 So I think we can get started. We have all counselors here except for one who's running a little bit late. We'll get to you in just a moment, but you're more than welcome to be seated if you'd like. Good evening. Today is Tuesday, June 20th, 2023. Thank you for joining us for the city council meeting. We're here in Contoy's Auditorium, and we have a number of people who are joining us online. The time is 5.50. I'll note that we do have counselors Hightower, Grant and Counselor Traverse that are joining us via Zoom. And the rest of us are here in person. Counselor Shannon is running a little bit late and will be joining us shortly. The first item on our agenda this evening is item 1.1, which is a motion to adopt the agenda. Counselor King, if you would make the motion and then read out the recommended action, that would be great. Motion to amend and adopt agenda as followed. Remove from the agenda item 8.10, resolution, annual tax assessments on the property grand list of the city for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2023, and ending June 30th, 2024. Remove from the consent agenda item 7.8, 2022, annual report on EPD data, Office of City Planning, and replace it on the deliberative agenda as item 8.11 per counselor Grant. Thanks, Counselor King. Is there a second to that motion? Seconded by Counselor McGee. Any discussion on the motion? Seeing none. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes and that gives us an agenda. We have a few items on our agenda before we get to public forum, which will begin at a time certain of 6.45. The next item is item 2.1, which is a presentation from Burlington Telecom regarding a Burlington City update. And we have with us the President General Manager, Mike Lucy, and Mike, I'm sorry, Chris. Chris Dotell, who is the Vice President for Strategic Planning and Corporate Development. Thank you so much for being here. We've allotted about 30 minutes for this presentation. So if you could speak to your presentation for the first half, and then that'll give us enough time for there to be questions from the Council. And thank you again for taking the time to be here. Thank you for the Council. I'm assuming everybody has a copy? Were they distributed or? Yeah, did you want to share item? Are you okay with just going through that? And we have a copy of course. Sure, yeah, great. So we wanted to start out with just the community sport that we have been doing and continue to do since 2019. One of the biggest projects that we finalized last year was the phone system for the city. And basically, with that, you can see that we actually volunteered over 400 hours to help the city identify their phone lines through all the different buildings. Because as you can imagine, over the years, a lot of different moves, and new employees changing a building, changing around. So we actually did all that work as being a partner with the city. And during that process, we identified a bunch of lines that are actually obsolete, not needed. People have gone to mobile phones, gone to remote work, which saves about $35,000 annually. And that would keep going on. So we continue to partner with the city on that type of work. Mike, could you just do me a favor and just make sure I think you do. Do you have, is there a green light on that that's shining? Okay, if you could just maybe get a little closer. Okay. Thanks so much. Yep. In addition to that, we've upped our free wifi hotspots throughout the city. We had actually 14, we're up to 20 now. We're updating our website so that people can see exactly where the additional sites are because they've been relatively recent. And you can see there's actually a savings there as well because once again, we don't charge a city for that. That's part of the overall partnering that we're doing because the customer relationship that we have with the city, we try to treat it as a partnership. We've initiated the Memorial Auditorium relocation. Once again, we're putting in significant hours towards project management on that. That work is underway. We're actually working on Main Street here this week to bring some conduit across the road. So that's ongoing. Innovation Fund, we'll get into this a little bit more later, but it's about 1.4 million since 2019, the STEM grant, 200,000. VTV Ignite, we participate that. I'm on the board with VTV Ignite plus our 10,000K to help it keep it moving because there's various costs and stuff to have that organization work. We maintain lifeline, affordable connectivity, edge and net programs. These are programs specifically designed to help the folks that are economically challenged that may not have access to broadband or phone service. The edge and net in particular is a self-funded program. It's not subsidized by the state or the feds at all. So those are programs that we try to maintain. We think that they're important for the community. And then we've honored net neutrality principles. On the next page, annually we spend between the STEM grants and additional sponsorships throughout our market. We spent about a hundred grand on top of the work that we just talked about. And you can see some of the organizations, New North End Fletcher, the new place, the libraries, food banks, launch VT, demo night, drag and heart. There's a bunch that we've listed just to give you an idea, a new COTS, the highlight events through the BCA. So I don't know if there's any particular questions about those, but you see it's a continued effort that we do year over year. Operationally, we've grown, we're up to about headcount of 35, which is a 20% increase, so that's good. Those employees are located here in Burlington. We've had 13 employee moves, promotions, for career enhancements for those employees that have been here. We've shifted some folks around, used their talents better. Six recent hires have actually come from internal referrals, which is a good statement that the employees seem to be happy with the work environment and the work that we're doing. Capital improvements since, well through 2022, about 15 million plus. Our linear fiber miles are up 54% since 2019. So basically we're growing. We've increased our market by 45%, so we passed 26,000 plus businesses and homes now today that we could provide service to. Our subscribers were over 11,000, 10,000 in Burlington alone, which is great. That's up about 38% since 2019. In our expansion markets, which was contemplated as part of our growth program, we're also hitting our targets for our business model targets as we move out of Burlington. So the name brand is good. Consumer interest is high. So, new products. We finalized our phone switch, which expands the capability and functionality of the phones. Basically with remote work and people moving to mobile devices, our phone system now can actually take your desk phone and treat it as if it's, it can push it right to your mobile device. You can do it to your computer, your phone. So it's as if you're working in the office, but you don't have to be in the office. So that's a significant value add for a lot of organizations. We were also named by Vermont Business Mag as best phone service in Vermont, which is pretty neat for a small, relatively small company in the state. We also do a third party customer survey with net promoter score. I'm sure most of you are familiar with that. We just won in 2022. We ended up with a plus 51 in that market. It's a negative five for internet providers. So in the primary things that were called out by folks with customer service value and network basically reliability. So we've grown, we've kept up with what we're trying to do. We're keeping the customer in the forefront of what we're trying to do. So business-wise, we would continue to be successful. Innovation fund, hand it off to Chris here. Thank you. You're okay. So Burlington Telecom committed to spend $250,000 a year for 10 years or $2.5 million total to support local startups and growth companies that are investable with a social or diverse aspect. And so far, total investments inception to date have been $1.137 million. So for throughout 2022, as this is an annual report, we added three more companies with two additional follow-on investments totaling $400,000. And those are Infosense is an IoT network and platform for analyzing sensor data. Lost Lantern is a small batch whiskey blender and promoter. Mama Va provides lactation spaces for breastfeeding moms. Benchmark space systems build small satellite propulsion systems. And that was one of the follow-ons investments from our original investment. And then Glavill is a foam glass aggregate producer, which is also a follow-on investment. We've exceeded our $250,000 annual commitment in 2022, mainly because of the breadth of opportunity locally and the funds philosophy to hold dollars in reserve for follow-on investments. And then with the reach outs to entrepreneurial and startup support organizations, we're raising awareness and we're raising awareness of our network and pipeline of potential investments for the fund. Next, we've achieved our highest investment year-to-date of investing $400,000 of our $250,000 commitment in 2022. And we continue to evaluate opportunities and pipeline to bring to the Innovation Fund Committee for the next round of investments. These five investments were part of larger 2022 funding rounds, including all investors with total raises of $14 million for the five companies. And then total employment directly supported by these five companies in 2022, for that cohort is 223 jobs and counting. The 2022 cohort represents investable businesses with diverse aspects, including three diverse founders. And the committee is working with companies to continuously improve diversity, equity and inclusion in their workforce, leadership and on their boards. Industries represented in the 2022 cohort were space, materials, IoT, retail spirits and moms. And then in order to expand the reach of the fund to diverse founders and communities, we've reached out to nonprofits and support organizations that assist startups and growth companies with mentoring and loans and funding sources and also introductions to investors like the Birth and Telecom Innovation Fund. And then when a potential investment comes to us but they're not quite ready for investment or they're not quite investable, we work with them to connect them with our network to get them help, support and mentoring that they need for their next steps. We don't wanna just say no. So, and we're still working on creating this network so that we can recommend resources for potential investments that may not quite be ready. And then the Birth and Telecom Innovation Fund committee is made up of myself, the chair from Shares Communications, Sam Roach Gerber from VSET, Fessel Nizar from ZRF Partners, Janice St. Ange from Flexible Capital Fund, Lee Boyer from Fresh Tracks Capital, Dan Harvey from UVM, and Luisa Shipley from RuralWorks. And then I just, I can't thank this local committee enough. They've been great from the very beginning. They've really leaned in and they've really helped get the fund to where it is today. And then for the STEM technical grant, once again, this is part of the APA. We've committed 500,000 over a 10-year period and we've spent 200,000 as I mentioned earlier. The application for 2023 is open now. It closes in July. We hope to award by August of this year. So we're a little ahead of the cycle, which is good. And then you can see on this page here for the 2022 grants. BTC, this is the first multi-year grant that we awarded. They had a program that really needed two years to get off the ground, to reach into younger school age kids so that they can get a two-year program through. So we awarded them a two-year, which is kind of new for us. We're pretty excited about that to see how that goes. Center for Women in Enterprise Vermont, Resource and Launch VT, we're the awardees for last year. So, yeah, programs are going on. We've got six totals since 2019, and it's all been great. And it's everything from educating entrepreneurs to hands-on training, leading to certificates either in construction, weatherization, where the likelihood of success of finding a good career or a job to get into a career has been increased by those, by that program. We're actually pretty excited about that program. And there is more information if anybody on the board is interested in the council to go to the BVV Ignite site. At the top, there is an outcome report if you wanna read some of the outcomes. Like, for instance, resource, they anticipated, I think around two dozen entrants last year, they actually had 60. And 90% of them actually found work at $17 to $19 per hour, initially right out of the box, or these are folks that probably didn't have much of a chance of getting above that $15 an hour starting wage. So that actually is pretty successful. And so those other summaries will give you some of those stats as well, because we try to track that to make sure it's producing. So, with that, that's pretty much what we have. Great, thank you. Thanks so much for that presentation. We'll open the floor now to comments or questions from the council at this time, or, well, we'll go to the mayor first, Mayor Weinberger. Thank you, President Paul. And I wanna thank Mike and Chris for joining tonight. For counselors that weren't around in 2020 tonight might not be obvious sort of why we're doing this. And from my perspective, I really appreciate the two of them coming in, given this oral presentation, and that we, while BT is now completely legally separate from the city, we do have this agreement that we negotiated that has very significant ongoing provisions that some of which are permanent, some of which last, as you've heard tonight, just 10 years. And I think it's important that we have the ethic of continuing to stay in close touch with BT and tracking their progress and their evolution. It's really encouraging to hear how well the, I think one of the more unusual elements of the agreement we have is the commitment to make local investments. And it's exciting to hear how much of that commitment you've already fulfilled and that you actually exceeded their requirements in the recent year. And it's certainly positive to hear about your continued service expansions as well and making good on those elements of the unfinished work that was in place when the transfer happened. So I thought it was a positive report. We wanted to make sure that the full council had a chance to hear it directly and ask questions about it and really understand the importance of this relationship going forward. Great, thank you very much, Mayor Weinberger. If there are any Councillors who have Councilor Carpenter. Thanks, I'm a little out of the loop. I used to work for a lot of years in affordable housing and some of the projects had earlier contracts with Comcast and have not been able to switch over to you. And I'm just curious around the discussion of getting Burlington Telecom and the multifamily low income housing projects. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you about is what you offer for lifeline services. Yeah, we work with several organizations trying to get in there. As you pointed out, there are existing contracts that prohibit access, but we're in constant communication with those developers and as they become available, we actually do bid or seek to actually provide the services to those buildings. Many of them already today. So that's just an ongoing thing. You just gotta wait for the contracts to be cleared. Okay, that's great, because it's not always to the advantage of the tenant and hopefully we can, you can be aggressive when you can get. And the problem is some of those contracts, they have NDAs in them, so we can't really pick them apart to see if there's a way that we can actually get in there to provide at least internet service and not cable, but you know what I mean? So it's kind of tricky, but we do stay in constant contact with those folks. And on lifeline services? Yeah, we do offer lifeline, that's a federally subsidized program. What telephone, internet, what do you? Yeah, it was originally telephone and now it's opened up to internet and they're actually phasing out at the federal level the support behind telephone, it's gonna be all internet supported. Okay. So that's, yeah, it ends up costing the consumer like 25 cents a month. Yeah, just to, my background was with the elderly and some of the folks I'm familiar with really still want a landline and I understand landlines run through the internet, but they're eligible for lifeline and your competitor only offers them internet and that's not very helpful when you really want and need a landline. So I hope that's an option that can be continued particularly in that senior housing. Yeah, we're finding a lot of the seniors because of hearing challenges, they don't care for their mobile phones. They may be a little bit more familiar with their landline phone as well. So we're sensitive to that and that's something that we, I mean, we're always gonna offer phone service. So we, and we'll look out, we'll, you know, we will be looking out for that type of community for sure. Okay, thank you. Thanks very much, Councilor Carpenter. I'm looking on the, looking on our screen and we'll do my best to make sure that if anyone who's participating by Zoom wants to speak, I'll be watching the raise hand function. Councilor Bergman. Thank you. Really impressive report and a lot of good things are happening. I'm wondering whether we, particularly those of us who were not here at the time of the original agreement could get an understanding in writing, so obviously not tonight, of the things that, in the agreement that are permanent things that sunset after 10 years and then a sense of where you may be for those things that are sun setting in 10 years thinking about, you know, continuing the commitment to Burlington. It's, for me, it's really important that we have got a vital and really invested local entity and I think you're bigger than the local entity, so as close as you can get to there, it would be good because the reason, and I was here when we first broached the subjects of the local internet entity was the need to deal with the monopolies that now its Comcast used to be Adelphia have had and that it's critically important that we have a service that really serves the people, so I'll be very helpful to get that information. Yeah, I know there was a fact sheet of the agreement that was produced at the time of the sale and that's something I think we can produce. Yeah, that's what I was thinking too, Mike. I think there's some good summaries from that time that we can recirculate with the council, particularly with the new council and maybe if there's specific questions about, I mean some of what your question was about was about how BT