 Hello, and welcome to Town Meeting TV's coverage of Town Meeting Day 2024. This program is part of a series of forums we are bringing to you in advance of Town Meeting Day on Tuesday, March 5th. Town Meeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers of questions that you will see on the ballot, introducing you to community decision makers, and connecting you with issues that shape your local community. You can find all the forums at cctv.org-slash-2024-2024 or on the Town Meeting TV YouTube channel. On today's program, is it today? I guess it is today's program. We will hear from Christine Lott, who's running for her third term as Windows Ski Mayor, and thank you very much for joining us. We've prepared some questions in advance. Our candidate have seen them, and you can also call in and ask questions yourself. The phone number for calling in is 802-862-3966. If you call in, we will do our best to prioritize those calls and interrupt my question asking, though we'll screen the calls and ensure that the questions are not repeated. We ask that you share your name, the town you live in, and that your question be directed at all the candidates, while we have only one candidate, so that doesn't matter. Not just the one candidate. Let's get started with a one-minute opening statement from Christine. Thank you Ken, and thank you Town Meeting TV. I'm here for my third time seeking reelection. I've been serving as the mayor of Windows Ski for five years now in my prior two terms. I have been in Windows Ski since 2009. One of the reasons that I came to Windows Ski was, is just a really small connected community where all kinds of folks can live together, affordable across income levels. You can meet different types of people, and you can really build connection in our small but mighty city. And when I first ran for mayor, I wanted to keep us on that trajectory of being an affordable place, being a connected place, and actually increasing community engagement to make sure that everybody's able to have a say in where we're headed. I think that we all know that affordability is kind of on the decline for reasons not unique to Windows Ski, and I think that it's more important than ever to have a focus on sustainability and how we move forward with our community vision in a way that is responsible and keeps people here. And I think that community engagement is also very important, even more so, as we're thinking about what are our highest priorities, and how do we keep towards the future that we want to have. Thank you. So we don't have any questions from callers yet, so let's dive in with the predetermined choices. So there are some ballot items that are going to be voted on besides the obvious, the mayor and budget, and you have two bond issues, I believe, coming up. Maybe you'd like to talk about those and how they're important and why you think a voter should support them or not. Yeah, thank you. So two bonds on the ballot. So for those who aren't familiar, a bond is essentially a loan, it's debt that the city takes on, that we need voter authorization in order to take on debt of this size. So the first bond vote, Article 6, is actually asking to reallocate existing bond money. So this is debt the city already took on for a prior project for Hickok Street. We didn't spend all the money and we need voter approval to use that money on other work. This will allow us to fix up the streets on the east end of town. Roger, Gail, Bernard, Reginald, I believe. So definitely support this. We already have the money. It's not going to increase your taxes. The second bond vote is for the Burlington-Wanewski Bridge project. And this is seeking up to $4.6 million of local money to provide the match required for the federal grant and state-funded project. This is a significant project the city could never do on its own. It's going to make great improvements to the bridge for all users, but especially bicycle and pedestrian users, expanding the multi-use path, adding a barrier for safety. So it's really important to our community vision and folks who live here and beyond. It is a little challenging the amount of money that is required from us for the local match. You know, there's 25,000 cars a day, 500 bikes and pedestrians crossing this bridge, and all of that traffic is not Wanewski and Burlington-based. So we are still in talks with the state and with legislators trying to get an adjustment down on how much is required. But we need the authorization up to the $4.6 million to make sure that we don't lose the grant and we don't lose the project altogether. So I support it and hope that we still have, I know there's still work to be done to try to reduce the impact on us as a city. You mentioned Hickok Street. I lived on Hickok Street when I first moved to Hickok. It looks nicer now. 40 odd years ago, a long time ago. Okay, second question, no callers yet, so let's continue on. So I just did two ballot items by petitions. So I'm aware with what connecting with constituents is like. And what did you do to connect with constituents? Yeah, so I mentioned in my opening statement that community engagement is really important to me. It's actually really important to our staff leadership and city counselors. And in 2022, me and the former deputy mayor kind of drafted a plan that the rest of council waited on and adopted. We identified a series of existing community groups, senior groups, the local mosque, a Congolese association, a parent and student group. So we could try to proactively kind of meet people where they are informally, not expect them to come to city council meetings and make sure that we're doing regular outreach to get input as we're making decisions. So throughout the year, we have been implementing that plan and trying to do like at least twice a year reach out to various groups. We've also started to add some more informal opportunities this year. So leading up to this budget process, hosted some coffee chats, some like cocktails with council, went to the farmer's market, the library, just to make a multitude of opportunities for people to engage us. I think it's also really important to put information out so people know what is happening. I have put a lot of work in over my time as mayor doing front porch forum updates after every meeting about the decisions that are being made and where there's opportunity for engagement. We have like city social media. And then just generally showing up to community events being present, talking to people because we have such a diverse community. I'm not necessarily going to meet everyone, hear all the perspectives from just interacting with my neighbor's friends family and so having this like intentional way of getting out there and