 as close as we can, you know, people can move up, because we only have, I'm gonna be running around with this microphone for people to talk, and there's only one of me. So I have a lot of ground to cover. So the closer I can get us, the better for that. I'm just gonna introduce myself briefly, and we're gonna get into this. I'll do some level setting before we start. I'm Alyssa Sherron, so nice to be here with you all. My background is about 20 years in the environment and also in organizational leadership and management. I used to run the Department of Environmental Conservation for a number of years under the Governor Shulman. It's so happy to have some of our staff here, and we have such a good conversation to have tonight. We have some panelists who are here today, who are, this isn't gonna be a formal panel, these are more resource experts. We're here to have a conversation, but we have, and I'll actually just let the resource experts introduce themselves to just like 30 seconds here. So you know who's in the room to answer questions. Good evening everyone. My name is Lauren Oates. I'm actually a new City of Montpelier resident, just moved from East Montpelier. It's an interesting time to move here. I live, sorry, I work at the Nature Conservancy. Prior to that, I worked at the state. You'll hear from my old colleague then a little bit. Been working on flood resilience, nature-based solutions, and figuring out how to mitigate. Yes, sorry, Lauren Oates, O-A-T-E-S. Thanks. Good evening, everyone. I'm Lesley, I'm a faculty member in the Department of Geography and Geosciences at UVM, and I'm also the Vermont State climatologist. Nice to be here. I'm Greg Gossin, 40-year resident of Montpelier. I'm the planner and an architect with GBA Architects. We do community redevelopment, which basically means we do a lot of work in flood plains and brownfields. Hi, good evening. I'm Nitz Walker. I'm the Regional Flood Plain Manager for Vermont GEC, and I work with communities in Orange County and Washington County around being flood resilient. Thank you so much. I think I got all the resource experts. So just to level-set before we start our conversation, for folks who were at the recent conversation up at the Vermont College of Fine Arts a couple of weeks ago, there was about 550 people involved, 300 in the room, 200 plus online, and that was a very open conversation. That was just sharing people's thoughts at that point. We took those ideas and narrowed them slightly into eight different groups, which are happening all around the building today. We talked, you know where you are. We've already talked about that. But what we're doing today is we are doing listening on the topic of the river corridor and flooding, and we will work to identify some of the areas where there's energy in this room to focus more attention on. So coming out of this conversation, we're going to identify the one, two, or three top priorities that there might be energy around that then we will move into a working group to explore key questions. So I say that because we're not here to debate. We're not here to make decisions. We're literally here to just pose questions and state opinions and then see where there's energy in the group. There's gonna be about, I'm gonna ask that you allow me to facilitate, which means that each of us, there's a lot of people in this room, I'm gonna give about two minutes. You raise your hand, I'm gonna keep the mic and go like this. That's a tip someone gave me earlier. They were like, don't let go of the mic. So I'm gonna try that. I hope that doesn't feel impressive. And after the two minutes, we're gonna make sure I'll keep coming back to you. We should have enough time that we can keep coming around. This is also open to the public. So I want you to know it is literally streaming. People are videoing you and I just wanna make sure you're well aware that there are cameras in the room so for the conversation. So the first 15 minutes of this, the key question is what is going on now around the subject of rivers and our flood plains that we should know to level set? So we're gonna start with a state of the state. I'm gonna take statements or questions and I'll go to our resource experts if we don't have any. Just a couple is that we have a number of old dams that are just stones and one failed during in-cabinet. And the other is that we have been perhaps a little bit less like turning the rice field dam which was intended to be a containment dam. A third of its capacity is actually being used for recreation. So there are some kind of big picture things we could look at. Thank you. When folks speak, would you also mind saying your name and where you live? I'm sorry, I should have said that at the beginning. Sandy Fitzgerald on West Street. Thanks so much. Hi, I'm Paul Bofo living in Worcester, also co-owner, used to co-owner business here in Montpellier as of a few weeks ago. I'm seeing the problem in two ways. One is, in terms of water, is volume and speed. I grew up in Flat New Jersey and also Rivertown. It flooded regularly for years when I was a kid. Army Corps of Engineers came in and dredged the river, end of the problem. I can't say that that would be a solution here. This is a mountainous place, we know that really well. I live up in the hills of Middlesex and Worcester and the water, and probably a lot of you had the same experience. The water came down furiously fast and caused not just washout, but avalanche. So I think they're the other pieces containing the speed of water and not relying solely on the catchment of the rice for the rest of war. I'll stop there for a moment. In order to plan or have any ideas of what we ought to do, can the climatologists or the meteorologists at this point give us any useful or somewhat reliable projection of what we might expect in the next 20 years? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm Carol Bassard, living in Montpelier, 35 years. Thank you. Would a resource expert like to answer that? Oh, I forgot, she definitely won't let me. No, no, no, that's okay. So in terms of projections out to the future, we know that there are gonna be more heavy precipitation events. I think one of the challenges for a place like Montpelier or many places in Vermont along the spine of the Green Mountains is it could rain four, five, six, seven, eight inches. And it's not just the amount of rain that falls, but was it wet or dry before, right? And where did it fall? Did it fall in the headwaters? Did it fall in the valleys? Did it fall in the urban catchment? So all of those pieces have to be part of the answer to the question and not just how much rainfall itself, because it was almost like a perfect storm here in Montpelier, right? You had pretty much every kind of rain that fell in an urban area. That's channelized like this. And so it was like everything that just came together perfectly, unfortunately. Hi, I'm Phil Dodd. I'd like to endorse the idea of looking at removing some of these old dams. You know, we have one at the Shaw's. We have one at the Bike Bathaways. I know it takes time and money and permits, but from