 Okay, perfect, thank you. Welcome to the NPA. Just as a heads up, we are recording this meeting and so just keep that in mind. And let me know if you hear better if I should take off my mask and such. I will get started by doing some quick intro. So just going around and saying hi, if you feel comfortable and what ward you are a part of and you can hand it off to someone else. So, hi everyone, I'm Hannah King. I'm from Ward 8 and I am on the steering committee and I am going to pass it off to Jack. Hey everyone, I couldn't hear until just a moment ago but I can now, my name's Jack Campion. I am the East District City Councilor and I live in Ward 8. Great, thank you. And then I'll pass it off to Linda. Hi everyone, I'm Linda Muski and I live in Ward 8. Thank you, Linda. And then we can hand it off to Kathy. Here's your word through again. Hi, I'm Kathy Allwell, School Commissioner from Ward 20. I don't know, I'm gonna put it in. I live in Ward. Thank you. And then we have some folks in the room so we'll just quickly go around and intro them. Do you folks wanna say hi? Sure. Hi, I'm Cheryl Green and I live in Ward 1. Peter Likowski, Ward 1. Do you need to talk through that? Yeah, you can talk. You can talk, like this camera's also picking you up. Yeah, so you can just talk into the mic. Okay. Karen Long, Ward 1. Richard Hilliard, Ward 1. Tom Darenthal, Ward 1. Carol Livingston, Ward 1. Keith Pillsbury, Ward 8. Chris Haseley, Ward 3. Great, thank you. I think that is everyone that's on right now. I know. Next we'll go into any announcements. Does anyone have any announcements? Yes. We'll go to Tom and then Keith. We will be having a raffle right at the end of the meeting for, and we'll be collecting names on this sheet for people who are here and off the screen for people who zoom in and... What do people get? They get, why am I blanking? Locovore. Locovore, a Locovore membership for a year. Awesome, thank you. And then Keith, you had enough? The mayor has called a special election for December 7th. Ward 8 is always in need of volunteers. You can be from any area in the city. We would appreciate if you'd contact me at the Ward Clerk so that we can have volunteers. We need at least 20 to 24 volunteers for the day. Great, thank you. Next, we're gonna head in to speak out, so you can just, sorry. So you can just indicate by raising your hand and then I'll go to folks in the room as well. The issue that I was asked to raise was from Jared Wood. He wanted to raise the question of road safety with the increasing number of e-bikes, so food for thought. You can contact him if you have any questions, but he wanted to make sure we brought that up. And then I will go to Linda. Linda, I think you're muted if you're talking. How is that? That's perfect, thank you. So good evening, my name is Linda Rasika and I'm a resident of Ward 8. And I'm going to decide who got redistricting. The first point I wanted to make is that the redistricted map should not be gerrymandered. In general, there were principles of properly redistricting to only gerrymandering, which are available to read and learn about and these principles should be applied. And more than one of them has relevance to Ward 8. One of the things I'd like to address here is called Compactness. Individual districts should be compact interference without ring-like protrusions on the map. Rings are an excellent indicator of gerrymandering. If you look at the map of Ward 8, you can see that Ward 8 is nothing but not a ring. And I think this should be addressed with a new map and it might require considering changing the map or snatching it or even eliminating Ward 8 altogether. Another point that I think is relevant for Ward construction, if you pay attention to how we have to experience community is that we could have, rightly so, Linda's access to the professor, if they're not a student, they're otherwise affiliated with the QBM. The rules surrounding this are understandable when a UBM is a fighting institution. It's important to note that the grounds are not to look streets and buildings. And that means that for contesting races in Ward 8 in comparison to a candidate who is affiliated with the QBM, a non-filiated candidate is at a deep structural disadvantage in the ward. That's because the student population which is funding and off-giving campus and such a huge proportion of our motorways is less accessible for direct grassroots campaigning by a candidate not affiliated with the QBM. And I think this concern should also be addressed with a new district name. And I'm running out of time, I'm sure, and I know the other chances to speak about their issues. I did hear an idea about outlawed counselors and I'm not sure what that, I'm not exactly sure, but anything is what we'll look at for the next year. And that's all, thank you. Thank you, Linda. So for folks that are just joining us, we are currently doing speak out. So if you'd like to participate, just indicate by raising your hand or giving a thumbs up. Does anyone want to speak out? Yeah, I see Carol in the room wants to speak, so you can just hop into the microphone. Let's find out. Yeah, whatever you're comfortable with. Okay, thank you. So I want to echo what Jared would say, he also called me. And one of the other things he said is he thought that e-bikes should be insured and registered like a motorcycle or like the little motor scooters are. So anyway, because he called me specifically, I told him that I also would mention that. I did want to mention, there's been things on front porch forum and stuff about that. We aren't having the enforcement about traffic stops and citations because we have lost some of the police funding, but that really is not true. If you could remember all of you who came religiously in 2019, John Murad came and spoke to us in October. So two years ago, and he told us they had stopped giving traffic violations or citations because people didn't like it. To anyone remember being there and he was saying it was much better. He says, people don't like enforcement. I have this like in a letter too because I wrote them afterwards. He said traffic calming and engineered solutions were a better approach. Now, most of us at the NPA that day did not agree with him. We all said that we want enforcement. We want Jared Wood's been upset for years about what it's like to be a walker in Burlington. So I don't think it's fair to complain or blame that on the police situation now. And my other thing about the police is Church Street has become really bad lately. And for the high school kids, my granddaughter is a freshman at Macy's and she walks from Elm Terrace. So she has to go either on Winnowski or Church Street up into Macy's. And every morning she is spoken to, she's not comfortable because of the number of people that are lawyering and smoking on Church Street. So I really think we need to deal with that. I called the school about it. I called the police about it. Also because of the number of late in the day, the people that are just hanging out at that fountain in front of City Hall and smoking, like for 40 minutes the whole time I was in City Hall, I came back out, same group of six were just there smoking. So we really need to deal with that or people won't go to Church Street anymore. Thank you. Great, thank you. Does anyone else want to participate and speak out? Yeah, Tom. Just a follow up to the e-bike discussion and that's that Jared Wood did send out an article. There's a fairly good article about New York City's experience with a surge of e-bike riders. And for people who are interested, I'd encourage you to seek out that article in the Times and read it. Great, thank you. Last call for speak out. That's one thing. And this, I think Jack might be the only one here. When I did call the police with my concern, the dispatcher told me to speak to my counselors because of their lack of funds and that's why they weren't monitoring Church Street. But she did tell me that the city had hired Chocolate Thunder to monitor City Hall Park, but that that was only temporary and that it was too expensive and not effective because Chocolate Thunder could not give tickets or anything. Chocolate Thunder I know is a group, they like go to big concerts. So they're sort of like the bouncers at a concert. So anyway, if Jack, when you speak or now, if you could address that, because I don't like hearing that people don't want to go to City Hall Park and they don't want to go to Church Street because of people not feeling comfortable. That's great. Thank you. And then Keith, I see your hand is raised. Thank you. Thank you, Hannah. One of the things that I haven't been mentioning, but it seems like it's one of those necessary things that we have to mention. Those of us who live on streets that are heavily housing student renters, it's always a change for them and they come in the fall living in a mixed neighborhood and learning how neighborhoods work. And there has been significant increase in different kinds of noise behaviors and bomb fires. And what's happened with the situation is that the police aren't really saying they want to help us. So we're out there at one o'clock to 1.30 or two in the morning on Saturday and Sunday, possibly Sunday morning kind of just talking to them. That is the way we react to these kinds of behaviors to kind of teach them that it's important to have certain behaviors, social behaviors in a neighborhood. It would be helpful though, if we could talk to their landlords, let them know that there are some issues with their renters, but the city is unable to provide us with contact information where we used to have it. I've contacted, I put in a public information request last March and have not received it. I've called Bill Ward at, I guess, the director of permitting and zoning and haven't received a call back. It seems like they really want us, the long-term residents on the street that is trying to make a neighborhood, a mixed neighborhood, but families, retirees and students, they really want us to do all the work. And it is really tiring if you lived on the street for over 40 years, which most