 but welcome to the May edition of the wards one and eight NPA. And I wanna just make a couple of comments before we start and talking about these signs kind of leads into a conversation about the budget. We presented a proposed budget last month. We haven't really done very much since then. It's been posted on the, we talked about it. We posted it on our page, on the CEDO page and we'd like to move forward with it. And I kind of like to move forward with it by consensus rather than have a vote because we didn't really get very much accomplished on the budget between last month and this month because we really don't have the resources in the bandwidth to do it. We're a very small group of people. We took some fantastic suggestions last month from people in this group. And that's a lot of appreciated but without the support of the volunteers on the steering committee or in the NPA, it's very hard to accomplish what we'd like to accomplish. And that kind of leads to a broader question about the steering committee. And we have a very small steering committee. We have three members of board one. We have one member of board eight. And when the member of board eight isn't here as she can't be today, or she's gonna come late, Hannah will be here probably around eight. But as she is, when she isn't here or when she isn't at a steering committee meeting, there's no representative for board eight involved. And this isn't a new problem. I mean, Richard Hilliard did board one and board eight for years and years, but it's really not right. And I think that we have a problem and we'd like to make the NPA more relevant, more reflective of the community, but we can't do it without increasing the number of people doing it. Not just because of our time, which everybody's time is limited, but also because we're not a diverse group of people. We're not a very diverse group of people. We don't understand all the problems in the community. We're missing an awful lot by being such a small group. We need more people to be engaged. So I'm trying to explain why we may not get as much accomplished as people might want us to get accomplished and implore members of the community, whether you're at this meeting or whether you hear about this meeting from somebody who's at this meeting to join us. It's not that much time, but it will get a whole lot more done with a whole lot more people. So back to the budget. If you have objections to us moving forward with the budget as we presented last month and as has been posted, talk about it during speak out and we can make changes reflective of it, but primarily what we'd like to do with the money right now is make the donations to Front Forge Forum and Town Meeting TV. And we'd like to do outreach in the form of getting some more signs. I really appreciate everybody talking about how you wanna put up signs because it's just a very easy way to communicate once a month and make sure everybody knows about it. We wanna go forward with that. I think we wanna go forward with getting some gift cards from the local four that we can use for raffles or we can use in some other way to get to actually as outreach for the NPA, but also to support the Wards I and Ward 8's eating establishments. And so those are primarily the things we wanna move forward with. We'll probably table the movie night for now. And if there are objections to that, speak up during speak out. If there are no objections during speak out, we'll just move forward with it. So with that, I guess I've taken up too much of my time. So I was gonna say we should all introduce ourselves and then you could volunteer to be part of this during committee while you introduce yourself. But let's hold off on that. I don't think we have time for introductions. I think we should move to speak out. So with that, if there's folks who want to speak out, raise your hand. Jean, Jean Keller. Hi, hi everybody. I live over in Billard Duke Parkway and you may have seen on the front porch forum that Cindy Cook, John Kane and I put together a citywide petition challenging and complaining about the problems around the reappraisal, the process by which the reappraisal was done. We got almost 300, last time I checked, we had 300 signatures citywide. So people were sharing it with their front porch forums, with their friends and everything. And we did get a lot of support back for that. I had my hearing today and I just want to point out that I think we've narrowed, some of us looking at this very closely have narrowed down what one of the major problems is with the way this was done. And that is that the way that none of us were given definitions of terms, but I think even the people who did the appraisals, the valuations of our houses were not given what in education I think is called a rubric, which is a definition of the different values that you might assign to something. So you give something a five if this is present, you give something a four if this is present, et cetera, et cetera. In particular, the condition of a house has turned out on Billidoo Court and Billidoo Parkway and East Avenue to be the biggest factor determining how big an increase you got, the determination they make of the condition of your house. I asked the assessor, what's the difference between average condition and good condition because that difference cost me $35,000 in the value assigned to my house because I was assigned good when one of my neighbors who just did $88,000 worth of renovations was assigned average. So I said, well, what's the difference? And the assessor replied, average is average and good is above average. Not to say you would give someone good if they've had a new driveway within three years, you would give someone good if they've spent $20 a square foot on a new bathroom, you would get averages. And so I said to the hearing officer, look, there are few of us in the neighborhood are basically old hippies. We don't do a lot with our houses and I'm paying more, I'm gonna be paying more in taxes than people who've done massive amounts of renovation on their property. What's the difference between average and good? And he said to me, this is the hearing today. Well, one person might look at a house and say good and another person might look at the house, same house and say average. And I said, well, there's your problem. So Mr. Vickery said he's developing a guide that should be available on their website sometime later this week, which is of course, after anybody could ask for a hearing or whatever. But I think he's risen above his level of competence and I think this whole thing, in light of what we've all learned about the importance of science and replicability and evidence, I think that's where part of the problem lies. So I just hope people keep fighting. And by the way, Zareia, congratulations on your new job. So that's all I wanted to say. Thank you, Gene. I see Elona, then Dave, Collie, then Karen Long. And you have to unmute yourself. Okay, can you hear me now? Yes. Yes. Okay, I don't know how to get rid of the hand. Maybe, maybe, oh, there we go. All right, so good evening. My name's Elana Blanchard. I work for the city of South Burlington. I am a Burlington resident and I'm here tonight because the city of South Burlington is preparing an application for a transportation grant for a pedestrian bicycle bridge over I-89 at exit 14. And that's a project that we brought to the MPA several years ago. Some of you may remember it. And so at this time, we're asking the federal government to provide funding to complete the engineering and build the bridge. So this is a big grant. We're asking for somewhere between 12 and $14 million. Probably it'll end up in the 12 range. And it's a grant that we've applied for several years in a row. This year, we're trying to put a really big foot, best foot forward and get more letters of support than we've ever asked for before and really show that this is important to our region as well as the South Burlington community. But from what we understand from many surveys and studies that have been done in the past and talking with you folks in other neighborhoods, that is that the exit 14, despite the fact that it does have some pedestrian and some bicycle facilities is fairly disjointed, daunting and is in need of a much better solution in order to make both systems on either side of exit 14, very functional as a regional system. So our application is due at the beginning of July. And so we wanted to give folks lots of time if they wanted to prepare a letter to submit. We are happy to provide information like who it's addressed to or examples of what other people are writing. But we'd love to have your support for this project. So, thank you. Can you, if you send Tom Derenthal a link, we can put it in the minutes. Okay. Thank you, Dave Colley. Hi, everyone. I wanted to let everybody know that. David, did you just, you muted yourself? Let's try it again. Go back to your beginning. Yes, thank you. Sorry about that. I thought I was, anyways, this Saturday, the 15th at Shemanska Park, we're participating with the Parks and Rec Department on kids week. We're gonna have a variety of activities taking place at Shemanska Park and everyone's welcome to come to give you a sense of some of the activities that we've got going. There's gonna be what we call treat cookies. They're little round discs that are gonna be painted. So there's gonna be paints available for kids to do artwork on. There's gonna be some yoga in the park. You'll be able to do some stretching. The Lake Monsters Champ is gonna be there to meet and greet people. There's also the meteorologists from Fox 44. Haley Bowie is gonna be there. And we have a new story walk that's up in the park. So you can come in and check that out. And we're also gonna do a demonstration of some live musical instruments that you can do your own percussion on. It'll be a xylophone, a marimba, and some bongo. So you can make and play your own music there. And speaking of music, we've got actually a pretty nice lineup of some groups that are coming. Eric, would you like to speak to that? Thanks, Dave. Hi, everybody. Art Montga, Grove Street. So yeah, from 10 to about 1230, we've got a lineup of four different groups. Our own city counselor, Jack Hansen, who you may not know. This is a very talented keyboard player. The Jack Hansen duo will be leading off at 10 o'clock. And then we have a small samba band called Blocco Montaña Vergi that's gonna be playing after Jack or across the street neighbor, Lola Houston. As a singer, a company's or cell phone on guitar and banjo is playing. And then we'll end up with, some of you may know Samba Tucada, the big samba street band that I've played in for years is gonna end up in, end up the set and hopefully have some interactive, depending on how many kids are there, maybe teach kids how to do some shaking or shakers and introduce the instruments and tell them a little bit about Brazilian culture. Thanks, Dave. So come on out. Saturday is really the kickoff day. Most of the activities will be going on between 10 and one. I don't know if I mentioned there also be free creamies. Palmer Lane Maple from Jericho is coming out with their truck. And so we'll come out and get a free creamy while you're at it. The story walk and some of the other things will be going on throughout the course of the week. So stay tuned or check out the old East End website. And we'll be updating our activities there. Thanks. Thank you, David. It sounds great. Hi, thank you. I wanna echo what Jean Keller said about the reappraisal. And I guess just from what I've shared with many, many people in my neighborhood and in other neighborhoods is that it's really just simply not accurate, especially that good and not good. I mean, on Henry Street we have Sunday night dinners or we used to before COVID. So I've been in probably just about every house on my street and the range of prices of the houses on Henry Street is pretty outrageous. I happen to get off really easy and the house next door to me was valued at $180,000 more than my house. And there's not a lot of difference between our houses, lot size, house size, whatever. And I don't know, I'm just really baffled by the whole system they did. And even facts like houses that just sold, so if we're supposed to bring everything to market rate, why aren't they using selling prices of houses? Because that was outrageously off with the number of people that I talked to. So anyway, I read in seven days, 18% of the people appealed. I had thought if it was over 15%, they were supposed to do some kind of a study and maybe reevaluate some of it. But I, and as far as the guy that we met with for our appeal, he had never been