what I've read, they don't help things. One other thing, we obviously need more room for the river to spread out. We need more flood plain. And the last thing I'd say is, I'd like to see us bringing some hydrology experts to tell us what's really wrong with the whole system. Can anything be done? Can new dam be added anywhere? What's the status of things? Yeah, I'm hearing a couple of questions about either removing or adding dams or dredging or a couple of different points that are coming up about a rainfall. Yeah, flood plains are really helpful to us. And we're not alone. We're part of a watershed. We're part of a whole place with many communities. And so having a place for the water to go is really important. So protecting flood plain functions and the room needed by the river is really critical before the water shows up in town. And then in the city, it's really hard to build some more capacity to handle the water, but it's still possible. We can set back some of the channelization. We can make some room. Even this morning, I saw a place with a railroad had shut off a whole section of flood plain that no longer functions for the city. So there's places we can explore to try to build more flood capacity to mitigate the depth and the impact and the arrival of water in the city. But we can't change the planet by ourselves. So in the context of climate change and moisture, we can anticipate a lot of water coming. Okay. I'm sorry, I need to learn that I live in Montpelier. I just want, I really appreciate the thought. So thinking about the water, accepting the water in a manner that causes less damage further up the watershed in the way that we would need to all work together. I just want to reinforce the need to work across disciplines about how do we have less impervious surface? How do we think about what to plant in different places? How do we keep all of the different elements of the state working together? Thank you. I'm going to work down this side of the room and then I'll come over here. Corby Griffin, Liberty Street, Montpelier. I'm just curious. It seems to me that what we're really needing and looking for is a combination of things. For me, it seems like dredging might be an issue, might be a positive. But I'm wondering if we can build up, if it's feasible to build up walls along the North Grant especially. I don't know if that's feasible, but if it is, would that, how high would they have to be? Would they really be a serious mitigation or not? I'm going to come to a resource person about that in just a minute. So think about that resource people. I'm John Snell, been in the city for 45 years. Vegetation along the rivers is a lot less than it used to be. And many of the areas along the rivers are now plowed fields. We really need to increase the permeability of all of the river areas. This one had a lot of water in it, the storm. I would be interested while we're close to what happened to really document it carefully. How high did the water come up? Where didn't it go? I know it won't be necessarily the same next time, but I think understanding what happened down to the inch is important. Thank you. I'll show you this. Everybody's seeing this. When all water comes in the downtown section of the river and goes out, it's gonna flood. So the water has to be able to go out on the river, it has something like this, which is you know where this is behind motor vehicles. This things like this jammed up is gonna be a flood. It's gonna make it easier and have less rain to actually flood it. And we have things like this. It's my opinion that this should have been removed from the Winniscrew River the first week. I have a lot more information, but this is what I'm saying. The basic idea is the dam I've been up there and I've got all kinds of pictures of the dam is working properly right now. As long as it's working properly, you can't ask that dam to do more than it's doing right now. So therefore that end, I don't know what you can do, but what you gotta do is be able to smooth it, smooth the way out so the water can get out quicker and we can prevent as much as right now right now. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. I've built a, now I live in a pile in the apartments which is in the flood zone. And I have pictures I took all of that place and I have it. And there's 60 people living where I live. And there's 40 people that the Montpere Housing Authority has in the land shops. That's at least 100 people. There's a whole lot more that will be without a home. If this, things like this come to correct. Thank you. Hi, my name is Carlo Albedo, I'm out of the pie and downtown State Street. I'm from Plainfield. So I've been here since 2005 downtown and I've been through four floods now. And I say that because we use our basement for prep kitchens, offices, whatnot. And we've had to eight feet of water, three feet, five feet, two feet in all those floods. So I just feel like I've been spending a lot of time observing and dealing with water in my restaurant. But this time it really came in and came in and destroyed the entire restaurant. So what I keep noticing is the problem I see is that it comes up in the back parking lot of positive pie and on the Julio side, it comes up there, rises up, goes around the front of Julio, starts to flood all the State Street and starts to take over the whole town from there. I also noticed that during this flood, places like Sarducci's and the Gin Shop, all those were fine, and they were still capacity left in the main river. So I too had an idea, why don't we build a giant concrete funnel that funnels the North Branch into coming into the city and then a concrete tube that runs all the way out to the Winooski and we build a park on top, I don't know. But just somehow contain it. So that water coming down through the city, if it has to be 50 feet deep, it has to be 50 feet deep. Make it so that water cannot come out of that tube until it gets out to the main river. And I realized it's a multifaceted solution. You know, probably the dams, you know, floodplains gotta be figured out and, but that's an observation I had. I just wanted to throw that out there as an idea. Thank you so much. That's okay. Hi everybody. My name is Gil Johnson. I live in East Montpelier, but I live in the same river corridor as everyone else in this room. And I got flooded out of my apartment because I lived 40 feet from the Winooski. This is a really multifaceted problem and it doesn't just involve Montpelier, East Montpelier. It involves everyone who wants the corridor of us and what we do and I think we're gonna have to work with other towns. Yes, we've got to slow down the speed of that river. We really have to slow it down, at which it can be done in many different ways. I am not an expert. My background is I'm a naturalist. One of the ways I think we can slow it down is to make more wetlands upriver and we can have an animal help us do that, beavers. Have any of you ever read this beaver land book? It goes into this. She, Layla Phillips says, our rivers looked a lot different years ago. When the Native Americans were here and no