finding voices that we're not hearing from all the time is really critical to doing a good job as an elected official. Like how many different ethnic groups, if that's a categorization, what does Wyniski have now? It's one of the most diverse communities in the state. I don't have the statistic off hand, but there were at least two dozen languages being spoken in our school district. So it does take a lot of work to try to connect with folks, especially with various language access needs. So that leads right to a question we didn't talk about prioritizing, but language access. This outreach must be challenging, I would imagine, with all the different languages that are being spoken. It can be, right? Like most of the information we put out is in English, obviously. We are currently working on developing a language access plan to formalize, like, what are the most important things and how do we get them to people? But what we have heard from multilingual residents is that what is actually really important to them is interpretation and in-person time. So during the pandemic, we actually organized meetings with the support of the multicultural liaisons at the school district to meet with different language groups in person, tell them what's going on, hear their concerns and needs, and that was really well received. And we've been trying to replicate that with sort of like focus groups. We've heard that that's much more effective than translating documents and things. So that's something we hope to codify through the language access plan, but also just relationship building. So I mentioned we have a mosque in Manuski. We have been connecting with leadership there. I now know who to reach out to. There's a Congolese association. It's just really important to figure out, like, who are the kind of leaders in different parts of the community and establish relationships with them to build trust in so you can reach out to them when you need to. And also, they know that they are welcome to come to us when they need to. How many different ways do you know how to say hello now? I've done at least five. There are more I need to learn. I'm sure. So let's see. No other calls yet. So we'll move on. I'm particularly interested in the fact that Manuski has switched over to form-based zoning. For those who don't understand, maybe you could explain what's the difference between this new method, form-based code, versus the historic method, which is use-based. Yeah, form-based code is focused on the form. So what we have in place now in our gateways, our denser districts is this is what your building, your development should look like to fit into the neighborhood. And what you do inside of there is less prescriptive. We still have, like, commercial zoning, residential zoning. But essentially, like, if you're in the commercial district and you build something that fits the scale, you can put whatever business use in there that you need to that, like, fits the project or there's a community need for. It's a little more flexible, and it allows us to do a lot of projects through administrative review, which speeds up the process. And actually, since we adopted it in 2016, we've grown over 467 new housing units in the city. So we have been seeing a lot of development from it. I do want to say, though, one of the reasons we adopted that was to increase housing, but also grow the grand list and kind of reduce the tax burden. Even with this amount of development, we still don't. We see 1% or less of growth a year. Doesn't keep up with inflation. So we're still having challenges with, you know, we've added almost 500 new housing units. Grand list is not growing at the same rate as the last year. Correct. And all these new folks also need services. New units need inspections. So there's a lot that we need to think about this year, as we're considering what is the future trajectory of keeping the city affordable? How do we keep adding housing that's necessary, but also make sure that we have the funding to service the folks who live here? We've only got a little bit of time left. I think we have about three minutes left. So maybe you can touch on any other items that you wanted to cover. How about racial justice? Maybe a minute on that. Yeah, I think this is something that we have definitely talked about. We completed an equity audit in 2022 in partnership with our school district. We see that like the region and beyond, there are inequities in housing access for BIPOC community members and in representation on council, school board, in staff, et cetera. So one of the ways that we work to address that is through that community engagement. We have increased representation. We have a long way to go, but trying to make sure that we have all the voices at the table to help address systemic inequities. And then like our staff have been doing things internally, changing how job postings are written or where they're advertised so that people feel included. We've added a lot of like frontline community services staff to connect more and create more access and connection with local government. So if people feel like they are included, they are welcome. Government serves everyone in the city. Educating folks on renters rights, we've been working with the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity to get more information in and also doing some code enforcement updates to try to address housing quality inequities that we've seen in the community. Super. I think that's just about all the time that we have. You just have enough time for your closing statement if you have one. I'll just say that it's been like an honor and a big responsibility to serve Winooski for the last five years. Six, if you count my time on council. And I am looking forward to a couple more to keep seeing us through on important work that is happening in community engagement, infrastructure projects, tackling housing issues, making sure that we execute some of the local zoning and ordinance changes that we need to do to keep moving forward. Well, thank you very much. And thank you all who watched. Thank you for tuning in to town meeting TVs ongoing coverage of local candidates, local budgets and ballot items. You can find this and many more on cctv.org slash 2024 or on our town meeting TV YouTube channel. You can also tune in to our live election results show after you cast your ballot on March the 5th. Don't forget to contact your local clerk to find out how to obtain a ballot or an absentee ballot and or to register. In Vermont, you can register to vote on election day. You can also register online at the Secretary of State's website. Vermont's Secretary of State website. Thank you again for watching and sharing town meeting TV.