 Okay, we are going to get started in just a couple minutes past 6.30 so I'm going to call the meeting to order. The first thing is to review and approve the agenda. My understanding is that from the advertised agenda that we are removing the zoning fixes which was item 7. Correct. And our- I'd like to propose that we add two items to the end. One discussion, likely an executive session regarding pending litigation. Just update for us to talk about the parking garage appeal and a second one dealing with a personnel disciplinary action. Both should be brief. Any further changes to the agenda? So we'll consider the agenda approved without objection. So general business and appearances, this is a time for anyone from the public to address the council on a matter that is otherwise not on our agenda. And I'm going to take this opportunity to just say I think the outside doors should be- or the one in the back anyway now- should be open. So that's good. Any comments from the public? Okay. Hello. All right, so we're going to move on. So the consent agenda. Is there a motion regarding the consent agenda? Move the consent agenda. Second. We've got battling seconds. Race. Okay. Further discussion about the consent agenda. All right. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? This is a motion carries. All right. City infrastructure. So this is a- actually an item that was requested by Councillor Hill as we are- Yes. We've had some recent water main issues and so we'd love to just chat about where we're at. You're both still on your feet. Snow, rain. I'm- I said- Water everywhere. We said it before but please do pass on our just deep gratitude to your department. Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it. Yes. Certainly goes to all the people of the department including the gentleman in front of us. Tom was up almost 18 hours, one of these nights personally handling one of the leaks and Kurt was- One two and one eighteen. Kurt was there with him at least one of those nights so it was from the top to the bottom. Yeah, there's certainly all hands on deck. Sorry for all the inconveniences. Water breaks and well-known issues and everything. Well, it's all your fault, you know. Well, if you had something to do with it. You were out there with your sledgehammer. That's a bad luck guy. Yeah, one night was in Nelson Street. We had two breaks simultaneously trying to fix some of those at the same time. Thanks to a bike path contractor who came to our aid, Jay Hutchins. So Kurt and I and a couple of guys in the water plant became water crew and division members. Well, the other crew was working on the Bingham Street leaks. It's been certainly tough. I appreciate the community's support. We've gotten a lot of expressions of gratitude from cookies, gift cards too. So people know what it takes, what they're going through. Hopefully that's over, but it's for now. But we'll discuss tonight. We have a water system that has a number of challenges. It's not as though we haven't been neglecting it. We've been working on water system improvements since the 1970s. It is a very old system. There's many miles of water maintenance. So Kurt prepared a memorandum. First of all, Tom McCarver, Director of Public Works. Kurt Monica, Assistant Director of City Engineer. I'm most familiar with our water system. So I'll turn it over to Kurt to know you just received this memo today. So I understand if you haven't read it. So we'll be touched on that. We have a couple of, I think, very revealing charts, graphs. We'll explain what we've done and get it over to Kurt. So I thought we'd start with a little bit of background about if this is an unusual year as far as the number of leaks we had compared to previous years. And one chart. So we've had data going back to 2012 from our asset measurement software which tracks work orders related to water leak responses. Just quickly to run through the years. In 2012 we had 15, total 15 leaks. It jumped up to 33 leaks. You took up this? Yeah. This one has the totals on it. But it relates to temperature. So on average, we're in the mid-30s from 2013 to 2015. It dropped off a little bit in 2016 to 26 total. Down to 16 in 2017. And then last year we jumped back up to 33 which sort of seems to be roughly our average annual number of leaks. I'll just interrupt for a second. On the scale of magnitude these range from a leaking valve pipe to more catastrophic leak failure of a pipe requiring a system shutdown. These don't differentiate the various types of water system failures. Just a number correspond with the intensity, the 1, the 5, the 4. Just a number of actual breaks in that month. Those are the number of leaks in that month. Like Tom said, this isn't necessarily an unusual year in the number of leaks. But this year happened to be two really significant leaks fairly close together. Which I think the public really took notice of the impact. Because when we have large leaks like that the issue of the oil water notices which directly affects residents and businesses. So briefly just some of the causes of the water leaks that we experience. One is cross-section. So this graph, the red line is the temperature. And you can see not always but often the number of leaks correspondence to the drop in temperature of the colder months. That's when we get more frequent leaks. So as the ground freezes and thaws, things move, pipes become brittle, and that can lead to leaks. Another issue we experience is pressure surges. So if there's a sudden stop or start in water flow I can call the pressure surge to the system. And in Montpilers we have unusually high water system pressures that are normal operating pressures in the downtown are about 200 psi or pence per square inch. So it's really quite high for a water system to be running at. So when you get these pressure waves for our system they really have a greater impact starting at a high pressure. And the third that we've really seen in the last probably five years the third cause of water leaks is corrosion. So Montpilers has a lot of clay soils and we've actually sent some of those clay soils out around the lake out for testing and found that they are highly corrosive. The ductile iron that was installed starting from about 1970 and out through the 90s was the preferred pipe material for water main replacements. Turns out that that's very susceptible to corrosion. So we're seeing a lot of failures in our pipes and the ductile iron pipes that were installed in that time frame do the corrosive soils we have here. Oddly, some of our older cast iron and water mains are still in service over 100 years old and are not seeing that level of corrosion that the ductile iron is. Is that because of the material itself or for the thicker wall? Thicker. But I'm not sure the actual difference but they are performing better. The ductile iron which makes the pipe more flexible is apparently weakened in the steel and made it more susceptible to the corrosive action. It's got different chemical properties in the steel so it is more susceptible to corrosion in addition to being thinner walled. So we're now switching to what's called identically polyethylene water mains. It's sort of a malleable plastic pipe that you can bend it and it can flex. It can contract, it can expand and it's not susceptible to corrosion. The downside is it is more expensive but we have done one project last year on the dew drive. It was our first full installation of that pipe material. Do those have warranties on them? There are some warrantier items but generally those are not beyond a year. The ductile iron pipe that we're seeing failure has been in the ground for 30 years or more that are failing. So well beyond any warranty that would have been. Sorry about the, it's HDPE pipes that you're using now, is that right? They're flexible. Do you know how long they stay flexible? I have the idea that plastic gets more brittle over time. Alright so PVC is another pipe alternative and that does, that can get brittle after a lot of expansion and contracting movements. HDPE, you know one thing they look at when they're testing pipe materials is how many pressure surges they take over time. HDPE has the highest above PVC than ductile iron. So from what we've seen in the last 100 years. The new water main on Northfield Street is PVC. Again, we can get away from the ductile iron pipe. It is a thicker wall pipe and it doesn't have the UV protection. It's meant to be buried. I think a lot of that brittle that you're about is from ultraviolet breakdown of the pipes. They have a very long life in the ground. I think a key takeaway from all of this, talking about the different ductile iron all that is that it's not necessarily the oldest pipes that are failing. I think that's one of the things we heard of. We had these old pipes that we haven't replaced but it's a particular type or brand of pipe that was actually some of which we put in 30 years ago thinking at the time that was the best thing to use was what standard was. So Elm Street, both Elm and Nelson Street failures with ductile iron pipes. Elm Street I believe was about 48 years old. I don't recall Nelson, but it's 40 to 50 years. Oddly, Elm Street water main was perfect. Other than the long crack in it. The external, there was no pitting. There was no corrosion on it internally. It was clean. Cement lining was all intact. I believe that may have been related to a joint that it was connected to that caused a crack to radiate 11 feet down the pipe. So that's, there's a number of reasons and causes for these. The HDPE pipe is seamless, it's fused and not susceptible to that type of crack. So one of the things that, one of the comments that I have gotten from people after that, you know, the series of breaks was, you know, what is the city doing to be proactive about it? And I know, you know, we have been, like with Northfield Street and I think Harrison a couple, like last year or the year before. So, you know, we've been sort of preemptively going in there and, you know, redoing some of the lines. Where can people expect us to be proactive this coming? I know the answer to this question, but just so that we can talk about it, some people know that we are planning on fixing some of these lines before they have broken. Where are we looking at for the coming season? So this summer we're planning to reconstruct the Clarendon Avenue. In addition to water management placement there's also sewer storm separation work to produce those. And then, you know, the street rehab itself. So that's our really big project for the summer. We also have a plan to do some in-house work. Most likely, I think we're going to look at Cusnell, which is the last really significant galvanized water main that we have in the system. So our replacement has really been focused on worst-first for water system work. We're trying to get rid of all the galvanized pipe, which is really groundbreaking. It's just very brittle, installed probably in the 60s. So, yeah, it would be Clarendon, and hopefully Cusnell, depending on, you know, the work demands on our staff. Sure, great. Thank you. There is the water system master plan, and that's a number of things that are phased in replacements. Schedules are identified, funding levels. So that's the plan we're following. We're thinking that a little bit now. Hopefully able to advance some other projects. But for example, East State Street, several of the leaks on these graphs are East State School. And in fact, we still have a minor leak on East State. We haven't found the actual location of it. And that's even tougher in the winter because of the frost and it doesn't always surface. So East State Street is part of our reconstruction plan presently proposed in 2022. There is a lot of sewer separation work, and so it will be a reconstruction project. That one street, and that was really our first major leak of the season in November and was the last leak of this series of leaks that was another early morning project. So that's one that we're really hoping to get moving along quickly. Sooner than 2022. If we can, but it takes a couple of years to put these projects together. There is state funding assistance and the pollution control grant that we're applying for. There's quite a bit of preparation work to put a project together like that. Ashley, and then I hope to move on soon. So that was actually one of my questions. It seems like we had one on East State over the summer. We had one at the upper end, almost in the same place. Was that maybe December? I'm assuming it's almost. We had two on Lower East State, is that right? This winter? So I'm curious to see. I know that that's been in the works for a while, and I know it's slated for 2022, but I'm just curious if there's any sort of flexibility in redetermining and what kind of support you would need for the council to allocate or if there is a way to sort of address that because that seems like a constant problem area. It sounds like there's still something that we just can't find where because of the weather, but I'm just curious if there is a plan to reevaluate the timing on some of those more critical areas. Well, we're starting to talk about some ideas. I need to start thinking out of the box. Again, we're limited trying to be mindful of the cost, the ratepayers, the outside funding potential. There is a plan scheduled in the master plan, additional work that would cover that one project as well. But looking at other alternatives that might be available to us and start to think a little bit out of the box on how we can advance that project. But again, it takes, correct me if I'm wrong, a couple years to put that project together. There's planning, there's design, there's survey, there's permits. So a two-year project advancement is a fast-track project. And again, I know you already said this, but just to remind everyone with that because this isn't just a fixing of water means. Water, sewer, CSO, and a complete rebuild of the road. So it's a major. It's a smaller version of the Northfield Street project that we did and reminder that we're going to be upgrading our sewer plant, our wastewater plant, which is a very major project. We're going to take a huge amount of curts time just on that coming up. But we are talking about some funding systems to maybe speed this up. We are looking at the state revolving loan fund, which has a series of engineering steps you have to follow to get eligibility. So just to get through that process is about a year, which I will be applying for funding through that this week. Just to get that process started. Yeah, we will bump it up if we can, absolutely. It is a priority for us. Rosie. A couple of thoughts and questions. One is I was a little bit concerned about the loss of water for some of our larger customers who were located up high, specifically U32 and National Life. And I wanted to know if we kind of thought about doing any outreach to them about the work we are taking to make the stuff we are making to make sure that that doesn't continue to happen, because I know the U32 had to close for a couple of days because of the boil water notice and the loss of pressure. And I have no knowledge that they're considering this or thinking about this, but if I was in that position of a large customer up high who might feel like my service from Montpelier had become less reliable, I might start thinking about what my alternatives are. And so we certainly don't want to lose those customers. And so I think it would be good for us to kind