other groups were here, Native Americans didn't really channel rivers a lot to my knowledge. I don't know for sure on that but I know beavers did and beavers do today. And I actually run a small wildlife refuge up north. It's called the Johnson Wildlife Refuge. It's named after my father, not me. A father's study of the family and there are beavers there. It's mostly wetland and when I go in there, I'm amazed how complicated they make that. Flood plan next to the Clyde River. There's pools of water, there's little dams. It changes every year it seems. There, they do so much. They help the access to the flood plan for the river. And you don't have, we have to pay to move them but once they're established and sometimes you have to make it comfortable for them with the right plans. But once they're established, they do it. They know what to do. And they provide that conductivity from the river to the flood plain and they make the water spread and it's a natural thing and the rivers are much more like that. Now they're more like channels because we've taken at least some of the wetlands and we need to bring it back more to what a river really is and we have to find out about that. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Pat Hinkley. I live on Redstone Ave. My wish is that we could ask help from the people who have worked with water for hundreds of years, the Dutch people. They have lots and lots of engineers and smart people who are figuring it out. That's it. Thank you. Hi, I'm Sarah Norton. I am in the flood plain but in Marshfield. And I'm really interested in what the last couple of speakers were saying about the flood plains and developing the flood plains. And I would love to hear from the flood plain expert how you are, if you're mapping the areas where you're talking about increasing the space for the river to spread out in as people are saying. And I would love to hear about where those places are in your thoughts. Thank you. I'm gonna do a couple more people over here and then I'm coming back to the resource experts and then I'll do another loop around. Hi, I'm Eve Jacobs-Carnahan. I live in Montpelier. So I have a two part question again kind of for the experts. And one is, is there some mapping that can tell us where the flood plains are in Montpelier itself that could absorb more water? And if those places have buildings, can we look at the feasibility of somehow changing them in some way to allow them to absorb more water? So that's the first part. The other part is, what about the other parts of the river, either upstream or downstream? And can there be, so what do we need to do to either talk to those other communities or have a statewide effort because Montpelier itself can't directly affect the expansion of the river in the upstream or downstream communities. So what do we need to do to turn that into a larger effort that's effective that we can help convince people that it's to everybody's benefit to allow the river to expand in both of those places? Thank you. I'm hearing a real theme of how do we get this water away from here and what are the key strategies? Are they natural? Are they wetlands? Are they changing the property? Are they channeling? Are they damming? Like we have a lot of questions. Hi, my name is James Ray, I live on College Street. I'm gonna put another point on those same comments which is essentially at request of the experts, I think it's really sort of after this meeting and for the folks organizing these meetings, the city government, the state government, to make accessible in an easy accessible and easy to understand way. The maps that I'm sure already exists, which is when one of the experts spoke, where did that ring come from when it fell and it comes into the city so that as everyone here and everyone who's thinking about how can we handle the vegetation, the permeable surfaces, the flood plains, that people have a good sense of what are we talking about here? Which cities, which counties, where, you know, sorry, where are the problems happening so that we can all be thinking as productively as possible towards where the solutions need to go. Yeah, where's the most strategic place to do this? Yeah. I'm also asking for like graphic visualizations that would be widely, and as someone who's spent my life in communicating science, I would emphasize widely accessible to the lay people and understandable to lay people and clear. Yeah, and we are gonna take these ideas and actually do that, I think, as the next step. Like, how do you then get more granular and tactical people? Hey, I'm Steve Inchin. I live on 12 up north of the ball fields and all that up towards Worcester, I guess, below the dam, and I'm on the, on Grout Road, which is where some of you might notice there's a temporary bridge where they're rebuilding, and we're close enough to the dam to be fine, right? But some of you got me thinking that if you know that area at all, you know there's some very nice big fields that are in the K in that area, and I, knowing that part of the North Branch, and I know the North Branch was not, you know, the whole problem here by any means, but there's still a lot of the Army Corps dredging. The Army Corps has left a lot of mess behind in terms of the walls of the river are still like levies, right? In some areas, especially if you go up further, and there's a lot of land along that river, above and below the dam that is not being used or let's say corn, it's mostly being used for hay, and in some ways it's a reservoir, but it didn't get used too much, and I think that part of that may be the way those banks have been controlled and rebuilt, and then I was thinking about the way we use current use, and we ask, you know, we value through incentives, farmers to use the land for agriculture, and there's no reason we couldn't apply that same kind of economic system to allowing those fields to be built in a way, or kind of reclaimed in a way that they could be used for water storage during peak events through in the same way we do that with agricultural children land now. You know, obviously there's a financial loss when the flood comes for farmers, but if that was compensated along through the years, through using a current use type of system, that could be something people had opt into to allow their fields to be built that way, basically. No, that's all. Okay, I'm doing two more, and then I'm gonna come over here to the resource folks and then we'll over to you. Hi, I'm Michelle Hill. I grew up in Montpelier, but I currently live in Worcester. Want to echo what others have said about how it's a regional issue. It's a watershed issue. My husband is a weather forecaster and five days ahead he said, oh, wow, Montpelier's gonna get five inches of rain. Might have ended up being more than that, but I wonder if with that kind of lead time that if it's possible to let water out of the rights field then in advance of the weather then. And then also I know my front lawn, even though I'm at 1,400 feet, my front lawn is still a wetland and it just occurs to me that there might be things that we can do in the rural areas, maybe