of the people who are long-term residents on University Terrace have been. So I think the city needs to, also we've heard all this about the police. Well, how about helping the neighborhood people so that they can have some sort of a social environment that is workable for everybody? Great, thank you. Keith, final call for speak out and then we're going to the council report. Yeah, go. I'm Chris Haysley from Ward 3. I just wanted to speak to your comments, ma'am, about the state of affairs on Church Street. I live pretty close to there and I can corroborate what you have said. In the past week, we had an overdose death in the parking garage. We've had a lot of issues of vandalisms and larcenies out of the same parking garage. We had had a couple of gunshot incidents back in July. Things have unfortunately started to decline in the downtown core due to the deterioration of the folk patrols that are no longer able to be implemented due to staffing. So in an effort to kind of get a better understanding of what's going on and how we arrived at this situation, I reached out to the police chief and met with him last week along with the deputy chief and sadly learned that due to some folks that are kind of in the process of retiring and some folks that are into the process of transferring to some of the other departments in the state police, the force is going to continue to decline in numbers through the end of the year and they're estimating that it's going to end up somewhere in the high 50s. So speaking for the folks downtown, what we would like to see is we'd like to see some folk patrols to kind of come back and have people walking and beat to try to deal with that. But I've walked into my parking garage every other day. I see someone literally sitting there, a group of people in a circle injecting heroin. I walked in the other day, there's a woman with a needle in her arm. It's just like that's an everyday occurrence and it didn't used to be that way. And I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm hopeful that we can put our heads together and come up with one. Great, thank you all. We're going to head into the council reports now. I see that we have councilor Hanson and high tower. So whoever wants to take it first, feel free. Huh? I can go down and check, but I'll try to cover. We've had two meetings since the last FDA meeting, so I can hit on things from our level then. I'm not sure what is our eyes going to get into if we have questions. So I'll try to like, I'll try to power through just high level what some of the big things we've done are. So we, so at our September 13th meeting, we moved forward, we moved forward 1.8 million spending of ARCO money. If you all remember, we Burlington got 27.3 million. We had used a chunk of that back in April. And now we used another 1.8 million, the rest of it will be, there's a community process underway. I think there's an online survey out now to start to get public input, but the bulk of hopefully the rest of the renaming money will be kind of vetted by the community if we can collectively make a decision about what to prioritize and how to move forward within the constraints of it. But we did spend some money on public health measures and also on property tax credit relief and for some water and wastewater and storm water work. We moved forward on Champlain Parkway in terms of basically splitting the project into two separate projects, one of which will move forward. Next year, the other will be delayed until 2025 and this way, we can hopefully sync this project up with the rail yard enterprise project and get rid of the potential traffic impacts in the King Bayville neighborhood by syncing those projects up. We also move forward a revenue bond proposal from Burlington Electric Department, that's gonna be on the December 7th ballot. And this would really allow VED to go out and borrow money to invest in not only some reliability, but also in the next year which is trying to be part of this and an election by Burlington. So it's not a tax increase, it's just allowing them to borrow. And it's not only is this allowing the utility to be more reliable and to get off of fossil fuels, but it's also projected to actually put a downward pressure on rates. So it should be economically beneficial to rate payers as well as what they're projecting. We started the ball rolling on a charter change to allow all legal residents to vote in Burlington and local elections regarding the citizenship. That was kind of high levels to September 13th meeting. We had another meeting on September 27th. We, at that meeting, we put on the ballot the Sustainable Infrastructure Bond, which is really to, it's an extension of what was a five year bond approved in 2016. And it's the next round of that, which will allow the city to pay for streets, sidewalks, more lectorium, bunch of other infrastructure projects. We did have an executive section about UVM providing more housing. So it was executive. I can't, we can't share details of it, but I'm excited that that conversation is happening. I guess that's what I'll say. We move forward the first step of an ordinance amendment around sustainable transportation requirements for new developments. We voted on the waste of the municipal collection of waste recycling organics and solid waste. We did not move that forward though. And so we're going to be looking at an alternative, maybe a hybrid system that provides a more efficient system of pickup of waste collection, but done by private haulers for the organics and solid waste and continue the city recycling pickup program. And then the final thing from 27 was we approved a scale down version of what the mayor and lease chief had brought forward around financial incentives to retain and recruit sworn officers at BPD. So it's basically incentive pay a few months out for current employees that stay on another one a year out and then incentive pay for new recruits who stay on for at least a few years. So yeah, that's a high level of some of the things we did at our last couple of meetings. Okay, so I'll jump in and then I guess look at the questions if that's okay, Hannah. Great, so for some public safety updates, yeah, I think I didn't talk about what we would cover. So great to have that general overview for public safety updates. BPD has been hiring for the positions that council approved back in February, which included the community service liaison to those social work positions. All three of those are now filled, which is exciting. One of them is in BPD two are in the CJC, but it's still being trained by and reported by the CNC and they sit in that but they took over this department. And then I think they've hired the first four and are closing on the fifth of the 10 community service officers that we've heard from so that I think it's when we're talking about the patrols, those are folks who would fill some of the patrol positions. And then I think I want to speak to what somebody said in public comment. I'm sorry, I think it was the beginning of public comment because I didn't realize starting at six, three, five, I missed that. But just, I think, want to do a general acknowledgement that will be your deaths that are out there across the US, but even more so in Vermont and that's not necessarily related to local factors as much as pandemic and economic and mental health factors. And a few other things is just, I know that things that are coming to council that folks might want to look out for so more of a look ahead. Then I'll look back is short term rentals are going to come to council soon and we love folks' opinions on that. Just because we've had a lot of investment property owners weigh in and not as many homeowners who don't have air bean beans or really end renters and think we've had end renters weigh in on the conversation at all. So just as that's coming up, we'd love to hear folks' opinions. Other things that's coming up is Joe McGee who's a new councilor has been working really hard on the reappraisal and making sure that that coming up is looking more equitable and finding ways to clean up that process and have it go better than it did this time around. And that's all I can think of off the top of my head. But Jack, if there's anything else that's coming up that you wanna highlight? I guess maybe let's see if people have questions or can guide us with what to talk about. Otherwise, yeah, we can keep talking. Great, and one more comment. Sorry about that. It's just because I don't want to completely forget one of the things that we passed with the last election was a whole host of charter changes and questions which are all still sitting in the state house. So one of the things that I think we're gonna be working on with the city's legal team, but also just as individual councilors is making sure that some of those charter changes, all of which passed by one in 60% with the voters get passed at the state level are not, I guess, making sure, but trying to do our best to make sure. Okay, does anyone have any questions for the process? Yeah, I think that's Sweden. Hi, thank you, Jack and Zariah. My name is Cheryl Green, and my question is about the progress on the process to hire a new police chief. Is there anything that you can talk about where that is, what the timeline is, what the council's role will be in that? I don't know if Jack knows more than I do, but I know that we have an application that there's a committee that's been set aside, which includes Jane. So it was said that she's not here because she would know the most up-to-date information, and I know that they've reviewed, that they have the application since they're reviewing them. I'm not sure what the next steps are or how fast those will happen. I think Jack does. Yeah, there's a committee working on that, that Jane's a part of, or a working group. They had whittled down, I think they had honed in on four applicants that they thought were the strongest of the initial pool, but I think there's also a feeling of the need to get more additional applicants and not just necessarily move ahead with those four. So I'm not sure