to Burlington. So I just don't know, how are they judging good and average? Certainly they did not go in houses on Henry Street and the good and average houses were really mixed up. Like the good ones were average and the average ones were good. And it was just really very inaccurate. So I think it's super disappointing. Thank you. And Jean, as I said to Alona, if you wanna keep collecting signatures, please give Tom the link and you can put it in the minutes. And Tom, you're next. Yeah, Jean, I just wanted to also agree with what you're saying. I know people in the South end who've had the same complaint that they didn't really understand the difference between average and good. And it did make a substantial difference in their values. I am also one of the people who have appealed their value and turns out that the guy I talked to from Tyler Technologies used to live in Burlington. But it really didn't make any difference. And we talked a little bit about how the values came up and it doesn't sound like Tyler did the computation. My impression is that that was done by the city and they're really handling some logistics. So I'm not sure what to believe. Tom, I can tell you that Tyler did the reappraisal. They did, it was a contract with them. Okay, well, what I meant was that he said that they got the information off the data cards. And I said, well, you must have been, you must have RSSed all the various components of a house to figure out what a component was worth and in a particular neighborhood and stuff. And he said, no, they didn't do that. And I was, I mean, I wasn't gonna argue with them. I only had a few minutes. I was just surprised. Thanks, Tom. Jennifer? Thanks on that subject, just to give you an idea of how inaccurate some of this can be, we took a look at our measurements and they have, sorry for the dog, they have us listed as having 200 square feet less of livable space than we actually have and have some areas that our kitchen is looked at as cold storage and some of our cold storage is looked at as livable space. So it's just really, I don't know, that's like on the assessor's card. Obviously what they do is exterior measurements and then make a value judgment from outside as to what the use is inside because they've never set foot in our house and we've lived here for 40 years. I'm actually, our value almost doubled. We're in an owner-occupied duplex and so I shudder to think what our actual taxes are gonna go up to and we're appealing. I've got, we've got our appeals meeting on Friday morning. And I think the issue that folks are raising about conditions is a valid one. Their conditions are very subjective. They're supposed to, Praisal standards say they're supposed to estimate everything based on average usage and average conditions. And then they upgrade and downgrade from an average and the average is supposed to be a relatively objective standard. Although I don't know how, I mean, I think appraisal is one of those voodoo sciences like economics where there's just a lot of latitude and a lot of it is subjective. But yeah, they're supposed to base conditions on a median standard and then downgrade from that for deferred maintenance and add to it for certain types of improvements and the increased value. Because not all improvements increase value. I mean, you could put 20 or $30,000 into a bathroom and it might only raise the value of your property by five or $10,000. And if you do weatherization on your home, it doesn't raise its value at all. You could spend $10,000 on weatherization and there's no reflection of that in your appraised value. I'd like to speak during public forum or in speak out. So is Tony raising his hand? He's touching, he's talking on the phone. Okay. All right. Thank you everybody. Next on the agenda is city council updates. And I'm gonna go first with that's okay because I have to pop off. Yeah, so, Jean, thank you. I guess I wanna speak a little bit to that. Well, one also the pedestrian and bike bridge, that sounds exciting, definitely. I used to do my grocery shopping and Trader Joe's when I first moved to Burlington and that was a weird corner to navigate on a bike. Yeah, and then I guess just to like the reappraisal, having never lived through appraisal, it's hard for me to tell like how this compares to other reappraisals, but I definitely, I feel like it's, I mean, just the fact that we didn't have estimated tax rates, even though we can guess I think what the budget is gonna be because generally we do the budget to be about the same as last year's budget is just makes it I think really rough for folks because it is hard to tell. And then you're trying to, the only information that you really have is trying to talk to other people and look at homes around you to see how that changed which it's, yeah, I guess, I don't know, it feels like, I haven't talked to John about this but it feels like at least like the mayor and Brian Pine both have said, okay, this didn't go well. I think so there is, if people are saying that this isn't a usual reappraisal and so I haven't done my homework on it but I feel like it's a conversation where like maybe the red X reappraisal isn't gonna be in further down the road. Maybe it is gonna be sooner and maybe a little bit smoother. Yeah, and the same I heard the same thing about the percentages that it's like a much higher, it's a much higher rate of asking for appeals than we were expecting. And it's hard to tell how much that is just because people don't even know like what that means versus, and then also if it's less because we had such a short amount of time in which to appeal. But anyway, so hearing all those concerns and I'm not a hundred percent sure yet what like the city and or council is gonna do about it but I do feel like the amount of frustration is real and the lack of information has been frustrating and appreciate Gene and everyone for doing kind of all their own research and informing folks because that hasn't happened. The two things I do wanna flag are the mayor's survey on the budget which is out and ends at the end of the week and then starting tomorrow to leave the survey on public safety. So I'll send a front porch forum note out and Instagram post highlighting both of those things but just wanted to flag, I guess verbally that those are two big surveys that are happening that I hope everybody who hears this participates in because that's gonna be one of the voices to get impact on the budget and on public safety. And the other thing I just wanna say, I think around the NPA and getting people to come is I hope eventually the NPAs will also just have more decision-making authority and whether that means like participatory budgeting or whatever else so that it just feels more like we really have the ability to make decisions about what's happening in our neighborhood. So those are not many updates from me today but maybe a good thing because I think we're running a little bit behind. I'm happy to go next if that's all right, Jack. So yeah, I one apologize if anyone's emailed me in the past couple of weeks and I haven't gotten back to an email a couple of weeks ago. I was out, I missed my first ever council meeting and I felt horrible about it but I was out pretty severely sick. So happy to feel good and actually caught up for the first time in a few weeks. But this recent meeting on Monday I brought forward a resolution regarding councilor compensation and the purpose of that was to send it to Charter Change Committee to explore various barriers that are kind of keeping people from running for office and historically in this country, if you look across the board it's a lot of like older white, typically male individuals running for office and having the means and the time and there's a whole, we can talk about that for a long time but what you need to know is that now that that did pass and we are going to explore and Charter Change Committee what kind of compensation might be helpful to individuals who wanna run for office but find barriers like health insurance like those costs and things like that to have to like a lot of people have full-time jobs to have health insurance and things like that and then if they pull back on their hours during the week sometimes that kind of is up for debate whether you have that or not if you're part-time that's one very specific instance but we're going to explore dependent care compensation childcare compensation, perhaps monetary compensation or raising that rather and also kind of looking at the same time like what is redistricting going to have on this in terms of impact and how much is going to be budgeted per counselor in terms of compensation so it's going to be a big research project and hopefully we get it done before August or September this year and figure something out that's hopefully a little different than what we are currently operating under but that's what the research will lead us to whether we change or stay the same in terms of what we get compensated for with our time so that was one big thing I had worked on I worked on with counselor Hanson and there's also a co-sponsored by counselor Ali Jiang and so that did pass and so yeah, that's in committee now and then let's see, oh the American Rescue Plan that was, I don't know if anybody here saw the council meeting where Patrick Leahy had brought forward or kind of I think it was Patrick yeah, we talked about it during the meeting and out of that money we have 27.3 million to spend and we agreed to spend about $880,000 of that on kind of event restart, COVID mitigation just kind of like giving us a little bit of a boost as a city in terms of getting things kind of a little bit back to normal so there was a lot of different line items in that and I'm happy to kind of publicly put that out in my media just to kind of like see what that budget looked like that was on the city's website but if you're interested and haven't seen it yet please reach out there are a lot of different things that that money is going toward again, this is only like 880,000 of the 27.3 million which the rest of it we still have to figure out where we're gonna allocate that so that was kind of like my week to some extent because I had been a little bit out of commission prior to that so I will hand it over to Jack and if I think of anything else that's pressing I'll definitely wrap back around so thank you. Great, thanks. Well, one thing I'm really excited about on Monday night we finally, finally, finally passed an ordinance change around mandatory rental weatherization so it's not the entire policy we're still, there's still other aspects we wanna work on but we have this first phase of it that's in place now and so as of January 1st of next year basically the least efficient rental units in the city are gonna have to be weatherized or at least signed up to be weatherized so that'll make a big difference we're kind of targeting the leakiest buildings first and we think that that's the way to go both from a quality of life and an economic perspective and a climate perspective so we've got that in place and we'll keep working on sort of the inefficient but not as bad buildings as we move forward so and then we are also contemplating changes to the livable wage ordinance right now the most immediate thing that we're looking at is just the enforcement of it and the aspect of the ordinance which is that contracts above $15,000 with the city, those companies have to pay livable wages and we, yeah, long story short we're looking to strengthen how we ensure that that's actually happening and how we enforce that I think there's gonna be other changes that we're gonna look at to the livable wage ordinance upcoming soon as well and trying to eliminate exemptions and really broaden that program and strengthen it and let's see, the other yeah, I guess the other thing I would mention I mean, the mayor's coming on later and we'll probably speak to it but the budget process has started there was just before this there was a budget session it's probably still going on so there's a series of budget sessions these next few weeks with different departments go through their budget you all are welcome to those and can give feedback and comments either directly or to one of us one of the counselors or directly at the session and the budget will then come to the council in June where we can amend it or vote on it at both of our June meetings we'll be able to look at that yeah, I think I'll leave it there for now and see if folks have questions one extra thing, I'm so sorry y'all it wasn't like it was Welch I doubted it when I said it so sorry I don't know if we're calling on people or what but I saw Karen, Sand, first