of do some proactive outreach and say, hey, we realize this was an inconvenience. This is what we're doing to make sure it doesn't happen again. Well, we had a similar situation on Northfield Street with USU Meadows. A lot of conversations with them. It's a similar to a hospital facility. And the public outreach or the outreach with that organization began and we were able to advance that project. We thankfully haven't had those types of problems. I have spoken actually throughout the Elm Street failure. It was in regular contact with the National Life Facilities Director. We don't know what we're doing. Really that was a short-term shutdown. We had trouble because it's such a large water main. Shutting that down completely. They actually had water back fully restored by, I believe, 8.39 o'clock that morning. But they had already made the decision to clear out. So we have been communicating, at least through the Facilities Director, but I think it's smart that we also reach out further to discuss that. And I noticed that there's text in here about how the boil water notices have changed. And I'm not really sure how that impacts some of those large customers. If there is a boil water notice, they can't, you know, can they have, for example, have school open, that sort of thing. So maybe that's part of what's happening here is that because we are now issuing more of the boil water notices in accordance with state regulators that that's causing additional problems for them. So just to... I think that's a choice of the schools. I know Mobility or Schools stayed open. I don't know whether... I know U32 was closed the day of the break. Mobility or Schools stayed open. But after that, I can't remember if they closed because of the boil water notice or not. I know that Mobility or Schools stayed open. I thought it was because of that. I had heard that it was just because they couldn't flush toilets the first day. But then I don't know about the second day. So we also just didn't have a lot of communication during the water breaks with our water plant operators. Because you were all out there. Well, we also have, we know, talked to them about sampling and timing of it and the leak when we're going to restore it. Just one note on what we're doing to sort of hone in on boil water notices. So they're required when the pressure drops in the system below 20 PSI. We don't have a pressure monitor on Gallison Hill. We don't have a gauge that tells us what the pressure is that we can read remotely and trend. So we're going to, you guys will be seeing a proposal soon to add that. There's an old booster station that's heated and enclosed. It's halfway up Gallison Hill that the city owns that we can pretty economically install a pressure transmitter there. And we'll know when they lose pressure when they don't. So we're going to reduce the number of boil water notices for that facility because we can't now verify when they lose pressure. So that would be the perfect sort of thing to communicate with them and say, hey, we realized this was an issue and we're doing something. First thing we had to do though was to put all this plan together and then just try to reach out. So we've got to debrief after all of this. And so I hear what you're saying but we need to first come up with a plan we have spoken with another consultant as well. Two consultants, one of a systems engineer for our plant for some of these remote readers. Some of the options we're looking at which is described in this report but we have a kind of a shock absorber idea pressure relief system so when these hammers and it could be a fire that causes a tremendous surge of water and then it's shut down abruptly cause that pressure wave to go through the system. Nelson Street because it was such a catastrophic loss of water shut it down quickly and they felt a 10 PSI pressure wave up at the plant. So one of the things that we're looking at is the two booster pump stations dialing those down from a 20 PSI down to a 5 where it would relieve that pressure. So we've learned a lot from this and I think we have some good things we can do pretty immediately and then more longer term plans and then we'll get that out. Two other things I wanted to note one is you talked a little bit about funding and I just want to remind this council cause you might not have the new folks might not have thought about this but how important it is to make sure that we charge all of this water work to the water fund to ensure that the water rate payers including folks like the state and some other folks who don't pay taxes although they do pay pilot instead that they are fairly and fully charged for those costs because this is our mechanism of making sure that our water customers do pay for the costs and some of those water customers are the very large customers. So that's that for fellow councilors and then the other thing I wanted to think about a little bit was my understanding is that some of these extreme temperature fluctuations going back and forth that those cause breaks more frequently and is that a correct discussion? That's really what this term is illustrating is the temperature changes in correlation to the frequency of leaks. So I've been thinking a little bit about with climate change is this something that we're planning or how we're going to be addressing all of these issues but do we need to be thinking about putting a little bit more money towards infrastructure in order to address these issues and maybe this is a real cost of climate change and we need to take that into our steady state planning so not something to decide tonight but just something to flag. Great further comments? Alright thank you so much and I look forward to seeing how it all works out with the funding and looking forward to the work getting done so thank you. Okay so the north branch east? Yes I think the as you recall we had a discussion about what we've ended up calling the former Vermont association for the blind, the former MOAT for TKS properties the three properties of the city owns we had some discussions in the fall about should we continue with the development plan for those should they become open space or what should we do you directed me to look at options and come back with a recommendation I pulled together a working group of some stakeholders I think you've been kept in the loop of those meetings and the notes from those meetings so I just tried to pull together all of those as one big summary for you and basically the final conclusion which is basically that we said let's do some master planning before you know we're spending a lot of time over a very small period of a very small piece of land we're getting kind of worked up without thinking of this in the context of the whole so let's take a look at a downtown master planning effort and I see some folks snuck in from the group so please jump in if there's anything left to add and that what we should do is think of an interim solution that doesn't preclude either the development plan or the creation of of green space and which perhaps in the short time does open up some more open space that wouldn't have otherwise existed so one of the I think what we came up with for guiding principles was keep the lot the development lot open put whatever pavement that was going to be would have to go through where the parking lot was going to go so if we if we went back to plan A we wouldn't be we'd only be paving where there's already going to be pavement and that we had to have a functioning road of course going back in so I think people got on board with that we've got a draft of that plan we can make some final tweaks we took a look at rough costs this is not in your memo I just actually got these numbers recently currently we're estimated about $600,000 to construct the original plan we think it'll be about $535,000 to construct the interim plan now so that the savings of $65,000 to be note that we only pay 10% of that so it's really only saving to the city of $6500 just so we're clear if we were to then go back and put everything back the way we were going to do it in the first place it'll probably be another $150,000 all coming from the city to go back and do the original plan so while it'll cost a little less to do the interim plan we will then bear the cost of putting it back as we'll be redoing some work that obviously could be perhaps the cost of a developer if they were going to go do that and obviously if they were to be a park or something else put in then those costs including the repayment to the state would be involved this has not yet I mean pending on to see whether this was an area that you all wanted to pursue if it is then our next stop will be to review this plan with state and feds and make sure they're on board with this but that's that's really all I have to offer that I think it's all otherwise it's all in writing I see Elizabeth I see MDC here Laura's here Cory of course was our key staff person on this and Tom so if any of them weigh in happy to have them I want to make just one comment Donna attended but all these different stakeholders came together lots of different opinions and right away given some comments particularly from Greg people fell in line that rather than to fight over these bits of little property to really work at a similar aim and that was really I really would like the process you all did good work so you let it good people in the group so exactly so they just want to touch upon some of the points that made especially around this and around this concept it was just really interesting that he has very diverse perspectives in the room which is great because it brought in different values to this one but we also particularly realized that we can't determine these uses by key spaces they need to be embedded in this bigger picture which ideally includes all these different perspectives so I am encouraged and I hope that you will agree with kind of a separate use plan until a master plan can be put in place the last kind of full scale downtown master plan that was done was the master plan from 2000 and if you haven't had a chance to look at that it's super interesting and I sent it to Jack there's a lot of projects that come out in addition and a lot of projects that are on the cusp of happening that are in there and that's just a really base copy and we can update that and integrate sustainability goals and how we develop the goals and all these different things and we're trying to parse out again with this one that bigger picture and then start to implement these different properties Rosie, can I just clarify Bill, so you said $100 to $2000 to go back and do the original I'm a little confused because I looking at the current the suggested plan it looks like it would still allow us to go and break off a lot it will but Corey you're going to have to save me save me here buddy but once we've created it then we still have to go back in and put in payment I think there's some drainage things have to be done you've got other connections to do so if we do it all right now while we've got the contractor there it's one cost if we then build something else even though we're doing it I think the most efficient way we can there's still going to be cost to come back mobilize a contractor back to do the work and undo some of what we've done I mean I think it's the least disruptive thing we could come up with but it's not free to then put it back but we would still be it would still be somewhat changed from the prior plan because the road is in a slightly different location it is but the road goes through where all the payment was going to go so the road's going to be pavement so it would it could still be expanded we might have to redo the base to deal with the sloping and that kind of thing but the road could be moved once I guess I'm not really explaining that I'm not really so but the advantage I see of this plan is that it actually would allow us to potentially still have a lot on the front part of the space a building lot while still having more park space on the back so there's right and that more park space is not so one option I want you to be able to finish your thought so when we say if we were to go back to the original plan we wouldn't be talking about taking that additional park space on the back of the lot and paving that over we would just be talking about separating off the front of the lot and selling out as a building lot so those are actually two different plans so yes the cost to go back to the original plan is to do exactly what we were going to do which was pave further back so that's correct we could potentially just leave it the way it is put the building in the building lot and have expanded green space in the back one of the things we don't know about that is how if that number of parking spaces makes a building viable that's one of the things that needs to be looked at in the future the cost for the 150 is just to be clear about that is to actually go back to the exact plan we were going to build in the first place it would be an expansion of pave space so in the scenario that it did a building was still viable with fewer parking spaces and we wanted to sell the lot it would just be correct I think that's right that helps Conor and then Elizabeth did you want to say something okay we'll go Elizabeth and Conor ha ha ha oh oh oh oh oh interesting anyway I just want to say ditto the process was really good so thank you and I think we handled scenario situation quickly and productive and I think it's a good lesson for us to remember as we move ahead into the planning process with the planning function thank you thank you I may have missed a bell the 18 temporary spots were they metered they can be our group got really more into the design of the space I think that's a policy decision for us Rosie had asked me also about why we came up with 18 and there's no magic to that number other than we have 18 new housing units going into North Branch which are using up to 18 spaces in that parking lot so we thought at the very least if we can replace those there was also some notion that if we took out parking on Berry Street to put in a bike lane that's 17 or 18 spaces so we kind of hovered around that as a number that was important to maintain in light of other activity I personally would assume that they would be metered or permit spaces like they would kind of be an extension of the parking lot out back but to be determined do you know how much that generates then if it was metered I bet we could find that out I don't we do have a revenue projection of how much each meter brings in so yes there would be some revenue from this for parking Rosie go ahead I just want to make sure that I'm following clearly I'm hearing master plan and we just went through a process of talking about when we were going to do the master plan are these the same master plan or is this a different downtown master planning process versus say yes about a month ago we received a municipal planning grant to do the state street street skate master plan and that there was $25,000 that we received to do this when these discussions started started evolving in I believe Mike was at that meeting as well the idea was we might be able to expand the scope of that planning grant to include not just the streetscape but to start to look at municipal properties that were controlled or at least adjacent to that area I spoke to the state and they said yeah they can do it they didn't promise more money but we're working on