 Yeah. Michelle, why don't you go ahead and start off, you can go ahead and start off moderating. Thank you. Hi everyone, I'm Michelle Maraz and I'm on the award six NPA steering committee. And we have all the members of our steering committee here except for Joel Fitzgerald, but we have Mary Riley. Hi. Matt Grady, Nelson Martel and Caroline Hauser. I feel like we're playing Hollywood Squares. So the steering committee is very happy to present our agenda this evening, which starts with music by Joe Brasca. All right, yeah, I'll get started again. I've been playing guitar for six months as a disclaimer for those of you that just hopped on. But Mary asked me to play my guitar a little bit and she gets to listen to it sometimes when I play outside across the street. So thanks to her for inviting me. I've been enjoying hearing him play now for several weeks and it's completely lovely. So we're lucky to have Joe play this evening. Thank you for coming. A couple of simple songs for you for a few minutes here. I was on mute but I was making the same sounds actually as zero. It has left, that's no fair. I know, she was getting all excited. All right, I'll play one more quick one for you and then we'll be trying to keep it during civil hours of course. No, that's one of the best things that come out of COVID, six months of isolation and now we get to hear you play, so thank you. And I could tell everybody I work tomorrow. I play guitar for the mayor, so that'll be fun. So yeah. There you go. Thank you, Joe. I appreciate your courage and your speedy learning of the guitar. You're very welcome, thanks for having me. You're welcome and thanks to Kira too. She was a great asset this evening. Sure was. Okay, so next on our agenda, we have the mayor who would like to talk about public safety and our mayor is Murrow Weinberger. Thank you, Michelle. Good to be with everyone tonight and yeah, wow, Joe. I'm shocked that I thought maybe it was a joke that you'd only been doing that for six months. That was very impressive and what a great way to start on one of these Zoom meetings. I basically wanted to be here with you. I think we've only got a few minutes together. So I don't think there's a lot of time for discussion but I did want to make sure everyone here was aware that I have restarted the search for the next permanent police chief and we are starting this search in recognition of the fact that certainly from my perspective, we are trying to forge a new consensus about what policing and public safety looks like in the future here in Burlington. I think hiring the next police chief is an important step in that process. And so the beginning of the police chief search process is involving me and some of the members of the search committee that we are putting together including city council, Karen Paul, hosting a series of event conversations with many members of the public, different stakeholders who have an interest in weighing in on what we should be looking for in the next chief. And we, since we can't talk to everyone, we also have launched a survey that I hope you've had a chance to see. And if you haven't, I don't think the chat function is enabled, so I can't drop the link in but it is very easy to find if you are interested in filling out the survey and haven't been emailed a link by one of our many communications in recent weeks. The way you find it is you just go to the city website, go to the upper right hand part of the city web page and there's a search box there, put in police chief search and it will come right up and you'll have a link both to the survey as well. If you really wanna get involved further in this, we are taking applications still for a few more days for anyone who would like, a member of the public would like to be on this approximately 11 person search committee that will be reviewing all of the resumes that we get in narrowing down a group. Last time was about nine people that get interviews and then the search committee's other major duty is to send on to me hopefully three to five strong candidates for further vetting. And that whole process is taking place between now and really the middle of this month, we're gonna end this sort of listening period and we're gonna post the report that really kind of summarizes everything that we've heard and what we are looking for. We may make some changes to the job description of the police chief at that point and post the position. And then we hope to begin interviews in July and have a nominee an appointment for me to put before the city council in August or September of this year. So that's the plan. Again, if you want more information, check it out on the website. I will also just plug one more feature of the website if you put in that search button, if you put budget into that box, you will come up with a landing page that has a ton of budget information about this year's FY22 budget. I am finalizing the budget for kind of my part of the process is to submit to the city council by June 15th a budget. We're gonna do that over the next week. We're gonna finish doing that. There's a couple, there's one more board of finance meeting on Monday before we make our final edits. There's a lot of information about what is in this year's budget on that landing page. If you have any comments or input you'd like to share, we would also welcome that in the mayor's office. With that, I think we might even have four minutes or so left, I'd be happy, Michelle, to take any questions about either of those topics if that would be helpful. Sure, questions are welcomed. And also if Karen would like to chime in anything about the police chief search, feel free to do that. But yes, we are open for questions. Do you wanna thank Karen? She's put a lot of time in with me and talking to dozens of people in the last few weeks in a bunch of different meetings at all, different points of the day. Karen as well as Councillor Jane Stromberg is serving on this search committee. There are two commissioners as well, which our charter calls for and that's part of the process. Commissioner Milo Grant and Stephanie Seguino are also serving on the committee and will be filling out the rest of the committee in the coming days as we move towards posting the job. Great. Matt, did you raise your hand or maybe I, no, no, sorry. I've never known you to not use your allotted time mayor. So you could either set a record, maybe a precedent or we can move along whichever you prefer. Well, you know, let me use this opportunity to say, first of all, it's awesome to see Liz Gamache, former mayoral colleague on the Zoom here and congratulations Liz on your new role with United Way. I look forward to working with you in this role. Let me also say tomorrow's the start of Jazz Fest. It is back and it will run from tomorrow through June 13th and I think it's gonna be a little bit different this year because of COVID protocols and the way in which the event came together this year amidst uncertainty but I think it's gonna be awesome and it's certainly safe. The events are all outdoors and as hopefully you're aware there's virtually no very low virus circulating at this point. The community has done such a great job at embracing vaccinations. We are the leading county and the leading state in the country in terms of vaccination percentage right now. So come on out and be part of Jazz Fest and then come join us again for our first ever Juneteenth celebration which will be on June 19th, it's a Saturday. It is something that Taisha Green, the director of our Racial Equity Inclusion and Belonging Group and her team and many members of the community have been working on for months and I really, you know, it's amazing that we don't have a national holiday celebrating the end of slavery. It's really almost like a second independence day for this country and it's great that we are now, you know, there have been smaller observations of this in Burlington in the past. It's the first time the city is embracing this as a city-sponsored event and I think it's really gonna be quite special. There's a website up on that too and you can check out a huge number of performances and educational events and food opportunities that are taking place over the course of that day. And, you know, and then the Burlington summer proceeds from there and really in many ways the downtown and waterfront are back and we hope you'll see out there and that you'll be spreading the word. It's exciting that we can start coming together again after a pretty tough 16 months. So I hope we'll be meeting in person at future MPAs sometime soon. Do you have plans about that or thoughts about in-person MPA meetings? Yeah, so first I wanna say thank you for joining us this evening. Thank you for your service and all that you're doing on behalf of Burlington residents and for all your hard work and we have been in contact with Father Andreas at the Greek Orthodox Church. And as long as we continue to progress in containing the virus, our plan and we haven't finalized anything but our plan and expectation is to be back in-person when we start in September again. So Ward six takes off July and August and we start again in September and we hope to be in person at that point. Great, well that's exciting. I'd love to do my best to be there when you restart. Cool, thanks again for joining us. Thank you, great to see everybody. Oh, I had a question. Oh, it has to be a quick one. And who was the person with the question? Looks like Anna. Yeah, do you have time for me to ask it? I have time, yes, but I know you... Okay, okay. I'd actually like to do it this way. Miro, can you wait a few minutes until after our tribute to Charles Simpson and then during the public comment, we'll squeeze that in? Sounds good. Okay, I just wanna keep Andy Simon on schedule here. So Andy is going to speak to us about his colleague and friend Charles Simpson and I'll just throw in that we worked, I worked, most of the steering committee worked with Charles for at least two years, perhaps longer on the steering committee. And we were fortunate to work with him and get to know him and his commitment and knowledge about the city. And we are honored that Andy is joining us to share some thoughts about Charles this evening. I'm just saying one more thing. So we were just saddened to learn of his passing within the past few weeks or so that's the reason why we thought we would honor him just one good point Charles. Thank you, Mary. Yes. Okay, Andy. Hello, my name's Andy Simon. I live in Ward 5 and I was asked as Michelle said to say a few words to honor my friend Charles Simpson who you know was a long time steering committee member of this NPA and who died at his home on May 3rd. Anyone who knew Charles would know that a few words would never be sufficient since Charles was not in any way a man a few words. I had the privilege of working with Charles many times on two progressive city council campaigns on the Coalition for a Liveable City, the Pine Street Coalition, People for Peace and Security, Save Open Space Burlington and just probably just a portion of the things that Charles was involved with in this city. In campaign debates before city commissions, numerous city commissions at city council and the Ward 6 NPA or in the streets, Charles always had the same goals, a more just, verdant and liveable city for everyone who lives here. I don't really intend to eulogize Charles. This isn't the place or time to do it. And I specifically would like to leave space for others who knew Charles to share thoughts