thanks I think I've asked you this before but to me the total key here is how we enforce this because for many years we've had the minimum housing especially with storm windows that are very easy to see from the outside or even windows that close and I have reported places you know it's taken two or three years sometimes on properties that I reported before I saw new storm windows getting installed so I think it's great I think we should have things be more energy efficient but I think it will be that's the key is how we are gonna you know hold people accountable and really do this and improve our housing because I met a woman lately that moved here from New York City and she was very appalled she says and she's young, he's like 30-ish she says I know cockroaches, I know crummy places I know high rents but the places she saw here I mean she just couldn't believe it and I know I've been a kind of a thorn in the side of code instead of them thinking of me as a friend or a helper they're angry at me because I'm constantly complaining about places but you know it's really it's like I don't know I'm just shocked that we allow these places to still be in business and you know that's the housing problem we have a lot of places but they are just some of them so run down and that's to me how are we gonna make these things get better? And I know you guys are working great I love these ideas but that's a problem that's gone on for 20-some years and we need to work on that, thank you. Absolutely, absolutely yeah the I mean I agree with you that there's huge issues to how we hold rental properties to a standard that we just yeah we don't hold them to high enough standard and we don't enforce well enough and yeah I wanna continue to work on that couple things I think the rental weatherization fortunately is a lot easier to enforce just from the standpoint of it's not gonna be complaints based the enforcement it's gonna be data based essentially so because the rebates are so generous anyone who weatherizes is really gonna be going through the rebate program through Vermont Gas so it'll be really easy to know who has and who hasn't weatherized and we'll be data sharing with Vermont Gas so we'll know the level of efficiency as well of each building and so we'll know who needs to weatherize and whether or not they have and what efficiency level they're at so it should be really easy to monitor and enforce compliance on it and then I guess one thing that is underway to your broader point is that we're shrinking we're working on shrinking the certificates of compliance and kind of and also making it so that if you have a violation in between your normal inspection cycle that can trigger a shrinking of your certificate which is good cause yeah right now like properties can be given you know a four year certificate of compliance and even if an issue crops up in the middle of that cycle they still might they still could be granted another four year one as long as they're as long as they're meeting the specs at the time of their next so it's not a great system but we're so that's one element that we're looking at updating but I think we need to attack it on other fronts as well. I think Earhard and then Jean and I don't know how much time we have but just really quick and then Tom after just really quickly to Jane's comment about the American Rescue Plan funds that the city's getting just so you guys know the Treasury Department US Treasury Department put out extensive guidance just on Monday on the state and local discretionary funds and as you guys are looking at how to deploy that you should take a look at those there's an eight page fact sheet that went out it's 151 pages of regs which you're not gonna get through I didn't Tom but there's an eight page fact sheet that you might wanna look at there's some if you're looking at investing in affordable housing some of that could be problematic and I've been talking to state housing agencies and other folks in the other congressional offices about you know getting some additional guidance because like you know we have a huge housing problem and I think I would expect that the city would want to invest some of that money in additional housing especially with the hundreds of homeless people that we have living in motels that are about to be evicted from motels at the end of June so yeah I can send you a link if you want to look at it but I just know that you know we're working with state agencies on trying to make sure that the money can be spent as flexibly as possible. Yeah that's great to know that that's out now that something we were waiting on and then and so please send that yeah and the other thing we're waiting on just so folks are aware I think the mayor will speak to this but we wanna see what the state's gonna do as well so we're trying to kind of wait on how we spend this money locally so that we're not just duplicating efforts with the state and we're filling in holes that are still left after that so we are other than the 900,000 that Jane mentioned that we just invested now the rest of the 27.3 million we're gonna be pretty slow and deliberate with how we use it. The discretionary funds that the city's getting is about $19 million out of that and that's the part that's subject to the treasury treasury guidance and as you probably know the state legislature is in its final weeks of settling on its budget and it may actually add some additional filters some additional requirements because the local dollars are coming through this I think are coming through the state budget. Hey, Jane. Yeah, basically support Earhart in finding basic small homes for the people who are gonna be evicted from the motels and if there's any chance we could purchase the motels and do something or build more places that are like the motels just basic everybody needs a bathroom, housing is healthcare so we need to work on that. Thank you. Absolutely. Tom. Yeah, Jack, with regard to enforcement has any apartment in Burlington ever been shut down? I believe so. Yeah, and Earhart's probably a good one on that for the historical knowledge but yeah, I think they have. Earhart, can you think of any off the top of your head there? Well, there was an attempt when Gene Bergman was still a city attorney with doing the enforcement there was a case for the building on the corner of Mansfield Avenue and Colchester owned by Sue Kwan that actually Gene was unsuccessful in getting it shut down but aside from that there are properties that have had temporary orders to be shut down but I think it's something that's of absolute last resort because it involves if you're really shutting down a building you're telling the tenants that they have to leave and in our housing situation there's really no place for them to go. We have a very low vacancy rate and so one of the considerations the code enforcement has to make in those situations is are they willing, is the condition so bad that they're willing to display somebody and potentially render them homeless as a result of their action? Okay, thanks. I think Zariah's gone. Yeah, Zariah had to run. Okay, thank you very much. Let's move on to the school commission and Kathy. Hi. Well, I think right now probably the biggest thing that has been on the plate of the school district is stopping Burlington High School's renovation and some of the renovation scope of the renovation had been reduced to a bare minimum due to the cost estimating and the questions repeatedly exceeding the project budget and so that was sufficient reason actually to stop but then PCB contamination was extensive and the screening threshold in Vermont is so low that it would have been almost impossible to have gotten the level of PCBs down to where they would have met the health department standards. And the third reason was that our best estimate now is that full remediation could cost at least seven to 12 million dollars and there is no budget to cover the cost of the PCB remediation. Fourth one is that there is no budget to cover the cost of renovating or rebuilding the Burlington Technical Center which is unusable in its current condition. Number five was that current market conditions make it likely that future reductions to the project scope will need to be considered which may render the final product unacceptable to our community and six at this point completing the renovation project would result and then improve building but one that is still over 60 years old and will still contain PCBs and to an extent that will pile on going monitoring. So those were the main reasons that made us say okay it's time to really step back and stop the renovations that are going on and we really need to look at financially how we're going to continue. I mean we do need to school high school that's clear and a tech center. And I guess at this point there will start we will start to be asking for more community input and I feel that we are going to need many minds from all areas of the community to come in and give input on this because this is going to be a far bigger project than I think any of us in the onset thought it would be. So if people have questions please ask that but those were the reasons behind us finally saying okay let's stop this before we throw more money into this. So if anyone has questions if I can answer them I will. So I'll go ahead if that's okay Jonathan. I'm just wondering Kathy if part of the conversation is looking around us regionally to other towns like South Burlington has struggled with the cost of renovating their buildings. Long past we looked at having a regional tech center. I know also just looking at what the pandemic has done in terms of kids being in smaller institutions they've gone to the airport or they've gone to Cambrian Rise or they've gone to other places to learn and whether having those smaller sort of nests of learning is part of this mix as well as looking at what other cities are having to juggle as well to have all of us building these multimillion dollar schools that all serve a variety of purposes. I'm just wondering if we're trying to look beyond Burlington to what's also happening in the area as far as trying to coordinate some of our own development. I you know Carol at the moment I think everything's on the plate and it's not that we're per se saying we have to do one or the other. It is literally that it's all back to the drawing board and those ideas should be brought forward because I think the more minds working on this project the better we will be. There is also clear that we have to look to the city and the state and not the city to the state and the federal government for support in this. The state hasn't given any support for buildings for the last what 10, 15 years or something and it needs to be put back into their budget but besides that we also I think that it's possible maybe to get some federal funds to do it but and we are looking into that but then the other part is you know that doesn't even cover the cleanup and we have to clean the site up. So that's seven to 12 and most likely more $12 million just to clean the site up whether we build back on that site or we sell it but. Thank you. Sure. Come on. Yeah, Kathy just a quick clarification question. So the school itself is never going to be repopulated with students it's going to be torn down that's a done deal. Yes, at this point it will be torn down. There is question there to use the slab even though the slab the PCBs have penetrated the slab there are supposedly you can seal off the slab so you but that's you know we haven't gotten anyone that has told us this this is people coming forward that are engineers saying this is possible so and so we could use that but also first we have to get rid of all of the earth around the building that has PCB contamination and certainly the walls of the building will all be torn down. Okay, that's what I really meant is school will be turned down it sounds like that decision has been made and that'll happen I assume fairly shortly. No, we still have to decide where we're going before they do that because that's the school could stand there if we're going to use a different site until we get the money to tear it down but you know that is way too far this is so new that I Okay, thanks. Kathy, since we're responsible for cleaning up the site whether we keep it or sell it and we've invested a lot of money in the football field and all the fields and a lot of other things around there wouldn't it be better to keep that site since we had to clean it up anyway and build there instead of looking for another site and then we have the problem of the athletic field that I know especially I was around when they did the track we spent