 but thank you all for hanging in. It doesn't look like we've lost too many people. Did Matt get lost on the trip up? Oh he's um carting a child around so he'll be here in a few minutes. Oh okay. With Tom in um on the screen we have a minimum set quorum. Alright so are we ready to begin? I think we could begin. Imagine that. Yes what a great idea. So I would like to. Oh this conference will now be recorded. Well thank you. I'd like to call to order finally the South Burlington City Council meeting of Monday December 20th 2021. I apologize for the Grinch who almost stole our meeting um but we're back on and we'll start the agenda and we'll begin without a pledge of allegiance because we don't have a flag. I don't have a flag right here. Okay we have a flag on. Okay so we will begin. Chief Francis you want to start for us please? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Okay instructions on exiting the building in case of an emergency and review of the technology options. Well we are living the technology option right now with this meeting. So now that we are on the third floor of city hall folks can go out this door in either straight down the hallway to exit or around the car to exit please use the staircases as I'm sure our friends from the fire department would appreciate. For those participating on go-to-meeting just a reminder that we are monitoring the chat for technology questions and if you would like to speak up but if you would like to provide content comment please indicate so in the chat and we will call on you and you can turn your cameras on to be heard. Okay thank you. Item three is the agenda review any additions deletions or changes in order of the agenda items and I'm going to propose one change in the order and that is once we complete this we'll go down to item nine the resolutions recognizing the contributions of Fire Captain Micah Gensinger on his retirement since they've been we're already half an hour late so we'll end there and the fire department is here so we'll switch that immediately following item three. Are there any other changes or and I would just note that a council member Emery is in Europe visiting her family and Matt Coda is being a father and picking up one of his children and he will be back shortly and then we'll have four easily and Councilor Chittenden is on the screen. All right so if there's no changes deletion other than that let's skip down to nine I need a copy of the resolution. So this is to honor the retirement of one of our long-serving firefighters Captain Micah Gensinger does Micah want to stand? Okay usually we have you why don't we do it in this okay let's do it over in this corner so whereas the members of the South Burlington City Council are celebrating the outstanding service to the residents of South Burlington by Captain Micah Gensinger and whereas Captain Gensinger has served as a career firefighter in various capacities in the department for 21 years starting his service to our community at age 16 as a high school sophomore leaving class to run across Dorset Street to respond to emergencies and whereas while matriculating at the University of New Haven in Connecticut he commuted back to the city on weekends to attend training and run shifts and whereas Captain Gensinger was employed as a career firefighter a firefighter on December 26 2000 and was promoted to lieutenant in June 2005 and to captain in December 2017 and whereas the community has benefited from Captain Gensinger's professionalism leadership caring and compassion and whereas in September 2005 Captain Gensinger was one of the first South Burlington firefighters deployed to the New Orleans metropolitan area post Hurricane Katrina as part of the Massachusetts U.S.A.R. Task Force 1 and actively supported the Fire EMS department in the city of Harvey Louisiana during a time that's greatest needs and whereas Captain Gensinger was overseen has overseen the South Burlington Fire Department recruitment academy and has served as the department's training coordinator fleet maintenance officer technical combat casualty care lead instructor for the active shooter incident rescue task force program whereas Captain Gensinger increased the level of emergency services provided to city residents by ensuring that all firefighting staff are fully cross-trained in fire suppression emergency medical services and technical rescue services and whereas Captain Gensinger authored the fire department's first energy savings project thank you um to institute changes to the fire station lighting systems resulting in lower operating costs and whereas Captain Gensinger has freely given his time talent expertise and wide counsel to the fire and emergency medical services throughout the state as a Vermont fire academy instructor for 15 years i can get it while you want to retire now therefore let it be resolved that on behalf of the residents of the city of South Burlington the city council does hereby recognize and extend its deepest appreciations for Captain Gensinger's service and dedication to the residents of the city of South Burlington whose lives and property have benefited from his years of service and that Captain Gensinger has exemplified the commitment to public safety that leads to making a true and lasting difference in the community and let it be further resolved that a signed copy of this resolution shall be presented to Captain Micah Gensinger and that this resolution will be inserted in its entirety in the minutes of the December 20th 2021 South Burlington city council meeting so i present this although we want to keep it so we get everyone but thank you i'll we have this every time so he was going to take it right you're taking the backup we have that all right it's awesome yeah micah was with you tonight my wife Tara and uh our son Keegan great hi guys thank you also for your service yeah yeah exactly thank you i'm sure you're really proud of your dad in your house real question is she ready to have them all maintenance and weekends huh he's staying in the profession though right let's see influence future firefighters okay so moving back to the agenda we have item four are there any comments and questions from the public not related um to the agenda so Jeff i want to come in this of this seat here we are because i understand that's the mic so okay speak up to heavens when you speak to us uh okay well um i don't think this is on the agenda okay you're talking about planning issues or later in the meeting but i wanted to talk a little bit about the hill farm and the situation we have there and another zoning issue that i became aware of that i'd like to make you aware of okay that's not really part of the ldr's i don't think so okay it may be but i don't know all the specifics about that i'll be brief as i can um so we've been following this um for a long time during interim zoning with the hill farm we've made suggestions and comments and we have a number of concerns um and we're going to again send you a letter of just outlining our concerns again but um and we want to be cooperative during this process and we'd like the best outcome for everybody um although our concerns are you know when i said this before the uh the current zoning ignores the regional plan um south burlington approved back in 2018 talks about job growth and enterprise in that area um it ignores the city's own comprehensive plan um um it ignores the city's future land use map which shows about 50 percent of the hill farm being higher intensity and median intensity non-residential uses um it ignores vermont's own planning principles that suggests that zoning should follow the city's comprehensive plan and it puts us in an awkward position potentially moving forward if it doesn't meet the plan then act 250 appeals in the past have been based on this this issue where you end up with an appeal because your your own zoning doesn't follow the plan that's a concern we have um in terms of the habitat blocks um your own consultant has never really has never walked the land they admit that um it's up against the interstate and it suggests that it's not really a robust habitat block and and your regs don't existing the current regs that are suggested don't allow a property owner to hire their own consultant and so we will be in art right now doing our own analysis of the property for its habitat potential and we will make that available to the city um the zoning that is contemplated traditional neighborhood zoning is predominantly residential um and it um i would i would just interrupt because this really sounds like the public hearing comments that we're going to have in january i think when you started you identified there was a an issue that was not part of the ldr's that had been overlooked or something well or had come to your um attention the other well the seat i i also act as an consultant or broker for other property owners and in working with the owner of the pizza hut um with the apartment pizza hut okay and the syria ono property both of those are in the c1 r 15 um we brought forth a plan that would follow p u d a plan due to development plan that currently under the inch under these regulations are not allowed so we put forth a plan to make the pizza hut a gap station in favor of a bank and a commercial building an apartment complex 39 30 30 units and we were told that that is not currently allowed but by who by your own zoning zoning that's been i didn't know if it was the planning commission that you would raise the issue issue with someone with staff it was a meeting with staff okay and so you know spark growth principles say you should have a plan unit development here everybody wants that property to develop um and the staff admitted that they do plan to make changes so that we could do this but we're in another situation where we're going to wait you know probably another six months or so so this has changed back to where it should be and it's as staff really admits that they want to allow plan unit developments there but meantime we're forced to jerry a one acre lot um just to try to fit it in with the current zoning which doesn't make any sense at all so it's it's um a little quirk in your current zoning that doesn't make a lot of sense okay do we notice all right thank you very much and feel free to come back and expound on some of the other issues when we have our public hearing we will okay thank you thank you is there anyone else who wishes to um speak on an agenda item not on the agenda i mean to speak on an item that's not on the agenda mark gable i would um i drive a school bus for south burlington and i get to hear a wide range of perspectives of joys and concerns from uh you know preschoolers all the way up to young adults and some of those things that come to my attention on that school bus keep me awake at night at the topic that seems most worrisome for the south burlington students is global warming and climate change and those two you're angry you're angry that for generations we've ignored the signs that we were devastating our planet and they're afraid of what their future holds and if there's going to be a future for their children and their children's children they're rightfully holding us and when i say us all adults accountable and they're really and i quote pissed mostly because they believe the same adults that caused the crisis are looking to them for solutions they're growing impatient they want action now and they don't believe there's time for them to have to figure it out all of us have a responsibility to keep environmental concerns at the center of our decision making i'm hoping and our kids are demanding that we change the paradigm around how our leaders make choices us council members can make 2020 year 22 the year that climate change is at the forefront of how local government debates and determine standards for our community going forward it's a topic that needs attention at each city council meeting a concern that needs all of our attention each day i urge you as our elected leaders to take the lead now talk with our students listen to your kids take their concerns seriously look for what we as a city can do to lessen our impact on the global footprint and improve our outlook for our children's and our community's environmental future i'm hoping with the new year you'll find a way to consider the potential environmental impacts prior to any and all decisions you make as city council thank you that was that thank you i'm just curious in terms of your role as a bus driver do you overhear these conversations or do the students occasionally engage with you both and occasionally engage them in the conversations so they've got a lot to say if you ask and sometimes they've got a lot to say if you don't ask them it's a great opportunity and i seek out those conversations with my students okay well thank you very much you sound like a bus driver it's the best part of the time job i ever had i don't think i ever had a bus driver like that so thank you thanks are there any other individuals who would like to uh make a comment on an issue all right so we'll move on to excuse me announcements and the city managers report so tim do you have any announcements well uh we could go friday i attended the most wonderful senior christmas banquet dinner downstairs at the senior center thanks to recreation and parks and rebecca for uh and all the hard work of the volunteers from the high school right and servers and then we got to listen to the and how are you over there this kind of gremant mesh courts regalists with lots of uh holiday songs through masks which you know is challenging so i give them a lot of credit for doing that but it's still just really pulling everybody in the spirit and then they raffled off pretty much every point setting that was in the place right everyone walked away so it was a wonderful night and and uh sugar snap did a great job catering and uh there was just way too much food i was tougher where i regret that next time if i've been invited again i'll bring my own tougher where because the turkey and the stuffing and the potatoes and the green beans every time we go so it was great so thanks again i really appreciate it being invited and it's pretty to be there and my paper my picture was in the other paper too so yeah great okay um i was as tim mentioned i was at that dinner and really enjoyed it that was um pretty special for me because that was the first well probably the second i guess time i'd been in the senior center for a meeting we had our our leadership retreat in there as a council with um senior management but this was the first kind of festive time and it worked really well and it seemed like it had enough space for us and it was pretty cool to just walk down the hall and then be in the auditorium to hear the the music so it was really um i think we that was designed really well all in the first floor you have to take an elevator or stairs to get anywhere so it was really fun and i also appreciate a meeting the other four ladies at the table but yeah that always is yeah some new people and i don't really lived and learned a little bit of history about the city you know before yeah no those are good good events um i also uh sat in for megan emory on the airport rezoning committee they're organizing the task force they're organizing meeting met with this is painful pardon i can't i don't think so probably muted there but not i can't find them here i just found out i'm on the back want to see it okay okay keep going um the consultant brandy saxon saxon we um talked about we had a presentation um by nick longo about what the airport's um potential or tenant very tentative plans are we're talking about they've requested the planning commission to consider rezoning the area where there used to be a dog park right against the fence of the airport and picard circle there used to be homes there well they're all gone and it's that it's about a 10 acre um chunk of land and they um uh nick described what um um they they would like is to have a um a new um i guess call it a maintenance shed although i mean it's going to be pretty big i guess and it's for where they work on on the different um pieces of equipment and can store them and have a parking place i mean i guess the plows are like 100 feet wide or something so there's lots of big four of them they need some space and they're kind of stuck down at the southern end um that's the heritage um aviation and they really don't have the room to expand so that's what they're looking at um initially um but then there's other parcels that they think could be um potentially um private businesses that um could come in everything on the property would have to be um airport oriented so he gave his presentation answered a lot of questions and um it was it was a good um meeting they're going to meet about twice a month starting in january late january and the meetings are open to the public so i encourage anyone if they're interested to um join i guess they'll be um online as well so from the comfort of your home you can join and hear their conversations and there's a nice group of um members from different committees or and commissions on the city so i think there's a couple neighborhood people um the airport will always be there to answer questions too from planning commission um megan it will be the council representative and um there's a member from the economic development committee and then of course they'll be planning people to organize it so it's a good meeting um i thought and then i also had an airport commission meeting um i think you know things in terms of finances and their use of arp of the knee and all the different other federal monies they um are in a very good place um the rate of um complainments is up to 78 percent um so it's moving in their minds in the right direction to um have a balanced budget and things look pretty good they are if you've driven by the airport that front portion that's new will be the new tsa there'll be one tsa station they've gotten i don't know five million dollars from the f a a to to reconfigure and build this thing and they'll be changing some of their office space as well because that will will be taken over as people i guess move to the other end of the airport to get on the planes that um leave from the from the north end so um generally speaking i i think things are going well to the airport so that's always good that's a somewhat of an indication of maybe our economy coming back a little bit more and in a positive way tom do you have a too quick things one i tuned into the planning commission some task force that you were on there helen and i just want to say i wish the airport had been more focused and considered of their tentative plans for building structures to be focused on dampening the acoustics the la the noise i remember hearing nick longo saying that when we drop those buildings those houses that used to be there the noise envelope led further into the chamber of the neighborhood i as one counselor and only going to be supportive of any type of rezoning in that area that is considerate and focused first and foremost to restating or rebuilding some of that noise buffer that those houses used to serve i just didn't hear that as an emphasis of this presentation so i was going to comment that night but the meeting was already going too long and i didn't offer it then but i wanted to offer it here and the other thing i want to say is i apologize for not being present tonight i have some family members that tested positive and i had a cough earlier today so i figured it'd be just as well to tune in from home but thank you for giving me the floor thank you okay thank you um and thank you counsel jennan for keeping your potential germs to yourself we very much appreciate it um so just a few quick updates for me tonight one counsel heard this but for the community's update as well alana blancher and i presented the tiff substantial change request to the promont economic progress council last friday alana did an amazing job putting together that application and walking