that so the idea is that if we've already engaged with a consultant which is going to be a landscape designer urban planner firm that's kind of an ideal time because you're engaging with the public to look at the right way and to just look at the adjacent areas will kind of give us to that economies of scale when we've already engaged them so I've actually got the RFQ ready to go we just have to review it and we're hoping to get that engaged but it is separate from a downtown master plan although just to be clear about this so the idea was do a state made just a little off track but just to remind one of the reasons we're doing a state street master plan is because at some point we're going to have to replace the bridge the Rialto Bridge so when we do that we want to have a plan for while the streets closed what is it going back at so we're trying to look ahead to that but the idea being we have the transportation the mobility and motion plan which talks about different bike lanes all these different plans as we do the master plan through the planning commission is they will look at the subplans and take them all and develop those into a master plan because some of them of course have conflicting ideas some are complementary ideas and many of those groups were represented in this conversation so I think we should be out in these segments and then have the planning commission look at them to create a whole so any other comments so my understanding is that we could use a motion something to the effect of oh I have lost it I used to have it I know it's right here so to some kind of a motion to pursue the plan the interim plan as presented and I'll make a motion I was going to read them go ahead I'm going to lose something totally what you say is so good to me anything I say I move that we direct the city manager to pursue an interim solution which will retain long term options for either building or parking open space or some combination of both and additionally direct the city manager to conduct a planning process which considers various needs and land uses throughout the downtown using the suggestions that the what was this group called city managers working city managers working group came up with as a basis for this work so just to reiterate this is the plan that we want for the interim and we're going to conduct further planning process about what should be their long term any further discussion hey all in favor please say aye opposed great thank you awesome thank you Laura and Elizabeth I appreciate you coming okay so now we are skipping the zoning fixes it's Mike Miller is not able to join us we're talking about revolving loan funds okay let's get a look at the zoning I do not want to touch the zoning Mike is so the issue tonight is the loan fund reorganization since the 1980s the city has managed and maintained a number of revolving loan funds that are in your memo most of these are the result of community development block grant funds which were lent to certain projects and then went back into repayment the challenge has been with these revolving loan funds is that many of them you know were solutions to problems in the 80s or 90s and as a result when we try to apply these to existing issues we don't really have the flexibility so as a result many of these loan funds are dormant and they accrue a modest amount of interest a year but not a significant amount and the plan has been to say let's realign these with our existing goals so a couple years ago we did the economic development strategic plan and one of the suggestions in there was let's start looking to to create loan programs and policies which are flexible but also are valuable what does a small business need in order to be successful what how can we work with the banks to best leverage these funds and so actually just recently we had Laura and Mike and I met with one of the local contractors to have a discussion on what is one of the best ways that we can do this so he offered some great suggestions and one of the things that we're hoping to do is to kind of continue those discussions to have a kind of round table of lenders and local business people small businesses, entrepreneurs and say what is it you need because our existing business loan fund for example is going to say things like you can't have any access to existing credit which could include credit cards so back in the 1980s when nobody had credit cards or as many people you know so basically we would be lending to people who are in such dire straits that no one would give them money your business is probably going to fail so again we haven't written many of these loans mainly since the 90s so the goal is to actually take this to redirect some of these funds into one economic development fund what we're asking for tonight specifically with each of these housing economic development and the ADA fund is to direct the city manager and direct staff to start having those substantive discussions to come back with a series of policies and guidelines which are developed with the business community for example for the economic development fund we're shifting some of the other money into a separate housing revolving loan fund and this is a result of we have programs which I think need to be looked at by the housing task force to say how effective are they how can we best use these monies that are sitting in these accounts that are repayments from loans from specifically housing preservation grant loans some of the funds come from CDBG funds for housing projects so the one of the things that we're looking at is to say let's relook at our programs so that they align with our housing goals do we have a rehab program is that duplicative because there are other agencies which do it how do we best use our time and resources so we've actually I brought a version of this memo to the housing task force to get their input on it and just recently Polly has offered to if approved to kind of go in this reorganization direction one person who's already volunteered to help work on these guidelines so that we can come up with programs and it's kind of a really good timing coming up actually I think at the next council meeting we have a proposal for a program which a pilot program to do accessory dwelling units and it's a very exciting program really exciting if you own a home like this is it's good stuff but one of the challenges that we look into is that in this is that we need to come up with the matches so we're working with other partners at the states the housing authority and for my community development program to start to see like where we can leverage some of these local funds and this would be one of those examples and that fits that's another example of saying okay let's make these funds more flexible still going to have council approval but make these more flexible and then when these opportunities arise we have the opportunity to go after these projects and programs flexibly and quickly because I think that's going to be the key so I think this is great I think this is it's somehow shocking to me that we have these balances that are really not being used and so if we can make that more effective and working for the city that is wonderful one of the questions I have about this is so in the chart that you gave us it says you know there's the right most column intended purpose slash restrictions so I'm sure this you've thought through this but I just need to check in about it the some of these some of this money it sounds like we're you know came through grants or whatever they would have their own set of restrictions on them and I assume that the restrictions that are here may be a combination of restrictions that the council placed on those or the restrictions that were that came with the grant itself correct so some of these funds are have our self-imposed restrictions like I can go through this really quickly actually before you do that my really my question is I just want to make sure that we have the authority to revamp the guidelines we do we in order to do this we just have to go to the state that we annually report on the existing funds although we're pretty low we're down to only really one or two that that we actually report on and we just get a release and generally speaking what they're looking for is with the reorganization of revolving loan funds is okay you know what's your plan to do with these balances in some of these cases you know we've been in so many generations of repayment that even under the original grant agreement we're not really under the restrictions they're essentially our own restrictions at this point so there's going to be a conversation with the state and that's one of the pieces in this request on the last page is just to authorize us to go through that process and close out those remainders with the state okay I'd like to make a motion to direct city manager, staff and committees to prepare an updated guidelines for each of the proposed loan funds and to present updated guidelines and procedures for the council approval over the next three to six months second I love how efficient you are team we're doing great okay for the discussion all in favor please say aye thank you so much seems wonderful okay so on to the social and economic justice advisory committee charge I know we have a couple folks co-chairs from the committee here welcome I'm Julia she fits in the co-chair of the social and economic justice advisory committee Peter Kalman co-chair do you want to introduce the topic or do you want me to do that either way you can do it so we were charged or we were asked to help the committee clarify what their charge was and so we have a document that I think you all sort of came either came up with or have had some input on that right as a you know draft for the charge for this committee and I think there's lots of great stuff in here so do you want to talk at all about thinking that your committee is done around around your charge and how you came to this point or yeah so that well I will say that that charge is modeled charges from other city committees just to looking at looking at the structure and substituting in where we felt we could be successful and needed to address as a committee it's in the work since we formed as a committee it's become clear that that having a clear charge is going to be really critical to pulling in the same direction and having having having making change and making making headway on these issues and so that the charge that I present or that I sent to you that you have now was not created by the full committee it was it was sort of drafted based on the energy committees charge and then I had individual meetings with folks and we kind of worked on it individually so the whole committee has not like but I think but everyone has looked at it and everybody has weighed in on it and I think will set us up well the other thing I want to say about it is that there is the kind of like official charge part and then the second piece of the document where there's some bullet points on the second half is more focused on is more about specific activities that we would take on and maybe not all at once maybe not all in our first year of existence but the things that we can imagine making headway on. Yeah that's great and so you had written me an email too about just like some vision process. The other thing that became really clear in our last meeting we had really broad consensus with everybody at the meeting that we were lacking a shared vision and it seems like the city in general is lacking a shared vision and understanding of what is the current status of social and economic justice in our community and possibly even what are the definitions of those terms and what it wears it now and where are we heading and that amassing such a vision I'm sure other people are having these conversations in various ways other organizations are having them various scales and sizes at the state level at the community level at the central Vermont level but that having it specifically about Montpelier needs to happen and needs to be an important first that we can't start making policy recommendations until we have a shared vision of where are we now and where do we all want to be and that it really does need to be a broad community conversation that is as inclusive as possible both of experts in the field that touch on that are working on these issues as well as individuals and groups that are affected so that is what we are kind of starting to look at sort of proposing that our first 12 to 18 months of work from I guess not our first but our next 12 to 18 months of work be focused around really not making specific broad policy recommendations but really amassing this vision with the hope that eventually we will be able to make competent policy recommendations as a result Super Any comments? Questions? Okay I guess Donna A supplement I got invited to a local neighborhood group of a dozen people and we've committed ourselves to become more self aware of one black lives matter as an organization saw a wonderful but short video of the three women who founded it an interview and discussion very expansive and having been in women conscious raising groups in the 70s yes You weren't born then True It's true But anyway I would be really interested if we could actually start generating a lot more of those but one of the things I brought was to share with you and asked maybe Bill to share there are some things of the six things of Black Lives Matter and some resources in Burlington and Vermont that I give to Bill and you can share electronically but we're going to actually start reading some books and some articles and see some documentaries and I'm going to share as I go along hoping that everybody can go on their personal journey as we then look to apply this knowledge to our policies That's great So I'll feed whatever I have into you if you can use it But I do think we have to do our own personal homework as well as in the community sharing that what we don't know and what we need to know So thank you Thanks and I'll give this to you later Bill That quick question Does the current composition of the committee reflect I think the diversity that you'd like to have or do you think that needs to be a component of it to sort of recruiting some new committee members with different backgrounds Yeah, I think I think we could use some more diversity among the committee I think we we've actually the two newest members have added diversity in terms of perspective and agency connections which I think is really great and yes we need to grow. I also would say that in my personal we've started to talk about this but in my personal vision of this committee that we also we'll need to we'll need to rely on work we'll need to like this is going to need to be a community lift and so we will need to rely on work that's already being done by folks in the community but also you know volunteers that come on for a project at a time that aren't folks who are going to take on joining the committee and staying on for the long haul but ad hoc and as needed and so I also hope that that's another place we can get in some diversity Yeah all right so I think we need a motion on the charge I move that we approve it second okay we have a second go ahead Peter I just I want to make sure that we have the flexibility over time to change the charge well yeah yeah I mean if you wanted to change the charge you probably have to come back to the council but that is an option yeah