is thinking about certain aspects, so maybe if you have follow-up questions based on that summary we could facilitate that. So the two important ones, I think, are the investment fund that Chris explained and then the STEM grant. Those are the two that have like a 10-year kind of sunset on them and right now we're open to if they're successful and we feel that there's a gain from them, they would likely continue in some form beyond the 10 years. There's no interest in stopping those, but we have to see, are we actually generating a meaningful result from that, for instance? Obviously the two objectives are a little bit different but I can't see any reason why we wouldn't keep those on the table as an option. Thanks very much, sir. Any Councilor Zhang? Thank you for the presentation. Thank you, President. The STEM grant, it seemed that the amount has now decreased. It used to be more than $50,000 and now it seems it's only 35. Is that correct? Did I get that right? What is the? The STEM, skilled grant, STEM? Yeah, the STEM is 50,000 a year for 10 years. This year in 2022 because we did a double year with BTC, 15,000 stayed with that so it's down to 35 this year. Now if we end up with a quality batch of applicants and we have the chance of possibly losing them, we do have some flexibility in increasing that like they did with the investment fund as well. And based on the agreement between the city, you had to allocate $250,000 a year in the community but it seems you guys are around 400,000 now, more than that. I just wanna say I'm appreciative of your work. So in some cases sometime in the new north end, people complain about the quality of their internet. People asking questions to each other online and we're just wondering is it only specific to that part of the city or what the issue is now? Well it can be, actually our network across the whole, and that work even our expansion is all the same. There is no lower quality of service areas just because of the way it works. It's different than copper, it's different than our competitors service the way they deliver their service. So that's the first thing. Usually what it ends up happening with quality of service is their router. If they purchase their own router, it doesn't get updates, it could be out of version. They're trying to process more data than either their computer can handle or their router can handle. So our team will actually roll trucks and actually work with folks to have them understand what they have in their system and what they're using to try to get their service. Generally speaking it's not the delivery and I hate to sound like that because we're not perfect, we do have problems and we'll go out and fix the card if that happens to be the case. But generally speaking it's in the home and the devices that they're using in their home to try to get the service. Thank you so much, Councillor Jang. Seeing no other councillors in the queue, we'll close out this agenda item. Thank you so much for being here, particularly for taking the time to be here in person. We greatly appreciate it. I will say that as someone who represents people who live in an area where they can't access Burlington Telecom and we have had this conversation many, many times, it would be wonderful if somehow there could be a reserve fund that was accumulated over time that would somehow be able to serve those, I don't know, what is that magic number? It's down to 108. Okay, 108. That's down to 108. It was 120, now it's 108. I know a fair number of those 108, as you know, and who are either unfortunately on Rockledge or it's just very, very difficult, but for those people who don't have it, it becomes a precious commodity to want. And I hope that at some point that might be, it's such a small number and I realize that, but I still hear from people who would love to have Burlington Telecom. We do coordinate with City, like Water and Sewer, if they've got a project that's going on that we can work with them, with BED, that's how we actually solved the 12 that we've solved so far, is working with those departments. So they have projects that come up on the ANIM, we'll take a look at them and say, can we get in there and work with you on them and try to resolve it? But the challenge of the area in particular you're talking about too, I mean, the trees that are up there, the congestion that's up there, the rock that's up there, I mean, it's exceedingly expensive to do that. We can take it into consideration or reserve, but I mean, it would be quite a while probably too. Yes, understood. Well, I'm actually excited to know that it's not 120, it's 108, so every little bit of progress, that's 10%, that's not so bad. Thank you again for being here. We have our next item on our agenda is 3.1, which is a communication, Jared Pellerin, Catherine Shad and Brian Monahan. I am not, I see Catherine is available online, I don't know, Kim, are the others here or available to join us via Zoom? Jared is here, he will come up or meet us wherever, yes, he's available. All right, and Brian? I'm not sure, I will find out. Okay, all right, so this is regarding the Lakewood Estates Tax Appeal, and before we go and start making motions to go into executive session, it's always our practice with expected executive sessions to go to either the city attorney, acting city attorney or the administration if there's any information that you are able to give to the public prior to the executive session. I believe this one's pretty self-explanatory, I mean, it's just regarding the appeal for the Lakewood Estates and potential resolution. Great, thank you, city attorney, assert event. Before we go to motions regarding executive session, there are two counselors who I believe wish to be recognized, Councillor Carpenter? Yes, I will accuse myself, I live in that neighborhood. Thank you, Councillor Carpenter, and then we'll go to Councillor Barlow. And I also will accuse myself, and my parents live there and have a trust that I am entangled with, so. Great, so your recusals are duly noted. With that, I will go to Councillor King who will give us the first motion to go into executive session. I move that the council find that premature general public knowledge of legal advice and information concerning the details of pending litigation to which the city is a party or has a stated interest would clearly place the city out of substantial disadvantage. Thank you for that motion, Councillor King. Is there a second to that motion? Seconded by Councillor Bergman. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. And we will note the two recusals. So the vote is 10 yes, no against and two recusals. With that, we will go on to, based on that motion, Councillor King will go to the second motion. Based upon that finding, move that the council go into executive session to receive confidential attorney client communications, one VSA 313A1F in a pending civil litigation matter, one VSA 313A1E. Thank you, Councillor King. Seconded by Councillor Bergman. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. So that motion passes 10 to zero, noting the two recusals. So we are now in executive session. I was mistaken actually, I did not realize that they are waiting downstairs for us. So because we have people that are joining us via Zoom, we have to do with the executive session downstairs. So we hope to return to open session by 6.45. That's the time certain for public forum. If we are able to do this before that, then we will go to the items that do not require public forum. So we will return to public session shortly or within an hour, thanks. Council President Paul. Yes. Will we be... Yes. I just want to make sure that someone is sending a link for the executive session. Yes, we will not forget about you. Thank you. And that will be, I imagine, Catherine, are you going to be sending that? I believe it will come from the meeting and then we'll get going with public forum. Thanks. I haven't eaten. Okay, so we are now out of executive session. Thanks again for your patience. And we will begin item number four, which is the public forum. There are four people that are joining us online to speak during public forum and we have a couple of people that are here in person as well. So just a couple of notes on public forum for those who are unfamiliar with the process. The system on the table in front of us has three lights. A green light will shine when you begin speaking. The second yellow light, when you have 30 seconds left and then the last light is red, that will shine when your time is up. We ask that you complete your comments when the light and sound indicate that your time is up so that we're giving equal time to everyone. We have a hybrid system for public forum. If you wish to speak in person, there are forms to my right in the back corner of the room. You can bring them to the clerk to the right in front of the room and they will come to me. If you wish to speak via Zoom, you can go to burlingtonvt.gov, forward slash city council, forward slash public forum and a form will come up. When that form comes up, I just complete the form and your answers will come into a spreadsheet that I'm looking at right here and that way I can call on you in the order in which you submitted the form. It's our practice that Burlington residents have first priority in speaking. We'll go to Burlington residents in con choice who've submitted a form in person, then to Burlington residents online, then to back to non-Burlington residents in person and we will complete this process with non-Burlington residents that are joining us online. During public forum, the only request that we have is that you please use respectful language and just to remind you and all of those that are joining us online that there are a number of families. We know that there are families who join us to watch city council meetings as their connection to civic engagement and to please keep in mind that there are children watching our council meeting. Please if you would direct your comments to me as the chair and not to anyone else at this table and please don't personalize your comments. It's a lot easier for us to listen if you just speak respectfully. With that we'll go to the, there are three residents that are joining us, Burlington residents that are joining us in con choice. The first is Ashley Adams to be followed by Catherine Bach. Thanks very much for joining us and you probably know about the green light that goes on in front for the microphone. Yes, you just push that and then just speak closer. You don't have to be really, really close but close enough so that we can hear you and the green light should go on. Yes, there's a little green light, great. That way we can hear you. Thanks again. Hi, good evening. My name is Ashley Adams. I'm a Burlington resident and I had the pleasure. You're gonna need to speak a little bit closer so we can hear you. I had the pleasure of attending the McNeil symposium last week and I'd like to thank the two committee for putting that symposium on. I know it was no small task and I really appreciate it. So I'm here tonight to just share a few points from the scientific presentation made by Doctors Bill Mouman, Juliette Rune Varga and I'd also first like to just briefly share a few of their credentials abbreviated because I only have two minutes. Dr. Rune Varga is an internationally recognized expert in climate change and sustainability. She is a professor of environmental science and director of the Climate Change Initiative as well as the RISC Institute for Sustainability and Energy at UMass Lowell. Dr. Bill Mouman is emeritus professor of international environmental policy and founding director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts. He was the lead author of five intergovernmental panel on climate change IPCC reports. One of these reports resulted in the IPCC receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for its climate work in 2007 alongside Al Gore. We learned that from these esteemed individuals, our national and international goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to increase carbon dioxide removals by forests. The goal is not to achieve more renewable energy. Renewability does not matter. Reducing fossil fuel use to the exclusion of all other sources of carbon emissions is a misguided goal that is not based on scientific evidence. Carbon emissions from the energy source is what matters and the fact is that burning wood is more carbon intensive than coal. CO2 is CO2 is CO2. It all goes up into the atmosphere when you burn it. There is only one carbon cycle. There's only CO2 from burning trees. Biomass incinerators like McNeil from forest fires, from fossil fuels all go into the atmosphere. It's my time already. I'll be here next time then. Thank you for hearing me. And if you have something in writing that you would like to submit, we're happy to post that online as well. Thank you. Okay. We'll do so, I appreciate it. Certainly. So our next speaker is Catherine Bock to be followed by Steve Goodkind. Good evening. Hello. It's on, right? Catherine Bock, I live on North Prospect Street. And when I moved to Vermont nine years ago, I was delighted to be moving near a city or living in a city that had 100% renewable energy. So you can imagine my disappointment when I realized that it was actually not 100% carbon emissions free, but more an accounting sort of thing. I want to talk about, I also want to thank you for the McNeil symposium last week. It was excellent. And I think people learned a lot, but what we're calling the district energy system, which is actually a steam pipeline, will be leading to more fuel consumption. And to get the fuel when we're using wood means cutting more trees. And we know that we need forests to reduce carbon dioxide. So the other thing is that we're not doing the logging industry or anybody a favor by using up these debris that they're apparently burning at McNeil, because in a natural forest, you leave the debris from a tree falling down on the ground and it acts as habitat and it decomposes slowly and doesn't emit carbon. So I'm often asked, so if we don't have McNeil, what should we do? And of course I can't come with an answer to that, but I know that putting more money into making this district pipeline to heat the hospital will end up using more trees and we want to save the trees and we should put our money and our energy into looking for solutions that are actually carbon free. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Steve Goodkind. Good evening, Steve. Good evening. Can speakers yield to other speakers? Is that allowed? I'm sorry, what? Can a speaker yield to somebody else if they wanted to, by the way? Could I have yielded my two minutes to someone else? Or is that not? You don't need to yield your minute, two minutes. Well, if someone didn't finish, could I have yielded some of my time to them? Just wondering, okay, there's the official word. Okay, let me get going. Thank you. I push this green button to start. Sure. Yeah, okay. And no, no, what do I push to start? Is it not, the green one is on the microphone right there in front of you. And I think you're, it's already on. No, you need to put it, the green light needs to be lit. And then start. Yeah, that's right. A week ago in this space, a unique event took place. It was dubbed as a symposium consisting of panelists with expertise on the impacts of burning wood to generate electricity as we do with the McNeil facility. I'm not sure if anything like this has ever taken place in Berlin before. The idea was that the public and city officials could hear experts on all sides of the issue and begin to form their own opinions on the use of wood at McNeil. Unfortunately, the reality was that BED was not about to go head to head with scientists who could debunk their party line that burning wood is essential to burning, to Burlington's fight against global warming. They offered no scientists to advance the theory that wood burning does not contribute to global warming and or that is less polluting than fossil fuels. Their panelists consisted of lobbyists and foresters, none of whom had expertise to engage with the scientists who took a different point of view. It was like geologists and mine owners debating climate scientists on coal burning. There's no expertise, it's nothing related. When it was their turn, these panelists talked in general terms about the good forest management practices they use to fuel McNeil. Very little pushback was given to the science-based information about CO2 production from the McNeil plant and its implications for climate change. I think this was by design. Let the opposing panelists have their say and then change the subject. No way they were going to risk having their experts face climate scientists. Nevertheless, a lot of scientific-based information was presented by the panelists at Bill, I always say his name wrong, but it's Moomau and Juliet Rudy Barga, I don't get their names right. Both distinguished scientists in the field of climate science. If you haven't watched the video of this symposium, you should and you should do so before making any decisions on replacing natural gas from the wood-fired McNeil plant to heat the hospital. And you should also be asking a lot more questions, thank you. Thank you very much. Our next speaker in Contois is Todd LeCroy. Is there a world where you guys wake up and realize how much you're harming your children? Because I'm hoping I'm living in that world, but it doesn't look like it from all the evidence of the last 20 years. All I see is you guys justifying, destroying the planet for your vanities, your egos, and getting mad at your children for complaining about the circumstances they're being left with. In fact, I would even go so far as to declare that the American oligarchy seemed to be enjoying making the youth suffer. While the middle class ignores the very danger that is also coming to suffocate them. Yet I see this thing going around. It's called, in the German language, short and Freud. People enjoying watching others suffer. And I think there's many people in this room that are very guilty of this short and Freud. Now here we are. And let me remind you, you've already lost the war against China. And let me remind you, I've lived amongst you both. And I know you both very well. And I know why you've already lost. Because you're all too busy killing your neighbors, killing your children, and killing the best of you, like me, for speaking the truth. And how close you need to look at your souls, at how close you are to the very fascism that you say you're fighting. You've already lost this war because you're too busy killing your own children to win any war against any real threat. Thank you very much. We will go on to those Burlington residents who are joining us via Zoom. The first is Romeo von Herrmann. And Romeo, I found you and enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak. Thank you, Madam President. I hope you can hear me fantastic. Madam President, Mr. Mayor, Councillors, City Administrative Team, fellow Burlingtonians, on this most auspicious of afternoons, permit me to share my thinking. Like many that came before me, I had been West Point soldiering through life. That's not to say that soldiering through life did not allow much expansion for my soul and contribution to humanity. In fact, to the contrary, while landing at Burlington International Airport on a very cold winter night, looking down at the plane's window on our beloved city, I had no reason to doubt that I'll be doing something special. Indeed, Madam President, life has a way of making the foreseeable that which may or may not happen and the unforeseeable that which life becomes. On that note, through my regular interactions with community stakeholders, I learned something very important and special that folks of position of trust sometimes risk very little, yet enjoy a position of others who offer up themselves to their judgment. The truth we must face is that in the grand scheme of things, community members who offer up themselves not only have meaningful thing to say but act to our city. But there are times that we truly risk something special and that is the discovery of the defense of new. The reality is that the world is often to unkind new talent, ideas and creations. In the past and present, I've made no secret about the importance of public service. In so far as to say that, not everyone can become a great public servant, but great public servant and compassionate folks can come from anywhere in the world. I'll be returning to the next council in person, hungry for more. Thank you for your time, Madam President. Thanks very much, Romeo. Our next speaker is Zach Porter and Zach, I have found you and enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak. Just need to unmute yourself on your end. Thank you. Good evening, City Councilors. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Great, thank you. My name is Zach Porter and I'm the Executive Director of Standing Trees which is an organization that works across New England but is based in Vermont on forest policy issues including biomass and we represent members in Burlington, residents of the city. I was also at the hearing last week, the symposium and want to thank the two committee and the City Council for taking a deep dive into biomass and I hope that you will continue that deep dive in the days and weeks ahead. As I think several of your speakers already have stated clearly the only arguments that were made in support of McNeil last week were economic and I think it's time to come to grips with the fact that biomass has no ecological basis. It has no climate basis. It's purely serving the interests of Vermont's timber industry and I don't think that's the intention of Burlington's City Council to subsidize Vermont's timber industry with its net zero plan. And many years ago, about in the late 90s, early 2000s biomass had a bit of a heyday even going back before then when McNeil was constructed but the times have changed and what we heard from doctors Mooma and Rooney Varga was that they would not wager that biomass had a future. Massachusetts has canceled out its subsidies for biomass. Australia has done the same. I'm sure Vermont is heading there too and I hope that we will start planning now and we look forward to working with you to shape a future of clean energy, truly low carbon energy that doesn't involve biomass but the time to start planning for that is now. And so I hope you'll review the facts. You know, the district key proposal would only increase emissions, not reduce them. So it's time to start working on that proposal and we appreciate your careful consideration of the facts and look forward to future conversations. Thank you. Thank you so much. Our next speaker is Pike Porter and Pike I found you and enabled your microphone. All you need to do is unmute yourself on the other side, on your side. Good evening. I also would like to thank the Duke for holding that symposium last week. I hope you all have an opportunity to watch it if you have not yet done so. I'd like to recap a few important facts. The client scientists applauded the work that Burlington has done thus far with weatherization and many of the other projects. They also recognize that McNeil was the correct response to the oil by boycott in the 70s. However, they recognize now that it is not the solution that we need. Burning biomass is not the solution that we need. McNeil is no longer the correct response to the current crisis. Rooney Varga made the point that burning carbon fuels is not climate neutral even though it theoretically could be carbon neutral. Even if the carbon emitted by the 400,000 tons of wood that is burned annually at McNeil, they could be recaptured. The heat generated by that wood has already done its damage. Sustainably harvest wood that gets combusted still contributes to the climate crisis. We need to understand that. We need to stop burning everything. The district energy plan will increase the emissions at McNeil 20,000 tons per year. It will not lower emissions. Emissions must be counted at the stack. It's faulty accounting to offset them with forest growth around the region. Massachusetts, New York and New Hampshire are all removing biomass plant generators. New York state as recently as May. They're also all these states are recognizing that it's no longer carbon neutral and no longer giving renewable energy credits for them. There are alternatives to burning wood such as cellulose insulation and shipboard products. And we can look to that rather than burning and releasing the CO2s. Again, if you haven't watched this symposium, please watch it, thank you. Our next speaker is Peter Duvall and Peter. Actually, before we go to Peter, we'll go to Sharon Busher. Sharon, I found you and enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak. Thank you, President Paul. I'm speaking about the budget. I was surprised that it wasn't on the agenda tonight and that I know you have a special meeting or another meeting next Monday to address it. But I was concerned that there would just be one meeting to discuss what I think is one of the most important actions that this council does take, which is how we spend taxpayer dollars. So I was disappointed that there would be limited discussion about it. I know that the administration will say it's been a lengthy process. It's been with the Board of Finance and the council could attend. But since I've attended all of those meetings, I haven't been aware that that many counselors were able to take advantage of those sessions. And so I am concerned about that. So that's enough said. As a resident, I'm concerned about the affordability of the city of Burlington. And I hope that all of you look at that as a factor, because as we create more housing, we seem to are shrinking our commercial and retail. And as that happens, more of that tax burden is on residential, which is not only homeowners, but renters. Last thing is, I think it was wonderful that the two had that session last Tuesday. It helped begin the process of education. It's so hard for everyone to do that on their own. They gathered information for everyone to hear and ponder. And this is the right time to think about it as we decide whether or not to go forward with our district heating. And it's very sad time, but it was right a few years ago. It's not right now. So thank you. Thank you, Sharon. And our last speaker who is joining us online is Peter Duvall and Peter. I have found you and enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak now. Thank you. My name is Peter Duvall and I live in Underhill. Thank you for the opportunity to comment tonight on Burlington Electric Department's plan for a steam transmission line between McNeil Generating Station and the hospital. It's not a district system. It's just a transmission line. With Dermot McGuigan in 1992, I wrote Burlington District Energy Corporation's Pre-Feasibility Report. 1992 was a long time ago, but I remember what BED did then and I see what BED is doing now and it is quite disappointing. President Paul, as a regular at mornings with Miro, it won't surprise you that I am also disappointed that the mayor has missed the opportunity to do something that is a measure of good managers terminating bad projects as soon as possible. Long ago, BED should have been directed to abandon the steam transmission line. The project would be a permanent step backward for the city's energy and climate goals. But don't take my word for it. Ask tough questions of BED. Here are a few. Utility planning is an exercise in evaluating many contingencies and alternative scenarios. It is about assessing risk. Should a utility prudently anticipate future environmental regulation? The sales pitch for the steam transmission line rests entirely on the assumption that burning wood would be considered zero mission and climate safe for decades. What if that assumption is wrong? What is BED's plan for the moment when renewable energy certificates disappear? What happens when McNeil begins paying a carbon tax that is similar to the $150 ton carbon pollution impact fee? I have more, but thank you very much for the time. Thank you very much. With that, we don't have any others either online or joining us in contoys who wish to speak during public forum. Thank you to all who offered their comments. We will close the public forum at 7.28 and move on to the next item on our agenda, which is item number five regarding the Lakewood Estates tax appeal. This was the subject of our executive session earlier this evening. Given the discussion during the executive session, the council is in a position to move forward with a motion on the tax appeal. But before we get to that motion, I believe there are two councillors who wish to be recognized. I'll go to the first, which is Councillor Carpenter. Closest to me, Councillor Carpenter. Thank you. I will be recusing myself on this vote as I live in the neighborhood. Great, thank you so much. And then we'll go to Councillor Barlow. I will also be recusing myself on this vote. Okay, so both of your recusals are noted. I'll look to Councillor Shannon for a motion on this item. Thank you, President Powell. I move to approve and authorize the mayor in conjunction with the city attorney's office, sorry, to enter into a stipulated settlement agreement in a pending litigation matter captioned Lakewood Estates Beach Club, Inc. versus City of Burlington. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Seconded by Councillor Berkman. Are there, is there any discussion on the motion before us? I'm just looking, just looking on Zoom here. Seeing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion to enter into the stipulated settlement agreement as outlined in the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously, noting the two recusals, so the actual vote is 10 in favor, none opposed, and noting the recusal of Councillor Carpenter and Councillor Barlow. And with that, we will go to our next item, which is item number six, climate emergency reports. Is there any Councillor or the administration who wishes to offer a climate emergency report? Councillor Berkman, we'll go to you first. Thank you. I just wanted to highlight for the council the action that South Burlington took regarding requiring new buildings to keep 40% of their roof solar ready and to actually have any commercial building or residential building with four or more stories to be required to use that roof space to generate some of the building's energy through solar. When I looked through, and very briefly after reading this, the news stories just recently, I quickly did not find, I might be wrong, but I did not find an equivalent here. So we often lead, it's not bad to be second, we were second in terms of the all resident legal voting, so although we tried before. And so I wouldn't mind us being second with regard to this. I think it is well worth us getting administration departments involved in looking at that and seeing if we can do this. We need to generate as much electricity and thermal energy as we possibly can without any emissions if we are gonna pull this thing off. And we have this on here because it is a climate emergency. So I hope that we can do this fairly quickly like we are pushing for the couple of ordinances that we have on the carbon fee and anything that's associated with that. So thank you. Thank you very much, Councilor Berkman. Any others or we'll go to Mayor Weinberger. Thank you, President Powell. I just wanna note we have just last week released the net zero energy report and had a press conference on it and later in the agenda tonight you're gonna hear. I'm update from General Manager Darren Springer is here and so that will be our climate emergency report for the night and a very subset one. Great, thank you, Mayor Weinberger. Seeing no others, we'll close out this item. And before we go to our consent and deliberative agendas, we'll go to the local control commission meeting that we need to attend to. So we'll recess the council meeting at 734 and we'll call to order the local control commission at that same hour. The first item on our agenda is item 1.1 which is a motion to adopt the agenda. Go to the chair of our license committee if you have that agenda up. Okay, Commissioner Shannon. I move to adopt the agenda. Thank you, Commissioner Shannon. Seconded by Commissioner McGee. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. We have our agenda, which moves us to the next items. We have five items on our deliberative agenda. The first is 2.1 which is second class liquor license application 2023-2024 for Little Bodega, LLC, doing business as Henry Street, Deli, Councillor Shannon, or Commissioner Shannon. Move to approve the 2023-2024 second class store liquor license application for Little Bodega, 11 Henry Street with all standard conditions. Thank you, Commissioner Shannon. Seconded by Commissioner McGee. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion to approve the second class liquor license application, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously, which brings us to 2.2 and outside consumption permit application for Cafe Dim Sum. Commissioner Shannon. Move to approve the 2023-2024 outside consumption permit application for Cafe Dim Sum, 95 St. Paul Street. Thank you, Commissioner Shannon. Seconded by Commissioner McGee. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes as well unanimously, which brings us to 2.3, which is a second class liquor license application for RGS Nepali Market. Commissioner Shannon. Move to approve the 2023-2024 second class store liquor license application for RGS Nepali Market, 1563 North Avenue with following conditions, copy of the lease, and with all standard conditions. Thank you, Commissioner Shannon. Seconded by Commissioner McGee. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion as well passes unanimously, which brings us to the fourth item, which is a first and third class restaurant bar liquor license application for Santiago's Commissioner Shannon. Move to approve the 2023-2024 first and third class restaurant bar liquor license applications for Santiago's through Main Street with the following conditions. Contingent upon fire marshal approval, complete records checks. All city permits need to be closed out and with all standard conditions. Thank you, Commissioner Shannon. Seconded by Commissioner McGee. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously, which brings us to our last deliberative item on outside consumption permit application for Santiago's Commissioner Shannon. Move to approve the 2023-2024 outside consumption permit application for Santiago's through Main Street with the following conditions. Contingent upon fire marshal approval, complete record checks, and all city permits need to be closed out. Thank you, Commissioner Shannon. Seconded by Commissioner McGee. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously. Many thanks to the License Committee. With no other business on this agenda and seeing no objection, we'll adjourn the local control commission meeting at 738, and we will reconvene the council meeting at the same time. So we'll return to the council agenda and continue where we left off, which was item number seven, the consent agenda. Entertain a motion to move the consent agenda and take the actions indicated. So moved. Thank you, Councillor McGee. Seconded by Councillor Shannon. Is there any discussion on the consent agenda? And we will note that there is an item on the consent agenda that has been removed and will now be item 8.11 on our deliberative. Seeing none, all those in favor of the consent agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. We have unanimously approved our consent agenda, and that brings us to our deliberative agenda. So we have 11 items on our deliberative agenda. One of them has been removed, but we will get to that. The first two items are two tobacco license applications. The first is 8.1, which is a tobacco license application for Little Bo Tega LLC doing businesses Henry Street Diner, or I'm sorry, Henry Street Deli. For this item, I'll go to Councillor Shannon for a motion. I move to approve the 2023-2024 tobacco license application for Little Bo Tega LLC, DBA Henry Street Deli at 11 Henry Street. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Seconded by Councillor McGee. Any discussion on this motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously, which brings us to the second tobacco license application, which is item 8.2, a tobacco license application and tobacco substitute endorsement application for RGS Nepali Market, Councillor Shannon. Move to approve the 2023-2024 tobacco license application and tobacco substitute endorsement application for RGS Nepali Market, 1563 North Ave. Thank you so much, Councillor Shannon. Seconded by Councillor McGee. Is there any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously. The next three agenda items relate to the 2023 Boards and Commission appointments. And the first is 8.3, which is the 2023 Board and Commission appointments, a slate for the Council's consideration. We were very fortunate this year to have four Councillors who offered their time to serve on this ad hoc committee. They were Councillor Grant, Berkman and Shannon and Councillor King who chaired the committee. I think for the benefit of the public, the community who is listening, that it would be helpful to have a description of the committee's work and then a motion on this. And for that, I'll turn to the Chair of the committee, Councillor King. Thanks, President Paul. So again, first thank you to Councillor Shannon, Berkman and Grant and to Samantha Sheehan in the mayor's office for their work. I think we had moments of disagreements, but I think we came to a slate of really incredible folks. Providing context into the process of this committee, we met three times, once to establish a process and review applicants, the second meeting being interviews where we interviewed a variety of folks from incumbents to new applicants, and then a final meeting where we deliberated. I think that we all were very impressed and grateful with so many folks that were willing to step up and serve, and there's still a number of positions that are open that folks didn't apply for. So if you didn't get appointed tonight, then I would encourage you look at the city website. Thank you very much, Councillor King, and as well. Our thanks, the committee does have a representative from the administration because the mayor does vote on a number of these appointments. We'll get to that in a couple of minutes as well. And our thanks to Samantha Sheehan for representing the administration. We need a motion. So if you would be kind enough to make a motion on that, Councillor King. I would move to approve the Board and Commission 2023 appointments late. Thank you, Councillor King. Is there a second to that motion? Thank you, Councillor Berkman. Is there any discussion on the motion? Actually, before we get to a vote, if we have the list, and you probably do have the list of everyone, I think it would be particularly meaningful to read the slate, and if you need a minute to get that up. Okay, so we'll just wait for a second here. The, those people who are gonna be serving on Boards and Commissions, we do want to read off their names. So we have, I'm just gonna give names, not, or do you want positions? Well, if we can just say that, I imagine airport is first. So an airport for a term expiring June, whatever it be. 2026, we have Chip Mason, Board of Assessors. Point of order, President Paul. Yes. My apologies. I just want to note that those are our appointments for the City Council with Mayor Presiding, and we're voting on the City Council appointments right now. Point is well taken. So we'll just, we're just gonna, we'll focus first on the City Council, and then we'll go, we will, after we have done items 8.4 and 8.5, we will then go to the Mayor, with Mayor Presiding. So Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission for a term that ends in 2025, Andy Montrell, Church Street Marketplace Commission, term ending in 2026, Becky Holt, Church Street Market Commission, another term ending in 2026, Eric Monson. Then we have Fence Viewer, Paul Schmidt. That's a term ending in 2024. Also, the next two are Fence Viewers, with terms ending in 2024, Shay Totten, and then actually re-advertising that, and then that is everyone. Great. Thank you so much. So with that, we have a slate of appointments for the City Council. These are the ones that the Mayor does not vote on. Are there any, is there any discussion on the motion before us? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion to move this slate of appointments for our City's Board and Commission, Boards and Commissions, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously, and with it, our congratulations to those who will be serving, as well as our thanks to those who applied. We hope that you will consider applying in the future. We often, as Councillor King has mentioned, do have openings either presently, but also there are openings for many reasons that have happened during the year, and hope that you and other community members will consider applying for those openings. But for tonight, our congratulations, and thanks once again for those who will be serving. We have two openings that the Committee was unable to find consensus. The first is 8.4, which is an appointment to the Green Mountain Board. Yes, actually that is correct. It is not correct on here. So we will say that again. 8.4, which is an appointment to the Green Mountain Transit Board for a term expiring June 30, 2026. Are there, Councillor Shannon? Well, hold on just a second. I would open the floor to nominations. Councillor Shannon. Thank you, President Paul. I would nominate Andrea Suazo. I might not have said her name correctly, but that's how it said in my head. I don't know if Andrea is. There'll be a point, I guess Andrea is here. And I just want to say I think that Andrea has a vision for improving ridership, improving communications, of recognition of how important this is to achieving our climate goals. And I think that as a rider and a longtime resident here, I think that she will serve this board well with her experience and her vision. And I thank her for throwing her hat in as well as for all the other applicants to all of the other boards. We appreciate your volunteer spirit. Thank you so much, Councillor Shannon. Are there any other Councillor Bergman? I place the name of Will Anderson for nomination to this board. Like Andrea, he has the same types of vision and the same experience in terms of being a rider, what Will has brought or would bring here is his work experience related to economics and public administration and financial management. He is a financial analyst for the state and that is going to be particularly important during the next year when the fare system has to be revamped by the legislative requirements that were just passed in the transportation bill and then going forward all of the conversations that we've had here and in the TUC related to sustainable funding of mass transit will of the two applicants and this is not to disparage Andrea but just to say that of the two, he has the expertise to really help the board and help management work through this particularly difficult time for mass transit but it's actually an incredible opportunity time. So I would hope that we could get Will on here. I just also would note that both of them have applied for two positions. So one, and there are two that are there. One is an alternate and one is a regular. I do think that we would be best served with Will as the permanent but we'll see how this goes and what happens after. Thank you. Okay, thanks so much, Councillor Bergman. As we know, nominations do not require a second. So we have two nominations and we do, this is the time when we do ask if there are, if the candidates are here and if they wish to speak. Obviously, Andrea, I know that you're here. I don't see Will and I don't see him online although there are a couple of people that are joining us online by telephone. If Will, you are one of those phone numbers, perhaps you can maybe text somebody here so that we know that that might be you if you wish to speak. Andrea, did you wish to speak? We'd be happy to. We welcome your input. Hi there, can you hear me? Yes. I can hear myself as well. Hi, I live in Ward 6. I've been a Green Mountain Transit rider for more than a decade and I do appreciate the service that the agency provides that helps us be a one-car household. I think there's also a lot that Green Mountain Transit could be doing better to serve riders in what is the largest city in its service area, not just in frequency and reliability of service. I took the bus here tonight. I'm not sure that I'm gonna catch the bus home timing-wise because it runs pretty infrequently at this time of night. But I think the agency can also improve in just communication with its riders and outreach to new riders. Professionally, I'm a data journalist, which means I'm used to coming up to speed on really complex topics pretty quickly, asking the right questions, vetting complicated data sets. And so I'm confident that I would be able to kind of get up to speed with how the agency runs from a perspective beyond just a rider fairly quickly. I am excited for this opportunity to learn a lot more about GMT and from the perspective of its management and of its drivers and to serve as a voice for Burlington riders on the board. I appreciate your consideration and I'm happy to answer additional questions. Thank you so much, Andrea. Were there any questions that any counselors had for Andrea? Thank you so much for being here. We greatly appreciate it. Don't see that Will is here and I don't see him online, so I'll assume that he's not. The way that we'll do this and what we usually do is the first person that is nominated, we will vote on and if they receive a majority, then they will have the seat. So Andrea, your name was nominated first by Councillor Shannon. All those in favor of Andrea, and you'll forgive me your last name. Is it Suzo? What? Swazo. Okay, thank you so much. All those in favor of the appointment of Andrea, Suazo as the member of the Green Mountain Transit Board, let's raise our hands, please. That is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That is eight votes, so that is a majority. Andrea, congratulations. We look forward to having you as a member of the Green Mountain Transit Board. With that, we will go to item 8.05, which is the appointment of the Green Mountain Transit Board alternate, and I'll open the floor to nominations. Councillor Bergman. And so I will place Will Anderson's name and nomination again. Thank you very much, Councillor Bergman. Are there any other nominations for this appointment? Going once, I'm looking at the Acting City Attorney, I know that I have to say that, and I should have said it the last time. Going once, going twice. The floor is now closed for nominations. Are we okay on the last one? Okay, thank you. With that, we have one nomination. All those in favor of the nomination of Will Anderson to this position, please say aye. We have an additional voter with Councillor Travers. Any opposed, please say no. That motion pass, or that nomination is successful and congratulations to Will Anderson, who will be the alternate to the Green Mountain Transit Board. I did notice, Councillor Hightower, that you had your hand raised. Did I miss that opportunity? Did you wish to speak or? I would just thought you were gonna say raise your hand for voting again, so my apologies. Okay, no worries. So that means that we now move on to, well, actually by charter, there are some, as we now know, there are some commissions and boards where in addition to the City Council, the Mayor also has a vote. So to move things in a semi-linear form, we will recess the City Council meeting at 7.56, and we'll pass the gavel to Mayor Weinberger to convene the City Council with Mayor Presiding. Thank you, President Fahl. I will convene the City Council with Mayor Presiding at 7.56 p.m. and would welcome a motion to adopt the agenda. So moved. Thank you, President Pahls, our second. Seconded by Councillor Shannon. Any discussion of the agenda? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the item of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The motion carries unanimously and we have an agenda. So similarly, as we just completed with the regular City Council meeting, we have an item 2.1 is a slate of the 2023 Boards and Commissions appointments that were created through the same process that Councillor King described a few minutes ago. Councillor King, would you like to read this slate here? Do we already actually read the full slate? No, we haven't, I didn't think so. So would you like to share any thoughts, anything you didn't hit in the regular meeting relevant and share the slate? I think I'll just share the slate. So we have Airport Commission, term ends in 2026, Chip Mason, Board of Assessors, term ends 2026, Jonathan Chapel Sokol, Cemetery Commission, two positions, both ending in 2026, Mary Wesley and Martha Dallas, Conservation Board, two positions, both ending in 2027, Miles Wait, Hannah Breslin, Design Advisory Board, two terms, ending in 2026, Jay White, Richard Martin, and there is an alternate position as well with Kathleen Ryan, and another, sorry, Development Review Board, Alternate Position, 2024, Evan Gould, Development Review Board, full term, or full position, ending in 2026, Sean McKenzie, Electric Light Commission, two terms, or two positions, both ending in 2026, Lara Bond, Scott Moody, the Fire Commission are two positions, ending in 2026, Ashley Bond, Monica Chapman, Board of Health, two positions, both ending in 2026, Celia Bird, and Jennifer Tomesak, Parks and Rec Commission, two positions, both ending in 2026, Harley Johnson, Lee Morgan, Planning Commission, two positions, ending in 2026, Andy Montrell, Erin Malone, Police Commission, two positions, both ending in 2026, Mary Cox, Kevin Garrison, Public Works Commission, two positions, both ending in 2026, Jim Barr, Justine Sears, the Retirement Board, one position, ending in 2026, David Mount, Board of Tax Appeals, there's three positions, all ending in 2026, Andrew Champaign, David Mayer, Meg McGovern, vehicle for hire licensing, licensing board, one position, ending in 2024, Stephen Hamlin, and then the board for registration of voters, ending in 2028, Leslie Gendron. Thank you, Councillor King. And are you making a motion to nominate that site? Yeah, I would move that we nominate the 2023 boards and commission slate. Okay, great. Do we, President Paul, we have a second for that motion. Is there any discussion of the slate? Councillor Shannon. I just want to thank all of my colleagues that volunteered for this commission and worked expeditiously and in cooperation. And I think the group was very thoughtful about the choices. I also appreciate all the people who applied for positions, whether or not we were able to appoint them tonight or not, as was mentioned previously, there are still openings. I hope people that will look into those openings. I wanted to flag one thing, of which is that in this process, we noticed that there are a few commissions where an inordinate number of commissioners terms come due at one time. And we're gonna have to look into that, not tonight, but I think it's important to address that because we don't want four and five members of a commission turning over all at one time. So before our next appointment cycle, that that will need to be addressed. Thank you. Thank you very much. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you, Councilor Shannon. Are there any other Councilors who would wish to speak to the slate that is before you? Okay, seeing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion to appoint this slate, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The motion carries unanimously and the slate is adopted. Thank you to everyone who was just appointed for your willingness to serve the city in this important role. And to those, as was stated by President Paul, just a few minutes ago, to those who were not successful this time, we really encourage you to consider the nontrivial number of open positions that still remain and to consider applying again. Many people who have served the city for a long time were not successful in their first or even second time applying for these competitive appointments. We're fortunate to have so much interest in these seats. With that, we have one more piece of business on the City Council of Mayor presiding agenda, which is to appoint a series of fire wardens and I would welcome a motion to that fact if I'm understanding this properly. What's supposed to happen here? Councilor McGee. I would move that we waive the reading except the communication, place it on file and approve the attached list of fire wardens for July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024. Thank you, Councilor McGee. Do we have a second for that motion? Seconded by Councilor Bergman. Any discussion of the motion? Seeing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Is there anyone opposed? The motion carries unanimously. That is the conclusion of our agenda. There being no further business and no objection the City Council of Mayor presiding is adjourned at 8.04 PM and I hand the microphone and gavel back to you, President Paul. Thank you, Mayor Weinberger. I'd blame it on jet lag, but I don't think I can get away with that. I, my apologies for speaking over you. We will reconvene the council meeting at the same time at 8.04 and our next item is 8.6, which is the city place public improvement construction costs. We do have with us DPW Director Chapin Spencer and Laura Wheelock public works engineer and before we go to some comments from you we'll go to a motion. Councilor Barlow. Thank you, President Paul. I move to accept and approve construction costs of the public improvements by SD Ireland Brothers Inc. and authorized payment for such construction costs in an amount in that greater than 11,600,624 dollars with an additional authorized contingency of $1,903,299 for a total authorized expenditure for such construction costs not to exceed $13,503,923 subject to necessary review and approval by the Chief Administrative Officer and in accordance with the ARDA 2.0. Thank you so much, Councilor Barlow. Is there a second to that motion? Seconded by Councilor Shannon. So we have with us DPW Director Chapin Spencer and Laura Wheelock, public works engineer. I understand that the two of you have some verbal presentation to give some comments to offer and we welcome them and then we'll go to the Council for additional questions or comments. Thanks for being here. Thank you very much, President Paul, on this one of the longest days of the year. Hopefully it's not one of the longer nights of the year for you all. I would be brief. In coordination with multiple city departments, Public Works has been working to make comprehensive and generational upgrades to a number of our downtown rights of way. Based on the Great Street Standards that you all have reviewed and approved, our goal really is to make our streets more resilient and our streetscape more vibrant. And we've completed a number of successful projects at St. Paul Street City Hall Park. We have Main Street Great Streets and Final Design. And tonight, we're really focused on several rights of way in the heart of our downtown. Partnering with city place partners and adjacent stakeholders really as we seek to return the vitality that many feel was lost out of the urban renewal many decades ago. So I'll turn it over to Senior Engineer Laura Wheelock with the details. There's not really much more to add after that, but just to focus everybody's attention for those who haven't been familiarized with the project. What St. Ireland will be constructing under these improvements are the new Pine and St. Paul Streets that extend between Bank and Cherry Street, as well as the curb to face a building along Cherry Street and Bank Street. And again, as Director Spencer noted, this is in the Great Street Standards. So this is an improvement of the entire roadway and or construction of the new roadways to those standards. The street