the commission through it and they approved it unanimously in the room which is great news to us for us and great news for the future of the tiff district um i also want to let the council know that um the recreation and parks department was awarded the 30 30 000 dollar accd grant um this is for the winter market on the new approved application for the winter market on market street next uh holiday season and it's part of the accd support of the recovering hospitality industry so good job to holly and alana for putting together that grant application uh just a reminder to the community and all that with the holidays coming up city hall will be closed on uh the 24th and the 31st the library is closing at 4 30 on the 23rd and the 30th the thursdays before and will be closed on the respective saturdays um and of course your public safety team will be here available for you 24 7 through the holidays as well and we thank them for that um and then finally just wanted to remind the council and the community at large that we are quickly coming up to election season and if folks are running for reelection petitions or are interested in running for election petitions are due by 5 p.m on january 24th and please for folks that are interested be in touch with donna kinville the city clerk who can walk you through the petition process and give you the forms that is all i have right i would just piggyback and put a plug in there three openings on the school board so i hope people are really thinking about um trying to join that and help us they have a lot of big questions and issues before them that are very very important and we need three more people to help make those decisions three races on the school board and two on the city council and two on the city council yeah okay um consent agenda we have three items the concerns sign the disbursements appoint chief francis is the town health officer effective january 1st 2022 and approve and authorize the city manager to execute the quick claim deed and replacement irrevocable offer of dedication uh related to the long drive subdivision easements so i would entertain a motion so moved and a second okay moved and it's been moved and seconded is there any discussion or questions yeah for item c for the long drive of subdivision easements does staff or the city manager or system and they know the details of what the drb's changes to the stormwater easements actually are you have any idea i mean i'm not that concerned i was just curious if you had any idea what it that's fine okay yeah all right tom you have any questions or no all right so um you're ready for the question all those in favor signify by saying aye aye and so it is passed um now we've megan overwork is she trying to us i don't believe megan is here megan overwork is the channel manager for town meeting tv and was supposed to present tonight and i do not see megan you are if you are here un turn your camera on i do not see her so we can table this for a future meeting okay all right so item eight then approve appointments to the recreation parks committee so um at your last meeting you considered three candidates to serve in two open positions you discussed an executive session but did not come back out into open session to vote on those appointments um so we will we are looking for that vote tonight um the applications are in your fox council only folder um and just as a reminder that's lyndon norris oliver pierce and and bravy uh and carnival i'm sure i'm fluttering well that's pretty good i think you might have missed the syllable but um all right so remind me the three candidates were all great one of them lyndon norris i guess was already on the um economic council so i believe if i recall correctly our um we had a unanimous vote to appoint um oliver pierce and and bravy ben katarama paraman salute and a second second okay any further discussion all right all in favor signify by saying aye good well those are two pretty great people they all would have been wonderful and linda i think will continue to be active anyway not just not on that committee all right so next up item 10 is the f y 23 budget for fire and ems and we're pleased to have chief very french presents that to us chief i'm assuming you would like me to show your slides do you want to come you can find anywhere i guess if over here you might make the film better tv i just wanted to give you a few folks an overview but what the budget looks like and some other comments and take in questions that you may have um so here we are this is what we're going to be doing we'll be talking about the staffing and our budget items and uh at all and uh talk about uh our emerging what we see is emerging issues for the upcoming couple of years and then spotlight some of the activities that we have going on so first of all let's talk about the department itself we have 32 cross train firefighter amt and paramedics and one city and that's our electrical inspector uh and we're configured in three divisions which is fire ems and special operations which is 29 firefighters uh configured in six fire officers and 23 firefighters we operate out of two stations um dorset street and holmes out and we work 24 48s we're here for 24 hours and we don't 48 hopefully that's not been the case this year but we'll talk about that um our our average is nine members per shift uh and we have one position currently unfunded and we kept them densely relieving uh we will have another position that will be open and hopefully we can get that filled in the fire marshals office we have a fire inspector and uh electrical inspector and then in the administrations there's myself who wears many many hats now including the uh health officer i intend to make that last one a very short tenure uh as i have quite enough to do so let's talk a little bit about what our activity is we talk about sometimes that you're sirens in the street all the time uh this is our numbers as of a week ago which is 4140 calls we're over 4200 calls now um of our call volume fire fire and hazard mitigations 1400 calls are about 35% of our call volume last year we had 63 fire incidents 16 structural fires we had three civilian injuries three firefighter injuries and our property losses about 1.1 million uh for a comparable city of our size these numbers the numbers of fires and property losses is very very low and it's because of the good work of the men and women of the fire service i can typically get to the house in under four minutes can i just ask you is the hazard mitigation does that include like a car accident where there's gasoline that's spilled yep it would be a hazardous material spill okay we do a lot of smoke and co activations i have actually have those numbers if you're interested in them but that's the idlh atmosphere which is immediately dangerous to life and health that's when we go into a building and we have one of four or five gas right on cue um to to go mitigate a hazard we may need to evacuate this the area the area of the gas uh or and and render assistance to individuals those have been on an uptick and the reason they're on an uptick is because nine years ago we adopted a very strict smoke and co standard so we're catching things now before they become a major issue we're catching things when they're 40 parts per million rather than 1200 parts per million and co which is significantly different so thank you um on the ems side of the of the world uh we have uh as a week and a half ago we had 2,575 ems calls that yielded 2,100 people uh transported we're up closer to 20 we're a little over 2,200 now uh there's 65 of all our call is ems related and uh of the uh 2,106 people that we were transported 49 of those people needed some sort of level of advanced scare which is why we have advanced EMTs and paramedics we pay for to get these people basically the emergency room to their house and it makes a substantial difference uh the folks had resuscitation this morning they had one yesterday and we had a number of successes with uh people who have overdosed and were technically dead until police and fire showed up and get them in our can so our ability to get to people in a very short period of time is pretty critical but you do those do you determine or find out if someone is um vaccinated against coven we do that's actually part of the screening that we do with all our patients now there's uh the department of health regulates the emergency services uh requires that as a question now uh to take a look and see how many people we are seeing coven i can tell you that as of september we'd seen uh 48 people with coven we're pretty we're seeing people almost every day with coven like uh symptoms and that's something the public needs to remember this pandemic is still here are most vaccinated or is it but it's following the state trend of about 70 30 70 not vaccinated and 30 are vaccinated and have breakthroughs so interestingly enough uh you know as you look at these numbers about 470 patients we don't we don't we evaluate we don't transport they either don't want to go to the hospital which is their right people have the right to make a bad decision or we determine through our through our patient evaluation that the person is pretty minor and and uh they can go to uh an urgent care or someplace so that we're taking trying to take some of the stress off of emergency rooms which are pretty well uh overwhelmed at this point i just have one i'm sorry i just one last question in terms of the use of our the mental health um outreach individuals um how often do they accompany you or attend to some of these no that's actually run through the police department and we don't really track how many times we have the mental but they are an asset to us we're very fortunate uh in this part of the metro area of having that type those types of individuals available to us our people are also really very good at de-escalating very good at de-escalating um and that's uh makes makes a big difference of much makes for much safer transport of a person so the police department would generate that um determination to have one go or is that something that they actually would have the uh the numbers of how many we call the street work but what's actually involved yeah my question was who calls them do do does the ems either either agency could call the fire department or police department can call them yep thank you yes and great all right on the ems side of the world continuing is that's a large chunk of our work we're following what's actually happening nationally and that's that we're the de facto primary care providers for some of our neighbors we serve and people over age 65 with the until recently we as you know we had a couple of hotels in town that took in the people who were homeless to give them shelter and they generated a lot of work for us and they had a lot of co-mobilities meaning of other illnesses involved and that kept us quite busy and we're happy to take care of them but that was stuff that was a load that was unanticipated but we were happy to take care of interestingly enough and this is follows pretty much a national trend that 18.5 percent of our residents are over age 65 and yet they account for 52 percent of the patients that we transport and that's pretty average for certainly nationally and regionally and that's just because we're older we kind of beat up our our our bodies over over the year we're on different medications now and as a result of that we see people more often as we get older gravity is not our friend we see people who fall almost on a daily basis and that's just because we are unstable or taking a different medication or maybe we're dehydrated also kind of nationally speaking we have 56 percent of all of our transported patients have some sort of public insurance so it's Medicaid Medicare or the public exchange and that really kind of affects our bottom line as to what we're actually able to recover in billables but we'll talk about that in a minute. The other one of the other the other division we have is the farm marshals office and we're responsible for building construction safety inspections you see from the numbers here we're pretty busy there's only three of us actually two and a half of us are taking care of that piece of the pie and between the building construction and electrical inspections they're pretty busy we try very hard to get back to our people who call us within a within a business day so that you can give them the good service or the tax toll so it's like in our revenues as we move along here we're kind of on we seem to be on track with our with what we're projecting for revenues which is about half a million or so in permit inspection fees and about $750,000 in the ambulance fees I did make a note here that COVID continues to impact the fee collection through Medicaid and Medicare if you remember we said that 56 percent of our people have some sort of public insurance Medicaid Medicare sets what you can bill for okay and they also have reduced the amount that we can bill for so on something that might be a standard BLS charge of $800 we're only recovering about $370 so that because of the federal rules is really what it is that's just something to be over that's and we're predicting that our we're projecting rather that our revenues from inspection services will be pretty flat that could change we are potentially talking with a couple of very large projects including the beta project and 330,000 square foot manufacturing facilities but we don't count that until we get permitted so what does our next budget look like so code is really kind of thrown a wrench into our ability to get our people trained we've had to do things differently as a result mainly because the training facilities are closed so just like this council we're using virtual training opportunities to get our people recertified but still you have to get out and operate the equipment or operate in an environment that you're going to be expected to work in we're using the ARPA funds purchase a new ambulance that's been deferred for a couple of years and we're using ARPA funds to reestablish the some of our firefighter personal protective ensemble that's the turnout gear that the men and women wear to fires it's good for 10 years we have stuff that's timing out and at $8,500 a set every firefighter has to have two sets the chunk of change so we're glad to have the ARPA funds to take a look at uh be able to correct them so what's coming up what's coming up next I'd like the term ensemble federal term not right exactly um Tom has a question Chief Francis good to see you uh so I was wondering if you could elaborate on that that you say a new ambulance uh I know since I came on council it's always been looming in the background the second ambulance I'm assuming this is a replacement ambulance and we're not yet at the place where you're coming to us suggesting we need a second ambulance but I want to add to that question in the numbers you just presented I remember in years past where you showed longitudinally how those numbers have evolved and increased over time do you have any commentary on the second ambulance and whether or not this is a replacement one and what you're thinking is in that regard so the the monies that are projected out using the ARPA funds that were projecting use for the ambulance is to replace the current ambulance that's six and a half years old we were going to be talking next year uh with some long-range planning about getting a second ambulance that we're we're at that point very quickly where we need to do that and I'll add to that in saying that one of the interesting things in running the numbers which was old we knew intuitively but until we did all of the data research and all our requests from mutual aids last year was 465 incidents and most of those are EMS and this year was 600 657 that's up a couple hundred that's a lot of mutual aid coming into the city most of that is driven by EMS it's done by the Vermont Air National Guard that took 273 calls we've actually given them a district there are five million dollar asset that sits across the airfield they're equally trained as well as we are what would be a 11 minute response for us they can make in three so we work in partnership with them to make sure that our citizens in the east end of the city have a good response EVM is probably our largest EMS provider they take last year they took about 370 EMS calls that we would make sales one of the things we have happening in the city is simultaneous calls we may get two three four five calls in a row and units can't clear that quickly so that's why we use the mutual aid and we have a very resilient mutual aid system but we want to make sure that we're not overusing our neighbors as we move on and the city begins to grow and that actually leads into pretty nicely into making sure I just we pulling data out of a 25 year old system is challenging especially the platform that we use is being phased out and we're looking we will be looking in January to start working on a records management system that is up to date and much more user friendly and we can pull better data out really what we need to pull out is usage data on individual response units and to Tom's question that's what will dictate the talking to you folks about getting a second ambulance involved that's a much longer conversation but that's how that works you have like interfaces in the fire trucks and in the ambulances that are real-time that communicate back to whatever database is collecting this we do not now so it's always after the fact always actually value you key something in somewhere right so what who did what are the cutting edge departments have right now they have mtds that will give them information well for that let me back up they have a dispatch it all starts with dispatch yeah and I'm sure we'll hear more about that as we go on but the dispatch is actually our first point of contact public and the more information we can get from this from the caller as to what kind of assets we might need we can actually turn around and determine whether or not do we really need an ambulance to go or could it potentially be an aid car is it something that we need to respond to code 3 because it's emergent or it says something that can wait a little while and when asset when assets free up if we're very busy we can go get addressed their concern later so and I'll actually talk about that and some of the spotlight stuff because we've had some work done by our captain specifically captain Corbin to work on some of dispatching as much as we can without a regional dispatch system here so then moving on an emergency in emerging issues we need to re-establish the deputy chief's position I wear six hats right now and I can only juggle so many balls and I really need somebody to work with in conjunction with start doing our long-range plans for the department we're behind to be very frank we're behind and we need to catch up and the men and women of the fire department have been working their tails off through COVID to make sure that the public has served properly and I'm extremely proud of them but as we look at this we're looking at we're using the same number of people as we did 18 years ago to cover 50% more calls 56% calls so as we move forward in 24 we are going to have some very serious discussions about how to grow this department incrementally and continue to meet the needs of the department council code I apologize for a minor emergency but I'm back when would we last have a deputy chief position three years ago when chief Burke Chief Burke I'm looking at Sean out here wasn't she he's like no I don't want that job when chief Brent left he left in June I was interim interim chief for a period of time there's a point in January and under the old administration like okay well you know when you take the job we'll get you deputy COVID hit and that was the end of that because we as the whole city had budget constraints that we're not we're not possible so as we move forward this is one of the things that we look for and it's