a lot of money on that track we spent a lot of money on the football fields of bleachers I mean all those things are really important to our school. Anyway, that's all. I know that they you know there was when we first started talking about renovating there was a group that had looked at building a new building and the spaces they wanted to build that the new building on was that turnaround where the buses turn around in the front of the building so we could stay on the site and use another piece of the site but at some point we still have to tear that building down and we have to take all the if we stay on the site and the other place was that people were looking at the baseball field but we have to build two buildings now or at least if there's a space big enough to build both of them on one place fine but you know we have to build a new tech center and a new high school. Thank you. Are there other questions from Kathy? Okay, thanks a lot Kathy. That's an amazing story. Thanks. That's amazing. Next on the agenda is Mayor Wanderer welcome and the floor is yours. Great thanks Jonathan. Nice to see everyone. Thanks for the chance to be with you tonight. I was hoping to provide updates in two pretty big areas and then if time allows happy to take questions on anything as time allows. So first I wanted to speak to you about the city's budget process. We are at that time of year where we are crafting we're really well in, we're focused on getting a budget completed and to the city council and approved by the city council between now and the end of June. I know Councillor Hanson was on and Councillor Stromberg may have been there for some of it too. We just completed one of four budget nights that we are holding with the Board of Finance and Councillors who are able to attend and the public's invited to these as well. There'll be three more of these sessions next week. We're really a goal of the budget process this year is to really try to engage the public as fully as we know how in talking through both the budget that we're gonna pass for the upcoming fiscal year as well as this really unique opportunity to invest this, these American Rescue Plan Act funds, ARPA funds, which we, the city will be receiving $27 million of and we will have an opportunity to make some of that money is going to be needed just to kind of keep your city government operating and do so without some major tax increase because of the impact on revenues that the city is continuing to face. But a significant percentage of funds will be available to make investments and really help rebuild from this recession and the pandemic and really make structural change that allows us as President Biden likes to say to build back better. That is the intent of the American Rescue Plan Act in some ways. So that's part of why I'm here is just to make sure that the word is getting out about how the budget is coming together to invite you to go to the city's website where we have set up a landing page for the budget. If I'm able, let me see if I'm able, I'm not able to share my screen but you can go right to the city's homepage and you will see a link. Okay, I've been, thank you, Jonathan. I'll try to, you've given me the power, can I pull it off? What is happening? Here we go. So if you go to the city homepage, you will find a link right here at the top of all the pages is the fiscal year 22 budget. You can click on that and take you to this page so we'll have all the budget materials on it. You will see the, here's the nights that different departments are presenting on their budgets in front of the Board of Finance. There will be additional budget meetings following that with the Board of Finance and then the full city council on May 24th, June 7th, June 14th will be hopefully the night that the budget will be in front of the city council for action. The council will have the option of taking action that night or deferring it to later in June but a budget doesn't need to be passed by the end of June. Also this year, you may have seen emails on this we have and you can see this link right here on the webpage. There is a budget survey out where we would love your input on the early, the kind of preliminary budget that we have put forth. What's in that preliminary budget? Let me hit just some of the major highlights here quickly. Here are the sort of principles that we're trying to meet with this budget. We are restoring all city services to pre-pandemic levels. As you know, constrained and cut back and in many areas to save money last year when about 15% of our revenues disappeared dramatically with the start of the pandemic. This year, all those services are being restored. We are also another impact of COVID was we have completed the investments from the sustainable infrastructure bond that about 72% of the city supported back in 2016 that the last five years has allowed a historic level, historically high level of investment in our streets and our sidewalks and our parks and the bike path. It was, there was always a vision that there would be a need for a second round of bonding after this first five years. We were planning on doing that last year until the pandemic hit. So we are actually, if we wanna maintain the level of capital investment that we have had for the last five years we are proposing using some of the emergency funds from the federal government to do that to continue to build three miles of sidewalk a year instead of one to finish the bike path to continue to reline water lines before the paving is one of the coordinated strategies of recent years. The preliminary budget has that kind of investment in there. We are restoring the reserves that we spent down dramatically in 2020 because of the pandemic. We are not, we were fortunate to be sitting on substantial reserves for a variety of reasons both intentional and some sort of good timing reasons. We had very substantial reserves when the pandemic hit. We had to spend about $8 million out of those reserves. We are proposing using some of these federal funds to push, to put some money back in to get us back to about, to have a rainy day fund of about 15% in case the FY23 or 24 budget years continue to be challenging as a result of COVID or if some new surprises comes up. We are especially, we are mindful of the fact that many of you have had painful reappraisals of your property or going through that process right now. We are looking to minimize the way in which we compound that reappraisal pain with new tax, with an increase in taxes. We are further mindful that this is a, not just the reappraisal issue for many households within the city, people have been hit hard by the economic consequences of the last year and this should be, it's a very challenging time to take on additional payments. So we are in the areas where we have kind of elective authority, where we have discretion. We are in conversation with the city council about keeping those discretionary increases as low as possible. You may have noticed we didn't seek new increases at town meeting day. And we are looking at not fully implementing a taxing authority that we have under pass voter votes to make good on this principle. We have proposed substantial new investments. As you may have seen, there's been some media attention to this and substantial increase in the racial, racial equity inclusion and belonging department is being expanded significantly. We are making new investments in language access and livable wages in the preliminary budget. We are enterprise funds, the city runs a number of businesses. We run utilities, we run the electric company, we run the water company, we run parking, essentially parking utilities. All of those operations lost massive revenues in 2020. And one of the reasons they lost revenues is because some Brawlingtonians couldn't pay their bills, these utility bills during this period. We are proposing using some of the federal funds to allow the, essentially the federal funds to allow the, to essentially help Brawlingtonians with those bills who have been unable to pay and to keep the utilities in strong financial shape. And the last principle here is that we will need to use of this $27 million that we are receiving from the federal government to make good on all of those principles that I just went through, we would have to spend about half of that to fully fund essentially all of those principles. And that's really what we're looking for feedback on. If those principles sound right on to you, go to the, we really welcome it. If you go to this survey and it should only take a few minutes to fill out, you can tell us what you're very supportive of and what you're not so supportive of. And I know the council is very interested in this information as well. And it will have a significant impact as we go from a preliminary budget to a final budget over the next month. And wrap, I'll leave that there and now shift to the other big topic, which is a decision that I made to, after putting on pause a year ago, our search for a new police chief, I think now is the time to restart it. I've been talking to many people since election day that the decision I announced a year ago said the search would resume after the mayoral election. I put the search on hold because of COVID and because of just, I felt it was sort of untenable to do the process that we need to do to bring a new chief on board. And sorry, I'll stop sharing this screen. And I had planned to, if I was fortunate enough to still be in this position, had planned to restart the search soon after the election. I did take some time since March to confirm that other people were kind of on board that counselors and other stakeholders, police commissioners were on board with the idea of restarting the permanent chief search at this time. I'm certainly mindful of the fact that there's a lot of police transformation work going on right now. And in some ways it feels like there will be extra challenges to starting a search in this moment. But I don't think waiting for that transformation work to be done is really a good option either. I think we have, that work is, we have months, if not years ahead of us in that work. And the basic consensus that I received was now is the time to reopen it. So I plan to announce, you guys are essentially getting a kind of sneak preview of an announcement that I plan to kind of share with the whole community tomorrow that we are reopening the search. Here's how we're gonna do it though. Mindful of the fact that we are in a moment where we're really trying to figure out where we're going with public safety, where we're trying explicitly to craft a new consensus on what policing looks like and what the definition of public safety is. I am coming to you and I'm gonna go to the other MPAs. I'm gonna start this process with essentially a month of listening and engagement tour to really understand what people are looking for in the next chief, what kind of characteristics, what experience the community thinks is important as well as what the chief's priorities in the first year should be. We will have a survey out soon for this as well. So that is one way that we are inviting and welcoming input. We also would welcome, I'm here to, hopefully we'll have a little bit of time for discussion and invite you to participate in other discussions that I have regularly weekly coffees. If there's feedback that you would like to share either in writing or with direct communication with me, I'm here to invite that. We wanna kind of complete this. The rough timeline from here is to, in mid June, we will publish a report on what I've heard and what this early part of the process has generated. We will also list, make updates to the police chief's job description as a result of this engagement period and post the job in June. And then we would expect interviews to begin in July with a search committee that will be approximately 11 people on this search committee will include two police commissioners. It will include two, my hope is it will include two city counselors as well that have kind of a, that represent a kind of range of perspectives on policing we're planning. I've talked to President Tracy, we're planning to have one progressive counselor on this committee and one non-progressive. And then there will be other stakeholders. You know, this will be, we've done this many times when trying to select department heads, we'll have a variety of different important kind of key stakeholder perspectives represented on this committee. And then we're doing something we've never done before, which is we'll be shortly posting an application for a member of the public that would like to serve on this committee. People