exactly where it's at, but I know that there was a feeling of potentially reposting or re-advertising, trying to get additional applicants. The mayor was thinking of calling a special meeting of the council to bump up the pay that we're offering, that we're posting to the position as a way to try to get the applicants, but I think there wasn't enough interest from councillors to kind of do a special meeting, specifically on that, but that's one idea that at least the mayor has quoted. So yeah, I hope that's a little bit helpful, and yeah, it's too bad Jane's not here because she's keeping it the most direct perspective. Thank you very much. And not that this question was asked, but I do want to add one more comment on public safety since we're talking about it again, which is that the administration, I think it's finalizing, I just gave comments on what it seemed to be a fairly final version. I request for proposal for the Cougars model that we've been talking about for, you know, well over a year now. So hopefully that's a request that we'll go out soon for firms to send proposals in for. Great, thank you. Linda, I see you have your hand raised, so feel free to go. Yes, I had a question. I wasn't clear about what's surrounding it. She was talking about doing something with the reappraisal. Is that something for any kind of back-of-the-point thing that's done in the repair of this situation? Well, one of those have really gotten scammed and there's a lot of, you know, the value is seeming kind of crazy and at least any kind of crazy in the same way for different people. So is this something that you're talking about trying to fix for the next time? I think this is something that you're talking about trying to fix for now. Yeah, so there's two different things, I guess, that the resolution that's coming up will do. And I think one of them is changing the process that will go through next time to make sure that it's a process that feels more equitable rather than having quite so many on the back end folks asking for realignments and that process is not really really transparent and clear or based on business status with sort of like figuring out, you know, a better reappraisal process from the beginning. And then there's also a list of recommended solutions for the city attorney's office to look into, some of which would address this past reappraisal, which I can't off the top of my head say what some of those measures were. And then I think the last thing is just making sure that the next reappraisal doesn't happen in 15 years, but that this is a process that happens pretty good, I think. Can I just make a comment that, you know, the next reappraisal I think is basically, it's just an expectation of giving a general idea about what the value of your house is and there's the expectation that the values will be changed once the home looks at it up to the user because the appraisers don't come into the home. They're just looking at, I don't know what they're looking at exactly, but it's just a massive table. It's not the kind of appraisal that can give you a true value. And it seemed like these appraisers really hung their hat when they're fighting on not changing anything instead of thinking in my opinion, understand the process is you kind of slap a number on that seems about right and then work it out. So many people, myself included, thought that if I wanted to just talk about feelings, I had the evidence or how why that values were off, and you know, pretty much ignore it. When it seems like the idea is that the process, in the very nature of the mass reappraisal is that the details have to get higher now for those sort of, you know, will have to be fighting it out instead of, you know, you don't know what you're talking about, but we don't care. Yeah, I think that is definitely the feedback. And I wanna let Jack speak as well because he answered the first question, but I think that's definitely the feedback that we heard. And then two, I think it was just also really unclear because we only had the values at the beginning and not the proposed tax rate that went along with it. So I think folks even had a hard time here standing, the impact of them, whether or not they should appeal until late in the game and so, yeah. And there's been rocket science every time where generations have been going through this and the fact that this happened, it's really not, I don't even think it's acceptable. Yeah. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money to have to pay. And frankly, it'll be a lot of money to pass on to renters and the landlords can't afford to absorb it. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. It can be a life altering amount of money to pay on the first thought, so it's... Definitely. I think this resolution is really important. It's maybe I can send it around with people after it'll go public tomorrow. So at that point, anyone can get access to it from the city website, but Joe took the lead on Joe McGee and Gene Bergman and they worked with a group of folks. I think Jonathan Schell was so bold who's a part of this FBA. I think he was part of that as well. But it basically, the resolution lays out like all of these issues that we've heard, issues with Tyler, issues with the process, issues with how it was communicated to people, issues with the outcomes and the appeal process. It really gives voice to what I think we've been hearing a lot and what has been, like you said, Linda, I think ignored. And then what it does is it lays out a number of potential solutions that specifically get at lowering the burden on residential properties. And it lists like 10 or 12 possible solutions. One example that I'll just throw out that's in there would be to increase the commercial property tax rate up to 150% rather than 120% so that commercial properties could get back in line with kind of paying the share that they've historically paid. It was raised to 120% in the 80s, basically for the same reason, but it's over time that their proportion has been eroded. So that's just one example. There's like 12 different examples of how can we reduce the burden on the residential side. And what it does is what the resolution will do, and this is coming on Monday night, would create public hearing process so that people can weigh in, give voice to these things, consider these potential options. And it would be a committee, ideally, that's taking this public hearing and then coming up with a set of recommendations. It also is gonna charge the city attorney with basically telling the council, here is what you can do under the charter now. And here are potential charter changes that you can pursue. And it has the community development and neighborhood revitalization committee looking into all these potential changes. So I think the idea is this is this huge problem that everyone's feeling and that everyone's talking about and we really need a robust process to actually not only give people voice, not only give voice to that, but actually move forward because I think the administration has really failed to do so. And so the council of now is stepping in and just to remind people like we didn't have, the council didn't have any authority over how would the appraisal plate out this time where we weren't involved enough, but we are now taking it upon ourselves to step in and try to make as many changes as we can, both now but also looking ahead to the next three appraisal. If I can add something which is related to the bond type of things that you're talking about, all of which seem really important. I don't know whether people will be impressed to know for things and they already feel impressed by this real appraisal. I understand. Yeah, I definitely understand that and the November Sustainable Infrastructure Fund will, it's a two, it will require two thirds voter approval. I think that's definitely on everyone's minds. At the same time, like the reason I supported still moving it forward, despite that is because if you look at where all this infrastructure is at, the more we delay, the more we're gonna have to pay on it to deferring it further. And so giving the voters the opportunity. I don't know for sure that it will pass, but I think we need to give people the opportunity because there is a higher cost to delay. If it does fail in November, there could be an opportunity to change it of something else on the March ballot for people to consider. Okay, I wanna be- In December, you guys think I said November, but December's up. I wanna be mindful of time. So if there's any final questions. Okay, cool. Next, we're gonna go on to the school board. So Kathy, any updates you have for us? Yes, I think what you wrote in as one of the things you really wanted to hear about were the PHS facilities and what was going on there. I have one other thing that I really would like to talk about to you at the end, but last time the finance and facilities committee heard from the real estate group that had been looking into the trios which are the site of the interest on Institute Road, one of the places they were looking at was in front of what is the present high school. As in the other site they were looking at was across the Institute Road in front of the athletic field but in what is, I guess, the baseball fields. And the third was the, oh god, now I'm gonna forget the name of what, it's the downtown one, that's the. Gateway block. Gateway. On Main Street using the old fire, fire, a lot of funnels. The old fire, fire, a lot of funnels. It is an old fire station, fire station that's on the north of New York City as well as the parking lot and also Memorial Auditorium and there is a property in between that was an old motel and they would be willing to give that space up to be used as well but they want in the basement of what would be composed on the street level, they would like to have some sort of space there, they have given a certain amount of space and I can't remember what it is. I'm not here to suck you 1,000 in these two things where that they would like as the words passing by the storefronts of all narrow, that they would rent