important for succession planning as well yeah I'm not any younger but I'm trying to push you out at all but it is important and it's important for the department and it's important for our folks to know that we have a we do have a plan in place when I was out for 120 days we get captain step and fill the position and very nicely did a wonderful job under some extraordinary difficult circumstances and when as we look at this incremental growth we have to look at how we're going to get firefighters and how are we going to get people to serve this serve the public which is a challenge and also a growth opportunity for us and we need to look at how do we recruit a broader spectrum of individuals into our ranks you may not know but Williston is looking to hire nine Burlington's looking to hire 18 eight rather that's a lot of people in a pretty small area to be able to recruit firefighters and and that's part of the reason why we need to have a long term plan that do we split out and have a separate EMS branch of people who don't have to have all of the skills that these gentlemen in the room have is a very highly qualified individuals and they do a fantastic job and they've been working their tails off horse and they're supposed to work about 2,700 hours they've been working 3,500 hours a year for the last two years so as part of the discussion included looking at that kind of regionally like the dispatch since there's so much mutual aid you're sort of yeah there without so I guess the question is is we have about $15 million to look at a metro system and maybe we should be in the long term in the long term maybe we should be looking at that and we've had moments to be able to study that but that's a very long-term project that's 10 to 15 years out and it's a big big political decision by the various boards to understand that so what are our spotlights what do you got well we've been able to hire three or four positions that which has been very important for our folks as I said they generally work 2,700 hours a year they've been working 3,500 hours a year so they're they're looking for some some some breaks here so that they can spend some time home so they can do rest refresh recovery and rest periods the department in spite of all the work that these folks have been doing they stepped up to the plate with COVID and said we want to be able to vaccinate our communities and this is a huge deal it's not just South Berlin it's all over the state that our firefighters have been going out and after taking for some of us some special training you know 583 additional hours of going out into clinics and putting needles in people's arms to keep them safe about 4,800 Vermonters or so have gotten shots from our firefighters and we always encourage our firefighters as to other fire departments and EMS groups to make sure that the people know that firefighters and mentees are giving them their shots interestingly enough a little sidebar here I got a call from a gentleman the other day that his son missed his vaccination and he called the firehouse and he said I know you guys give vaccinations I want to bring my son by I had to explain to him that while our personnel actually inject people in oculi people we do not have the vaccination in-house to be able to give that and finally as I said with lacking a regional dispatching system again in particular Captain Corbin spent a great deal almost a year of time working on an apparatus response plan to try to limit the number of resources going emergently to calls so that we can work with the dispatchers get better information and still get people of the health that they need to get folks not have our trucks running through the city emergently which is a risk for our people in the public any questions for the electrical inspections I mean do you make more money proportionally off of large commercial buildings versus individual single-family homes or is it relatively just pro-rate in the sense of the amount of time to expend inspecting versus the number of wires or whatever it's oddly enough when when we adopted the electrical inspector here seven years ago we decided collectively that we would follow the state permanent permitting process and fee schedule one of the things I think that we need to talk about down the road is is changing that permitting piece we're our electrical inspector is giving a great service and people are getting it for cheap like $70 a permit and is that for single-family homes or for large that would only be for multi-families or rental homes you don't inspect single families you do not know what is that it's a decision that the board made nine years ago when we brought when I came on board as a fire marshal to just look at what the what the state looks at multi-family and and rental properties Burlington is one of the few municipalities that does all both meaning all properties um they also have uh what it's 11 people now to do those types of inspections because they do minimum housing inspections as well is that is that a loss I think in terms of of safety for new homes single-family so in a development where there's a hundred homes or single-family homes you don't check them right you do not and um as a professional I actually have a problem with that you know I see the gamut and really the advantage of the fire marshal's office and what the work that the men and women the fire service it's not just three of us doing the inspections there's 29 of us or 32 of us doing inspections and in reality and we have the opportunity to take a look at multi-family homes and rentals and know that they meet the minimum qualifications and there's an argument there as to whether or not a municipality should be kind of the guarantee or how a property is made um and put together but um I can tell you that I've been in myself and the fire inspector have been in properties where we have a duplex on one side and it's perfectly put together perfectly put together and a single-family home right next to it same group of people working but because they know it's not being inspected it's not up to the same standard so how can we change that that's up to you folks in city council yes okay only not extinct sorry it's up to your professional staff to bring you information and data and recommendation but if that's a recommendation you would like to see I'd like to explore it bring me that yeah I will tell you that it's it's personnel it's it's very personal have personnel heavy right and that and that's a decision that we can certainly give you the information then you have to make the determination so if that's something that you would like to do part of that question the fact finding would be what's the breakdown of single-family homes versus condos multi-family I actually have that information I didn't bring it with you yep for the regional planning commission just put a study out on that what I'm going to share that through extra questions how much can you bleed over from electrical inspection into other types of inspection of the new construction uh the national electric code is pretty clear as to what what it's designed to look at yeah um and uh while there may be elements that bleed over a little bit into plumbing uh or HVAC we really try to stick right Jim tries to stick very close to what the national electric code says firewall specs between condo units is that in your preview as well yes that is that's build that's the building inspection that's one of the hats I was as a building inspector that's because I think something we all look for yeah it's not myself it's ed if it's not me it's the firefighter look next great any other thoughts questions any other questions tom do you have any didn't it no okay I have more but I'll talk to you another time okay because we have to keep going I guess we can hear from you sir yes yeah I was gonna ask the chief to introduce all the leaders that are here what's up Brad the tillio is uh union president Brad do you mind sitting over there so the camera can not at all get you please so the public can see your face very part of it up your eyes copy your head right is this corner okay I think that's perfect we can move the camera so please thank you to the city's leadership team and city council for the floor this evening I have a few comments following uh our chief francis's budget presentation that I would that I would like to share uh as the chief already has kindly introduced uh I am an employee of the city I work for the fire department I currently am the president of the south brongton career firefighters association I was raised in south burlington and attended our school system graduating in 1993 I am a second generation firefighter tonight I'm speaking on behalf of the uniform men and women that serve your community I've been an employee of the city for over 20 years I care deeply about your fire department the employee morale within the south brongton fire department is the lowest I've witnessed and been a part of in my career the COVID-19 pandemic is not the primary driving factor in this equation certainly we have all read how the pandemic has impacted healthcare workers firefighters police officers among many other occupations some of whom are sitting in this room this evening however the primary influence that impacts this story is the ongoing need for staffing I'm deeply concerned about the fire department and I'm asking for your attention your fire department is in crisis this trajectory has been looming in the shadows for the last three to five years but has since risen to a concerning level over the past 18 months we have lost eight paramedics through attrition since 2012 critical management and administrative positions have been eliminated we have lost an administrative captain's position we have lost the deputy chief's position as chief francis has already discussed we did not replace we did not replace an administrative assistant position the current proposed budget seeks to unfund a 30th firefighter position the chief has previously spoken about the city of berlington and the town of williston what I would like to add is the proposal that has been approved in the town of williston has followed an independent study conducted by a third party I would encourage the city of south berlington to engage in discussions for data driven decisions chinan county growth from 2010 to 2020 has been reported to be 7.5 percent growth in the city of south berlington since 2010 is 10.37 percent approximately 2.87 percent increase over the chinan county average the 2020 census listed the south berlington population increase of 13.3 percent our city ranked second in the state of vermont and population listing our population 2021 at 19,761 we have recently reported a 1.4 percent increase to the grand list our current our current emergency incident total is 4,190 slightly below what chief francis slight reported earlier this evening as a reference point our incidents in 2010 were 2,627 we are currently responding with the same number of on duty personnel and when I evaluate this I look at our minimum manning staffing of 8 in 2021 compared to 14 years ago in 2007 with a 56 percent increase in emergency incidents our projections this year are estimated to be to be between 4,200 and 4,300 incidents my estimations are an 11 to 12 percent increase in calls for service from 2020 as we analyze this historical and current data we're left with a story that clearly identifies factors and explains reasons for increased employee fatigue and burnout which ultimately influences higher employee turnover and as we have experienced costing the city more money to invest in future employees the greater number of hours employees have worked serving this community which has been a direct result of lower than necessary staffing levels has created an atmosphere rich in sleep deprivation employee dissatisfaction and mistrust let me acknowledge that running calls while the rest of the world is asleep is inherently part of our job we all understand that and own that sleep deprivation is linked with increased errors and tasks requiring alertness vigilance and quick decision-making a study by jacklyn to me and printed in firehouse magazine found that sleep deprivation is medically linked to the leading killers of firefighters including heart attacks cancer and suicide rather than to respond to the city with frustration anger and disappointment i recognize the need for better communication and i'm asking the council to reevaluate the proposed fire department budget as it relates to staffing specifically 29 firefighters and your obligation to honor our collective bargaining agreement the future of your fire department is in jeopardy we must recognize this and find creative solutions to address these needs i imagine chief berke will also talk about how public safety is losing employees through retirement and attrition at a faster rate that we can replace them i understand and respect your fiduciary responsibility to the citizens of south brokington and i thank you for your service to this community thank you thank you any other firefighters wish to make a comment or would you like to know who's here would that be possible that would you want to introduce your leader yeah certainly starting over here uh roger pigeon senior firefighter against dnp spooner senior firefighter fire inspector uh captain chris corvin firefighter enp lieutenant rats tillio uh who's a firefighter paramedic uh and station station two uh senior firefighter erik ballard member of our executive board senior firefighter paramedic nick perkoff who's also a member of the executive board uh next to him uh with his n95 is uh senior firefighter chad pool against d&t and next to him is our newest department member one of our new people uh fire fire recruit firefighter uh alex mccarthy boy almost almost didn't pull that off alex well thank you all for your service thank you any other questions for the board on this i understand the concern expressed by um firefighters about staffing my thought and thought i would be close to keep that as well how do you recruit today younger people to join the fire service or or paramedics or police what is the tools that you have or other communities that have had to convince more young people to to take this up as profession yeah interestingly enough this generation of people that would be eligible they think differently certainly than i do uh and we need to find ways to do that and actually that our most successful way uh has been a number of the folks here in the in the audience number our firefighters are also fire and academy instructors uh captain genzinger who as you honored tonight was the uh was this recognition uh as also lead instructor captain corbin's lead instructor i'm a lead instructor in the fire academy we talk to people we literally go and talk to people about hey this is this is a job that may be for you um there's a lot of training that has to come in before people can even come in uh in the door it's about 140 hours of training an emt is about another 180 hours so we're requiring people to come in the door uh with the with a lot of invested interest in the department of their own time and even their own money um this is where uh potentially your regional approach for running a fire academy for people who maybe have never experienced the fire service in the past would be we could be beneficial but that's expensive you have to acquire gear you have to get instructors and a time commitment to kind of introduce these people is it worth it i think so but that's how how we have to one of the things we found nationally and even locally is if you don't ask somebody to think about the job they won't think about it um so it goes into walking into the high school and talking young men and women and saying are you interested in being a firefighter uh if they're have an interest in the uh and already started with outside organizations uh then you try to recruit them um to to come to the city and work as a professional firefighter a career firefighter uh and get paid for their uh for their time and effort and energy so does that answer your question i know the guard has the same problem yeah you're frustrated by your ability to get new people it's not insurmountable i think we just have to think out of the box just go straight across the street you got this huge resource of almost 18 year olds yeah uh if we could figure out how to do it off of a iphone or a laptop right but there are there are elements of that now that weren't available before that uh can open some doors of opportunities you have any kind of program where you invite potential people to come over and visit the fire station and see what it's about with covid no but uh but like i said when we're out doing our classes uh we certainly talk to people those people already have shown an interest in and serving their community and and becoming a firefighter at least in their own community we have very high standards for our firefighters and it's a lot of work and it's a lot of maintenance and it's expensive for for community to do that okay good question well thank you very much thank you and again thank you all and we wish you a wonderful holiday i hope it's a quiet one for you with no calls but you know that won't be the case so right so as we move forward Helen um if i can i should have said this in the beginning um just a reminder to the council and to people watching in the public that linked on the council agenda is the website that hosts all of the budget information so if you want to be looking through the actual line i don't know about budgets or anything like that it's all on that website that's linked off of each other great well chief Burke you're on the hot seat now yeah that's very hot though i know chief i'm it's me you want me to share your presentation as well yes please in the first slide we're good to go yes we are thank you excellent no thank you for this opportunity uh to be here to talk about our budget proposed budget for fly 23 and thank the manager for the structure of this of this process that's made it quite easy as a department to meet the objectives in an efficient way so um i enjoy being here i think it's important obviously to start with the overview of who's actually doing this work at the police department we're uh one of the largest city departments carved into essentially three buckets if you will we have our dispatch center which handles emergency calls for both police and fire we have our community justice center that's doing a host of restorative work parallel justice work and victim support upstairs and then uh our supporting roles of civilian staff in the records division and our executive assistant currently we have a roster if you will for 39 total police officer positions we are unfortunately carrying four vacancies which is about the industry standard nationally 10 percent reduction through attrition is what where law enforcement is at compounding this a little bit is we have uh one of our police officers that is deployed with the army national guard currently and we see a lot of crossover with folks that serve in the military and serve in public safety it's it's like minded we're proud to have uh officer lame away but it's a tough you know a tough situation to be in we also have one officer that's on uh long-term medical leave uh anticipate you back rather shortly but what that represents is a 15 shortage in our sworn uh sworn officers who are available for deployment in our dispatch center our census is full we have seven uh full-time positions in the center all seven positions are uh are occupied the seventh dispatcher is actually finishing up her training and will be deployed to the evening shift i think council remembers uh a management certainly does when we had the incident at the university mall last february it quickly uh quickly shown the light on the dispatch center not being adequately staffed for what is a major event and what we're actually seeing in terms of growing call trend complexity of operations in the center so it'll be good to see what the