have a chance to apply. The role of this committee will be to narrow down what I expect and hope will be a large number of applications down to three or four finalists that would go through some additional vetting and that would give me some options to choose from in figure out who the appointment that I'm gonna make and put in front of the city council for confirmation. Hopefully this whole process will conclude in sometime in August or September is the goal. And that's another thing that factored in my decision to restart this is it's gonna take some time and we will be farther along on some of these key transformation efforts by that time. So those are my updates. And if there, I think we have a few minutes left for questions, if there are, I'd welcome them and questions and input. Absolutely. So who has questions for the mayor? Glenn? Yeah, thanks. Thanks, mayor. I hope... Am I okay? I can hear you a lot clearer. I was a little disappointed on the survey on the budget. I think it's a really important thing in terms of putting it out. But as survey design goes, I'm not sure you're gonna get the best feedback through that. So I just spent time earlier with another one of your departments where we had grad students working with them. One of the things that they did was look at survey design for building better metrics for that department. I think with the work of the city that you've been doing and your departments have been doing to get more feedback, surveys are a very specific type of tool. There's a science to it. We actually have lots of people in Burlington at the university and otherwise who do this work professionally and I'm sure would be glad to create opportunities to work with the city to make sure you have the best feedback tools possible. So I just wanna really encourage you to design those tools to really get the best feedback for the city and encourage you to do as much of that as possible. Thank you, Glenn. I appreciate that. I think it's fair. This is something that we have not done as part of the budget process before and this survey itself came together fairly quickly in response to discussions just over the last recent days with this city council. I will say, I think I didn't quite articulate in my kind of summary of what's happening that there's another, in addition to the decision that we're gonna be making with the council over the next six weeks, which is again about the FY22 budget. Beyond that, we do expect there will be, depending on exactly where we land with the council on how much of these ARPA funds are committed to the FY22 budget, there will be $10 to $15 million still remaining that we are going to take, we're setting up a more deliberate process to allow for better, for extensive stakeholder engagement, public engagement before making those decisions sometime this fall. And so there will be another, in some ways I think those are gonna be, a lot of the FY22 budget is really driven by priorities and commitments the city has already made. There are some big decisions in there that we are seeking feedback on. What we will be, the decisions we're making this fall will be in some ways even sort of more discretionary and really kind of create the opportunity for more innovation. And we will work to, we will have a little bit more time with that and we will work to get that public engagement even better than what we're able to do on this FY22 budget. I take your point and understand what you're saying. Who else has? Let's see, you have a- I don't have anything. Yeah. And I know we're almost out of time. So, Earhart, is that a hand? Sure. Evening, Mayor, thanks for joining us. Just, you may not have seen this yet, but the guidance from Treasury came out on the state and local funds on Monday. So obviously you're gonna wanna take a close look at that. There are some restrictions in there that are not gonna allow the most flexible uses in certain areas. So, you and your staff will probably wanna take a look at those. Yeah, no, thank you, Earhart. It was cool, the White House did a briefing on the new guidance on Monday night and invited cities from across the country to participate in it, which is something, this White House does a lot of, as did the Obama White House. We basically never heard from the Trump White House for four years. It's refreshing to, it's not entirely fair, but it's much more greater level of engagement and collaboration. Clearly this administration really sees cities as key partners in achieving their goals. It was kind of cool to be the welcoming voice on the briefing was Luke McGowan, who was our CEDO director until just a few weeks ago. He's in this position now of really being a key liaison on CSU. So we are, one of the reasons we set up this essentially two phase process for investing these resources is knowing that we weren't gonna get that guidance until Monday and it's still not necessarily final guidance even. It's been, it's called interim, interim final guidance or something funny like that. We knew that that was gonna be coming pretty close to these budget deadlines. There's still work going on in Montpelier about how the state is going to use their emergency dollars, which could, we wanna use our dollars to fill the gaps. We don't wanna be redundant or budget our dollars towards an area where there isn't need because it has been addressed by other aspects of the emergency response. So that's one of the driving reasons why we have set it up this way to set it, at least basically half of the funds or approximately half the funds will be decided through this more deliberate process so that we can carefully study the guidance and what the state is doing as well as get the greater input and have better surveys this summer about those decisions. Are there any other questions? I think we have time for one more. Thank you very much, mayor. Feel free to stick around. Please come any time. We love to have you here. Well, thank you, Jonathan. It's always great to be with you. Look forward to being back with you in person, and I hope sometime soon we're looking, I'm certainly looking forward to that. Thank you. Thank you. Next on the agenda is an update on the neighborhood project with Jillian and Jillian Nanton and Bill Ward. Hi, Jillian. Hi, Bill, welcome. Yeah, hi, Jonathan. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and thank you for inviting me. It has been a while since we have done an update on the neighborhood project. So I'm happy to do this update. As Jonathan says, my name is Jillian Nanton for those who don't know me and I work in CEDAW. I just want to remind a little bit about the neighborhood project and for those who are not familiar with it and how we got here. The neighborhood project came out of Burlington's housing action plan. It was one proposal in there and the city council passed the housing action plan in October 2015. And we were asked to do a study which became known as the neighborhood project to identify potential strategies and tools for neighborhood stabilization in their campus, in their campus neighborhoods. And so that consultancy work was done by Niniweb partners and this study that was presented to the city council, it was unanimously accepted in April of 2019. The council accepted the study but they asked the CDNR committee to prioritize the recommendations in that study and to come up with an implementation plan and timeframe. And so CEDAW worked with the CDNR committee to come up with an implementation plan and that was presented to the council in December 2019 and the council accepted the implementation plan. And so what have we been doing since December 2019? Besides dealing with a pandemic, as folks would know much of CEDAW had to pivot and provide support to Burlingtonians. But this is not to say that nothing happened under the neighborhood project. And just to refresh, the neighborhood project has three goals and most of the action steps fall within the goal of enhancing the quality of life in their campus neighborhood. And the two other goals relate to containing and slowing down the conversion of single family homes for rentals. And the third one is to convert selected primarily student rentals to owner occupied or longer-term rentals. So in terms of the enhancing of quality of life, I know that Bill is here and Patty is also here as well. And they would speak to the work that has been going on on the review of the specific product of compliance and as well on the city property tax database where some work was done to make it more user-friendly for those searching that database. But I also want to say that one of the other action steps under the quality of life piece of this was to look at successful initiatives like Isham Street and to see if one could emulate that in other neighborhoods. And so I've been working with Gail Shramna of UVM Community Coalition and will be providing support to the ambassadors through the ambassadors program to do similar type of activities as was done on Isham Street, working with Hiccup and Green Street neighbors to beautify, to repair planter boxes, fill boxes with vegetables, herbs, flowers. That's the kind of thing that we'll be doing very shortly in so far as enhancing the quality of life under this project. The other thing I want to mention too, another activity there is relates to tracking up data, what's happening with quality of life issues. And again, Bill will speak to that. We have seen some diminution over the last year in our complaints. Of course, some of that could be tied in very moment closely to what's going on in the pandemic. But we will talk some more about that. So I want to invite Bill and Patty to do their updates on the certificate of compliance and the work that has been going on there and where things stand and the updates on the city property tax database. Thank you, Jillian. Yes, I'm gonna turn it over to Patty in a few minutes, but I'm gonna try not to take too much of our remaining time just to give you a couple of high level departmental updates just because not everyone may remember, but about a year and a half ago, the administration made some pretty major changes that impacted me, made me work even longer hours. I'm now the department director of the department of permitting and inspections. It has three divisions. It has the housing division, the zoning division and the trades inspection division. And Patty manages the housing division. That was what we once called the code enforcement department. It's now a division within a slightly larger department. So I wanted to start with some specifics. And I know it's a neighborhood issue that folks in Ward one and eight are concerned about. And something we're working on with the department of public works, the recycling. We've heard a lot about rental units that are not in compliance with the requirement to have a wheeled toter. It is a requirement if you have a duplex or more that you have a wheeled covered toter for recycling. And the challenge that they're having right now is that the department of public works does not have a supply. They typically have a small area within their pretty large work room that is filled with those containers. That area right now is completely empty. You know, I posted a picture on it on C-Click fix about a week or two ago just to give folks an update. They're on back order and DPW actually does not, as of this morning, they didn't have an accurate date when they would be available. They're at least weeks away from arriving and doesn't sound like there's much that they can do to get those. But Patty and I know firsthand that the recycling truckers, the workers that are out there are working overtime into the evening hours to keep up with the demand. It appears that it's pandemic related because there's a lot of online purchasing that we've seen a great expansion in the recycling need in the last year. It's resulted in larger than normal amounts of household recycling, extra packaging, shipping boxes, things like that. So Patty and I are typically working late and we see those recycling truck drivers who would normally leave earlier in the day around three o'clock. They're there much later into the evening beyond their normal shifts. But Patty and I took advantage of that time when we'd see them, because we were some of the only people left in the building, we would ask them, you know, what was it that they were seeing? And because the problem was pretty extreme, we asked them to work on the worst properties that they faced in a given day or over a period of days and Patty's office is right where they sign out. So we have a process in place with them to work to take some preventive action when they see something with some properties that