 Welcome everyone, I'm going to call the meeting to order. The first thing to do is to review and approve the agenda. I think we have some adjustments to make. So the first thing is that we have an addendum. There's an executive session to talk about a property along the bike path. And we're also going to talk about the pocket park as well. And that's also an executive session. So just a note about that. And Donna, yes. I wanted to move an item. There's a group of individuals here to talk about State Street being closed for the farmers market three weekends in May. And I'd like us to actually have a discussion about it. And it could possibly be early in the agenda since they came thinking they would be in the early part. That would be good. Sure. We could call that, well, we could put it right after the consent agenda. Part of me wants to call that item four and a half. Okay, so any other adjustments to the schedule or to the agenda? Okay, so no objection. We'll consider that approved. So the consent agenda. So we're pulling, do you want to, oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. I'm going to skip general business. So general business and appearances is a time for members of the public to come speak to the council on any matter that is not on our agenda. For those here for the farmers market, they just got put on the agenda. And we would also ask that in general, this is going to be true for the whole meeting if you would try to limit your comments to two minutes. We have some cards to help you know. Donna, what's the orange one for? I mean, it's one minute. Two. Two minutes. Okay. So just to help you know. Yes. All right. So, sir, and if you would say your name and what street you're, you can come to the table or you can go to the microphone. Either way is fine. Marie Spineau lived on 6 Scribner Street, lived here for 22 years. Just a few things and I'll talk as fast as I can. 20 years ago I asked for a crosswalk across Pioneer and River Street and I was point blank told that will give a very insincere and just not comfortable feeling to give anybody security by putting a crosswalk there. I couldn't walk my three year old children across the street. And this week when I went by Jolly, there was a woman with a carriage, two young children trying to cross the street to get to Jolly. I think this should be crosswalked there. There is not one until we get all the way to the bridge. You're hurting businesses on the cross the street. Second of all, very discouraging to see people waiting for a bus standing out here in the winter when they've been told sometimes we've got to get off and bury. We should have some place to go to. We should have, if it's temporary, cut the bloom and wind and rain. My Lord people. The other thing I think we should review the pilot program. I don't believe it's been looked at in probably ten years. And the other thing, you know, we want to be a bicycle friendly city and I agree with that. However, how many times have you seen an adult taking children on the sidewalk going in the wrong direction and not even knowing what the rules are? I grew up in Barrie. We had to register our bike, pay $5. The police took an ID of your bicycle so in case it got stolen and you were handed a helmet and the rules. And that should be done again. Ta-da! And you didn't do it. And I'll stay here for the script. All right, thank you. Thank you for those comments. I just wanted to say I'm hearing you and I'm going to chew on all of those thoughts and I think that they're worth thinking about. So, I appreciate that. Yes. Is there anything specific with the pilot program or something you and I could talk about separately? Certainly. I just didn't know if there was something in particular that you had a concern about. I don't know when the last time it's been reviewed. I brought it to our latest readers before and they say, don't look at it. Don't touch it. We've got a good deal. We don't know. And yes, I will help us, Cirillo, on the rec board. I was on the rec board twenty years ago and I'll come back. I do have one other question for you actually. It's a place where you would like a crosswalk. You said it really fast and I didn't catch it. Right across the street from Jolly, while the old... I'm not sure. It's a Jolly store. Oh, yeah. I did. You've got a youth clothing store there. You've got Utton's. You've got children on the other side of the river that can't walk across that street without an adult. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so any other comments? Okay. All right, so the consent agenda. Yes, Rosie. I did not have time to read all the consent agenda items so I would like to abstain from the consent agenda items unless it's needed to move it forward. Rosie, I can't hear you. Oh, sorry. I don't know. So I was admitting that I had not had time to read all of the consent agenda items and so I would like to abstain from voting on them myself unless the vote is needed to move them forward. Thank you. Donna, did you... I guess we... I want to pull H. Okay. Do for discussion. And we've sort of effectively pulled... I guess we... I thought we had a... Never mind. Awesome. Great. Any other things people want to pull? Okay, I just want to make a comment, too, about the investment policy. This is the addendum that's going to put the Montpelier Foundation funds in together with the city's investments. And I had pulled that from a previous agenda in hopes that we would have further conversation about some socially responsible investing practices. And so I just want you all to know that I'm comfortable with this moving forward, adding in those funds for now, and it's going to take a little more time to work out the socially responsible investing policy. But we're on it and we... I hope to be back with some recommendations for you all in June. So just a heads up for the timing on that. Okay, is there a motion? Seven. All right. We're clear on what we're voting on. I think so, right? We pulled one item. All right. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? So item four and a half. The State Street Farmers Market. So Donna, do you want to start with your comments and then we can invite the public up? Yes, sure. Well, several store owners have talked to me and unfortunately I didn't make the meeting that the Business Association had with the Farmers Market Group, but I really wanted... I got a sense that there hadn't been any... many things had not been worked out well. And so I really wanted people to be able to speak and us to exchange ideas, versus if you just made comments in the public they just stand there on their own. So I would really like to share and see if we can't help make things work better for everybody. So I'm listening to your comments and seeing what we can do with them. Any other comments from the council at this point? All right. So if you would like to... any members of the public would like to comment on this, that now's the time. I can say your name and... what street you're on. Karen Williams and Woodbray Mountain Toys. What are the... actually what the thoughts I had was that you said that the market was for three weekends. We are under the... assumption that it's for the entire summer that it would be every single Saturday to be closed. Yeah, I was going to jump in. The council approved a similar enclosure. I think what council member Bate was referring to was apparently it was going to be tried with a certain set of three weeks. Yeah, but they have no parameters for that trial period. They just said we'll just see. So there are no parameters in place. I'm just trying to clarify. Exactly. So that was one of my questions was what are the parameters that are involved in how they're going to make their decision? One of the things that they... the configuration that they have shown us is with the tents facing... the backs of the tents by the businesses so that the customers for farmers' market would go down the middle of the street. And I know that the fire marshal has approved for the tents to be set up on the yellow line back to back, so therefore that the customers that are at farmers' market would also be this... the businesses on State Street would be included in the market and it would be more favorable to us. And one other thing that I would like to address or to say is that I have supported State Street closures because I know how viable and vibrant it makes it downtown. But it also causes sales to go down for my business. Saturdays are my busiest day. When streets are closed, I'm down to 15 to 30% for those days. If we were closed every... if the streets were closed every single Saturday from May to October, it would be detrimental to my business. So, thank you. I'm Nancy Martel from Coenor or Pinkies on the state and I'm going to reiterate a lot of what Karen said is when we have street closures on Saturdays our business is down more than that, ours is about 50% down. And to have that many closed during the summer, that's our summer business. That would just be horrible for us. And if they have it the way that they're showing us now it also blocks us off completely. We have no sun. We will see the backs of everything. And in order to get to our shop you have to walk down one end of the street or to the other to come into Pinkies. Another concerning question is power. I know that somebody said they need power and stuff. Where is that power coming from and who pays for that power? I mean, we pay rent, we pay our taxes, we pay our employees no matter if we're open to it or not. So, it's flipping the bill to power on that. I'm Sarah Lasser. I manage Solom on State Street. And again, I'm definitely reiterating a lot of what has been said but I guess maybe the more these things are said the better, so they'll be heard at some point. I just checked our numbers for one of those Saturdays from last summer and we were down 25%. And I had to run over here because I didn't want to be late but I'm assuming that the other days were pretty much in line with that because I remember it being way, way, way down. It was super noticeable. Saturday is also our busiest day of the week so to be down 25% or more for every Saturday for almost half of the year would be really rough for us. I can't even imagine what that would do, actually. And again, having the backs of everybody's tents to our stores, nobody's going to come to our stores. It directs all of the traffic away from us for our whole street and then when you leave the market you've left our street. When it was in the lot, when you left the market it came down our street and I think we hopefully all saw. We saw extra business because of it, definitely. But last summer everybody was leaving the market and then going to probably back to their cars but they definitely weren't coming into the businesses. People that were wandering in were bored at their tents and just looking for something to do but they weren't shopping. So I would love to see if there's any other options, if it has been approved for it to be down the center of the street with the fronts facing our stores. I think that would be no harm done to the farmer's market people but definitely a huge benefit to us and it's kind of about the downtown as a whole. So it seems like that would be helpful. Or in front of the state house might be better too. Or half on State Street, half on Langdon Street was mentioned. So just anything other than this is what I'm going for. Anyone else? You can do it. I'm Jess Turner. I own Capitol Kitchen on State Street. I'm a very nervous public speaker. True, preemptive apologies. Things get weird up here. I definitely want to just echo everything that my fellow business owners have said and also talk a little bit about the process of how this all sort of happened. When the State Street was closed for the three week kind of trial run last summer, I was a fan. I loved it. I championed it to fellow business owners, to other community members. I kind of said, hey, this could be awesome. Look how vibrant downtown is. However, that was a very different setup. That was down the center line, vendors back to back looking into our stores. And it wasn't until I read the first article in the Times Argus that I said, oh, that's not the configuration that's planned anymore. And now, as we said, lining the sidewalks, vendors facing in their backs to our stores. Then I saw the map of what the layout was going to be and I couldn't believe how bad my position is, Pinky's position is. We're in a box. There's no entry to us from, if the parklet happens for positive five, which I've also been a champion of. If that happens, I'm blocked from the crosswalk of downtown toys all the way down beyond Botanica, like almost the whole block. You cannot get to me unless you go all the way around. And I just feel like my storefront is a huge part of my business. I feel like it's a big part of what I'm paying for, for rent, and I pay for rent 365 days a year, just like everybody else here does, who owns a business in town. And I just feel like there's got to be a better solution. I do feel like we're all in this together and we make the market better. The market makes downtown better. Together, it's toward the same goal, which is a vibrant, exciting, awesome downtown. So I'd love to explore other solutions, as Sarah said, that aren't this. It's pretty terrible from where we're sitting. Thank you. Well, thank you. Anyone else? This is Lauren Parker, owner of the North Branch Cafe. And from my perspective, it's more about looking at farmer's markets in other places. I think everything that they've said is absolutely true and I support what they're talking about. But also, if you think about other farmer's markets, when they are backed toward the businesses on the streets, it just doesn't look nice. It doesn't look open or friendly. It looks closed and boxy. And it's not at all welcoming to the community for the retail and restaurant owners. So from that perspective, just the visual on top of all the annoyances for business owners. So at this point, I guess I'm going to pick on you, Bill. So we approved the street closures already at this point. Correct. So how do we... I may have to jump in here. So obviously I think we all just want what's going to work for everybody. So yes, this came to us last fall, winter. I think it had run through various groups. And at that point, we approved the closure for the season. I'm not sure there was a specific layout that was part of the other conditions, but I don't think there was a specific layout. And as I understand it, it's who jumped in here at any time, because she's really been the person on the ground for us. So in fact, like now would be a good time. Mr. Remind, Bill, there was a discussion about the layout, because I objected, because they did change it. And they said that was the layout they were going to use. And at that point, there was a bit of a misunderstanding. Well, it wasn't a misunderstanding. The fire department prefers the layout along the edges with the backs to the businesses, because it lets their trucks through. Now, having said that, I talked to the fire chief, and he is comfortable going back. He's actually in the room. He is comfortable going back to last year's layout. So in your approval of the initial layout, you were actually under a misperception to some degree. And the fire chief now says he can live with it. He can get his fire trucks down with the old layout as well. Yes, Donna? Bob? Chief, fire chief. Sorry, I called you by your first name. I mean, one of the suggestions was also to break it up. Is nobody here from the farmers market? There isn't, and I actually could let them know. There is talk about splitting this into two pieces. Closing Langdon Street as well, so that one row could be on State Street and one row of farmers vendors could be on Langdon. It