out. So they have put together the real estate, they've put together a very, very preliminary kind of footprint of what a building in each of these three places would look like. It's very clear at the north or north in front of the old VHS that that is the area that at least from the soils and the geology that they have looked at so far probably could take the largest building would be the cheapest for us to build on. The site in the old base above fields, there's a lot of the soils there are probably not because it's landfill, it's they probably would have taken a new land a new field put in to make it take such a large building on that site. So that would be a more expensive site. It also, I don't know, they were showing these and they are on the website on if you look at the four dots, all three of these are there for people to actually look at. When it came down to an end of the down to town site seems to be far smaller. There were two options. One with using memorial auditorium and the other was with just taking memorial auditorium down and using the land that it's on. But evidently, there is a huge pipe that was built in the 1800s under this whole piece of land that the city, even so slightly, had to pay for all of our infrastructure to go around that pipe because they don't want to feed into it. It sounded like, I mean, I didn't write everything down, but please if you want to see the exact description it is on the website from the real estate group. It sounded like that would be an extremely expensive site to do a lot of what we need to do and it would not even fit all of the high school and the tech center. There are at least two of the tech center programs would have to be off site, that would be and maybe even the third. So we would still be renting facilities elsewhere in the city for the tech centers, which makes that a very expensive option. But none of these things are set in stone yet. It is still in preliminaries, but they thought that they would like to give us at least some information about what they had leaned up until now about those three sites. And if anybody has any questions about that, I can try and answer what I can, but. I see Jean, you have your hand up. Aaron. Has a question. Yes, I haven't been filing this much. I don't feel like, is there ever a survey again in the city of where people would like to see the high school, because I've heard a lot of people say that they would like it to be more central you know in the downtown area, so they wouldn't have to be so much transportation to the high school. And people are wondering, okay, what's being done with the pit? Tell us, Kate. Right. There's a poll in the city. So if you could address that briefly. Yes, this is the state report I only looked at from 20 properties. All over the city. And yes, one of those was the so-called pit, but the city is not having with us taking on the pit for our high school, because we don't pay taxes on our properties. And that is definitely an area that they hope to get taxing on for the buildings that would be put out there. So the only thing that could offer us was this gateway piece that is on directly on main street bordered by William Steeve and one of the public's power. No. Union. Union, union, sorry. But that seems to be expensive too with the point you just described. Yes. And then Karen, you had your hand raised. Thanks. Kathy, thank you. I'm not, I have followed it some. I'm not quite sure why you folks are taking choice number eight, which was the gateway project because I know you had them ranked before or the real estate company did. Why they, you're putting so much energy into that when it just seems like there are so many strikes against it. And I also, I mean, we need a school. My granddaughter is at Macy's and there are no windows in there. The lights are fluorescent, kind of like these in here. It's noisy. I mean, we need a school immediately and I don't think, you know, I think we need to have a bond for that, not for all these other infrastructure things. But I guess my main question is, how did the gateway block get turned into number three choice when it had been number eight? You know, why is the school board having to put so much energy into that? It just seems like, you know, we can't waste time, we need a school quickly. Right, but I think there has been a lot of people asking us to look at a downtown location and it was the only option that was downtown besides the tip. And so we had already been told that the tip was not something the city would record. And so we decided that the other option was to look at this gateway option with, I mean, it's looking like that might not also be an option, but that was the reason for looking at it. You know, there are a lot of people in the city that would like to see a more centrally located high school. And it is kind of the education of the future is getting kids out of the high school and doing research and things within their community. And so having a downtown location would have been wonderful. And I have to admit, I'm one of those that really did want to see us move downtown and do something because it is the next generation. And at the same time, I am very cognizant of what it would cost the tax fairs to do a lot of that. And we need to look for a site that is large enough for both our high school and our tech center because also our tech center is very much part of forward-looking education and we can't separate communities out. It makes it far more, far less appealing to kids within the high school. It should be on one site. So there are many different things that are weighing into how we ended up putting these three. And by some time at the end of November, they will have finished all the work on these three sites, but that is the reason we're going to be looking at the downtown site. Okay, thanks. Okay, is there anything else, Cathy, before we wrap up? The other thing that there is a, the superintendent's contract is not for renewal and I have put out on the front porch forum. There, this time we're going out to the community and we want to get back to the community how they think that he has done his job for the year that he's been there. So we're, there's a very short questionnaire, but we ask that people get on the front porch forum and put it down to that. And it's to the questionnaire for us. We'd like to hear from you back. Great, thank you. Next, we are going to move on to the Ward 8 steering committee elections for Keith Hillsbury. Keith, do you want to say a few words or anything? Not to put you on the spot. Well, it just seems like something that I could give a little bit of time to as a community service, I guess. As long as I'm in Ward 8, who knows, I'll be willing to help out and take suggestions on what we can talk about at these MPA meetings. Great, thank you. So now we're going to go into nominations and hopefully confirm Keith. I would be honored to nominate Keith to join the Ward 8 steering committee with me. Is there a second from any folks in worry? Oh, second from Ann Brenna. So everyone from Ward 8, we raise our hand. Should I read the names of the people that I know of that are from Ward 8? These are the only people that should vote, okay? This is Hannah King, Keith Hillsbury, Linda Rizvi, Anna Brenna, Ann Brenna, Lisa Bridge, and Jim Cohen. And Jack. And Jack, sorry, yeah. So folks in Ward 8, if you would like to vote yes for Keith, you can indicate by raising your hand, unmuting yourself. However, you feel comfortable raising my hand. So I see two on Zoom and how many in person? Okay, anyone against? Seeing none. One, I see, is that a hand up from before? Is that, is your hand up from before, Linda? Thanks. Yeah, okay. Okay, great. Congratulations, Keith. You're on the Ward 8 steering committee. Happy to have you. Great. Next, we're moving on to redistricting. So Ann and Richard are here to give us some updates. So feel free to take it away. Hi, Richard and I are part of the ad hoc redistricting committee. I'm the Ward 8 representative and Richard is the Ward 1 representative. As you may know, the city's undergoing a process of redistricting of the city wards in response to the 2020 census numbers. At the last census in 2010, Ward 8 was created, well, previously there were- I'm having a hard time hearing through Zoom and maybe other side too, side in or out. Right. So- Do you mind getting closer to this? This is the microphone. Do you wanna switch spots with me? I'm happy to move as well. This is fine. And then bringing a chair for Richard. For Richard, do you wanna come up here as well or sorry to do that to you? Okay, I'll start again. Richard and I- Sorry so much, sorry about that. Oh, that's okay. Richard and I are members of the ad hoc redistricting committee. Again. I am the Ward 8 representative and Richard is the Ward 1. So as I was saying, the city's undergoing a process of redistricting of the city wards in response to the 2020 census. And the goal of redistricting is to equalize a number of residents in each Ward. All wards have increased in population since 2010 when the exceptions of Ward 3 and 7. The ideal number in each Ward is determined by dividing the population by the number of voting districts. So, our role, can you hear me okay? I hear you so hard, I'm listening hard. I'll try and speak up. I'll try and yell. It's not a good role. Yeah, there's a lot of overhead noise. So our role- I have a suggestion. Yeah, and I could hear Tana when she spoke. Are you near the computer that is on this one? The audio is not on it. The audio is just there. Thank you, Linda. Is this any better? Any better? How's that? So far. Okay. Okay. So our role on this committee is just to gather community input from members of the city and our respective wards. So some of the changes that are being considered are to increase or decrease the number of wards, creating a city counselor at large, changing the boundaries of the wards, and changing the number of city counselors. So the forums for input will be this NPA meeting. So we're hoping people will give us community input today, a survey that will be posted, hopefully on