seventh dispatcher does in in terms of expanding that bandwidth and determine where dispatching is going to go whether further investment is going to be needed to be made on a local level or perhaps in the future uh the regional model will be stood up in the community justice center we have newly hired an executive director uh joseph levonway who grew up here in south brolington he has a uh staff of two both are part-time positions and again they're doing uh the restorative practice with referrals on criminal cases parallel justice work which an easy example of parallel justice is if you had so your car window broke or something like that in the cops had zeroed in terms of lead the center reaches out to those crime victims and assists them with deductibles and things of that nature another important component of their work upstairs is through their outreach to domestic violence survivors and making sure that they're connected to services to talk a little bit further about operations on the next slide the dispatch center handles in terms of incidents that are documented in the records management system about about 16 000 total incidents between police and fire each year i use a five-year averaging so it's not exactly on point of what we've seen uh as fire illustrated they are seeing a peak in their incidents post pandemic we've seen a little bit of reduction in our incidents mainly related to our proactive activity but i'll talk a little bit more about that detail in a future slide the police department in responding to an average of about 12 000 incidents per year many of those are criminal in nature we're making about 800 referrals to either the center the community justice center or to district court that represents about 800 arrests a year and the sworn members of the police department are assigned to patrol detectives in youth services a point about the community justice center in their funding sources the cjc as it's called the primary fiduciary is the department of corrections the department of corrections has intimated that funding may need to be structured differently moving forward i just wanted to kind of bike rack this for now it's nothing it's nothing imminent that we're aware of but it kind of a strain that we've seen here is that the department corrections is more focused on people that are on supervision and that need to be re-engaged with the restorative process what we do with our center the south point of police do so many direct referrals so those folks are diverted from the system and then they're subsequently not on probation not on parole and off of the department of corrections really radar so but they don't see whether or not there is a recidivist that you know a cycle of recidivism there or not but those will be conversations going forward with doc and other partners next slide please a little bit about the data trends it's interesting looking at what's going on in policing over the last five years an interesting metric that i like to keep track of as a measure of traffic safety is our crash rate you'll see that illustrated in the yellow line so that yellow line has been decreasing i think 2020 is a bit of an abnormality because of the pandemic it looks like it's going back to a normal trajectory what i left off this grid because it skews the the other axis is the number of traffic stops that the police department's been doing over this time the number of police traffic stops has reduced from about 5000 per year to about 600 a year with no effect on our crash rate so that'll be an interesting metric looking you know going forward but uh it's definitely something that a lot of police agencies are looking at especially in terms of the disparate outcomes with the with operators another uh element that i wanted to kind of highlight on this on this graphic is what the cops are actually doing with their time so uh the blue line represents criminality and our leading crime types in the city over this five-year set really have been retail theft larceny which is just theft burglary activity breaking in the places and and stealing stuff domestic assault and stolen vehicles and as you can see uh again we're on a street upward trajectory until about 2019 i think that downward trend is more related to the pandemic than anything else and now we're seeing that sharp trend upwards what that means is officers are spending more time on more complex incidents especially when an arrest is made the hours that that are needed to process the evidence interview and collect all the evidence write it on an affidavit refer to the prosecutor's office get that reverb submit additional follow-up material and then filing a criminal charge just those occurrences are far greater so it really reduces the overall officer's availability for proactive patrol so when i mentioned traffic stops i think really our reduction in traffic stop is less about the officers opting not to do that work and more about all the time that they're spent on other more important cases another uh element that is definitively impacting police service is the manner in which or the frequency in which we respond to those with unmet social service needs although we do have our strong partners in community outreach oftentimes the police are still the initial responding entity to incidents of intoxication drug overdose suicidal persons and welfare checks and as you can see on that as the green line depicts that that has been a steady trajectory upwards i did kind of eavesdrop into uh chief francis's question session i don't have the howard data to tell you right now how many calls community outreach is responding to i know i do have it on my desktop back at the office they are responding to hundreds of calls uh in the city i think we are the leading actually leading use use agent of the community outreach team and many of those responses are co-responses police fire then we summon community outreach but we have been trying to use community outreach ahead of those resources when we can do so our dispatch is really good at trying to find a team member to deal with incidents that they know do not need a public safety response i'm just asking what is the issue with welfare checks are they stolen or no so welfare checks are simply someone calls in the police department and says there's a person staggering down wilson road and they were driving by oh i was thinking that's like the welfare payment and i was trying to think what is the issue all right silly me yeah so many many early drive by observations uh other really common is someone's based on despondent or depressing remarks on social media and we have to go and check on those folks or i haven't seen my neighbor in a while and other newspapers are piling up yep okay thank you next slide please man thank you the proposed f y 23 budget actually represents a return to the funding levels really in f y 21 restoring training and equipment when you look down our budget lines it's not shocking at all that once we pay for salary and benefits of employees that there aren't huge pockets of money to take from so last year with the 1% guidance from council we really had to dip into our training budget that was a you know it's a larger body of money typically we brought it down to 25 000 a year we've asked for it to be restored this year that's really essential for us in order to be progressive so last year we were able to meet all of our state mandated requirements we're able to keep our certifications we have a lot of in-house expertise that we can rely on but when we think about ways that we really want to be innovative and cutting-edge that's where we use the extra training dollars and also to that to that extent some equipment investments i know when i first came here we uh i spoke with council about a number of the different uh equipment needs that we were going to have as we were we evolved our training platform into the integrating communication assessment and tactics and that's about really containment and isolation and we needed to make investments in in simple things like ropes to hold door shut ballistic shields to stand behind all about creating that time and distance which that's de-escalation time and distance and then infusing resources and communication that's de-escalation defined so we're anxious to get back to that level of funding and kind of that level of progressive thought and action a very exciting budget item in the FY 23 proposal is our investment in the body-worn camera technology i've got a slide kind of dedicated to that to really kind of flesh that out we also have earmarked ARPA funds to invest in three new dispatch radio consoles which are a critical need i have a slide dedicated to that another opportunity related to not only service to the community but as a recruitment portal to the police department is a small amount of funding for two part-time positions for a parks patrol division for this would be restore essentially college age kids summer employment working part-time on bicycles that we already own using radios that we already own to patrol the paths because you always get an ambient of deterrence anytime you have an official they would be equipped to call us if it actually elevated to a needing a police response and it allows for an opportunity for us to get to know prospective employees and perspective employees to know a lot about the organization and it's also something that we've heard a lot from the community about that desire to deal with those quality of life issues if you will and then lastly on this slide is in this budget would be an investment for two new patrol vehicles looking at actually investing in hybrid technology disco around we had talked about it in previous budgets but due to the constraints and needing to bring it in under a certain number it just didn't seem logical to make the investment in the hybrid cruiser technology that was available forward yeah the explorer or yes yeah and it goes to the m miles per gallon a little bit yeah essentially when it can run on electricity and it doesn't have to idle it's not pluggable it's just like it when you slow down it charges battery a little bit and you you go back and forth with battery okay yeah it's like gen one hybrid technology that's okay that's okay it's okay it's a step in the right direction it is and actually kind of the break in the action allowed other for my agencies to buy them and try them so we actually know that it's a successful yeah and so we all will try yes thank you and a project that we're all very excited about at the police department is an investment in an axon solution what we have now is a cruiser camera deployment and cruiser cameras they were kind of the first cutting edge of this technology but they're very limited and since that you get whatever wherever the car is parked wherever the car is aimed you can see that field if the officer gets a little bit too far away from the car where the body might the radio transmission may be interrupted in that last investment was made in 2014 here in south perwinson that technology has reached end of life and is actually dying so we're at a point where we're going to invest in the axon solution and what axon offers is a body camera deployment cruiser camera technology that's fully integrated and they're also the manufacturer of the taser device that we carry so not only is the platform fully integrated and very intuitive and when I say intuitive I mean when you throw on the blue lights both camera systems turn on if I arrive on a scene and someone's running their body camera that body camera will turn my body camera on all the evidence is cloud based so we don't have to worry about physical servers any longer we don't have to worry about producing digital media any longer we can send links out to our partners at the prosecutor's office there is full redaction software completely baked into the cloud that we will have to use in order to redact the face of a video just like we do the face of a document and it allows us to provide a very transparent portal into our operations and it's really what communities expect I think actually that our neighbors would be a little surprised to know that we don't have this technology and we're very anxious to give this deployed in hope to here in the first part of 2022 how many systems do you need to buy for the police was it 39 I mean everyone gets their own and so that is that is the unfortunate side of it so it'll be 12 cruiser cameras and 39 40 cameras essentially for a spare because what happens is each one is licensed and assigned to an officer and in order if we were to try to do say like half that fleet someone would have to go in every time in the software portal and reassign that camera to that officer and and doing our research we learned that that is really susceptible for errors and not a great way to proceed because the hardware itself in terms of the body camera is a few hundred dollars all the cost really in the project is in the licensing and the cloud based storage complicated here in vermont is our generous public records law and how long we have to keep that data so we have to subscribe to like the unlimited storage package if you want a big cloud how quickly is the information sent to the cloud I'm sorry to get so if you go to an incident and in your camera records you have to wait to go back to the vehicle or to the station to upload to the corner yeah so this technology there's a cradle point server in the vehicle itself okay so the cruiser camera will actually start spinning off as long as you have 5g in for the most part okay you know you um so that's almost immediate the camera doesn't begin its upload process until it's docked and they haven't really come up with a great docked it's rugged enough to be in the cruiser so most of that will be back at the station the resolution of the film is really high as well so I don't know how well it would offload if we were doing both the cruiser and and the body camera from the cradle point does burlington have axon as well they have axon too just the they have the body worn camera system they do not have the cruiser camera technology you know you know an important reason to invest in both is that the body cameras are fantastic for everything except for when you're driving the car because when you're driving the car the only thing the camera films is the steering wheel and when you think about our liability in responding to incidents or investigating DUI or when officers arrive on crash scenes that static point of data capture is very valuable next slide please the investment in ARPA funds our dispatch consoles is really a necessity our dispatch consoles were new as I understand it when police headquarters was built I think actually we brought one from from the old station over and bought two new they're at complete end of life and need to be replaced what the council does it's actually the integrated point of all the software and hardware solutions that the dispatchers need to to actually dispatch both police and fire as you can imagine reliance on ip ip switch as opposed to voice modulation other technologies has changed dramatically this investment in this hardware will not only modernize the center it will be an opportunity that if regional goes and we need some type of investment of hardware that this would be viable of women and will serve us well going forward and again essentially it is is end the life and will no longer be supported by the vendor in about 12 months this hardware be applicable to the regional dispatch yes yes some emerging issues not shocking given the prior conversation workforce development retention I think it's it's beyond a public safety problem right it's everywhere we can't find people to work for us the police department has been losing about a 10 percent of our swarm workforce every year we're only able to hire about one third of the officers needed for replacement another limiting factor that hasn't impacted us yet but could going forward is just the sheer number of police officers that we can actually produce in this state essentially we run two academies a year those are generally capped pre-covid at 40 officers per academy generally the state police get about a dozen of those seats so there there's a lot of challenges with our ability to make police officers however the disinterest in becoming a police officer hasn't really eclipsed that that phenomenon for us yet we just aren't seeing the number of applicants that we would historically it goes without saying the temperature on policing has been really hot over the last few years I feel that that's coming down I I suspect that we'll start to see greater interest in policing but I think some of that is also going to be relying a reliant on what other opportunities are out there for folks until there's an economic downturn or some other real highlight in policing I don't anticipate folks are going to be beating down the door like they used to 20 years 20 years ago you would go to the police academy and sit in the gymnasium with 150 or 200 people looking for jobs and law enforcement and that's simply not the case one of the issues I think facing our profession takes about 40 weeks to become fully trained we send a new officer candidate to Pittsburgh it's a residential program they're there for about 16 weeks and then they come back and do 16 weeks of training with us in field training before they're even released to handle their first radio call by themselves much of our attrition has been retirement related we've had enjoyed long-tenured staff at South Burlington PD others that have left outside of retirement report their reasons for leaving as seeking a higher salary a promotional opportunity more diversity and simon like we've lost people to federal entities or larger police agencies or the common stressors related to municipal policing you know I just use this opportunity to talk quickly about the proposed legislation on qualified immunity that conversation about that that inequity in government employee that is not helpful to police recruitment especially when folks don't understand actually what qualified immunity is and then the wrap around wrap your head around why does every other government actor get to maintain their qualified immunity why the police can't have qualified immunity because qualified immunity has nothing to do with with our discretion it's a standard that's used by the court to evaluate civil litigation whether or not an officer should be excused from a suit or not and this new interest in taking qualified immunity away from the police really feels like a tipping of the scale and when I when I say this this is not reform this is starting to feel almost punitive against the police so I hope that the legislative process can can see see all the negative aspects of what's on the table in that bill I can interpret one Tom just put his camera on but two I would also just take a sentence further and say what we as a collective community and region and state need to be focusing on are what are the police reforms we want to see much of which we have accomplished in the last five to ten years instead of these punitive measures but so Tom you want to make a comment just putting on my other legislative hat I just want to say your words are very meaningful uh Chief Burke and so I'm still struggling to understand this issue from many different angles but just know that I share a lot of your concerns and I'm going to look at this issue very closely and I'd love to hear more as it goes forward thank you sir and then lastly just to highlight due to our staffing situation we have had to reduce the number of officers that we have in the schools we had two officers in the schools we are now down to one we had to take Corporal Breanne Williams and out of the elementary schools and move her onto the day shift to cover a vacancy based on a retirement and we've also in the recent past September ish temporarily suspended our traffic safety position and brought Officer Aaron Schwartz back on to the patrol day shift to fill a critical need there thanks