as provide catch basins. In addition to right along the river floodplains. Hi, Parker. I've lived in Montpelier since 1988 and my own the North Branch Cafe. Sadly on the North Branch. We do also use our basement for refrigeration and freezing and supplies and have no space to not use that. We had about 12 feet of water for 24 hours in the basement but it never made it into a cafe so we are open. As we watch the North Branch at our windows, we judge how it rises and falls and that helps us to figure out what do we have to worry about. And we were talking about every flood we've experienced from 92 on has found its route down Elm Street and Main Street. And so in addition to working with the floodplains north of Montpelier and also in Montpelier, if we could look at ways to direct the water under the road instead of over the road and into the businesses, that's the thought that we had. Okay, resource experts, how are you, what are your reactions to this? Anyone? You want to hold it? All right. Ned, you can fact check me. All right, I wrote down while I'm taking notes too so I'm hoping I'm capturing everything accurately. Yeah, can we give Lauren a round of applause for taking notes for us because I sprung this on her two seconds before this and she's going to real champ about it and she's going to at the end hopefully be able to tell us our top themes that are coming out. Just kidding, I'll try to do that once I look at her now. That was sprung on me in this moment. Okay, so a couple of themes that the other experts will be able to answer too. I'll try to cover a few of them. A couple of discrepancies between whether or not we speed the river up or slow the river down. All of the science that we have to date, all of the lessons learned from Tropical Storm Irene are that we need to slow our rivers down. They are moving too quickly off of our land too unnaturally that it is causing these highly erosive, very, very strong river flows creating significant damage. We have a tendency to want to move water off of our properties as quickly as possible. That's like human nature. It's like, oh, we're flooding, like get it off of my property. But that actually causes a great deal of water going downstream. A former colleague of ours, Medin9, always said, we all live downstream, our upstream neighbor's decisions. And so we really need to look at those areas for floodplain restoration. We have dams. Ritesville performed exceptionally well. It did its job for the city of Montpelier but there was just so much water. Like only could hold so much back. We need to look for those areas that create wetlands, create floodplains all the way up into our headwaters or forests to catch that water before it comes down to our river valleys. Those areas exist in the state. We have a couple of really strong examples. Middlebury effectively was spared from Irene because of the floodplain restoration and swap work they did on the Otter Creek. Brattleboro has invested significant funding and work on the Whitestone Brook in the city limits to actually spare it from downtown flooding. We have those opportunities in Montpelier and in our neighboring communities. And we need to kind of look at the watershed scale, the reach of the Winooski, or yeah, and where we have opportunities for down and upstream restoration. Oh, if I come back to you. Okay. I do. So first of all, say hi to Roger for me. And the other two things I wanted to really highlight, it was listening to I think the last of the comments with if the same place keeps flooding and it's going below the ground, it makes me think of places in Burlington where that happens because they used to be a ravine that flowed through the city. And once you identify where the lowest point is on landscape, even if it doesn't look like the lowest point today, it will always continue to find that. And so I really wanna echo James, your comment about that mapping and the visualization because once you see a 3D of what it looks like from head water stuff, wherever we end up, that'll give us a sense of where the water will naturally flow regardless of where the buildings are from a topographic perspective. So hardly echo that. I'm gonna basically echo a lot of what's being said. We need to let our rivers breathe. And that is a larger question and problem than just Montpelier. But that being said, that's land use policy and land use kind of the egg of land use policy. Looking for the Dutch, I think it's good actually. That's a great suggestion because the Dutch have been living with this for years. They have retooled their entire agricultural industry around flood plain agriculture. So they've got to know. Now, if you get into Montpelier, our tiny little town, there still are some opportunities for us to treat our flood plain properties better than we have now. And I think we should start instituting flood plain issue policies towards development and saving our flood plain properties as community. We've got a lot of them on the North branch. We've got a few of them on the Wienerskie, but there's still some significant properties that we can do some better jobs with. I wanna recognize that I said we were gonna do 15 minutes on the state of the state and then move into talking about solutions. We are doing both of those things, which is totally fine. I just wanna recognize that we're looking at also short-term and long-term solutions in this conversation. Yeah, there's been lots of great discussion, lots of great ideas. And one of the basic things that the state strategy has around flood resilience is to try to protect the functioning of flood plains and rivers where they still exist. So leaving room for the rivers to adjust latherly slows them down and allows them not to become too deep and to be able to flood in many smaller places before it all piles up in the village or in the city. So that's the best thing we have working for us. When we create walls and block it in, we end up pushing the water on our neighbor. And that's the problem because we're all in a watershed. We're all here together. So we're trying to take the walls down. We're hearing a little bit about the berms that have been created. That's a project that is funded. A lot of groups like Friends of the Wienerskie go through and take those berms down, point them out, and we can pick away at them, get more money at it. They go away faster. One of the biggest berms we have around are the railroads. The railroads, when they came in, were all set up to follow a nice, straight, flat path and block the river in and make it straight and too fast. And we're still suffering from that. That's a big issue all the way down the Stevens, all the way down the dog, all the way down the Wienerskie, down the white. And again, that's a big issue. A lot of times they don't have culverts. They lost floodplain function. A much harder process to get the railroads to talk to us. But that's a place where we can gain some floodplain access and help out a little bit. Other places I just walked the top of my head is to live in Dayton, Ohio, which is a flood prone city on the Miami River. And they eventually, after having