caused the biggest problems for that day or that group of pickups, we get one of our inspectors assigned to do some proactive at the property and we contact the property owner to make sure that they know about. So the confusion that their recycling problems are creating could be things like oversized boxes, mixed trash and recycling or just scattered loose things. But Patty and the inspection team do reach out to the owners and the tenants to follow up on the rules to try to get things better organized and the truck team to see some progress there. And I think that's a really good piece of teamwork. And it's a great way for us to use our resources on the places that need the most attention. We know there's more needed and as soon as those containers come in we'll be harping on the people to make sure that those applications are going back out the door for people to get them out on the streets. We found so many places that add so much recycling that they've actually had to use covered toters and the old open bins in combination. And I just wanna be clear that this is not a violation. The ordinance that created the wheeled covered toters requirement does not, it says that you have to have a 20 gallon equivalent or more per rental unit. So for example, a triplex would be covered by a 65 gallon tote. But a lot of places are actually using more than that now. So if you see some of those bins out with the wheeled toters, it's not a specific violation. So I also wanna talk about SMOP because the spring move out project that we're partnering with UVM on just a couple of minutes on that to say that student notifications are going out to leaflet in the neighborhoods for students and by email from the university, Friday, May 21st and Tuesday, May 25th. It won't be a traditional swapping of household goods that you might have seen in previous years when they do the spring move out. This is gonna be focused on having dumpsters available for students on those specific streets designated locations to help students so they have move out trash overflow going into those things. This is paid for by the University of Vermont. We're out there helping and partnering with UVM and some volunteers at these two events. I know that's not popular with all residents because they don't think city staff should be involved in something like that. But I've always disagreed. I know we're just city employees, but we actually feel like we're part of that neighborhood and we wanna be out there to keep clean the areas where we can and pass on accurate information about sanitation to the tenants and to the students who are moving out. We do think it's really clear to us that it would be a lot worse if it were not for these events. And I know there's no doubt in my mind that there'll still be some problems that people with property owners or property managers that don't do a good job managing that there'll still be some problems where things pop up on the green belt. We hope it's small enough that we still have a strong enough staff that we'll be able to deal with those, but we couldn't deal with all of them if we didn't have the spring move out project. So we're really happy to partner with the University on that. For the residents who find violations, they can report them on CclickFix.com. Just as a quick update, we've closed over 5,000 issues in C-ClickFix since May of 2000. I'm sorry, 2020. So most of those were pandemic related, but we're shifting from those pandemic responses that citizens needed back to what we would consider a normal summer season. Hopefully it'll be normal. On the new initiative side, I'm gonna turn it over to Patty so that she can talk about what we're doing with certificate of occupancies because we've had an ordinance since 2015 we've met to talk about an update to that with counselor Paul who originally requested this rating system as we call it. We instituted a one to five year rating system back then and I'll turn it over to Patty to talk about how we're gonna raise the bar with changing this requirement. Thank you, Bill. So as Bill said, since 2015, we've had a one to five rating system. We don't call it stars or good landlords or bad landlords. We refer to them. We refer to this as properties have earned anywhere from a six month to a five year COC. And that's our shorthand for certificate of compliance. Until recently, so thank you, Bill, for putting that up. If we walk into a property, if one of the inspectors goes into a property to do a routine minimum housing inspection, a property with no deficiencies would earn a five year COC. That hasn't changed. However, what has changed is the number of deficiencies allowed to earn a five year COC or I'm sorry, a four year COC. So up until now or until this changes, it's been five or fewer deficiencies and those deficiencies need to be corrected within the time set for compliance. Typically, and there are exceptions to all of these, typically within 30 to 45 days. The property if it had five or fewer could earn as high as a four year COC. Now we're limiting it to three deficiencies. Four to six deficiencies. Again, corrected within the time set for compliance is a three year COC. Up to six, we're in the past, it was up to 10, all corrected, but not within the time set for compliance. And this is where it gets, and I'm not gonna say tricky, but there's a little, we have to pay particular attention. If it's up to six deficiencies, where it used to be up to 10, all corrected, but not within the time set for compliance. So say it took two or three follow-ups. They could earn as high as a two year COC, but that begins, we start counting from the date of the initial inspection. So it really would reduce it instead of say, if a property came into compliance on a second follow-up after, I don't know, 60 days after a couple of months, we would start counting from the date that we first inspected. So they really wouldn't be getting two full years from date they came into compliance. It would be from that date of initial inspection. Let's see here. The next one is the seven or more deficiencies corrected within the time set for compliances. Oopsie-deezy, sorry, I lost the list. Seven or more within the time set for compliance is a one year COC. And I had to ask Bill earlier, because I couldn't remember what the term that he uses all the time, but if a property has one of the major or eight major violations, like a sewage issue, then that property would also get only a one year COC or certificate of compliance. And finally, the last one is the seven or more deficiencies not corrected within the time set for compliance, earns a six month COC and is eligible also with the, not eligible, but it can be granted or given assigned if it has one of the eight major violations. Like I said, sewage is one of the ones that comes to mind most rapidly. This bill might be able to jump in and give me the other seven off the top. I have, it's his term, I know what they are. The other thing that I wanna point out through this and everyone, I know that everyone has lived through this pandemic in the same way. Well, for the most part, we have not done nearly the number of inspections over the last year as we ordinarily would. Typically, we're doing about 3,000 and we're inspecting about 3,000 units a year. We're at way less than that, about a third of that. And in the past year, a good number of those have been complaint driven inspections. We are, however, thrilled that all of our inspection staff is vaccinated and we are ramping up very quickly. Flight learning curve with a new database that we just started with one week ago, Monday. So we're inside two weeks. We're gonna be moving back at the same pace we were before, if not faster, because this new database will allow us to get information to property owners and potentially tenants much more quickly than we have in the past and more directly. I think that's it. And Bill, I think it's gonna jump on to complaint the other addition to the, or the other change to the ordinance that we're hoping to make. We're trying to wrap it up anyway. One of the COCs and the complaint update, it is something I've been working with Councilor Hightower on. She had mentioned to me a few times over the months in the fall about making a connection between complaints and routine inspections. What we have is a proposed draft that we're re-editing because we let the Ordinance Committee know a week ago and they had some sort of a property owner who gets a good certificate of compliance for say five years that they have a complaint in the compliance period. All they really have to do is fix that complaint and come back into compliance. It doesn't... Hey, Bill, you're coming through really quietly. Sorry to interrupt. I just can't hear you that well. Sure, maybe I can sit a little closer. Is that a little better? Yeah, that's getting better. Yeah, thanks. Sorry to interrupt. Maybe I got too comfortable, too far away from the microphone. Yes, we try to make that connection to the complaint so that if a property that was in compliance but has a complaint putting in a scale so that we can, in an organized way, reduce the certificate of compliance based on the number of deficiencies or the speed that it takes for a property owner to come into compliance. And that's really just a fairness issue because we could have properties that are coming up on their certificate of compliance a year away. They have complaints that they fix the deficiencies. And of course, if we come back eight months later, it's pretty clear they're not gonna have any deficiencies. They could end up with another five-year COC but the complaint now has no bearing on that. Founded complaints, as long as it's something that the property owner was neglectful of and not caused by the tenant, things like vandalism or punching a hole in the wall wouldn't be counted against a property owner but clear neglect would and we'd want that ability to reduce the COC and a fairness for the people who really earn them. A lot of people do but there's a few others who put some small repairs together before we come in. And if they don't last long, we think that complaint suggestion that Councilor Hightower has recommended will be a good answer to that. I've gone quickly to make sure I move. I know we're going over on our time. I'll just say, Patty mentioned this, I won't spend too much time. We have our new permitting software. There was a press release from the mayor and there's a story in Digger tonight. We hope that the system's gonna eliminate the paper chase that residents have had over the time with online permitting applications, approvals, payment process. This should streamline things. Owners should be able to print things on their own and we can assist them if they need help at the office still. But in the first seven days of using this new OpenGov system, we've had 350 people or more create a login for that and we're pretty happy with it. So we've also seen a 22% drop in front lobby visits just in the first week, which means that people seem to be going to that online system rather than coming in. So hopefully instead of a one stop shop, it could be a no stop shop for a lot of people they can go through this in an organized way and get regular messages from folks from our office for zoning and plumbing, building electrical, mechanical permits and even from DPW's excavation team. And the last feature of the OpenGov thing that Patty and I'll be working on is making sure that that new rating system we talk about gets up and running as properties get inspected. We want that rating history to show up in the new OpenGov system. We just started at May 3rd, but it's a work in progress, but we think it'll be a great addition to what we do and make it sort of revolutionary for the residents of Burlington. So thank you. I'm not sure if we have time for questions, but happy to answer them if there are. Yeah, I think there's time for a couple of questions. Jonathan, Lisa Kingsbury is in the house and I'd like her to spend a minute just updating on where we are with student housing because that's part of the neighborhood project. So I think it would be important. Thank you, Lisa. Sure, I can be pretty quick. So you may remember if we go back to, I think it was January of 2020, we came to the NPA to give an update on work that we were doing with Bittison Hyer, who had done our housing master plan. We brought them back to look at the market demand for upper class student housing and graduate and medical student housing. And I believe it was January, 2020, we presented that to the NPA and to city staff. And we were starting to do our analysis of that information when COVID came and it got put on hold for a