Front Porch Forum and the city websites, and at least two or three citywide public meetings to take place at some point in the future. So originally we were supposed to finalize a report for feedback from the public to city council on November 8th, but we have requested an extension from city council, and we are still waiting to hear back for sure about this extension. And Richard has more information about the timeline. Yeah, the timeline has changed as of, but I would also like to say that Chris Hazley is also part of the, aren't you going to part anymore? Got jobbed off. That's pretty bad. As of today, we are working, this is the city speaking, not Anne or me, we're working on a new timeline as far as public input is concerned, very tentatively working with October the 6th, 26th for a public meeting, October the 17th for a public meeting, and December 6th for a public meeting. One will be in the new North End, one will be somewhere central, and one will be in the South End. We are pawns in the game really, and our city councilors probably know a little bit more about what's going on than Anne and myself do. We jumped the gun as far as ward one is concerned with the help of our MPA steering committee, and especially with the help of the whole committee, and we posted on front porch forum, this is exciting, we posted on front porch forum a survey monkey for which we got about 33 responses, I think, at the moment, and I'll go through that, the questions that we asked and some of the feedback just to give you, hopefully, a chance to see what people are thinking about, and some of the questions that we, the committee, are going to be thinking about. I would say, before I get into that, I heard what Linda Risley had to say, and Linda, I hopefully can address some of those questions later on if that's okay. So, I'll go through the survey monkey results. We had, as of this morning, we had 33 responses, which is not a heck of a lot, but it may be representative of ward one. Are you in favor of the current ward district structure? Yes, 27%, no, 73%. If the city continues with this ward and district structure, is ward eight, the ward that ward one should be paired with? I thought this was surprisingly close. Yes, 46, no, 54. I was sort of the opinion that ward one was trying to invest in the city and quality of life, and ward eight was sort of on the other side of the ledger, but that's just some editorial comment, I guess. Should there be an even or odd number of city councillors? Only 10% were in favor of an even number, 48% said odd, 42% said it doesn't matter in consequential. There was an open-ended question how many city councillors should there be, and the answers ran the gamut. I can go through the details if anyone wants them, but it runs the gamut from sort of somewhere around about eight to as many as 15 and different configurations. I mentioned before that city hall intervened and the mayor offered that there should be one city councillor, but we'll pass that over. What do you think of having at-large city councillors along with the ward city councillors? 19% they loved it, 23% said it's okay, 35% said prefer not, and 23% said it was a terrible idea. So, we are getting feedback. Lastly, which best describes the role you expect of your elected city councillor? Advocacy for the ward is 44%, advocacy for Burlington, 56%, advocacy for the state, national and global agendas, 0%. So, city councillors, take from that what you will. We also asked an open-ended question, any comments, and I know at least one or two people who I can see on the Zoom screen offered very constructive comments, and we'll put that together as part of the total package. I think with that, well, we can, I've just put together, I wasn't sure how many people were going to be here, but I do have the actual, or I think their provisional figures from the 2020 census, pending some clarification of some housing on the UVM campus in Ward 6 slash possibly Ward 8. But the city population increased by my arithmetic's not very good, but it looks like about five or 6% from 42,400 to 44,700 from 2020 to 2020, from 2010 to 2020. Ward 1, which was already the biggest and therefore the most underrepresented ward, increased by the most population. So I'm struggling to find where the 700 new residents of Ward 1 are, but a lot of them are obviously in Babery Commons, and I'm not really quite sure what accounts for the rest. Ward 2 was pretty much just a small increase. Ward 3 was flat. Ward 4 was about 10% increase, so that's part of the new North End. Ward 5 was pretty flat. Ward 6 was about a 5%, 6% increase. So that's also might be part of the student population. I'm not completely sure of the demographics of that ward, up along South Prospect Street, et cetera. The slight decrease in Ward 7, so that's the other part of the new North End, and a big increase, not as big as Ward 1, but almost as big in Ward 8. So about 550 new residents in Ward 8. So these things need to be considered. We have, for instance, we're here at the Ward 1, Ward 8, MPA, and we have, haven't edited up, and I'm gonna try now, but about 12,000 anyway, inhabitants, whereas the new North End has about 10,600. So the representation you can do the arithmetic yourself. Ward 1 is actually out of compliance. The measurement for compliance with, I believe it's the city charter and probably state requirements, is that there shouldn't be a deviation for any representative constituency of more than 10%. And Ward 1 is about 10.5%, 10.3% maybe, too many people for its number of city councillors, whereas Ward 7 is about 11% the other way. So you can see that there are large disparities within the city, and that is what we're going to have to deal with. That's a lot of talking and some numbers, but I don't think we're gonna be able to do that. I'm just talking and some numbers, but I'm just trying to show the dimension of the issue. Now, I think I will put a lid on this for the time being, but I have brought a copy of the presentation that Anne and I received and Chris received three weeks or two weeks ago at the meeting in City Hall and the city, new city attorney made a presentation and explained all the city requirements and some of the guidelines. And if necessary, I'll introduce one or two of the slides and criteria if the appropriate question comes up. But if anyone wants a copy of this, I can run a copy and get it to you. I'm gonna shut up. Anne, what do you think? I think we should get some community feedback, input, if anybody has any. Do any folks have any input to give? You can indicate by raising your hand or raising your hand. I see Zariah and Jack both have their hand raised, so we can start with them. I'm more just wondering if some of the figures that Richard just read off, if we can see those anywhere from a better reader than listener or if... I don't have an electronic presentation, partly because I'm not completely sure that the 2020 numbers are not... Can you take a picture of it? Can I take a photo of it and email it to you right now? Is that what I would need? I think the figures Zariah are pretty similar to what Megan Tuttle had presented at the City Council, but the slides that I think Richard's alluding to are also posted on the City website, on the redistricting page. Great, thank you. I think I heard just about the City website of your districting page and then what Megan Tuttle presented. Jack, I see you have your hand raised. Yeah, thanks so much for all your work on this and for already getting a jump on, getting some of that community feedback through the survey. I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm definitely a strong component of getting rid of the districts, and I was glad to hear that the vast majority of people so far in the survey were also not happy with the current ward and district model. I just think it's an issue of fairness, an issue of simplicity and straightforwardness and an issue of representation too. For example, if we had, if we took, if we still kept 12 city councillors but went to 12 wards, you would go from, you know, like district councillors like me right now represent 12,000 people. Instead, councillors would represent like 3,600 people. So I think there's a lot more accountability and it's a lot easier for councillors to be responsive and be accountable to the voters. So it would obviously be very disruptive for me personally because if my position gets eliminated, I'd have to run for something else or whatever, but I just think it's a much better system to have just straight-up wards and it's simpler and smaller and more accountable. And it's also fair because right now it's kind of weird that we represent twice as many people but have the same power, the same pay, the same everything as the ward councillors. So I just wanted to weigh in with that and kind of put in my two cents for that. And then because of that and other issues and also the fact that Ward 1 and Ward 8 are underrepresented right now and aren't getting adequate representation, I do think there's some level of urgency around moving forward and trying to get the ball rolling for March ballot. I don't know if the new timeline that you all are requesting would still allow that or not. So I guess that's a question is would the delayed timeline still allow March ballot? Theoretically. And from what I understand, a decision can't be made until City Council meets again, which is the 18th. Is that correct? We meet on Monday, yeah. Okay. And this is the first time hearing about that just to see you all know. I didn't know that what you had read from the administration was news to me as well. So Council hasn't gotten any updates on this in a while. But I think as long as we can still get it on for March, I personally don't have any issue with taking more time. Jack, the only thing I would say is that these, that the delay is so far in getting this going are all from the city. They're not from the committee, although given the timelines that the city is imposed, that's why the committee requested an extension. So we met five weeks ago to do the nomination for representation of these two wards, and we didn't have the kickoff meeting for another three weeks. So that wasn't our delay. That was the city's delay. And I would just add that there is a person who is assisting us with the compilation of the data, and she will need all of the data at least a week before presentation to City Council. So there is a deadline for us that precedes the deadline that the presentation goes to City Council. Thank you both. Maddie, I see you have your hands raised, and then we'll go to Carol. If you're speaking, Maddie, you're muted. Sorry, I couldn't hear. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah, I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you initially, so that's why I'm on mute. Sorry about that. So I'm Maddie Posen. I'm a resident of Ward 8, and I would just like to speak to the boundary lines that were drawn for Ward 8. If you look at it, it's a really strange boundary design, and it's almost as if it includes primarily all the UBM residence halls, sort of configured into one Ward, and I just think it doesn't give a fair representation for the students. I think it would be better if they were more equitably distributed throughout the various Ward's and not concentrated in just one student Ward. I really don't understand how that configuration ever came to be. So I would really appreciate city counselors looking at the boundary lines being redrawn more equitably. And then I also just want to put in my two cents that there have been a lot of high votes recently on the city council, and so I think an odd number of city counselors would help alleviate that situation. So those are the two points I'd like to make. Thank you. Maddie, can I just say one thing? Sure. There might be a sequester to this as well. The notes for the 2010 redistricting considerations, the census was in 2010, and the actual changes were made about four or five years later, but one of their criteria was academic institutions should be in more than one Ward. So obviously they didn't follow that to the letter of the law, and that might happen this time. The city attorney made it clear that regardless of what public input is, this will ultimately be a political process. So I will leave you with that. I will also say that one thought thing that I didn't understand had never thought about it, but Anne brought it up. Obviously this affects, Keith knows all the city officers, but it affects the school board especially, and how many students do you reckon that were going to garland and public schools from Ward 3? No, you mean Ward 8? Ward 8, yeah. Okay, as I was walking around, I counted a total number of 15 children under 18. How many went to our elementary school and high school was less than 10. And I'm talking about children. Part of our ward is the facility for families who are needing to be protected. That's at the YWCA. So we have families there that are from, we have children that go to our elementary schools from that facility on Main Street, and that number varies depending on the families as they come and go in that facility. I think that's reprehensible personally, and I can't believe that City thought that was a good idea. But I would say to Zariah and to Jack, please don't let that happen again, because you're going to do some of the configuration of the wards, regardless of our public input. So please don't let that happen again. And then we heard what was said. Yeah. Richard brought up the fact that there are in the Ward 8 school districts, there were at least one Keith last tabulated kids in his school board school commissioner district. There were 15 children, or people under the age of 18, and 10 of whom were in the public school system. So we have one school commissioner representing 10 children. And actually my two kids have graduated from high school since then, so there's probably 13 now. Yeah. Thank you for that. And just to know, on the route that's starting up, I'm not seeing the outputs of the survey. So I assume that'll be part of the reports that's not necessarily something that needs to happen now, but we don't have that yet. Well, Zariah, there will also be, I said we jumped the gun. There will also be a North Avenue news city-wide survey. So this was just to inform the representative for Ward 1. And I can let you have the dates if you need them. Okay? Sure. Thank you for repeating that, Zariah. This is not a great room for meetings like this. No, do we get the chance to talk about this? You're talking to us, but we're the ones that really are affected by this redistricting. And we haven't had a chance to talk about it. Are we going to get the chance to talk about it together or point a view out? Or are we going to listen to you all the time? I really came wanting to talk about how I perceived redistricting because of all the wards, Ward 8 was the most affected. And we are the ones that are long-term residents of Burlington. And it's just a small number in Ward 8. A very small number. We're out where we have basically the ones that are affected the most and it seems like we're not given a chance to talk about it. We're listening to you. I think it's important that you realize that Ward 8 is not like any other ward. Not like any other ward. You're talking about that Ward 1 is underrepresented. Well, the least number of voters in the last March election were from Ward 1 and Ward 8. Ward 8 is lucky if it gets 20% of its 4,000, I don't know, 99 voters on the checklist gets 20% of them to vote. Last time in March when we had that big election and the progressives were really getting the students out, we had 837 votes in Ward 8. 837 votes. 250 of those were registered on the same day as they voted, which is their right. But what I'm saying is very few came off the checklist. That means very few people that actually have been long-term in Ward 8 actually, they're out there. When I have had to go and get a petition signed, it's only 30 signatures. Every year for City Clerk, Ward Clerk, then the next year was for School Board. So I walked the whole ward. First of all, I can't get on the campus at UVM, which is where the majority of the people are voters, not registered yet, but they're there. And I walk the streets every time, and I have a hard time fighting 30, 30 people who are actually registered before the end of January, which is when I have to have my petition in. And if anybody dies, I'm out of luck. I have constantly searching. When I represented Ward 1, I could go out on a Saturday afternoon and get 200 signatures. Ward 8 takes me a whole week because I have to go back when people are home. So I'm just saying that the whole idea that we have a ward that is so dispersed where a majority of the voters are not accessible to anybody running for that, is a person that doesn't live on the campus. So Keith, what do you have any ideas in terms of redistricting or changes to the structure of the ward? I think the visibility really said it right. It has to be a compact area. Ward, my street, has always sort of been isolated and stuck out there. We should really be in Ward 6. Not that we've been in Ward 1, but we are connected to Ward 6 much closer than people on the other side of the campus. But for some reason, we get stuck here. The last time that we were going to be redistricting, the city council said that my street and the first block on Summit Street where the mayor was, we were going to be in Ward 6. There was a meeting of some Ward 6 counselors or committee, I don't know. The next thing I know, we're back in Ward 8. So you think that changing the boundaries so that the wards are more reflective of neighborhoods might be a solution? I think it would be a very good solution. And I just want to tell you that we have over 4,000 registered voters in Ward 8 and we've had anywhere from 150 votes the most ever that we got. And who knows why, it was in November 2018. It was 1390. That's the most we ever got. We didn't even get that when Trump was running against Biden. Now, I do say that some of this redistricting had to do with power politics. And that's exactly what it is. That's why we have the way our city is running now. It's all about political parties running more power. If you look at the representatives who are the Progressive Party, if you look at the number of votes they got in the last elections, they got 1,000 votes less than five of the other representatives that happened to be of the Democratic Party. So it seems like we, our city, like our Senate, U.S. federal Senate, is run by a minority of voters and the majority are outvoted or we have ties as we're having. So I think it's really, for some of us, it's really losing trust in government the way it's being run right now. And I think that is a shame. Thanks. Did I make that point clear? Yes. I have thought. Totally. Sorry, but I got frustrated because we are the ones that are most affected. And I don't want to, I just don't want to hear about... Well, this is what this time is for, to get feedback. So I think... Well, let's make sure we hear the war for more people. Maddie? And then you, and then is there anybody else? Carol Hansen. Okay. So, Zariah and Jeff, can they hear us? Because I'm wondering, Zariah spoke up before. Can you hear us? Can you hear me? I don't know. I don't know. I heard you loud. I mean, I can hear you. I heard everything else thus far. All right, great. Because, yeah, it is hard to hear. I mean, I could hear you. Thank you for being... Yeah, but I want... They're the ones that are making decisions. Right. Not us. So, I agree with Keith and Linda. And if you look at the map, which I have, all of the districts are little blocks. You know, they're like little blocks. Ward 8 is kind of like a river running down. I mean, I'd love to know how this ever happened. Seriously. And hearing about the school board representation, that I never knew about or thought about. But thank you, Keith. So, Jack and Zariah, you know, I'm not sure... I doubt you were even involved in creating Ward 8. Well, Jack might... I don't know. But anyway, how did it happen? Especially it seems like it wasn't legal. And I agree, we just need to... You know, Ward 8, what