put up multiple huge dams to control the flood problems, they also started removing big sections of downtown and creating space, recreational space to walk by the river that it looks like can be entered a little bit and create capacity even in the urban environment, massively expensive and usually only after tremendous tragedy. Hi, my name is Kasia Rangio. I'm one of the co-directors of Vermont River Conservancy and also live here in town off of Elm Street. I wanna welcome you all to the historic banks of the North Branch of the Winooski if we were to all stand up from in the step to see the river flowing across the Capitol lawn. That is the historic path before we took the river and said, no, we would prefer that it went in this dredged channel that goes straight through town, not here. And so that's one of the big things that we've done in the past, to dredge and wall off and straighten our rivers and it hasn't really worked. I want everyone to know that we are in the process of looking into the feasibility of removing four dams here in Montpelier. We've been working with the city on this for several years. We have feasibility funding, the RFP for choosing an engineering firm is out. They're going to be studying the value, how to take these dams out if it's possible. I want everyone to know that that's in process right now and we'll have those feasibility study results probably in the next year or so it will take to determine a path forward for those dams. But I think that's an exciting step forward. My organization restores flood plains. Tomorrow in the city of Brattleboro, there are going to be dump trucks on site for 12 acres along the West Stone Brook. It's an area that didn't flood during Irene. Like you all have been talking about areas that should have flooded and didn't. And we're going to be hauling out 200 years of industrial fill and restoring that floodplain and wetland right in the heart of Brattleboro and giving the city a park downtown. That's the kind of project that I think we can do here in Montpelier as well. And we need to be looking both upstream and downstream of our cities. When wetlands are a huge piece of the puzzle, my organization Vermont River Conservancy, we hold easements upstream and downstream of town. A landowner sent us photos of her easement in Worcester and those beautiful wetlands the day of the flood. And she looked upstream and it was a raging, raging, fast, generalized river where the road was closed because it was too fast and jeopardizing the road. And she turned her body 180 degrees and the river across her easement stopped. The water turned into a lake. You could have a hair and fishing there. It stopped the river. And then it's channelized again and it goes super fast into it to continue on. But when we do those kinds of projects both upstream and downstream and look beyond or within our borders and beyond our borders, we can actually slow the river and it's the natural function and restoring the natural processes that can do that. So thank you. Thank you. What she was saying, I wanted, I think we have to look at, because we are a mountainous, silly area, we have to look at what's happening down because the water always goes to the lowest point and so we have to do things up high too, to build ponds and things to slow it down before it even hits the river. Kind of like what you were talking about but even higher off of the river, right where the river is. My name's Barb and I'm Barb Alford. I live on Barrett Street for 18 years. I'm Jill. I live in Montpelier on Redstone. And I'm just curious about what is going to come. I guess it's probably moving fast forwarding a little bit but what so many brilliant people here, like how are these engineers and river people and climatologists and environmental engineers going to, is there a way to come together and come up with a comprehensive plan and suggestions for, then we can look at it and say, oh, that makes sense. I mean, I think it's great to get all of our input but I know for me I'm not smart enough to figure this stuff out and I wanna see a comprehensive plan from the experts and just, I don't know how that's gonna happen if there's a plan for it. That's actually the next step. So the vision here is that the next meeting would be with the experts who ahead of time considered the questions that we put forward and came with some suggestions. Like these are the top five most strategic areas. You should have wetlands or buyouts to slow the river down or things like that. Thank you. I wanted to pick up again, Barb, a couple chairs down from me and others in the room have talked about the upper part of the watershed. That's where I live. And the thing, and bless the towns because they're working so rigorously and furiously to build back these ditches and culverts but it's all rocketing in a downhill, linear high speed direction. And the thing that's missing are these diversions to, and I don't know the hydrological terminology but some kind of catchment ponds that would divert water and hold it at much higher altitudes, 500 feet to 1,000 feet, 1,500 feet above the river plain. So I just wanted to respond to Jill for a sec. And I think meetings like this are the most important for us as scientists because if you live this and walk this then you are the expert. And so it's science meeting experience and lived experience. And so when I watched the stream two weeks ago, I was just blown away. I was just furiously typing everything that everybody was saying. I think I got up to like 10 pages and there were another 21 pages on the path that itself which just blows me away because it's all of the lived experiences and all of the observations that are so critical. And so I just wanted to lift up all of the things that are being said, not just here tonight but was said two weeks ago because those are what are gonna help us to move forward tonight. Hi, my name's Diane and she said that off Territory. And I just wanna reiterate what other people have already been saying that we need to be talking not just about the riverine corridor but the Winooski River basin as a whole. I live off of Territory here in Montpelier. There's a brook in my backyard that it on July 10th overflowed the banks, overflowed the culvert, covered the yard. It just, you know, this was happening. I don't know how many dozens and dozens brooks all over the watershed and that's where obviously the water starts and that's where we need to start. I just wanted to address your question which is a great one because it was a complicated subject that's gonna take decades to deal with. Luckily tonight, one of the categories somewhere in the state house is just talking about that very thing. What body, what kind of leadership do we need to take all of these disparate ideas and bring them together and actually come up with an action plan. So what they come up with tonight should be pretty interesting. All right, coming back here. Yeah, I'm Tim Murray. I live in Montpelier for most of my life and a lot of great ideas but I also think you just mentioned decades, right? I don't think our city has decades. So I don't