ecology, the balance of the roadway between pedestrians and vehicles are of the forefront of those design standards. And that is what the street would focus on. Great, thank you very much. That was brief. Are there, we'll open the floor to questions or comments from members of the city council at this time. Councillor Jane. Thank you, very quick question. I was just wondering if those construction include electric poles. It's not part of the list. Do they have any electric poles and also are there a plan to put them down underground? The current streets and areas that they're reconstructing don't have overhead wires. There is one section of Bank Street that the city is pursuing a grant opportunity, which would then allow us to move that wiring underground to kind of complete one of the very few sections that still has overhead wires in our downhound. Thanks very much, Councillor Jang. Any other questions or comments? And if not, we will move on to a vote. All those in favor of the motion regarding the acceptance and approval of these public improvement construction costs please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously. Thank you so much for being here. We'll move on to our next agenda item, which is 8.7, which is the net zero energy presentation. And for this presentation, we have Darren Springer, general manager of Burlington Electric here with us, as well as the chair of the electric commission, Scott Moody. Thank you both so much for being here. And ideally, if we've allotted about 20 minutes for this agenda item, and if you can limit to about 10, and then we'll go to questions and comments from the council. Very good, good evening. We have actually two agenda items, so I know I'm gonna walk through our net zero energy update, and then we also have our commission report as well. So as the mayor mentioned, this was released just last week. And in terms of the roadmap, which was released and adopted by the council in 2019, as a reminder, the four major components there are moving towards electrifying buildings and becoming more efficient within our buildings, moving towards electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids for ground transportation, moving towards district energy, and reducing the number of vehicle miles that we travel through a walking, biking, transit, and other alternative modes of transportation. This was the report that was developed by Synapse Energy Economics out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they do the updates with us every year so that we have the most current data in terms of our emissions in the ground transportation sector and the building sector. I wanted to start with just a good accomplishment here that we've had over the last several years, which is Burlington continues to be ranked by Environment America in its Shining Cities report as the top city per capita for solar, not only in the Northeast, but really in the entire East. We are the top city for solar in terms of watts per person and that's been several years running now. Wanted to share as well in terms of incentive performance that relative to our state requirements, which is the orange bar here, we continue for the last three years to exceed and this is on purpose, exceed the state electrification requirements, which are under tier three of Vermont's renewable energy standard. We had that big bump in 2020 because we had the geothermal system at Hula come online and we had two electric transit buses that year, but we've been able to maintain the outperformance even without those measures and we are hopeful, I know we're just talking about Green Mountain Transit, we are hopeful we're gonna see additional electric transit buses in the near future. We're working with them on that and we're also hopeful that we're gonna see additional geothermal heating and cooling, including potentially at the new high school among other places. So there's opportunities still to have that kind of an impact over the next several years as well. Our revenue bond is really helping us to fund the incentives at the higher levels and as you all have seen, we've done this graph a few times, but since we launched the green stimulus effort during the beginning of COVID, this is June 2020 where that dot is on the graph. We have now over 22X, the number of residential heat pump installations that we had in June of 2020. So we're seeing that, starting to see that kind of exponential level growth that we're hoping to see in terms of heat pump adoption in the city of Burlington, which is certainly an important component for net zero. So going to the net zero roadmap, and I've linked here to the website that we have where we maintain the roadmap and these updates. This is a goal to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuels across the electric, thermal and ground transportation sectors. And of course, Burlington became the first city in the nation in 2014 to source 100% of our power from renewable generation. Now we're trying to have a similar accomplishment in terms of buildings and in terms of ground transportation. The plan that we have has been recognized as the first US 2030 net zero plan by the Smart Electric Power Alliance. I believe Ann Arbor, Michigan has joined us now with a similarly ambitious approach and we've joined them for some webinars to talk about what we're each doing. So it's great to see other cities around the nation and even close to home Montpelier joining this effort as well. And important to note, this is not a Burlington Electric initiative. This is an all departments initiative as well as a community initiative. We really can't get there without collaboration across every different department, across the community. And we have so many great opportunities that we're partnering on with different city departments. So I wanna thank every department for their participation. Lastly, just before we jump to the data, I wanted to note that in terms of where the data comes from, Synapse Energy Economics gets data from Burlington Electric and also from Vermont Gas Systems, particular to the thermal sector. And then for the transportation data, it's primarily from the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission and the Vermont Travel Survey, but there is a lag with that. So that data applies 2021 and prior. For 2022, they use Vermont State travel data and they essentially extrapolate for Burlington. So every year that we do the report, we update the prior years, a travel data to get a little more granular for Chittenden County. So jumping to the data itself, this is good news here in the ground transportation sector, which is we continue to be ahead of the very ambitious pace that the roadmap lays out for us in the dotted lines in terms of our actual consumption, estimated by Synapse for gasoline and diesel. And they come to this estimate looking at the number of vehicles registered in the community, the number of vehicle miles that are traveled and then the number of electric vehicles out of the, as a percentage of the total vehicles. And in each of those cases, we're seeing really significant progress. We're seeing less vehicles registered in Burlington than we've seen in past years. We had the press event to announce this report at the new car share charger in the old North End at the community center, where we have one of a number of car share EVs that have been located around the community. Car shares a great organization. I think they're contributing to that reduction in the need for vehicle registrations as well as Green Mountain Transit. We've had free transit ridership for the last several years, as well as all the opportunities for walking and biking, electric bikes as well. We are seeing a continued reduction in vehicle miles traveled relative to pre-pandemic. So we had a big drop-off, as you can see, going from 2018 to 2020, but we've been able to mainly sustain that. Vehicle miles traveled have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. And certainly a number of different innovations, including remote work, I think has something to do with that. And then lastly, we're of course seeing more EVs in the community and we continue to press for opportunities to help our customers with electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids that reduce the use of gasoline and diesel. So good news here. More challenging news in the building sector. And this is not weather normalized, which means that the weather can play an impact on this data. What we've seen with natural gas is a decline still since 2018, but a bit of a rebound over the last year. Some of that could be due to weather. There are some other factors that could be a play as well. I'll break it down here by residential and commercial. And you can see residential and commercial. Commercial had a little bit more of a pronounced rebound, if you will, between 2021 and 2022, relative to residential. So this presents a bit of a challenge for us in the building segment relative to ground transportation. This is the overall picture for Burlington. Thermal and ground transportation, greenhouse gas emissions from the 2019 till 2022. And as you can see, we had a significant drop during the pandemic and we've largely been able to hold on to those gains, not entirely, but largely. And I'll talk about just on this next slide. Compared to the national trend, we saw nationally a six and a half percent rebound in emissions between 2020 and 2021 and an additional 1.3 percent between 21 and 22. Burlington's rebound between that same time period is a total of 3.2 percent. So we're seeing a significantly more mild rebound in emissions coming out of the pandemic here than what we've seen nationally. Emissions here are still down over 11 percent relative to our 2018 baseline. So that's good news. It's not as good a news as we want. We wanna get further onto the path of the net zero roadmap, but this is still a significant change relative to 2018 and it's something that's definitely in the right direction. In terms of, I mentioned the fuel consumption in the ground transportation sector, 10.6 percent below what the roadmap pace would have been. So that's a real positive. I mentioned Car Share, that EV is called Sparky, I believe. That's the Nissan Leaf that's out here on St. Paul and Maine. And we celebrate Car Share's support for all of these different initiatives. I mentioned the rebound relatively in the commercial sector with natural gas and the desire to have even more adoption of heat pumps and EVs in particular as we try to move towards the roadmap goals. I believe this is my last slide and this is just some forward looking thoughts to share. I think that the policies that the administration and the council have adopted or with respect to the carbon fee in the process of working on are going to be particularly meaningful in impacting the building sector data in the coming years. Rental weatherization has only just begun to roll out as of 2022. The renewable heating ordinance has only just rolled out as of 2022 and the carbon fee policy would potentially have a even more significant impact, both for new construction and large existing buildings and city buildings. So there's a lot of reason for hope there if we can implement those policies. District energy would have the single biggest impact in terms of reducing commercial sector fossil fuel use. It's approximately a 16% reduction for the current system design that includes the hospital, UVM, the Interveil Center. And we're working hard on that to bring you a concrete proposal in the very near future that you can evaluate relative to district heat. And then just lastly, the Inflation Reduction Act at the federal level is going to provide a significant boost when combined with our incentives and the state incentives in making an impact for Burlington. So let me stop sharing my screen here and glad to answer any questions. Hopefully I was relatively on pace timing-wise. That's great. Thank you. Thanks so much. So the floor is open for any questions or comments from the council. Yes. Councilor Bergman. I gave them the opportunity. Thank you for the report. I'm really enjoying working with you all through the two in other ways. So there are three areas that I wanna explore. Have you looked at the South Burlington Solar... And if you could just, so you're familiar with it, have you all studied it? Do you have any preliminary? Because I know we don't have anything similar right now. Thoughts related to its applicability for the city of Burlington. You know, generally speaking, favorably disposed towards it. We work with new construction buildings to try to look at opportunities for solar. You know, it's not always... From a technical standpoint, there may be barriers in terms of needing the roof space for different uses, whether that's mechanical or otherwise. But having something that was pushing towards where it's technically appropriate and feasible, let's have solar on the roof is something that will always be supportive of. Great, I look forward to working with you to maybe come up with a similar ordinance here. I'm curious about the potential for geothermal heating. And would just note that Farmington, Massachusetts has a district geothermal project, a pilot project that Eversource is, that company, is pushing more is doing. And I'm just curious about the potential that we have in Burlington and sort of what are those potentials and what are the limitations that we would see? We love geothermal. It's a great heating and cooling source, very efficient. We have incentives for geothermal. We even have new incentives to help with the test wells so that a customer can explore if they have the appropriate groundwater for geothermal. So we're active in this space. We have a number of buildings around the community, Champlain College, Hula, several of the schools that already utilize it very well. And we're working with the new high school. I'm looking at the geothermal opportunity there. I'm optimistic that we can help with that. There are several other buildings that I'm aware of that are looking at it. I think it's not necessarily in Burlington a district system opportunity as much as it is a building opportunity. It's much more expensive to retrofit. If you're building new and you have that opportunity, it has amazing life cycle economics. And there are companies that are working on retrofit and trying to make it more cost competitive. There's even a company called Dandelion Geothermal that's a spin-off of Google that is looking at trying to do this for residential and using shallower drilling techniques. So there may be applications in the future where retrofit becomes more cost competitive, but right now it's a really amazing opportunity. Any time we're either building new or there's an opportunity like there is at the high school with a major change to look at whether we can place a geothermal system. And our team will support that 100%. It's a great opportunity. Great. I actually look forward to you investigating the work done in Massachusetts and being open in terms of a district project, which I think is the future in a large way, although I understand the problems with retrofitting and the capital that's included in such a project. And just to caveat, we're not opposed to district geothermal. Our technical folks just don't see as many cost effective opportunities for it currently in Burlington. It's a great opportunity if you're building a new housing complex, a new university campus. It may be a little more challenging for retrofit, but we're supportive of that too, where it has a cost effective opportunity. Great. And then the last relates to the solar potential. I'm very impressed with the numbers there. Wondering what different areas of the city might be appropriate for a larger array. You know I've talked with you about the old dump in my neighborhood, in Scott's neighborhood, and it looks to be perfectly situated for such a thing. So what are the potential for those? Yeah, certainly the land use decision about that property is sort of outside of our boundary of expertise, but yeah, opportunities like that where you might have a megawatt or two megawatts of solar are gonna be fairly rare in the environment we have where we have a relatively compact and relatively built out environment. Certainly rooftop solar going back to the earlier discussion, particularly for new construction or retrofits, major opportunities there. And anything where you can add something along the order of what you're talking about at the landfill, a megawatt, two megawatts. The biggest project we have is two and a half megawatts. It's the South 40 project, which is located in the New North End. So we don't have, after that, the biggest project is the 500KW on the roof deck at the airport. And then much of the rest of that solar is really smaller projects, 100 kilowatts here, 40 kilowatts here, three kilowatts on my roof, those types of things. So really we've kind of disaggregated the solar and spread it around the community, which is a good thing. But if there are opportunities to do something bigger in a cost effective way, that has potential as well. And solar is a kind of a small but growing slice of our energy mix, plays a useful role, is complimented well by having kind of a diversity of renewables. Great, thank you, Mr. Mayor. I would hope that you and your administration would look seriously at the old landfill and the potential for solar and perhaps the passive uses that it's being used for now. I don't think that there's a conflict and would be great if we could include that in our thinking and our planning and in the attempt to get a zero emission future. Thank you. Thanks very much, Councillor Bergman. Are there any other councillors who wish to have any questions or comments regarding the presentation? Councillor Barlow. And thank you for that. My question's more about, it's really troubling that the thermal sector is so far behind. And I'm just wondering if you think with some of the measures that we're currently undertaking that that's sufficient to sort of bend that curve back in the other direction. So I guess I'll start there. I think we have the opportunity to bend that curve downward significantly with a combination of the policies that we're discussing and district T. Roughly speaking, I'm gonna get the numbers hopefully reasonably in the ballpark. I believe we have about 1,600 MMBTU or no sorry, no. 1,600 maybe it's billion MMBTU but in terms of kind of commercial thermal sector use and you could reduce by 230, 225,000 MMBTU with district T. So it's again, it's about a 16% reduction just on that one project because you're really talking about some of the larger energy use in the community being kind of taken away from fossil fuel and put on renewable steam. There's also significant efficiency with district T that maybe we don't talk about as much because we're talking a lot about the steam provision but Boiler is gonna be a certain percentage efficient and the district steam that comes, the steam is gonna be already at the level that's needed for the campus. So you can save a significant amount of fossil fuel by not running some of those boilers as well as much of the time. So that's where that 225,000 MMBTU figure comes from for the district heat reduction. The carbon fee policy I think will have a significant impact if it is enacted. And that's not only we're talking about new construction making sure that it's being built with the clean technologies that are available but also beginning to make the transition in large existing buildings as well and in city buildings which we're already working on but it would codify that. That's a significant chunk of the thermal sector that you'd be affecting right there. And then you get to some of the harder to reach how do we help small businesses with heat pumps? And right now we're doing an incentive approach and we wanna keep doing that and try to reach more customers. At a certain level, prescriptive policy may be a challenge to apply for certain segments but I'm optimistic that we can bend that curve down with those two interventions with the carbon fee and with district heat. And the roadmap really calls those out kind of as being key policies as well. Okay, thank you. The other thing I've been thinking about ever since the symposium last week I've been educating myself on electric generation and one of the things that I learned this week is that the power we use is actually generated at the time we use it. Which I guess I didn't appreciate before so we talk about solar but solar only works when the sun is shining, wind only works when the wind is blowing. And so I'm wondering if there are other strategies to leverage those clean technologies in terms of storage and are there feasible utility scale storage technologies that are on the horizon or are they being looked at by BED? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it goes back to the point about you want a diversity of renewable resources. We can't really rely exclusively on anyone or even just a couple. If you wanna be 100% renewable which we've wanted to be and we are having the different characteristics is really important. You know, hydro runs certain times of the year very well, other times of the year a little bit less. Wind produces a little more in the winter and at night so that's a good complement to solar which produces more in the summer and during the day. And obviously McNeil with wood can be dispatched for when we need it. And Burlington is a load center within the state of Vermont. You know, we are the biggest sort of energy draw in the state of Vermont, maybe alongside if you think about the Global Foundries Campus which is roughly a similar kind of power use to Burlington. Those are load centers. They need generation in a nearby proximity to keep reliability for the grid. So the diversity of renewables provides that. We are looking at storage, not only for battery storage the way that everybody thinks about with lithium ion batteries. We're looking at that for utility scale. But we have pilot projects through this program called Delta Climb where we bring businesses to partner with us, seed stage businesses from around the country. One of those is looking at the idea of when prices are low on the New England grid when renewable energy supply might be optimal when the sun is shining. For example, if we have a lot of solar, can we use electric boilers essentially as a form of thermal storage? And run those during those low price times, basically draw on the renewable energy that's out there and put it to good use with decarbonizing thermal loads. That's part of the district energy proposal as well as to have an electric boiler to do exactly what I just mentioned. But we're also looking at it with a company called Neothermal which is one of those seed stage businesses that you could use one at our Pine Street campus or you could put one somewhere else at a smaller size and do similar things. So we have to think about thermal storage and timing of the grid for pricing as well as things like lithium ion battery storage. So we are exploring all of those as well as just moving demand like we do with our EV rate, trying to move demand off peak. Thanks, appreciate it. Thanks so much, Councillor Barlow. Are there any other comments from the council as well as on Zoom? I am paying attention to the screen. Seeing none, thank you so much. General Manager Thringer greatly appreciate this. Is it your intention to, I'm trying to remember when the last presentation was, are you doing these at regular, so you are, and how long has it been? Roughly we were able to get the results of the roadmap update usually sometime between April and June each year. So typically you'd see us around this time every year. I think last year it might have been in May, if I remember correctly. So we try to do this update once a year and then I think we try where we can to provide additional updates relative to incentive uptake and other things different times of the year. Okay, thank you so much. So seeing no other Councillors in the queue we'll close out this agenda item with our thanks, unless there is someone. Yes, we will, we move on to that. That is item 8.8, which is the annual commission report for the Burlington Electric Commission. We have the chair of the commission, Scott Moody with us. Scott, thanks so much for your time and for your service on the commission. Were there some comments that you wanted to offer before we open it up to the council? Yes. Great. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for, Mr. Mayor, President Paul and Councillors. Thank you so much for having me here tonight. It is a pleasure and an honor. And if you'll allow me to fill a buster for a quick second here. There's a few of you that I've known for a long time. There's a few of you that I've met once or twice and some of you that I've never met at all. A lot of you know me from my role at Channel 17 on the other side of this. I'm rarely on this side of the table once a month. So probably see made my role at Channel 17. And that's kind of how I ended up on this board. It was part of when I first got on Channel 17 in 2009. One of my first assignments was Burlington Electric. And I found it absolutely fascinating. And at every board meeting, as soon as I shut the camera off, I was talking to the engineers and commissioners and stuff and just absolutely got fascinated by it. And there was a point where a general manager, Barb Grimes, said, Scott, you know, you're here every month anyway. There was an opening on the board. She said, you should probably come on this side of the table. So I did. And that was 13 years ago. And I've learned so much. So coming to be here tonight is kind of a neat culmination of 13 years of waiting to be in front of you folks. So thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. So I have a couple of things that I just want to go over really quick. Hopefully you've all read the summary here. And I'm not going to get too deep into it. I'm going to just touch on a couple of things and a couple of items that are not on this briefly. So a couple of things we've been looking at. There's been some concern about the department's fees. They're very slightly about when changing apartments in this and that and the other thing. We haven't been able to get to that yet with a lot of other things that have been going on as General Manager Springer has been talking about. But that's something we're hoping to look at doing some revisions on in the fall. The other thing that this subject is near and dear to our hearts at the commission is street lighting. We've had several recent discussions with several neighborhoods primarily in the south end over our street lighting policy. There's been a couple of neighbors that have had some really major projects in their neighborhood and kind of feeling the pain of having a different lighting setup. To that end, we've had meetings really kind of doing a deep dive on the department's policy. And we brought in some experts and we kind of hashed out a lot of things and took some information for some communities in Connecticut that are doing like dimming technology at night and that sort of thing. But the conclusion we came to and it's consistent with our policy and with our is to maintain our status as is, our policy as is and maintain the IES standards. Primarily from a, just a safety point of view is really the biggest driver of that. So we are not changing our policies to make everybody happy in different neighborhoods. It's, you know, we were looking out for the safety of Berlin Tonians. On to the bigger things that really have our attention have been the economics of running Burlington Electric over the last year or so. I mean, with, there's been a lot of inflation, energy prices not being what was expected of them. There's been a couple of things that are absolutely out of the department's control and it has been concerning us on the board as we look at every month's financials and it kind of, it's a troubling picture. However, the folks at Burlington Electric have been diligently really trying to mitigate all those things that are sort of creeping up on the department and giving us financial stress. We are well aware of that and it's at the top of our radar but there are folks, there are really intelligent folks there that are trying to do as much as we can across the board to try to mitigate those things. So know that there's, it's a little bit troubling but we're on top of that and we welcome any questions about that in detail after this. We're also, you know, also looking towards finishing the district energy project since I've been on the board it started, this has been going on for what 20, so 20, 30 odd years but since I've been on here about the last eight years or so it's really caught steam, ha ha. And so we're really looking forward to that coming to fruition here in the fall. There's just a few more things to tie up on that project and so we're hoping to get to that in the fall. Yeah and as far as what the general manager Springer was talking about, I personally have about to benefit from BED's policies and incentives. Now's the time to jump in and get into heat pumps and all those sorts of things. We're about to re-insulate our home and we're working with a company through BED and Vermont Gas to do heat pumps in our own home. So now's the time to jump in. So there's some really great things happening and there's a couple of troublesome things certainly in terms of finances but that's something that between the department and the board we are laser focused on that and there's a few ideas out there that are being floated or some really intuitive and ingenious ideas out there from some of the smart cookies that we have down there to mitigate that even further and I hope to down the road be able to talk to you about some of the board out of the box thinking ideas that can help mitigate some of our financial concerns. Sorry, I'm a little bit nervous. I'm not used to being in front of people like I've been in front of this crowd here so yeah, I'm very nervous about that thing and the other thing I just wanted to mention real quick is that I would be remiss if I didn't make all you folks aware of just to appreciate the line crews out there who risk their lives every day keeping the lights on for the city and it means a lot to us and I would just wanna mention those folks who do a very dangerous but necessary job every day for all of us in the city and the people at Burlington Electric, there's some folks and I've noticed this over the years and I might be on this board, there are people, there are a lot of unsung heroes, people that are in dark cubicles in a dark office someplace whose keen minds are able to sift through as some of you know certainly Councilor Paul knows the complexities of municipal power and some of the hoops that these folks jump through day after day for the rate payers of Burlington should not go unrecognized because the people are having impacts and are keeping your rates low and keeping the city safe that none of us hear about and I just wanted to take a moment to recognize those folks who don't usually get recognized for the great work that they're doing. Thank you. That was a wonderful, wonderful presentation. Thanks so much and well said. I can, I agree with you as a person who is once in the same seat that you are in now, the Burlington Electric, there are many employees who do wonderful work as well as in the entire city. Are there any Councilors, Councilor Shannon? Thank you and thank you Scott for your many years of service on the board. Thank you also for raising the issue of the neighborhood lighting, which has been an issue in the south end. And there's two things I have heard about and have questions related to relating to that. So one is, I know that you say in your report that safety is number one, which when we're talking about line workers and just the safety of the system, I completely agree. But safety has also been the reason for creating lighting plans in neighborhoods that have been objectionable to a lot of neighbors. I don't know that the south end is necessarily different from neighbors across the city. And I am wondering why neighborhoods get the lighting upgrades and where else it has happened, where it's coming in the future. And secondly, some streets have gotten like old fashioned looking lights and some streets have gotten the commercial looking lights. And I'm wondering how that decision is made and because of course the ones who have commercial lights would really like to have those nice looking traditional lights. Yeah, I actually was down on Lyman Avenue the other night talking with a couple neighbors who did just have get those gray. And my understanding is that those fixtures are for when they're doing underground, when the wiring is underground as opposed to aerial, they would end up getting the fiberglass poles. But I believe the same. Like the lamp posts? Yeah, the fiberglass lamp posts, that's my understanding. So SCARF Ave is underground? I don't know the SCARF. Yeah, the lighting, the kind of more traditional looking lighting, my understanding is the policy that was adopted a number of years ago said that if a neighborhood, if a street had that already, pre-existing, that when the replacements happened that the department would seek to replace with sort of a like kind, but if they didn't have that and we are providing underground or if you're providing, if you already have overhead wires, there might be a wooden pole or something where you have a light attached to it, but if it's underground, then they would have more kind of the lighting that you know, you're just referring to the traditionally they're gray street poles at I believe 30 feet with the Cobra Head fixture. So that's the rationale in the policy at least for why one street had the kind of more traditional looking lighting and another street had the overhead lighting. But the other question that you had, if I, or I don't know if you wanted to. Go ahead, go ahead. I was just gonna mention that the reason why a street would get the upgraded lighting would be really one of two things, it would be somebody called and said I don't believe we have a safe amount of lighting on the street, we want you to do a study which we would and then we would prioritize that area or the more common being and what's happened really in the south end is if we're doing any sort of upgrades on the street, we bring the street up to what's called the IES code which is the standard that's adopted by Burlington Electric by the Electric Commission that is a kind of international recognized standard that we use to really to protect the city and BED in the event that something went wrong, we have an objective standard that we can say we're trying to light to a certain level for safety and for other purposes. So that was that, I did, if I can have it just a half second, I wanna correct my math from earlier for a counselor Barlow, it was 1400 billion BTU in the commercial sector and then 225,000 MMBTU would be district heat and that's the 225, you divide that by 1400, you get the 16%, I just couldn't, I didn't wanna let that happen. Just to follow up on the new lighting, I think it's a relatively new standard so it hasn't gone out across the city in too many places. I mean, where have you done it other than in the South End? We've had a number of streets in the South End because we've had a number of projects happening in the South End where we've been, in one case we moved lines that were sort of overhead and behind houses and out into the street and in other cases we've had other kind of electrical work that's happening there but it would happen, it would happen anywhere, I believe there's been instances in the new North End as well. My entire street just got done, I'm on Oak Street. Yeah, so it's not limited certainly to the South End that's happened elsewhere. I just wondered if you had complaints in other places, I mean it might be somewhat relative to how close houses are to the street, it would impact them more where the yards are, the front yards are smaller. I think that's a fair point. I would agree. I also think that the South End seems to be something of a 100 acre wood and some of those streets, I was on them the other night, their canopy seems to be just so much more denser than some of the other areas in the city and I wonder if it's oftentimes a perception thing that, wow, it's so much brighter than before because it was so much darker than you're used to as well as if those fixtures have been on there no streets for any length of time on the order of years then they've dimmed over time and there's certainly, you know, there's a change in color temperature is gonna probably get Raul someone up, I know for myself, mine got changed from the really, really orange lights to the more pastel ones now and I absolutely love it. I had someone on Lyman Avenue tell me this light is ugly to you, to me, I'm loving it, I can sleep now. So it's a matter of perception and the bottom line is this has to be something that we can defend in a court of law and God forbid there's any sort of accident or anything that happens that the city or the department might be on the hook for that we can say, no, we've put the safety of people first and have a defensible argument. Well, I won't belabor it, but I do understand lighting hazards and the city has gotten in trouble for not doing so, but for, you know, lighting our bedrooms, I can understand people being dismayed, that they don't enjoy that, but I think we need to continue to work to serve our community in the way