murals, one down by Chicks Market and one on Winooski Falls Way. I wanna call out special thanks to the artists, Holly Greenleaf, Rachel Fernando, and Stephen Welter. This is really a public education campaign to educate our residents about not putting things down the storm drains. And they're also very cool in getting lots of social media attention, Paul would want me to say. So thank you to that organization and those artists. Our auditors are here this week in this room. Angela put together 75 requested documents in advance of them showing up today. And really has done a great job pulling that together, middle of budget season as well. So thank you, Angela, for that. And thank you to Sullivan and Powers for being here. The police department purchased a solar powered radar speed detection system with the governor's highway funds that people will now see up on the top of Main Street. It's part of our attempt, again, at place making along Main Street getting people to slow down. One of the new innovations with that radar screen is that it's Bluetooth enabled. So we'll actually be able to pull the data out and understand what's happening over the hours and days, which is great for our planning purposes. We want to welcome Julie Montanera, as the new youth services coordinator at the library. She started last Thursday and is fantastic and we're excited to have her join the team. Also wanted to mention that last Thursday we had a fire at the school and probably lots of the parents watching got the notification about this. It was actually a burned out motor in one of the roof units. It took quite a while to find it. But really special thanks to Chief Audie and the superintendent and the building staff for managing it really well and St. Mike's for showing up and the Thrive's team as well for managing an evacuation after school hours but with a lot of humans still in the building and then finding the problem and rectifying it quickly. Minimal damage to the building, which is great. Last week we had our housing policy panel discussion, which is great. We had five professionals from around the region talking to us about housing policy options. If people missed it, it is broadcast on CCTV and on the CCTV website as well as linked off of our Facebook page. They shared a lot of interesting insights and information. Just a reminder that CCRPC and the County Regional Planning Commission is also hosting a convening of all the housing commissions in the area on October 29th for discussion specifically focused on affordable housing trust funds, which is one of the things we're considering. So if people are interested in that, that's Monday, October 29th from six to eight at the CCRPC offices on at 110 West Canal Street. And of course, VHFA is holding their housing conference from November 13th to 14th as we've talked about. I'm gonna hold on the item A of our agenda. Just a reminder, October 27th is Halloween here in Winooski. So we will be having a, it is, Halloween at Winooski on the 27th. The community services party at the second community room, pumpkins in the rotary, haunted mill, all sorts of fun things happening on the 27th. And then for you all, I just wanted to give you a quick briefing that next council meeting on November 5th, we are going to do a capital improvement plan preview for you in advance of the budget process. John and his team have been putting a lot of work into data collection and it's a lot to take in all at once. So we don't wanna do it just during the budget process, but bring to you some of the data we've been looking at, as well as start giving you the debt service modeling potential for Main Street and the pool. So heads up that that's coming. And then finally, we will need a meeting at the end of November to contemplate the agreements around the global settlement in the TIF district. So I'm looking at November 26th and 27th. So I, or sometime at the end of November. So I will be sending around a doodle poll to schedule that. That's all I have. Thank you. Thank you very much. Go to council reports. Let's start by saying thank you to you, Jesse, and to Heather and Robert and the whole housing commission for the housing panel we had here was really informative and really great. And I think the CCTV was here, right? So we'll have video from that. Yep, it's up all the time. For people who didn't get a chance to watch that. It's some really great discussion about housing in our city. And then the second thing to just update you all on, bring to your attention. I don't know if you've seen some prior information on it that's been put out, but David Blair's store bought a bunch of old train cars and has been restoring them and is interested in discussions in the state around. We're turning some sort of commuter rail to certain spots, obviously far down the road. But one of those discussions is on a potential Essex to Burlington rail with the hope of going through a new ski. It's very simplistic for a very complex discussion, but they are doing tours of some operational carts that are cars, whatever they are. They have up in Montpelier. So I said that I'd pass around info to everybody here if people are interested in going down and taking a tour and getting a little demo. Just let me know when I can connect you. I'm gonna be going down one of the nights, so yeah, let me know. Great, thank you. We'll talk about season's greetings and pumpkin gathering and what else, what everybody can do for that in a few minutes because I think that's the one that's the most time on since we last saw each other. Again, just reiteration of the Kudos to Housing Commission and the work to bring the panel together. I thought it was a great discussion, good turnout by the panel and individuals and really encourage folks to watch the recording if at all possible. Planning Commission met last Thursday and continued the working plan. I think Eric did a really great job in the last round of highlighting the discussion that they're having. They were, one thing I just wanna bring to folks' attention that's been a consistent discussion point there is we passed an interim vision statement that was really supposed to act as the pillar of our thinking or the directional statement of how we were gonna focus our work and investments. I think there's been some really good conversations about some of the language in that vision statement that's come up and my consistent sort of bleachercy comment to them is that vision statement was done as a stop gap to the master plan. The master plan really in a lot of ways replaces the vision statement at some point even though the master plan's being developed around the concept in bends of the vision statement. So I just wanna make council kind of globally aware is I do think that there's gonna be some offerings of suggestions for some tweaks to that. That I think the conversations have actually pointed out a lot of really good things where we maybe had some contradictory language in there as they're kind of grappled on trying to put details into it. So I just wanted to highlight that and flag that for folks as that conversation moves forward. And then I just want to reiterate that November the 13th is housing 101 and 102 and a focus on health policy for the statewide housing conference and the full conference is on the 14th. There's still registration spots available but they do expect that it's gonna sell out relatively soon so I hope everybody can make that. I met with Jesse to review the proposal from the trainer on equity and how that Hal and I worked with individuals so expect us in the memo from staff on safe, healthy, connected people that will have a solid plan to review in November or December but making progress on that project. So I also attended the housing series. It was great. Thanks again. I had a meeting with Jesse to go into a deeper preview of the budgeting process to be prepared for that for my first go around. And also we discussed the TIF district to make sure that I have a solid understanding of that too as we move into budget discussions. The planning commission met on Thursday and looked at some preliminary data on like road conditions in the city. So Public Works is working on putting together, I guess this is probably part of the Kevillian Provements Plan work, reading of where road conditions are and then how they will be addressed in the future to have a proactive approach there. And the commission is providing input on what, like what are, as a community, what our expectation should be of our road conditions to drive that process. We also, the commission decided to move forward with doing social media posting of updates on their work. So like a monthly, very factual, here's what we've been working on. And want to do that in conjunction with me is the council liaison. So we'll put forth those updates together. And if other commissions are interested in doing so, we'd be happy to share the conversation we've had. Okay, that concludes council reports. We'll move on to tonight's regular agenda items. First up tonight, we have something that I think everybody recognizes as really significant, both in an Onuski level and quite frankly, as a region and as a state as well. After 50 years plus of public service, one Mr. Clembusnett has decided to, number one, leave our Ferris City, which is heartbreaking in a number of levels, but number two also has decided to step down as our representative for Onuski and the House of Representatives. One of many roles Clembusnett has played from a leadership perspective, a community service perspective in our state. Clembusnett, we've said a couple of things to you while you weren't here, so now we can say some nice stuff to your face. It's all been good up to now. So we won't go away from that. But I think this body really wanted to just take a moment and reflect on just how much you've given as an individual and how much your family sacrificed over the years to let you play the role that you've played in our community and it's been huge. It's rare probably that you can say that somebody's role and impact can't be overstated, but I think there are a lot of things that we do as public servants that never get recognition and the things that you've accomplished for this community in the city. There are a lot of people that will never know the long list of things and the hours that you spent to make sure they were accomplished, but I do wanna point out there are several very, very visible ones that people can walk around, put their feet on, put their hands on, including the downtown and leaving the community through the state's largest redevelopment project in its history and the complexity of that and the time and hours that it's spent, that was spent doing that. But prior to all that kind of big stuff, 40 plus other years of service leading up to that, where you prepared yourself to be in that type of position to lead the community in the way that you did. And I just personally just wanna reflect that I hope that you're able to sit here tonight and when you submitted your letters to the legislature, let them know that you'd be stepping down with a tremendous sense of accomplishment and pride and the work and contributions that you gave to the city of Onuski. So I can't say enough about the example you've set to people who are interested in being public servants and for people who are just interested in being good humans and going to things and volunteering. You know, you were just as likely to be seen carrying a pumpkin as you were swinging a gavel. So that's what it's about, right? Leadership doesn't work. So we can't thank you enough and we have a resolution working on that. I won't say we've passed yet, we gotta vote. So, you know, we've gotta invite the three of us from there too. But I'll take a second now and read that resolution. Anything else from council? Thank you for your years of service. It's been a real pleasure to work with you and learn from you. Thank you. And we're gonna ask you to come on up. So we're missing a member tonight and we have a nice little plaque in production. So you don't get to take this home tonight. But we do wanna perform on an official rating for you. So resolution recognizing the Klem-Bissenat service to Onuski. Whereas the city of Onuski is proud to acknowledge the legacy of community service and leadership of Klem-Bissenat. And whereas Representative Bissenat has served Onuski community for over 55 years in various capacities. And whereas Representative Bissenat has served the residents of Onuski since the age of 18. Well, hold on a second. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's starting with the Onuski JCs. And whereas Representative Bissenat served in rules such as Model City Recreation Committee and the Onuski Housing Authority and the Onuski Fire Department. And whereas the residents of Onuski repeatedly elected Representative Bissenat to serve as city councilor, mayor and state representative of the Vermont Legislature. And whereas Representative Bissenat led the city of Onuski's largest redevelopment project to reconstruct the city's downtown in the early 2000s in a project that has revitalized the cities of vitality and vibrancy. And whereas Representative Bissenat not only served as neighbors in formal capacities, but also through dedicated investments of time, volunteer efforts for events and causes throughout the city. Now, therefore, be it resolved, the residents of Onuski have immeasurably benefited from a representative Bissenat's contributions to the city. And we acknowledge the sacrifices and support of contributions of representative Bissenat's family that allowed him to serve the residents of Onuski so faithfully. And we acknowledge that this city is not only losing a deeply committed leader, but also a beloved neighbor and community member. This will be effective. This will be Clean Bissenat Day in the city of Onuski. Thank you. I'm here in council for this, to Jesse. You're right, without the support of my family, I would not have been successful. The downtown was the highlight of my years as mayor. And I've taken a lot of, or I've been given a lot of credit for that. But without the visions of young Bill Nekat, we would never have this downtown that we have today. And the leadership of Jerry Myers, our city manager, and Steve Palmer, who was my city engineer at the time, for these two gentlemen to get the project to follow through on time and within budget. And when I got called down to Montpelier shortly after Governor Douglas became governor, he called me aside and he said, I am not going to have another Fletcher Allen on my watch. And I said, Governor, I don't want one either. But I didn't know at the time how much he was going to put us through the ringers. I know there were days when Bill and I came back, I was ready to throw the towel in. And Bill would say, we'll have another plane to give him tomorrow. And the next morning, Bill would have another scenario and we'd go back down. But over the course of the couple of years that we went through this, Bill would not give up. And I had to support Deputy Mayor Michael Bryan who was my right hand when I couldn't make it to a meeting. He would adjust his schedule during the day to leave work and participate where I couldn't. And I had a tremendous council who supported the downtown. We had some tough decisions and there were times where we left at midnight wondering if we were making the right decisions. But Bill hired the best group of consultants in this state on redevelopment. And with all of their help, we became very successful. And thank you. We've benefited and are so grateful for all the work that went into that. And in public service, nobody ever questions any decisions that you make. Or the way you go through anything. So we appreciate your fortitude in saying it for a... Thank you very much and thanks to the family members here. Sharon and Mitch, you guys had probably a lot of nights where he was given back to this community. And we're sure appreciative of that sacrifice that you all made too. So thank you very much. Thank you. Hey. It's just like every other item though. We also get to open up for public comment. In public comment this evening, the comments from the public. Well deserved, Clem. You are a pillar of this community. I always have been. I think the first time I met you was when I was playing CYO basketball and we were on the fritz. Coaches. We don't want to go that far back. But well deserved. Everything you've done for this community. I think you mentioned a lot of things, but a lot of things like sets that go unnoticed of how much time and effort you put into it. And I can't overemphasize enough. Clem's leadership is mayor. Made downtown happen. Billy Niket, all the support folks, the council were all instrumental. But without Clem's leadership, it wouldn't have happened. So me, we owe a huge debt of thanks to Clem for downtown as well as, in cheese, school ward, city council, mayor, representative. They don't let me go on this. They don't let me never was. That's right, you don't let me do that. Which still gets talked about. We had to discuss it in planning commission the other day. But anyway, Clem, congratulations. We hate to see you go and best of luck to you. The public comment? Best of luck in the next chapter too. Thank you. Oh by the way, our house is right across from the town hall. Oh. I don't know if that's a sign. Look out. No, you don't have to do it in the afternoons or your letters or whatever. You're asking about operations. Have you guys thought about this downtown? We don't want too much competition out there now. So with that council, I would entertain a motion for approval of the resolution acknowledging Clem's Senate service to the city of Gnusky. Don't move. Motion by Nicole seconded by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Aye. I almost forgot to vote. And those opposed? Motion carries. Congratulations. Thank you. Okay, item B is the event permit for the Festival of Pumpkins, N-City event. So thankfully for all of us, well, sadly, Heather is holding the flu. So she's keeping her germs to herself, which we appreciate. Otherwise, she would be presenting this. This is the Festival of the Pumpkins event permit. We have reviewed it with staff, of course, are in great support of this happening. It happens regularly. And we are recommending that we waive the Rotary Park fee as part of this event permit. Totally agree. This is a legacy event in the staple. 