know what the answer is but you know, all of our great businesses in town it's gonna happen next year, right? So I'm sure we can't do all this stuff in a year, I'm sure but I think we do have to get really organized and have leadership on the community to work with the state government, the federal government to really start looking at this. We're gonna do a lot more watersheds. These are all watersheds that aren't in Montpelier. We don't have enough watersheds in Montpelier to stop the Moose River from flooding. So how do we coordinate that? How is that possible to create watersheds in Worcester or in Morrisdale or wherever, right? So that's pretty complicated but I do think we have to be very focused and try and move things forward more quickly than we have. I'm not sure historically what happened after Irene and I'm sure, I don't remember having this much energy in the community and this much discussion but I'm not really sure what we did to get to the watersheds and how much we got in place in 10 years but it wasn't enough, obviously, right? So I think we should be looking in a shorter window to try and move everything forward. Are there things that we can do in a short term? What are those short term solutions to? Hi, I'm Thomas Weiss. I live in Montpelier and I've done hydrology work and one of my observations is that the flooding on the North Branch is caused by the Winnuskie. The Winnuskie rise is so high that the water in the North Branch backs up beyond the Spring Street Bridge and so what little water is coming down the North Branch which is only about 10% of what's in the Winnuskie at that point has nowhere to go other than Elm Street and the Main Street as well as its River Channel. And so I'm thinking that don't ignore what's going on in the North Branch basin but that in order to really reduce flood levels in Montpelier, we have to work upshed in the entire Winnuskie River basin and not the North Branch basin in the shorter term. Hi, my name is Lynn Wilde and I live in Montpelier over on School on St. Paul Street and our house was one of the very few houses on St. Paul Street that did not take on three to five feet of water in our basement and it was because of a number of reasons. One, we have a giant cottonwood tree in our yard and it fields about 200 gallons of water a day. It's surrounded by hazel birds which are taking up more water. The soil is healthy soil, it is mulched, it has got deep rooted plants in it that also take up water and the soil has become a soil water sponge. The neighbors that we have were amazing. They put sandbags by the driveway to divert the water from Luma Street away from the back of our house. We have downspouts that direct water to the street and we have a sub pump that could not keep up with all of the water coming in till our neighbors put in the sandbags in the back but all of those things were required to keep our basement dry and it did. So what I would like to highlight are two things. We need to look at the plants on the ground that we have around the flood plains and around our homes. We need to plant plants that take up water and that can hold the soil in place and that can make the soil healthier. The second thing we need to do is have healthy soil and we can have soil that has roots one or two feet down and it doesn't take 10, 15, 20 years to create healthy soil. This is being done all around the country right now and there are experts here in Vermont who can help us with this. So I just wanna say our neighborhoods can also be flood plains and recharge zones. We just have to look at our grasses and lawns a little differently. I just wanna point out those are some short term ideas right there. Some more green spaces, some more planting, Steven Ruiz, those are some shorter term. Hi, my name is Chris Piatik. I also live on St. Paul Street. In addition to the upwater shed, improvement of flood plains and riparian habitat. I'm also very interested in increasing our riparian habitat through downtown Montpelier. One of the questions that I have is about the choke point when we get to the confluence of the North Branch and the Winooski. And so I'm curious how much upstream improvement of habitat would help if nothing is done about that choke point. Another question that I have is about if there's any engineering benefit, I know there's a wildlife habitat benefit to a bottom release dam for keeping water temperatures cool at a consistent, a fairly consistent temperature year round. I'm wondering if there's any flood mitigation benefit to that as well if we could look at comparisons on how the Waterbury Dam and Waterbury Resort did during this most recent event versus how the Wrightsville Dam did during this event when it came, I guess, within a foot of going into this billet. Yeah, I just had a thought occur to me. I really like the idea of flipping, playing, improvement. But I'm also, as the gentleman over there was concerned about, I'm also concerned about short term, immediate, how can we make sure if this kind of rain happens again next year. And I'm wondering, I know we don't want, I get it, it makes sense to me now that dredging or building walls is probably not the best way to go. But I'm wondering if we actually lowered, main, not main street, but state street and used the actual street as an avenue for water to go with that actually held in the form of a flood. Interesting question. Hello, Donald DeVile, Montpelier resident. I just wanted to throw out a little long term thinking idea because this is not a short term thing. And it's not to suggest a lot of the other ideas aren't also important. But I want to suggest that given we are, given how climate in the Northeast has already shifted and what the projections are telling us moving forward, I think we need to be able to come to terms with the reality that we are probably not gonna be able to stop flooding categorically. So what does that mean? Well, I think it means that again, we turn to other examples like the Dutch would be mentioned here a couple of times. And I think a lot of people know the Netherlands as this country with this long history of being able to keep water out. But what maybe isn't as well understood is what the Dutch have been doing more recently. And in many cases, they've been giving some of the land back to water, even though it's one of the densely populated countries in the world, low line, their projections are telling them that they cannot keep the water out in some places. And so what they're doing is they're moving through zoning and things like this to these long-term strategy of saying to people, you can live here, but understand you are periodically going to get flooded out. So you have to learn to live here in a way that it doesn't devastate you when that happens. This is not an easy thing to do. I think it's a really big long-term change, but I feel that we might benefit from adopting some of that mentality here as well. Coming over. My name is Bob Robertson, formerly of Deerfield. I found a solution about 10 years ago. I bought an old seal boat in the Keys and lived there in the winter and an old seal boat up here in