would sort of be a circular foot pattern. The farmers market wasn't closed to that necessarily because they could do some things like music and workshops. They'd have more room. It hasn't really been discussed by them, and they haven't taken formal action. It hasn't been discussed by our staff or by Langdon. That's correct. It hasn't been vetted by anybody. We tossed this at you and asked you to vetted, thinking that you could make more room for your fire trucks if we only had one row, and they would be facing some of the storefronts and maybe not so centered but over. Is that what you're thinking? Langdon Street also? Yeah, staff, we need to discuss that. I wouldn't do that on a fly. Now you've got two streets closed. You've got State Street and Langdon Street closed. I think it's 28 Saturdays. I think that's what it is. It's 28 consecutive Saturdays. That's problematic. I think we should hear from the police chief and the public works director also. It is problematic for me also. Maybe you could mention State Street. They had it talked about going in front of the State House and there were concerns about that as well. There are. Again, I prefer it here, but I know the police department would not because that becomes very problematic because when you block State Street in front of the State House, cars coming off the interstate, you now have to stop them out at Memorial Drive because you can't let them turn left on the Bailey Street and get down the State Street and find the street close. So you really have to stop traffic out at Bailey and Memorial and keep traffic going that way. So that's what we have to do for July 3. Because otherwise the traffic will turn left on the Bailey, come down, now they're at State Street and they have no place to go. Likewise, on State Street, if it were spread out so it was further, like from Julio's all the way down, maybe not so thick, would that help with as far as trucks or anything that would have to go through? It would help fire, truck fire vehicles. It's not going to help traffic, the PD that has the control traffic. No, it's going to be problematic. I believe one of the concerns and one of the reasons it's been successful or anything's been successful at stretching the State Street is that the on-street turn is still open. No, I was saying Julio's to the traffic light. Just that end. Right now the farmers market doesn't... Usually it allows a big space between Julio's and up across the bridge and then they start with their boots. The farmers market? No, it went from the corner to Julio's. Basically State to Elm. I mean, Maine to Elm. Maine to Elm, right? And I know that's what the police chief would prefer for the exact reasons that the city manager's talking about. It gives Elm Street as a way traffic can come down and continue out. Or if it's up in front of the State House you have to stop it much further up. So one hypothesis is that the farmers market was proposing this other alternative configuration to accommodate emergency vehicles. But do we know that there was any other reason that they made this change to the layout? ADA. Well, mostly they were concerned also about liability. They felt that when they face the sidewalks there's a space that people have to step off the curve to get into their vendor tents. And they're concerned it's a liability issue. So they were worried about that. Because if they back up against the sidewalk and people are coming in the front, they don't have that issue. They were also concerned about unloading. The businesses did volunteer to help them with unloading. Last year's layout was a little bit complicated to get their wares in. So that was their concern. So I guess I'm going to look at the council here as to what you would like to do. I mean, my inclination is to actually recommend that we go with the old layout. But I'm curious for other thoughts. I'm not clear what say we have. I mean, we've allowed this organization to close the street. And I am trying to recall exactly what our motion was at that point, because we may have made the motion that they could close it contingent on that configuration. And if so, we could take that back. But I'm not sure. I don't know what power we actually have here. I could picture us making a recommendation to them to say, you know, did you go one way or the other? I mean, a street closure is at the discretion of the city council. So presumably you could make a condition of the closure. But I don't have in front of us the actual motion that we passed. And we might be able to get it before the night's over. But if there were conditions placed then and whether that requires a reconsideration or that sort of procedureally. Presumably the council could. When is the first? May 5th. So that's really, that's quick. I think it was January 24th. I think I have the agenda right here. Yeah. Yes. And I get to say one more quick thing. One of the frustrations that I'm having and that many of my fellow business owners are sharing with me. There has been a representative of the farmers market, the manager who has attended meetings, Mopiliar Business Association meetings with us since November. And we've been quite straightforward about all of these concerns even before we saw the official mapped plan of it. Learning that they were going to be configured in this way. We've really tried to be collaborative and shared these concerns in a very direct way. But now we're starting to feel like it's like, whoa, whoa, it's too late to do anything about it now. It's been several months that we've voiced these concerns. So they've been quite aware of the issues that we've had with this from the beginning. I just wanted to make that clear. I attended last year's RV antique collection and they were on the sides and people didn't have any problems or issues stepping off the sidewalk to go look at these nice RVs. I don't know if it helped or hurt your businesses, but I know it was great to walk down the main street, look at things go around, and then walk right into a business. And it just seemed like I think that, you know, the fire could get through the middle. They weren't really closing it all off. And they left room for everyone, both businesses, pedestrians, and the RVs. I wasn't here last time when this was taken up, but reading the email we got and listening to the people who are here, I think it's a really legitimate concern. I think that I'd like to see some way that we could make this work for them. I don't know whether that is to change the conditions in which the closure was granted, but I'd like to see us do something to make work. I really don't... I haven't heard what legal advice anyone might have gotten about liability, but I don't... The sidewalks and the curbs are there seven days a week, 365 days a year. I don't think the liability picture is a concern. Rosie? I think it was actually accessibility. It was difficult for a handicap wheelchairist to get down. It was liability. Also liability. They had an issue with liability where someone got hurt at the farmer's market a few years ago, so they've been through a court battle about this which made the very sensitive about it. And I actually can't really speak too much more. I invited them to come here tonight, but... John? Just for reference, because you're wondering what the motion was, the motion just referenced the proposal, which was the attachment, which was simply approved request to move into State Street for 2018 season. The only addition was that it was contingent on discussions and approval with the relevant department heads. So it was pretty broad. All right. What do you think, Donna? I'm not sure how to frame the motion, but I would like to make a really strong suggestion, if not condition, that indeed one of the things was working with the stores. Nothing has changed since they presented it. They did a trial. The trial had everybody in the center, and that's what I expected them to move towards. But they came wanting to change it, and I'd like them to go back to that, which was tried, which did include the shops on the streets much more. So I guess I'll test it out here in the waters. I'll make a motion that we make it a condition that the farmer's market make an arrangement that works better for the stores and works with them to do so. For the first three weeks? For the first three weeks, sure. I do like the idea of checking in, how's it going, is this working? Yes. With any arrangement. And that's something we need to take into mind, not make such a broad time period without testing it out. That's the other issue. I know that we approved this request to move it, and I know that there is a process by which the city council can revoke that. Not saying that that is what we're going to do here, but what, I guess Bill, what would that look like? So if we're going to check in it three weeks and decide that, you know, if the layout isn't going to change to what we suggest, because I don't think we can amend our original since we've already moved. What would that process be, Bill? Or John? I don't know. I think you would obviously have to have it not just an add-on agenda item. It would be certainly by the fireworks market, by interested parties, and have a full discussion. And certainly I think the first question that Karen raised is what are the parameters, what are the criteria that are being looked at, and I think we might want to think about what would be the causes for us to don't like it and I don't mean that disrespect. Is that cause to take away a permission that you've already granted? Or is it, you know, demonstrated loss of business to the businesses, or is it, you know, just a poll? How would we make that determination really important? The other piece was that when, you know, whatever, I don't have a strong feeling with the other how we do it, but when we did it, we, I think the council did get the trial had been held in fall, and there wasn't really a lot of opposition heard at that point, and we didn't really talk about the layout, but as I recall, it wasn't important to the market at least, that the season, I think the council did. We've got construction in a lot this summer. And so the idea was, you know, when you're marketing there, you tell people they're in a brochure, this is where it is, to change it, which is not to say if it's causing harm, we still can't do it, but that was an important consideration to the basis of your prior decision as well. Procedurally, I have to look into it, but I think the worst case scenario is you might have to proceed it with a vote to suspend the rules, which would be a two-thirds majority, but I'll check that. I think that's a very important consideration where we think we've done the thing to cure the defect, and then it turns out we've made another defect. So it would be, I realized, so the farmers market start on the fifth, which is not this Saturday, but the coming Saturday. Would this mean that we would have to have a special meeting then to address this particular issue? That's what I'm hearing, if we need to have an agenda item if you're simply adding a condition about how they set up in the street, I don't think you're necessarily, you're not revoking permission. It's just in addition to speak up the hand area. Sorry, I don't know if Mike's done it. All I was saying was it would seem to me that if we were adding, simply adding a condition about how it was setting up that wouldn't necessarily require a special meeting, they may ask for one, which would be there right, and I think appropriate. This was just added, there was no publicity given that this was going to be discussed, although the market was told that we were expecting people and it could come up, so they were aware of that. But I think if you were going to actually have in there a discussion of taking back the approval, something stronger than that, I think you definitely would not want to have that beyond. I'm sorry, I'm trying to frame my thoughts and it's not a production studio. I'm sorry, Dave. I think if you were to have a decision to revoke a permission or create grounds for revoking a position, I would think you wouldn't want to have a special meeting and invite people and duly want it and follow all proper processes. You're simply adding a condition about where tents go, you could probably do that tonight because they could ask for a special meeting to reconsider. Maybe I'm just being overly cautious because being a lawyer ruins everything and then you're overthinking everything but what I'm afraid of is if we offer a direction, a strong suggestion, a few different questions, they're one, what if that's not taken and then two, does that trigger some sort of other thing that is an issue? My understanding is that the motion is not just a strong suggestion, it's a condition. So they have to do it. It's a condition. If they go back to the setup that was done in the trial in September. I would love to be wrapping this up so you can go. I'm just wondering since the original motion that we approved was contingent on them working with department heads, could we simply instruct the department heads to request that in their deliberations they request that the market come up with something that's more satisfactory to the businesses, that wouldn't be changing our original motion, it would just be giving our department heads some more instruction. If I can jump in strictly speaking I'm a relevant department head since I managed the what am I trying to say, the vendors which who I always have to sort of step up and defend in situations like this. So, maybe that could be, if they've already talked to everybody, maybe the whole thing could be held up technically until I spoke to them and I could deliver that message. I'd be comfortable with that. Does that work for you? I still think that the council ought to be clear about what we're asking for because we have gone through a process we have encouraged them to speak Seuss tried to broker meetings between the farmers market and downtown merchants and we've been very active trying to reach a conclusion and in all fairness, the chief is being very gracious but really in terms of purely a public safety response what they're proposing is preferable we can make work what's here so I think the department has done their job and said here's what we think works so we're happy to go back and be the bad guy or a good guy depending who's mirror you're looking at but it would be great to have the council speak clearly if there's something that you want us to deliver. I mean it seems to me that you know the shortest distance between two points is a straight line if the council wants to add a condition vote and add a condition I mean we'll still work with them but my motion wasn't seconded was it John? No that's what I was talking about strictly speaking it needs to be dealt with as a second right away or it dies second I was going to remake it I was going to modify the language so that Bill was correct and Ashley's point to say that I want to make the set up a condition of them using State Street and that they will come back in three weeks time and keep us abreast of how it's working, both them and the store owners You're going to have to restate that one Don, just make it real short. My motion is a condition of Farmers Market using closure for State Street is that they go back to the set up they used in the trial so that they're facing the stores and that replaces the other motion? Yes sir and Jack is still seconding it and then you just said and that they come back to us in three weeks as a follow up of how it's working for them and the stores David I think was next and then Dan, or unless Dan maybe you were yeah go ahead Dan Groberg is Executive Director of Farmers Market at the meeting between the MBA and the Farmers Market there was a discussion of a four week trial due