16th or 18th year, I think it's 18th year of this event. And last, yesterday, we picked around 900 and some of Pumpkin's Mitch. Yeah, so, and beautiful pumpkins this year. Last year, it was a little spotty out there. It was a little wet, but beautiful pumpkins, really nice, nice size, good quality. When you spend enough time with Sally, you know how to gauge Pumpkin's quality. So, but she's also feeling able tonight too, and sent her regrets for not being able to join. But thanks for all the work to support this and to help it grow from the city's perspective and to the event that it is. Questions or concerns from council? Any questions or concerns from the public? Yes. Right, this energy that's been Sally has not been contained in the leadership role of bringing provisions to make sure that the festival continues. Yeah, so we as a city are engaging in that conversation. And also, I believe the downtown group too, we've at least had initial conversations about the larger decision was to sort of hit pause on that and let this year's event occur and then get together with the organizers, which is primarily the season greetings part, seasons greetings group committee about what the future can hold. And I'll just say personally, I know just as a volunteer for it, there's a lot of intent to ensure it continues to happen. But just something that if folks wanna reach out to us into seasons greetings, if they have interest in participating and seeing it continue, that's something that we would love to hear from people about. And I think too very important if folks at home can't see it that pumpkin carving is gonna take place on Saturday and Sunday this year at the community center or excuse me at the senior center. So be sure to block off some time. Is it 10 a.m.? It's nine to six. Nine to six, okay. So nine to six on Saturday and then nine a.m. until they're all carved on Sunday. And even if you're not a good carver or some people to help lift things around, it's a big deal to have some extra hands and help. Any questions or concerns from the council? Any questions or concerns from the public? So singing here now to entertain a motion for approval for the event permit related to the festival pumpkins in the city Halloween event. So moved. Motion by Christine, second by Eric. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those if they would please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. I'm C, downtown when we ski. Hi, I'm Sweeney, my name is the vice chair. Page three there is our treasurer and then there are five other members of our board. And we're just pleased to be in front of you today to give an update, especially with new speaking to members. And it's that slide show that's gonna play in the background that you don't have to pay attention to, but there are fun smiling people in there. Yeah, so really we just want to come in and make sure we had an opportunity to get in front of the newly formed board. And we're gonna start by just doing a little bit of history on what is downtown when you ski. Perfect timing going up right after Clem is honored. You know, we are here because the downtown is a designated downtown that will require my state to have a nonprofit board associated with that. So we're lucky enough to be that board at this time. The organization started around in the beginning of 2001 when the downtown was formed. And originally it was built around this four pillar approach that the state had adopted, which was design, promotion, economic vitality and organization. So the board had always kind of used those guiding pillars to drive the organization. And it went through a bunch of different iterations of people and format and responsibility. One of the main things it's always done is report. Works with the city to report back to the state about certain economic development numbers and downtown related numbers, I guess. And we were previously known as the Winooski Community Partnership. It's always been downtown Winooski Inc doing business as WCV ditched the WCV last year I think. And just went back to our roots of downtown Winooski. Some of the other recent changes, we had a staff position for a couple of years as an executive director that was a new position, something the organization hadn't had before. We gave that a go and due to finances had to scrap it and kind of take a look at the organization and see how we wanted to move forward sustainably. So for the past year, it's been just... It's January. Yeah, an all volunteer board. We do have some staff related to the farmers market, but no staff for the larger organization. And just another thing to note, we've always been below that $50,000 threshold for the tax man, just to enter his radar. So yeah, that's kind of the quick history. Any questions or anything about the downtown Winooski and its kind of like purpose or structure you've had just eating away at you? Could you do an overview of the funding sources for the, even though you have full-time staff, I believe the city does allocate a certain percentage of sidewalk fees. So we get the sidewalk fees. We change 100%. Is that 100% of that sidewalk fee? It's about 60 averages out, it'll be about 6,800 a year. And then we also have some contribution from on-street parking. That was 12,500 in this budget. We also do an annual appeal, that obviously varies in how much we get. We have some grant funding for the farmers market through City Market, their seedling grant. That was the one time. That was a one-time thing. Vendor fees from farmers. And we have some events that bring in a little bit of money in the dog show and some of the stuff that Kelsey's gonna go over of some of the different things that we do. But those events generally bring in some money as well. Which is probably a great time to just talk about, unless there's any other questions. Hey, then. What's up with you? I'm just gonna go over some of our successes this year with some fun numbers. So we run the farmers market. There are 20 dates. It runs from Mother's Day to Columbus Day Weekend or Indigenous People's Day Weekend. There were 13 seasonal vendors. So folks that were there for all of those weekends. And then there was a total of 22 vendors. So plus or minus folks that would come for a couple of weekends. The average attendance for the farmers market was 520 people. And so that was as high as just north of 750 for French Heritage Day. And as low as like 300 when it's raining and cold. We've received a grant from City Market for our hub, which is a free meal site on Sundays. And there's a great activity tent that not a lot of other farmers markets have nearby. So it does draw a good amount of kids. And it's a great, there's a group of folks that reoccur and attend throughout the season. That's really great. And our farmers market Facebook page, just in terms of reach is 2,100 likes. And then our downtown page is 1,300 likes. And we also have a readership of our newsletter around 1,500 and the open rate for that averages 27%, which is pretty darn good in terms of other readerships. Another great program that we do is Access Winooski. So we have a card that gives you benefits at 29 participating businesses. And so we'll be selling those again for around small business Saturday. And so one of our goals is that business reach out and engaging businesses, representing businesses. And that's something that Brian's gonna talk about how we wanna improve on that in the future. Some other events that we hosted this year, we had the Winooski get down where eight businesses were at the monkey house to promote and sell their product while we also gave out awards for great community members. That was a picture of Clyde Mitchell. So he got an award for all this work with music. He also booked all the music for the farmers market. So we love to find like synergistic things like that with them, you know, movers and shakers in the community. The French Heritage Festival that I mentioned previously is a great event because it's getting a wide audience. There's a wider variety of audience that we don't normally hit. There was a meat pie contest this year that Linda Howe helped arrange that brought out just, I think we had 10 entrants and the range of folks from somebody who was in eighth grade and who had never made a meat pie before to forget her name, but she's lived here her whole life and she won, hers was the best by far. It was just so great to see that range. And then this past weekend, best pooch in the noose, we had 36 dogs registered and over 100 people participated in the event and Seth smelled dog breath because he was a judge and one of the categories was worst breath. So small business Saturday I mentioned and oh, so also last Friday we hosted the first ever Art Walk that I worked with Nicole Carey at Birdfolk to organize businesses to stay open from six to nine on Friday and it was just, I guess I haven't been out on Friday night in recent memory, but it was happening. I kind of test and it was really great to see all of these lights on the first kind of dark weekend or dark, it's getting darker, the winter's coming and there was just so much light on the circle and so that was really great and we're looking forward to continuing to do that on a monthly basis, especially now that winter is coming and that's a slower time for businesses and so coming up with new ideas like that to just continue to support businesses and keep driving traffic downtown. That's what we're looking forward to doing, right Brian? That's correct. Is that like a head-off? Yeah. I don't know, someone's better by your hands. Yeah. Well, thank you Betsy. Thank you. Yeah, so this is what we've been doing and we've also been taking a lot of time to look at where we want to be moving forward. The city has this wonderful economic development plan that's an active document, right, that has a laundry list of things spelled out in there that we kind of combed through and pulled out everything that called on the WCP or downtown Winooski to help the city achieve some of these economic development goals. So we have been working with Heather and Jesse to comb through that and see where we might actually be able to do that and how we can do that moving forward. I mean, the list ranges from, I don't think I have it right in front of me, but there's probably a 10 or a dozen deliverables in there, anything from meetings of businesses to developing the arts district to, yeah, co-marketing opportunities, hosting more events, cross-promoting events. So just kind of some of the things that downtown Winooski is already doing and some things that there's opportunity for us to do more of. So we want to look more at that and figure out how we can help the city achieve those goals really. Another key thing we're going to start to look at is really figuring out how to advocate for businesses in a more impactful way. So right now we have great relationships with a lot of businesses and we do a lot of fun things throughout the city and throughout the year. And there's a lot going on in the city always, but there's about to be a heck of a lot more things going on that are going to impact the businesses in the long term in a very positive way. It's going to be a long road to get through all this stuff, but we see a real opportunity for this organization to find a way to be a stronger advocate for those businesses as the city moves in newer, exciting directions. So we want to figure out a way to do that, not just to be, not just to butt heads of the city, either, we really want to be able to have somebody at the table and be a really good partner through a lot of the changes that are happening. And we see that businesses, the goal is just to do their business, right? Like if they're selling something, it's to sell more of that thing. It's to serve people, they want to serve more people, it's to create art, they want to create the greatest art and so it can be sustainable, right? What they don't want to do is come in here and have to slam their fist on the desk and worry about upsetting their patrons and potentially losing business because of taking political sides on an issue. So we see an opportunity for Dent and Wynuski to act as a lobbyist for the businesses to really make sure that their voices are heard in the city and beyond the needed. So part of that is gonna be looking at our board governance and figuring out how to really incorporate more businesses in a very active way. We have traditionally had a single seat filled by a business owner. We're looking to fill that seat right now but we think that there's opportunity to expand that to a much higher percentage to make sure that the businesses are an active part of the board and have just a stronger voice. So yeah, that's our kind of like what we're looking at in the future. What we haven't fully fleshed out is how we're gonna do that but we wanted to come in and just take this opportunity to let you know that we are taking a hard look at the way we're set up and how we want to be in the future and we're trying to figure out how to get there and we're gonna work very hard with the city with Heather and Jesse to figure out how to do that. So I think just a couple more context things. The downtown designation isn't just a designation. It opens the door for several types of specialized funding through state programs and some cases federal programs that would not otherwise be available but for that designation of the activity that the downtown board does. From two primary programs that we utilize, number one is the historic preservation funding and tax credits and as well as the revitalization and sales tax reallocation credits. Those have helped with hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment in the Champlain Mill, the block building for historic preservation, peaking duck house, revitalization, the hotel that has a sales tax reallocation which is the only thing that made the financing even though it hasn't gone yet, work. We got $250,000 and it was essentially flow through CBG funding from the state that again is only available in designated downtowns which would have been paired for the standup strand project. Understood a couple of those didn't happen but those are sources of funds we would not have but for that. Just to put some funding context in, because I'm the old guy, the city for a long time just did $5,000. That was a budget item that was always in negotiation so the city said you can all sidewalk fees which round about each year I think is shaking out to between six and $7,000 roughly and that $5,000. So we were sitting at about $12,500 until 2017. 2017 reached out to Gary Hollowell who's the state coordinator for the downtown organizations and said can you send me a list of what all the towns invest in their downtown organizations. It's a little hard to parse through because some downtown organizations are actually the place where the city's economic development money goes so the economic development officer is actually either a joint expenditure or the city pays for it and they're the executive director of the downtown organization. So the range goes from $200,000 in Rutland which they count towards it all the way down to $0 in the designated downtowns. The overall average is about $33,000 and effective in 2017. So what we said a couple of years ago was we wanna take that $5,000 out of this sort of flexible budgeting thing and fix it and do a higher amount that was more appropriate for the activity and for a city musky size. So we came in at $12,500 fixed thinking that the $7,000 or so from the sidewalk fees would get it up to $19,000 and we were expecting that with the strain development alone that sidewalk fee increase was gonna bump it up to about $21,000. That's all the math that I'm recalling when we were kind of rearranging it in my head and mind. That was pretty spot on. So that's just some additional context. I think one question that I know I've had asked for me has there been in your restructuring conversations has there been discussion about expansion to be on the downtown or? In terms of? Activity, focus. I mean we are really inclusive to all businesses so like that participate in our access program that we reach out to to participate in events that we've contacted to see if there's interesting co-op advertising funds we don't limit it to the downtown. So I think yes, we already are and yes, we would, I think we see ourselves more as a women's key business organization who's really focused on the downtown. Questions? I thought a lot of the future direction and future activities sounds well thought through and coordinated with the approach. I have one concern about performing more of a lobbying role if the source of funds being used to support those activities, the city funds. So I would be interested in some, you know, how are those activities being supported through funding that's not basically the city paying an organization to? Well I'm going to remember it's not the city paying, right? Right, so within the, well there are a lot of organizations within the city that residents may or may not want to support so I just think I'd be interested in learning more about how that might be supported through other activities and so if it's a revenue supported activity that's done through events or what have you. That would be my one caution. Yeah, I mean I think, you know, ultimately when we look far out, we would love to see downtown, would this be a member organization where it's actually the businesses financing a large portion of that? Right. I think we'll have some work to do before we can get there. Right. But that is ultimately right now kind of the long-term goal and if we can do some of those things I talked about I think there's enough value there to the businesses for them to support, you know, a majority of that to that channel. Heather also has a lot of really great ideas on how we can provide more value to businesses beyond like the word lobby is, yeah, like not the best word to describe what, but we don't have a better word. That's okay. Yeah, I'm an advocate myself, I'm not familiar with it. What's the tongue in my teeth? I'm just, in my seat, I think it'd be useful to have the members of the businesses supporting their own advocacy and having the city funds being used to support other activities. And we want to get there and we want to make sure that we prove our value to businesses before we ask them to be supporting us directly. Great. I would also just recommend that the, any funding conversations involved looking at the sidewalk fees again because it's something that we have identified as being, hasn't been touched since I've been here and I feel like we did look at it at one point. And we decided not to because we were implementing paid parking and that's a long ways in the rear view mirror. And in the price comparison per square foot, pretty crazy with other communities and towns in terms of what people are paying versus what they're being charged here. That being said, we're also gonna be talking about a 1% tax that's gonna touch those same businesses that is connected with main street infrastructure improvements. So, we might be at that same place where we want to be, walk gently on multiple things sitting with businesses at one time that would just appreciate that if any other conversation comes forward or in regards to finding that that'd be something that's looked at. Absolutely. Any other questions? I don't have any additional questions but I just want to say thank you for coming in as new member of council. This is good information for me to get. I'm somewhat familiar with the downtown organization but this additional level of detail is helpful. So thank you. Good. Thank you. Questions, comments, concerns from the public? And just to reiterate, you guys are volunteers doing amazing things for the community. Thank you for all your time, working investment in the city and the community. Means a lot and all your work is really appreciated. And as somebody who's on the downtown board when all of those windows almost downtown were dark, it's just phenomenal, the difference and if I would say vitality, I know you guys have played a role in that. I know the support of it. So hope you feel good about the work you're doing. Wonderful job and thank you for all you do. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thank you. Next up is the Manuski Bridge replacement for the stripping study. I like that it's the Manuski Bridge. One comment I was going to write was a lot of times on the white papers for the state, you see it referred to as the Burlington Manuski Bridge or the Manuski Burlington Bridge, but it's just the Manuski Bridge. It's kind of nice, except for when you're dressing built. Yeah. So CCRPC is here tonight. They initiated a scoping study along with the city of Burlington and V-Trans to look at replacement options for this 1929 Manuski Bridge. So during that process, McFarland Johnson was selected as the consultant engineer to put together this report. They worked together with a advisory committee, local advisory committee made up of the city, city of Burlington and other relevant parties to look at options and provide feedback on the alternatives to design. So I'm actually going to kick it over to beer keating from CCRPC and McFarland Johnson, Dave Kahl and Brian Holberg. Good evening. Thanks. Could get crowded up here. Yeah, I'll move forward. Yes. Thanks, John. I want to start by saying, you mentioned that we had an advisory committee was a further substantial on lots of folks from the cities, including Manuski and John and Ryan Lambert and Heather Carrington were parts of that committee and they gave us an awful lot by the way, but Justin was involved in one of our public meetings as well. So we got a lot of perspective from city employees and hopefully get some feedback from you as well. Johnson, my name is Peter Keating and we're with the Regional Planning Commission, Dave Kohl, Brian Cogurn. McFarland Johnson is an engineering firm based in Concord, New Hampshire. A lot of bridge expertise, which we don't have a lot of in Vermont, so we're hired a lot here. Good work to get set. This is going to be kind of a two or three part presentation. I'm just going to talk about the process we went through, put it in overall context. I don't want to leave here giving the impression that if you're going through a study and next year you're going to see a big project out there, this is way down the road. I want to make sure you're aware of that as you go through this. And after that I'm going to turn it over to Dave to get into the particulars of all the alternatives we looked at, how we analyzed them, how we compared each to the other and where we ended up with a recommendation from the advisory committee. And in fact, although it doesn't stay on the agenda, we're hoping that perhaps he'll concur with the recommendation that came from the advisory committee, I'm selecting a preferred alternative if he feels that we'll get to that motion at the end that the advisory committee came up with. So a little bit about this, yeah, taking it. This talks about the relative place of what we call scoping in an overall context of getting to something, a final bridge. Scoping is just a study that defines the problem, looks at alternatives, recommends a solution. Once that's done, it goes into a much more complicated and detailed process or processes where it goes through lots of design phases before something happens at the final line of construction. We're at the very, very beginning here and given a project like this that's likely to be what we know is going to be very expensive, very challenging site to deal with, lots of constraints. It's a very important link between the two communities. It's very important to stay wide actually with all those issues around it to get from where we are to constructions is going to be probably many years. So, good perspective. This project didn't come out of nowhere. John mentioned that we decided to scope it but we have been hearing from other places, communities, parties that this is something that need to be looked at. So it happens to be five different planning documents with scoping documents just in the last few years that all said this is a critical link and it's got some major deficiencies especially for people who walk and bike across it. Curious for lanes of traffic, that seems to be adequate but if you walk or bike it, it's got some real problems. So we have your master plan earlier in the middle right that was adopted pretty recently that talks about the need here but Burlington on the bottom right just finished a walk and bike master plan. They identified as critical link in there in the overall regional bike path system. At the top right is our regional at the transportation plan that we adopted a couple years ago. That identifies this bridge as critical. And over the last couple of years on the bottom left we looked at the intersection of the immediate other side of the bridge, the river cycle, just our avenue, mill, barrier intersection, problematic, lots of delays, lots of safety issues. And that point of the bridge is another problem as well. And finally the one on the top left. Couple years ago we looked at, well if the bridge doesn't get fixed soon maybe we look at buildings separate by some pedestrian bridge. So we went through a scoping process there. Anyway, all those things fit into the project that we're going to talk about in time. So going back that scoping process at the very beginning of the phase it starts with developing a statement saying here's why we're doing it this is a rationale for doing it. So you can lay out the problem statement in one or two pages. And then you move forward you look at a bunch of alternatives you would analyze them. We have public input as the third phase here but public input is sort of constant. We have to involve the public in all cases of what we're doing. John mentioned the advisory committee very significant number of people like we have 17 people lots of input from the cities as well as VTrans and other parties. And after about a year plus of analyzing this and having meetings about it we came up with a recommendation for what the committee feels is the way to move forward on this. You'll see that in a bit of a set up later. So we're now at the start point here where we're done with a recommendation from the committee but we really need the blessing of the legislative bodies and the two impacted communities in Ryuski and Burlington. So that's why we're here tonight. You'll hear more about this in a minute from Dave. But hopefully at the end of the evening you might feel comfortable to concur with what we're recommending. Burlington is a whole new story we'd have to go through their process which is a little bit more bureaucratic I'm sure I'd say that. Complicated we have to go through a subcommittee at the full city council and hopefully we'll get to that on your calendar sometime in November. So that's where we are and I'm gonna turn it over to Dave. Now to go back to a little history of the bridge itself and describe the alternatives that we went through. All right, thanks for letting us come up and present. It was a fun scope and report to put together. It's a challenging site to say the least and a challenging bridge in and of itself to try and figure out what we're gonna do while trying to piece so many different parties. So we think we came up with some interesting and good alternatives here. But to start out with the existing bridge it was built in 1929 and there's been several rehabilitations that have been performed. Going on right now also is a bridge rail rehab. We were actually designers on that on the project manager on that project as well. I can just say from the rail rehab that's going on it's going well but there was as with any project for a bridge is about 100 if you're getting close to 100 years old they're finding more deterioration than what was originally anticipated. Concrete and steel at some point just end up having a useful service life and they each their expiration point. The bridge is inspected every two years as part of the national requirements that the bridge be inspected for safety considerations. It currently has a satisfactory rating. So there's no immediate danger of any sort of collapse or immediate structural failure but as Peter mentioned this is not a small undertaking or small project and I think everyone recognizes you don't want it to get to the point where it's a critical concern we have to make a decision under threat of something major happening. It's better to be a little have a little bit of forethought on a project like this. So one of the things that we did early on on the project and Brian Colburn who's actually I'm a bridge guy, Brian's one of our roadway people we took a look at early on three lane or four lane structure and Brian you can talk to this one pretty quickly here but yeah. So as we started this project an idea that we heard that and then floated out was well why couldn't we just take the four lanes that are on the bridge now reduce it down to three and then use that extra space for bike lanes. The scoping study for the intersection in Burlington had suggested to look at only one lane coming into Burlington and two lanes going into Newsy. So previous analysis of the circulator also suggested that maybe that could work but both those studies just looked at their respective intersections. We did and we built a traffic model that had both intersections in it so you can see the interaction of the two and found that only having one lane southbound does in fact decrease the level of service that's on the letter three we give to traffic operations. Similar to the school A is really good, F is not good. Currently it's a D which is considered acceptable to the site of the environment but it's a D. It's current operation, it's a D. It's a D, yeah. So if you reduce the lane it goes to an F and mostly it's the main street and the west street approaches. As traffic backs into the circulator they don't have a chance to go. So because of that we dismissed the three lane options all law alternative show maintaining performance. Give you a very quick overview of some of the alternatives that we had looked at. The first one was to rehab the existing bridge and what would also be entailed in that was taking the recommendations from the separate bike and pedestrian crossing that was performed two years ago. It would be to construct a completely separate structure some location adjacent to the bridge and basically keep what's out there and rehab it just enough to get us to another 50 years design life. There would be no change to what you see when you're actually walking on the bridge it would just be repairs to keep that satisfactory rating going to at some point in the future. The second alternative we looked at was basically what we call a superstructure replacement which is the steel beams and the concrete deck that you drive on. Included on that was, in that alternative was also constructing the separate bike and pedestrian bridge immediately adjacent to the existing structure. One thing to note about this alternative that we looked at and became a constraint was the existing bridge has a total width of 57 feet. Going with modern design criteria we can only really get about 54 feet out there right now because of those overhang brackets that you see underneath the sidewalk. We don't typically design those currently on reverse design practice so the maximum reasonable overhang that we would do would be about three and a half feet so we had to basically reduce the width of the bridge if we were going to replace the concrete deck and the steel bars using all like modern typical design criteria. That structure we took a look at and that has a hundred year design life compared to alternative one which was 50 years. We felt fairly reasonable that replacing the steel and the concrete deck get a hundred years out of the existing bridge. The existing abutments and piers that are in the water we would rehab and keep those for the next hundred years. Alternative three that we looked at was a super structural replacement but we would keep the existing piers and the abutments and we would widen them to get what the optimal crossing would be on that structure that meets all current pedestrian and traffic and safety control guidelines and so that results in if we do everything to current standards we increase the existing bridge with from 57 feet out to 76 feet. That was through discussions with the advisory committee. We had talked about doing sidewalks or some sort of separate bike pedestrian lane or sidewalk on one side and it came through in the advisory committee that it was the most preferred alternative was to do a multi-use path on the both sides of the bridge with some sort of barrier that actually separates traffic from pedestrians. It's good from a traffic control and a safety feeling from poor pedestrians that are out there right now. For a bridge that has this much use both from traffic and pedestrians it was discussed with VTrans and going with a 12 foot wide multi-use path on both sides of the bridge allows plenty of room for both bikes and pedestrians on both sides of the bridge. Just want to add a detail especially for those top two this is a cross section of the bridge that propose bridge changes if you're looking from the Winooski side. So those top two are important. The bridge, if there was a separate bike bed bridge it would be downstream near the dam. Closer to the dam. Thanks Peter, I should have mentioned that. So those are the three alternatives that we looked at. Through discussions with the advisory committee our proposed structure just showed a bigger view here with the 76 foot wide structure four lanes of traffic. Traffic lanes are 11 feet wide six inches wider than it's currently out there with two foot shoulders and a grade separated protected multi-use path that's 12 feet wide. Meets all criteria and it was felt that looking into the future for the next 100 years that this would satisfy all current and future needs that would be needed both from a pedestrian and the traffic control standpoint. So then we looked at alternatives four and five and this is kind of when we were moving through our advisory committee these were what was really focused on as being like for alternatives. Bridge alternative four is a three span structure. The existing piers would be widened. They would have to get into the water and wind them and the existing abundance would also be widened. The existing abundance that are out there now would obviously be rehabbed. We would go through but we wouldn't be doing a complete replacement. We would as part of a project of this size and scale we would do things like take concrete cores and measure how much salt penetration there's been. And then one of the advantages of this bridge is the fact that there's no joints over the piers. So when you're walking out there you'll notice the piers are actually in pretty good shape because they haven't had any road salt washing them up. So the piers are actually in pretty good shape that are out there right now. So that was one of the things that we looked at and we felt that it was reasonable that we could do for alternative four would be widening the existing bridge and this right here in the shaded areas we wanted to make sure that the alternative that we came up with is wide structure would not interfere with any of the right way both on the Bromington and the Wendusky side. So going with a 76 foot wide structure with wider sidewalls those are about the extents of the impacts that would occur. We also wanted to make sure that the results that were done for the scoping study for the city of Burlington for Riverside Avenue intersection that all of our alternatives would actually work with what they're proposing as well. We wanted to make sure that we wouldn't have anything that would really preclude or inhibit traffic going into the circulator as well. So this was alternative four was a three span structure. Alternative five actually came about through one of our advisory committee meetings and also an interim meeting that we had with each man's. They recommended that why don't we go through and construct a new pier in the river and do a two span structure. One of the things that came about was maybe we can get in there and construct the pier using what we call auxiliary bridge construction which I'll talk about in a second here during the actual dam drawdown. And it was felt that this might be a good opportunity because it would be a real cost reduction savings if they can actually not have to build a causeway but could actually get out there and drive across the exposed rock. And we took a look at it, we looked at some pictures we looked at some recent construction. We felt that it was a reasonable alternative to assume that we could go in and do a two span structure. A bill of completely new pier in the river. The abutments would also have to be