the summer and lived up here. Now I'm here permanently. I'm going to be building a small tiny house in Montpelier, looking for a site to put that. But I'm listening to a lot of things here. One of the main things you gotta come with is make sure that we have a good relationship with all these agencies that we're working with, particularly the Corps of Engineers. And they're the ones that have the deep pockets and are able to pull together this thing. They've been doing this all over the communities, all over the country. And I've got some further information that I'll be sharing with you later. Yeah, and I live on Hort Street in Nampang, Montpelier. And I just wanted to add the name of the program in the Netherlands that's been going on for the past decade. Plus it's called Room for Rivers. So if you want to look it up, please do. And I'll just read a little bit here. The main goal of the program was to manage higher water levels and rivers by lowering the levels of flood plains, creating water buffers, relocating levees, increasing the depth of side channels and the construction of flood bypasses. And they have videos and text just great content for all of us to educate ourselves on. Thank you. You're doing a great job. Yeah, I'm Elizabeth Courtney. I live on Clarendon Avenue where it's high and dry, but there's still a lot of rot going on in the plant life all over the city. I'm sure you've noticed. What's occurring to me in this discussion tonight and it's great, there's a lot of good information coming in. I think Jill expressed an interest that I'm interested in too, which is long range planning. All these good ideas are going to cost something. And we need to figure out a way to sell what it is we're doing before we do it, after we do it and while we do it. And what's occurring to me is that we sell, Vermont is very good at selling ski areas, recreation, biking. Inviting tourism is high on the list of areas where we make a profit. So I think while we're doing this work, we should, I think how we're gonna package it, how are we going to document what our process is right now because I think there are many people who would be very interested in knowing what we're doing, who are having similar problems or even very different problems, but problems nonetheless with the rapidly changing climate. So I look to places like the, yes, the New York City dilemma of what do we do with the High Line? And that was a resource which was a built resource, not a natural resource that was threatening the city, but the city took that problem and treated it as an economic problem, needing an economic solution. So while we're looking at nature as part of the solution, let's look at the economics at the same time so that we can pay for the good work that we're about to do. Thank you. Come down here. And at eight o'clock, I'm gonna start summarizing, attempting to summarize a couple themes that are coming out of this conversation because we have one, two or three themes we can share back with the big group and I feel like it's gonna be a bit of a challenge. So start thinking about the themes you're hearing too. Dvorah, Jonas, Loomis Street, and I can see my note. Okay, so what I was thinking is that we need to think about impervious surfaces and where they are and which ones we can get rid of and that we might have to do that through zoning with our landlords, some sort of a financial incentive to get people to be willing to remove parking lots, possibly laws, depending on what the rules or laws are in the state. And that could be a short-term solution too, removing a parking lot or two and making it a great space. Our climatologists here brought up the perfect storm situation that helped produce this flood of two weeks of water rain that left all the ground saturated so the ground itself couldn't absorb the water as a result there were 74 landslides in Vermont. And this I don't know and the question is do we need to do something there was an article saying we need to reduce the speed of all the streams in the mountains and I'm wondering whether we also need to do anything with the vegetation to allow it to have more water absorption properties than what is normally in our forest now? Tom Stearns, State Street. This question of the river as our adversary is something that really strikes me as a sad perspective. This whole valley was made by this river. The farmlands that have been feeding people here for a long time have been fertilized by this river. As much as we can not be limited by the imagination of the people who have built and designed this place with eyes closed to the truth of the river, we don't wanna be limited by those mistakes. And so thinking creatively about how this amazing creature that we live with is an asset to this town, an asset to this community. And in the face of climate change, where much of the world is burning and is drying, how incredible that we have clean, mostly clean water coming down from the sky. And how could we use this as an asset to build, attract and model how to finally live with this place that we love so much. We've gotten into this mess by not listening enough. So I hope we can listen. Hi, Howard Mickelson. I live on Sunset, well above the flood plain, fortunately for me. For weeks, as people have said, the water was coming down in the ground. Everywhere that I walked was saturated. I couldn't keep my feet dry. When we had this massive rain event, of course, having areas to absorb more water would be helpful. But in my mind, the reality is that we're only gonna get wetter, at least that's what we're being told. And so the water is gonna come. And it doesn't matter how many different ways we try to mitigate it, that we're in a valley here and it's gonna flood. And so I think the long-term solution, there's plenty of things to try to do in the short term, but I think in the long-term solution is we have to figure out how to deal with downtown flooding. And whether that, I mean, the unimaginable of moving the downtown is always talked about. But if there's ways that we can learn from other places for dealing with flooding and maintaining the business district in the same place, it seems like that has to be the long-term solution, at least in my mind. James Ray, I wonder if the landowners, the farmers and, sorry, the farmers and landowners who are throughout the watershed, we've been talking about slowing the rivers down and the work the Vermont River Conservancy is doing. I wonder if there's an opportunity going forward to say, you have a tremendous service to offer and you should be compensated for that service. And that service is, will you landowner, will you farmer, work with the experts at hand to allow a certain part of your land to flood when nature wants it to? Recognizing then that we as a state will say, thank you for this service and we will pay you for this service so that when you have a farmer who loses his or her crop, they're not losing a crop, they're actually gaining an income for providing the rest of the state an incredible service of a field that's absorbing our water or a landowner who has woods to offer to this