because I think as we reach out into the community and hear from a broader range of voices in the community we're going to have some disagreement about even a word and that disagreement will be actually important to helping us understand social and economic justice better so I think a year from now we probably could rewrite the charge in a way that would be the result of what we've learned and I just want to make sure that this isn't written in stone no for sure that's fine I also hope that whatever is you know here or whatever you find you might need to change it to is empowering enough to your group to do the work that you want to do and in all honesty I hope that is the focus more so than changing these words that's exactly why I wanted to say that because in our I can't remember if it was our first meeting or our second meeting or both of them we got so hung up on the words go ahead and get to the work it's great it's important work needs to happen thank you there's a motion and a second further discussion all in favor please say aye thank you so much thank you and thank you to your committee as well please pass that on okay the recreation feasibility study they're not here well no they actually having a public presentation tonight six so they're coming from that to here so we should just they had asked us to put it later in the agenda we just are moving along so I'm anticipating you know I want to be done by 930 well with the because we have some executive sessions so I don't be done with done with the public session in 930 that's my goal we're going to be done sooner than that you should well Rosie just went to the bathroom I think so she's not here for the public message board so we're going to jump to the community indicators does that sound reasonable yeah that's yours that's mine we can talk about that okay so it's been a little while since we talked about the community indicators the color coding in case it's confusing here the red items were things that we added as a result of the conversation that we had the last time some of the suggestions it turned out were not terribly feasible there were the kinds of data that we didn't think anybody was collecting we didn't know of anybody but there were a lot of great suggestions and so a lot of those ended up being added in to this list now if there are other things that you see that are still absent is perfectly fine and would love to continue to have those conversations in a certain sense this is even still basically a first draft this is a first run at community indicators they may yet change as we go to actually reporting on them but hopefully they're the kind of thing that would be useful and some good data for other folks so just so you know Rosie we skip down to community indicators so any comms or questions about the list as it stands I had a couple of them I remember I remember under environmental stewardship a bunch of these I would suggest would be more useful if they were percentages rather than numbers because a lot of these things like vehicle miles traveled and number of single occupancy trips per week if our population grows which we are hoping that it will those will go up and then we would have an indicator that showed that we were failing when actually we might be doing better so to reframe those in terms of percentages that's excellent thank you Donna then Connor do you actually have a color code indicator with this chart somewhere yeah so like this remember what they are yeah so I have this in a google spreadsheet that is color coded this is you're sort of seeing the like behind the curtain a little bit as to how I think and you know thinking in terms of color coding things so but yes that does live there sorry so it's yeah okay so on my link I don't have it but it's on the website it's on the website yeah okay Connor sorry I think I mentioned last time I'm still at really down with including some of these school test scores I think it sort of feeds into the notion of people teaching to the test which I don't consider an indicator of how well our students are doing here that seems fair so teachers they will throw a frisbee to teach it's just all too apt I don't know I don't know anybody who throws frisbees okay so are you suggesting like the S back scores or SATs that I'm happy to remove that thoughts on that team one note on that is that there is going to be the school report card from the AOE that may be yeah well it might include but that might be sort of serving the same purpose without you know getting at the socioeconomic sort of bias that's inherent there so yeah I'm not sure that I agree with getting rid of that I agree that it's a it's a partial and imperfect measure but it is something that people can look at compare to other places but I guess I wouldn't sign up to just ditching it I'll tell you I don't have strong feelings about it it's on there because I know the school keeps track and they publish that data so it would be very easy to access but so you know one either way what's your pleasure team I'm with Connor on that I if it's available elsewhere that's then that's fine we can provide a link to it but I just feel like those numbers they don't mean what everyone ascribes to them other thoughts on that go ahead Donna just if you take that one are you taking all the ones that have a score or a grade associated with it because a lot of them do have some sort of a grade rating is it just one line you want to take out or is it all the lines that refer to any kind of a score or school rating that's back on the SAT just the SAT is when you want to remove and as back what do you think Glenn I'm not sure I have a strong opinion I think I'm leaning with Jack if people are measuring it we might as well include it people can make up their own lines I don't feel strongly I guess it depends on how we're presenting this are we I mean this is a data point that somebody can look at and ascribe whatever meaning they want to it I guess if we are measuring our success based on that then I guess it would be a different matter you know what we could do potentially team is we could actually just take them bow well so the school is going to publish its own data we could just have a link to the school and that's their responsibility is that okay alright so let's just we'll just have a link to the to the schools publishing of their whatever data they think is most relevant so are you saying that for all the well I think actually to be fair that would apply to anything that says Nancy Fitzgerald those are all pieces of data that the school points to and honestly that's less that we need to maintain on an individual basis so it would actually just be easier if we could say interested in school data go here great good plan does that sound okay alright great any further comments oh yeah go ahead presentation for our Access Montpelier and if from what I'm hearing with these data points you're trying to tell a story about each of these areas of subject areas correct goal areas they're under the beginnings of goals for values or something with this with RGIS this provides you the capability to tell these stories and gather thousands of data points that allows you to compare to other communities allows you to do all these different things so I would caution limited to just these data points maybe instead get to what are you trying to answer with these are you trying to inform the community tell the story about how is our school system performing that tool has that capability so rather than having these people try to give you numbers you know every quarter or so that might just be an easier solution and provides much more robust data and maybe gets closer to what you're trying to accomplish with these indicators so one thought is that so this is sort of draft one and I think the plan would be to take these and see how we would be plugging them into the Invisio software and I think the goal certainly is to tell a story hopefully have this inform the community about who we are certainly interested in that so I see that as a next phase so supposing we approve these indicators then really the next phase is to say how do they either interface with Access Montpelier or Invisio or both and I'm going to guess that we may have yet another round of tweaking them so sorry go ahead I was going to explain my understanding this is your initiative so I don't want to I appreciate that but I think the idea is we lay out some specific criteria for the community these aren't necessarily things that the city does or doesn't do maybe the meals it's just the kind of thing we can see statically how are our health risk assessments going how are our home sales going those kinds of things it's just stuff we would have and once a year maybe update and say and then to over a period of time we could I think there's like you're saying there's a huge opportunity to bring other things in or integrate the same but I saw this as just something that's in some ways intended to just be informative for us and then as the city council might look at it year in year out after five years and say whoa we're really slacking here maybe we should then enact a program or bring up you know do something about it as opposed to oh this is just happening does that help clarify totally I just wanted to actually sit down and see the healing geeked out over this and right now with your current license you have access to 3,000 sub data points so you can have access to all these indicators it's just pulling the you know pulling the report so just wanting you to think through what's the easiest process instead of having individuals kind of dole out these different data points and maybe yeah and maybe looking at what's all in that system and I don't know so no that's great one of the a potential modification to the recommended action could be I mean because the recommended action right now is just adopt community indicators it could be adopt community indicators and direct these staff to explore the best way to present them or compare them yes oh sorry hang on one second oh sorry okay speaking for myself and for in a way for the social economic justice committee I think it is important and where I'm kind of at a handicap because I haven't seen the indicators but it is important I think to look carefully at the indicators to be sure that there aren't any biases or biased uses that could be made of some of the indicators so I think the point about that you can tell us a story you can tell a bunch of different stories and a bunch of different people can tell a bunch of different stories I think Bill's idea that this is actually a document to help you track and decide and discuss that's great you know the dirty laundry you know I mean the potentially dirty laundries in here but when you start to put out stuff that can lead other people to say aha you see and tell the story that they want just that we need to be a little mindful of how this could be used that's fair and you know certainly open to suggestions there so so is this available for others to see yeah it's online I will take do you have more comments I just want to make one comment I don't see anything on there I don't see anything on there tracking anything having to do with racial or ethnic make up of the city I was thinking that yeah and you know I don't know I don't know I don't I don't know where the like where your what your sources of data are for this or if that's been considered yet the other thing that I've been hearing a little bit more about recently is both folks leaving the city because they people of color in particular leaving the city because they don't feel comfortable or folks visiting and not feeling comfortable even relative to other Vermont towns so I think that's something for the city to have an eye on I think that's worth checking on like I feel like we had that conversation I'm not sure what's not on this list but there's population by age group race gender and disability okay I think we could there are more data points that we could put in there to capture what you're talking about yeah fair enough thank you uh Jack when you mentioned well all the lines that include that are saying talk to Nancy if it's Patrick yeah one of those is down below and it's the percentage of children on free and reduced meals which I think is very important not to take that out of there I'm remembering a couple of years ago hearing Nancy or hearing Rebecca Holcomb speak and and she said your prosperity is tied to the most vulnerable child in your community so maybe we want to call that one out particularly okay we'll keep that one okay great noted Glen just one question about it looks to me like under public health and safety the newly added ones are sourced but the older ones are not sourced am I misreading that I'm not sure why that is I'd have to get back to you on that's a good question yeah sorry I don't see anything under public health and safety about um fires just a number of fires I'm just missing it we do report that I think I'm just missing it on there well let's put it on there okay and again this is that we can absolutely tweak it later on that's perfectly fine if there's any I know people are reading reading through them those colored things are a little hard to see oh sorry about that is there any further yes please do it's good public health and safety I wonder about police complaints against police behavior or if there's any like if there's any wait or civilian oversight of police in any way like to attract that is that something that I'm sorry the police department keep track of great thank you I'm also wondering about children in state custody if that's data I'm pretty sure that that is available through DCF but that can be an indicator of community health as well okay and then the other thing I know that I saw anything about substance abuse it's drug right public health and safety there's a couple a measurement of drug use but we don't include alcohol in that and I think I think that's important I'm trying to find the line here it's like halfway down it's underneath hate crime data oh measurement of drug use drug and alcohol again we'll just have to see it may you know evolve as to like exactly how we're reporting that but service providers in the area may have to report on that anyway population served and yeah okay Jack I include myself in this of having been bad and not really putting time into thinking about this the nature of this kind of discussion is that once you get into it you can immediately think of five other things that aren't listed that that should be and so it might be useful to like set herself a date to review it again and come up with with more suggestions maybe with a ticker going out to the council in advance of that well so since this is our second time reading through I guess what I would suggest is that we implement something and that we continue to think about it and adjust it because you're right we could we could just talk about indicators find this forever yeah forever right it could go on indefinitely and over time the things that we care about and things that we want to track might change they should change so my hope is that you know while this list is probably imperfect I would like to start I would rather start collecting or I'm not necessarily collecting but start saying alright this is what we're going to try to to do and then adjust it but we should have a what I'm hearing from your comment is that maybe we should plan to review the indicators once a year and it might