question to this school was talking about SROs have they finished that discussion yet or no no okay but you you have to pull them out if you need them for the street so yeah it's always a tough decision to make because there's things that the community wants and deserves but our raw numbers just are allowing for some of that and uh in policing you always have to bring it back to the things that we have to do the things that we have to do is staff patrol and to keep a dispatcher in the dispatch center so as we lean our operations that's what we're looking to sustain just to go back to recruitment and interest um has there been any change in the number of women who um are interested has that gone down or is that is it um seen as maybe a possibility since there's a little less competitive with so many men applying so we're in a unique position where we enjoy uh an average head count of female officers that's far greater than the national average so although we haven't seen in the few applications that we've had as of late we have not seen any new female recruits uh come to us but we do uh far exceed I think we have how many is it it's almost 20 percent women on our force which is uh really admirable so you know when we talk about ways to recruit and where do we find people and how do we diversify the force you know I think that um when people can see themselves in the people that are working for us and wearing our uniform that's important and I know recently we sent Corporal Kelsey Monroe to Norwich where she's an alum to a job fair I know that we also have a Detective Superno who's an alum of Castleton and it sounds like state colleges is going to do their job fair virtually but we're going to look to make for all those touch points to highlight what we have um I feel as though that most of our applicants are either finding us on social media or on the internet so we're making investments in our social media platforms with the recruitment in mind we're also going to look at a new uh section of our website to kind of jazz up our our appearance there and attract folks as well as with through our partnerships with others in the community with the Islamic Society of Vermont here and talking with the imam about any potential recruits that like uh be there I feel as though there's opportunities they just those opportunities having those trees haven't gone a lot of fruit as of yet thank you and uh the last slide spotlight the proposed police budget will advance the department's objectives towards operationalized aspects of the 21st century policing report in 2015 uh President Obama had a commission that studied policing that we talked about before you know amongst those pillars transparency and leveraging technology are our strong elements the body worn camera policy uh body worn camera program will certainly be a huge step forward in that regard this budget sustains our deep commitment to the community outreach program I've said this countless times we could not police without the relationship with the Howard Center and the value that they bring you know the cops are really good at responding and making scenes safe but become really really frustrated when they don't have the answers or the resources and the community outreach program has really grown to where operates handing love with us of course do we want more of course we do but is it working and are we the gold standard in the state in Chittenden County that certainly is the case uh the reinvestment in training helps advance and helps in advancing our objectives related to the use of force legislative mandates in 2021 we were handed legislation and model policy from the legislature on a new use of force standard in training metrics we're taking that um you know as far far forward from that as possible and investing in things like having instructors in jiu-jitsu and other techniques so our officers have a whole host of options when responding and forced to use physical force on a person so um this this proposed budget will help us in that regard in these investments in the department in retaining higher officer the higher officers we want to return to our service levels to meet our community expectations and hopefully by filling a few vacancies we can offer that diversity and service to the community and in turn diversity and assignment that helps retain our police officers then lastly two other spotlights include the agency's leadership on fair and impartial policing last year in early i'm sorry in early oh us early 2021 so this year we were approached by community member dr avalia from uvm mc does a ton of equity work she invited me to one of her lectures with department of children's and family and i sat through that evidence-based education on structural racism race history in our country and i knew that there was that type of education is that it was exactly what our police officers need to hear about much of the fair and impartial policing training from 2010 until more contemporary time was really adversarial and an indictment on policing as a profession and you could see officers just kind of pulling into themselves take it and then move on when you start to offer police officers evidence-based education about these critical issues their minds open their critical thought gets going and they start to understand why the part why the profession's under criticism and you can see where we've fallen down uh at times and how we can improve our service for our community and then lastly is our innovation in use of force throughout the legislative process that led to the 2021 legislation our use of force policy that was published previously is a cited reference than the model policy progressive in nature focused on the sanctity of human life and very progressive uh in terms of police use of force policy well i thank you for your leadership on that and really being willing to work with the community to find a yes thank you that that was a lot of work and i appreciate it i appreciate that any other questions yes sir you guys a status update on the slow march towards our regional dispatch center one step forward two steps back so i think the the quick overview on this is the program was essentially suspended for about a year while some fiscals were being worked out with an io opera and having an operational center in 2024 i know now the department of public safety is talking with uh fire ems and police leadership around the state about their strong desire and mission to extract department of public safety from providing dispatch services to a whole host of entities outside of chitin county why does that matter to this conversation what the department of public safety is essentially talking about is potentially providing uh funds to regional dispatch centers that will remove strain from their center apparently they have a number of proposed regional centers in mind there's four such of these things in operation in the state they know of the chitin county center and the proposal there and they're also dispatching for a lot of smaller entities across chitin county so perhaps though there will be an opportunity for some funds to come from the department of public safety to an entity such as ccpsa that will help that stand it up stand it up before that 2024 timeline but there's still a lot to be fleshed out there um you know aside from that we don't we haven't seen a lot of movement on the the regional model probably i have to assume because it's you know one it is a very large fiscal investment but to the pandemic really slow it down anything that can be done creatively with budgets any other questions tom you all set okay i don't see your cheery little face so oh there he is i'll set thank you okay so thank you very much thank you all my buddy and happy holidays to you and thank you thank your department and he'll just a quiet evening for you as well never use that word use manager okay so why don't we have like a five minute break thank you let me call back into order the south barlington city council meeting of december 20th 2021 and we're going to pick up an item 12 which is an update on the city's stormwater utility and recent changes to the state's permit requirements with tom di Pietro the deputy director of environmental sciences and david and david wheeler wheeler also from that department your first normal or superintendent yes that's right so if i could just say a couple of things tom before coming over to you so a couple of meetings ago we had a number of folks join us for public comment asking about some stormwater permitting issues so that that was really the impetus to bring you this uh tom and his team put together a great presentation both giving you a very high level reminder of what our stormwater utility is and then specifically talking about some of these permitting challenges just so you are fully educated and aware no action is needed today we just want to make sure the community and you all knew and then i also wanted to just want to have the floor thank tom again for his cooperation and naming interim public works director as we lose just in at the beginning of january so very thankful for tom and adam and the rest of the team for a step for a step enough thank you jesse all right well thank you all for having us this evening again tom the teacher and david wheeler public works um here we've got my slide going here hold on there we go okay um it's a quick overview of what we're going to talk about tonight we've got a very basic stormwater 101 overview of south berlington stormwater utility then we're going to get into i think the big part of it tonight is the state permits and kind of the different stormwater permits that have been issued for the city in the city and then we've got a couple of examples in there go over and question and answer time so we get right to what i know um majority of council probably knows this i'm gonna go pretty quick through this part but kind of what is stormwater runoff so stormwater is rain or snow melt that flows over the ground doesn't infiltrate into her to groundwater um we always talk about stormwater pollution what is that i always try to describe it like this is that stormwater pollutes in two ways the first is the obvious way that people see right whatever the water flowing across a parking lot comes into contact with and washes it into a water body or into the stormwater drainage system whatever pollutants it picks up and and that's the source of stormwater pollution the second way is less obvious and it is really just the volume of water creates a problem also what you see on the screen here is two hydrographs from a uh a one year return storm or a two inch roughly a two inch rain event over 24 hours on the left if that rain falls on open field uh with fairly uh sandy soils you get about 2 000 gallons of water generated stormwater runoff if that falls on a parking area i think it starts 4.47.3 million gallons of water is generated so what's the problem with that it results in this you see stream bank destabilization and erosion whether the sediment and the phosphorus that is reaching the stream or the lake is generated coming off a parking lot or from a stream bank it's all the same to the water body too much is a bad thing and why is it important uh well what flows into our stormwater drainage system our catch basis ends up in the lake that we all use for swimming and recreating uh that's where the water district pulls drinking water so it's important to protect that resource and no stormwater discussion would be complete without a few words about the lake champlain phosphorus tmdl i don't want to spend too much time on that but a tmdl is a total maximum daily load it's a pollution budget so for any given water body uh folks at d ec or epa determine what is an appropriate amount of that pollutant that the water body can manage and then that is allocated down to the different sources so what you're seeing here uh what was determined in lake champlain as far as the phosphorus tmdl was that the lake was currently receiving a base load about 631 metric tons uh requiring about a 213 metric ton reduction uh to get the lake healthy again so we see less of these algae blooms right we get the phosphorus levels down so the whole pie gets smaller uh the big takeaway message here is if you look you probably can't read it but the yellow piece of that pie that we hear a lot about agriculture and farms uh stormwater loss is a significant portion of this as well uh the brown piece of the pie is stream bank erosion and the red is developed land so it's roughly equal so there's a good chunk of phosphorus reaching the lake that's also from developed land so it's certainly a big chunk of the reductions that are needed what is the source of phosphorus from stream bank versus developed land uh that erosion there so all this sediment is containing nutrient phosphorus that's coming from the stream bank yeah sediments okay yeah so you know uh joe here so that's in the stormwater division he's over six foot tall that stream bank yeah just think of all the the mass of salt sure okay washed down in um pretty significant and wtf is is wastewater treatment facilities oh yeah sorry i'm probably gonna hack it in you guys and then what's the source from forest that's like that is a significant source so naturally any land use generates phosphorus it's so much forest cover is Vermont uh that when you head up that huge land use um it's significant fortune on phosphorus but anyway a lot of it is natural in the environment right not all phosphorus is bad it's too much phosphorus that yeah some good questions but you you could break the circle out into man-made phosphorus right versus and there's natural versus naturally occurring phosphorus i mean you could yeah um and so what we did is we took this i think this is from the tmdl document from a number of years back um this is sort of a demonstration oh because this is what drives a lot of the regulation kind of going forward in vermont uh there's also stormwater tmdl for our streams right and those are volume based getting back to the idea of too much water so those different tmdls get kind of pushed forward in the different rules the state passes and puts in place kind of they'll tell the story about how we got where we are and part of that story is certainly what we've done here in south burlington so south burlington city council um it's really been a regional leader the city of south burlington has been a full leader in stormwater management uh we developed the first stormwater utility in vermont one of the first in the region uh this is a very brief timeline you know in the beginning of the utility uh going all the way from a feasibility study doing the public outreach finally assessing the fees updating our ordinance hiring staff all those things kind of happened in that first three-year process to get this launched at the time the reason the whole discussion came about in the first place was really because of various legal and state permit situations um the state of vermont i'm sorry the city of south burlington found itself in a very interesting position uh because it was the municipality where there was the most permit issued in the state a lot of expired permits so the state of vermont issued these stormwater permits over the years uh the water bodies became impaired there was no way to renew them so these expiry permits just kind of lived out there and they still do we'll talk about that more in a second uh but the city had number of stormwater impaired watersheds five which is more than any other municipality in the state i wanted to just charge us to the lake so growing community and a number of clf lawsuits at the time this is kind of 2004 2005 timeframe um and so all that sort of drove the purpose behind the utility uh and really at its core the stormwater utility is a funding mechanism it allows the city to pay for its stormwater requirements um just like any other large landowner with impervious surface uh the city has obligations under those state permits to manage its stormwater runoff uh and so we own property right whether it's this building public works the roads um there's quite a few permits to get issued for all of that that you're responsible for so the utility in its core was to help us meet those requirements uh there's costly capital improvement projects so the more stormwater treatment practices we build uh that's all part of it and then the watershed planning and plan development uh is also part of it the other half of it really is just maintenance of the things we already have around the city so our storm drains uh with 65 miles of pipe we've got about 90 stormwater treatment practices that we currently manage there's many more you know privately held in onto the city um so taking care of that takes a good bit of time and effort we've got seven full-time employees uh that help us do all this right now in south burlington when you see one of the greats you know in the street that collects the stormwater or do does all the water that goes into that go into one of those ponds or some of them don't they just go into the lake depends yeah yeah originally those systems were put in place just to serve the roadway to move water away from the road from private property homes buildings whatever what we found is that it was harmful for the water bodies right so we were quickly pushing all this water to the stream causing that erosion we're kind of going back now since all the development that occurred and trying to put in between there in the discharge point right those treatment practices or find ways to get that water and soak it into the ground before it's even collected in the drainage system or the strategies we're using yeah so when you see a new development i mean i walk around my best friend lives in um the o'brien development you know so they have all those greats on all the streets and they have a stormwater pond i think there's just one maybe there's another one i don't know so would it be accurate to say that all of the stormwater that runs down the the pavement or the impermeable you know the surfaces um in that development goes into the the catchment area yes and the newer developments if they trigger that state permit threshold of one acre of impermeable surface they're going to have to capture uh detain treat that stormwater runoff there's a variety of standards um in some of the older neighborhoods that wasn't the case right okay if i say 2002 and newer goes to treatment anything built before 2002 may not okay thank you yeah um so let's see we talked about what the utility fee is for uh just some misconceptions kind of what the utility fee doesn't pay for it was not intended uh to pay for stormwater management on private property or to help private property owners meet their stormwater obligations that remains you know their responsibility uh similarly we're not doing maintenance or repair of drainage infrastructure to the town private property uh we're not settling disputes between private property owners when it comes to water related issues that was never part of our purview that's still between the private property owners and in generally speaking uh we're not set up to manage wet basements and and roadway puddles that may be generated you know that's a function maybe of paving or other projects so those were the sort of things that we created the utility originally for to to manage it was more of the big picture of permitting um watershed planning kind of things okay um shifting gears again here so that's what we're doing locally um and so the big part of what we're talking about this evening is uh the state of vermont and what the state is doing currently so we're getting our time machine here i've got doc brown already up there for you to remind you but this this slide is from 2005 a presentation that was given to council and i thought it was kind of neat it just shows at the time where things work uh so the city had 141 state permits 98 of those were expired um there was currently no legal mechanism to renew an expired permit in one of these