replaced too, we're assuming right now that the abutments on either side of the bridge would have to be replaced because since we're removing support we'd be putting more load out onto either one of the abutments and at this stage we didn't feel it was a safest option to say that we could really have those. But if it ever went to the final design that would be one of the first things that we would look at. But we're assuming that would be a complete bridge replacement from the rock up to the sidewalks or the multi-use path with this alternative five and a two span structure. This was beneficial, we did meet with all the resource agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and other resource agencies and they liked the idea of removing a pier from the river both from a hydraulic standpoint, debris accumulation. You will get a very slight reduction in the FEMA map flood plain through removing an obstruction from the river and any time you open up a river they always like that idea. So this was looked upon very favorably. So one of the things we also looked at was how do we actually build this bridge because this is really great to come up with all these concepts but what are we gonna do to traffic? And in the packet that's in the report and the discovery report is we looked at multiple different ways where we could use accelerated bridge construction. It's basically where we take a construction activity that would typically take several months or up to a year and we try and go in there fast and build it fast to get it done as quick as possible and reduce construction durations from several months or a entire year down to several weeks. This method of construction is actually very common in Vermont is the preferred method of bridge construction. I've worked on several projects for the state of Vermont and I would say them and the state of Utah are the national leaders of this method of construction. So the method that we looked at for accelerated bridge construction was what was called the lateral slide method which I'll go through and do a little bit of a quick animation here to see how it would actually work. This is just the existing bridge that's out there right now. For alternatives four and alternatives five we would actually widen the bridge to the downstream side ahead of time. We would go in and widen the piers and we would construct a portion of the existing bridge ahead of time. This could be done this option for both alternatives four and five going to the downstream side allows a basically separation and construct this bridge in a series of phases where we build a portion of the bridge ahead of time that could actually be used as a separate bike and pedestrian bridge. We don't identify the first three alternatives but it would still end up being part of the final bridge which you'll see here in a second. The advantage to go in one of the big advantages we identified going to the downstream side was in between this stage where this portion of the bridge is constructed and we would replace the actual portion that you drive on there's some utilities that are out there right now and relocating those utilities will not be a small process. There's fiber optic cables that run across the bridge and relocating fiber optic cables is quite an undertaking. So if we can move all those utilities to the newly constructed bridge it really moves a slow critical task off of the actual construction when we have to shut down and it would make construction substantially easier. What would happen then on the upstream side is we would have to build temporary supports and build basically the new bridge ahead of time in place and have it being set there ready to go. And then when the time comes that we actually decide well they decide that they want to shut down the construction but they would shut the bridge to construct or shut the bridge down in traffic. Remove the existing bridges out there right now. At the top portion of the existing piers they would have to reconstruct them because the elevations might be slightly different and just rehab those. And then what actually would be done is we would slide the bridge into place. And that whole slide process right there the actual moving of the bridge probably only take a couple of hours to move it into place. It's a pretty fast process. I did one of those in Maine where I was a project engineer on and doing another one in New Hampshire right now. It's a fairly, it's actually of accelerated bridge construction is probably the oldest method. It's the most durable and it's the most tri-intruded method and it's probably the fastest from actually getting the new bridge into place. The barrier of traffic would then be put back on the new bridge and the temporary support would be removed. So it's really great using that method because it gets the bridge replaced fast and we're not having to work with several years of construction. But one of the drawbacks is the contractor needs an area to construct this new bridge. And that would, because of the dam to the existing downstream side we have to go to the upstream side and the bridge has to be constructed in line with the existing structure. So on both sides on the Burlington and the Winnowski side, we would have to shut down that whole area probably for a year and put in temporary supports and a staging area where the contractor would build a new bridge ahead of time and then slide into place. And then they would have to remove all the supports and reconstruct everything that they basically take down. But accelerated bridge construction is a good option from the standpoint of it's really limited impacts to the traffic but they have to go to somewhere. So there's gonna be some residual side effects for that. And just for example, like that's the river walk with substantial steel infrastructure underneath it. Would that require removal of that river walk? Yes. And drop in over it? Yeah, a portion of it would require removal. And in the plans we would recommend and everything has to be reconstructed back to its original intent. But both from a safety perspective and everything else that's going on out there that they would need to build those supports in line with the existing environment. So it's still high impact from the sense of getting constructed. But from the roadway user impact of several years of lane reductions and moving around barrels. That's probably that is the best from the roadway user perspective but from other areas, this one does have some impacts. So in our Scoping Report, we did go through we have a really big decision matrix. We also try to summarize it. And I'm not gonna go through all the portions of the decision matrix. But it was determined fairly all in the alternatives four and five have the most benefits and have the greatest impacts. With the decision matrix, we tried to weigh everything off the three things. The public concerns, the advisory committee and local and state agencies input. Trying to find the best solution that fits right in the middle of all those concerns. To get to the crux of it for alternatives four and five. Alternative four has a project of cost. We anticipate of 18.3 million. Alternative five is 22.7 million. That's total cost. That's preliminary engineering. That's traffic control. That's preliminary design, public outreach. There will be a very substantial public outreach on this that needs to be accounted for. We looked at all aspects of basically from starting construction to the plant that last seed of grass and they can walk away and it starts growing. Through our advisory committee meetings, we had six advisory committee meetings, one public input meeting and then several meetings with VTrans. This is how we came up with all these alternatives. The locally preferred alternative that the advisory committee recommended was both alternatives four and five, which is why I highlighted both of them here for you tonight. It was basically decided that alternatives four and five and constructing a portion of the new bridge downstream of the existing bridge gives us the most options. It allows for the bridge to be built in stages. It allows for if it's determined through discussions with the local community that that accelerated bridge construction is not a viable alternative. It doesn't have to be done that way because we built with conventional construction. But going to the upstream side, we really didn't find a feasible way where we could do the accelerated bridge construction. So alternatives four and five were both thought to be a viable alternative. There's a lot of preliminary engineering of what we've done once this final design process gets underway like analysis of the existing structure. What's the concrete like out there? How much salt has penetrated in the apartments over the last hundred years? There's still a lot of testing that needs to be done. Which is one of the reasons why it was difficult to come down on a preferred alternative at this time. But the concept of both alternatives four and five with a wider structure to the downstream side was looked at as providing the most options both now and in the future. And with that, I have a couple questions. Actually, can you go back to the cross-section of the alternatives four and five? So to briefly mention that, you know, the advisor, when he had a lot of discussion on this alternative four by the five, but they all agreed, what's on top of the bridge, we all agreed to. So it's what he would experience. This would be the cross-section, this would be the layout for the bike path, the traffic lanes and the shoulders. The only difference is what's underneath. It's the steel and the concrete underneath. And because a lot of it knows, hopefully the answer in the design phase, going forward with both recommendations, that's what it sets. This is the identical thing and this is what people are going to experience it. So a lot of confidence in that. So a difference in the lifespan between four and five? The lifespan was assumed to be the same. We did go through a life cycle cost which I did not identify here. And we're assuming that for alternative four, you will have to do some sort of re-abilitations, major re-abilitations in the future for those piers and abundance that are out there right now. So looking from the life cycle cost perspective, there is going to be a premium aid that some of the costs will make down the road because assuming that you can get 200 years out of those existing piers and abundance without some substantial re-abilitation being formed is not a reasonable alternative that we could really make at this time. And what was the lifespan on five? I mean, we've heard 100 before. 100 years. So just to be, let's just be blunt, the other ones are 100 years as well. That's a nice round number. We would expect that four and five would outlive alternatives two and three even though 100 years is also being used. Yeah, that's- I understand that through engineering world you can only say- Yeah, we can only say 100, but realistically if you went with alternative five it would be over 100 years. Okay. And there's no way to predict, but you had mentioned there are a lot of kind of the stakeholder individuals or groups that prefer the removal of one of those piers. Do you think that that could also open up potential alternative funding streams because some of those groups that might be interested in the removal of that additional pier? That is a good question. There might be, there's so many different funding sources that are out there right now. I can't speak to whether there is, I'm not saying there's not, but there's definitely, yeah, there definitely could be, and from the permitting standpoint as well, that would be a little fatal if not. Is this a question? Is this a good time for us to start peppering questions? Sure, fire what, yeah. So, I haven't seen the lot, I saw the report from like six years ago, but I don't think I've seen them a recent one. What did it score and what's the line for federal money? It's 50 something, 60 something. So, right now the funding would be 80, 20, 80 state or federal and then 20. So, VTrans also has some incentives that they kick in, so if you went to, if you go with an accelerated bridge construction, they'll knock the local share in half, and then if you also go with a rehabilitation of an existing bridge, they will then also cut that in half. So, if you go 80, 20, and you went with an accelerated bridge construction, it would be 90, 10, and then if you went with a rehabilitation, it would be an alternative four, it would be 95, five, and then that cost would be split equally between both cities. So, just backing up, what did the bridge score in the last assessment? I know there's a number that's produced in that. 67, 72, does anybody know? It was, I think I have a single in there, but I think it's about six, I think it was actually down to 67.3, it was a sufficiency rating. That takes many different things into account. So, there's kind of a, don't quote me on that, I'll get you that number, I'm just running off the top of my head. But, there's many different ways that that score Honestly, it's kind of like a mystery how the federal government does that, because all of a sudden, as we've seen before, where if there's damage to the existing bridge rail, and it's noted that the inspection report might drop it by 20 points because a bridge rail is a major problem. So, it's not a linear score, things are weighted differently when you're looking at best efficiency ratings. So, if they start to find some concrete compiling on the outside of the deck, and it's noted that it could have a substantial impact on all that rating, it's performed. I've done a lot of bridge inspection my day, and usually we've seen those bell curves, but it goes the opposite way, or something goes bad, kind of, it's not linear, goes like that. It drops like a rock. So, you mentioned this is a long term visioning piece. I'm gonna talk through some of the timing obstacles you see, I mean is it just sheer planning, and organization, or do you just think it's gonna take us a really long time to get the money together at $10,000 per year that we're gonna set for the rest? Money again, there are things that's happened earlier, the constraints of the sites, you know, all the parties involved in it. This will have to compete with other bridges around the state. B-trans only does so many bridges a year, and as you mentioned, the inspection report for this bridge is actually not bad considering, say, it's functionally absolute, the problems of the block pipe component. You know, I can't speak to B-trans, but given the conditions, the physical condition, given that I know they've got lots of priorities around the state, and all the constraints around this about the difficulty will be to design, that's why I think it's useful in the future. If I had a crystal ball, I'd say it's a minimum of five, but 10 or 15 would be an issue. But that's total speculation on my part. I will plead it. It won't happen next year, I'll be guaranteeing that. For our behalf, Sue Minter, Phil Scott, Matt Doon, anybody who's ever run for governor has stood on that bridge, and we've made them do so, and feel the traffic go over it and experience walking across it. So we'll continue to do so, remind them both how important it is. Can you talk about the implications of the fact that this is a city in miss blown bridge versus a state bridge? Yeah, it's basically, it allows, so if you wanted to, you wouldn't have to have any B-trans input at all. You could, if you apply for a bill of grant, and where it was successful in the bill grant, you could hire a consulting firm jointly with the city of Burlington and not have any B-trans review input required at all. It's right now as part of the, you know, the state aid program that Vermont has, so a project of this size where a lot of the other bridges that come through that program are small, little culverts and these tiny little stream crossings out in the middle of nowhere. It's, you know, it's a lot of small bridges and there's this one, you know, not sure how many other really big bridges are probably none of this size and scale that are sitting in that program. So it does make a challenge from the sense of the funding source is typically allocated to that program. It's going to have to be looked at ahead of time. There's got to be a balloon in that or it might have to slide up all the money in that for a couple of years. But it's a discussion that I think we all feel that they need to start happening at some point. Before I guess to that point, like you said, well there's a red flag that's out there. Brian's worked on several of these grants and we both feel like through the build grants with the multimodal, the pedestrian access, it does easily qualify, it would be a good grant to apply for as well as a lot of funding sources. With a, for building New Hampshire, you call it Tiger, right? We're used to. Yeah. Because that's how Congress downtown got done, right? What are their one or two though in the Northeast region? Three or four, did they get funded? Which number are you? I know Maine's been successful. I've been through their conditional representation on the country. But yes, New Hampshire, Vermont just received a joint one. I've re-divided the bridge carrying 89. I've been to the two states. As you mentioned, Congress has been successful. So, Tiger Grant was the old acronym. Build is the new one. I don't remember what it all stands for. Economic development is one of those. As Dave mentioned, those funding sources, as with others, taking into account multimodal improvements, taking into account economic development, so being close to it downtown could help me score pretty high. And I just thought something is that when we met with the transaction, we didn't talk about the build grant that made the patrons who apply for it. And then it means funds will be partners in. So that's an important thing too. They understand the significance of this bridge, the original significance of this bridge. But unfortunately it is a time-happy bridge and it's not a state bridge. But even then, they do understand it and we talk about options. And you know, scoping, as Peter said and everybody said, it's the very beginning of the project development phase as you all know. But we need to start somewhere so we can have those design plans so we can apply for a build grant if we decided to do that. So these gives us the opportunity to do