about him related to the NPA or not. Charles was a man whom I admired for his courage, his analytical ability, his subtle humor, often, if you knew Charles muttered kind of under his breath, soto voce, and for his kindness. You might not know that Charles also was the author of a novel which came out this year it's called Uncertain Harvest. And it's a crime novel actually, very fast paced and very not surprisingly for Charles, politically connected around genetic engineering. It's a book that is available at the Fletcher Free Library. And like Charles, this book is, it's witty, it's sophisticated and has a depth that sneaks up on you. Now I didn't really wanna do an advertisement for the book but I did wanna use this as another illustration of how multifaceted, complex, and yet consistent Charles was. His spirit of outspoken principled engagement will stay with this NPA and will live in our city. Because of that, and because of Charles and Anita's long time commitment and engagement and involvement with Latin America, I just wanted to end by saying Charles Simpson, presente. Thank you, Andy. I do invite other people to say something about Charles, their appreciation for him or memories of activities that you were engaged in with him. Neal and then Connie, you need to unmute Neal. Got it. And Charles and I were on the NPA steering committee for a couple of years and Charles in his other lives could be controversial and could have opinions that were different than others. The NPA steering committee tries to be neutral and Charles always was and he always wanted to hear both sides of the, or more than one side of the matter at hand and he was really good at holding that in the NPA. I also wanna note that I really miss his, missives on Front Porch Forum and he will be missed. He also lived right down the block and his cat at one point was usually haunted, my dog and Charles would come and say, don't worry about the cat, just water, spray water on her and she'll run away. And then every once in a while I'd get a phone call. We were missing the dog and Charles would say, dog's here chasing our cat. So anyway, he's missed and I'm sad to hear he's gone. Thank you, Neil and Connie. Yeah, Charles was a member of the Progressive Steering Committee in Burlington for the last few years and it really brought much of what Andy was talking about his intelligence and his sensitivity to the group and it was always willing to do research and he had a principled point of view about everything and really was a great contributor to the committee and I know we have already missed him because he stepped back when he was diagnosed. So anyway, it was really an honor to know him and to have a dialogue with him about a whole range of topics. So that's all. Thank you, Connie. Is there anyone else who would like to comment on Charles? I would like to say something as well. I'm really grateful to Charles. When I started on the NPA, I was quite green and I really kind of want to echo what Neil was saying. Charles was a very, very good leader by example. And so even though you could tell, he had some very strong specific points of view, but whenever a point of view, we were going to have some point of view at the NPA, he always wanted to have all sides explored. He was really diligent about that and very thoughtful about it in ways that I hadn't really even considered. He would come up with a way to try to get other, different points of view represented and I thought I just was really impressed with that kind of leadership, even though obviously he was very passionate about his beliefs and we thought things ought to be. So anyway, I definitely miss him. And I'm very, very sad to hear, I was very sad this last month. Thanks, Matt. We're just about out of time, but I'm going to echo Charles and Matt and also say that Charles provided really good leadership, gentle leadership on the NPA steering committee and that his leadership was quiet, but clear and that he was non-partisan on the steering committee and he was fair and he was democratic with a small D and he, Matt and I started around the same time, I think he really guided us in how to be open-minded, especially around issues that were highly charged. So I also appreciate and will miss Charles. So thank you all. I really appreciate your contributions to remembering Charles. And then we now have time for public comment and so I encourage folks to speak up about public comment and we are going to just give some time to Anna's question for Moreau as well. Great, thank you so much. Mayor, thank you for talking about the police chief search. And I can't think of a more critical hire that needs to happen at this time where we are. So I was looking at the survey and the survey is an interesting survey, although it's very hard to answer, not at all important on any of those questions. In fact, all of those questions are extremely important and relevant to this next hire. So I'm sure you're crafting the survey in terms of trying to kind of get the nuance of what you need to look for and looking for a police chief in this climate will probably have to come from out of state. And I guess I'm curious about really, I guess my question is a little hard to articulate because issues of racism and diversity and inclusion are so, so important at this time and we struggle in this state with not being a very diverse state. So to try and welcome a new police chief here to address these really important issues in this state will definitely be a challenge and it will be hard finding the right person. So I'm curious to know what you and maybe what Karen Paul, what are you actively thinking about as being the absolute key attributes that you must have in this role? What are maybe the top two or three attributes that you think are absolutely critical in this next hire? Thank you, Anna. So I've been through the process of hiring new chief twice now and I've hired many other dozens now of other department heads over the last nine years. And I must say actually one of the things that, I do some form of this kind of listening effort before every one of these hires often, this is by far the kind of most community focused and biggest effort at that, but I always go and check in with key stakeholders and the people working in the department. And I must say I have learned over nine years to suspend judgment a little bit on formulating exactly what I'm looking for until having completed the process. I actually always learn and kind of my vision of what we're seeking is sharpened by that effort. And so, especially since we're putting real effort and resources into it here, let's do that. That said, I certainly agree that the next chief needs to understand that we are in the midst of a long overdue reckoning on racial injustice and in every part of our society. And that certainly includes law enforcement and there's certainly the chief. And we know that we have specific unfinished work here in reckoning with documented racial disparities that we need a plan for how we are going to address and talk about and understand. And so certainly this person will need to be conversant and skilled and prioritize that effort. I always look for good communicators in these department head searches. These are leadership positions. Certainly it is critical that the next chief be someone who is able to communicate very well with the community as well as internally as a leader of a 100 person department and grappling with the transformation that we're going through communication is gonna be key in every way. So at least those two things will certainly be high on my list. That's great, thank you. I can appreciate it's gonna be a difficult position to fill. We certainly intend to consider candidates, this will be advertised nationally. And I do think there are some potentially strong for my candidates. I would never rule out there being a Vermont that we would settle on as the next chief. But as you've seen with some of my past appointments, I'm certainly willing to appoint people from outside of Vermont if I think that that's warranted. And I am encouraged that we are after a long period where we really struggled with this. I would, you know, of my last three appointments, two of them have been black women, which I do think is, I welcome that we're finally making some progress diversifying the leadership team in the city as well. We've had growing gender diversity throughout my nine years, but had struggled with racial diversity and we're making some progress there. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Anna for your question and Mayor for your response. Does anyone have a public comment? Karen? Am I allowed? Yeah, you are. Okay. So I just wanted to mention a couple of things. The first is that if anyone who is listening to this right now or listens to this in the future does have any comments about the police chief search, I do hope that they will reach out to us and offer their input. The listening sessions that the mayor referenced, we're trying very hard to get a broad, you know, cover a broad spectrum. The mayor is going to each of the NPA meetings. We're also having these one-hour listening sessions today. We spoke with people in the downtown business community. We've also met with high school students, the city and lake semester group of students. We met with them last week and are also talking with members of the police department as well. But, you know, it would be wonderful to hear from as many people as possible. The more people we hear from, the more information that we have. Then the other thing I just wanted to mention is that it won't come at this council meeting, but probably at the next one. So it'll be after, it'll be after obviously our NPA meeting. We are, it does look like going to be moving forward with a committee that will be gathering public input on the redistricting process. And at this point right now, it looks as though each NPA or each ward, I should say, because some NPAs are more than one ward, each ward will have one representative from the ward to be on this committee. And so even though you don't meet during the summer, if it all possible, it might be helpful to have a meeting even if it is only a very short one, but more on that to come. And then I just simply wanted to add, just so that we didn't go over that I was also, I knew that Charles had not been well and was sad to hear about his passing. One of the things that, there are two things that always impressed me about Charles. One of them was what a lot of you have already said, which is that although I think it was no secret to anyone that he had some, he had perspectives and he had opinions about many issues. But when it came to the NPA, he was very, very fair about making sure that all points of view were heard. And I always appreciated that. And then the other thing I just wanted to mention is that just in passing a few years before Charles and I ran as opponents in a council race, I ran into him with my daughter at an event and a man came up to my daughter and wanted her to do something that she really wasn't able to do because she wasn't old enough. He wanted her to sign a petition for something. And he was pretty persistent. And Charles was the one that intervened and said, and was very kind to our daughter and something that Caroline will always remember and something that I will always remember as well. So I am sorry for his family's loss and think that and do feel that his absence will be felt for many years to come in Word 6. So thank you. Thank you, Karen. I appreciate your sharing your thoughts about Charles. We do need to move on with our agenda. And next up is Liz Gamash. Liz is director of business development and donor relations for the United Way of Northwest Vermont. And Liz we're interested in hearing from you about the pandemic, how it has affected our most vulnerable residents of Northwest Vermont and how we may all pitch in to help alleviate the struggles of some of our folks here in our area. If you don't mind unmuting that would help us even more. Great. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? That's so good, that's so good. Let's make sure everyone else is muted. And then Liz, let's try you again. I actually had to call it on my phone. Did you hear that, Liz, to turn the phone audio off but you're still muted. Phone audio off and also unmute your computer. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Yes, a little slight echo. Yeah, it seems like Liz, your audio is connected through your computer. So I think you can hang up the phone. Okay. How's that? That seems fine. I can't hear you though. Give me a thumbs up if this sounds good. I will do my pitch and then what I will do when I'm done is switch over to my phone so that I can hear your questions. I apologize, not sure what's going on. This is the first time I've experienced this with Zoom. So go figure. Good for me to go? Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for including me in the meeting this evening. And first and foremost, I really want to extend my condolences on the loss of your neighbor, Charles. He sounds like he was quite a fabulous community member who meant a lot to a lot of folks. So I'm sorry for your loss. I am Liz Gamache and I am one of the newer members of the team at United Way in Northwest Vermont. I started a couple of months ago but I've been involved with United Way over the last 20 years. So it's familiar territory for me. I worked at Brinkland-Grandale, United Way about 20 years ago for a few years and that was my introduction to mission-driven work and I've been involved ever since working with organizations in the nonprofit sector and the municipal sector doing work to help build stronger communities through community and economic development. So I want to get to some discussion about COVID and our response and how we're moving into the recovery phase at United Way here in Chittenden County and also Franklin and Grand Isle counties. Just by way of grounding the conversation, I'll just go over a few general bullet points that applied before the pandemic and continue to be a part of our work. Our mission as always is around building a stronger community by working together and we work hard to find opportunities to mobilize community members to work together to improve the lives of our friends and neighbors. And one of the things that is particularly powerful about United Way is where we sit. I like to say we sit at the intersection that brings together individuals with businesses, other nonprofits and government entities and together we're able to fight for that strong, vibrant and healthy community. And we're able to do this because we have a combination of a dedicated staff that works under the direction and leadership of our nonprofit board and with dozens of community volunteers that help us to identify what our community's primary issues and priorities might be and then they work with us to help raise the funds to provide the resources to address those needs. And also they work diligently with our staff to review funding requests, to review programs, develop relationships with community organizations and ensure that the funds that we're putting out into the community are indeed making an impact. So in recent years, through our community driven process, we've been focusing on five eight areas, meeting basic needs, housing, transportation and food, promoting mental health, supporting families, reducing substance use disorder and advancing employment. And as we've focused on these areas, we have also, especially in the last year, deepened our pursuit of deeper awareness and understanding of how we can be responsive and identify areas of racial injustice, social inequities that we can address within our own organization and also with others to take action. So we raise funds, we facilitate giving for individuals, corporations, workplaces. Many of you know us for our workplace campaigns, I think. And we help to fund those programs that meet the priorities we've identified. We also mobilize volunteers, not just the ones that work directly with our staff, but we help to connect volunteers to other organizations in the community. We work on strategic initiatives. And I think this is something that is unique and heightened by the experience that we've gone through in the last year with COVID is that United Way is an organization that's able to be very nimble and responsive in the moment. And at the same time, we are also looking further out, working on strategic initiatives that can help to change and fix systems. We work in collaborators, we're connectors, we engage with partners throughout the community. And in addition to all those things, we have a few programs of our own. In addition to funding other organizations, we run the Working Bridges program, foster grandparents operation happiness, just to name a few. And with that, what I'll do is I'm gonna just do a little thumbs up check if you're still hearing me. And if that is all good, I'm going to shift into some updates on our COVID response and recovery. Now I'm new to the team. So I have been involved as a supporter of United Way when COVID struck. And so some of what I'll relate to you will be feedback that I've gotten from my coworkers. But let me start with a little bit of data. United Way was able to establish a COVID response fund very promptly. It was in the mid to late March timeframe after the pandemic struck. And since then, we've raised about $610,000. And we have distributed all but about $47,000 in that time. As we started, we began with a COVID response fund. And there came a point where we began to recognize that there were really going to be two parts to our funding. One was the immediate tactical needs just to get help out as fast as possible to be responsive to community needs. And then the other side is what we're experiencing more right now, the recovery phase, the longer phase that will take quite a while, I think for us to come out of. So we've been able to raise $610,000. We have distributor allocated most of it to over 40 organizations, external partners. And we've also used it to support some of our internal programming like the Working Bridges program. It was a crowd raising exercise. We had over 400 donors that included corporations and so many individuals. Our donations to the fund ranged between $15 to $25,000. And we even had one very large anonymous donation of $200,000. So we were really pleased that we had a mechanism that invited donations of all sizes because they all make a difference together. We amplify the impact of those gifts. So we had crowdfunding, corporate gifts. We had some dollar for dollar matching by the Palmerlow family and the flood family, which also helped to really inspire more giving from others. So we brought the resources in and then the next challenge was to get those out. Into the community. And in the response phase, we were nimble fast. We reduced the barriers to the application process. We eliminated the application process. We were able to take in needs and requests quickly and turn funds around quickly. And we were able to, as I said, support over 40 external partners and their programs with grants ranging from 1,000 generally to $3,000. We aim to be fast and flexible. And we focused on those categories that I just mentioned. Meeting basic needs, focusing on emergency shelter and related services, food access and meal delivery, housing retention, rapid rehousing. When it came to supporting families, we were helping to support the work of parent child centers, school districts and home health organizations. And we focused specifically on these in the early phases, the response phase. And we also used a lens to identify how we could support vulnerable underserved communities, BIPOC communities disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. And we reserved a certain amount of funding that went to 11 organizations that were directly meeting these needs. In addition to the funding, we were busy doing other things and adapting and adjusting. We went remotely, very rapidly. And like the rest of the world, we adapted and we're able to keep a very full workload throughout the pandemic, continuing to meet with partners and stakeholders to understand needs. Our working bridges model is a model where in non-COVID times, we have resource coordinators that work at employer worksites and work to help employees overcome or eliminate barriers that might keep them from maintaining stable employment. With a pandemic, it changed the way we operated. So we had to quickly respond and move to remote services and we were able to do that. And we also were able to establish a special connection with the restaurant industry so that we could offer statewide support to restaurant workers who were so hit so hard by the pandemic and we continue to do that. We are just starting to get back into worksites to offer support. Our volunteer mobilization became really key. We have a platform on our website that helps to connect volunteers, people interested in volunteering to the organizations that need them. So that proved to be very instrumental during the pandemic, especially as it related to food distribution events and programs. We worked with one of our working bridges partners, Commando, oh, two minutes to wrap up. Good, I'm getting close. Thanks for the sign. We worked with Commando to deliver 10,000 masks to nonprofit agencies. We also participated in the Vermont mask up social media campaign. As we moved into the recovery phase, we added more focus to supporting families meeting basic needs, promoting mental health and also reducing substance use disorder. Because we're running short on time, I'm gonna stop there. I'll mention just that we still have $47,000 left that we'll be using to do flexible, responsive funding. We appreciate your support and we are always looking for more volunteers or feedback and if you're interested in participating in any way, we would love to hear from you and help to identify opportunities for you to engage with us. So I'm gonna stop and I'm gonna dial in. You can't hear us. Sign language to answer your questions. I'm so sorry. And I would be happy to follow up by email afterwards as well. Bear with me. I might be able to fix this. So just give me a second when she dials in. Okay. Okay, it sounds like this isn't working. We're also running over. So what I'd like to do is think about how folks can get in touch with Liz, my hunch is if you go to the website for United Way for Northwest Vermont that at that website, you will see how you can be in touch, offer to be a volunteer, offer donations and all the ways they need support, I imagine are available on their website. And Liz, thank you very much. If you can hear me, we can't hear you because you're muted or unavailable to us by audio. But yes, there we go. Thanks, Liz. Okay, great. Alrighty. And we're just gonna move right along here. Grace, and I'm gonna take a stab at your name, Grace, your last name, which looks like five. I could be wrong about that. It