bit, for two reasons. One, people on campus were just really focused on opening campus and keeping our students and our faculty and staff safe and the community safe. And two, at the time, we weren't really sure what was going to happen with enrollment. So we weren't clear whether the numbers that we had at the time were gonna be valid or not. You know, right now we are still focused on finishing up the semester. Yesterday was, or today was the last day of classes. So we'll be finishing up and starting to pick that work back up soon and start to do some planning. Thank you, Lisa. Great, thank you. So will we get, you'll be able to tell us how that's going at some time in the near future? Sure, I'm happy to keep you updated. The years over and all. Yeah, thank you. I wanna take a little question time because I have some quick questions. One for Jillian and one for Patty or Bill. Jillian, I remember seeing at a CDNR meeting a fantastic neighborhood project table. It was a spreadsheet that was all color coded and it kind of showed all the suggestions and all the recommendations. And I'm just wondering whether that's been updated or a timeline has been put on it and it's something that we can just look at at some point. Yes, Jonathan. That in fact was turned into the implementation plan. And so that color coded document was eventually became the implementation plan. So I don't know if you have ever seen the implementation plan, the neighborhood project implementation plan but I could share that and send that with you but that color coded document became the TNT implementation plan phase one with the great emphasis on the quality of life initiatives as I said earlier. Okay, that's great. Thank you. And for Patty or for Bill, I'm just curious when now that the inspections are ramping up again, when do you think you will actually be caught up or does it have a dream? No, I think we'll have to look at the numbers because we have a lot that are coming off in the upcoming year but we have others. It was unusual because we rarely have a tenant not tell us to come into their rental unit. We had a lot and it's very reasonable. Even recently we've had people who say they're not vaccinated as a tenant. They really don't want anybody whether we're vaccinated or not coming in. So we've had a lot of tenant refusals during this time. I haven't run the numbers but I could certainly report back on that. I think part of the beauty of the system though is it sets it up so that we do inspect the worst first and that's what we need to do because the ones who've earned a five have told us that they can be trusted to keep their properties very well maintained. So I want to get back on those ones with the low numbers quickly. We definitely have time for that in the coming months. That's fantastic. And you're raising the bar so there will be more of them but that's good, your optimism is great. Thank you. Karen, if you got a quick question, go for it and then we'll move on to the next item. Sorry. You know, I'm very frustrated. I'd love to ask Jillian questions. I'd love to ask Bill, I'd love to ask Patty but we're way out of time blending the two together. I think it was a big mistake because the neighborhood project is not Bill and Patty with what they're doing now and we really don't have time for both. So I don't know, I'd love you to have them back because I know you have a whole nother thing to do. But I guess my biggest question to Patty and Bill or Patty is that the trash and recycling not only maybe there aren't toters available but people are not putting their toters away and it's getting more and more accepted. It seems like in the neighborhood and I've pointed this out to the city counselors. I pointed out, you know, to you with a language I really hate to see that happening in our neighborhoods that trash and recycling, especially when it's overflowing is out in the front in the sidewalk on the green belt 24 seven. And, you know, you know this, you know, the neighborhoods and it's just growing. It's actually grown to Western street now. So because the city is not enforcing this ordinance about bringing the trash cans back and not leaving it out, it's just becoming an issue in many, many rental neighborhoods. So that's one thing. But I'd love to talk to Jillian sometime more about the neighborhood project, but we're out of time. Thank you. Yeah, happy to talk to you, Patty. Yeah, happy to talk to you, Pat. Thanks. Is it quick or hard? Yeah, thanks, Jonathan. Two quick questions either for Patty or for Bill. One is I know during the pandemic for landlords that are on a five-year cycle, you were doing some self-certifications. Is that still the case? Or have you moved on to more live inspections now? And the second question is we discovered a homeless encampment on our property. Put it on C-click fix. There were a lot of needles there. Howard came and took care of those. But I'm very concerned about the abandoned, the rest of the abandoned stuff. I think there's probably needles in it. There's a collapsed tent. And frankly, I'm just not sure how to go about removing that and I'm asking whether or not there's any city department that you know of that can help with that. Yeah, I'll try to be quick. On the COC question, if you had a five, we can still do those because until we get caught up. Again, if you were trusted, we can give you the extension time on a self-certification. People still fill out on their own that they've done these required elements, sign off on it and the inspector signs off without a physical inspection on the fives. But only if we've had those conditions previously and we feel confident we can trust them. On the homeless encampment, I think that there are a number of departments that are actually involved, but really the lead spoke in it is gonna be the police department. Lacey Smith that the police department does the notifications out there about what if we can't remove people's property without proper notice. So she's the one who takes the lead about getting notice out to the property before something's gonna be removed. It might seem abandoned to folks, but other times they could say that the police or a city took their property without a proper search warrant or seized it improperly or disposed of it. So there's a process that the city has to go through and Lacey is the lead person through the police department to get the other departments involved and really enact the homeless encampment policy that the city attorney's office works to coordinate to make sure that we stay within the guidelines of making sure we don't violate those search and seizure rules. Thanks for that. That's really helpful. Thank you. With that, thank you, Jillian. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Patty for joining us. Thank you, John. And Jillian, we'll talk more. Sure, yeah. Thank you. The final item on the agenda is Tony Redington and Steve Goodkind on the Champlain Parkway. And can we do share screen on this? I have the PowerPoint here. You should be able to share your screen, Tony. I've made you a co-host. Okay. Okay, Steve, you're up. Steve, can you hear me? Steve, are you on mute? How's that? Am I muted now or not muted? That's good. You're not muted. Good. Go ahead. I want to know where Jillian got those glasses. I want some. She's still there. I'm here. Where'd you get those? I'm very much here. I'll talk to you offline about that. Okay. Anyway, Tony Redington, how are you here tonight? Talk about Southern Connector. More specifically, talk about environmental justice issues regarding the connector. Tony's got some slides, but the slides are really background because we don't have a lot of time to go through them. So you may use them as background. I prefer you more or less. Listen to what we have to say and the slides can be looked at later or even offline once the meeting is over. Again, my name is Steve Goodkind. I used to be the public works director and city engineer for many years and for a time I was the project manager for the Southern Connector. So I probably know as much about it and as much about his history as anybody. I'm going to give you a little bit of a background on it. Then we're going to talk at the end about environmental justice. I hope to keep this down to about five or six minutes. The concept of the connector was to build an alternative to the existing North-South Pine Street route around Burlington. And in doing so it was designed to take traffic out of neighborhoods, specifically neighborhoods down in the Flynn Home Avenue area and in the Maple King Pine Street area. And that's what the project was for. It wasn't meant to create a new way to downtown. It was basically meant to be a way to provide another route North-South. If downtown was helped from that, so be it. It was part of a concept probably originating in the 1960s of Ring Road. If you look at most maps around this country and interstate maps you'll see as a interstate approaches a city there's often a series of ring roads around the city. Boston has them, New York really doesn't but most major cities do. And this connector project was part of a system of ring roads that were designed to interact with Route 89 which runs just to the East of Burlington. The other ring roads include the bypass in Essex, the Northern connector and Route 189, the Cirque Highway which is never built and I'm not sure where that stands. That was another part of the project and so was a Southern connector. The idea was to create a ring road again west of downtown Burlington. And in fact the Southern connector and the Northern connector were designed to connect at Battery Street. They weren't headed for downtown. They were headed around downtown and they were supposed to relieve traffic on Pine Street maybe even a little bit on Shelburne Road. In the past the city was always vehement that this project would accomplish these goals. And in the past when we had to do environmental impact statements for the project and I did two of them during my tenure as project manager the federal government asked us to look at a route that went up Pine Street and didn't bypass the King Maple Street neighborhood. And we would say for instance in the 90s when we did the EIS environmental impact statement we said we're not interested in that and the matter was dropped. Never heard of it again. But then when we had to update the EIS 10 years later the fed said, well, what about that? Considering a route that went just up Pine Street through King Maple. And again we said no but they surprised us by saying, well, not only do we want you to consider it and mind you this was really their document they can dictate a lot about it. They said, not only do we want you to look at that route but we want that to be the preferred route. Which means that's the route that was gonna get the most attention. That's the one they really wanted to do. And of course we said immediately, no way. And they wouldn't back off and the city spent three years arguing and literally fighting with a federal highway administration and trying to provide the reasons why that route was not appropriate. It didn't fit the project and it probably didn't fit federal law. One of our big concerns was what was called environmental justice. Environmental justice is a federal rule that basically says that projects cannot have a disproportionate impact on minority and low income neighborhoods. In this case, King and Maple is a low income neighborhood. It also has a large African American population. It certainly fits the criteria. And we argued then, this is back in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 we argued that if the road were to go up Pine Street all the way to Main Street that would violate environmental justice rules. We were told at the time that those rules weren't very strong and that other rules such as historic preservation and things like that really took precedent over any environmental justice concerns and that eventually the project was going to be approved to go up Main Street. I mean, to go up to Main Street on Pine and environmental justice was basically said nice, nice to think about it, but we really can't give it much credence at this point. The mayor, time Bob Kiss said that, well, that's the best we can do even though he didn't like that idea. Basically said that that's what the only thing that'll let us do, we'll have to accept it. In fact, the feds went so far as to say if we did not accept that route, that they would withhold funds for the project and they actually did withhold funds for a time until we finally basically said, we fold it. So he folded and said, okay, I guess if that's all you'll let us do, that's what we'll do. Now, fast