to the date of the next MBA meeting so I think it's offering a perhaps you can start four weeks instead of three I'm willing to do that do you want it to be as an amendment John? Jack Jack you're okay with that? Oh yeah that's fine I was thinking either the last or second meeting in May or the first meeting in June either one would be fine but have it on the agenda now so that everyone effective knows that's without objection change David I was here for different reasons but my name is David Brownlee and my wife owns Alameda and I'm not here representing Alameda but I just wanted the council to recognize that the state street businesses are here year round and the Farmers Market is here six months that's all I have to say Thank you Rosie so I'm a little bit confused about this motion are we instructing them to set up for the the first four weeks of the market we're telling them they need to change their setup to what they had last September and then check in with us or to use the setup that they're proposing for four weeks and then check in with us at that point at that point we may instruct them to use a different setup if it's not working no it's directing them to use the setup they did during the trial which was facing the stores so the vendors have their backs to other vendors and are all facing the stores that was what was done in the trial and that's what I'm asking to be a condition of them using state street and you want them to do that for the first four weeks of the market first four weeks if I could so what I heard was that we could be wrong so I'm asking clarifying questions so what I understood was we were asking them to switch to that design with their backs to other vendors so they'd be facing differences and that after four weeks of that they come back in and check so that was for the duration of the permit to shut down state street they would come in and check in with everyone at four weeks and then the direction would still be to continue unless there were other direction from the city so are you saying is your motion to say go back over that's what I said for the duration of the farmers market the state street would be shut down with the condition that the vendors have their backs to each other facing the businesses on state street for the duration of the farmers market for the summer interesting that's not what I understood I thought the condition was just on the first four weeks I thought the check in was at the four week mark too I think the clarity from Ashley is important because I would rather than be able to plan that's what they're going to do unless they run into problems they come back with us after four weeks and then we change it but if it isn't changed this is the setup does that help clarify I guess I'd like to just talk about that for a second because I'm really sympathetic to the businesses that have voiced their concerns but I also know that my understanding was that there were other businesses and maybe I'm wrong because I did not attend the meetings but there were other businesses that maybe felt differently and I also am really concerned about making this decision right now without checking in with the market so I would be more comfortable actually letting them proceed with the current design for the first week or two and then having a set check in point because my understanding from the businesses was that you were really concerned that at this three week check in point nothing would happen that you didn't feel like you'd been heard this spring and so you were concerned that we'd have this check in and it would just continue on even if it was problematic so I would prefer to give you some teeth to that check in point and say at that point if it's really not working and let's make some criteria for what that is then we will give strong direction that it needs to change rather than changing it on a fly like this for something that's happening two weeks away it's not on a fly because we have expressed our concerns about this every single month that they show up at the meeting and we would like them to go down the yellow line back to back facing the stores and every time they come back with the configuration with the tents facing the backs of the tents facing the stores and all of their detritus and you know, debris which is what it's not it's just not acceptable to us so it's not on the fly there were no other businesses on State Street that were that who you were speaking of that are the different businesses but I mean I I know that I spoke with Lotus Day Spa she said that please say that she is also against the configuration as you know it shows now so it is Botanica and Aramedd and Willowind and Alameda Coco Bean I'm not really sure I didn't speak with anyone directly that was my understanding from city staff so if that's not the case we don't want to do the setup with the tents and seeing the tents for three weeks and then come back I would much rather change the configuration now and hopefully it would be in a positive manner and we can say like yes this does work you know as opposed to no it's yeah I'm sorry so again I'm concerned about making that change without having warned it and I would rather give teeth to a check-in point and say that you know these are our metrics and if it's not working this is what we and I hear you and I hear you that we haven't been helpful to you throughout this process in the spring and I apologize for that but I really am uncomfortable with us as a council having made a decision and then going back on it without any public notice you know it's such a short date so maybe I'm in the minority that's my oh yes Donna I would agree with that except it's mother's day and this is like Valentine's day and what are the stories we're hearing from typical mother's day the kitchen, flowers candy jewelry I mean so it just that's what to me makes it so pressing I mean mother's day Valentine's day Christmas these are key times for our downtown stores so that's my concern that's my concern well team I think we gotta move on one last thing and then we gotta you know once again who's to define the metrics and is it up to the store owners to record their negative sales from over one period of time etc who's gonna measure and find the metrics I think we're just gonna have to ask the farmers market to work with businesses to come up with those metrics I'm concerned about that because it sounds like that's not working they should be here tonight they've shown up in the past they requested that we report actual sales figures to them and none of us were super comfortable doing that saying we'd work with percentages happily like they were giving the orange card mother's day is our second biggest busy time of the year Glenn if we move forward with Donna's motion Bill mentioned something about the farmers market potentially being able to call a special meeting if they could request they can't call so I want to just bring that out as a kind of failsafe or check so that if we do this motion and the farmers market is furious and has very good reasons for why it's a bad move that is their next recourse is that correct I just asked the chief real quick if we did go back to the original configuration for about four weeks there are there any pressing safety concerns on your end we can make that work certainly the center aisle is preferred for us but we can make that work keeping in mind we worry about the vehicle the access and we'll have to get together with them to make sure we had the proper and then keep in mind that we will only we would not put a vehicle down there unless there was an incident down in there if there's something on the other side we'll go around so the only reason we'll work with this and the police chief we're also concerned about safety of the folks that are down in there so we have to think about that also protecting the folks that are down in there so that's high on our list of priorities also so if we're going to change it we need to change it soon we need to get together and start thinking about normally vehicle access but how we're going to protect the people that are down in there okay yes Rosie so I appreciate Glen's point and if we are willing as a group to if the market really strongly objects or if we're hearing you know some strong objections to this that we would consider calling a special meeting then I would be willing to support Donna's fine with me I'm going to try to make something work okay no further discussion all in favor please say aye okay thank you thank you thank you thanks for coming in alright I'm just going to make a prediction right now I'm going to guess that we're going to be out at 9.40 9.40 executive session oh my 10 into executive session at 9.30 okay we're going to go into executive session at 9.40 that would be good one of hopes okay Kate thank you thank you for waiting item four and a half so this is the what for the energy advisory committee an update word to go I will let you all introduce yourselves um I can't get into the computer because she means a password he's Sue she's out talking you want me to go get it we can introduce ourselves but the presentation part are you on her computer is it on her computer? yeah I stuck it in there maybe you're out doing the presentation put your password in there so I'm Kate Stevenson I'm the chair of the Montpelier energy advisory committee and you guys want to introduce yourselves? Jeff Fitzgerald member of the committee and I work on the municipal working group municipal projects working group Barbara Conry and I'm working on the energy planning group and I'm Carl Johnson and I'm on the municipal group as well great so our goal here today is really just to introduce the new members of council to introduce you to what we're doing on the energy committee give you a little bit of an update and kind of talk through where we are relative to the city's net zero goals and kind of where we're headed and how we would like your support in all of those efforts just press enter enter that's not that it's like fun though so just it's filling the screen alright so just to get started so our I guess I can't page through here but we'll just scroll so what does it mean for the city of Montpelier to be net zero net zero community is one that produces required energy for transportation for electricity and for heating our homes and buildings through renewable energy sources and the goal of the energy advisory committee is basically to advise city council on any energy related matters we have sort of taken a broader view of that task we do a lot of outreach in the city to residents and business owners and as my fellow members alluded to we have four different working groups within the committee one that's focused on municipal operations buildings one that's focused on transportation looking at alternative transit options electric vehicles bike and pedestrian issues one that's focused on planning the zoning our own city energy plan and then we have a residential group really focused on homeowners and landlords so that's how we organize ourselves and just looking back at a couple of the projects that we've been focused on recently this background image is all the solar installations here in the city of Montpelier but in 2016 we were really involved with the one megawatt of a municipal solar array that's half here in Montpelier half in Sharon and organizing that for the city and the school district we also put together a workshop for landlords so they could learn about weatherization options and how they could reduce energy use in rental apartments we were part of something called the Georgetown energy prize which was a national competition of 50 cities from around the country trying to reduce their energy use so we were competing in that and were named a semi-finalist in 2016 we also did a series of home tours of about 15 different houses around the city so that people could see different energy efficiency things in action we had a transportation festival on the state house lawn looking at electric vehicles and other alternative transportation options and we won energy committee of the year award so we're excited about that last year we did a big weatherization campaign in the fall, the button-up campaign which was connected to efficiency Vermont we did a retro commissioning process at the police department and what that means is retro commissioning is something I'll talk a little bit about but it's basically going into existing buildings and looking at their heating and ventilation systems to just figure out how well they're working are their opportunities for improvements back into look at what we have and what we can do to make them better so we did that at the police department we also did energy audits of six different municipal buildings at the end of last year and another series of home tours we worked a lot on the recommendations for the zoning update and we've been talking a lot with city staff on the ESG Organics to Energy project which is still under discussion and I think you'll be hearing more about soon so when we look ahead at 2018 and what's on our agenda we're actively working on a draft of the city energy plan and that is in coordination with both the regional planning commission and part of the city's own master planning process so we've got a draft of that and we're still working on it fine tuning we have three more retro commissioning projects lined up we're going to be looking at the water plant we're going to be looking at the district heat loop in the basement here of city hall and at the fire station so those are all projects that will be funded through Efficiency Vermont so at no cost to the city and our plan to start in the next month or two and it's basically bringing in some some outside engineers to spend a day really diving deep into how the systems are set up and giving us some recommendations we just finished up a big weatherization campaign called Weatherize Mount Pealier that you probably heard about we had about 150 homeowners from the city express interest in weatherizing their homes and we worked with four different contractors here in the area to set up free crews and so that homeowners could get a proposal for energy efficiency work on their property so we're in the process of falling up with all those people and it was a really successful first crack at a campaign we're planning to do a campaign on modern wood heat this fall and really introducing people to the idea of super efficient pellet boilers and kind of automated wood heat and as I said we're still working on the ESG project and want to hear more about what they're up to so in the big picture we're trying to track how much energy the whole city of Mount Pealier is using and as you may have heard the cities or the whole states comprehensive energy plan calls for 90% renewables by 2050 that's the state's goal and so one of the tools that we use is called the community energy dashboard and it helps us track overall energy use but as you know the city of Mount Pealier has set a goal of net zero by 2030 which is basically raising the bar and saying we're going to do it 20 years faster and we're going to go 100% so we're looking both at the big picture of the whole city's energy use and then really diving deeper right now into the municipal energy use so our committee started tracking municipal energy use about four years ago I think as when Scott started and this year was the first year that we kind of handed it from the committee to city staff so Todd Provencher, the finance director has taken over tracking all of the energy use and I've been working with him really intensively over the last few months so we're going to try and pull all our numbers together and as you can imagine there's a lot of different pieces to this and a really big spreadsheet so we're still kind of