actually make some sense to do that you know early with the new council to say these are the things that we have been tracking do you want to make adjustments Rosie I think it would also be useful to send this out to the committees who deal with these areas and say you know take a look do you have any suggestions for better indicators or other things that we're not covering because we do have a bunch of committees that are really focused on all of these different issues I agree and I think it would make sense maybe even to because we're going to be inviting other committees in our strategic our yearly strategic planning session that would be a great time to do that potentially just thinking out loud but in the meanwhile I would love to if there's a motion to adopt these and try the city manager to adjust as needed I'll move to adopt the community indicators as amended tonight second further discussion please say aye great thank you all looking forward to this data and speaking of data sorry yes exactly speaking of data we're going to go back to the recreation feasibility study which had a lot of data that was great how are you all doing team do we need a break are you feeling good yes fantastic so we're going to take a five minute break and you can all look and set up we'll be back welcome and as we're coming back from our break please do please introduce yourself Marty McMullen recreation director Sue Allen assistant city manager Ken Ballard Ballard's king and associates Chris Hancock citizen just I'm going to turn this over to Ken and let him walk you through the various proposals and the survey I just want to remind you all that where this started was concern over the existing rec center which is not ADA compliant it needs work there are food violations so we're sort of starting from the assumption that doing nothing is not an option that's kind of where our placeholder and it also adds a certain urgency to doing this work because we can't let that center just hang out there forever so with that as the background I've also asked Ken to be short but he has tons of data to show you so ask any question and it's in here he can answer it so Ken okay well good evening mayor and members of council as Sue indicated I'm going to kind of cut to the chase on this pretty quickly and show you kind of the back end of this and again if there's other information that you want to see or work with we can bring that up but we're going to kind of make this short and sweet just a little bit about ballard king and associates we've been around for almost 27 years we're a recreation planning firm we specialize in recreation center work we've done over 700 projects across 49 states have about 200 facilities mostly public facilities open around the country done over 25 projects in New England kind of a list of some of the more recent ones that we've done so this is what we do and I've been having a lot of fun working on your project up to this point real quickly the parameters of our study this is an indoor community center rec slash recreation center study that's what we've been focusing on our tasks are market analysis which is understanding the demographics not only of Montpelier but also of a larger market area understanding who is currently providing services whether they're public nonprofit or for-profit doing community input series of focus groups we've had 11 different focus groups over two different occasions going back to October community meetings we just finished the second one here right before this meeting and then a statistically valid survey that was done in November and December so where we sit is the next one which is the project options and what we're going to talk about here tonight the first two the market and the community input really kind of inform us on where we think the project could go and we're going to share some options with you once we get some direction we'll be doing some operational impacts on the direction that the project may go also explore a little bit more on the partnership side so what do we see coming out of this is kind of the issues for the project well if the question is what to build is it a new center is it rehabbing the existing berry street recreation center kind of is soon indicated doing nothing really is an option for you if you do build a new facility where do you build it is it downtown is it on the edge of town or is it some other location that may be out of town who are the potential partners and we've started to work on identifying potential partners for the project and where we are clearly one of the biggest questions for any project of this nature is how do you fund this from a capital perspective and how do you operate it what are the financial implications of both of those and ultimately what amenities do we need to include in the facility and this is even going back to the rehabbing option that says what do we get out of that and what would be potentially in a new facility and ultimately how do we move forward in which way do we move forward so these are some of the questions that we're going to focus on and we're looking for your input on as well clearly as we present these kind of three options to you tonight we want to understand what the right option is to meet the needs of this community but also fitting within the financial realities that are always present in the project of this nature and really what does the center need to contain and what does it need to have to meet community needs and this is the community needs not only today but looking out in the future so let's talk about the three options that we've kind of put together in this project and there's kind of two sub-options under the first one these are not in any particular priority order or recommendation this is just kind of laying it out there the first one is just saying we're going to rehab the existing Berry Street Recreation Center one of the options to sit there and say we're going to do the minimal amount of improvements the code improvements the ADA access issues but that's really it so you but it's what you have now you're not getting any space out of it it'll be meet the requirements but you're not really getting anything more than what you currently have now the second option is to take it further do all of the things that are in the first piece there but now also allow use of the basement area which is not currently in use because of access issues and other other things as well as the second floor which both have usable space potentially if they're remodeled obviously that one we actually gain space and how that's utilized how it's used for recreation purposes can be determined but you're getting something more than what you have now it's within the footprint of the building we really don't have the ability with the site limitations to go outside of the existing structure of the building but it's what we'd be doing inside of that the second one is deciding well what we really need to do is get it or you really use the existing recreation center but we're going to build a new recreation center with the components and pieces that the people have identified as being important for the facility what we heard during the community input process and then the last one is a combination of the first two build a new center and keep the Berry Street Center obviously you'd have to do improvements to Berry Street and you'd also be committed to build a new facility so those are the three options I'm going to kind of take you through these in a little bit more detail in terms of what we kind of basically see as basic pros and cons and some really preliminary cost information so rehabbing the existing Berry Street recreation center what are the pros well it's a lower cost you have an existing building that's there yes we have to do a lot to renovate that and bring it up to code and make improvements but there is an existing building it's in town it's walkable people told us in the community meetings and it came out real high on the survey that walkability was important it certainly supports that because it's lower cost it's a little easier to fund we really see this as being a city of Montpelier project in this regard that you would take on really the responsibility much like you do now for that facility the cons really are not going to be able to add a lot of new amenities again we're kind of dictated by the site limitations and the building limitations things like a swimming pool really aren't possible at that site and the reason I put that in here is the pool came out as the number one priority coming out of the survey in terms of what people wanted to see not unusual that's always a pool indoor pool is almost always in the top three often times the top number one or number two but we're limited in really being able to do that with using the Berry street center other partnerships are also limited there's a number of things you can do there is pretty limited so it's hard to bring in any real what we call equity partners that are going to put potentially dollars into the project itself and certainly the issue of lack of parking if we do the full of renovation expansion of the center where we're getting that basement and that upper level to work and provide new space we'd expect the utilization rate for that facility to increase pretty dramatically well when we do that we're going to have more people coming do we have the ability to park them to get them into the facility certainly the fact that we're in town and have the walk ability issue helps with that but you know you're going to get a lot more use out of that so that's another potential issue cost to do this the minimal one which is just code implications and everything else could could be two to maybe three million dollars and these are pretty you know just very general cost estimates we are not an architectural firm we're not a capital cost estimating this is a little bit out of our bailiwick when we move further with along with this we will try to nail this down a little more through utilizing some of the services of people that can do that but anyway there's going to be a certain level of cost associated with that the improved side of that could push that up to five million dollars by getting again those other two levels so they're not cheap and again anytime we're talking about a renovation of a building of that age there's so many unknowns it's always a little bit of concern and you carry a huge contingency just because you don't know what you're dealing with you really get into doing it so it you know what it might be operational subsidy and we see operation subsidy that's the difference between costs of operation and revenue potential it's the what the net is if you will of what you're dealing with your subsidy level could go up by nothing if we're just doing the simple improvements to the to the building without adding space up it's upstairs and downstairs may not have much of any maybe pick it up a little bit potentially up to about fifty thousand dollar net increase in cost to the city do the full building improvement now we've got two extra floors we're going to have two spaces that'll be utilized for a number of functions we'd expect to be bringing in revenue in some program areas for that but we'll still have a net cost increase to that and that could be a pretty wide range right now I think it'll be more on the lower end of that scale but that remains to be seen what's the main driver of the improved cost with subsidy operations well we're going to have to heat and cool on a better basis those spaces that what you're doing now we're going to have to clean them we're also going to have programs and activities that we have to pay instructors for those programs have staff there to do that so it's a kind of combination of all that stuff so new center what are the pros on this well it can be a full facility and you know we're not limited by site in fact we would say that whatever you do at a new center that we have to be looking for a site that would allow this to be supported so that potentially could have aquatics whether it's done in the first phase or later phase and you would find a site where ultimately you could do a full build out even if it was in phases so you can sit there and say the future of indoor recreation for the large part could be at this location you potentially have more partners you have more amenities that we'll talk about later probably won't be downtown so you may be able to bring more partners and we say partners we're really talking potentially equity partners ones that are bringing dollars to the table because of the size and magnitude of the facility and adding aquatics you're really taking on kind of a regional focus now before the Berry Street facility is primarily what it is now it's going to be really inward focused on your residents this becomes now the amenities it has and potentially by where it's located you would need to have improved access in parking we'd have to find sites that would support that hopefully we'd still be able to get other forms of access in terms of everything from walking to trail access to biking all of that cons obvious thing we're talking about a much larger building high cost build and you don't have an existing structure you're probably starting from ground zero so you're going to have to take on the full cost of building that building it's likely not downtown and by downtown I mean in the city core and it's because of the size of the building parking and other requirements you know finding that kind of property or purchasing property to do that probably not likely wouldn't say it's impossible but not likely and the reality is we get to cost here in a minute you're going to need an equity partner somebody else putting money into this project cost depends upon what you're doing the size of magnitude in a lot of it's driven by aquatics and whether you have that in the first phase and how big it is and that could be anywhere from 12 to 20 plus million dollars so it's a big price tag to do that these are not cheap buildings to build operational subsidy again difference between expenses and revenues the net cost if you will to wherever the operator is anywhere from about $150,000 a year to maybe as high as $150,000 a year so there is a subsidy involved with that obviously and then the third option which now involves again keeping the Berry Street facility would have to have some level of improvement to it and building a new one as well you get two facilities obviously you would have those in different areas serving different users you would have potentially both a local focus and a regional draw you'd be have multiple types of uses maybe by different locations and more opportunities in multiple locations you just have more variety this is the highest cost option on the consite you're having to make improvements to your existing facility and you're building a new one also has the highest operating cost because we're subdividing the market so we're having some folks that are going to one location for certain things one to another some people say well I don't need to go to that location because I can do that here so it kind of divides up your market that contributes to higher operating cost by two facilities and minimizes a little bit some of the revenue potential that's there cost implications as well as a little harder because you're dealing with two of these things but it's basically anywhere from 14 to 25 plus million dollars and the subsidy now is about