stormwater repair watersheds which i have a map in a second you'll see it covers most of the city and that can really frustrate real estate or at the time it was frustrating real estate transactions if i was going to sell my home for pandem a real estate attorney would do a title search say hey there's an expired state permit what does that mean what's that going to cost for the buyer to you know deal with in the future um and it would be problematic for those hit transactions uh and then uh back then we said oh back in 2005 the state of rama is going to release some new regulations um and it's going to deal with this all right fast forward to today we've got that in this 2020 we got that new regulation we'll talk about that in just a moment but here's the status of those same bullet coins today so now we've gone from 141 to 198 uh state stormwater permits issued in the city all of those 198 61 are still expired so we're down from 98 and the city owns a pervious surface in 62 so there's some overlap there right it's not all the same you know uh but we're we're part of about a third and about a third of the total are also currently expired uh in 2021 there are now two ways that a property owner can obtain valid permit published in south furlough again uh the first is by going and getting a permit from the state of rama so the state issued we call stormwater general permit three dash 90 50 and what that does is it took a lot of the old permit types that you may have heard about call these operational permits as well uh these are the permits that are issued and they deal with managing stormwater sort of after the development is constructed all those are your ponds and treatment wetlands and things of that nature so it took all these old permits it rolled them under one 90 50 uh in large part due to the lake champlain phosphorus tmdl uh it added requirements for any site that has over three acres of impervious surface that was a new thing that was added um in in is part of this 90 50 permit another permit that the state of rama issues uh is the ms4 permit that is the permit there's issue to municipalities of a certain size or in special situations where there's impaired water bodies involved the state only should add directly to municipalities um this includes requirements for development and implementation of a variety of things i've got some acronyms up there uh you may have heard us talk about our flow restoration plans those were required in each of our stormwater impaired watersheds talks about how we're going to deal with our stormwater management issues in those watersheds um the phosphorus control plans that again it's through the lake it's how we're going to manage phosphorus in the city that was a recent addition to the ms4 um and then there's also a municipal roads general permit or mrgp that is a municipal permit that was issued to every municipality in the state but not ms4s that sort of got written into the back of our ms4 permit so we have the same requirements it's just inside our ms4 rather than a duplicative permitting thing um i just took a footnote there that's not the only permits that have the state issues for stormwater those are the relevant ones they also issue a construction general permit for sort of construction phase management on making sure that you know when they're building the neighborhood they're properly managing water yep how many three acres does do we have you said it great question i have a slide for that here's a picture of it yeah i've got a venn diagram too you're gonna so you don't have to digest this slide the uh the point of this slide is uh within that 1950 permit the first thing it does is establishes timelines for compliance um and so if you're outside and any kind of what you have to do but the first of the timelines if you're outside of a stormwater impaired watershed uh you can currently renew your permit under an old standard if you are an expired permit in a stormwater impaired watershed your deadline for the NOI which is a notice of intent it's basically your initial application that just recently passed on december 1st which is really what generated a lot of the discussion itself early and you've been hearing lately um after that uh in a year and a half from now there's going to be a final NOI or application that really between now and then um folks that want coverage are going to need to come in with a plan engineering plan to talk about how they're going to meet the permit requirements and then all that has to be constructed by uh june 1st 2028 uh three acre sites they've got a different scenario there different timelines i'm not going to get into all of it uh but just be aware if you are depending what impaired watershed you're in it's going to be a different time where it's going to be a different deadline but if your permit is expired that trumps all that and you have the earliest deadline there it does get a little confusing and that's kind of a day we're on the inside lake champlain watershed yeah so we're well primarily you're not expired you're going to probably in south burlington be in a stormwater impaired watershed and then you're going to be if not there you're going to be in the lake champlain uh children day burlington's day my glass is off yeah and then the other lake segments have a later day folks outside the may god my from a god comes in but also set standards for how you have to treat the stormwater depending where you are again i don't want to get too technical but um if you're outside of going to stormwater impaired watershed you renew under your old standard if you are in a stormwater impaired watershed you have to treat that one year 24 hour storm or basically that two-inch rain event a 24 hour period that's going to be the standard you have to meet uh three acre sites outside of stormwater impaired watershed they have to treat the one-inch storm uh and then if you're in the stormwater impaired watershed you have to treat that one-inch storm and also that that one year storm the two-inch storm of that what was irie uh larger uh would we determine that one to be like a point hundred year the intensities i think i'm not sure in south burlington yeah i can follow up with you on that i'm curious yeah we have a chart we charted some of our larger storms this is like the engineered model storms my Halloween 2019 yeah um the state permit allows if you can't meet these standards there's impact fees that you can pay but you first have to try to install the treatment to meet the standard and then are the impact fees like annual no one time just one time are they a pretty significant amount of money they are yeah so for the water quality um it's $12,500 per impervious acre and for channel projections $25,000 per impervious acre so it could be as high as 37,500 so the incentive to find a solution is there yes okay to get to your question uh counselor was uh in south burlington so trying to find a simple way to explain this and we thought a venn diagram might be the best way so we've got the red circle there that's our three acre sites uh expired permits are yellow and stormwater impaired watersheds are blue and these all overlap so in a lot of municipalities you know you don't have that stormwater impaired watershed circle so it's a lot simpler here in south burlington the majority of our sites live in multiple circles which again is kind of explains the complications in that previous slide what your deadline might be what treatment standards you have to meet um so again the majority of things are in an impaired watershed in south burlington anything on this one should add jay and in half their site might meet one standard and half their site might meet another standard in one section might even be in compliance i'll just note for those that are going to look at this later these numbers don't add up to the ones on the previous slide because it was difficult to put them in one spot a permit might cross watersheds for example so it might be in an impaired and then also in a not impaired portion it might have been issued a permit for a piece of it but then later identifies the three acre site so in multiple categories again it gets pretty confusing but just trying to visualize this for folks um and then here is a map kind of showing south burlington and just i wanted to show folks the coverage um and so just to orient i think folks see 89 going through i don't have a pointer but um the main takeaway here would be just the land area there you go there's 89 um and then go north south of spear street so the green is valid permits um and you updated this very recently i think right Dave so you can see the airport's one of the big blobs the upper right the northeast right yep um so those are the valid permits yellow are the expired permits and the red are the three acre sites that have been identified in the city um and then if i go on the next slide we just overlay that with storm water impaired water jets so there's five different watersheds there i don't have the lines are showing up very well on the screen um i guess i'm confused i thought three acre meant three acres of impervious it does yes so we have three acres of impervious at the oiler park parcel am i looking at his map wrong it's the red block where one of the park is i see the country club yeah um is that two uh it's a country club across from this is the we look here those that said dorset park just sort of veterans for one of the park none of the above yeah just south of it south of that is the golf course yeah that's the modern national country club three acre of our solar polygon that's that's that's golf course so there is a putting green and impervious surface it's not what the path is thank you i move a lot of path in parking areas but it was a large development it includes all the houses they had a lot of streets and rooms and sidewalks and yeah exactly it all adds up i'm there okay um so that was sort of the state permitting regime um that's kind of the first way you can obtain a valid stormwater permit if you are in need uh the other way is to work with the city uh and so we've got a defined process in south prilincon for the sea uh and the stormwater utility to take over and manage your stormwater treatment system uh you're not expected to see that flow chart but it's a linear system and flow chartable it's defined in ordinance it's stormwater flow right yeah that's on the website if anybody wants to take a deeper dive in that but there's basically once you decide or you request that you want your permit to be taken over by the city there's two parts in the ordinance the first deals with residential properties and in another instance as we take it over we manage it um and your permit coverage is provided under ms4 if it's a commercial property um you still do your own maintenance and things of that nature but your coverage is still provided under the city's ms4 um our process is similar to the state process uh basically it requires upgrades of treatment which is identified in another document we have uh in our process there's an option to pay a mitigation fee rather than install treatment or you can do sort of a combination treat some areas pay the fee for some other areas um similar in some ways well and again just quick note about the assistance that the utility provides so again we've got this process to help folks get coverage uh if they want to work with us we provide technical expertise to help explain all of this to everybody as they come in in their own individual cases uh the city also has a cost sharing policy in our ordinance so if we own impervious surface the city is self-drunk and only impervious surface we kick in funds to help pay for the capital upgrades or the stormwater treatment practice installation um and we spend a lot of time applying for and managing grants to help pay for this so to date we've obtained about 12.3 million in grants to assist with designing construction that's a big deal and i think um you i'm not sure if you've seen this in the budget book or other presentations we pulled this together recently that blue line uh was what we thought the stormwater rate increases would be in 2012 so we took that from an old spreadsheet we put it on there that's what we thought the rates were going to do going forward to meet the financial needs the gray line is from this past year and it shows actual and then what we project going forward so really which changed there is we're paying for a lot of our stormwater treatment system construction using grant funding so that is not falling on our rate payers i'm sorry e are you our equivalent residentially unit that's kind of the basis for the stormwater billing system i did i apologize i did cut that out for time but we have a whole series of slides i could do that and then the last piece of this that i have is just a couple of examples for the real world how this is is working out in south burlington uh and the first i have here is legional so uh this was a development uh it was built in the 80s issued a permit and it had a 7.8 property acres of impervious surface for the construction of 57 single family homes um almost three acres of that is road way the city now owns and it's in potash brook so in 1935 where is it oh this is off heinsberg road kind of across from butler's farms okay other side of the road okay thank you um so 85 permit expired uh between 85 and 2020 the big jump there but basically what happened was it was determined that potash brook was impaired during that time right so they couldn't renew this permit um this one is interesting too because there is no homeowner association so this development was built there's no homeowner association to gather everybody up and organize things on their behalf to yield this permit to developer polled when the neighborhood was built so in a case of 2020 the state passed the 9050 permit requirement for three acre sites which this is also a three acre site so it's an expired permit from the 80s now it's a three acre site for a new requirement um we started working with these folks to let them know what was going on because they had the permit out there so david held a number of meetings with the homeowners um the state permit indicates that they have to form an association to deal with this issue um after some conversation they decided they didn't want to do that also we you know because we work with state staff on a regular basis we chatted with them they decided that if we can get everybody to sign on the NOI or the application that they would allow this to go forward um and kind of consider them in the process of getting their compliance so that's what we've done here um we well i skipped august but we went around and on david cut all the signatures we got this submitted and um we also went out and got grant funding uh it was about six hundred seventy five thousand dollars of funding through the clean water state revolving fund the cws rf uh and that's a hundred percent loan forgiveness to help move this a number of other projects along through the engineering phase so without a um HOA just signing this NOI is that what it was yeah um are the homeowners then uh willing to have the city um assess money from them to help pay their portion that an HOA would normally do that's what we talked about setting up a special assessment district okay so that's how we deal with this if they're not an HOA and that was one of their concerns they didn't want to be forced to have to collect funds from one another they wanted the city to do that so why did you have to collect signatures because there was no HOA to sign on behalf of everyone yeah um and so the permit runs with the land okay that's for the permit yeah not for the special assessment and we're not there yet yeah okay so right now we're paying for designing through this loan okay well it's a hundred percent loan forgiveness a warm grant but um so we're gonna take care of that if you sign your assessed and if you don't sign you're not no no it just they've all had to sign right as well there's a somewhere on this knowledge the permit exists right now is basically what it is to get a permit to get a valid permit otherwise they'd have an expired permit so the state was gonna sign but then maybe they couldn't sell their house there's two different things there's so that's the advantage or the impetus to get this fixed if someone wants to buy your house and they you know oh it's expired what is this gonna cost you in the future so that hasn't been an issue that someone from fusing decides so all 57 signatures on the city we're able to sign on to this which is great so now if somebody calls up because they want to sell their home they'll call the state of Vermont and they'll say oh no they got their application and they're working with us if that hadn't occurred the state would say we don't know what they're working on it you know that doesn't kill the buyer with confidence that's great and so the next example um so I had three deadlines from earlier uh so that initial NOI our application was due on the 1st and then between now and then it required just some simple and previous mapping signature collection what we're going to be working on going forward is the engineering that's due June 1st 2023 that will put a plan in place for kind of the stormwater treatment process that are required to meet the standards the state will receive and sign off on that and then sometime between 23 and 2028 and that's when we'll have to talk assessment construction phase you know that's a separate separate phase here but they're pretty lucky that the city has this um capacity to do that apply for the grants or the loans and do the engineering work so that quote all the homeowners left with is their portion of the assessment versus they're stuck with doing it all I think I just want to underline that point because I having worked with other municipalities in Vermont South Burlington was by far the forerunner in this in Vermont and because we have the expertise on staff we have our residents are getting a much higher level of technical assistance signature collection um grant application engineering assistance than I think any other municipality in the state there are municipal homeowners in the state who are having to deal with this with zero assistance from the municipality with no stormwater utility in place so it's a huge added value that um Todd and Dave and their team bring to the residence well and I'll go quickly through these other examples for more Q and A time here but the next example is Grandview Southridge so that is a development um near uh well not too far from 575 Dorset it's on the opposite side of the road of Dorset kind of between Dorset and Kennedy the corner of the uphill area yeah near Twin Oaks no Twin Oaks exactly um so very similar uh there were two permits issued for this development again it expired uh it was identified as a three acre site very similar story except in this case they do have homeowner associations so rather than go and talk to 57 different people um I think you call together a meeting with each of the homeowner associations or maybe they all came to one meeting to get their call off yeah able to explain it to them their boards signed off on it what simpler process in this instance because that homeowner association existed um again we're working with these folks uh to get the engineering design done get the grant um I think it's the same timeline I'm not going to spend any more time on this right now and then the last is just an example I picked the blue law um so again similar story issued a permit in the 80s uh permit expired it was then identified as a three acre site but all of the impervious surface here is privately owned the city doesn't have any roads sidewalk or anything that's part of this permit so we are not getting involved uh with this permit and again similar deadlines is the other one but that's just an example of where the other property was going to be on their own now they could go get a permit or they come talk to us about come under the MS4 right those are the two options