probably isn't. That was very close. It's file. That was very... Okay, it's misspelled on my agenda. So Grace, file, thank you for joining us. And Grace is going to speak to us about police accountability. And I imagine you represent police or police accountability. Yeah, so I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. It looks like, oh, I might need permission to share my screen if that's possible. I've made you a co-host and you should be able to share your screen in a second. Okay, let's try this again. Sorry, bear with me here. Okay, well, I'm not sure if I can figure out how to share my screen, unfortunately. Grace, if you go to the bottom of your screen at the very bottom, there should be a little arrow. If you bring your cursor down. Yeah, I see that arrow. I think it's not working. Yeah, I think there's maybe something happening with my computer on my end here. Can you talk us through what you would otherwise be showing us visually? Yes, I absolutely can do that. So I'm just gonna go ahead and do that. Yeah, so my name is Grace Vile. Thank you so much for having me and for sharing some of your time with me today. And I'm here on behalf of people for police accountability to talk to you about the community control of police campaign. And I know I'm just coming off of another conversation about policing and about our new police chief. And I didn't catch that whole conversation, but I just hope that our new police chief, whoever that may be would welcome accountability and would welcome oversight from community members who are really important stakeholders, right? Without the people, there would be no police department. So I'm gonna hopefully stay within my time here and talk a little bit about what community control of police is and what's in the actual proposal and where we are now in that campaign. And then hopefully we'll have a little bit of time for questions at the end. And I really wanna encourage everyone who's in this meeting and if there are folks who are watching at home on channel 317 to reach out to us and to email us at any point. If you have any questions, we would love to connect with you. Our email is BPD05401 at Gmail. So yeah, so people for police accountability. So we're a group of concerned residents and we're organizing specifically around community of control police and the creation of an independent community control board with diverse membership and disciplinary and investigatory powers over our police department. Our goal is to get community control police on the ballot for the special election in November through the petition process. So hopefully if we can collect all the signatures that we need, we'll all have the opportunity to vote on that in November. And I'm just here with you today to make sure that you have the opportunity if this gets on the ballot to make the most informed vote possible, right? So if you're gonna vote yes, we want that to be an informed yes. And if you're gonna vote no, we want that to be an informed no. So we wanna make sure that everyone has the information about this. So community control police is a proposal to change the city charter, which is basically like the constitution of our city that outlines all the rules and regulations of how our city functions and to create an independent community control board with investigatory and disciplinary powers over our police department. So right now the police chief is the only person who has the ability to discipline and fire police officers. And we would like community members as the people who pay for the police salaries and who are on the receiving end of police services, we would like community members to be able to have an ability to make some of those decisions about discipline. So currently if you experience unfair treatment or you experience police violence or misconduct, you have to report that misconduct directly back to the police department, right? And then they are tasked with investigating themselves. And there is very little transparency into the investigation and adjudication of complaints of misconduct. So even though we pay the police to do their job and we grant them special authorities, we don't actually have the ability to directly hold them accountable. We fund the police department with our tax dollars. And then we also have to pay for settlements and for our buyouts of officers in use of court force cases. But ultimately none of us, not even city council, not even the mayor can directly hold police officers accountable. And I think we saw a really good example of that. Last summer with the buyout that ended up happening of Jason Bellavance, right? Like the mayor kept saying, we can't do anything our hands are tied because of the charter. So community control police would fix that. So the community control board would be made up of to the extent possible, folks who are most directly impacted by policing. So we're talking about BIPOC members of our community. We're talking about LGBTQ folks. We're talking about folks who have experienced addiction and houselessness and mental health issues. We know that those folks are most likely to have interactions with police. We know that black members of our community disproportionately have interactions with police based on data from the police department itself and based on research that Stephanie Seguino has done. And the members of this disciplinary board would have to undergo extensive training. And the board would have an investigatory office to receive and investigate complaints of misconduct. The board would also have input into the hiring criteria for police officers and for the police chief, right? Which is kind of the current conversation we're having about hiring a police chief. The board would review complaints. They would hold hearings and they would discipline and remove police officers, including the police chief. And then the board at its office would also issue regular public reports and to allow for as much transparency as possible. That's like a really important component of this proposal is to create as much transparency as we possibly can. A couple of things that I think are really important to understand about this proposal are that police officers would continue to have a right to due process. So that right to due process is protected and maintained within this proposal. And the police department would still be able to investigate complaints that the board chooses not to take up. So that would be things like uniform infractions or tardiness kind of lower level misconduct like that. So I think another thing that is, another thing that's really important to note is that the community control board in its office are not going to be searching around for things to investigate, right? So they're only investigating based on a complaint that they receive. And additionally, the community control board would not replace the current police commission. The police commission has an important role working with the police department to craft policies and directives and to have an overall advise review of the department. So we envision these two bodies, the police commission and then the community control board existing alongside each other. And it's crucial that there be a fully independent body from the police department that can investigate and adjudicate discipline. So that was a lot of information. But I think it's also important to know that this is not something that is totally unique, that is totally crazy and far out. Across the country, there are over 150 different models of police oversight in cities of all different sizes and all different demographics. And the Burlington model is based on existing community oversight models. And our community control police proposal also directly aligns with the criteria for effective oversight of police created by the ACLU of Vermont. So those tenants that the ACLU of Vermont lays out, that's directly what our proposal is based off of. So we also have had extensive input and support from community members and we're supported by the ACLU of Vermont as well as the National Association of Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. And then we have support from local grassroots organizations too, including the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and Migrant Justice and the Women's Freedom and Justice Initiative and the Battery Park Movement. And I think something else that I, the last thing I kind of wanted to add was that the process of changing our city charter is actually something that was initiated by city council. So last summer, after the murder of George Floyd, we experienced one of the largest uprisings around racism and police violence in this country's history, right? And certainly some of the largest protests around police violence here in Burlington. And so in response to that, city council unanimously passed the protesters in public safety resolution and the racial justice through economic and criminal justice resolution. And so those resolutions tasked city council with exploring public safety alternatives and the protesters in public safety resolution actually requested that the charter change committee review options for who makes and reviews police disciplinary decisions. The community control police charter change was passed by city council in December and then was vetoed by Mayor Weinberger which blocked community control police from being on the ballot during the March election. So now our goal is to get community control police on the ballot for the special election in November through the petition process. So we're currently on our way to collecting about 2,000 signatures from registered Burlington voters so that all of us collectively have a chance to vote on it and so we can decide as a city if this is something that we want. And I'm happy to answer, I don't know if I have time left, I'm happy to answer questions. We also have a website, it's called peopleforpoliceaccountability.com and there's lots of resources there and you can connect with us there as well. So thank you, I'm happy to answer questions, yeah. Thank you, Grace. We're going to give you a few extra minutes because we've been running late. Yeah. We don't wanna deny you the time that you were allotted so we'll take a few questions and it looks like Mary had her hand up and then I have a quick question as well. Yeah, of course. Hi, Grace, thank you. I was wondering, how does one get on the community control board? Is there more elected, appointed and who would do the appointing? How would that work? Yeah, sure, so city council and the mayor would select a number of organizations. There's a specific kind of stipulations within the proposal that a certain number of those community organizations be black led or have a majority black membership. The representation component is really important to us. So there's a selection of organizations and then the organizations each nominate a person to serve on a selection committee and on that committee there's representatives from community organizations and the mayor is also on that committee and then there's one city councilor who's on that committee too. And then the selection committee will find people who are qualified to be on the board. Yeah, so that's how that works. And there's also a graphic on our website too that I think is really helpful that lays out that whole process in a visual way too. Okay, and can you name your website right now? Yeah, so it's peopleforpoliceaccountability.com. Okay, thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Grace. And