that $300,000 to $500,000 range so that's kind of real quickly the options we're certainly interested in your input your questions on which of these you would like to see us pursue it may be some version that we don't have up there but that's kind of where we sit we kind of want some idea of how important you think different elements may be to have in this facility and again we can talk about some of the project partnering aspects and those types of things as well that's kind of the long and short get I prepared to talk about survey results if you need to and other things as well yeah we sent the survey out on Friday so maybe you've looked at it and don't need that but Ken is prepared to talk about the survey results if anybody would like more interest he's also been talking to sort of equity partners in the region to get to gauge some interest of sort of the business community partnering with us on something like this that's being made by equity partners are these investors or are these businesses that would be providing services or somehow like doing something more than just paying for it it can be all of the above but equity says they're actually putting dollars into the project either capital and or operational dollars into that level involvement would depend on the partner some of them may want to say for the public good we're interested in doing that and others may say we actually want to have some type of the presence in the building can you give me, are you talking like large employers or are you talking like an exercise company that wants to use the space I'm just having a hard time understanding it's a higher level than that it's some major businesses that may be willing to help fund the capital construction of the building some of the partners we've talked about they're a little more aligned with some of the purpose of the facility might actually want to go beyond just giving potentially dollars for the facility but actually have a presence and they would be a medical provider the Barrie street existing facility is in the designated TIF district right yes yes it is and okay in theory that could be a public private partnership I know the city owns the building right now right but if for example we were to find an equity partner who was willing to put up significant amount of money the city could in some way partner with them is that permitted with the TIF district or if the city sold the building to someone with an agreement that this is going to be for this purpose I think it would be more that this would have to be an improvement that was related to a private investment so let's say theoretically someone next door was putting in a health facility and this was going to be a public improvement next door we might be able to use the TIF funds from that to help pay for this but I'm not sure we'd have to look at that I don't know how on point that would be for a TIF we'd have to see what the city would face and then we'd have to see what the link would be what this was doing that was allowing the business to go ahead we'd use TIF funding in other states for public centers I don't know that there may be limitations we can do in Vermont it's pretty strict in Vermont I think that might be something that's worth we'll look into that for you Ashley I think the other issue is with you we've kind of noted I think you're going to have big problems getting an equity partner actively involved in Berry Street because I just don't know that there's enough there for a real partner to get much out of that unless they were going to take it and use it for some other different purpose but actually on the same level as saying we're going to partner to develop or improve for a community purpose I'm not sure you're going to get there's going to be much traction with that are there any sites specifically that were looked at I knew we had talked last time about the possibility of holding open an option for the redstone but I don't think that made it anywhere with the legislature we've floated site ideas redstone is now assuming the papers have been signed privately owned that property is privately owned and that would be a great location for it if that private partner would be willing to talk to us about it we've looked at I mean I'm sort of dreaming here so when people see it on TV they don't need to panic but national life has some land you come right off the interstate and head up to national life that might have some regional interest or up by the hospital or in town maybe down even by the Elm Street wreck field with the pool that you know the outdoor pool there so we're sort of keeping everything on the table you know talking about savings pasture or some land owned by the Vermont College of Fine Arts probably looking for a site realistically that's on the grander vision at least where we sit right now may need to be as large as five acres and that would be to support not only the building but also required parking in that type of thing so it's not a small site now there are ways to stack these things and others but it's going to be hard to do it because big might be able to do it on three acres I've never really seen it done on less than that one of the survey results it's probably worth mentioning is while people do want a pool and might want a new facility we ask them if they're willing to pay for that through their taxes and there was a little bit less enthusiasm when you asked that question more than half seem to be either very willing or somewhat willing to renovate the facility I was going to ask Ten we all have our own local biases and preferences here but you're out of touter what was your read of the survey results if there's a quick I actually was concerned that would be far more negative than what it was I was actually somewhat feeling a little bit better about this I think there's reasonable question on basically improving Berry Street and actually that's reasonably strong in both of these you have huge numbers of maybe and not sure and that's not unusual in a survey of this nature because people go I don't know there's a whole lot of other questions that they need to answer but that shows a willingness to at least look at that you have a yes of 41 you even take half of those next years you're there and the nose are about almost a little more than half of the yeses so I'm encouraged by that one that's you know that has a possibility of moving forward and again the key thing is getting those people that are in that unsure maybe information that he ultimately need to make a decision and so that in compared to other projects that's not too bad this one you know part of it's the magnitude is I would say it's not a non-starter but it's certainly a much higher mountain decline you know yes here is only 25% and you know the maybe is a non-sure and now because we're talking bigger dollar amounts are huge numbers I mean we have over 40% in that category of I don't know and now the no numbers gone up so I I wouldn't say well just forget it but it's definitely going to take some work the first one's a lot more palatable to the community than this one is and you know this is the one you know it says well tell me what I'm getting tell me who else is participating in this what we go I think the other key thing that's in here the 200 to 350 number does not get you full dollar amount to pay for the full center that's not funding all of it that's funding maybe 50% so that's what we talk about the equity partner you know this is going to be hard enough this is going to get you maybe half a little more than half of what you would need potentially that's with a pool you take the pool out of the equation you're higher but even then I don't think you're going to fund it all from a tax number so you're going to need their sources and that's what we talk about the equity partner piece being pretty critical if you're going to move forward with this concept on the bigger standalone facility what are the things that I've been wondering about for as long as this conversation is going on is that it's privately owned but we have a facility just a few miles up the road where there's a pool there's indoor tennis there's a lot of recreational opportunities and I wonder why is that what how do we keep with compete with that or how does it how will it make sense to to do this when when first and fitness is already up there well part of our market analysis was to understand who's there in the marketplace a facility of this nature is very different from a private facility in terms of you know what you do there the types of programming the way you gain access and everything else it also doesn't perform financially like a private facility and that's where we're showing an operational loss in those options and part of it is is is trying to get access so that people don't have to be members of a facility to utilize this you know I'm from out of town but if that facility was there tonight I could go plunk down my dollars for a pass for tonight go in there utilize it I'm done certainly passes and our memberships would be available but there's a lot of different ways to access the facility so it's a different thing a lot of people say well I already belong to this facility and what we say is that's awesome and what is you know there'd be other things you may want to do at our facility come on down take that class take that program do something in our facility that is not available or maybe somebody else in your household wants to be doing as well and that's the beauty you can kind of come and go as you want but they're also because of that limits our ability to cash flow the operation of the facility so it's a different animal than the public excuse me in the private sector in terms of what typically is available and how it's utilized by the general public it's really curious about this chart another one here it's like you get them two chances to say maybe and not sure I mean that's like another opportunity to say to say no so why did you have those two that are so similar in my mind well the survey company when we put this together they don't ever like to have just a yes no and a not sure it's more on how it scales it between that yes and no so how do they define those two well maybe basically says that's closer to yes okay yeah I like that a little bit better unsure is closer to no going I really don't know so the way you see it set up there coming down in terms of level of support yes maybe unsure no and likewise on this other one you have high priority very high priority and to me I can find those two and say okay there's 36% who's more than medium priority that really is I mean part of the thing that was interesting out of this is that you know well way over 50% thought this was at least a medium priority you know and again and very pretty low percentage at 28 thought it was a low priority so it is on people's minds in terms of yeah you know we have an interest in this how that translates we do some projects where that comes back as a I don't really think that's something you need to worry about that's not really seen as a priority I would say this is worth consideration by the city and by council in terms of what you may want to do it's on people's minds enough with that to do that but again I think part of that medium and even high number is once again the uncertainty of what are we talking about here it says it keeps people from making that either high or very low you know you get more information that will flesh out some of that middle ground a little bit more one of the I mean property taxes would go up to fund this for sure but one of the things that strikes me is there's a huge number of large employers well not a huge number but there are a number of large employers who partner sometimes I know with I think first and fitness as a state employee I have a I get a member discount sometimes health insurance will pay for that did anything sort of look at that in this part of the study or is that the next phase we have had discussions with some of the larger employers in the area to gauge levels of interest in this you know certainly at this point we don't have any commitments but we have several that have indicated this project they're willing to look at there are ones that they're a project they're willing potentially to even help with some level of funding yet to be defined so you know I we don't have it's ready to sign the dotted line we certainly haven't done an exhaustive study on that but one of the things we were hoping is that if this was an option to pursue there is a level of interest out there and that you know you'd be able to leverage out some of the bigger employers that be able to sit there and say look we're not going to make up the difference but we're involved in you can leverage that to get other other levels of funding from other sources as well and there's at least some indication that that's worth pursuing and in terms of I'm just thinking about how Kellogg Hubbard goes to other area communities for funding as well would we be interested or with the city is there any appetite or was that explored at all in this is going to other municipalities and for you know for we did think we were going to build a new facility was going to have a regional focus we should go to our other community partners and ask for some money that's not big money that turns out not to be big money but we would ask them and I think to continue to do that and yeah and there's implications you know if other communities don't want to partner the price points of what they may have to do to gain access versus a resident of the community they pay an upcharge potentially on that so there are some opportunities we have had some initial discussions haven't exactly been see them as is viable equity partners at this point but I don't know that that's absolutely definitive and as this gets more defined that that needs to come back around again so something that I thought was really interesting in the survey was the number of people who currently use the rec center facilities generally in classes and I think that was around 20-22% and I found that surprisingly low for the amount of emphasis that we put on it and that kind of made me take a step back and think okay so this is this big community service that we're providing but a large share of our community is not utilizing it and so what does that mean for how we prioritize this in the budget and so you know one takeaway might be that we need to do stuff to expand how desirable these services are one takeaway might be that this isn't something that our population is really interested in using and so maybe we should scale back our efforts in this area so I'm curious what how that participation rate compared to other communities that you've surveyed and what you might take away from that here's my take on this your rate of participation is low it's actually a higher number than I maybe would have thought to be honest with you Berry Street Recreation Center there's not much there when I read that question and had I answered that question I would have assumed that you were asking about all of the rec department programming and that's I would imagine that a bunch of people answered it that way and there is a lot of rec department programming outside of the current rec center oh yeah the intent was to gain who had actually used the Berry Street Recreation Center not just recreation in general but I you know I would contend that you're limited in what you can offer in terms of general