available to them for coverage going forward but this is the one necessarily we're going to go out and do design and signature collection or whatever else is necessary so is the blue wall in um city center is that part of the tip district or no it is so without a permit and I mean it's a private owner so they would be responsible unless they want to work with us I guess for really fixing that before they could sell that property for redevelopment is that or before they could redevelop before they could redevelop it it's just to be so they can still sell the property but we have to take care of it yeah it doesn't go away right so you know things can still happen but it's not like locked up it's just they're gonna have to come to some agreement regarding what that would be during the transaction so I remember the discussions about the library design right and then the initial to you know conversations about the school and the school storm water that I think Kevin Doran said that this area before this building was built where they you know worked with the school that basically all the storm water here just flowed into a ditch but over by between trainer joe's healthy living or something like that right yeah so it's great but this building and the improvements to the school property have improved the storm water immensely right by doing ground you know infiltration of the ground and what so then between that and then the the senator paperman you know designs for the rest of the city center area has also improved storm water handling right and these little pockets of people like the blue mall and now the you all I have no idea what but their condition is like same I think it's the blue mall same as the blue ball higher permit three acres right similar boat yeah well yeah kmart plaza when they went okay mark did they have to do it fully redeveloped and they made improvements that met the requirements but did they exceed the requirements to the end of exceeding the state requirements or just meeting the state requirements for that at least meeting them yeah because I remember giving some feedback in one of this meeting because I wasn't happy but at least they met them I mean they had to right fully before that parking lot just drained just ran yeah right it's on as broke right in my mind that's a big improvement right no I mean sure right so so bit by bit right as places get developed to redevelop right it ends up improving the handling of the water which is good but but this is a necessary path with everybody's got to go down right because these permits fall expires and that's how you force people to make changes and improve right okay are there any other questions tom I can't no thank you right no I guess not so just how does this apply to a member bob britt you know was on the screen and and there was a discussion about uh was that south point that is over look at spirit over look at spirit it's similar to life now in that look they're all sort of unique in a way but there's kind of there's the condos that do have homeowner associations in that instance yeah and then all the single-family homes don't have an association right they're all covered by the one permit that was issued by the state of rock for that whole development um yeah so that's part of it's similar to let's dole right without the so a lot of signatures collected for that one as well so there's good progress so then all the signatures are okay yeah it's good how many was that one do you know can we take combined there's 112 22 thanks for your work on that yeah it takes a lot so again no action needed tonight we just want to make sure you were else is really important and that the committee had some I love getting a kid on store water because I mean it's it's just amazing I mean the watershed you know to serve it right it's kind of react a certain way and we've been serving it for a long time and we're recognizing it and we're trying to rectify it a little yeah a little bit right and all these streams go into Lake Champlain right which we drink from which we drink from I know they just tell me the plant is so deep it'll never get polluted but I don't know I think that's debatable okay okay thank you very much thank you very holiday okay so now we move on to item 13 continued discussion of the land development regulations we see from the planning commission so I can again do sentences of table setting while pollen pollen come up and I believe command is also on phone so there's there's two and of course Monica is here representing the planning commission tonight there are two purposes for bringing this again forward to you tonight one is just the opportunity for you all to continue to discuss and provide direction if you want in advance of your first public hearing our next council meeting second purpose is we have completed the legal review of the draft and in doing so and you've got a memo right as this meeting was starting tonight oh yeah we're going to walk you through it oh okay in doing so found that while there are no we don't think that there are policy changes that came out of that legal review that would change the intent of the planning commission there are an aggregate amount of administrative legal changes or wording changes that we think to be safe probably warrant a second public hearing so we're going to walk you through what those changes are tonight and at that point you can decide how you would like to move forward but that's just the second public hearing by the city council the planning commission doesn't have to have another public hearing on these legal things that occur so Paul Colin who am I good evening everybody Paul Connor director of planning Zoe uh Colin McNeill our city attorney is with me and my thoughts be the court of our planning commission has volunteered as both our chair her vice chair were excuse me out of town and unavailable but she was as versed as everybody and she was invited by the chair vice chair to represent the commission that there should happen to be any questions um and Amanda Lafferty the deputy city attorney is also available on the uh on the computer here so uh as um Jesse was saying here uh tonight this is uh really intended in part to be a uh discussion item for yourselves of whatever you'd like to discuss we're also um happy to go through just very quickly the legal review um would you like us to start there um we should be able to do it very quickly yes I would I'm going to bring it up the screen do you want to sort of walk the show then okay we need to give you sharing permission no I'm just having my computer's uh been a busy day for it do you want us to follow Connor yes I'm also I'm just it's just people awesome thank you and good evening I we we uh as the as your city's legal team wanted to take a look at uh what was being posed and really just make sure that there was any um big alarm bells that were raised for us and reviewing through it and make sure the language was consistent uh references were accurate um that's the language was um cross referenced appropriately uh and you know made sense according to what the intent is we understood it uh so we we did an entire kind of read through of of this and uh it was it was very well done and you know those very little uh changes that needed to be made but there but there were some um and for the they're all minor uh and we highlighted uh two here in our memo one is that for uh conservation PUDs there's a uh there's an instance where for an elective PUD uh so if you if you're going to do a conservation PUD it has to have to have a lot of land that's over four acres uh you can do an elective PUD if you have 50% hazards uh if your if your land is essentially undevelopable for 50% of it um and the standards were a little unclear as to whether um you were able to do that you'd use the conservation PUD in instances where you had uh four acres uh under four acres or over two acres so it's a little bit inconsistent in reviewing it uh we found that the language was most consistent that it required under four acres but over two acres uh so we wanted to clear that language up and you said require but it's elective elective yeah and then there was another instance that uh that paul wanted to incorporate as well yeah the the other one was just that uh with all the various different versions of things the uh what was provided to the council on november 8th was a slightly outdated version of the building types from what the commission had seen and had approved so there's no actual change to you the document looks different but what was in fact given to you is a uh was was a older version just going through the work there those are the two main ones as um colon and uh jesse indicated uh there's a number of just little things um due to the overall timeframe the we knew going in that the legal review was going to lag a little bit um we prioritized making sure that it got to council at a timely manner so it's a lot of things like uh cross mostly cross references making sure that maps are labeled correctly um making sure that uh the areas have the correct titles to them um uh what else are there spelling there's spelling errors uh there's some language in there that just you required some clarification just could use a little bit better wording uh and we did that um and you know rather than walk through it in our in our memo to you we provided uh a step by step kind of bullet point of all the minor changes that we have made they're all indicated in the in the land development regulations you know just for uh you know reference to start off in article two section 202 we've moved to definition uh because the section which it referred to has been deleted in the revised regulation so um and then another one is you know updated cross references with civic space definitions and ro w after first use of the term right away um corrected section numbering as you go down the list it's the barely minor but our thinking really was that uh they are all minor um but cumulatively there's you know there's about three pages here of potential changes so cumulatively it may be viewed as you know maybe something that should be considered for a for a public hearing just to make sure that someone can read it and see them all just so other people can decide you know whether they want to speak to it uh so we suggest uh you know having a another public hearing on this and that's in our memo we refer to the 18th that would allow us a sufficient time to to post it in the other paper and have you have 15 days to to warn the hearing would the public hearing be um limited the second public hearing to just these changes or is it just a second public hearing on the package of ldrs with all of these little twists and and then the real substance i think it would be rid it's a it's a final hearing uh so i think it'd be really difficult to limit it to just these changes okay so it'd be the whole thing okay i just think that the public meets that clarified too so we'll get two bites at the apple i mean before us they've had a bushel already you're proposing that the second city council meeting in january to have a second public hearing is that what you said yeah that's correct it's technically the third city council meeting because we have oh i'm sorry i didn't look at the schedule third the tenth okay yeah okay your mondays are spoken for generally speaking in january and technically the 18th is a tuesday exactly that's right okay yeah okay can i ask does that make the this um once this is warned for the 18th that makes this upgraded version the one that is in effect as the draft that is correct yes as an actor tonight or once it's warned for the 18th that's correct good point so my other question i have two more questions so this legal review was planned in advance yes to be done through the whole document right and and you and amanda did this together okay so it was totally internally generated as part of a review so there was no external impetus for this just internal only okay it was internal only i think most most times uh when uh obviously i'm newer here but uh most times when you're going to have a rewrite or a large scale amendment it's going to be reviewed by by your city attorney's office sure uh and the same thing happened here so it wasn't driven by anything but in particular it was driven by the to follow our normal practice the typically uh councilor barrett typically that happens during the uh period after the when the planning commission is warned its hearing and before it holds its hearing frankly the volume of these amendments made it so that that was just not viable and then of course you know the commission wanted to get it to you in this time so that's why you're seeing the legal review but the practice of an internally generated review of any kind of substantial uh amendments is completely standard practice for this it's just normally you don't see that piece of it and then i'm just one more question sorry so um it was recently reported by bt digger that uh the still reporter group is and other little small papers are having trouble getting newsprint printed in new hampshire so if for some reason the other paper can't print for the next three editions for what it is they can't get it printed is that an issue because there are paper of choice for legal notices so i'm just going to put that out there in case it's probably not going to be a problem because we we got ours on saturday for thursday yeah i know that they're they're publishing date they still consider the date that they put it on okay um and also they'll deliver it to all their usual uh spaces like city hall will get a copy yeah but in terms of the mailing date um they're still figuring out when those will arrive for individuals but um but that should not impact for our purposes so from a legal point of view what what is the requirement to meet the state requirement to warn for a public meeting in the city if we chose the other paper does it it's going online it's not an internet publication no publication date is going on yeah i mean i i don't know if that's ever been tested in this year but um yeah just i just asking is i don't know because i've we haven't had this problem before right yeah i mean at this point as good as we can do i think you don't know okay thank you did you have a question yeah two basic process questions one is uh for the chair of the legal team which is the second the 18th the tuesday the 18th hearing is that public hearing limited to changes of which are taking place now or is it simply it's the whole shoot match no but i mean it's all of the ldr's because these will be incorporated in the ldr's we can't limit is what he said right okay well i should one very minor clarification to that it is all of the ldr amendments oh right it's not all of the ldr's yes just the amendments uh but then the second thing is so say we make changes between the third and the 18th is that is that another hearing do we have to hold it depends uh if by by statute if they're minor uh as long as they're made 14 days prior to the final hearing then no you don't have to have an additional hearing if if they're substantial as the statute says you'd have to have uh you might not you'd have to it's a warrant a final hearing on the changes but in this case wouldn't there not be 14 days between the third and the 18th so if changes were made in that window there would be a third if there was a minor change on the third which i know is just a hearing date but let's say there was a a counselor found a typo on that day that can be incorporated because that's 15 days if on the 10th the committee the council has a discussion that says we'd like to either make minor changes or major changes that would be to an additional public hearing being warranted after that right that's right Tom Tom so the public hearing on the third though really should be a genuine public hearing where we listen to the public and then we possibly might want to make changes uh to these things uh so i personally i think we don't need to warn for the 18th what we can do is have the third and then with that discussion that should generate some conversation among the council and if there are other changes in addition to these these can be disclosed or otherwise publicly available but we have until April 9th to be to to get these into effect so i don't see a reason to warn for January 18th right now instead i think we as a council should have our ears open and listen to what the public have to say on the third and look at that all of these possible amendments uh from not just a legal perspective from a policy perspective and what's right for South Burlington so i for one will will not vote to support uh warning a public hearing for January 18th today because i want to listen to the public on the third and we have until April 9th and so i just don't see any reason to rush through these very important consequential land development regulations i don't think it's rushing through i think it's giving us the flexibility and the warning i mean if there's no reason but there are no changes we don't have to have the second public hearing or do we because of these we have to have that because of these um technical changes or legal changes um so we have to have them i i think what thomas is saying and i tend to agree with him which is yes we do have to have a second public hearing absolutely because these changes we don't have to have it on the 18th however and if we have changes that we want to make after hearing public comment on the third of january it makes sense to hold a public hearing after the 18th so there's time enough to incorporate those changes into the new document well if we don't make any changes then right i i want to make changes well they have to be approved by the council yeah so if we don't get a majority to agree to any changes then we won't need that's true there'd be no reason to put it off to april there'd be every reason to get it done because people have been clamoring and complaining that we've taken so long just for you uh we're going to be clamoring and complaining all sides i suspect maybe maybe we'll be talking here sure so i think so the if you wanted to take action tonight it would be to set a public hearing at some future date in a date in a future you can also hold and not do that until um after the first public hearing but it will still be a requirement either on the third or the 10th or the 18th or into the future um the other thing we wanted to give you time to do tonight was have any discussion you wanted to have about um the amendments as they are proposed or ask us for any additional information or language that you would like to see at a future meeting of course this is a girly opportunity you can do that in the future as well um but just wanted to give you that space and i i have one more thing to share and i i realize that it's 10 o'clock and i'll try not to be too technical with it um counselors always brace yourself guys ask will speak about you know are there any side effects of of going later timeline lines so as you know when the council warned its public hearing the draft regulations took effect the second implication of that is that during this in between period the old the new and the older in effect so it's a little bit of a vortex for applicants in this time period where in order to go all the way through to get a zoning permit to construction they have to comply with everything from the old regulations and everything from the new regulations they can do the drb part of it there's a drb because the drb can look out of the draft rules but we can't issue a zoning permit until both are met so i just wanted to make sure that it was known that that is a um complex area for a period of time for applicants between now and whenever whenever you take the vote to either adopt or reject the regulations so i just wanted to make that as a sort of a known thing around timelines it does have an implication but i don't understand that ball could you comply with both when developing the regulations it's challenging what it's