thank you, Mary, for your question. I just wanted to know, and maybe the counselors will be able to answer this if you can't, Grace, is this the only question on the potential ballot for the special election in November or are there other items we would be voting on? Yeah, to my knowledge, it was my understanding that the mayor was gonna call for a special election to vote on some tax-related things. Maybe that was my understanding, but Councillor Paul and Councillor Pine can correct me if I'm wrong, and Councillor Shannon. So there is the possibility that there may be one if not two other items that might go on a ballot, but just to keep in mind that, and I apologize, Grace, if you already said this, this is a very unique situation because this is a charter change that has to do with governance. It doesn't need to go to the city council or to the mayor. So we don't go back to the process that we had before. This would go directly to the ballot. In other words, with most petitions, you get a petition together, you then show up at a council meeting, and you, with that petition, then want to be on the ballot. In this case, that's not what happens. That bypasses that system and goes directly to the ballot. So technically, once the number of signatures has reached, they can affect, the petitioners can effectively call for an election at any time. Hopefully, if there are other items that need to go on a ballot, considering the fact that it is fairly expensive to do a ballot, it would be helpful if we could do it together. But it's possible that there may be a bond vote on Burlington High School. It's also possible that there may be a vote on TIF funding that's what Grace is referring to, tax increment financing. So, but I think it's probably safe to say that one way or the other, there probably will be an election in the fall, when of course, given that we're on an odd year, we normally would not have that. Okay, great, thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks for the weeds. That's okay, thank you, Karen. Thank you again, Grace. I will throw in a pitch for an acting board clerk in Ward six. If you would like to work at this November special election, please do special elections, require special help from special people, and we've got a bunch of them right here in front of me. So please consider volunteering for the November election. And I think we are done with questions for Grace. And what I'd like to do now is welcome Brian Pine to our NPA. Brian, I understand is no longer officially a city counselor because Brian has accepted the offer to become Burlington's next director of the Community and Economic Development Office. And Brian, I know you haven't assumed this role, but we wanted to catch you first and hear about your aspirations and plans for CEDO, in which the NPAs are housed. So we wanna become a good friend with Brian Pine. Thanks, Michelle. It's maybe apropos that I'm talking to you before I'm even in the office. My very first political involvement was living in Ward six when I was a student on Redstone campus before I really knew what it meant to be involved in local politics. So I helped a guy by the name of Huck Gutman for office back in those days. And this was quite a while ago. So kind of cut my teeth in Ward six. So I guess I'm doing that now for this position. The, I guess what I'd like to share is that, as Michelle said, my service for CEDO begins on the seventh this coming Monday. But I'm really returning home in a way. CEDO was my professional home from 1996, right around this time in 1996 until January of 2015. And a little bit of my background is, I'll just try and be really brief, but after graduating from UVM in 1985, I worked in youth employment, working with young people who had dropped out of high school on how to learn the skills of carpentry. And we owned buildings through the Burlington Youth Employment Program, and we would renovate those buildings and use the work experience and the skill building as an opportunity to engage young people in both the skill that we were teaching them, but also in taking personal responsibility and seeing that they could actually shape their future and hopefully get them to realize that either going back to school or get some more training would lead to a better future for them. We had some wonderful successes. We didn't necessarily, not everybody's path went straight path and maybe would be viewed as highly successful, but the Youth Employment Program was an experience that really shaped my thinking around what we need to do to make sure that the local economy really takes into consideration or the public policy that helps to advance the local economy really focuses on the folks who are often just sort of left to their own devices in navigating their labor force participation and that I'm glad to have representative Blumlee here because she devoted so much of her career to that work as well, focusing on women, which CEDO was responsible also for being a big supporter of both the Youth Employment Program and what was then Northern England trades women and step up for women. And so all of these related efforts that CEDO was part of have really shaped my thinking and my approach to really what is a people oriented economic development strategy and it's best typified by some of the basic principles of local ownership, fostering local ownership, really focusing on building the local economy from within as opposed to seeking to attract and lure companies from elsewhere and getting them to Burlington, we could never compete with even our neighboring state across the lake to attracting companies to Burlington necessarily. We have the ability though to show that what's unique about this community is we have an incredible natural environment, incredible natural beauty. We have a huge supply of new highly educated young people every year we churn out young people with incredible skills and intellect and desire to make a big impact. So we have the ingredients for a really locally driven economy. And I think that one of the most exciting things for me is to ensure that we support people who are not necessarily traditional career path through four years of higher education and then they may come back or they may go elsewhere and look for a job but to also focus on those folks who don't take that path who take a non-traditional path. And I'm thinking of people of color I'm thinking of single mothers who end up parenting at first and facing the struggles of parenting but our success as a community and our success as a city in my mind is best measured by how we ensure that the economy works for folks like that. Folks who had been largely thought of is an afterthought and I hope we don't looking back I hope that will be the thing that we have accomplished as CEDO is to ensure that our local economic development efforts are really, really focused on that. And I see some incredible work happening in Burlington around ensuring that some of the tech jobs are available to non-traditional students coming out of the high school. We still do have kids who aren't finishing high school and their career paths are really extremely, extremely limited. So I'm hopeful that our focus on sort of a workforce development strategy is really very essential to the work that I'm hoping we can do at CEDO. We did have in the 80s, end of the 90s and in the first part of the 2000s we had a thing called jobs and people and it really looked at what are the jobs that are gonna provide a decent family wage, a wage you can support a family on and what do the people of Burlington need to get into those jobs and how can we ensure that we're linking that up? So I'm focusing a lot on the economic part of CEDO because the housing part is my that's like what I've done mostly but people should know that the economic development side of CEDO is as essential and core to what CEDO really is charged with in the city charter. And I could talk about so much more but I wanna give you all a chance to share your ideas with me because since I haven't really started this is more of a listening thing than a talking thing for me. Thank you, Brian. Does anyone have a question for Brian or a comment, feedback? I'd like to ask a question. I mean, this is getting kind of cliche for people to ask a question. What about this last year and how has it changed your thinking? But I think probably in your position it probably does have a strong influence and just wondering what your thoughts are about like the special situation we're now trying to recover from the last year. I think Matt that is probably one of our biggest, most important challenges we face not just as a CEDO or city government but really as a community. And it's been said so many times but I'll just say it again that the pandemic really did expose some of the fractures and weaknesses in our society and in our community and the economy is certainly part of that. And so, I hope I want to see the city have an economic recovery plan and agenda that really has a strong racial and economic justice focus and that we really keep that centered in all of the thinking and all the planning we do and to ensure that we aren't leaving folks behind as we recover. There's a lot of talk in the media about how people on unemployment are kind of better off than they were on their jobs that they were in before and that's a broken economy if that's really true. If that's the case that people don't have an incentive to get back in the workforce that's a real, that's a structural problem. I don't look at it as a problem of the person who's doing a little bit better financially on unemployment which there are some for sure but the fact that that is really a factor and I did experience this today when I called to see if Tire Warehouse could change my tires. They said, we have no one to change your tires for like a week from now, we might get them done but we usually do them, they usually could call them and you could bring your car in and they said, there's no one here to do that. We have no one willing to do that. And I thought, okay, interesting. Well, maybe you need to look at your business model here and how you compensate your workers and what do you give them for benefits and training and opportunity and all that. But so as far as what we as a city need to be doing we have a significant new resources coming in the form of American Recovery, American Rescue Plan Act funding, ARPA funding. And there's probably a number of things that need to be covered with that that are one time expenditures. There may even be, I personally don't think you take one time money and use it for ongoing expenses because that's a bad arrangement to get into. But I'm hoping we get really focused on ensuring that those dollars get invested in a way that has lasting economic impact for folks in this community for whom the economy and the market has not served that well, whether it be housing or jobs or job training. We really can, I think, turn a corner and come out of this stronger. I think we can do that. Thank you, that's really interesting. Thanks a lot. Thanks Matt for your question and Brian for your response. Does anyone else have something they'd like to ask Brian? If you're wondering where my office will be, I don't know, no, I'm just kidding. With the pandemic, I haven't been in City Hall in over a year. And so when someone said, where are you gonna sit in the building? I actually have no idea. I didn't ask where my desk would be. I don't know if people are talking