finalizing all of the data from FY 17 and updating all of our numbers so I just want to throw I'm not going to get into the details and I think if you all have questions about some of the details of municipal energy use Todd would be happy to come back and really dive into more but just as an overview this gives you a sense of kind of when we look at all both thermal and electricity you know where is our energy going and you may not be able to see all the details here but the wastewater treatment plant is a big chunk and then the schools are another big chunk about a third of the total but the good news is we are making progress towards our net zero goal if we look at just overall fossil fuel use you can see in this the red line is propane and the green line is total oil we've seen a real reduction in oil as we brought the district heat online and a couple other projects so we are making good reductions in our fossil fuel use and we've also made some really good conversion to renewable energy sources when we look at our electricity portfolio so if you compare 2011 we had about 2% renewable energy produced here for municipal use and now we're up to about 37% with the addition of the the big one megawatt solar array with this slide is it's 2% and 37% is the number also getting lower by means of conservation well we're getting there the other thing I wanted to say but the other thing I wanted to say is this is not taking into account the fact that green mountain powers portfolio is also about 55% renewable so we're trying to figure out how to incorporate that piece of data in but this is just the city's own solar panels and what they're producing so this is getting to your next question so how are we conserving are we just using less energy where our vehicle fleet and the use of diesel and unleaded fuel has stayed pretty constant over the past 8 years that we've been tracking our thermal load has gone down a bit you can see and our electric load has gone down as well it doesn't look like a huge change but I think it's a 14% reduction over the 8 years but that's it it's a difficult question because there have been so many improvements efficiency improvements for instance at the wastewater treatment facility but while those improvements were made they also tripled the amount of septage that they're processing so the power requirements to generate that additional revenue for the city were exponentially greater even though they were more efficient than they were 10 years ago so it's a good question but it's not one you can easily answer for the most part the portfolio has stayed the same but there are some changes if we compare FY11 the senior center wasn't operating so we added a whole building which has pretty low energy use but there are some things that have changed over the time so this is just giving a sense to increase the renewable portfolio so we brought in a small amount of wood pellets at the senior center we have the PV photovoltaic solar production we have wood biomass and that's all from district heat and then we have biogas that's being produced at the wastewater treatment facility and is used to heat the operations there to heat the digesters in the winter and that's one of the things we're working on is how to better track that but we're up to about a 20% renewable produced energy in the municipal portfolio so now so that's kind of looking backwards where have we come from looking forwards what does it mean to get to zero so when we're looking at electricity our target is 30% reduction so 30% from energy efficiency and then whatever is remaining to replace that with renewable electricity and so this the dotted line that's going across the bottom here that's the average annual production from the solar that we already have showing that if we can reduce our usage by 30% we'll be pretty darn close to being able to be 100% renewable on electricity so and then that kind of the division is between the blue is municipal and the orange is from the school district so we're definitely within striking range on electricity if we can see 30% efficiency reduction not really a Roxbury the change in the school district is that going to make your numbers a little more difficult to track given that you've got another building that's been part of the school district I haven't even thought about that one not an immediate concern but just about how we track this going forward yep that's a good point so when we look at thermal efficiency we're also targeting a 30% reduction in heating fuels and that means basically we still have to replace 77,000 gallons a year of heating oil we talked about how our use of fossil fuels has really gone down but there's still a big chunk 77,000 gallons of oil and 17,000 gallons of propane a year so how are we going to do that what are the options really we're looking at switching to renewable fuels and the three biggest users are the high school, the middle school and the wastewater treatment plant I think we do have some great potential at the wastewater treatment plant to potentially produce more methane that can offset the rest of the oil but we should be looking at some fuel switching for those two for all the schools but the two schools there and we also want to follow through on the energy audits that we just did and if we do a lot of the measures that they recommend around efficiency and envelope and air tightness we have the potential to see some improvements there on the thermal side but I think it's going to be more around fuel switching on the thermal and then transportation it's the real the gorilla in the room in a lot of cases our goal is to reduce vehicle miles traveled and when we're talking about replacement currently we use about 20,000 gallons a year of unleaded fuel for city municipal operations and about 31,000 gallons of diesel so what are the options there looking at electric vehicles on our light duty fleet looking at biofuels for heavy trucks and equipment looking at electric vehicle charging stations to support those electric vehicles and just in more in general looking at how do we increase downtown housing to reduce commuting by car so a couple of the things that from the committee's perspective that we think that the council should consider in terms of your agenda we really see a need for city staff support to reach this net zero goal right now we don't have any staff representation on our committee and when we take on these projects like the energy audits or the retro commissioning or the tracking there's not really a point person so we struggle with that a lot and what we've seen is a number of cities that are similar to the size of Montpelier like Hartford, Vermont recently hired a full-time energy coordinator Lebanon, New Hampshire a full-time person South Burlington has someone within their planning department so we do see that there's a real potential for additional savings if there was dedicated staff we have a really awesome very motivated group of volunteers but there's only so much that volunteers can do so other recommendations we are still really encouraging to see the analytics to energy project at the wastewater treatment plant there's details to be worked out but we really want to try and see that work we want to follow up on the energy audit recommendations and really figure out how to work those projects into the capital improvement plan in the long term our short term plan is to use our new revolving loan fund to fund a number of smaller projects this year about $20,000 worth of work but if we did all the projects that were recommended in the energy audits it's about $400,000 worth of capital investment but they do, it does have a return on investment for sure we'd like you to consider some policies around requiring new construction in the city to be net zero it's for municipal buildings but eventually for all new buildings there's no way we're going to meet this goal if we keep building inefficient buildings and to start thinking about the conversion of the vehicle fleet really the municipal transportation piece is not one that we've spent a lot of time on so far but it is something we need to be paying attention to so that's basically it happy to take any questions but I know time is it's short I mean just happy at all your meetings look at that picture we are always happy yeah it's a great committee thank you I just want to make two small points one is to really focus on because it's going to be coming before you in a big way the wastewater treatment facility and we have not checked in with staff recently enough for me to even say anything more than obviously we want to work with what their feelings are and we're dedicated to that but this is a huge project and it's going to be a huge responsibility for you folks to make the decision as to which way to go there's a huge opportunity here and you just need to look from an energy point of view how much it means to city operations it's a third of city operations in terms of power and the other thing I just wanted to say and I know time is short but retrocommissioning isn't just a term but the police station didn't know what the heck was going on with their power and we brought in this CX associates to look at what was going on and it didn't take very long for them to figure what was going on and it was a all you had to do was turn off a switch and the power drain that was going on that no one could figure out was figured out so there's real benefits to looking at these buildings in a comprehensive way especially when you have a problem like the police station was having but you know that's where these things lead ultimately is to savings for the city and more efficient operations and also why it's really important that we're tracking because you know that issue is going on for two years before we kind of figured out what was going on and we're able to fix the problem so so thanks it was such like an accessible presentation even a knucklehead like myself can understand it so I really appreciate it just the way you laid it out and everything I worry about our partnership with the state on some of this stuff and you throw out the number the goal is 90% renewables by 2050 I'm wondering where that comes from is that like codified in statute is that the position of the administration because I feel like there's a lot of lip service when we're having like a moratorium on wind essentially you know and they're saying stuff like that so you know where does the number come from it comes from the comprehensive energy plan and I think it has been codified in statute at this point would you please come up to the to the microphone to speak I'm just asking you to come on up and speak from up here just curious if you looked at geothermal and I'm disappointed that you use the solar panels when I heard a statistic that in the three weeks the solar panels were shut down with the advent of pilgrim closing and Yankee nuclear those three weeks when they got no electricity to the grid more fossil fuel was burnt than three months of the rest of the year and I've got that statistic in writing so I find that there's other sources I know wind isn't popular but geothermal is yes Rosie we need to have everyone who makes comments come up to the mic because there's the orca doesn't pick up the comments when they're not at the mic thank you I certainly want to look at all the options thank you I'm excited of course to continue having these conversations moving forward two quick comments one energy audits have been great figuring out what needs to go into the plan for the buildings over the next year to try to be like so that's been great and you mentioned the water treatment plan council's getting it updated on May 9 we know we'll be back we'll be here all right well thank you all thank you okay we're up to item six tax thank you thanks for being here I'm going to let you introduce yourself good to see you all in some new faces tonight we are here to talk about Tiff my name is Stephanie Hamlin real estate investment advisors and here with my colleague Gail Henderson King I'm here tonight by you know her Sue Allen assistant city manager Peter so for the for the new counselors it's nice to see you and we are Whitenberg has been hired by the city to look into the tax and financing district to do a oh yeah here we go thank you I've been hired by the city to we initially were hired to do due diligence to look into the feasibility of doing a tax increment financing district here and then we were authorized back in January to look into the actual creation of the district and to go forward present you with a Tiff district plan and if authorized from there to take it on to the state so we're back here today after several months of some work and to follow up on what we presented back in January and so we're going to run you through a little bit of back story and some big picture stuff and we're going to walk you through what is Tiff and then we're going to drill down into the nuts and bolts of what we're proposing in this Tiff district plan we did send ahead the materials which included the narrative, the map and some tables which I'm sure you've read cover to cover which is fine because there's you know nothing like good reading when you're tired and so we're going to hopefully give you the update and the big picture view so that when you get the revised materials you can do a deeper dive this is also a time that we want to present this for the public because there are a lot of components that are included in this and so we want to make sure everyone's up to speed and has all the information before we come back before you in a couple of weeks so we're starting with the why and a pretty good quote to kick us off is there are only two ways to influence human behavior you can manipulate it or you can inspire it very few people or companies can articulate the why they do what they do and that's Simon Sinek and so we thought we start we as in Whitenberg had come into this trying to understand why does the city want a Tiff district and why did what are the economic development goals and outcomes that the city is interested in doing and so we like to start with that why because it really paints the picture of the vision what we get down into the nitty gritty that we get into is Tiff and Tiff is pretty grand granular pretty gritty for lack of a better word so we want to we like to keep thinking back to why are we doing any of this why do we need this tool the city had done lots of planning to get to this point years ago in 2016 the city did an economic development strategic plan and it actually identified Tiff as one of the tools to be used to help further some of the economic development goals and last year the city funded a lobbyist along with a lot of other municipalities around the state to get tax and permit financing authorized again in the state house so the new districts were authorized last year and Montpelier was one of the big advocates for it so this is a continuation of that really the big take away from some of the strategic work that had been done that we understand is that Montpelier does not want to stagnate Montpelier wants vitality and to not be left behind amongst the other towns around it and it wants to be a thriving capital city so how can Tiff get us there well we go from infrastructure and catalyzing private development the idea being if you can fix and create opportunities how much more private development that you want could happen here so by investing in infrastructure improvements or fixing infrastructure problems how can you leverage into development projects like that have been talked about for years and years like savings past year like the capital plaza like the pit getting those things really revitalized and into what you want and what your vision is for housing retail office space and overall