did it solve? Nothing. We are still underrepresented in Ward 1. So, it didn't solve anything. When we go back to a blocky system and we change the line so that we are more equitably represented, I love Jack's idea of 12 counselors. Not this East District and all those different ones where they have to, like, double over. I can't imagine running in those wards. Like, it's just a ridiculous thing. So, I really think that's great. And we just... They need to do the boundary lines. We said that, like, legally, there's not supposed to be any appendages off. Well, Ward 8 wasn't a appendage all on its own. So, who did this? Like, I'd love to know. I don't know. Well, I have some ideas. I have some ideas, but... So, Karen, you're... What? And also, I encourage you to run those surveys again. Because, like, we saw them once on front. Karen, we are... There's supposed to be a universal survey being created for all the wards. And I don't know if Richard's planning to post it again, but I will post it on the downtown front porch farm and whatever front porch farms encompass Ward 8. And then, like I said, I think on the city website they're supposed to be posting it. So, Karen, I just want to make sure that I tabulate your response so your suggestion would be for changing the boundaries. Yeah, totally. Like, they should be blocks, like, you know, Colorado. I'm sorry. Not in any of these, like, the river running down. All right. I can't put my elbows on the table. Other folks? Thank you. I just want to echo just, you know, the authorities that were pointing it out and that I teased your words and to have the words more reflective of neighborhoods, I think makes a lot of sense. And maybe we can take some time apart from this meeting to think about what that might look like so we can give some more specific suggestions. Any more comments from folks online? You can raise your hand in person. Yep. I have a comment. I have more of a question. I suspect that Ward A was wrong the way it was to be inclusive of students on the campus. Is that correct? Yeah, I think it was billed as the student ward when it was created. And so ever since living in Burlington, I've always wondered about the wisdom of having part-time students at the risk of offending students in the area here, and there's a lot of nice ones, but they're here temporarily to represent the long-term interests of this community. And I just don't understand the wisdom of including them in the voting block and not to say they don't have a say about the community they live in, but they're here today and they're gone tomorrow. And I don't understand it. And we live right on College Street and we see the mess that's created up and down the streets and the adjacent blocks and it's really discouraging. And to Keith's point, maybe those folks are recruited the day of the election to swing an election or to convince or to get a vote going because they only register because they're told to register, but they're not participating in this community. And we all pay property taxes here, those of us who own properties here. And I think that we're underrepresented because there's so many students who are trying to be inclusive of. And I just don't see the balance. I think the way that we're drawing the districts, especially Ward 8, might be more inclusive by eliminating those, like I said, at the risk of offending larger groups of people. I just don't see them as part of this community. Well, they are legally allowed to vote. I think there was actually a Supreme Court decision that determined that, but I understand your point. So I think your suggestion is about boundaries again. Changing the boundaries, so it's more neighborhood and less student more, right? I don't want to put words in your mouth. I shouldn't be about the demographic. It should be about geography. Right, geography. Other comment? What? My reason for coming as the interloper for Ward 3 was we can't hear you. My reason for coming as the interloper for Ward 3 was largely due to my prior service on the committee. Prior to my departure, I was one of the individuals tasked with developing the citywide survey, which I believe is still under development. And George Love for Ward 2 and Daniel Mutano, who's the new member representing Ward 3 are kind of taking the lead with that. So I think that's a great departure from the committee in terms of the process here. One of the things that has come out was the boundaries and whatnot. There's also some fundamental ideas on what the council should look like, again, the districts versus the wards. We're trying to get a handle on that. One of the concerns was that having an online survey does preclude a certain demographic so there was thought to really do like a door-to-door effort or do some door hangers to really get the word out. Having worked personally for a company that specialized in doing surveys for the government, I know that you need to get a certain number of responses in order for the survey to be quote unquote statistically valid. I think from that perspective really it's incumbent upon the city and the committee but more so the city to ensure that we get adequate number of responses once the survey instrument has been finalized and approved by the advisory committee. So I'm hopeful that you know there's a good get out the opinion effort to get that kind of input there. I'm just wondering how would the door-to-door whatever it is you're handing out generate survey responses? By going door-to-door having one-to-one contact with people who live in the Lord you can basically have a conversation with them if they had questions it'd be an opportunity to answer any questions also give them the importance of it but also it would be something that's directly on their door they could see and be like oh hey here's a URL I can go to it would have some information. They may not be subscribed to front porch form they may not be hearing other ways so really trying to get the word out you know a lot of different ways to do that. My interest was I've always been a big fan of process I've always felt that people can live with a decision that they may not personally agree with if they feel that they've had a seat at the table and looking at where we are today and what we have in place now it does conjure up a number of questions for me as to how we got there. I have had some informal conversations with folks that were involved previously and to kind of make a long story short I encapsulated in a nutshell I think the answer is political compromise is how we got there but I think one of the points that came up in addition to looking at boundaries like many of the folks in this room are advocating was the actual representation the city council is supposed to be a representative body and so I know when I served on the school board Mr. Pillsbury here we had seven wards with two representatives from each ward for the board and the council a total of 14 individuals and you know the smaller we make this the bigger the wards to see more people and there's been research done that demonstrates that when you have a smaller district a smaller number of people engagement goes up because your representative is more accessible so that was definitely one thing that was discussed in the development of the survey and I suspect there's going to be a question of what is the ideal size of the council I think the range that had been initially discussed was from 8 to 16 and corresponding with that will be a table that says okay if we have eight seats this is how many people are in the ward all the way up to is if we have 16 seats versus this is how many people we have in the wards and to councilor Hanson's point if we did a 14 wards or 16 wards or 15 wards if we need to go to an odd number whatever it is the greater the number of wards the smaller the population and the greater the likelihood of investment there so that was something that really came out on it I know that there was also some feelings about the quality of population as many folks have emphasized the statute is 10% I think there's some feeling from folks that we can and should do better and maybe try to make it as equal as possible so those were some of the things that came up Georgia and Daniel are still working on that and I suspect they're going to have a draft at the next full committee meeting which I believe is next week I'm not getting emails anymore so I'm not sure there's another committee meeting that was not really sure but I mainly wanted to come because I'd gotten an email from UN about what was going on I said you know I'm two blocks away I'll just swing by it's a topic of interest to me being that I'm on the other side of south and I live on College Street not too far away having also lived over on Beale Street for 13 years so I kind of see some kinship here but what I had asked Kirsten is it pull up there's a page that I wanted to pull up on the city it's a history of redistricting which I think has some great information I just wanted to ask her to pull that up quickly so folks could kind of take a look at some things and I would ask that you open the PDF version of the 1865 map and then we'll go on to the 1950s it's at the very top the 1865 map PDF version and I bring this up just based on what I've heard from a lot of folks here about where the boundaries should be how the districts should be contiguous how there should be preservation of communities of interest so I thought maybe having a historical perspective might inform the discussion a little bit so I wanted to call out attention if you scroll down a little bit there Kirsten, you're in Ward 4 which is kind of the center city if you look at that and I don't know how much resolution we can have here that's the green in the center of the nice clean rectangle that encapsulates the downtown core the downtown core as I understand it's traditionally been Pearl Street South to Maine over to South Union looking at that you have the downtown core and the residential neighborhoods here of the our portions of Ward 8 and I think some portions of Ward's present day so I don't know if that is something