about that stuff yet. Brian, I'm wondering if your years out of CEDO have informed your views going back into that department? Yeah, I think that's, for me, I took a risk in 2015 by leaving a job that I loved, working for the city that I love where I've made my home for the last 40 years. And I took a risk because the climate imperative motivated me to get back to that part of, I came to UVM to be an environmental studies major and we were discovering as students the stuff that is now kind of more mainstream but it wasn't 40 years ago about what we've done to our planet and what we continue to do. And working at VEC was for me in some ways kind of like a coming home because it allowed me to take that environmental ethic or ethos I guess and combine it with a focus on social justice because some of the work we were able to do at VEC was about things like me bringing a zero energy modular home to low income folks who are living in dilapidated manufactured mobile homes, bringing energy efficiency to public purpose buildings, which would be public buildings, would be affordable housing developments, things like that. So I was able to bring the passion I had around environment and what we can do to sort of chart a better course for how we live and how we function as a society in terms of the environment, but also the social justice piece. So weaving those together, I gained a really stronger appreciation I think for just the incredible work you can do in partnership with folks who you might not necessarily know are actually kind of trying to do the same thing perhaps maybe in a different parallel track but working more collaboratively with other sectors is something that I think I gained over the last few years of being in another field and for the last year and a half I've been self-employed and as a consultant and I've seen the struggles of what that entails to be self-employed. And so I feel much more informed than I was. It was almost mostly theoretical before but I have much more personal experience now. Good, thank you. So I would just like to congratulate you, Brian and us because it really makes me hopeful that you're gonna be in this position. So it's great. Thank you. Thanks Connie. I appreciate that, I really appreciate it. This community, we're a lucky community. We have incredible people all across the city and I have a friend, a long-time friend who likes to refer to it as the conspiracy of goodwill but CEDO feels like if anything it's that city department that helps to cultivate a conspiracy of goodwill in this community and it's just the highest honor to be part of that. Great, and again because of CEDO we're all gathered here this evening and Brian we look forward to hearing from you throughout your tenure. Hopefully you will be joining the Ward 6 NPA at certain times and just keep us in mind when you're doing your budgeting and your staffing. We're very appreciative of the increased funding we've received recently. Great, well I believe very much in the NPAs and was on a steering committee right after getting out of UVM as well. I was on the, then I moved to Ward 1 I was on the Ward 1 steering committee in like 86, 87 so I'm a big NPA fan for sure. That's great, wonderful thank you. Feel free to stick around. I will. Okay, yeah we've got Barbara Rachelson here. We've got Tiff Blumlee and Gabrielle Stebbins they're fresh off the end of the legislative session. Gabrielle and Tiff have completed their first year on the, in the legislature and we'd love to hear from all three of you your impressions of this session, your successes, your disappointments and we also will give time for folks to comment or ask questions on their thoughts about the past session. This very odd session which required you to spend endless hours in front of your computers on Zoom. So why don't we start with you, Barbara? If you could unmute, that'd be great. We hear from you less than the other, so please lead us out. Thank you for inviting me and I hope to come more regularly. I'm not sure when you're gonna be meeting in person again but I know many times I was invited and it would be like a jinx and the house would be meeting late and I would have to call and say I wasn't gonna be there. It looks like our former representative Joey Donovan was on earlier and she was a mentor to me throughout my process and I know Tiff is gonna talk a little bit more about Joey later but we did what you asked Michelle and all three legislators got together to figure out a coherent way to present to you all so that we wouldn't all be getting up and saying the same thing. So let me just say that I miss representative Sullivan and representative Donovan so much, no one can fill their shoes and I wanna say that so this NPA has two different districts. I'm a one-person legislator for 6-6 and we have two seats for 6-5 and I must say that both Gabrielle and Tiff have brought incredible gifts and energy and it's great to have them as new colleagues. So Tiff was gonna sort of kick off our presentation and as you said, Michelle, we're gonna leave a lot of time here from you all because we could talk to you all night and you probably don't want that. I just wanna say very briefly, Brian Pine is one of the very first people I met when I, before I even moved to Vermont and has been like a real touch point for me and I look forward, Brian, to working with you in your new capacity and hope that you'll call on all of us to coordinate with you, especially as we're looking at ARPA funds. So welcome and it's really fun to keep having, it's the great thing about Vermont, people keep showing up in different roles. So yeah, thanks. So Tiff, represent the bloom legs, sorry. Thanks so much for inviting us and giving us this time. We, I'll just, this is, I just wanna preface what we're gonna say by reflecting on where we were last year at this time. And you know, Gabrielle and I would go around and introduce ourselves to people at a great distance and people would say, why do you wanna run? Because everybody imagined that it was gonna be an incredibly grim session in which we would have to make significant cuts to really important programs. And imagine our surprise in January when in fact CARES Act money had been rolled over, it had been extended so that we could use what had been unspent. We had a tax surplus, which we didn't anticipate until very late in the game and then we had the ARPA funding announcement and that just changed everything. And the caucus spent, I'm sorry, the house spent probably the most energy on three different areas of activity. One was supporting Vermonters who had been hard hit by the pandemic. Second was making strategic structural investments in Vermont's future where we could, where ARPA money was possible and then take meaningful steps to address systemic inequities. And Michelle, I actually emailed you a link to a document that I don't, I don't wanna, we didn't wanna do a slideshow because you've got, I just, we wanted to have more conversation but this link, I don't know if you have a chat capacity but you could put that link in there or I can send it to, well, we're gonna send it out via front porch form. So that's fine because I'm reading your face and you are indicating that you don't have that capacity, is that right? That is true, we do not have the chat function in this webinar format, unfortunately. All right. I see your email now. Thank you for forwarding that link. Well, that's fine, totally fine. It's a report that Gabrielle and I put together that highlights kind of these three buckets but also then individual pieces of legislation. So we're gonna talk about those buckets, each of us and then we're gonna talk about some of the loose ends, things that are either pieces of legislation that are left hanging or that are on the governor's desk and awaiting some kind of a decision and then we'll open it up to questions. So in terms of COVID related legislation, legislature was able to make some significant grants and loans to small businesses that didn't receive federal assistance in the past round provide housing and community supports for Vermonters who are struggling with mental illness, provide one-time stimulus checks to reach up participants, added investments to the Vermont Farmers to Families Food Box Program, which was highly successful and statewide, there is more money that has been allocated to Vermont Housing Conservation Board for new housing and we added long-term supplemental benefit of $25 a week for those who are receiving unemployment insurance and rental assistance continued through what's called VRAP and Vermont Emergency Rental Assistance Program. I guess that's what it is. And I think there have been, there were some glitches but I think it's just run pretty smoothly, reducing the unemployment tax burden caused by COVID layoffs by removing year 2020 from employer calculation, providing immediate increased access to healthcare for income eligible pregnant women and children regardless of their immigration status and then some new transportation incentive programs which I'm gonna let Gabrielle tell you about because that is her committee. So I'm gonna pass it off actually to Gabrielle now. Thanks for representative Blumlee and thanks everyone for inviting us. So of the three buckets, if we have COVID relief and then really investing in infrastructure and then the third category of social equity, I get infrastructure because I'm on the transportation committee. I just wanna put things into context which is back in 2018, 19, we were approving rather the Vermont budget that in that fiscal year cycle was like 3.8 billion. And with all of this federal dollars, this year it's a $7.35 billion budget, right? And it's important to acknowledge that we shouldn't just keep making money at the federal level on the other hand if money is gonna come from the federal level to Vermont, I am willing to use it here for Vermonters. So I recognize that tension but in terms of investing in infrastructure, it's pretty mind boggling what we were approving this year. $150 million to expand high speed broadband throughout the state, this is critical. We know Chittin County is the only county that's actually growing in terms of our economy. So when we're talking about pensions or when we're talking about how we're going to support education at the statewide level, we need to think broadly about what that means for growing the entire Vermont economy. So putting $150 million into expanding broadband throughout Vermont is really critical to making sure Chittin County is strongly positioned within a strong Vermont. $115 million to protect Vermont's water, $40 million to develop new workforce and low income housing opportunities, $20 million into weatherization and efficiency upgrades, $150 million to reduce the state pension liability, which Representative Richardson is gonna talk on a little bit more and $52 million in state IT systems upgrades. It was really enlightening to learn how many things we couldn't do and to hear from so many of our constituents about how challenging it was to either gain support through the unemployment insurance system because of IT system upgrades. For example, in the division of Department of Motor Vehicles, we are working on an IT system mainframe from the 1980s. I mean, I was like seven years old. So this is really critical. We can't keep asking more from our state employees when they're like scrambling together Excel spreadsheets, which just asks for human error. So we've put a lot of dollars to Brian Pine's point, not in new one-time programs, but in how do we rebuild the structures we have? Couple of other items, the capital bill, this is H438. We've put 45 and a half million into state office buildings and courthouses and facilities, 13 and a half million into mental health and correctional facilities. 