vitality so that's the Montpelier picture I'm going to turn it over to Gale to give some better some more description of what Tiff can do and then what Tiff is and then we'll get back into the details of what we're proposing here in the Tiff district plan so there's several Tiff districts throughout the state of Vermont but one of the Tiff districts that's really been fairly successful is St. Albans and like Montpelier St. Albans started off with creating a master plan and doing a series of studies and trying to figure out how they could revitalize their downtown and after doing those studies they decided to focus on one block in the core of their downtown bordering on to Main Street and Lake Street which is a pretty big area the interior of this block has had a large surface parking lot a lot of the buildings were run down or vacant and having a lot of brownfield issues private business just on the outskirts of the city Milan Technologies wanted to expand they did not want to leave their current location but they needed additional space to expand into and one of the bordering properties was state owned the state office building so working with the state to sell their building to Milan Technologies the city worked to get the state to relocate that office building downtown into this core block area but in order to bring all those employees there they also needed to address the parking issue they had infrastructure issues and they also had brownfield issues so this project would need to have a parking garage to be able to help with the parking issues the parking needs for the new state office building as well as a larger hotel and also for the neighboring businesses and development in the area so that there could be additional free up parking spaces in the downtown so this was a very complex projects to put together and involved a lot of different economic development tools TIF being one of the tools that was used here and this resulted in the new state office building on the left a four story building with a new city owned parking garage there in the middle photo that actually has a connection to the state office building and then the last part of the redevelopment for this block is the hotel that was constructed and finally opened the end of last year St. Albans never thought they would be able to attract a national chain hotel to their downtown but they were able to do that and has been successful so far so this was a great a great start for their TIF district and since then they've had other projects but what is TIF tax incremental financing is a tool that's used for incentivizing private development by being able to create public infrastructure that is needed for those projects that would not otherwise be able to work to get those projects to develop as I said TIF is one of the tools in the toolbox so it's a way that a municipality can build public infrastructure that is needed for that private development and uses tax increment revenue for financing that so this little model that we have up here on the screen a municipality will create a TIF district in an area where they want to encourage private development and but private development is not happening because there's needed infrastructure required infrastructure in order for it to happen so the municipality will establish that TIF district then as projects come forward that need that private development and need that public private development projects come forward that need public infrastructure the municipality will work with those project developers and determine what is needed how it will benefit the development and encourage incentivize the development to happen the municipality will then take out a municipal bond for that public infrastructure that public infrastructure then is built by the city or in this case the city then once that public infrastructure is in place for that development then the developments go forward and are constructed and then the increment of the taxes from that development are then put into the TIF fund which are used to repay the debt service on the municipal bond so what is the tax increment I didn't really explain this so if a property is in a TIF district and today is assessed at a value of $1 million when that property is redeveloped expanded and reassessed after it's developed that property then is worth say $5 million that increment of $4 million is what we're talking about the TIF funds the tax revenues are based on that increment value so the way TIF works is once the district is established all the properties within the district are assessed their current their original taxable value of what their value is today and that value is set that's the baseline for the district all the taxes that are collected for all the properties that exist in that district at the time it's created all go to where they go today to the state education fund and the municipality then any new development that is done that increment that I just was referring to the value of that increment the taxes from that development for the funds that go to the state education fund 30% of that will continue to go to a minimum of 30% will continue to go to the state fund and up to 70% can be used for the TIF district and for the municipal taxes a minimum of 85% must be used towards the TIF projects so once those public infrastructure projects are the bonds are taken out for those projects they have a 20 year period to repay the debt service on those bonds so the district will run for that period of time when those various bonds are held and at the end of the TIF district when everything is all paid for after that that period of time all of the taxes from all the development in the district then will revert back to where it would normally go so 100% of the taxes would go for the state taxes would go to the state education fund and 100% would go to the town so you have effectively grown your grand list so jumping back to St. Albans for a minute creating a TIF district plan is just that it's a vision it's the best estimate of what could happen within a TIF district based on what you know at that time as the projects come forward things often change and will go in different ways for St. Albans their original projections within their TIF district plan was they would have 33 million in public infrastructure that would be financed through TIF and are resulting $89.7 million increment of private investment within their district five years from when they started to today they've invested 16 million in TIF bonding for public infrastructure projects and the result has been $43 million in increased private investment property values within the district so they've come a long way so far they've got a great start but again it wasn't exactly how they'd planned it but it's working and it's moving forward so there's frequently asked questions that often come up for property owners within the district and outside of the district and one of them is does having a TIF district raise my taxes TIF district does not raise taxes the only way taxes can be raised is either you have improved your property and the value of your property then is assessed higher or the municipality raises the tax rate and your value of your property the taxes you pay on that value goes up the other way is if you do a townwide reappraisal there could be a change but TIF districts will not change the value will not raise your taxes at all another question is does having a TIF district take taxes away from the state education fund no it does not take taxes away from the education fund you're actually creating new revenue, tax revenue by building infrastructure to get those development projects here without those infrastructure projects happening that development would not happen and therefore there would be no increase in the taxes for education fund or the municipality so what does this mean for my peeler Stephanie will take it away so as you saw on your materials but for the general public we have spent some time pulling together what could be a good TIF district plan for the city and what's reasonable with what expectations we have today what we know about the projects and the barriers today again this is just a menu of options but we started here with the district boundary it's a little tough to see but what you're looking for is the blue the blue is our TIF district thank you, good point so the blue is our TIF district and the yellow is the designated downtown the pink red or purple is the growth center boundary the black is the town boundary so what we try to look at in this is we build the district to be fit within the criteria one thing about TIF is that it's authorized by the state under the economic progress council so once we get city approved once the city decides what it wants to do then it has to get state approval and some of the rules a lot of why you see the things presented the way they are is because there's a lot of rules and so one of them it has to do with the boundary and where you can put your district because the important part of the program is where they want to see development happen statewide so they're incentivizing using a portion of the TIF of the proceeds of the projects that you would otherwise send to the state you get to keep to pay down debt service so we have the blue district it is mostly within the designated downtown that is entirely within the growth center and Stephanie their maps have the TIF district and yellow so if you're looking at your map and wondering the TIF district is in yellow well there is that yellow for you yes that does have yellow the one in your packet I think was a different color can I just ask you to repeat that last statement that the entire TIF district is within the growth center boundary because it looks to me from this map that we're looking at this is an old map that it bisects it here it doesn't the growth center line actually follows the entire property line of savings pasture this is an old layer I suppose I think it's right on this actually on this map but thank you for pointing that out because well because I want to update my materials for next time but that was a question mark is did it go with the zoning line or did it go with the property line and it answers its property line but it is entirely within the growth center mostly within the designated downtown which was important to meet certain state criteria so this one which is what you have in front of you is pretty hard to read so I'm not expecting you to read it from where you're sitting I'm going to use my laser pointer but it is in front of you for the public I apologize so we have identified seven sorry six general buckets of infrastructure projects that are going to catalyze these eight private development projects the six are divided up in some ways you'll see in the materials some things are phased because they have to happen in two different times you kind of do things like Berry Street you want to do in phases but essentially we've identified eight different projects starting out here on the eastern side this is Sabin's pasture Sabin's has long been discussed as a great possible housing site right inside of the growth center and the problem is the infrastructure along Berry Street is not sufficient to meet the demand and again what this goes back to is Gail was talking about is that there's such an infrastructure burden on these projects the market rates don't make it work to actually what they can afford to charge for a house isn't going to pay for the infrastructure public infrastructure that's needed in the right of way to actually serve their project so it's incumbent on the city to upgrade that and then it takes it makes the project more feasible otherwise it would be done by now the project would already be done by now if it penciled out so there's infrastructure along Berry Street for utility infrastructure that could happen that would catalyze housing at this site again I use the word could a lot I use the word would a lot but that's been long discussed and that's been the identified infrastructure issue next to it is the site of the Vermont College of Fine Arts and the front part of that has been identified as a possible housing site again they struggle with not just the infrastructure along Berry Street but also the intersection of Berry and Main Street to serve housing that needs to be upgraded down along the river there are a couple of granite sheds that have been you know I guess closing over the years along that area but now they've been targeted as possible sites for future housing and commercial space again they rely on that infrastructure along Berry Street to be upgraded and how much of the infrastructure you do at certain times is completely dependent on that phasing coming up the street a little bit at that intersection we have cited capital cleaners capital cleaners is a great business a great piece of property but it's underdeveloped it's a one story building on a site and one thing I should clarify and you've seen in the plan is that we do this in a tiered system tier one of the projects we are pretty sure would happen if you just put in the right infrastructure tier two projects are ones that have been talked about for a while things that could happen if all these other projects came up and if there were other types of infrastructure available to them but there's nobody at the door ready to make the project happen tier three is like capital cleaners it's not that people have been talking about redeveloping it but if that intersection changes and is making it more viable to do a multi-story building with capital cleaners on the first floor and upstairs residential or commercial that becomes but that could be ten years out and we have to project it's a ten year projection so it's on the menu we should say and then you get into the core of downtown where along state street we have the pit the long discussed pit which is maybe prime for redevelopment if you could put parking in there and upstairs you could put retail or residential and commercial but they need upgrades to again the utilities and some of the transportation improvements there in order to make that happen and then next to it would be the state and governor Davis property which is calling it state governor Davis just because that's the intersection but it's field gas station and that's recently been purchased and is prime for redevelopment but again really relies on some additional infrastructure work with the access the utilities and they also need parking desperately need parking now I've left the I've gone you noticed I've gone backward because oh Christchurch Christchurch is affordable housing project that I know has been discussed publicly a lot and again they need parking in order to make that feasible especially housing always needs parking because they really have to be parked units and then we have capital Plaza which has been long discussed as having expansion potential but they keep running into the barrier of structured parking structured parking is around $28,000 space not including contingency cost so it's very costly and it adds quite a lot to the ticket that when you're already doing downtown development which is costly because of infrastructure and you have to do different types of shipping materials in you don't have a big green space to do your staging and everything adding that cost has become a big barrier which is why they haven't been able to proceed yet they have a contract they're hoping to go forward but they've been working closely with the city to look at different configurations of what they could contribute and what the city could contribute to do a large that would be both public parking and private parking for their use but how else could it be leveraged to use for other private users for Christchurch for maybe incentivizing