that. Yeah, I mean I'll just say obviously that the proposed 76 foot structure, certainly from a public use perspective, seems to reflect the values that we've heard time and time again from the people that live here and from the larger regional transportation need standpoint. So absolutely think that that's much more reflective of the transportation goals in our community to have the local opportunities set aside, specialized and also continue to meet the traffic demands. Any discussion about three lanes, I mean that especially with only one going out of Winooski, the circulator was done in part to stop traffic from queuing out of Winooski. Whether I'm sitting here or not, I know I would fight that. That sounds like a really bad idea. So I appreciate the continued access for four lanes as well. I'm not clear, I follow bits and pieces on what's going on on the river side, into things there at those crossroads as to whether they're doing circulators or double diamonds or what's happening. Yeah, we actually have one of the slides show the current preferred alternative for that intersection. But that is similar to this process, hasn't completed scoping, it's about the same point as trajectory we've been done. But that, yeah, this drawing on the left is the current preferred alternative for that intersection. I mean we haven't gone to UCI yet, we haven't gone to the Burlington City House. We wouldn't come to you in, it's Burlington. We haven't gone to Burlington City House on this, but that's what the committee's recommended. And they looked at alternatives as well, it was a roundabout alternative and there were a couple other redesigns of the intersection, but this is the one that the advisory committee felt was comfortable with and addressed the purpose and need of the project best. We made sure we worked with, we sent what we were proposing to the consulting firm that was doing this scoping study and they sent some information back to make sure that what we were both proposing was for both alternatives, we don't wanna, you know, work with our head in the sand about what else is going on in the community and come up with alternative or include something from being done in the future. So, going with a 76 foot wide structure, shifted to the downstream, still allows for this to be instructed. And then I guess just a larger question too is whether or not we're paying, you've eliminated the need, the bigger concern about which side of the bridge to put the multimodal options for have centered around how it connect to the larger bike pad system. You know, it's been long perceived that the best thing for Winooski commuters is to have it on the, I'll just say the riverside side, right? Or the downstream side versus the upstream side because it's a more challenging bike up Colchester Ave than it is riverside. But the riverside one connects to Essex and bronze the horizons for bike commuting too. So, actually I should say that part of the amoeba of Colchester, the four area first. So, I guess that you've eliminated that by having both sides because that's been a long historical conversation when you skied about which side to focus on. And it's also looking at how you're trying to look how to do some of the future and make sure we don't, we're gonna go out there and cause this much disruption and this much traffic. We don't want people sitting here 75 years without 50 years. We're like, why don't they put it on both sides of the bridge? We wanna make sure we're having the four sides to think about what we don't know for the future. I guess to me, I mean, the new span doing the altering of five seems to be the Cadillac option from a price perspective but make the most general sense. Eliminate the spans. I can see the environmental impacts of that. That makes sense. Not reusing existing supports with all new peer construction makes sense. I mean, I think that's gonna come down to the dollars and cents conversation and whether or not the people in power that does occur wanna spend short-term money to reduce long-term costs or wanna skim three to $4 million off of it. Well, I can say what we meant with the VTrans with their executive committee, they're the ones that actually proposed going with the two span option and putting a loop here in the river and no bumpments in their perspective was it's gonna be brewed off here when this is constructed. I'm gonna do it, let's do it once and try and minimize the water that I had to be done. Can you just clarify for me the role of VTrans plant? So I think in the next steps bubble that came up here. So are they, would they be involved in approving a final report or since it is a town highway, I'm confused about what happens then. They don't approve the report. We do submit to them. We're going through the planning phase now but they're the responsible agency to design to take it through the next phases. They'll have a lot of input back by the time. So then they would actually produce the final designs for the bridge. And that process will involve input from the community. So it'll be a lot of back and forth and that will be a multi-process. But this is in a white book project, right? It's what they call their little book for projects, right? The white book. So now with the VTrans, the white book where they've lined up the state funding projects, it's not going to go in the mix. Yeah, so the capital program, you're talking about the front of the book and the TV. It's not even in the program at this point. So both the discussions with VTrans will be actually to include this bridge into the program at some point. It starts at the candidate, right? Then many gets prioritized and then it moves up. But this is, as I said before, I mean, VTrans does recognize how significant this bridge is. So they are, I think they are conscious to put it into the queue to start something. And this coping is the first step. And hopefully we're going to be able to just partner and VTrans will partner with the cities and with the RPC to actually move forward with the program on this one. If we can all of the stars kind of align. And the majority of the funding for this work that you've been doing was from to VTrans grants that were given simultaneously to a new scheme, Burlington. So they are, there is local matches in those, but they're still being supported at the state level. We're going to be the first municipality to get two bill grants in the course of a decade. We're on it. We're also applying for our main street stuff. Okay, other questions, comments, concerns, and also too, I would say if there's specific feedback you need from us to direct that now. I don't know if anyone else wants to share the reflections on the alternatives. You've summed it up for me. So one of the things of, I can just add on, can you undo the next step sign? Yeah, perfect. One of the things I know that has been a conversation at the advisory group level that isn't in this presentation because it's into operations far down the road is staging. So one of the conversations we're going to have to have as a community with Burlington as this moves forward is, we saw the red bar of where the river walk will be impacted by that slide in option if we go in that direction. My understanding is that there's gonna be additional staging area in addition to that and whether that falls primarily on our side of the river or Burlington side of the river and how that's managed is going to become a bigger conversation. We can't decide that now in the process but I think it's something that staff is definitely keeping our eye on and thinking about the previous presentation from downtown Winooski. Obviously we have a lot more available space on our side and how we keep the business community and visitors to Winooski welcomed and happy here during whatever that might look like as well as our office and residential tenants right at the store. Seems like their side would be the answer. The river walk concerns, I mean that's a large, you know, federally funded steel infrastructure thing. I'm sure smarter people than me and I have thought about that but touching that is... Yeah, and I think, you know, we have trouble pruning the trees that had paid for let alone touching the sidewalks, you know, so it's, that'll be interesting. Yes, yeah, it will be but we can show that maybe we don't replace all of it. We just, you know, replace a portion of it so that some of it still remains in place. Yeah, it would be but it would be something that we can, you know, replace, it would be a replacement in kind improvement of that nature. It would be one of the many logistical things that would just have to be worked through and discussed and get that process conversation started early. This might be a question for you and Jesse but I'm just looking for a read on the sense of urgency and focus on the Burlington side on this bridge. I don't know what other priorities they may have in terms of infrastructure needs and is this a relatively high priority at the administration and council level or can we expect that to be a more? I think we should look at the Regional Planning Commission comment on that. Sure, whoever can speak to it more diplomatically. Well, we've had two city councils from Burlington on our advisory committee, gave us some idea but they both represent Board 1, Chief City Board, right in front of us, the river. You know, what kind of priority is it? Citywide, the mayor's office, I can't really know. I mean, I do recognize it as a very critical thing for each and wide. So, just as a reminder, you know, we moved forward through these grant, these joint grant administrative processes together and we were the grant administrators on that but Burlington was very flexible with us in how that was going to work. So, while more fell on us, I think that it was also fast tracked to an extent on their side to enable that to happen. I certainly also think that they're in a huge building phase right now. So, it could, so any previous hesitation could also just be symptomatic of all of the construction that's happening in Burlington at this point, which may look different in five or 10 or 15 years when this is a reality. I think, I would say, I think a very good sign is the amount of attention, resource, and investment that's been paid into the, like the Riverside Culture Strait Avenue intersections that's been recognized as a key entry point. Are we still saying 40,000 cars? What's the number, the magic number? 30,000 Bridge. I'm sorry? 30,000. I mean, a little bit less maybe. Brian, you probably know the number. Okay. Within how much time? A day. A day, sorry, a day. Yeah. So just from, I mean, I don't know what Main Street takes, but I'm sure if you did the, I call it the Tic Tac Model Ike. It's a little bit over. Yeah, it's a little less than 30, right? And I mean, but just from a sheer numbers perspective, that's a significant amount of traffic going into that city, so. I'm a believer that there is a fair amount of urgency to at least get something that can get in the queue and start the process moving forward and look into some of the read the tea leaves. What the likelihood is of it moving forward in the next six months. Well, I also, I think it's very beneficial to us in that regard to have CCRPC so involved. I mean, this isn't a project that's solely being managed by Burlington and Boosky. How do I CCRPC is that convener a lot and the ones who track that region-wide, those region-wide dollars coming in for infrastructure projects is very beneficial for us. It would be hard, we would be hard pressed to do that without that, right? Anybody have any concerns as to this path? I mean, I think that's two of their hair. Any concerns as to the designs or the, what's up? So just as a reminder to the, this team also presented to the Public Works Commission a couple weeks to me. A couple weeks ago, yeah. So they had, that was part, getting that community feedback was also part of this process to get to these alternatives. And so they would work supportive of four and five five was an option. Yeah, five is kind of, if I came out later when the final game would be transit suggested that. But again, four and five were identical at the top of the level of experience. They liked the idea of, because we looked at a phase in which I didn't go through about how you would do this maintaining two lanes or three lanes of traffic. And it's multi, met several years. And what we pushed, they accelerated a first construction option without knowing at this time frame is that a couple of weeks is going to be more a couple of weeks might be a month or two. They liked the idea of ripping the band-aid off the bridge being shut down then three plus years of sort of like around and three lanes or two lanes. Dave, can you talk about the, so the, the solar bridge construction on the bridge between the side. What happens to the existing bridge and how it's kind of slid? What the time frame were basically there'll be no traffic. So when the bridge, the new bridge is constructed, everything's sitting there ready to go at some point. And this would be, you know, something probably one of the major sticking points of when they're allowed to actually close it. They'll shut the bridge down and they'll get in there. And this is also another community concern that we would have to discuss is are they allowed to work 24 hours a day? Are they allowed to work, you know, seven to seven? You know, the worry of all the work when the classroom gets done was you also have to deal with noise. But maybe it's like 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. But they would get out there and they would basically, they're just removing it and taking it away. So they would get out there and remove it as fast as humanly possible. They would cut the steel, cut the deck, just lift it out of there, retract just all of the other as fast as they could. That's a pretty quick process. The demo is usually a pretty quick process that would take about, we estimate if you look to a lot of projects like this, Ramon has done another lateral slide project for some bridges on I-91. They did it over a weekend where they removed the existing and slid the new one in. And they can probably get that existing bridge based on similar race production out in about four or five days, I looked at, yeah. Mental services is quite fully smooth. Is that different between four and five, that and four also? Yeah. So that just reminded me of that planning commission meeting. One of the other, the preferences for the accelerated move was because of the displacement of emergency services. They wouldn't have to go around for extended months of time. Mm-hmm, yeah. Boy, that would be something for a mutual aid consideration. And if a portion of that bridge was built ahead of time, it was sitting there, it was looked favorably upon from a bike and pedestrian standpoint that they would still be able to use the bridge. And we didn't really look at this at all because there's a lot of side road impact, but the potential could be there too, depending on how much could be built ahead of time, that it could actually be widened up to get an ambulance across it or something like that. You would have to do a lot of paving and separating areas, but that option doesn't exclude that from alternative sport bike. It doesn't exclude that option. For the 1924 style of the temporary bridge, that would be nice, though, to hit that. Because that's 1924, I think it was when that bridge was wiped out and the whole concept of this one came along. So we're literally coming up on that 100 years and not too long, right? Yeah. Other questions, comments, concerns? Yeah, I think you're hearing the feedback here that it's positive, you know, obviously in regards to the design, four and five. Everybody on board with that one, five makes the most sense to me if the environmental impacts are great and accelerated, sounds wonderful, too. I think understanding what's a long-term impact in the effects of the river walk piece will be an important thing to have vetted out before final decisions are made on that from a city's perspective. Comments, questions, concerns from the public? There aren't many of us here. We ask it even if no one's there, actually. One comment, one question. Sure. I'll be getting two questions. Common is separating pedestrians and bicyclists from cars is absolutely essential. So any solution that doesn't do that and do it in spades is not satisfactory. And I speak of someone who stopped for a pedestrian in the crosswalk and got my car totaled in the Iran collision coming south on that bridge. Question is, is there any diurnal difference in volume across, in other words, is the traffic flow northward from Burlington heavier at night and the flow southward on the opposite side of the street heavier in the morning? Yes, that's what it is. Essentially, that's the way it works. Then you could do a three-lane solution if you can flip the lane, possibly. We did briefly look at that. The logistics of switching lanes midday are quite challenging. Just with how you change markings, how you move, you know, is there a barrier you're asking to move here in the day that some of our new cities have? But there are machines that flip the barriers. There are moving headlights that the right people can move to. I mean, I wouldn't call it inconsiderable, not something that you couldn't consider at least. So during maybe midday at work, what we found was even at night when the traffic is heading north, heavy, that one lane southbound isn't safe. Isn't that what we're there for? Yeah, okay, that's true. One other question. Have you looked at the present pedestrian underpass as a possible way of flipping the pedestrian and bicycle streams to keep them separated from the road lane? Do you know what I mean? Some sort of spiral arrangement that takes people down and under. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and probably for pedestrians. That's probably more detailed than you get into the scope. Because we have to go through some design phase, things like that may get looked at, but we did not look at that, no sir. That's a neat idea, yeah. When we had floated out to Burlington previously this idea of a three-way lane and the feedback from the current administration is they were not interested in entertaining that after huddling with their folks. You know what, real considerations was three years ago, four years ago we had that conversation. And we did not include RPC in that conversation. We were just going to bag ideas around how to make it more pedestrian friendly and if they would be able to do that conversation, they would not at that time. And one thing to note too with the wider structure 76 feet wide, in the future when you do have to do work, even though there's a barrier there between the path and the travel lanes, that could be removed and you can still maintain four lanes of traffic while you perform like a rehab on one side just by shifting traffic. It also allows you more flexibility from a future maintenance perspective of moving four lanes of traffic around instead of having to reduce traffic lanes to do some sort of repairs. Are there questions from the public? We're incredibly appreciative of all the work that you've done. We're lucky to have just had the RPC annual report Charlie visited us and we were boasting about all the great work that you guys have done for us and with us, over the last year or so. Again, this is just another demonstration that we really appreciate all the work for RPC and thank you all very much for coming here all the way from Cancun. Quite a lot of problem. So Ben, can I say there was a consensus that that recommendation that came from the advisory committee to move forward with four and five is the answer to this consensus of city council? It's absolutely what I'm hearing. We don't take votes from items or discussion items but you're hearing no concerns back on that path and I think we fully, from what I'm seeing and hearing accept that alternative five coming in late in the game for good reasons could make a lot of sense. And if it's useful, if it helps in grant funding, possibilities in the future to have a formal vote, we can award it for a formal vote at the next meeting. Move forward. Great. And if you need help, I'm probably going to watch now. Thank you all very much for your time. I appreciate it. Thanks for the work. It's exciting. It's something you get asked about regularly, especially while it's getting its face left right now. OK, next up is the discussion item on charter status, you know, Moosky Charter Commission. Charter Commission. Charter, a draft you have in front of you. Eric drafted it, so he is probably better equipped to talk to it than I am, but this was my understanding of the intent here was to give you a draft to consider the charter for convening this committee. Here any feedback you have tonight, and then bring it back for final approval on the November 5th meeting with the appointments. Use this space as the posting for interested parties over the next couple of weeks, and then bring back appointments in this charter at the next council meeting, I think was my understanding. Yeah, I think that encapsulates it. I think that was the charge emerging from the last meeting was that there's been an update since then. The liaisons to this future committee would put together the position description for posting and be put together a draft of the charge for the commission. Hal, who was initially elected by us to serve as that liaison, had to step down due to capacity concerns that he wouldn't be able to give this the full time, especially due to some recent developments and things that he is doing. So I've stepped in to give some background on the formation of this. It's very much a draft for us to consider tonight. Put in any edits this body thinks are necessary for consideration of a version that we can vote on for the November 5th meeting. I took the language as much as I possibly could from Seth's memo at the last meeting to put into the language for formation of this and also worked off a draft of a previous committee that had been formed from Jesse. So a lot of the language remains true from that initial draft of what we've used as a template for other committees. So there might be things that you or we don't think make sense in this, but a lot of that is drawn from just previous committee charters that we've put together in the past. And just because I know at least Christine was in this update, we approached the school district. The school district responded that they're going to take up this issue on November 15. That was the soonest that they could come forward with a recommendation on participation. I think it's great. Good job. I think the only thing would be the couple question mark ends the date cleanup and I think just the staff piece in the bottom is it might warrant mentioning or maybe it's implied anyway that we'll get legal review on anything proposed because I feel like we'll try to change as there's a lot of back and forth with the attorneys. But I think that's implied there. So I think it does the job. It's broad enough that it doesn't prescribe. Other questions or concerns? Good question about the intent. So in the membership section, it outlines the seven members. So the three public voting members, the two city council voting members, and the two school trustee voting members. And then it calls out some, for lack of a better word, categories of people. So seniors, youth, 20 to 34-year-olds, new Americans, and long-term residents for five. So is the intent to try and get as close to that to have at least seven of those reflect one of, at least five of those seven be reflected in those five? No, not necessarily. That was leftover language from the prior template. I do think, I did keep it in because I think in general we should strive to reflect a breadth of diversity in our committees. But I don't think that there's, I think what I heard from the council prior though, and one of the things that I added was that it was really important that we strive to get an individual or individuals who would be directly impacted by this, who are non-citizens in our community right now. So that's the addition right there. But I did decide to keep the other language in as well. But I don't think, I didn't write it with the intent of saying one of each member that represents this specific perspective. And then my other comment, and not necessarily for this, so obviously I would be the staff person. I would like to ask your permission to look into getting a consultant to actually staff. So I would attend the commission meetings, but in terms of doing research or outreach or those kinds of things by some consultant support to support that process. And if that, if I get a gentle nod for me, we'll look at what that funding might require and bring you a fund balance request for that. It's good, I would probably recommend having the committee, I would probably have the committee brought together before you did that so you understood the pace at which they desire to work and the scope under which they're gonna work. Cause I think it would be hard for you to guesstimate hours, times and resources necessary there without having those, probably a couple of conversations with them, does that make sense? And just also the skillset and the interests of the group. They may be the scooby, some heavy lifting without a lot of external support. It's on the passion levels, the skillsets. So just so I'm clear, we're gonna appoint the five members on our end, on the fifth, if one's our first meeting and only one, I think that's it. And then just we don't know if the school board is going to even elect to participate in the process, much less appoint folks. Is it a problem if we have a charter for a committee that says that there will be two school district trustees as part of the committee if they opt not to participate? I'm just trying to understand the order of operations of us taking action on the fifth when we don't really know what the school district. I thought that was addressed in here. Where is it said, should they choose? Cause I had wondered that question coming into this. Oh yeah, may serve as voting members of the committee of Funuski School Board chooses to do so. Two schools with these may serve as voting members. That sentence itself that I would say from an input perspective was the one I wasn't sure in the wording along those lines and what's really interested in input from us as we go back to edit. Yeah. I wonder too if should they elect not to participate if it makes sense to hold off full appointments to seek out someone to kind of fill that void. Right, I guess that's my concern is if we move forward with approving the charter and making the appointments and then it's sort of like the trains off the station. You'd have to just afterwards. Yeah. You could make the four appointments ahead of time and then react to what the school board chooses to do at that point in time. Is there something? I'm sensitive to the fact that we did not consult with them at all the sort of the first time around and I don't want to be perceived as not being collaborative in this time around by saying we've gone ahead approved of, I mean, I don't know if they've had an opportunity to look at this. Would they have an opportunity to look at this? Is that, I just. You could balance this to them as part of their is the document. Right, it's got a different feel to it of we've approved this and have appointed our members. Now it's on your plate to sort of take it or leave it versus we've reviewed it. We're comfortable with this approach. We'd like to move forward. You know, our first meeting in December, we in order to have full input into this process, you need to take action on November 15th or whatever their meeting is, not giving a lot of opportunity for delay in their process since they aren't going to be taking it up until mid November, but I don't know. I just, it doesn't feel particularly collaborative have made all the decisions before they've even taken up the question. I, yes, I was about to share something similar. Okay. It feels undiplomatic and I don't know what they, the appropriate process is in establishing the charter for this, but I wonder if they should be invited to also participate in review of that before we approve it. If they're going to, you know, potentially serve as a substantial portion of the actual body. We could share the charter with them as material, supporting material for their meeting on this proposal as part of their meeting on the 15th. That makes sense to me. I think that we don't do approval voting until after they've weighed in is how I'm feeling. That's fine by me. I think it's all about timing now and it's just, let's all acknowledge that and what that implication is and but I understand those. So would the desire be to share this then with the board to say this is our draft in the format that it stands and this is our draft charter, you know, and just explain that we typically have a charter committee that's established and we're following that process now. This is what we're proposing in terms of what it would look like. Is that okay with everybody? Yep. Okay. So that means that then we'll take that feedback. I'll reach out because I don't want a whole gaggle of us to show up, but you know, I do think we should probably have some presence there to answer questions about the process. And I'll talk maybe, I don't know if the two of you is the committee members want to carry that flag of that meeting or if you want me to go. November 15th. Yeah, I think that that's... Oh, you know what? They meet the second Wednesday of the month, which is November 14th, which is when I have my board meeting. So I cannot attend on the 14th. Seth, I'm going to nominate you. Huh? Let me see what the response is up back here. November 14th, you're right. I'm sorry. So we'll have a response from there after. So I'm happy to attend with you there. Yeah, I mean, if you as the mayor want to speak on behalf of the actions we've taken as a body, I'm comfortable with that. Okay. So we'll plan to attend that on the 14th. And in the meantime, any other alterations to this draft that we want to be aware of? You know, language, just so we're presenting something we're all good with and don't change it afterwards. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would just reserve the right to change that sentence about the true school trustee members. You know what I mean? We would ask that. Do we want to formulate it as though they're participating? Could I recommend that? Right, rather than if the chooses to do so. I can make those edits and get it to you tomorrow to the police will work. With the presumption that they're participating since it's what's been offered and asked. And then have we already decided on that? I'm forgetting on a special meeting date for us in November where we have to schedule a meeting we were prior going to have. Or is that a discussion we need to have? Oh, we're getting set to do the poll. Yeah, 26 or 27th, I think. Those are the dates I looked at. You can set it now if you'd like. So it'd be my request that we can have this on as an approval discussion item based on it. It's following the school board meeting. And what I would then say too is that, so then the public posting would go up sometime right after the school board meeting and in terms of request for participants. Is that right? I think that makes sense to me. We don't want to open it up and start recruitment because the position description, I mean doesn't need to be attached to the charge necessarily. That's what we've done in the past. Looking at the position descriptions we've used for committees before. I mean, I think we know broadly the topics that the committee will be discussing. So I think if the draft charter change charge is shared with the school board chair and the superintendent like to discuss this, we'd like you to consider this as part of your discussion. We are gonna move forward with recruitment. I don't know, I guess I don't know how we're recruited but we haven't finalized a real strong opinion about what comes first, although. I mean I think in just speaking from a perspective I've got opening it up so that people who are interested can kind of get, start the application process. Also means that if they're approving this on the 15th then we're so narrowly, but we're putting on much more narrow window on recruitment if this goes up the 16th and then we're meeting on that date and late November. So we have an opportunity to garner a wider pool and just go through the scheduling of interviews for consideration of candidates. So it's like the works, if anything were to change about this I think we would wanna go back to applicants and say the shape of the committee has changed a little bit in this way. We could reassess them but I think if we wait to actually open up postings and start the process of interviewing people or having discussions with them then it's not gonna be until mid December by which we actually formulate a committee which means they probably wouldn't meet until January, which from my perspective at that point would be four months after we decided not to move this forward on the November ballot before we even have an initial meeting of the committee. Right now we're talking about me on the 26th or 27th, the 3rd of December would be the next meeting which is a week later. So you do have just a week gap there. Just throw that out there. If you decided not to post until the 15th and consider applicants between them and there you probably have enough time to do the vetting and recruitment by the 3rd. I don't know because if you post the 15th you still need to interview and vet candidates which means it's gonna take a while for people to put their applications in. Now everyone's gonna apply on the 15th which means we can schedule interviews for the next week if we get an application for a week. We should write that off as a week to do business. People are useless during the holidays. And I think on the converse side too opening up then we start to hit into the December holiday stuff too. So I think if we open it up it doesn't mean that we need to all of a sudden on that meeting on November okay we need to take immediate action right now. We could do our appointments on December but that would give us a long time between now and before that time to consider candidates start having discussions with people so that we can be ready to move. Yeah I don't have a problem with soliciting interest ahead of the school board decision but I wouldn't want to be doing appointments or finalizing things before that. Are you guys good in coordinating the posting? I got yeah I got some like a previous position posting language from Paul so I can do a draft or you can do draft fuel on the contrary before it goes up. Okay good to you. Thank you. I have a conference this week so I'm a little bit under water this week if you wanted to take a first step I had a few minor edits to this and I can get back to you but okay. That's appreciated thank you. Sure. Okay. Yeah I think broadly sharing that is wonderful and then if the school should choose not to participate you still got the latitude then to make we could make adjustments to the composition of the body if we needed to and you could make directed selections to try to pull in whatever perspectives you would think are needed at that point. Make sense? Yeah I think that sooner you can get a framing of the issue to Mike and Sean so that they can do some preliminary thinking and talking in advance of the meeting on the 14th so that they're prepared to really make a decision would be great. So here's the decision points that we need from the school board. And they've got a pretty lengthy I gave them a lot of information but I think this charter is the big thing is getting them that to say this is the comp this is what the structure of it will look like but we laid out for them actually the memo basically and explain which options were selected and why so that they had that for context and I think in them attending that meeting make sure that that's filled in very clearly. Other questions, concerns? Great so I'll look forward to the updated charter and as soon as it's done we'll share that with the school board. There are all that's. Any questions, comments, concerns from the public? Yes sir. I have a designated question. Are you considering holidays in your schedule planning? I think we'll just put in some buffer thinking about that from the Thanksgiving perspective as to what impact that would have on applications. Well not only Thanksgiving but there's Christmas New Year's and people travel. And I think that this is a serious issue. It requires a lot of careful thought. It requires an opportunity to bring all the different constituencies that are likely to be concerned about this issue into play. And everybody should be treated with enough