10.8 million into the Vermont State Park System. We know how much that has been, frankly, a mental health boon to Vermonters over the last 15 months. Seven million into UVM and Vermont State Colleges and $4.2 million into various building communities grant programs. And lastly, I'm just gonna touch upon the fact that Vermonters do care about balancing multiple needs, where we spend our money, whether or not it's recycling through our economy and whether or not it has an environmental impact. So one of the things serving in the House Transportation Committee, this is House Bill 433, we have put quite a bit of those federal dollars into electric vehicle incentive programs, $3 million into electric vehicle incentive programs, $1.5 million into replace your ride program. This is to help folks who don't have as robust an income as others to shift up in terms of how efficient their vehicle is. It doesn't have to be electric. It just has to be a more efficient vehicle so they can spend less getting to their jobs. Over a million dollars into the mileage smart program, which helps low income Vermonters to get used hybrids, plug-in hybrids, fully electric vehicles, $50,000 into electric bikes, and a million dollars into expanding our charging infrastructures for electric vehicles. But then also understanding that transportation is not just about cars because it's really not. We've also looked at electrifying buses. We've expanded zero fare through 2022 and it's really important to call it zero fare and not no fare because there's still a cost there. And we're all paying for that cost. So we need to keep that nomenclature clear that even if someone walks into a bus and therefore they don't have to change their money and exchange terms, which is what we learned about COVID, the fact is if folks can more easily access public transit that helps them show up to work on time and it actually reduces so many pieces of our public transit issues. We've also put quite a bit of money into expanding access to state electric vehicle incentives for various nonprofits like Car Share Vermont and expanding our commitment to Go Vermont, looking at a $5 million increase in the Downtown Transportation Fund and also really looking at high-use bike corridors to make sure that they're as safe as possible. And also developing a transportation equity structure so that we can start to try to reach out to the folks who may not show up to NPA meetings but are impacted by our transportation choices and our transportation planning. And with that, I'll pass it off to Representative Rachel Sim on social equity. Thank you, I muted. I mean, can you hear me? Yes. So, one thing I wanna say is the difference between how much we were able to get done on Zoom this past session versus the end of the last biennium was remarkable and granted we were sort of caught off guard and had a transition quickly but we passed 100 bills this first year which is a lot by any standards. And we've made headway in so many different directions that it's sort of the glass is half full. There are so many issues that are near and dear to me that we have not done. On the other hand, just even telling you about what we've done with social equity has been impressive. So I'm gonna just sort of top line some of these issues because even that will take a while but part of the recovery money is directed at promoting economic opportunity for BIPOC businesses and that will take the form in helping to address needs that people are going to identify as part of a committee that's looking at startup, technical assistance, et cetera. And they're looking at all different kinds of practices that have currently put minority communities at a disadvantage. We have also looked, we have done an apology for Vermont's involvement in eugenics, which again was an important apology to do. We expanded the office of racial equity. We had one person in that office and that person is a dynamo but there was no way that that person could address COVID climate and systemic racism, health racism. And so we upped the FTEs in that office and the ability to collect data because one of the things we know is without the data to back up, like police stops, I know you've heard some of the work that Stephanie Seguino has done, we need concrete evidence in order to know where to be making headway. We uniquely addressed access for voters and expanded mail by voting, which will definitely be of help to BIPOC communities. And as we're learning, people are going in the other direction in order to exclude minorities in other states. We passed legislation to promote healthcare equity. We saw disparities even in terms of COVID cases. We implemented healthcare for undocumented women and children and adding them to the Dr. Dinosaur-like program. We passed a bill declaring racism as a public health emergency, which will help us to really try to address many of the inadequacies. And I want to jump to one bill that I know is near and dear to all of you that addresses social equity issues too, which is the pupil formula. And I know from the last MPA meeting I was at, boy, I can't remember when that was, when we were talking about the pupil waiting factors, it has been, the study was very clear and it has been something that in 2013, when I started, Representative Donovan was carrying the torch to change this and it has been a slow- What's in a can not lie, you other- Is it music to someone's ears that we're working on this? We're hoping. So basically, there will be a task force that got set up to implement pupil waiting factors. This bill has not been signed by the governor yet. And one part of it is the factor of excess spending threshold, which ideally we would be doing some relief from excess spending threshold while we implement it. And that has been a tough sell. I heard today on Vermont edition that the governor has not been public or decided yet if he's going to sign this and that Secretary French isn't so much of a fan of it because it's going to cost a lot of money to implement it, which we all know because Burlington's been paying that money and it's really hurting our students of color, our students were English is not their first language, our students with special needs. And so one action I would encourage you all to do is to call the governor's office in the next day and encourage him to sign this bill because if it doesn't get signed, I sure will address it in the veto session, but it has such a big effect and I don't have to tell you that because you all know that and have helped educate me on that over the years. So I think I'm going to stop there on social equity and then we're going to get just some odds and ends that are by no means odd. Yeah, why don't, yeah, why don't we because I'm looking at the time and I want to make sure that we have time for questions. Why don't we just go to those loose ends? There are a number of bills that are sitting on the governor's desk, the bottle bill, vote by mail. Also, there were a couple of bills that were stuck in the Senate or never quite made it to the Senate, but that offer new opportunities to develop more affordable housing or to access interest-free loans for mortgages, for first-time home buyers and establish a rental registry. At any rate, we'll be filling people in over time as the status of these bills changes and there will be, there may be an opportunity during the veto session to actually move some of those bills out of the Senate or into the Senate and then quickly off to the governor. So at least that's my fondest hope because some of the stuff that didn't make it was really important. But there are a couple of loose ends that I think that we thought were really important for you to address here and then open to questions. So Gabrielle, do you want to start and then hand it off to Barbara? Or I want to touch quickly on, you all know the chart changes that Burlington citizens voted to approve. They do end up going to the legislature for a vote for a few reasons. One is to make sure that there's not a complete clash between local law and state law. And another pertains to whether or not there is a funding consideration. For example, if it's related to education and how the local education decision might impact the state education budgetary process. I have to say your Burlington delegate met probably 10 or 12 times at the spearheading of Emma who is in the old North End. She really led the charge every Friday morning at 8 a.m. to pull us together and say, okay, where are we going from here? And as a result, we had the mayor's team participating, we had the city of Burlington lobbying individual participating. Ultimately, because of the pension discussions because of how much ended up hitting government operations committee and how long those other bills were taking to go through the legislative process. Ultimately, not a single charter change made it through the house and passed the house and into the Senate. So we're likely to see it. I see, did I get something wrong, Representative Racialson? We did get one through the house. We got the airport one through the house but the Senate said it was way too complicated and apparently Senator Chittenden wants to add amendments. So it did not get to the Senate. Even though it flew through Berlin Tonian voters, I really was such a high percentage, something like 80 plus percent. So, okay, so yes, we got basically our speaker, Kowinsky, ended up saying, okay, if we can't get all of these pieces through, should we try to take a different approach, which is why the airport piece was separated? And thank you. The airport piece was separated. And thank you for correcting me, Representative Racialson. We did get the airport through the house but not into the Senate. So, but it, you know, that we're in year one and if we can do a hundred year, a hundred bills in, you know, our first session via Zoom, certainly we can get some more done next year. And I will pass it on to Representative Racialson who's covering several other critical items that we've heard from many of our constituents. So, before you start, just let's be mindful of time to make sure we have time for questions there. Okay, so I will be super fast. Yay, the good news is because I know a lot of people were calling me about their property tax reassessments, which is combined of, you know, two parts and happily we were able to use federal funding to keep for FY22 the state part of the property taxes level. So that is good news in terms of cushioning the blow. Pensions ultimately are going to a group that will be working on them this summer to look at ensuring that our state workers and our teachers are getting their pensions and that we're not pulling the rug out from under them and that we are managing the funds and coming up with provisions that are sustainable for our state. So there is a committee that is well mixed in terms of membership, including state employees and teachers and financial advisors and stay tuned. We have heard from a lot of you on those issues and I'll leave it there so we can hear from you. And my apologies. Oh, no need to apologize. We're just super grateful for the organizing you did prior to this evening to bring us this cohesive message and coordinated message. Thank