other developments in the area to provide them with parking that all of those expectations and all of those configurations are not set in stone by this plan by any means this plan is purely a just that plan it is a menu of options and it is doing the due diligence to set up the city for using this tool how you end up using the tool investing in that parking garage or not is up to you once you have the tool it's up to you but you have to put some expectations in writing and present that to the state and show that you've done the due diligence in order to get approval for the tool and then as negotiations proceed with all of these property owners to do a public private partnership then you have the plan in front of you and if it meets with the intent of what you're trying to do you'll have authorization to use TIF so this is not binding I make that very clear because there's parallel paths of the city working entrepreneurially with different partners all over the city and this is irrespective of that it's really setting up the tool excuse me you just said something that I'm not sure I understood you said you then have authorization to use to do the TIF does that mean that even if we go forward with creating the TIF district that there's some state review of the individual TIF investments it's a great question it's and sadly there's no real clear bright line if you if you follow exactly which it never happens that way exactly as we've projected here that you do this much investment and you bond for this much you don't have to go back to the state at all it's just carte blanche if you vary a little bit within that and there's no real clear bright standard and bar of what that is you don't have to get approval but basically as you're doing projects you're communicating with the state consistently and it the big thing is to stay within intent so if you intend to do parking you've said that in your plan and then you do a parking structure you've pretty pretty you know and you meet within the location criteria nexus and all these other tests but you've proven that then you're pretty much authorized to go it's if you vary but widely from what you've planned if you if you start to include a project that wasn't on this list for example then you go back for authorization and how much authorization if it requires a full board meeting or not is again subjective and that's to that see but but also I guess just to balance that answer when you go to the product your tip approved and you go to the projects because they're in there as a maybe you're not obligated to do them right you look at each project once you have the tip and decide what you want to do and each gets reviewed and bonded yes yes and actually as an example in St. Albans there were several that were on the list that they've done there's a few they haven't touched at all they may not do it all and then there's one they just did that wasn't on the list they went back and got approval for that so it was actually more of a reporting even they just reported to the council that that's what they were doing so sorry it's not a more clear answer but also as projects projects are getting ready to move forward you're working the good point that's when it's binding so the nuts that those are kind of the nuts and bolts of what we've included in the plan if everything happened exactly as we planned is what happens we could expect to see $7.8 million of public infrastructure leveraging close to 66.5 million of private property value increase that's just the increased value the new taxes on that again just go back to the tip 101 it's the taxes that would go from the 66.5 to pay down the debt service for that 7.8 million and then you've got a grand list that has grown by almost 70 million at the end of 20 years and all of that is going to come off and feed your general fund we do a lot of modeling so what I need to take a side step and say is the process and I'm jumping ahead in my own notes but because I'm warning you about what you're going to see in a couple weeks when we bring back a final version which is a lot of tables and that's what we've used as the model to go through this it's what the state gives you a template and you build it you build the model so we have to have a tip district plan it's pretty overwhelming I think I gave you plenty of tables with a little teachy because it's pretty overwhelming but this is where those numbers come from let me go into really quickly I hope everyone gets this reference I'm a little worried but the really important part is that this TIF program the one that's currently authorized and the way we're building the district is not an if you build it they will come model you do not want to build infrastructure in a way that is speculative and hopeful that the private development will come as Gail said you work closely public and private sector as as a team to create development agreements that really hold the private developer accountable so that you know you'll pay down that debt service using their TIF revenue and the point of that is that the reason that's why we go through all these exercises of doing all the modeling we do sensitivity analyses well if this project didn't happen could they still pay the debt service because you don't want to get stuck on the hook for infrastructure you built and no private development came essentially the other piece of the program the real important part of the program is not to just be doing infrastructure for infrastructure's sake you're not doing deferred maintenance this is the tool is meant for economic development it is to help the council fulfill its economic development goals that the city has set forth and so when you have a district once you have the district the point is to work really closely with your private developers who are at the table who are willing to invest and treat them as a partner because you want you do not want to do anything speculatively you want to build it in lockstep knowing that they're going to invest and raise their property value and pay those increased taxes that are going to help pay down that debt service for that infrastructure piece meanwhile the rule insists that the infrastructure remains public so it has a public benefit but the point is to incentivize economic development so I wanted to emphasize that can I ask so you're saying you know this is not to maintain current infrastructure and that made me think about how in your formula is how do you account for the new added maintenance that the city is going to have of the new infrastructure that we build is that taken into account or do we need to take that out of the increased general fund revenue that we're expecting yep it's it is capital cost only so that's when we see oh we're going to have this much more in our general fund to do all these other great things but we really have to remember to take into consideration that we're also going to now be maintaining this other right and the hope is that you've gotten you're improving and increasing your sewer lines down Berry Street and that your fund is actually eventually you're going to have to replace those anyway the idea being you're going to increase them now you're going to invest in them now maybe it's an accelerated timeline than you intended and it was all you're also going to expand them which will have other benefits as well but the idea is it's not only for deferred maintenance I guess so for city staff there were some things in there like I saw there was a traffic light suggested to be added at one intersection and that kind of thing it would be really helpful if you could give us some sort of ballpark numbers about if we were to build this infrastructure what that added ongoing maintenance for the new things not for the you know I understand we're hopeful that we can eliminate some other maintenance headaches but for those new things that would be useful going forward yeah and looking at something like the parking garage where you want to look at that one's a big one when it comes to maintenance right is is adding that maintenance cost in when you do the actual model so you see what the parking revenues will do usually the parking revenues are what you use to pay down that maintenance cost so that it doesn't impact your general fund your existing general fund I will say this is a real technicality but I'll throw it in there just to confuse you you can actually retain less than a hundred you can use less than a hundred percent of your municipal increment to go into the tax increment financing district and some municipalities have chosen to do that you can allocate almost no less than 80% so you could have 20% go into your general fund of the increment and 80% go to the TIF fund conceptually that's fine with these numbers it doesn't work because in your early years you don't have enough cash flow to pay your debt service that way and so some municipalities though have enough because they're not front loading their district that they could use that 20% to be paying into the general fund and kind of offset some of that that being said you will see in the model if I don't know if it was one of the tables I showed you you actually have a huge amount of surplus in like year 10 or 11 so you can actually at that point ratchet it down to retain less than 100% and a portion of that increment can start going to your general fund earlier is that way too much detail that's real nerdy no that's actually helpful because I think you realize that we may end up having taking a property tax hit in those early years and I want to tease that out a little bit more yeah you might want to look at that with each individual project see what it will cost to to maintain that because you're not going to do all of them at the same time anyway so maybe picking which ones you do I will say you'll see in the cash flow projections that some of the early years have a negative cash flow we talked about that at the last meeting but that's done in every municipality general fund is loaning you don't take that money from the general fund and eventually it gets repaid because you don't want too many of those years it's like by year 6 or 7 it's back surplus and you've already repaid those so I'm going to keep going real quick and we'll come back for more questions because I know there's there's plenty more but I want to get through this last few pieces which is process this is a complicated process the binders in the middle that you see or what go to Pepsi there's a ton of paperwork and things that we have to do to really educate the state because they don't well in most municipalities they don't know your city well their headquarters are here but assuming they don't so you're educating them about what but there's a story to tell here and that's why we wrote the tip district plan the way we did what's the truth about the growth in the capital because there is maybe a misconception that surplus you guys are one of the thriving cities in the state but there's also an increased demand on infrastructure here so there's a story to tell that we need to make sure it's very clear so the tip district plan you have in front of you tonight in very draft form is actually the nut at the heart of the Pepsi application then we build that application around it with all the other forms and materials that they need and we submit that to the state and they do a series of hearings around that to review your application we have submitted the letter of intent following our last meeting so the state knows we're intending to apply by the end of May should this council choose to proceed and so we would assume we'd have hearings over the course of the summer and the reason we did that and timed it that way is so that you would have authorization if you so chose to go forward with any developed infrastructure project to make it to the November ballot so that would be an option the draft you have in front of you is a very draft form and we understand there's probably a lot of edits and we've continued to make edits since we sent it to you on Friday but the point is we do it in this way so that you have chance for input not just you council but you public and any concerned or interested stakeholder who wants to have input on what this plan means or has any questions so we are going to leave this in draft state until Monday April 30th we have got this slide here on the website for TIF and a contact information will be on there so we have ample opportunity for people to submit any input they have before Monday and then we're going to revise the plan with all of that input we're going to take that into consideration and rework what we need to or rerun the numbers if we have to and the hope is to submit then a new fresh final version of the TIF district plan back to you by May night meeting and at that meeting should you choose to proceed you are actually authorizing and starting creating your TIF district it's by your vote that actually creates the district you can't use the tool until you get state approval but you've started the district and you start the clock so there's a specific resolution that's prepared by the state that would be put in front of you presented in front of you if you choose to go that way today so that's the next step that we take after that it's a whirlwind to get to the state application I think I guess I'll go to the Q&A slide for my own question my question to the council and to the public would be what have we missed is there anything we've missed we've gotten input we're working closely with the core team which has included a couple of counselors and partners the MDC has been a big partner in helping us gather data and gather assumptions and then we've talked with a lot of stakeholders local property owners, business owners, developers and tried to get as much input as we can because we've been working at this since last July but we're always happy to take any input now and then after we put together the final plan there's still opportunity for input because the council can then choose to do projects as they wish with the tool after it's been authorized how about I'm going to stop talking and open it up to questions there's no burning questions I love that people have been asking questions along the way I have a question people who know me know I'm a very optimistic person so I'm trying to kind of curb my enthusiasm and ask you to talk about what could go wrong what's the possible that's a great question sure there's definitely risk here so it's not a high risk but there is risk and the main point to remember is that as a partner in any endeavor like this it is taking risk on to be entrepreneurial to see through your vision so there is some risk and the main one being when you go to vote for a bond you're taking on debt and you have to pay it no matter what you have to pay the debt should the projects not proceed as planned should they fail after 5, 10 years and go out of business and the property loses value if there's a fire and the property loses value you're still on the hook for that debt service that is a risk there's a lot of wording in the vote that goes to the voters that says that so voters are aware that that's one of the risks that being said there's been a lot of things in the program that have been built in to help protect that which is why you do not do a district on one property you don't do one project district you do a whole district because the hope is that even if one doesn't perform as well as you'd hoped other things have been catalyzed other projects and properties have increased in value you see some natural increase somebody in 5 years was already going to redevelop their property in 5 years that still goes to help pay debt service so there's some barriers and it's a 20 year period so it gives a little bit of a longer runway this is going to