recreation programs on an indoor variety simply because of the limits of that I think the interest in the survey says there's interest there it's you can't be met even there was the other questions about does this service your needs and the response on those were very low and that was just not this facility that was very low compared to a lot of other locations so I think there's a lot of lack of better term pent up demand that facility is not doing it I would say exactly the opposite I don't think it's a question of whether you should invest more in that because not so many people are using it I think the fact that you can only reach a pretty small percentage because of the shortcomings of your facility is the issue some people don't use it because it doesn't have a pool it doesn't have exercise machines etc but a lot of people are trying to use it even for what it does have the last time I went to play basketball we had 20 people show up at lunchtime we had to cycle through you could only play half the time there's tremendous competition for hours so this time of year that building is just used almost every hour of the week and so the pickle ballers are frustrated that they can only get the hours that they can get there are a whole bunch of middle school aged kids doing basketball practices so it's kind of maxed out is another factor and to Rosie's point I wonder though that's obviously reflective of the people that are here now and part of what Montpelier is trying to do is to grow and to attract new residents and so I'm sure that there's probably research out there about this already but in terms of we're looking to grow the grand list so we're investing in housing and all of those other things would one of these particular models be more desirable or less desirable to populations that we're trying to bring in interesting you should say that right before this we had a community meeting it wasn't particularly well attended but we had some pretty frank discussions and some of them where I would say you're younger people in their 20s early 30s and they made it pretty clear that they thought you know something was more would you know they're saying look if Montpelier wants to try to attract people here and get a younger dynamic in place you need these kind of facility and beyond just Berry Street they said that is not enough so their whole premise was and even to keep them here we need more if you're trying to attract this younger population so it kind of anecdotally got to your question just to follow that up though they also expressed some concern about raising the property taxes that they would like to buy houses in Montpelier so at the same time they were very anxious for us to pursue partners to try to hold the cost of the facility down and some of the businesses actually said that this would help them attract employees to the area they felt like that would be a draw so I think ultimately what we're looking from council there's a little bit of direction on how you want us to proceed we're kind of at this little more than 50% maybe in the two thirds range so how do we deliver back to you something that meets your needs and expectations we don't have to have an answer to that tonight but at some point we want to have at least a blessing that we're heading in the right direction what do you want us to see us do if you're saying don't look at this option we don't want to go there that's fine we just kind of want to have a little bit of insight Conner you had a hand raised do you what does fitness mean to you fitness is anything from group exercise classes to you know functional fitness to machine weights to cardio it's a broad term that covers a lot of that without having to break it out into all the particulars but it's it's an active fitness based program do you see like a possibly a slice this up even more like they got the planet fitness there right it's like 80 machines there you pay what 10 bucks a month seems like a pretty good business model right I don't know if like the fitness equipment necessarily needs to be in this place they got a ton of space back there could you do a fitness center up there and pull somewhere else maybe could be phased out one of the things we talked about just to keep in mind we talked about doing well if you do Berry Street and do a new record the more we spread these pieces out the less cost effective it is for whoever is operating it so if the city want to do that your cost to be able to do that both from a capital and operational will go up pretty dramatically your revenue potential is generally less because now people are having to go multiple locations the model of trying to get as much into one area is kind of the most cost effective way in a lot of larger cities we've been trying to consolidate facilities because they're not sustainable operationally or even capital wise so I just caution you that that's a difficult model to sustain over time just one more point I think you should all be thinking about like it was 18 years old plus who was surveyed on this we have it broken down by the age of the respondents we also have the ability to look at data in terms of so what did this age group where their response is different than so you all look at well what do younger people say what do older people say if you look at the full survey document there's like 200 pages back behind this stuff and it's just the raw data so you can look in there by age by income levels all sorts of different criteria and you can kind of cut the data or see if there's anything that's different about that I think the one point I just want to make is even though a lot of people are okay with getting there by car there's probably a lot of kids walkability is a huge factor and they might not be taking into consideration here your walkability answer we kept hearing that the response level even out of the survey was that was high way high so Rosie you have a comment and then I would love to just go around and if anybody has strong feelings about what you are interested in what you want to support you don't want to support moving forward you know we're not it's not binding obviously at this point so you know general impressions are good but yeah and then we can be moving on yeah so the one comment I wanted to make is that our current rec department programming and how we might pay for this in the future if we use public money to create this thing then I feel pretty strongly that the bar to entry and participation needs to be really low and one of my concerns right now is that we have a lot of city money that goes to subsidizing you know our rec classes and stuff and then there's still a feed to use the classes and I think that that means that the lowest income members of our community can't actually enjoy the amenities that we as a community are paying for including the lowest income members of the community and so it's very counterintuitive because I kind of I also feel like well user fees you know if you're going to use the amenity then you should pay for it but I want to be really careful that we don't try and split it down the middle too much and really support this with a lot of taxpayer money and then make the bar to entry high so high that you know through an annual fee or you know a monthly fee that half our community can't use it because it's too expensive so that's just a I don't have an answer to that it's just a challenge that I think we have with these sorts of programs and with this type of project and I just want the council to be aware of it and thinking about maybe we take an all or nothing approach where either it's you know entirely city funded and we have no entry fees for residents maybe it's not really funded by the city and we figure out some kind of method for us to facilitate this but that the city is really not putting any money in and it's fully user funded so that's just a thought about that. Arnie I thought there was a sliding scale on the course fees, no? We do help when people are in a situation as far as classes going not sure of people who have been turned away for classes or haven't come because they can't afford it My concern is that we don't I know that you help out when people ask but it's not one of those things where we apply it across the board and make it really obvious that four people below this income level this is how we handle it or anything like that and it's another one of those things where we have this if you're in the know you can access it if you're not if you're from the outside you don't know to ask and so I would like us to be a little more transparent about that That's a good point I also feel this is my own little pet thing I suppose but I feel really strongly that learning how to swim ought to be free because everyone ought to know how to swim but if you're going to take an ultimate camp for example they should charge a lot for that you know what I mean everyone doesn't need to know how to play a bit because their fees are so high I know What are the things we look at now is it's not unusual to kind of tier programs and services so it gets at what you talk about that says swimming lessons are a basic service so those are going to be priced at a different differential than your like even private swimming lessons okay that's a different level or some of these other four things so you have pricing scales a little adjust down there and the more you can get the better your cost recovery is I mean just to put it in perspective a facility that we're talking about on a new center with a pool just for the sake of conversation and you know your operating costs will be north of a million and a half dollars a year so if you're not bringing in a pretty hefty amount of income to offset that it becomes a non-workable issue so the issue is how do we make or have the people that have the ability to pay to pay and how do we handle those that are under that bar that cannot and a lot of facilities in some really socially and economically depressed areas have been able to work out systems that allow that to occur Salvation Army and their croc centers do that a lot and so they're into communities that are very difficult when Boston everything else that says okay we're trying to make sure those that have the ability to those that don't are taken care and we have those all those people in the same facility with not even really knowing that says you didn't pay anything and I paid this much so that there's workable systems out there that still get the numbers that you need for revenue there's a lot of different options for how people utilize the facility that will really just push up the amount of people that are coming through there and you can make decisions you may say we're going to have swimming lessons for all second graders in the city that are free those types of things are done and and those are fine and you know I already can sit there and tell you what the implications are doing sir I just need to be told that revenue is not a factor no we make the school pay for it so impressions from council team for the direction for this crew good so I was really charmed by the Berry street building when we took the tour this year I think having seen it back to back with the senior center and the amazing renovation in the senior center I can really see the potential for that building being a beautiful space and to me I think that that's you know we have an opportunity with this historic building that's in a great location for a cost that isn't as big a hit to the city budget to make that space more usable and so I'm that that's intriguing to me I still have budget concerns and I want to you know make sure that we're not continuously having an unsustainable tax rate but I could see some real big advantages to the city in that with renovating the existing space I'm really really wary of taking on the commitment of a city run aquatic center you know knowing the capacity of our city staff and knowing the capacity of our city for a tax base so and I also I can't think of a it's really important to me that it be a walkable location even if it is an aquatic center and I can't think of a good location within the city to have that happen and I feel like if we have another car based pool outside of the city how is that better than first and fitness from a an accessible point of view for elderly folks in the city who are trying to be able to stay fit and not wanting to drive and from a from an environmental perspective there just seem like so many disadvantages to putting some kind of destination outside of the walkable core so those are kind of where I'm at right now Donna well from the other end I did not fall in love with the tour I hadn't been in the building for a long time and I just felt sad for it that it just really needs help but I am sold by the numbers that people are really looking for exercise and there's a lot of small rooms there as well as the basement with true renovation it can create a lot of niches for different things so I'm much more into not just the rehab but the improvements that's much more sellable financially and use wise and it is in the core of walkability other thoughts I think Donna I know a big driver of this discussion are a group of people who really really want a pool and they are very committed to wanting that but I think that it's hard to as Rosie said see we agree on stuff as Rosie said it's hard to see the capacity and the willingness of voters of Montpelier to do something that big it would take a lot to convince me of that I see Rosie and Donna talking about the same kind of the same thing about the current rec center in different ways which is that there's real potential there and I would like to continue to look at expanding that to see what we could generate any further if not that's fine and maybe it's because I'm naive although I don't know that I've been called that in probably 33 years I'm curious about the TIFF options and what may exist there and additionally I'm wondering assuming the responsibility of an aquatic center is something just based on finances alone that I don't think I could in good conscience vote for however I'm wondering if there may be ways that we can make something like that happen whether it's a partnership with first in fitness that is an actual partnership which would really translate meaningfully to residents in Montpelier having access to a facility that already exists or finding ways to really actually partner with surrounding communities to sort of go in all together in some way for a regional facility that everyone could use. I know how many people approached me about the pool idea and I love it I think it's great I would swim all the time but that sort of taxpayer burden that would translate into a significant increase in rent in Montpelier it is just not sustainable to me so I need more time to process some ideas on that sure does that provide sufficient amount of direction from time being and I know you all are going to do further work on this and are coming back at some point to take up this conversation again can you fit a new facility on top of a parking garage you laugh we're getting ready to do one in south Florida on the top of a parking garage there you go can we have your slide presentation tonight given to us I didn't get it but we can show you the report so I think we'll do if this sounds right bring you all the sort of flushed out renovation proposal perhaps for the very facility and maybe sort of keep a little conversation going on the side with partners for a