service. I know it's, this melds with the finance committee next door but I think there might be some answers there, that honor the rivers, honor landowners, slow the water down and recognizes a resource to be offered. Thank you. I am going to go back. Okay, you wanna come out? I think a lot of participation, I appreciate everyone's perspective, thank you. We're gonna, I'm gonna read back given the time, some of the themes that came out of today. All right, well some of the things then, well first up, Lauren, thank you for taking notes for us. Really appreciate you. So some of the things this is gonna be really hard to do that way. Okay, so some of the things that I was hearing as I was walking around is how do we slow our, how do we slow the water down through giving the river some room to move both upstream and downstream so that we're not experiencing that same flooding. And we can do incentives or we could do plantings in the short term but, or we could create wetlands and pulling up parking lots but it's all about like slowing that water down in a way that it's not going to overtake the town. That's one primary thing. I'm also hearing a lot of engineering questions about when engineering either removing or adding dams or different engineering steps would be helpful here. Heard a lot about it, you know, a lot of those questions, particularly early on, those might feel intention actually, those two topics but those, that is the tension in the conversation. There are other themes that we're really popping up popping up for people that you heard many, many people say. I like to say that we heard people saying, I want to see the data but some of us, like lots of people in the room know their Angelo and there's really rich data out there. There's the A&R river corridors, there's vitrins work on resilience planning and repeat damage, there's municipal, there's a lot of stuff out there that's not, maybe not visible enough or hooked together enough. It doesn't have to all be in one place so much as I think we need to improve our communication. And I think that's a short-term step. We should be thinking about how we communicate with each other about these great programs that exist, about the data that exists, that this doesn't have to be quite as intimidating as it might sound because there is so much data on science and plans underway already but maybe we could in the short-term figure out how to communicate that. Yeah, so we have an engineering, we have slowing the rivers down and we had a lot about show us the data so that we're doing the right and the strategic thing. I'm gonna come here, I'm gonna come back there and see if there are other people that have themes. Where you hand your hand up to? Oh, you want that? Yeah, no. Back to you, Lauren. Thank you so much. A theme that I haven't heard a lot tonight, I think Ned touched on that briefly but I think I've heard lingering in the community that I want to bring into this is that as we envision the future of our river, this opportunity to re-envision our green space along the river and parks, I think that's, we haven't heard that a lot that tonight but I think it's in the community and I think it speaks to what you said about our relationship with our river to reconnect and embrace our identity as a town and as a space that's, as a river town and so I think that's a really big opportunity that is maybe not something that we've heard a lot but I think it's really important and it's lingering within the community, I wanna make sure that gets into this space. Yeah, and we just captured that in the notes and these notes are going to be synthesized and made public and looked at by the experts. Three things that I'm hearing are to understand the climate, the river system and the flooding. What would happen in flooding? Number two is to slow the flow, both short-term and long-term solutions and then to look elsewhere and see what others have done that has been successful that we can learn from or mimic. Thank you, that's a great point about learning from others that I wasn't capturing in the themes, yeah. Lauren, I'm gonna love the ending of these notes where maybe we're capturing those top things, thanks so much. Yeah, I'm hearing a lot about the upper reaches of the watershed to the wetlands that aren't in the flood plain but are far up our forests and pervious surfaces in towns far away and I think kind of like married to that the needs for I think really thinking watershed wide regional wide from the top of the watershed all the way down. Yeah, thank you. I'm gonna tackle people who we haven't heard. Hi, I'm Harry Tumbo and I've lived here all my life. And one of the things that I think we have an opportunity to do here is we've done a lot of stuff that's already been developed from an engineering and scientific standpoint. We have studies that are underway six weeks ago or just maybe disjointed or maybe had a specific purpose. And maybe one of the things that we can do is to take the engineers or of engineers whoever those people are and saying, okay, so what have we got going on now? What information have we already developed? How do we use this event to flesh out scopes that we wish we could have done when we started a non-going study that we have going now? So we get a comprehensive list of data and choices or alternatives and future studies that we can then put to work. Thank you. I'm gonna go here and back there. You're gonna close us out and we're gonna take a breather because everyone is gonna be coming back into this room. My name's Eric Oberg, I'm North Franklin. I had a few ideas I heard about the railroad berms. Well, they could be perforated in places so that water could spread onto the other side of them. We could reservoirs be kept at lower levels so that when they start to fill they can slow the water that way. Can we allow beavers to live in the upper uplands as they like to do and not persecute them so much? So catch bases, I heard about that and all these ideas in concert would probably do a lot. I also want to say that the Dutch don't live with mountains. They're trying to make land out of ocean side and so we're like having a roof above us and our rivers are like the eaves trough and the downspout and once it gets there if we hurry it through our town it will flood the next town worse. So at every step we have to slow it and that's what I've heard all around. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, coming back for our last comment of the night. No pressure. No pressure. Hi, my name is Cherie Smishow and I live on Mountain Dew Street and the one thing that I've heard many people say that I do think is really important and a good thing for tonight is that this is not just a mountainous problem. This is a regional problem and there's no way my failure is gonna solve this. On its own that we have to be working in concert with the Watershed region. Yes, thank you. Give yourselves a round of applause. Thank you so much for your participation today and just take a break. You have like one minute. You can either sit here or stand on the stretch and we'll all get back together in a moment.