your next question that I know you have have any TIF districts failed in the state of Vermont no they have not not yet we haven't actually seen any finish there's not a close to any districts yet there is one district in Colchester that actually folded and just said we're not going to use the tool they turned it back in which you don't really do but they just never used it and just ended it but none have finished for us to see if they have failed nationally if you google TIFs that fail one of the best examples is a Walmart example that and I'm not even saying where it is or when it was and there's probably several of them but you know it wanted to come they wanted the town wanted it to come so badly to an interchange that they offered to run all the utilities out to the interchange and they thought as soon as that builds all this other development will build around it it will help pay down that infrastructure debt they built it it didn't come now they're on the hook for water and sewer to nowhere those are failures that's why the program and there's been some studies done about why Vermont's program is better than a lot of other a lot of other states around the country because it builds in all these protections to make sure that you've worked on this in tandem with your property owners as best you can but you're a partner you're basically a partner in the development and a little bit more in that direction back to Gail's slide I think about frequently asked questions Tiff does not raise your taxes I understood that as it stands if Tiff succeeds and for 20 years it will not raise taxes am I correct that if Tiff fails after 20 years then taxes would have to go up in order to pay back the debt that was not successfully paid off does that if the municipality took out bonds for infrastructure and for whatever reasons the developments did not happen or did not happen as planned and there's not enough revenue coming in then the municipality would have to look at how to repay that and in that scenario they may have to raise taxes but Tiff itself does not raise taxes having the tool I would say yeah if Tiff fails it's a little bit of a misnomer because the tool doesn't fail a project might not suffice or the Tiff fund may not pencil out yes Josie so you had a recommendation that we do bonding over 30 years and that was because of cash flow that makes me nervous because the time period for the Tiff is only 20 years can you talk a little bit more about that thank you for bringing that up the Tiff district life of a Tiff district is actually as long as you still have debt when you finish paying your last debt that's when the district ends you can only retain taxes for 20 years so you can stockpile squirrel away your revenue for 20 years and then still have debt service but the point is with that model where it shows cash flow you just use from that pot to keep paying for those 10 more years realistically and it's so stupid of course you're going to pay it in a balloon payment at year 20 if you have the money in your account of course you're going to pay it all at one point at one time but you can use a tool that's longer and intentionally longer because it will reduce your annual debt service in those early years problem is what it does with debt it gives you paying more interest over the life of the loan so if there's any way to avoid that you want to try and the way you could do that so if you borrow a little more then you need for the actual infrastructure you put that into a sinking fund to cover your debt service in those early years you can do that which they didn't say it's super helpful because then you don't go into a 30 year bond and pay a bunch of interest you don't need to pay so we don't need to approve anything tonight this is just an opportunity for us to gather information and to sort of take the temperature how are we feeling about this and any other questions or concerns yeah Dan thank you I sent a letter of support to Mayor Watson and I hope that was shared with the whole council downtown's really at an inflection point and there's a lot of excitement and I think that we can really use this as a tool to catalyze a lot of development that we've been talking about for years and years and years long before I came to Montpelier but we're talking about having the ability to do some major progress towards our goals in terms of affordable housing in terms of economic development in terms of downtown parking that's been talked about for what four decades and I really think that that we have this opportunity to just have another tool on the tool belt there'll be plenty of opportunities for public comment there'll be review of every project there'll be votes on the bonds I think it's really important that council moves forward and just gives themselves this tool that can catalyze change any other thoughts I just want to add that I don't know the right protocol but if there are any granular questions as this goes forward we want to make sure you're as comfortable with the material and the plan itself as you can be when the state comes to review this they want to know that it has the full understanding of the municipal body that's approved it and so if there are any more specific technical questions like Rosie had so I filed them through you I suppose and then I'm happy to answer any of those types of things there we go so because my hope is that we'll be able to provide you with the final plan and come back for approval in two weeks alright well thank you thank you very much I'm looking forward to this and I think this is going to be a great tool for us is your presentation going to be on the website sure can be now so the Scribner street right of way received some emails about oh yes Donna I'm sorry it's the two hour mark sure like a five minute break thank you alright so I guess I'll call us back to order here alright so if Maggie and if you'd like to come on up I'd love to just get a really brief description of situation and then and Tom if you want to come as well yeah well you can do either you could stand there or stand wherever you prefer yep well Tom's coming out maybe we should there you are I don't understand how these just I I am Maggie Neil I live on Scribner street up at the top number eight there used to be a number ten long time ago but I am at the top at this point it's a very small parcel of land it's a wild land less than a quarter of an acre that has been very dear to me for 23 years it's a tough hill street I don't climb in the wintertime but it's been worth it to have this land and I've been protected on this small acreage by a vast acreage of fourteen acres around me owned by number nine and it's been wonderful to have all this wild land so close to Montpelier so I could be an artist and work for the arts in the community for the 23 years so I've been pleased to be part of Montpelier so in the last year things changed on the hill and it became very unsettling there was a waterway that came down the hill from an upper spring and it was disturbed and moved we didn't understand why this was happening so we talked to the number nine neighbor and he said well it's my land when I bought this piece of property I thought that my eight rods were all along the whole length of Scrivener street that's what the deed said at least Scrivener street when I spoke with Tom it seemed there was no a designation of where Scrivener street ended so there's a real question of do I live on Scrivener street or what at this point it has really changed I would like to appeal to this council to set a designation of how long Scrivener street is I would like to see it be 340 feet from river street I would include my front yard and my driveway as part of the easement of Scrivener street rather than belonging to a private individual what can I say there's so many questions I'm not one who wants to live with anxiety and I have felt great anxiousness in this situation and it's affecting my life, it's affecting my health so it seems like little peanuts compared to what we were just talking about these big money and this tax and you know whoa all I want is to know that the street in front of my house is a public city street and that I have the access to my property that I've had for 23 years and that I'd like to give to my son without any entanglements so I probably could say a whole lot more but I know there's going to be a little red card that comes up he didn't tell me the time well I feel like we've talked so long tonight or others have would you mind explaining the process from here or Bill so the agenda template explains the recommended action and provides background information provided a memorandum and some attachments everybody received that have an opportunity to review it so unfortunately in this situation the city's lack of proper records or the town of Berlin's if it were Annex and it became a street for that has really resulted in this anxiety and uncertainty which is unfortunate as I said in our memo it's important for all property owners including the city to know their boundaries and most of our streets and roads in fact that's one of the jobs I first took when I started here many years ago was to survey right of way so much to my dismay there was no official record of a right of way for Scribner street and nothing in our files and then we went a surveyor to search it further Maggie's friend also did quite a bit of research I spoke with an attorney Paul Gillies who has a lot of background in this and unfortunately we're at this step where a lack of official action exists in this case and we must correct that in state statute provides the action to be taken which is described in Paul Gillies step by step procedures the meeting tonight is to give a general overview of the situation and where it stands and why this is necessary and then to under the action is to set the date to begin that actual process under the title of 19 VSA 33 subsection 33 just briefly under that section in the statute survey of existing highways for the purpose of this the word survey means the survey of an existing highway where no previous survey has been properly recorded or the record of a previous survey is not been preserved or the terminations in this case and boundaries of a previous survey cannot be determined that's the conclusion that we've come to a re-survey is to produce a previous survey of our surveys we can assume that one was done we just cannot locate it for whatever reason whatever the outcome whatever this is either a survey or a re-survey the same to Paul Gilley's recommendations I asked him to prepare a step-by-step procedure so that's what the statute says and what has to be done then how do we do it all so there are notice provisions I did under for this particular hearing a briefing which was duly warned I sent a letter to all the known property owners so that's this process it wasn't a required piece you've done the warning but the rest of it is laid out in statute and so we have a 30 day advance notice of the hearing we have to notify the owners, lenders, utilities and those with easements we have to set the date of a site visit and basically go to the street and view it there is a hearing and the hearing is we will take testimony you'll question me speak with the property owners any evidence that they wish to present to support the case that it is in fact a public street and or any evidence that may be available to help us the city council determine what its true length is Maggie mentioned a length of 340 feet that is the crux of the matter what is the length there are highway maps under the state requirement for certificates of highway mileage which we still do annually every February indicates 340 feet the surveyor indicates that her entire frontage is along the street which is 396 feet so in the background information and the memorandum that is the information that we need to know is to complete the research the surveyor that I hired did a review of the records both here in Montpelier and in Berlin and it made Maggie's property so it made sense to use that surveyor to move forward and then from that found that her description actually describes a border with Scribner on the westerly side and so what needs to happen next is to complete the research of the entire street and all of the properties to find additional evidence to support that there's no question about and I do have a typo I wanted to point out in the background says the city council has asked to consider historic evidence of acceptance by the city through continuous and uninterrupted care and maintenance not interrupted so there has never been a period where the care and maintenance of the street has not occurred so our my suggestion is to allow us sufficient time to provide the notifications has to be sent by certified mail that we suggest June 13th for that meeting a regular council meeting this is going to be a time consuming process because that is that is the prescribed method that we have to follow there is a part in the statute that I think is important and is an additional action notice of the completion of the survey shall be sent to all known abutting landowners by certified mail not less than 30 days before the survey results are filed with the appropriate town clerk together with notice of statutory rights or appeal so that tells me that should at least get the survey scheduled now or this is going to take even longer so what city council will be doing and as Paul points out the survey does not have to be available at the hearing I think it makes sense to do that because you cannot take deliberative action until you have that survey and the results of her finding or his findings if that survey is booked out too far this could be the fall before we get this result and we really don't want to cause any more anxiety and concern about this so if I could add that you can order me to issue those notices and to retain the services of a licensed registered land surveyor to begin that survey process would you like a motion? certainly and any questions and the other property owner is here if you would like to speak Mark is listening I have a couple of questions so first what I'm hearing but I want to ask the question it doesn't sound like there is a dispute whether or not it is a city street the question is how long is that city street and is it 310 feet 316 feet 340 something feet or 396 feet that's the ultimate issue here is how long the city portion of the street is the boundary includes the width and the length I believe it to be I think it's 2 rods 33 but that all needs to be resolved so the question is not whether it is a city street it is how long that city street is okay and then my other question for you I saw I think it's the designation between a class 3 and a class 4 and that comes after the determination is made as to how long the street is I think it's the last page like last full paragraph okay so that's a great question so there are improved portions of a street and that is actually the eligible portion of the street that's eligible for state aid and what we see today in the current certificate of mileage is what I believe to be the improved portion of the street there is a section and certainly Bruce Sargent could speak to this further I can't say whether it was ever improved beyond this I believe it was actually laid out as a right of way beyond the improved aid portion okay but there's no way of knowing whether ever existed it's possible there were other access up there so we have not been maintaining that in an un-maintained street could be two things can be a class 4 which the town is under no obligation to maintain and prove under that designation you don't receive state aid for it there are minimal obligations which is to address drainage primarily under statute may have heard about that but a number of