larger aquatic facility that should come through at least for me that was renovation and improvement he actually gave two little options the service show what people were looking for and a lot of that can be done in the very area that's great thank you thank you very much alright so on to the discussion of public message board this is an item that brought up at some point do you want to frame this sure so I've thought generally about how we as a council are limited in our communications by public meeting law and also how our committees are limited in communication by public meeting law in that you can't have those sort of back and forth email discussions you know hey here's this article I saw what do you think about that you know and oh this reminds me of something else all of those discussions if they're kind of relating to substance really can't happen outside of a physical public meeting and that's state law and I've seen you know being on some of the the various committee email lists and stuff I've seen people struggle with that and have to be reminded that hey you can't just reply all and give your opinion on this because it's not a public meeting so I I think that if there were some kind of electronic forum where people could have those discussions and it would be readily viewable by the public and you know and that would still meet the intent of the public meeting law although it currently doesn't meet the letter of the law I think that that could really help move discussions along and you know make involvement in public discourse more accessible to people who can't necessarily afford to attend a four hour meeting in person and can't necessarily afford to sit and watch our four hour meeting even though it's recorded and available online that's still a major time commitment to see what we're talking about so I think that this is a tool it certainly wouldn't replace our current meetings and replace our current committee meetings but it's a tool to make those more productive and so I would like us to ask our legislators to consider making some sort of amendment to Vermont public meeting law to allow for communities to have electronic message boards that are used by members of their governing bodies and their committees to have some of these discussions outside of a public forum so I've done a little bit of not a lot but a little bit of thinking around this and I so the question for me comes down to the logistics right and making it accessible because I think we all want to be accessible even to people who don't have electronic capacities and so just as a first step towards that one of the things I could picture potentially is let's say it's just a threaded discussion within a committee they want to have a discussion around some topic that seems relevant if it were some kind of what if we could call it like a supplemental conversation and that it could be approved along with the minutes of the meeting so that it's accessible as accessible as the minutes of any prior meeting then that would be one first step towards that and I think having some thinking through like okay so how do people not connected to electronics or not preferring to interact that way is it still equitable and is it still accessible and that's one possibility put it out there other thoughts I just had a simple logistic question in terms of if we're going to do this do you envision this or does the council envision this as being for the bodies only or would there also be public comment and I'm sure I'll be asked that so would it be you know in between meetings the council's working over something and Julia wants to weigh in on it can she do that or is that only no this is a chance to read this but we still have the public comment here so I guess I was envisioning some sort of it's a back and forth between the members of the body but there is some kind of public comment section where members of the public could generally address the committee through an electronic forum and have that be public if they wished so what you're envisioning is like a whole new platform right that you would have to go to so I'm envisioning that we ask the legislature to allow us to if we can show that whatever electronic forum we're able to produce and it might be different from Montpelier than it is for another community but if we can show that this is you know the public can participate and see and you know be involved that they would allow that and then what we actually do with that authority after we get it you know we can figure out what platform do we use and how does it work and all the logistics around that and maybe I know Donna is very concerned about this maybe you have a group like us that decides you know Donna doesn't really like participating in this sort of written back and forth and she would rather discuss in person and so maybe as a group we decide well we're not really going to use that but maybe if we're a small subcommittee working group and I ran into this you know when we have subcommittees of three people you can't have any discussions outside of your meetings at all you can't even explain to somebody you know what's going on or what your thinking is or what your next steps are outside because two of the three of you make a majority and so you know it just it's very impractical so maybe we end up you know using it for those situations and not for whole public or council discussions I just want the authority from the legislature to do this so maybe it could be even the kind of thing where if the whole group doesn't agree then you just don't do it maybe yeah yeah, Connor I was just wondering would it be worth having Secretary Kondos come in and just have kind of a round table with us he's a very engaged constituent he's a very engaged constituent but everybody would be happy to come down and just kind of throw some ideas out because they turn the SOS opposes it I don't like our odds anyways so I'd almost rather start working kind of collaboratively with them to come up with something good, I think that's a great idea I saw Rosie and then Donna Ashley Ashley the other thing I'm wondering about is just getting an advisory opinion from the Secretary of State about the feasibility just in terms of like is that something that could be permitted with some reading of public meeting law and then that might give us some insight in terms of how we could shape or structure a conversation going forward I thought Bill sent us an email about this maybe I read it somewhere else I'm just like a picture I don't know how you can have a conversation over here that involves a few people from this body and a few of the public and then meanwhile you have this meeting that's official and you have this discussion over here so do we sit and have to read all of this to know what's going to happen here and how does it not become a front porch forum where a small group just takes on this topic and gets it way out left so those are my concerns Jack I think it's an intriguing idea because we all know that there's most issues that we discuss here we don't get a lot of public input at our meetings but I also kind of worry if there's as full a discussion as one could imagine on this message board well people show up at the meeting and their reaction was going to be well I wanted to tell them what I thought but the decision was already made so I'm going to talk about this for three weeks on their computers those are fair criticisms I think those are all things that we need to figure out I'm saying explore it I'm not saying no but there are some concerns I'm trying to think of next steps to your team I would be happy to make a motion that we direct city staff to reach out for an advisory opinion from the Secretary of State's office about the current state of the law and what nuance may exist there to allow for something like this I second that that's okay alright further discussion okay all in favor please say aye opposed thank you alright before we go off that topic I don't know if that has to be the end of it because I suspect that either they'll take longer than we want them to give us an advisory opinion or more likely they'll quite very quickly say yeah this isn't allowed under current law so so I think suggestion of inviting Jim Condos to come in and just be part of the discussion while that's going on might be a good idea and I'm not making a motion I'm just thinking if someone wants to do it I think that would be fine if we can express our realities to him and say you know what where can we go with this yeah I'd be interested in that in my mind it's already mid-March and so I don't think we can do anything before that which means you know I just wanted to plant the seed and you know I think that it's something that might be useful to some future councils and some future committees and so if you guys go through this process and find that it doesn't seem workable and you can't figure out a way to address some of these challenges then that's fine we've talked about it and okay well let's look into that when we can so great okay so thank you all I think that wraps up our regular business so we're going to do some council reports then we have other reports and then we're going to have three yes three executive session topics and I don't think we're going to be have no action coming out of that so in case who would like to start with council reports I'm going to just pick on someone if no one volunteers like Glenn come tomorrow morning to baguitos excuse me I think that's all I have this week thanks good con scooter survey in the field now so I should have some stance for you in the coming weeks also I dropped the ball in this while ago but resurrected at the sister city committee there so Phillip Tom Abtler will be at the helm of that working with Harris Webster to hopefully generate some ideas and maybe not too soon but just have a discussion council we have definitely some people on the transportation committee who'd like to be on the scooters so people have been asking just so you know the interest is there to evaluate today there was a good meeting despite the weather on the micro transit and there is a lot of research being done with land use as well as marketing and looking at it much more holistically as a demand response a very interesting group and I think I'm pleased that it's made a lot of progress out of just a narrow focus to be much more expansive of all transit users and all transit systems so it's good great can we say hello to Rosie I just wanted to use the opportunity to try and pass on some issues that I've been thinking about that I never really got a chance to to finish up we approved the certificate of highway mileage today which made me remember that the highway terrace is still in a limbo state this is a street that we have not officially accepted as a city street because of some weird stuff with the developer Tom McCartle is very knowledgeable about this and it is on his list but I just want to remind the council of this I don't want 50 years from now to have some of those issues that we had earlier this year with a different street I don't want that to crop up and so it would behoove the council that this is addressed in the somewhat near future it's not an urgent issue but it's one of those things to remember and to eventually have it in a place where the city can accept it as an official street I'm sure the residents of Ledger Terrace would love to have that solidified along those same not really the same lines but in the same discussion that I had with Bill and Tom the city owns a parcel on Berlin street that was a contaminated site that the city ended up taking under its control and doing some remediation work I believe as you're going up Berlin street it is kind of that grassy piece of land on the left and it's just a city-owned piece of land that we've done remediation on and you know kind of on Tom's non-urgent list so you know he's got some urgent things so I'm not sure that it's a high priority was to kind of look into it and see if there was anything that we could do with it at this point in terms of has it been remediated enough to be able to do something with it I think it's an intriguing little piece of land because maybe it could be at some point a city park a playground or something like that right now we're just mowing it so just passing that on keeping your brains it would you know I'd like to fully utilize all our city resources and so that's one underutilized potentially city resource can you just say where it is again it's on Berlin street I think we have it currently is number zero Berlin street because it doesn't have an address but it's like the bus shelter it's like across from 165 167 in that neighborhood it used to be called there was used to be a building there it was called the creamery huh okay um uphill from the if you drive up the hill there's there's like a can ranch house on the left and or uncle avine used to live and it's just past that cool I'll check it out so I just wanted to put that on your radar it was something that I kind of been in discussions I'm sure that you know Tom has been swamped with everything else it's not a high priority but could be an interesting thing to work on at some point cool thank you check um speaking of Tom being swamped I've just had had a couple of constituent issues where people have contacted me and had had a complaint or concern about something I've forwarded those to the manager and I'm always very impressed by the promise of the response from the manager and the other department heads actually I would echo what Jack said I got some emails that I passed along and Tom responded and sent very thoughtful responses despite being out completely straight for the last several weeks um and another thing but I forgot okay Bruno um I'm going to pass I don't have anything to report um clerk just left so he wants to come back afterwards or when he comes back he has something to say great I don't have a lot just remind you we are meeting next Wednesday to continue our conversation from last week great and then I have more to say shortly uh okay hi Tom I wonder if you want to just like pop her head into the door right there to see if John has anything to see if John Odom is there I would hate to like close the meeting without giving him an opportunity he's getting right he is also keeping minutes but if he's not there you know then sounds like he's there we'll delay 30 seconds here would you like to do you have any report there sir oh just that early voting is incredibly slow come on everybody come out but also I'm glad you made this certificate highway mileage I did not get the original handed to me to pass around so it just made me think I always vote people to give me the things so I just printed out something that I hope will do which is the image but I know you're supposed to send the original didn't get it so I would just pass this around and maybe everybody can sign it and I hope it'll be good enough works for Tom but um okay um great so that is the end of our business or in public session tonight so um do we have a motion to go into executive session I would move that we go into executive session to discuss personnel and real estate real estate and litigation litigation matters pursuant to one BSA section 317 313 313 get there A1E subsection A1E A2 and A4 there you go there's a second okay there's a second all in favor do you say aye aye opposed agreed and we will not be returning to public session there's no action to take alright thank you very much