that interests folks but I wanted to point out there is this information out there if you want to look at the historical development and how things have evolved over the last 150 years I personally found it to be informative and I just wanted to share that with everyone here so I'll get off my soapbox now so I want to be mindful of time because we do have to be out by 8.45 it's 8.30 and I Sandy's had their hand up for a while online so I would vote to let her speak and then wrap up the other comments so Sandy go can you hear me okay? yes can you hear me okay? yes loud and clear and thank you first of all for taking the time to do what you guys are doing my understanding of the last time the council got reorganized the way it currently is nobody liked it nobody was happy and this was a compromise of no one really liking what they were ending up with I don't think there is anyone that was particularly happy Ward 8th was a politically decision the way the lines were drawn and I'll leave it at that at least one council person that wanted property in one Ward and not in the other it was very politically chosen and that's why that Ward is so weird there was not a lot of logic but there was political rationale behind it and I'll leave it at that but thank you for all that you're doing I do support your conclusion so far we organized drawing new lines it's crazy the way it is it's so blatantly gerrymandering anyway thank you guys thank you Sandy so Ann and Richard any final comments before we wrap up no I'll be glad to come to the next NPA meeting because that will now be within the I just want to say that Ward 8 also has three legislative districts which are so convoluted one side of the street is on one legislative district the other side is the other side yet we have the lofts that split in half one's Ward 6, one's Ward 8 we have redstone commons because all redstones in Ward 8 redstone commons on redstone is Ward 6 that is how crazy the whole thing is and if I sound crazy it's because trying to do this every election day and with to do not know our Ward it's very difficult to help people to vote and as our city clerk says Ward 8 doesn't get many votes but we work the hardest for each vote and that is true thank you so as a steering committee person can we put you guys on again for November does that make sense I think I can do it okay so that's the 10th is that what date is it I can all look yeah we can reach out and see if that works I think so I have to look at my calendar but I think so and we will hope to be in a place where we really really can hear each other yeah good now on the microphone remember move on Jonathan Darren with the nut zero plan thank you for being patient with us feel free to go thank you good evening everybody I'm Darren Springer general manager with growing in electry and joined by colleague Emily seven real occupants as well I realize that we have a little bit of time constraint here so what I'm going to do is share my screen and just want to slide very quickly and obviously glad to answer questions if you have them and if we run out of time I'm glad to follow them with folks off on as well so let me just get this presentation up and running can everybody see my screen yes excellent so we're talking tonight about the net zero energy revenue bond that is going to be on the ballot December 7th I'm going to jump ahead here I can just highlight some items the revenue fund is a obligation if it's passed solely up growing in electry and payable through our revenues this is not an obligation of the city general fund it does not impact on property taxes or other taxes requires a majority approval of growing in voters and it does not affect the city's debt ratio or debt policy and we've got a number of examples where we've used a revenue bond in the past for some of our renewable energy plants like the Neal and the U.S. P1 and for energy efficiency and other infrastructure projects we actually had an 11.3 million dollar revenue bond for efficiency back in 1990 that really was the foundation of our energy efficiency investments in the city we're using less electricity today than we were in 1989 because of the energy efficiency and now that we're moving towards the climate goal that we have as a city 2030 trying to become net zero reducing and eliminating fossil fuel use for heating and for growing transportation we're looking at this revenue bond as a similar foundational support for our efforts in that regard and also to invest in key infrastructure and reliability for our system so 20 million dollar revenue bond proposal about 12.3 million we're going into the grid both to upgrade our systems to accommodate new uses like electric vehicles and electric bikes and heat pumps and other electric clean energy technologies as well as reliability upgrades we would invest about 3.9 million in replacing our aging technology systems about 2.2 million in our renewable energy plants and about 1.5 million in infrastructure investments that support net zero new e-charging stations for example the electric rocket truck for our long cruise and other investments along those lines the other piece of this is by moving forward in this manner we could utilize some of our annual bond funding to double the rate that we're funding customer incentives we've had about 1,400 road and electric customers take advantage of our incentives for heat pumps and heat bikes and heat lawnmowers and electric vehicles and all these different technologies and we're seeing even more demand so we want to support our customers in moving in this direction we can reduce emissions significantly by doing this and that's a key part of the strategy as well this chart here just illustrates what I just mentioned which is compared to state requirements we're actually seeing Burlington customers going above and beyond what's required in terms of the top 50 technologies the green line or the lower green line is the state obligation and the blue line or dark blue line is where we actually are in Burlington you can see we're going well above and beyond and we want to fund that strategy to continue to invest in those technologies key question what does this do relative to rates we just had our first rate base 12 years coming out of the pandemic what we're seeing is that in order to maintain some of the financial metrics that we have with Moody's and we just had our A3 credit rate confirmed by Moody's in August with the revenue bond we can reduce upward rate pressure significantly we would see about 4.9% upward rate pressure projected next year that's not a rate case that's just the amount of pressure that we would see on our budget but it doesn't necessarily reflect that without the revenue bond as you can see if we try to maintain all of our metrics and make all of these investments you have over 23% upward rate pressure which is not something that we want to see or our customers would support obviously and then I'm going to jump ahead a little bit here because the point of these slides is how are we going to repay the revenue bond there are two key pieces to that one is we have an existing revenue bond that's going to mature which creates about 684,000 capacity and we'll leave it for it to retain on the new net zero bond and we also are going to realize some revenues as a result of more customers moving towards those electric technologies and that can support approximately 40% of the repayment on the annual bonds and the revenue bond so all together we're projecting that in five years from now we're repainting principle on this bond that this investment will put approximately 1% of upward rate pressure on our budget with those savings that I just mentioned realized so I've gone as quickly as I can and I'm expecting your time constraints and I'm back here on the screen to answer any questions that you might have I see Keith has there one question I have Darren is just simple when people plug into those chargers on main street or wherever who pays for that electricity does that come out of our is that through the general fund that we all pay into no so in terms of public chargers that we have including the ones on main street customers who park at the charger and use it are paying per kilowatt hour for the electricity that they're using at those chargers so those are investments that we made to support electric vehicle deployment but we charge per kilowatt hour for any of the use of the energy and that's how we recruit revenues from those drivers thank you I have questions I'm not seeing any actually I see Tom just a quick question we have a copy of this presentation I'm sure we can get a copy of the presentation it's on MTA website and it's also right there physical form okay thanks thank you so much for going quickly and I'm sorry that it was so crunched for time thank you Darren thank you and right on time we're going to go into the raffle so Carol Tom do you want to explain that maybe we're having a raffle we're handing out some local work memberships and so we've made a list of people who qualify for this we're here yet and we just need a volunteer to pick the names out of the hat or out of the bowl Charlie will do that for us just making sure folks heard we're raffling off local board subscriptions if we use part of our NPA funding to do it and everyone that attended the meeting tonight that isn't a steering committee member that entered in to win so that's kind of context so and yeah so the two people and we're also going to give one to each other and we're going to be registered and and right after they get done after they get done after they get done after they get done I think they're pretty done Cheryl Green gets one of the coupon packets and Lisa bridge who was Woody gets one of the packets Lisa and Cheryl won this one I think I got a couple how do I get a hold of Cheryl Green and Lisa Bridge and Lisa I've got keys thank you all so much Lisa on the screen is she on the screen right now so she knows she was back here I thought you had to stay to the end to win this is for cause of war 2-3 I'm going to close up the meeting so everyone say bye bye everyone bye