that they want to be served, but I'll leave it at that and thank you very much. Thanks so much, Councillor Shannon. We'll go to Councillor Jang. Thank you, President. Thank you for the presentation and Moody, I believe that I've known you as a parent before all of this. Yes, sir, you do. And yes. So I think the part of the report, you did not include you who received visitors, some animals came to BED. Some deer? Yeah, this year. All right, I think it's good. It's really great. And I was just also wondering if the council know about the podcast on your website, NetZero Podcast, it is an amazing, and I recommend everyone to please take the time to listen to those. Those are phenomenal, short, concise, and powerful. Great idea. When it, please add it next time. And we're just wondering how many miles of overhead wires have you put underground in 2023 or 2024? I just wanna see if we, making advantage or no? That's a good question. First, so we did have some deer in the park and a lot of BED. They walk right by the charger. It was a great social media post. And thank you for the compliment on the podcast. We have Jen Green, Sustainability Director for the city who's the host and Adam Raven who is a talented, working on the web and AV and does a lot of the behind the scenes work to make that as useful as it is. So in terms of undergrounding, so we have typically looked at undergrounding any time there is any sort of project. I know Laura Willock was mentioning that we're looking at it for part of the street design that's happening here. I think that the one that was happening in the timeframe that you were discussing where we had some undergrounding was the Champlain Parkway Project. So I know there's some undergrounding that was happening as a result of that project going forward. That was the main one that in talking with Muneer where we might see or have seen some impact there. I know we're also talking to the city about the Great Streets Project that's happening and opportunities, most of that's underground as it is because we're really talking about kind of the main street corridor which is already underground, but we're looking at certainly maintaining the underground infrastructure there, upgrading it and also locating a number of EV charging stations in those areas as well. And then I guess the other one would be the one we were just talking about in the south end where we had some overhead lines that we were able to move underground in the scarf kind of neighborhood. It was also in the timeframe roughly that you were mentioning. Thank you. And I think part of the report enhancing public outreach or community outreach, it seems as if you could do more because it seems that you're just tapping into events that are happening but targeted outreach exists and there are ways to do it and also make it more effective. I just ask you to maybe look for it better because I'm confident that the rate support for low income, many people just will take advantage but they don't know. But how do we change the mind and reaching them in order for them to take advantage of this? Thanks for your work. Thank you so much for all you do. Thank you. Thank you so much, Councillor Chang. Councillor Grant. Thank you. I had a couple of questions since we're talking about overhead wiring. How is the planning for that work? Like I can think of some streets in the historic north end that would really benefit from a major project like that. How is it decided which streets get to have that moved underground? Grant, so in terms of undergrounding, we typically, we don't have a budget to underground. Typically what will happen is if there's a project that's happening that's gonna change the infrastructure, maybe a major street project or something like that, we look for opportunities to underground cost effectively within those projects if we can. Obviously a number of the downtown streets have been undergrounded over the years, partly as a result of that. And underground, I would say, we're roughly 40% or so of the city has underground infrastructure and there's benefits to it in terms of certainly aesthetics, reliability can be better in a storm event, for example. There's also some challenges. Like our line crew has to have special training to be able to work underground and it can be a more hazardous environment for them in terms of going down. When there is an outage, it takes longer when it's underground to get the power back on than if it's just an above ground system. So, but the short answer is we don't really have a budget or any kind of discretionary ability with that. It really depends on what projects might be happening from a city standpoint. And then we look for opportunities if we can within those, if we have to relocate infrastructure to try to underground it if we can. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much, Councilor Grant. Seeing no one else in the queue, we will close out this agenda item. And again, Scott, thanks so much. Please extend our thanks to all the members of the Electric Commission. Thank you. And just closing, I would just invite relative to some of the two meeting and other discussions that we are, we meet the second Wednesday of the month at 585 Pine at 530 and we welcome all of those discussions and debates looking forward to where, to how this city gets its energy from. I think it's a worthwhile discussion. It was last week, it will continue to be and we welcome that continued discussion going forward at our meetings. And I would invite any and all of you. I know you have all kinds of free time, but we feed you people. So stop by and see us sometime. And again, thank you so much for having the opportunity to, and the honor to present in front of you tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you both so much. Our next agenda item is 8.9, which is the fire leadership pay scale on the, from the Burlington Fire Department. And we do are very fortunate to have Chief LeChance here with us to speak to this item. Before we get to you, we'll go to a motion from Councilor Barlow. Thank you, President Paul. I move to approve and authorize the wage scale adjustment to the fire leadership pay scale for the Burlington Fire Department command staff comprised of the positions of battalion chief and deputy chief as further detailed in the proposed tables and allow future wage adjustment adjustments to be consistent with the BFFA and COLA increases and further authorized back wages to be paid according to such revised pay scale, effective retroactively to January 1st, 2023. Thank you, Councilor Barlow. I'd like to get a second on that motion, please. Seconded by Councilor Carpenter. Thank you very much. Chief LeChance, nice to see you. We're hoping that maybe you could just provide a brief overview of this agenda item and then we'll go to any Councilor comments. Sure, good evening, everybody. So this conversation has been one that has been, you know, probably every three or four years it comes up and we have to worry about pay compression with between the union staff and the non-union staff. The pay compression is an issue because it reduces the number of folks that wanna promote into my command staff and as a newly appointed chief without a administrative chief or a EMS chief for the last three months, I can tell you those positions are very worthwhile. After, based on the most recent BFFA contract, currently, if you were to promote to the rank of battalion chief in charge of a shift of 25 folks, you're gonna take a base pay cut of about $1,070 a year and that doesn't take into account over time for minimum staffing or any of the annual retention or education bonuses or other various sprinkles as we call them in the contract. That is a 1.03% pay cut. So it is getting more and more difficult to entice folks to promote. What this does is it solves this compression issue once and for all. It sets clear percentage increases over the highest ranking union member, which is typically where you promote from and when you promote to deputy chief from battalion chief, again, a clear percent increase that it will be consistent through the years. We won't be here doing this again in five years. I know that there's some concern, about the retroactivity of this proposal. I just wanna speak to that if I could. This was considered, this whole process began probably March or April of 2022 under Chief Locke. He was noticing a significant compression issue prior to the latest BFFA contract. He moved on prior to solving this issue. Acting Chief Libby was, he worked on it as well, but wasn't able to bring it to fruition. It was one of my primary goals in the first few months of my promotion to Chief Engineer to solve this problem and just move on with it and not have to have this conversation at every Monday morning command meeting. The scales as you see them in the memo are moderate increases and I can speak to any questions. Great, thanks so much Chief. Are there any counselors who wish to speak to the motion before us? Counselor Shannon. Just very briefly Chief, I wanted to just recognize how your, how much more work your department has and how much all of your staff has had to step up in many different ways. And I very much appreciate the compression issue and that people don't want to take what should be an honor because there isn't a financial insensitive to take on the additional burden. And it is tough, it's a tough environment out there for all of you. And I want to thank you and all of the firefighters EMTs and staff for all that you're doing for the citizens of Burlington. Thank you, counselor. I appreciate that and I'll pass that onto my crews. I really do count on these folks, my battalion chiefs and my deputy chiefs to just be champions for their crews, to mentor them and to just keep spirits up when times are tough sometimes. And so I think us being able to pass this will just allow them to feel appreciated for what they're doing every day. So thank you. Thank you and thanks, counselor Shannon. We'll go to a counselor grant. Thank you. I wanted to echo some of the comments that counselor Shannon just made. I kind of look at the fire department overall. I like to call you kind of like the silent warriors behind the scenes. I really don't feel that Burlingtonians have a real understanding of the amount of work that you're doing. And as someone who is extremely concerned about the drug crisis in our city, I really see how members of the fire department and the EMTs are responding to that crisis and saving lives. And we have to look at wage equity. We're looking at it in other departments. So I definitely support this for the fire department. Thank you. Counselor Grant, Counselor Carpenter. I just do want to add on to that. And I had to bump it in the chief and was complimenting as you all recall, we had asked Sarah Russell to pull together a inter municipal meeting. We've been meeting every Tuesday on the houseless issues. And I'm very pleased that Kyle has been participating and just really helping us deal with this situation. But it makes us proud to have them so much involved in those conversations. Great, thanks so much, Counselor Carpenter. Seeing no other, having no other counselors in the Q and seeing no other, oh, my apologies, Mayor Weinberger. Thank you, President Paul. I just wanted to thank chief Lachance for making this a priority early in his 10 years, a new chief and working hard to get this fixed so that we can address these problematic staffing issues within the department and have a good system going forward. So thanks chief for getting this done. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much and thank you, Mayor Weinberger. Seeing no others, and if we can just get the Zoom screen back to the, thank you. Don't see anyone else, so we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion is made by Counselor Barlow, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. No. Okay, that motion passes by a vote of 11 to one. Chief Lachance, thanks so much again for being here. Have a good night. Thank you, you as well. Item 8.10 has been removed from the agenda, which brings us to our last agenda item. President Paul. For our deliberative agenda, which was added by a vote to amend our agenda and that's now 8.11, which is the 2022 annual report on BPD data. President Paul. Yes. I'm sorry, over here, it's, sorry. Just, I believe you should have a roll call on that last vote since it wasn't unanimous and we have been two different, yeah. Okay, we'll dial it back a little bit and go back to 8.9. Lori, if you could call the roll please. Counselor Barlow. Yes. Counselor Bergman. Yes. Counselor Carpenter. Yes. Counselor Jang. No. Counselor Doherty. Yes. Counselor Grant. Yes. Counselor Hightower. Yes. Counselor King. Yes. Counselor Amiggy. Yes. Counselor Shannon. Yes. Counselor Travers. Yes. City Council President Paul. Yes. 11 ayes, one day. Thank you so much. That motion passes by a vote of 11 to one. So as I had mentioned, 8.10 has been removed from the agenda, which brings us to 8.11, the 2022 annual report on BPD data. This item had been consent item 7.8 and Counselor Grant had asked that it be removed. So, Counselor Grant, if you wanted to speak to this at this time, I'm happy to recognize you. Yes, please. Great. I wanted to mention a few items of concern regarding this notice and then also request, and I guess this would be at the discretion of you, Counselor President Paul, whether it should be an agenda item for a full council meeting or for the Public Safety Committee. So in a nutshell, I was concerned about the following. That I felt that I'd like to see more information regarding to the access of the use of force data. I find it concerning that it's saying that we have a vendor being used by our police department since sometime in 2022, and that vendor is not providing information. And here we are in the middle of 2023. So I would like a little bit more information as to exactly why that's happening. There have been reports being provided. So if that vendor's not providing it, how is that data being extracted, I guess for lack of a better word. I understood the first initial delay. I do have a concern about further delaying it because that it was a little bit late last year, which caused the police commission's report to be late again, and this would make it even more late. So I just wanna have a little bit more transparency as to what's going on because this can put stress on the commission. So I'd like to hear from Megan Tuttle and Nancy Stetson as well, and then if they feel that BPD needs to chime in, they can certainly do that. I'd like to also know the process for how the data is quote unquote cleaned. The use of force data, it can be really sensitive and has been really sensitive issue in the past because it relates to racial disparities and tracking those within the department. So those were some concerns I had and would request that either in a future city council meeting or the public safety meeting that these issues would be discussed in full detail. Thank you. I don't know, Deputy Chief, if there are, there was quite a number of items that Councilor Grant had mentioned. If there were anything you felt you could speak to now or okay, great, go ahead please. Yeah, just for everybody's information, as of June 14th, the benchmark company, their engineers had sent the data analyst the information that she required. The issue came from, obviously there are a private company that markets their software to police departments. And before we used Valkor, which we were actually a part of. And so the access to that was already granted to the data analysts and other departments that wanted to use it because of the type of software it was. This time they have, they are going to have to create a way for the data analysts to go in through a back door because the data that I use to put in my reports, I have, they've made up, they've created reports for me that give me the information that I want. That's what they've done now that they know what the data analyst requires for the annual report. And moving forward, we're in talks with them on how to allow the data analysts to go in and extract that information themselves when they need it. So like I said, Valkor before, we were part of that as part of the creation of it. So the access was there already for the data analysts. In this case, private company obviously was concerned about having someone to have access to the back entrance to their data, into their programming. And so that's what's being worked out moving forward. And as far as I know, she has, our data analyst has all the information that she needs now to finish that report. So moving forward, that's where we're headed a year from now that should be in place and she will be able to get or whoever the data analysis at the time should be able to get that information. Once again, the stuff that I get, I had to do the same thing, I had to reach out to them and I had to tell them exactly what I wanted and then their engineers had to put together a program that put together that information. And now for me, it's a couple of clicks and I put the month in that I wanna look at and it gives me the information that I need for the report that I put out. So much, Deputy Chief LeBreck, is it, you know, I know that I had reached out and I believe that Megan Tuttle had also reached out to Councilor Grant and she's not available this evening. So it probably would be wise to, I will certainly follow up to see when that report will be done and it sounds like it will be done more regularly going forward now. Is that on time? Yeah, they have the information now that the data analyst requires because their reports are different than mine and moving forward, they should have that report and it should be able to be put in a form that they can actually run themselves. The data analysts can run themselves much like I do. All right, I'm happy to see if that could be available for our July meeting. Councilor McGee had had a, was next in the queue. I didn't know if you had, were you finished? I appreciate Chief LeBreck's feedback. That's definitely very interesting. It does raise more questions for me. So yes, I would definitely look forward to a meeting with the Megan Tuttle, Nancy Stetson and the new analyst whose name I'm forgetting right now. Thank you. Councilor McGee. Thank you, President Paul. DC LeBreck, I just had a quick question. I know that the memo also mentioned some changes to the security and VALCOR that made it difficult for them to access information from that side of things. So I'm wondering if you could just speak to that briefly and then I'll have a comment afterwards. Sure. So anybody that has access to VALCOR obviously has to pass a background check, a fingerprint check, criminal history check, and then pass two tests that the criminal justice, the DOJ puts in place for anybody that has access to any type of personal information with the National Crime Computer, NCIC. So they're not, it's actually, if we don't follow those steps, we can lose our access to that computer system. So there's not anybody trying to prevent anybody from gaining access to it that is allowed to see it, but they have to follow certain steps and pass these security things before they're, these security parts before they're allowed access to it. And we had just hired our own network head network person after a couple of years of not having it and they went through and we were remiss in a few of those places. So they have gone and corrected where we were basically allowing people access that hadn't passed those security protocols that we had that are supposed to be in place. And those are not anything that we have any say in, they're put together by the Department of Justice to prevent people from gaining information that they shouldn't. And how you should keep your, everything from locking your computer if you're not sitting at your desk to if you're escorting people through that don't have that type of access, your computer should not be able, your screen should not be able to be seen by them. So it goes down into that type of minutia and everybody in our police department that has access to Valcor has to have those in place. Or, and it even has to do with bigger things like a room where everybody in there has to have Valcor access or pass these tests if there's computer screens or that type of stuff up or they'd have to have their own secure office. So those are the types of things that this network administrator that we have now is making sure that we are following all the rules. And just a quick comment. I just hope that for all city departments that as we're looking at potential vendors for data management that we're making sure that they're meeting the needs of the city and ensuring that everyone who needs access to data has access to the data so that we're not running into these sorts of delays with reports or any other necessary information. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor McGee. We'll go to Mayor Weinberger. Thank you, President Paul. To Councilor McGee's last point, I just hope the council and the public's aware of the enhanced transparency portal, the enhanced dashboard that we just relaunched last week and we put out a press release about it last week. So certainly it is a high priority for the administration to put as much data as we can consistently out into the public. I do just, I appreciate Deputy Chief Labrack coming on at 9.20 a night to try to answer these questions. I do, I think it is important. Just do you want to point out we would have been happy to respond to further information requests ahead of time. Director Tuttle made an attempt to reach Councilor Grant in advance of the meeting when this item had been pulled. I certainly with respect to support our talented, skilled, hardworking team, I would hope that we would attempt to seek informational responses to communications through other means and having to schedule additional meetings, having to bring staff to late night meetings for information that could be transmitted in other ways. Maybe this was unavoidable, although I think from the conversations we've had, we could have answered these questions in another manner. Thank you, President Paul. Thank you, Mayor Weinberger. We'll go to Councilor Grant. Thank you. So I worked during the day and I only got an email from Megan Tuttle today and this document was only recently put up. So I understand that for a whole variety of reasons, things are put in the consent agendas and on the agendas at the last minute. So as far in advance as we can get things on, I responded to it when I saw it. I appreciate Chief LeBrecht coming down tonight. I wasn't anticipating needing to have anyone speak to it tonight. I only wanted to have it out of deliberative to say that these questions do have and that I would like for the sake of transparency because that has been a very, very sensitive issue. And as we move forward, we do wanna keep maintaining that transparency. So that document raised certain questions that I had and I just wanted to make sure that they were covered in either the full council meeting or a public safety meeting so that they're discussed thoroughly. And this is because that there have been issues with the data and the data was a little bit late last year and there were problems that I don't wanna belabor at this moment. So that's where my concerns are coming from. I'm not trying to make anything difficult. I just reached out when I saw it and I said, oh, this bears a discussion. And that was what I just really wanted to do was say, these are what the concerns are and can't we have a more detailed meeting inviting the principals that are involved with the gathering of this data. So nothing undermined it. I thought I could do that. And just sometimes, I think emails that are sent same day, it's difficult if we can get things on the agenda. I felt like there was a lot of things added to the agenda that weren't there when I looked over the weekend. So I just wanna put that out there but I understand things go on late but if they go on late, then we might have late requests to be fair. Thank you. Sir Grant. Hearing no other discussion on this, the recommended motion is to waive the reading except the communication and place it on file. I am happy of course to follow up with Director Tuttle when she is available. I'm not sure when that will be but certainly in the very near future to get this on an agenda as a completed document perhaps for our July meeting. But in the meantime, we have a recommended motion to waive the reading except the communication and place it on file. Thank you so much, Councillor McGee. Seconded by Councillor Shannon. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously. And with that, we complete our deliberative agenda. There's just a couple of items left. Item number nine is committee reports. Are there any Councillors who wish to offer a committee report? Councillor Barlow. Thank you, President Powell. As you heard tonight, the Transportation Energy and Utility Committee met on 613 and held a symposium on biomass electricity generation at McNeill. For those who missed it, CCTV recorded it and it's available on YouTube and on their website. We haven't talked about any follow-up action as a committee but expect we'll continue to dig into this. That's an important topic for the committee and for our council as we consider district energy in the coming months. We'll also be holding, Duke will also be holding a joint meeting with the Vehicle for Higher Licensing Board next Tuesday, June 27th, 5 p.m. at 6.45 p.m. Haven't finalized the agenda for that meeting yet but expect you later this week. Thank you so much, Councillor Barlow. Any other committee? Yes, Councillor Carpenter. Actually, this is not about my committee and I don't know if this is appropriate but first I wanna thank Duke for pulling together that forum. It was a huge amount of work, I know. And I am overwhelmed with information. And I just wanna request some time perhaps before we consider the district energy proposal that we have a work session of the council. And I'm just gonna say that and suggest that that get mold around. Great, thank you. Excellent suggestion, Councillor Carpenter. Councillor Bergman. So the joint ordinance and Charter Change Committee on Police Oversight will be meeting on the 6th of July. And the Tax Abatement Committee had an organizational meeting and we will probably have hearings in the fall when all this hadn't done. So then as people may know, the Tax Abatement Committee is basically a hearing body but it then would come, our work then comes to the full board. Thank you. Great, thank you so much. Councillor Grant. Thank you. I just wanted to thank the REIB department for the Juneteenth celebration. Despite the very wet weather, I thought it was a really beautiful event. It brought a lot of people together. There were already a lot of things planned inside at various locations, but even more things such as the community meal had to be moved inside and con toys was packed. There was even people, I know when I finished my meal and I left, there were people in line waiting because the account of people inside the auditorium was too high. So just a shout out to the work done by the REIB team and okay, okay. And a big shout out to them bringing the hip hop legend, one of the real pioneers of hip hops like Rick, that was a really incredible show and very well received. That put a great cap on a lovely day. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Grant. That's actually a wonderful segue to item number 10, which is City Council General City Affairs. Are there any other Councillors that have comments on General City Affairs? Councillor Jang. Thank you, President. And I think it is more appropriate to talk about it here, which is the racial equity inclusion and belonging director of the city of Burlington, Kim Carlson, has delivered something very meaningful about REIB. One, we stayed on budget. Two, we worked with okay, okay, which is an organization right here to plan and execute. And this is the third year, but from my perspective, the one we pass this June 20, 2023 has been the best in the city of Burlington, in the history of the city. One, it was centered, also it worked with all departments in the city in order to make it happen, including the Flint Theatre, BCA. In one point, there was a performance right here in this room, and you can see former City Councils performing, you go outside, you see current City Councils performing, and all the doing, two City Councils actually performed. It was unique. The food was great and available, and it was all free, right, not to mention the reception prior to the event itself at the Flint as well, where Mayor Weinberger has given substantial amount of recognition of community members who have been doing racial equity work for decades in the past, including Patrick Brown and many, many other people. I think this was a great celebration and also it was done with the Kemp family. They also did something, I attended all of them, but this year for some reason has been the best recognition of Juneteenth in the history of the city, and I'm proud to witness it, and also proud to recognize Kim Carlson's hard work in making it, in delivering this. I wanna say thank you to everyone, including the mayor and the administration for making it happen, and for recognizing this day. Hopefully, next year, it will be a free day off for everyone in the city. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Councillor Jang. If there aren't any other comments on general city affairs, we can move on to item number 11. I just wanted to remind everyone that we do have the addition of the June 26th meeting to our council calendar, so we will be seeing each other very, very soon after this evening, and although there may be a couple of agenda items, the main reason for that meeting is to vote on the mayor's recommended FY24 annual budget. My apologies, Councillor Grant, did you wanna add something before I had moved on? Just need to unmute yourself. Thank you. Just under general city affairs, I just wanted to mention again, I know we are all concerned, and I am gravely concerned for the historic north end in terms of the crimes that are occurring that are being driven by the drug crisis. The meetings that we're having Tuesday mornings regarding the motel and on-house crisis are very informative, are very helpful in keeping track of how things are moving. I think they also engage new conversations in terms of getting people information, and I really think we need to do something similar with regards to the drug crisis in the city. Thank you. Thank you so much, Councillor Grant. That will move us to item number 12, the final item of our evening, and that would be updates from the mayor, Mayor Weinberger, the floor is yours. Thank you, President Paul. I wanted to also note and voice appreciation for the successful Juneteenth celebration this past Friday and Saturday, and thank Director Kim Carson and the team from OKOK for leading a really great effort despite some not optimal weather. I thought it was, again, a great celebration. It does seem to me, something I said a couple times over the course of the weekend, is looking back over the last decade and the kinds of work we've done together, the changes we've made, I think the creation of this holiday, as a city holiday, and making it a major annual city event is really one of the bigger changes of the past decade, and I want to thank everyone who was involved in making this a really great year. As well, and I appreciate, Councillor Jang, your remarks. The, I also wanted to give the council an update on what, and the public, an update on events that happened today that I think will be of general interest to Burlingtonians. Today was the first day of a pretty remarkable 2023 veto session that the legislature has convened to vote on, I believe, seven, at least seven different bills that they are considering overriding. There are three votes today that have a significant Burlington focus. One, the governor's veto of the childcare bill was overridden, which means that the really historic and transformational investment in the state's childcare system that we have been advocating for, the city of Burlington has been advocating for with our childcare providers is moving forward. And this will, in many ways, is a bill consistent with the Burlington's Early Learning Initiative as attempted to do of putting additional resources into the local childcare system. And this, of course, does that on a wholly different scale that the state is able to do in a way the city can, and it's a very exciting step forward for everyone who really thinks we owe it to all Burlington children, all Vermont children, to ensure that they all have a great start in life and have access to the important opportunities of high quality childcare. The governor's veto of the Burlington charter change regarding all resident voting also went to the floor today, and it was overridden in both chambers is my understanding. So we will now join a couple other Vermont communities in having the ability to allow all legal residents to vote in local elections. And then finally, it was not a veto override, but it was a pretty extraordinary action. The House voted by a voice vote, and then the Senate voted 30 to zero to support a companion bill to the budget, which was also overridden that sets the sunset of the pandemic-era motel program on a very different path that is, and really supports the regional plan that we announced earlier this month and that we talked about at the work session with you at your last meeting with Sarah Russell. As a result of this action, I wanna make sure everyone's clear the feared evictions of the high need group in July is not gonna happen. These households will stay housed until they are placed in alternative permanent or transitional housing between now and next April. Anyone who is still in the housing as of next April, the legislature is gonna reassess what happens at that point. This is a dramatically different outcome than what the state was headed towards when the legislature adjourned just a month ago. At that point, essentially there had been agreement that the program was gonna end on July 1st after an initial meeting with our team, the Burlington team that was amended backwards to July 28th. As recently as last week, the Agency of Human Services was continuing to communicate to us that that deadline was not going to change and we should stay focused on that deadline. So this is a major change with this legislative action. And we are, it is our understanding that Governor is going to sign this companion bill. I certainly urge him to do so. I, it is my sense that we would not have gotten this outcome had the city of Burlington not objected to the plan and a lot of people had objected. I think what was different about our objection is we came forward with a viable, humane alternative plan for basically a comparable cost. We made the point that the plan as of the beginning of month of housing and basically offering families with children, elderly individuals, people receiving home health care, offering them, expelling them from the hotels and offering only congregate shelters, these large rooms, gymnasiums with cots that that would, for weeks to months was what was stated to us at the time that that was going to be a terrible outcome. And we pointed out how that outcome was completely avoidable using the coordinated entry system that we have built. The city has really been a leader in building this over the last decade and that we had, we secured over the last couple of weeks unanimous vote by the Chittinac County Housing Homelessness Alliance to focus all of the resources and really the power of that coordinated entry system on housing everyone who is in the motels. So we really pointed out that we could get everyone housed through the system by next April. I say all that to point, the legislation that passed today is very consistent with our proposal. It gives until next April for this to point out and it really elevates explicitly in the legislation that coordinated entry is a key strategy. We already have had a meeting this afternoon. There was a very different meeting with the Agency of Human Services to discuss this implementation and make sure that we are getting at the local level all the information we need to successfully deliver on this commitment that the CCHA has made to use the coordinated entry system to house everyone. So that's where things stand with the high need population. We are of course concerned about the people who've already been expelled from the hotels and a large number of unsheltered individuals that we are seeing here in Chittinac County. This is to address this need that we proposed the use of the 108 Cherry Street facility as a temporary emergency shelter. That proposal has not been accepted yet but we are continuing to actively collect information through outreach workers, our own and partner agencies and we continue to communicate as recently as today to the state the urgency of further support of action for this group. So that's the update on the hotel room. Thank you President Paul. Great, thank you so much Mayor Weinberger and that brings us to the end of our agenda. I'll ask for a motion to adjourn please. So moved. Made by Councillor McGee, seconded by Councillor Jang. All those in favor of the motion to adjourn please say aye. Aye. Any opposed please say no. We are adjourned at 942 and again to keep in mind that next Monday June 26th we will have another meeting. Have a good evening. Thank you.