forward five years. Now we're about the year 2015. President Obama is the president. Environmental justice rules have been strengthened and modified and strengthened and a group of people and Tony is certainly one of them got together, called themselves the Pine Street Coalition and they began to look at the road and say, can we have another look at this thing and see if we can do better? Now, mind you, the road was pretty far along and the city kept saying about to be built, about to get its final approvals but this group got together, thought of some ideas that might be acceptable, hired a lawyer and the lawyer filed a federal suit seeing if they could block this road and have a redesign looked at. A very surprising thing happened when they did that. The Department of Justice represents Federal Highway Administration cases like this and when the Department of Justice Attorney, someone in Burlington, looked at the five or six claims that the Pine Street Coalition was making, they said, well, we think we're pretty good on all these except we agree that the environmental justice rules which exist now and they have changed, those rules have to be followed because the project hasn't been built yet and you don't get a grandfather clause. If the project hasn't been built and there's new rules in place, you have to abide by it. So they agreed without having to be told by the court to do it, they agreed that they would go back and do environmental justice review of this project. That's where the project stands today. That was a huge, huge thing. They basically not only said the review had to be done but the decision that had been made back in 2009 where they said that the environmental justice rules didn't really apply, that's all been avoided. We're back to square one in a sense and the project has to justify that it can meet environmental justice rules as they exist today. Now, one thing that's a problem with that is back in 2009, the city made a strong case on environmental justice. The city was a champion for it. The problem today is the city is not a champion for environmental justice. The city is trying to just put some lipstick on the pig and say everything is okay. They're actually saying that things are okay today that the city claimed were not okay 10 years ago. So it's gone 180 degrees. And I think it's very important for people to understand that the city has a long history of trying to protect this neighborhood. Has a pretty long history, long before most recent awareness of racial inequities in Burlington has been known about. The city was trying to protect this neighborhood. It's not trying to protect it now, but it was back then. And I think it's a very consistent thing for the city to basically look back at what it had done, look back at what it had said 10 years ago. And what it's saying now through this review of the environmental justice issues that we have a chance to do this project right. The way it's proposed now is not going to pass environmental justice standards. The city may think they can bullet through and the feds can bullet through. It's not gonna happen. If it has to be done, there'll be lawsuits following this. And this project will not get off the ground for a long, long time. But, Antonio, get into this a little bit. There's at least one way, and there's probably many ways that this project can be revised, even taken back to how it was originally proposed 10 years ago, and it can meet environmental justice standards. There's also other things that can be done to help it just be a modern project in other ways. Don't involve environmental justice. But the message we're trying to say now is, hopefully the city is gonna wake up or hoping the city council, or at least enough of members of the city council, will insist that this project find another route besides going through Maple and King Street. And then to go through another environmental impact statement, look at some other alternatives, modern alternatives to this kind of road, see if we can't do a lot better. And I know as a project manager, I know as someone who has an engineering background, we can definitely do better. And we tried to do better 10 years ago, though I know it can be done. Let me turn it over to Tony now, and he'll tell you maybe a little more about what things could possibly happen. And we're just saying, these are our ideas, there may be many others. The only thing we can agree on is what they're proposing now is not gonna pass most. So thank you. Thanks, Steve. Let me make three or four points here. First, we are in alliance now with the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, who has taken on, this is a major project. And together we, as some of you know, we received a equity a day award from the Vermont Sierra Club for our efforts to address the environmental injustice and blatant discrimination against the low income in the King Maple neighborhood. Now, one of the things that really certainly caught me back because I was not aware of the connection of transportation and racism, and particularly the fact that it's the low income and the communities of color who are most discriminated against in transportation. This was a picture of students getting on the bus at the corner of Pine and Maple streets. I think it gives a picture of what this neighborhood is like today. And the Secretary of Transportation, the new one, Pete Buttigieg, has talked specifically about the past of using highway funds to divide, literally cut into communities of color and low income. And what does the Champlain Parkway do? It literally cuts into the King Maple neighborhood. It couldn't be any planer than that. And I agree with Steve that that's probably its greatest problem. Here's this table tells you very, the disproportionate impacts. Basically, in the lower Pine Street below Flann Avenue, you have a 72% decrease in traffic with the Parkway as it's currently designed. And here at Pine and Maple that we were just looking at, there's an increase of 37% in the area, which is dominated by apartments and the lower income. In fact, if you take a look at the data, here's the traffic in King Maple and down below Flann Avenue on Pine Street. The King Maple census tract has 77% low and moderate income residents. The lower, we'll call it the south of Flann, which is fairly well to do, only has 34%. The disproportionate impact of this project is just glaring. It stands out like a searchlight. You need to recognize the Walkbite Council, which from the beginning back in 2014 and 2016 submitted detailed objections to the current design. And they were the first ones to really raise the concern about this project failing in regard to walking and biking, which we pretend to be pro-walking and pro-bike in the city and the DPW does, but this project doesn't do a thing. In fact, if you look at this project, there's not one inch altogether. And we're talking about the possibility of doing that railroad enterprise project connection over to Battery Street now, all together the parkway historically is now reaching towards $100 million. And if you're gonna spend $100 million, which is the only project I can think of that's more expensive than that was the Belt Line, which was built in the 80s, there's not an inch of sidewalk in this. In fact, the sidewalk in front of the Public Works Department, where Steve used to work as taken away, and it's made into a shared path. Here's a simple, we believe, from the top to the bottom, going via the, over to Battery Street again, you can have your sidewalk, you can have your two-way safe bikeway, and here's your parkway over here, keeping the cars separate. This picture, Tony, that's not what they're proposing to do. Oh, this is what- That's not what the connector's gonna do. Like it would do it. That's not what they're planning now. They have no sidewalk. They have not a single place on the roadway for the safer bicyclists, and they have a shared use path. You're gonna be mixing people with toddlers, with older folks, you're gonna have people with walkers who are gonna be mixing with e-bikes and inevitably gonna have people on skateboards. There's no way you can spend skateboards where there's an open space. So I think the point is that the Champlain right way, we call it the right way, is a multimodal transportation improvement alternative to the obsolete, environmentally harmful, and racially unjust Southern connector Champlain parkway proposal. By the way, we have one injury a week to somebody who is walking or biking in Burlington. We have two car occupant injuries, three injuries per week, and there's been no analysis and actually no discussion of the safety in the past, and also they dismissed the man management and all of the modern things we are doing to discourage so called solar driving and to encourage walking and biking. None of that was considered in the original environmental document. I guess I'll just go with a quote from the late Charles Simpson, who before the NPA five pointed out that the parkway was fueled by little more than inertia and a lack of imagination. It was conceived at a time when Burlington was the retail center of the county, something that's no longer true. It came at a time when the automobile traffic dominated planning, now traffic planning, and both Jane counselors, Stromberg and Hanson are on the transportation energy utilities committee. They deal with this all the time. Now traffic planning is multimodal. The parkway designed today was born when heavy industry was leaving the city and there were few signs that a new economy of artisan arts production, small manufacturing with a retail dimension and digital information services would take their place. And the question is, will the city squander our tax money to put all of this at risk? That's it. Any questions? Anyway, let's go with us. We got a few people. Are there questions for Tony and Steve? It's late. We don't understand that. I've got my board to see more tonight, so I'm gonna be doing a double header in two days here. Steve, too. Sharon? I just wanna say thank you because I know you've put endless hours in this and it makes total sense to look at 2021 and not look at this parkway that was designed so long ago. And waste all the money just because, I don't even know, 25 years ago or whenever it was started. Anyway, I don't know. I read your stuff. I just really appreciate all the effort you're putting into this. And I hope. Sharon, I just add that the Federal High Administration, who are really the bad guys in the story, as Steve has explained, have actually changed their position as both Councilor Stromberg and Hanson well know. They changed their position a year and a half ago. They now are favorable to the connection of taking the parkway over to the Battery Street. And there's a project that the Council will be looking at to sign and get going this summer. It's very possible that in our view, and this hasn't been solidified yet, so I'm going out on a limb, is we should build the rail enterprise project connection from Pine Street over to Battery Street first. And then do a scale down along the guidelines that the Walk By Council has endorsed after. That would mean that we would improve the King Maple neighborhood environment, reduce the traffic, and do all the good things that we'd like to do. And then, so that we would never put that neighborhood at risk. Note this, Kurt McCormick has, Representative McCormick's been quite clear. He has part of this King Maple neighborhood. 30% of the people who live in the old North End and King Maple have no access to a car. They tend to be low income. They tend to be people with black and brown skins. The discrimination that occurs by increasing traffic is in the King Maple neighborhood is one of hurting those who walk and bike first, and that's where the real discrimination takes place. And nationwide, the deaths to pedestrians are half again as high for Hispanics over whites and almost twice the rate for blacks over whites. There is a direct connection between traffic, the invasion of low income neighborhoods and the casualties that occur because those neighborhoods are disproportionately dependent upon walking and transit. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Steve. Thank you for staying up so late, folks. Yeah, it's just a little over, but it is over. We appreciate everybody for sticking around and appreciate everybody who came to the meeting. Anybody who's interested in doing some steering committee work or doing some ward work, please let any of us know and we'll get back in touch with you. With that, I wanna thank you very much and wish you a good rest of the evening. Take care. Goodnight, everyone. Goodnight.