challenging suggests the buffer zones so if you how do you say you can't the old regulations say you can be within a hundred feet the other ones say you can't so in the instance of uh one said to you one said you had to do more than the other in terms of the buffer then if you met the higher standard then you meet it where it gets difficult is one thing says that it has to be green and the other says it has to be blue that is really difficult um so it's just an in-between period once the council takes its action to approve or reject the regulate the draft regulations then it clears up retroactively for everybody that's how that's how it cleans it up but if it goes before the DRB or the DRB looks under the new rules well just the new one right it's the zoning administrator who has to say oh okay oh but you didn't also comply with this other thing it's it's no chassis and if and if the regulations ultimately are not adopted then anybody who is reviewed under the by the DRB under the new ones gets to automatically be re-reviewed for free under the prior ones that's how it all works it's free all right so same as to me we ought to set that a date so we don't make this any more complicated than it needs to be Amanda did you I'm sorry I just wanted to speak up about um that that it's um briefly described at the bottom of the memo that we the three of us provided uh as kind of a cover so right under 24 BSA 44 49 D applications uh before the DRB get reviewed under the proposed amendments and if an application is approved under the proposed amendments it it still can't go forward because the uh we don't know yet what the DRB or excuse me what the city council is is going to do whether those will become law if an application is denied under the proposed bylaws then the applicant can hang in there and wait and find out and if by any chance um the provision or provisions that was the basis for a denial for them they can either ask for um well they can they can ask for another review under whatever was uh goes into effect that maybe that decision would be reversed so that so there is um this 150 days um is impacting uh basically what happens with applications and projects I was also just going to offer that the planning commission has discussed that once it is approved and active uh that we will we haven't officially said we would do a subcommittee but we will be watching very carefully over the next set of just like we have with the form-based code and we will be watching taking feedback um doing what we need to to um monitor any comments or any evolution that we might recommend going forward just like we we have right now harm because there's some corrections that are needed for enhancement that that can improve things so we are committed to monitoring that from the capo Matt you were gonna say something or not no okay Tom so I picking up on where I think Paul said something before Amanda chimed in on that useful point on the 150 days I I've still not seen responses after our last meeting our late executive session where I don't think my mind was functioning too well I did spend the next morning composing some questions that I still have about these I have not seen responses to those so I'm still a no on these land development regulations but I could go through and read those questions now I don't see any value in and so doing I would also just say that Sandy Dooley did compose a note to Paul Connor asking about the conservation PUD and some of the public transit things I have not yet seen a response to that either so I am a no on these land development regulations but as previously stated if majority of council supports them as is I'm sure they will get passed but for me to get to yes I'd like to see answers to those six questions as well as Sandy Dooley's question on conservation PUDs that's not for tonight that's just for the public hearing or for after right we and and the we are looking at those we had to set those aside just for for this meeting because of the review but yes we we will be answering those questions I think what what just is suggesting is that we need to set a hearing date for the 18th in order to have the the legal amendments that we were given today I'll move there I'm not suggesting you set it for the 18th I'm suggesting that you have the option to set it for the 18th you could also set it after the public hearing if if you're going to potentially make changes that night too so it's not to then trigger a third public hearing down the road I'm just I'm suggesting you could take action tonight you don't have to take action tonight I understood if we didn't set a public hearing for these technical I'm going to call them technical legal technical amendments then they would not be in effect for anyone who is interested in pursuing a development and getting a permit or else it'd be very difficult because there'd be two sets of rules so in terms of making this a reasonable process for the best possible process for a developer it seems to me we do need to set a date because once we set that date tonight then these are in effect along with the other um LDR amendments is that accurate that's accurate yes so that being said right I mean we've already the current proposed changes are already in effect right these are just minor tweaks to to fix a bunch of typos and things like that so let's just go ahead and move that so so I won't support that you have a motion I haven't I haven't made yet because I'm waiting to see whether it's something we should do but I think we should spank the motion to go for it I don't mind proving a date it's just not not the 18th what's wrong with the 18th because because I have this list of things that I think I would change if I had a magical one but that's not what he's talking about but but hold on but if we hear testimony on the third I may change those opinions I may have more suggested changes I may be convinced that it was written perfectly and nothing needs to change but on February 3rd if we collectively or majority say no let's make some changes some additions some subtractions we'll need to hold another public hearing but if we schedule it in February we only have to hold one more public hearing we won't have to hold the third public hearing so if you schedule it for February 7th instead of January 18th well these typos will be vested and we'll have time to make changes and not hold a third public hearing well what about January 25th or 24th well that'd be four meetings in January no we don't not have the 18th the Tuesday the 18th that gives us a whole another week yes you make it you know that all the concerns that frankly then I think you get into people running for city council and we haven't passed or adopted or not a set of regulations and it just seems like that generates um unneeded debate over what will happen or what hasn't happened when you can have a conclusion on the 24th which is the day before everyone has to file they don't like that they can fight you know if they want to run against someone who voted for it or against it I mean it just I'm not concerned about the politics I'm concerned about getting this right well I think we'll get it right I mean we've already spent three years getting it right Tom so I just want to echo I'm not concerned about the politics either I just want to get these Landam-Ellen rights uh Landam-Ellen regulations right but two things on the 24th one I think the filing deadline is the 24th so that meeting would be after 5 p.m but also also so that this body hears I am very likely not able to attend that 24th meeting at the steering committee meeting so I'd like to be at it and the 24th is the night that I'm already committed to something else and uh I've been meaning to communicate that to Jesse and to you Helen right to the 18th I know I'll I'll I'll make a motion I'll make a motion that we hold in public hearing on the Landam-Ellen regulations changes on February 7th I can second that motion because you won't support Tom can't make the 24th and you won't support I think this afternoon if I may I just because that gives us time after hearing from the public on the third to meet on the 10th to consider possible all the revisions so I I just like we can all just decide this on the third or the 10th we have the time till April 9th that's what I think makes the most sense rather than pick a date today but that's just where I am let's all go enjoy our holiday break is where I also think you're right now but that's just well we can enjoy it if we get this done we have a motion on the table yeah I I understand the motion but it's like we already have the new LDRs in effect and these are just legal tweaks to make the document correct that's all they are and that's all I believe they are now your feelings about the LDRs go way beyond what the legal changes are most likely right so I would at least like to be able to to give the PNZ staff right in the DRB the assurance that the LDRs that they have in their hands are going to be correct as of the 18th regardless of what or else we do for the changes that have been made they're corrected as soon as we vote and affirmative for my motion yeah you just have to set up all you have to do is vote yes for my motion that tom is seconded I just want to take up the 18th that's all but they take effect as soon as you warn them not on the 18th they do correct if we set a hearing tonight then they go into effect is that right I think they go into effect on the 30th of December 30th when they went but yeah I mean I think regardless of what the actual date is yes it's when they're noticed in the newspaper or however we do right if you if you make additional changes you'd have to warn those as well right that's but you're correct yes you'd have to you have to they go into effect as soon as you want it well I mean I would prefer doing it on the 18th but if we have a two to vote it fails it's true so pardon that's true yes right so I will support that if you're ready for the vote yeah right I don't want to go beyond that because I think we need to get this done I think the plan commission as well as this council have heard a fair amount of discussion in public about these LDRs what people like and what they don't like we will hear it all again on the 3rd probably all again on the 10th and now we're going to hear it all again on the 7th but you want to hear it three more times we can I don't want to go beyond the 7th because I think I think we spent considerable time I mean Tom is not going to vote for it because you know I think I may be able to convince them if we make some changes still hold on well maybe that would be nice I mean I read his counselor's corner and I didn't agree very much he said so if that's his position then I'm not going to go there I've gone too many times go in there and then you go to get that anyway on other issues so I would like you to cite us as an example of that I could get to yes on this Helen so we don't need to let's call the vote resurrect history so let's call the vote so we'll set up a second third public hearing um on February 7th 7 p.m. at 7 p.m. yep so I would recommend you do this by roll call because I do not think it's going to be unanimous and we have somebody participating remotely okay so I'll call the roll we'll do it alphabetically Thomas Chittenden and then yeah and then Thomas Chittenden so I seconded the motion and that has been done before where somebody then votes against it I am not going to vote yes because I don't support these regulations but I do hope the motion passes so I vote nay okay uh Matt Coda hi okay and Helen really I Megan Emery is absent so the motion passes three one and we have sent a another public hearing so as I understand it uh you have uh we will publish uh the updates with the legal adjustments in them uh in the next available newspaper with the hearing for February 7th if either on the 3rd or the 10th of January the council decides to make additional changes then you still have sufficient time to update your warning for February 7th if you choose perfect that's exactly what we need to do okay thank you just want to make sure that is correct all right okay that's good is there any other discussion or comments around the ldr topic or okay so um thank you reports from counselors on committee assignments I think I gave them so that was easy GMTA oh GMTA yeah so we're gonna get hit with a bump but what two percent increase about $10,000 more in our assessment there are a couple different stresses right first of all is the drive is the you new union contracts with the drivers rural drivers urban drivers and um mechanics you've agreed to this yes you've signed a great yes and quite frankly um if you want a CDL you are in the if you have a CDL in your pocket you are in the driver's seat no pun intended um it's very hard to hire drivers bus drivers whether you're talking about school bus drivers or municipal bus drivers and those cost pressures those inflationary pressures have hit the GMTA second we rely on subsidy and we don't charge fares I haven't charged fares and that will be an ongoing discussion which I'd hope to put from other council members in the public because sooner or later if the subsidies run out from federal government the bill back better plan doesn't seem like it's going to happen um we are going to have to have a very serious discussion about what individual municipalities are be willing to kick in as a higher assessment or whether to go back to charging fares so those are some conversations coming from the GMTA in months ahead as well as the increase to South Carolina of about $10,000 over last year's assessment so do you want to include that discussion about fares um to get some feedback um in the next month or is this something or is there action that that maybe your the board needs to take before we dive into that quagmire I I think that's a great thought I don't know the timeline I wouldn't say next month once we hear from okay the operations committee I'm on the operations board the operations committee decides whether or not to forward a proposal to the general board that will be asking for feedback and then I would be asking for feedback from all of you and the public so we're not there yet all right well let us know because I'm certainly willing to include that in a um an agenda item this this new assessment the increase is in the FY23 budget that's right it is not in the draft budget but it but it right it needs to be we need to add it in okay all right thank you good way to end the evening the question is comment on GMTA what fair is fair oh Tom I'm we sold more political ads on the bus I think GMT will do well in that regard I just want to say when I first got on council GMT had a different manager Karen Walton and she came before uh city council I think two or three times and did a great presentation really reminding the public about what GMT does and that sort of dropped off and we had another manager I know John Moore is there now and if the it's in within John Moore's capability to invite him to a January or February meeting I see a lot of value in having GMT come we saw really can gives a lot of money to public transportation and I love that the other paper covers these meetings and I'd love to see John again just to give us an update of what's going on at GMT if that's uh possibly in the cards coming up that's a great idea I will invite I think um in terms of our budget um I mean this is like a state formula so it's not like you can say no right uh yeah I mean in the formula yeah I think you're right I don't know so we don't really have a I mean I can say no as a as a commissioner but if we if I get out voted so then yes it's it's a bill that you get in the mail right Justin right so the the for the financial operation challenge is if we under budget it in the FY 23 budget and get a voice invoice for more we're going to pay it and we are going to run red in that line which we will make up in another line so it would be helpful to us if that line in the in the approved budget was accurate so we could run that line and okay in the black and and I think it's a pretty minor change we can update that and give it back to you so um so to that end I like your idea Tom of having the new manager come in but I don't know we have a lot going on in I mean since we have to pay it anyway to hear a convincing story from the new um manager is sort of moot I'd like to hear it afterwards it is a time when I bring up really good residents they chime forward with what they want to see with service so it's just a good time to bring that conversation to the public here in South Burlington because we are the second largest funder the second largest assessed on this one I just think it's worth considering but I would just add that those cost drivers that that we were right now experiencing with GMTA I think every school district is going to experience with their own bus drivers as it becomes harder to hire someone with a CDL into work what are very difficult jobs even though they you're just driving but it is a challenging job okay well I just am with thinking that we have so much going on in January to try to squeeze it in along with all the other budget presentations I don't want to like give them just 10 minutes but if you think in February we could hear from him and get some input I mean I'm all for that and I think I mean I just recommend Matt put a questionnaire on front porch forum and you'll be busy um so that's a good idea well I mean you do get great feedback obviously you don't always follow it but it's you know you can you can get it here get it sense um is there any other reports okay other business I do have one item that I forgot to include and that so you'll allow me I wanted to and actually mark um Gable croted up and is that as many as I want yeah um and I think the climate crisis is just becoming so ubiquitous in news that um there's lots to read lots to understand and I think um it would be helpful for the council to have on the agenda an item every every meeting that either allows someone to or all of us to share articles that might be good to be reading um hear updates from the task force um climate task force to hear from the public about what they're thinking and just make it it doesn't have to be long I'm not talking about an hour it could be 15 minutes and people have a time as well as council members to comment or say this is a terrific um article I mean Ray Ganda sends us all articles all the time I don't know if any of the other counters have read them but they're really quite good whatever you think array um those articles I thought I think are pretty well researched and come from you know all over the world and it's helpful oh I'm just kind of putting it out there that we will you'll see this on the agenda well I'd like to see your report like once a month from the committee you will I'm sure yeah that that would be good and the public has been chiming in before the meetings like repeatedly right and that's good too um but um I would think that the task force should be the ones kind of like concentrating that information about you know scholarly articles news reports things like that as part of the information that they're gathering for their own mission right so maybe I don't know if they have a website on the city page I think they will they wish to okay so I mean that kind of information could be disseminated there too uh huh yeah well I'm not suggesting that we read the articles um but but you know I think it would recommend everyone start with the 273 page climate action plan which I have read because it's my day job yeah I've read some articles about it that are disappointing but anyway well well yeah I will read it yeah okay so I will put that on at least once a month but I think it's something that you know it's a hot topic okay any other info comments are you ready to adjourn okay well I wish everyone a really wonderful holiday my goodness we'll be back in 2022 right that's right see you next year okay all in favor thank you thanks for keeping your germs to yourself uh yeah and I hope you