you so much. And thank you for all the work you did through the session. Who has a question? I know I do, but I wanna see who else. There right now, go for it. First, I just wanted to thank all three of you. I mean, I had the vaguest idea of what the state did with Recovery Act money, but I had no idea. Now that I've heard you all talk, I honestly had no idea. I don't remember, I can't, I wasn't sure if I heard about support for childcare in the state. Can Recovery Act funds be used for that because it seems like that's, like as Brian was saying, people to get back to work, how can they get back to work? Childcare, and I don't have those businesses survive this last year, it's impossible. So they seem like some of the most important things to get us started again. We did make a significant investment in childcare. So we can elaborate on that. And when you said that about getting back to work, I forgot to mention, I am hearing from people that are still having a horrible time, we all are, with unemployment. And that is something you or your neighbors, if you hear, like tell them to contact us because we can unlog jam things and we're trying to make sure people don't need to have a legislator, unlog jam things because everybody deserves to be treated well. And it's not happening right now. Thank you. Great, anyone else have a question or a comment? Well, I'll just say it's House Bill 171 is the childcare bill. And I don't know if you saw my toddler, but you have plenty of people in the house right now who are keenly aware of how you can't show up for work if you don't have childcare. So we're keeping an eye on that. But if you go onto the state website and you look up H171, you'll see what moves through the house. And it was passed by both houses and was signed by the governor. So. Great. I have kind of a three-part question. One, well, just a comment. Wow, this is a lot of money, a lot of distribution, a lot of decisions that were made. I'm curious about what, in terms of how you prioritized the breakdown and the distribution of the money, were there particular restrictions or directions that came with the funding? And did that direct your prioritization? I'm curious about that. Also, how partisan or bipartisan or nonpartisan the decision-making was like, these were so many decisions to make about so many different priorities. I'm just curious how the negotiation process went. And then I'm a little bit curious what you're doing in terms of the courts. You said there was a chunk of money going to the court system. I'm just curious what the actual funding will produce or provide for the courts. So we each can answer parts of it because, yes, there were lots of rules and regulations about how the money can be spent. And the governor has made clear that if it is, just like Brian said, like he doesn't want us to bake it into the budget and then how are we gonna sustain it? So each committee of jurisdiction has looked at needs and the way appropriations has worked the past two bienniums policy committees have been part of making recommendations to appropriations. I sit on judiciary and one of the big issues has been making our courts COVID safe. So a lot of money went into that as well as being able to have defendants be able to video conference in making sure that juries, because we have not had jury trials in a really long time. So judiciary got a ton of funding for capital. Legal aid got funding because of all the COVID related work that they've been doing with people losing their jobs and their leases and all kinds of things. And I would say that in general, 80% of the time we have good tripartisan support. And I'd be curious because we all sit in different spots and see different things in our committees and perspective. But when COVID hit, I saw more tripartisan support than I've ever seen in my time in the legislature. And the first time we reported a bill when I was in the legislature, everybody was all excited and then it went down party lines. And I like held back the tears because I couldn't believe people were voting against free school lunch. So I really feel like our speaker and our leadership have helped us to find common ground. It's been a mixed bag. There have been some real surprises for me like a bill passed to make a therapeutic dose of buprenorphine legal, the possession of that legal. And there were a number of people who got up to say I would have opposed this bill two years ago, four years ago, but the case has been made. And there were very few no votes on that bill. And the transpanic bill was, I think, nearly unanimous. Maybe there was one person to vote it against. And it has been interesting to see, I think that money commitments, especially those related to schools, the community schools, Republicans challenged that bill significantly. But I do think that there has been, I know that my chair tries to work with the three Republicans and one independent. I'm on House General and Military, Housing and Military Affairs. And we work pretty hard to get a unanimous endorsement of the eugenics, apology, et cetera. But where money is involved, I think it was a lot easier this year to win Republican support because there was money. And, but still, the most resistance tended to be about money issues or registries, labor bills. Yeah, and I'll just throw in two seconds' worth, which is there's a good chance we might have to show back up in October or so as we hear more of the understanding of what the actual regulations are related to some of the ARPA dollars. So it's an ongoing, you see the high level language and then you start to see the regulations come through. And so that has been a tension. I think it's noteworthy that our current governor has vetoed more bills than anybody else ever. And so it's an interesting tension because kudos for having a governor who follows the science with COVID and has really done exemplary job there, but so have Vermont citizens. And yet, meanwhile, there is this other tension with vetoing bills. I will also just say in terms of moving forward, one of the bills that Representative Bloomley myself and Senator Ram, as well as Representative Sims from the North have put forth, both on the Senate and the House side, is to reinstate an office of strategic coordination and prioritization, because when we are thinking about Vermont's future, we really need to think about not just the next two years, which is what our structure is right now because everyone has to run every two years, but what we're gonna build towards over the next two, 10, 20, 30 years. And that's a bill that didn't even get off the wall, but we're gonna keep working on it in the summer because if there are more dollars coming down the pipeline, yes, the committees of appropriation, ways and means, they know where the gaps are. They know where the holes are because they've been having the same conversation year upon year upon year, but that's different from having a strategic plan about how we're going to invest and grow in Vermont. Prioritize. And we should mention that we have only spent half of the ARPA money with the idea that one, we want to hold forums or some way to hear from all of you. We're all trying to hear from our constituents as we move into the next legislative year. And so stay tuned. We are eager to make sure, but to your point, Michelle, that it's not just the people sitting around the tables making these decisions and that we're not spending it all. There will be a formal process for that. It's not just constituent district by district. Yeah, I had another question to that, which was was there a public participation requirement or deciding where and how the money would be spent? And if there was a requirement or there was a process and I didn't pay attention if there was, sorry, how do you do that in the COVID era? How do you generate public participation, meaningful participation? And I imagine you had to make these decisions quickly. Well, you know what? One thing that has been interesting about Zoom is in many ways, at least in Burlington, I mean, a lot of our state does not have connectivity and many people don't have computers, but it has been more accessible for people to both watch what we're doing, because this is the first time ever that you could get anything other than a committee recording which are really hard to listen to and to testify. We do need more. I mean, one of my pet peeves since before I was a legislator is they have like one day of hearings and you get like two minutes before appropriation and it's known fondly in the nonprofit sector as Wynor's Day, which legislators are like, don't call it that. I'm like, but that's what, you know, so we need to continue to find ways to keep public involvement up. Not everybody can make it to Montpelier, we realize. And so even if we're gonna be back in the state house in September, we're trying to not lose ways for people to be involved. And as broadband spreads around our state and people can get the free internet access, we're hoping that we're not keeping any Vermont or from having access to it. Great. And as the NPA, we will do our part to bring your constituents to you, bring you all together so folks can directly inform you of their priorities and interests. We can do our part there. That's great. Well, and, you know, we weren't able to really talk to a lot of people when we campaigned last summer. And so one of our priorities is to find ways to get to talk with as many people as we can. Because not everybody wants to participate in those public forums. And so we wanna try to make it as easy as possible through tiny polls, through walking neighborhoods and by participating in meetings that are sponsored by the NPAs, but also neighborhood associations. So I like community-based neighborhood associations. And so I didn't wanna let people know this went out through Front Porch Forum, but Gabrielle and I tried in the fall, but then the governor really put the kibosh on any public gatherings when the number started going up. But we wanna celebrate Mary and Joey and their service. And so on June 13th, from 4.30 to six at Callahan Park, the social hotspot of the South End, we will be celebrating them on the upper field. And they're in Front Porch Forum this today. You'll see, there'll be a link and we, for numbers sake, we just need to, we need to people to register, knowing some will just show up, but it helps us anticipate for refreshments and things. And we invite you to bring, if you're able to come, bring stories that will about the two of them. I mean, they have such a long and storied tenure and it would be fun to hear them. So. Great. Thank you. Yes, I think, you know, we have come to more than the end of our time. I wanna thank you three for your extraordinary effort this last session. You had the special unique problem of a ton of money you had to figure out what to do with. I mean, when does that happen in the legislature? So thank you for coming this evening and Barbara will keep you on the shortlist for our legislators and the NPA. Thank you, Gabrielle and Tiff for being so present in our monthly meetings. It's wonderful to have your participation. And I just wanna check with the other steering committee members and see if there's anything else you wanna chime in about. Okay, Brian, thanks for hanging in there with us. This is like old home week. And with that, we will conclude our meeting and thank you everyone for your work out. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good night. Thank you. Have a good night.