respect so that they feel not being steamrolled. Yeah and I think if we stayed along this timeline when we would expect that by the 1st of December there's discussions about when people couldn't have initial meetings and get the ball rolling. And I think our expectation is that we've laid forward some outreach considerations or thoughts, some baselines that the first job of that group is to really analyze that and say were we given the right task to accomplish the goal? We're giving I think a fairly prescribed goal in terms of saying this is what we would like to see happen. Tell us what the obstacles are to that and ensure that we've gotten feedback on it and that we're considering all the right points and concerns. So there but there's the process thing we've said let's let the committee first look at that and the scope and decide its own pace in a way. You know I don't think that that's a fully unbridled license in terms of if it comes back. Well we think we can do this in four years. There's probably gonna be a discussion as to why in four years. But there was acknowledgement in the last meeting that the majority of the council said let them, option four and what we're looking at let the committee get its arms wrapped around the work prior to prescribing an exact timeline. Somewhere between four years on the one hand and four months on the other hand has to be accepted as a reasonable evolutionary process. The other and we are generally is the city very respectful of volunteers times during the holiday season and the family demands that they have. Anything past mid December is a wash until the second week in January. We can staff at work to them. Just we got like two weeks of their attention left and that's just gone. So it's all through 2019. Okay any ideas you guys? No. Any other questions, comments, concerns from the public or council? Okay so seeing and hearing none. Thank you very much. Thanks for your work on that Eric and Nicole appreciate the time. I was sick Eric I was really good I was a little bit of a thank you Eric. Yep so we've requested a two to three minute recess. So we'll restart at around 8.19. You know we did have a conversation about and Emma is one of the organizers that's one of my good friends and she's a mask for any night we're hanging out and we're talking about like expect to get paid trust me. Okay we'll reconvene tonight's city council. Meeting and we'll pick up from where we left off and we're very pleased to welcome the goal update for safe, healthy and connected people. So this is our regular monthly update for you all in front of you is the matrix of the status indicated as well as qualitative updates. We can walk through it if you'd like or we can just deal with questions or we can each highlight two or three key points if that would be useful. I think just a quick high point especially for public at home and this isn't I just want to say just off the bat this is an awesome report and it's really cool and I want to talk about the committee police and strategic plan specifically but yeah. Do you want to just come down a little bit? Here go ahead Chief. So my name is really simple district the local emergency operations plan. There's some changes on the state level how that reporting is done in the formatting. We're able to do a personal touch if you will it used to be pretty boring like late. Not a lot of difference between like when you see Burlington the new format allows us to really put the reality of when you see on paper. That requirement is due this year I chose to do it in this reporting year in order to get a jump on it and be able to understand it, get some feedback which we got from the state so we were kind of the first one out of the gate with it and got some really positive feedback and some ideas on how we can develop a work plan that's around that. We will do some staff training and a tabletop exercise. The goal of ours are cross functionality you hear us talk about a lot. How community services plays a role or the admin team or you play a role in an emergency here in the city. We haven't practiced a lot so that's becoming a priority as we kind of set the stage for that. So that's my update. Pee and two things that we wanted to highlight in the report, I'll start with the community outreach team. It's gone very well. They've really just been a great addition to both our community and the police department. They're accepted right away from the uniform officers which is usually pretty rare when some new entity comes in but the officers have embraced it. They see the use for this that people are getting help that we're spending less time on these calls and one thing that I'd like to highlight is that even though when you see the smallest community or the second highest utilization of the team which I think is pretty important. So it's been a really good addition. We appreciate the funding and look forward to continuing it in the future. And I'd echo that too. I think for my staff, non-police staff we've had a few instances where we've leveraged it as well which has been really helpful. We, especially at the library, often see some frontline challenges and it's been really nice to have that business card in people's back pockets to pull out and make that phone call when it's needed and Rick and his team have been great about integrating so I just would echo that as well. It's been a great resource. But just to call out something to expect during the budget processes, we are the smallest but the second highest user. We also pay the least it's done. The funding for this is done on a prorated basis with South Burlington covering way more than their prorated share. So Rick and I are meeting, we met with a team last week in our main with them again in a couple of weeks to really lay out the FY20 budget and talk about how we distribute that cost across the community. So we do anticipate that there may be a cost increase to this. We're also hearing from other communities that they wanna join the network so that there may be some offset there as well. Put in the ignorance on this. The only thing that I found confusing in the report was the call in the shade from with other being 240 which is a pretty significant portion. Any additional information on that other? Like the- I think it's direct calls. Yeah, that's what I was wondering if it's public. Or businesses or other community partners. So housing authorities are a high user when they present this data to us. Housing authorities, Champlain Housing Trust, is that where it's going to begin? And then they did do around all the businesses as well so businesses can direct contact them as well. And then the other question I had was the, can I say this? When they're not there tracking the individuals that have caused the call for service to take place. Tracking, what do you mean? Yeah, if there's one individual for example that's causing 60 calls in a community versus, because I see the client sort of face to face number was trying to reconcile that but I couldn't figure out. I'm sure they have that information. I don't think they went into that kind of detail for this report. Yeah. Well, are you looking for unique users? Is that what you're? Yeah. So that's on the first page of the report. So there's 611 contacts. And then there's the distinct client serve face to face. So there's 233 unique users. So are you looking for like, did all the rest of those come from one person? Like the frequent fires? That's exactly right. Yeah, is whether or not that's discernible? I'm sure it is because they are tracking at that individual level. I'm not sure that's in Valcor. So one of the things that's really, I think unique about this is that the community outreach team members have been prescreened to look into our police data. Data I can't look into but the police officers and the community outreach team can. Community outreach team can also look into the Howard Center medical records but can't share that data with the police officers. So when they're walking into a situation they have a lot of knowledge of what our neighbors might be experiencing that's helping them best meet that individual's needs where they are. That's not data we can have access to. We might be able to get that in summary but not individual level. Sure. Part of it they're self-dispatching too. If they deal with somebody who's really in crisis one day they're gonna go and follow up with this person without necessarily being called. I brought up the concern at that meeting that basing this just on the number of calls was a little concerning to me because we don't wanna discourage people from calling or us calling and asking for them to come and respond because it's going to be a higher cost for us. Yeah, I guess that was my, do we know by community where the calls are initiated from. So I guess I think that's, to me that's an interesting piece of information. The calls initiated from and then drilled down from a community perspective. I'm sure we can get that breakdown for you for the next report. For just for the budget. It does shine a little bit of light on. I can tell you theoretically from what I've seen the majority of the calls are officers requesting dispatch to have community outreach come and talk to somebody. I would say 75% of those calls probably are generated through the police department. Through the police, right. This is tremendous though. Yeah, this is awesome. Yeah, it's really good work. And you know, they hired four really good individuals. One changed careers and left silver in the process of hiring a fourth. But Howard has been great about sorting out these people and making sure that they're a good fit for the program. They've done an excellent job. It was to you guys. I mean, that was a push to get this arranged and frankly a political push so to speak to ensure that it got funded. So way to go and finding innovation, innovative solutions to address issues. Thank you. It's awesome. I mean, I just think our police department, if you look at the strategic plan, I mean, we have a culture that's being built because it's the police department that is extremely community oriented and seeking to, you know, take that sort of holistic approach to people. So I would hate for, not that we would be punished, but that because we are actually practicing good community policing, not that, and I don't know what is happening in these other communities, whether, but if that's why I'm interested in, where are the referrals coming from? Because if it's being driven by our police departments, approach to policing versus other departments who are perhaps not, you know, that the force is not tapping into that resource as readily as ours would. I would hate to, it's sort of a perverse incentive. There's some different factors we talked about at the meeting. I think the fact that, for instance, Colchester doesn't have a downtown. So, you know, the fact that we have a downtown and people see, you know, things that concern them or people hang out and we get to see some behaviors that maybe, you know, we view as a problem. It leads to some calls where, like, that wouldn't happen in Colchester. Same with Essex. Essex doesn't really have a downtown. So, even though they're larger, I think their call volume is less. Do they have some centers? Moving on. Okay. Next thing is the three-year strategic plan. I haven't gone completely public with this because I'm trying to balance, actually implement and we're doing, we're starting to do the work, but I'm really trying to hold back for the rebranding so I can make this look nice and not outdated by the time it actually hits the press. So, bear with me with that. A quick explanation of this is it's really just a blueprint of what it is we're trying to do. A strategic plan involves goals and goals are long-term solutions or, you know, strategies that we're trying to accomplish under, so we have five goals in this plan. The first one is reduce, prevent, and solve crime. That's always basically going to be our basic premise of what it is that we're here for and what we're trying to do. Focus on community policing. Maximize operational efficiency. We're always trying to do more with either the same amount of money or less and try and stretch that as hard as we can. Develop and retain our personnel. They're our best resource and always will be. And enhance technology and resources to try and streamline services that we can provide. Under each of those five goals, there's five specific objectives and objectives are the path that you use to obtain the goals. So they're short-term, some of them are long-term, some of them will outlive the document and be entered into the second strategic plan. This is a live document that we're going to review once a year. We'll always be willing to adjust. If we have a checkbox next to a specific objective that wasn't a three-year project, then we'll be able to memorialize that, remove it from the plan and the updated plan and add a new objective. So I wanted to have a realistic number of things that we could work on, but I didn't want to tackle something that would just gather dust and we would never gain any steam or actually make any progress on. So for this first plan, we really tried to keep it boots on the ground simple. 25 things that we could focus on. We can do monthly check-ins within the police department to make sure that we're making progress on those objectives and kind of give us a direction of what it is we're trying to do. Because if you don't have something written down, sometimes everybody gets busy, call volume, all that type of stuff comes into play and before you know it, you've lost six or seven months and you had a bunch of notes scribbled down of things that you wanted to get to and you just don't. So this keeps us honest. It keeps us on a timetable. And to say I'm excited that this document is done is an understatement. This was a huge lift. Thank you to the Public Safety Commission. AALV also sat in a couple of sessions and had some input. So there was community surveys, Paul helped with that. Other department heads were in the city. So it was really a team effort. I'm proud of that. You should be. Great work. Thank you. You should be. And the fact that it ends in these objectives that are so tangible and action-oriented with assigned people too is awesome. Like it's, I'm sorry, but not to be Wumuski-Kornier. I choked up reading this to think about how far that your department has come in the last four to five years in terms of the way you've approached your work, thinking and planning. It's really phenomenal. And you should be really, really proud of that cultural change. Thank you. Because I don't think that it would have happened but for a really great leadership and being supported by great leadership. So this type of thinking though is, I mean, for a resident to read that this is what their police force is thinking about doing to make this a better community. Anybody can sit down and read this and very visibly then connect actions. And it's so rare that in the name of our planning processes we actually do that. Well, it's hard to capture in public safety, right? Because we're always trying to keep things from happening. So it's really nice to be able to embrace things and look, we want this to happen. We're going to physically take the time to spend the effort to get these things accomplished. And like I said, when you have a 24-hour day, seven-day, so we operation, there's always a lack of communication. It's just natural because you don't see all of your employees all the time. So this is just a great way to remind people of what it is we're trying to do. Yeah, I do think having teams organized around, people organized around specific tasks makes it much more likely that you've built in an accountability structure, not us to you or Jesse to you, but to yourselves. That's really, I think, powerful in terms of making progress. Thank you. Nice, and community service wise, I think one note here is we have one big may do item which was the pool that climbed into the must do category, so that early in the fiscal year was a pretty big lift. Certainly happy to be working with John now and handing that to a construction project, but definitely excited to see that project meet that leap and be moving forward. And I think just two other things I want to highlight more as things to look forward to in the next couple of months here, but releasing the survey looking at program needs and interest in the community, very excited about that, spent some time last week at the REC conference, the contractor who's helping us develop that was there and it was really nice to have some focus time with him. Hear about some of the work happening in other communities they've worked with and kind of comparatively feel like we're on a really good track there. Along a similar line, working on the financial labor process and standardization of some of our scholarship efforts, I think is something that I know staff is very excited about nicely with other communities and colleagues, so more to come there, but I think a lot of work, intentional work going in upfront to make sure to come out the other end with a process and a product that's gonna be what the community wants and what reflects I think the values we talk about here, but very excited to be working on those. Slow processes though, and I think to get to the right place, that's okay. Appreciate the work and expansion of program and it's taken place the last couple of years and it feels like it's gathering steam even more and people are identifying with what the offerings are. Thought the guide book this year was really great, taking people through what the opportunities were, services book and all the work that went into. And then we're not there yet with the O'Brien Community Center and also the 21st century childcare funding too and a lot of work chasing things that some didn't come to fruition. Maybe not for fault. Or the pursuits though I think in all cases that happens in the work and dust off and get back at it. Two other very quick things I want to call your attention to that you're gonna see in the next couple of months. One is the County Public Safety Authority which has now stood up, the Board of Board is meeting. The Chief Hebert and our dispatch supervisor have been working with the team on selecting a consultant who will move us into the operations plan of what that organization is gonna look like and then manage it for three years. So that's a process that Rick and Sharon have spent a lot of time on. We do anticipate awarding that contract in November and that will come with an additional FY19 ask of funds from the communities to pay for that consultant and invest the capital money to actually stand up the new center. So that's forthcoming and thank you to Rick and Sharon for doing that. And then just as a reminder, the Senate Mitigation Committee is on hold until the new noise exposure map with the F-35 data is released which is supposed to be in November in draft form for public hearing in December. So that has the potential to kick up very quickly. And of course we will keep you informed but just a flag for the radar screen. So that's kind of cool. Marnie, what's an F-35? It's been so long since I've had this conversation. Questions, comments from Council? Thank you for this update. Appreciate all the work. I think some of these we've checked in on more and know we didn't have as many big items, Chief, but thank you for all the work in the department and the restructuring that's been done over the last year and a half. Getting positive feedback on the street on that. So thanks for all your work. Questions, comments from the public? Seeing and hearing none, you're released. Thank you very much. Thanks for all the work. Thank you. Up next is approval for Myers-Pool Engineering Contract. So this is a follow up from the October 1st meeting. So we have provided a revised proposal. The scope and fee of pretty much, they've stated the same but we've clarified some things that were discussed. So one is kind of a basis of design. So within the proposal, Weston Samson provided that the basis of design is for that PD option. That is the option where we're looking at eliminating shade structure, reducing the slide. Those items are outlined in March 30th memo. The other item that's in the proposal is the kind of billing fee structure. So task one through four, they've clarified that that would be billed on per second fee. And then we also discussed, we changed task five, the construction administrative piece to time and materials. Thought there as sort of the detailed design comes to fruition. Some things may change based on the funding, so we don't wanna lock ourselves into that $100,000 potential lump sum fee if, say, we remove a community center that requires less inspection. So we've changed that to TNM type billing. So I think the major question leaving last time was the dollar amount. Yeah, so in the memo provided, we gave a breakdown, so the full sort of hard construction cost number, $3,070,275, which was outlined in the March 30th memo. And that's with the $267,800 deduction for those ED options. Then adding in sort of the soft costs for things like permits and this engineering proposal with construction administration plus the bonds and insurance and some of those other soft costs overhead and profit for the contractor and contingency. The total cost of the project, total estimated cost is $3,740,000. And that is based on the current preliminary engineering documents. So the other thought is as we go through design phase and getting starting documents, you'll see updated cost estimates as the scope of work gets more defined. Would that 3.74 just from a financing perspective, would that all be covered by bond? So debt, minus any grants, et cetera. That's the total financed amount, right? Minus any grants or fundraised amount, right? Right, okay. That's all in project costs. But the bond amount was higher than that. 3.9, yeah. So this is one of the conversations we've been dancing around and this is the first time we take a hard vote on that is we have talked about the all-in preliminary engineering plan. We've talked about the value engineered plan which enables the full use of the pool, all the features minus those kind of on the margins cost savings opportunities that the engineer could identify. It's still keeping in all the features minus the shade feature, I guess. And then the, so that, so if we approve this, if you approve this contract, that's locking the engineer into designing that value engineered option. I just, I think that the base number has moved from the original numbers that we considered. I think it's the point, right? I mean, yeah, it definitely has. So we went from 3.7, we went from 3.9 to 3.4, to 3 million on the initial options, right? So the, I have to pull up. I mean, it's first time we've seen 3.7. That includes the $300,000 that in features, assuming fundraising. So that is the 3.4 inclusive of that. Okay, yeah, okay. No, no it's not, because it's the VE construction estimates, the 3 million. The value engineering is just the material cost saving stuff. Not the slide, it's not the fund, the stuff, the 3,000. Okay, I'm sorry. Well, I think what's different is that when we first saw value engineered, it was at 3.582. And so it's $200,000 higher now than it was before. So the March 30th data did not include all of those sort of post-engineering design costs. So the construction inspection, the bond, the construction support. So those were not factored into this. The other thing is they outlined a design build sort of project execution, which we are not proposing for this project. So design build does, in the March 30th, they called out $150,000, for example. It's in this proposal, it's more like $170,000 for traditional project implementations. Thanks for breaking this out in that detailed way. I think the challenge that I had this time was trying to map it back to those last, that's what I just did this weekend is I tried to pull up those old numbers and plug them in somehow, and that's why I was saying it changed. And I just, I couldn't, I couldn't get there, so I stopped with the brain damage and just said, oh, man, oh, man, oh, man, oh, man. So if the fundraising targets of $300,000 is met, we would be looking at 3.44, as needed. Bonded that. I calculated, so say, for example, fundraising covered the slide in the community room, that's 314,000. There would be a bond payment of 3,431,000, wrapping in, say, the 5,000 in interest from the band, if you're to, if you're to band right away. So that would be the bottom line. Okay. The questions, do we have any lingering questions from last time? I think this will get us that much closer than putting the numbers together so that we can overlay them on the final budget proposal and we get to that big, giant discussion after we get the bill grant. And then. But that is what, you know, we're going to start previewing with you on November 5th, is that how that debt service, how that debt payment could potentially lay out over FY20 and future years. Great. Thank you. Just to be a little bit nitpicky. So in the previous value engineered one, the, you know, the design and engineering costs were $115, other $173. There's additional fees for permitting. I'm curious why those line items increased. Additional fees for the 150 and the updated. Like permitting task three, $20,000. We didn't have that previously. Exactly. And that's the, to get the full picture of the project, they probably should have been included this March 31. So you had that design sort of, okay, here's design construction, but it didn't give you the full picture of construction administration permits. So this updated estimate is a closer estimate to what needs to be for the project cost. And can you speak to why the engineering design increased $23,000? So that's the design build versus traditional sort of design bid built. So you save a bit, you know, in this initial memo, they discussed design build project, which is turnkey, which is a bit more riskier and not recommended for this type of municipal project. This estimate is, or this proposal is for a traditional design bid build project, which you pay a little bit more, plus this is just a rough, you know, they threw $150,000. This is a little more thought out with this proposal, but the thought is design bid build, you save a little bit, potentially more in the beginning, but you have risk because it's a turnkey project where your traditional sort of design bid build project, you pay a little bit more to do the really detailed engineering upfront versus designing and building it all at the same time. I guess what concerns me is that each time this comes back to us, the price is gonna go up because we're already speaking in terms of like, you know, we have estimated construction costs of 3.07 million or whatever, and we're already saying like some inconsistency, and I don't, I would be very concerned if somehow we crept back up to the 3.9 million when we already tried to kind of mitigate some of that for our, our tax base. So I think that's a totally reasonable concern. I also think it's important to remember what was happening in March when that data was presented. You know, we were doing preliminary engineering on the pool and Main Street in the attempt to get to the bond vote. We were, John was a month into the job. This was primarily a community services project, not a public works engineering project. So yeah, these numbers, as we get more specific into executing contracts and final design documents and whatnot, the numbers will change. You can never have finalized construction numbers with a massing study or a preliminary engineering design and try and get as close as you can, but it is going to change. But this, this document is the first contract outside of preliminary engineering that we enter into for the life of the project. So these numbers for the engineering portion of this, once this contract is executed, won't change. Hopefully the bids come in. And then we'll see what the bids come in. Yeah. And I will say, you know, as we get into sort of that construction design, one of the decision points will be, okay, what do we want to put as, you know, bid alternates so that we could strike it from the actual construction work if, you know, bids came back higher than we anticipated to keep it, you know, in that range that we want to keep the budget at. Okay. That's helpful. But the bids are going to come in lower. They always do. They always do. Cost of construction is definitely not going up right now. Right. Right. Thanks for addressing the questions and issues and numbers were still a little confusing, but not through any fault of yours. Appreciate the memo that clearly outlined it and appreciate you guys vetting those other questions we had on there. Thank you. Questions, concerns, additional? Questions in terms of the public. Yes, ma'am. Hi. I just have a couple more questions actually. Are there any outside, other than the funders and group, are there any outside, is the city looking at any outside other funding options? Are they investigating grants or federal money or whatever else that's maybe out there? Yep. So, so far when we talked about this at the last meeting, we have submitted a pre-application for the Vermont Land and Water Conservation Fund grant. The pre-applications were due today. Full applications if you're invited or due in mid-December. So, the way that process works is if you're invited to submit a full application, you have a site visit with a funder from the state Forest Parks and Recreation Department. They kind of walk through the site, talk about the project. What I'll say is I think we're in really good shape in that funding pool and that we have a lot of the design work done. Pre-application is very basic and I think I probably over send information in terms of site plans and maps and design. I think they at times get just sort of an napkin sketch. So, we're in a really good position to be competitive there as with any grant. It's, you do your best to put in a good application and see from there. We are gonna be looking at some other opportunities as well over the coming months. So, we will definitely be coming back here to seek approval to apply for funds. But right now that's the big one. How much is that? So, we are asking for initially 150,000. The grants range in terms of award size anywhere from eight to 10,000 all the way up to I think the highest I saw in the 40 years stretch was like 250. Anything above 100 is definitely fewer and farther between. They tend to be more in the like 50 to $75,000 range for the larger projects. So, we're gonna ask for what we need and hope they award it and we'll go from there. Thank you. Yeah. Any questions, comments, concerns from the public? So, seeing and hearing none, I are taking a motion for approval of the engineering contract from Mars Memorial Pool. Motion by Eric, second by Nicole. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. And those opposed, motion carries. Thank you for your work. Thank you. Thank you guys. Next up is discussion of approval of pre-development agreement of the Champlain Housing Trust to consider a home ownership affordable housing project at the front of 32 Mallets Bay Avenue. Also known as the community center. So, just a quick background on this. So, we, Champlain Housing Trust is very interested in doing perpetually affordable housing development in the newsgate. It's been quite a number of years since they did a new project here. We had originally been talking with them about Lot 7D when the hotel was going to be on Lot 9. Obviously that is changing, but they're still very interested in being here. When the space study was done historically on the city hall property and the police station property, it was conceptualized that we would only, if we moved to the front of the OCC building, we would only need about a third to a half of that space. And so therefore we'd be interested in fully developing out the street front with a community partner. Doing affordable housing option at that space seems to be very logical to us. And especially the model CHT is looking at, which is a affordable home ownership option. So, townhouses or condos, where people are really invested in their property, we think would be a good match. It also, they don't, they can do that project, they believe without low income tax credits, which we would likely not get in the next funding cycle because 268 got those tax credits this year. So they've identified a grant funding to do the feasibility study that would be needed to move this project forward. So that's an engineering study, a market study, a zoning permitting study, et cetera. They, for that application, they need, they don't necessarily need site control, but they need to know the site won't be sold out from under them. So what this pre-development agreement says is that we're interested in exploring this, that we commit to not approaching another developer to use the front portion of the OCC for a specific time. And actually that time has changed since this draft. So this draft says June 30th and it would actually be the end of September, 2019. We have no plans to talk to any other developers. And with this pre-development agreement, they can apply for that funding and that application is due November 5th, hence why it's coming to you tonight. Happy to answer any other questions about that. There's no local dollars in this. Yeah, I think the only, that was the restraint on approaching other people is just, I think we would appreciate the mentioning that if, should they pursue this and decide in April or March or May that it's not feasible, that they consider releasing us from that requirement and not arbitrarily holding it and that we should make them aware that we may present that request. Should we get a determination from them that it's not a feasible project? Just, I mean, you're right. With everything else we have going on, we're unlikely to do that, to be in that place and space. I don't think it requires any kind of adjustment to this. I was just gonna mention it as a talking point to them. And I've seen letters like that before where they release communities from that requirement and they're like, we're no longer considering it. Feel free to consider that and all in point. I don't think we should build in the contract. I think they're right to ask for that whole, that makes sense. Other questions, concerns, comments? I just have one point of clarification. It reads like this, so I just wanna be sure that, this doesn't prohibit us from moving forward with any of the discussions we're already having about the actual, like tenant space. Right, no, it does not. So anything that's currently happening, any of the current tenants in the building or any future tenants in the building or anything having to do with the current building for the print, fair game. This is solely for that undeveloped parcel at the very street front of the lot. Good question. You just fill us out that this council hasn't taken on this issue, but we have lots of supporting documentation. If anybody's curious about that space, we have an extensive look at it from a conceptual standpoint as to what the property can hold. There's, we're dealing with financial issues with it right now because the property itself is underutilized in Lynch Park. It's a huge piece of land, and back when there were other buildings envisioned on that plot of land. So we pursued potentially moving city hall there in addition to the housing, et cetera. So we've got stuff, if from a conceptual standpoint, anybody who needs wants that. I was really excited to hear about this actually. For a real home ownership is really important to me. I have many times walked by that property and thought that there was a bunch of space up there that we could use. So I'm really happy about this. Yeah, it's very exciting. Thanks for all your work to bring this to fruition just so now that that came from all of your conversations there. So thank you. It's got great potential. Questions, comments, concerns from council? Questions, comments, concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing none, this is on as an actual discussion item. So I would entertain a motion on that. I'm from the pre-development agreement for the Champlain Housing Trust for 32 miles to get out of there. Second. Motion on a full seeing by Christine for our discussion. Seeing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. We are ending tonight's meeting at 9.01. We are doing so without councilor Colston at the table, which means we should all jab him and say he's the reason we've been going late. And seriously, that completes tonight's agenda, and I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Second. Motion by Eric, second by Christine for the discussion. Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion is adjourned. Meeting is adjourned.