cases related to the town lack of diligence in maintaining drainage there is another option and that is trail status I don't think that's appropriate in this case I think it is the primary or a future access I think you can always reclassify it as a trail leader so the recommendation would be to again subject to the outcome of the survey is to classify that in the acceptance as a class 3 and then the remainder as a class 4 and so does that mean and I'm not saying that these are the numbers but it would be whatever number this legislative body finds to be the length of the street so for example the paved portion let's just say that that's what we agree not just hypothetically let's say we say fine the paved portion is 310 feet and then there's another street behind that and so what that ask in that paragraph says is that the paved portion would be a class 3 road and then the rest would be class 4 86 feet would be class 4 all still right of way all still city property but just a class 3 versus a class 4 okay if we called it a class 3 and then submitted a new mileage certificate we actually have to approve it to class 3 standards and the standards that we adopted okay okay I think that was all that jumped out to me immediately but do you have another chance? rest assured I will have questions yes I know I'm 6th Scrivener street I'm in Magnus neighbor when she got her surveying done I was surprised that the line I assumed where my line was this will be a survey of the street right of way research of the adjoining properties will occur because that needs to take place it's all looked at together under the research but it's not a survey of your actual property so you need from us probably a motion directing you to begin this process to do the survey set the date for the hearing to consider the official action I think the thinking was we do the site visit right before the regular council meeting what time do you want to start? we normally meet now at 7 so between the site visit I don't think it will take too long it's really a viewing here's the beginning here's the end here's the neighbor's property I'm thinking it will be up there maybe 20 minutes 6.15 p.m I don't think I need an official motion to order the survey just to understand that I will begin that that makes sense so I think the motion would be then I would move that we commence the surveying process for a hearing on June 9th June 13th site visit at 6.15 that will be the warning notice that I sent out any other comments? great all in favor of you say aye aye great thank you very much so the tax stabilization application all friends coming up I'll just do a quick introduction of general tax stabilization we do have voters have approved tax stabilization in the city for a maximum of 50% of the municipal taxes this is not school taxes for up to 10 years the council in 2003 adopted a policy which I attached which gave different levels of approval based on if you met certain criteria I think for most of you you have the only one you may have done was the Caldonia spirits which was tied in with the development agreement this was actually more common where a developer comes to us with a project and says I'm requesting this and here's my story and we take a look at their criteria we weigh it against the policy and present to you you're supposed to hold two hearings to discuss it the theory is if you want more information have questions then you can direct them to the staff or to the applicant and then we come back at the next meeting to try to adjust that this is Fred Connor I'm Fred Connor and I'm here to represent the applicant which is a company that's owned by myself and my three brothers Steve Michael and John are approaching our 30th year as Connor contracting and have been doing redevelopment work in the city for about 20 years and I wanted to just touch on a couple of projects and circle back to this application I had gotten word that the Mark Pilla Hill Center which was previously located on State Street across from the state house was being dislocated because the state wanted to buy the building they were in so we got in touch with the owners of 156 Main Street which is the former Masonic Center at the Roundabout and struck a deal with the Masons to build them a new facility over it across the road from the Civic Center Central Vermont Memorial Civic Center and then redevelop that property for the Central Vermont Medical Center as the Mark Pilla Hill Center so that's a project that we went into with a tenant in hand we had another project which is this property where we had a tenant in hand which was Cabot Creamery the applicant purchased from the city of Mark Pilla that property which had been put out for votes for both police and fire buildings prior and that was rejected by the voters they wanted to see those uses stay downtown so the city then went out for proposals and we won that bid and brought Cabot Creamery to town starting with 50 employees and going up somewhere in the 75 range so again that's another story where we had a tenant in hand moving over to Stonecutter's way and working with very strong support by the city we acquired the property next to the and we developed that property on spec and it is now the home of the office of the state Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges as well as the Nature Conservancy so we've done about a handful of project redevelopment projects that have substantially increased the grand list and created upwards of a couple hundred jobs moving back to the application that's before you we've been successful in releasing the existing facilities to cascade technical services which is an environmental drilling and testing company and also CADCUT which is an aerospace company that also has operations locally in Middlesex so I'm here before you tonight to request a tax stabilization agreement for this new building that we have building on the back half of the former Cabot Creamery site it's roughly a 15,000 square foot building so it will be roughly doubling the assessed value of that property and we are in current discussions with I said in my application one prospect of actually two prospects that are looking seriously at it and I would like to go to those meetings next week and tell them that the City Council has weighed in and has supported the maximum allowed by your regulations which is a half half off for ten years on the municipal taxes in order to do that we would be making the same request that we did at Stonecutters Way which is to have a one year deferral of the benefits accruing to our company in order for us to demonstrate the jobs so we did that at Stonecutters Way I think the minimum is 25 and there's roughly 50 to 60 people at that location and we would like to have the opportunity to demonstrate level three benefits we'd like to have the opportunity to show that we can demonstrate that we meet level four requirements for the employment and again this is a twin to Stonecutters Way where we want to take it on a regular basis and then get the building filled so we'd be glad to try to answer any questions Rosy so my biggest concern would be that a business that was currently downtown would move out of downtown to this location and I would not want to poach jobs from the downtown area even if in the course of that you added 25 jobs out there is not as good to the downtown businesses as having the rest of those jobs downtown and so I would be much more comfortable supporting this if we had some assurance from you that the tenants that you were looking at were not locations companies that were currently located within the downtown area I would be glad to accept your concern as a condition of the approval so I have a couple of questions so actually one is about the levels so one of the things that I'm interested in and I don't I just want you to know I'm planning on supporting this and I want to see this go forward one of the questions that I have is about again the kinds of jobs that we bring into Montpelier and I know you're a lot of reference bringing quality jobs to Montpelier and one of my definitions of quality is a livable wage and so I know that you as a developer are different than whatever the tenant whoever the tenant would be so not necessarily I'm not sure that we can require anything in terms of livable wage of the tenant but for the future what I want to see about thinking about for the criteria for this list is are these livable wage the policy actually calls for that to get the top level it has to the project will result in a net increase of 25 full time equivalent jobs which pay at least a livable wage for a single person so that is a requirement to make that representation that we the annual report the building owner provides a report but the information is provided by the tenant so that's a condition I assume it's a condition of a lease if they're passing on savings I'm maybe a little confused and maybe I read this differently I thought it said the project doesn't currently meet that and that's why it's a third level rate the issue and I think that's what Mr. Connors proposing here is that they don't have a tenant so they can't make a representation that they have these jobs so he's asking for the approval for the top level but deferred for a year to give them a chance to certify that they've reached that and he's correct but the way it was handled last time was we actually reapplied we came back and I see the council said here's the new tenant we'd like you to welcome and here's what is with the job situation we actually had to come back in to get to get those level 4 benefits I think the way I drafted the proposal here was that you could award the level 3 benefits because I think it qualifies for those defer it and provide them the option of coming back to seek to upgrade it to level 4 and I guess I apologize so one of the questions we just heard about how Montpelier is working towards being at zero in hopefully our lifetime and so I'm curious how this construction project has factored any of that in as a city we're in essence being asked to expend funds and it's not really an expenditure it's just not generating the revenue which means that we're in essence losing money because we're allowing for the abatement for that period what sort of what sort of information can you provide to the council about the environmental impact of this construction and how that meets with our net zero goals we by the state energy code have to execute a very strict adherence to those codes building envelope and mechanical systems and lighting and we're rewarded by Efficiency Vermont for some of that but most of it is to for bragging rights to the tenant to be able to show them when a lease renewal comes up that they're a building that is very cheap on energy relative to other structures and we've had tenants tell us that it's half over what it was where we were on a square foot basis and that's how you keep in touch with us to make sure that you have a very high efficiency equipment and a very good building envelope what are you playing on heating it with fuel oil that's a big propane propane there's an aside not well I can't wait I have a comment about the policy related to this application yes Glen in that direction for net zero efficiency is great and production is also usually part of it because the building is always going to be using some energy have you considered any kind of solar or other energy generation as part of this construction we have the roof then set up with a strength to be able to hold a solar system but we have not gone forward with that so it has the potential is this something that you would do with or without the tax stabilization from the city can we even ask that question but the decision to do the job which involves a lot of engineering and site permitting etc was made knowing that you have this tax stabilization policy so and as I tried to point out in the application our tenants pay the taxes whether it's monthly a health center where it's the hospital or whether it's the state of remod of the nature conservancy the tenants pay the taxes so what we're able to do with your incentive and if I could bring you one of these a month I'm sure you'd be glad to see me we haven't been able to be back in about five years so we're pleased to have the opportunity to be back so you made the building so it could hold solar but you wouldn't do that your tenant would do that the tenants pay the electric so it would be up to the tenant if they wanted to execute that project I would encourage you to put it up there so they would use it and benefit from it it's also a sales tool right it could be we definitely have to work on this criteria I mean if we're going to change the rules I certainly don't want to burden burden with that right now so if I understand right the motion would be to approve Connor's brother's application for Level 3 table we don't even need to do that at this point this is the first of two meetings you'd actually make the decision at the next meeting this is your chance if you want more information to come back okay you don't great Rosie I don't think we officially open this as a hearing oh well we'll open it right now so we're opening first first hearing that's good so I guess I will say one of my concerns is and I said this the last time tax stabilization came up and this is a different project I'm treating this as a different project because I think that having more office space or light industrial space it's a different request than the last tax stabilization request we were presented with was but I guess I'm concerned because I don't see a tenant list and I know that people have talked to you about it and I guess for me what I am looking for is to see who those employers are are those the kinds of businesses that Montpelier would want to be investing in because this would be an investment of city dollars through the non through the abatement period and I agree that they're not in town developments but that's not to say that having employers out of town who are generating business for this area is not something that we should be investing and I just would like to know more about those potential employers and I know that you guys have done great work here in town with the businesses that are here I'm just concerned that we don't know anything about any of those prospective businesses that would be getting taxpayer money and as a resident here who doesn't own a home because of whatever economic circumstances are at play I think that asking our people to spend their taxpayer dollars on something that we're not quite sure about is concerning to me at least in this regard because I want to make sure that the jobs that we are attracting to Montpelier do pay an actual living wage and not the 13 something an hour that the state says is what it costs because anyone who lives here knows that it costs way more than that to be here and so I realize it kind of puts you in a bit of a predicament because these have just been potential people but if you had anything at all that you could bring back to us you know about even inquiries for the type of industry or anything like that that might assuage some of my concerns about that it's just you know I don't want to be spending people's money or you know abating taxes for businesses that are sort of hypothetical at this point because you know the facility obviously isn't built yet but I just I think in order for that to be a vote that I could vote in favor of I would need to know more about those prospective employers I think your point ties into Consulate Bates' point about what we're asking for we're asking for level 3 and we're saying we have to come back and demonstrate to your satisfaction that we have the caliber of a company and the employee pay scale that you're looking for and I guess so and maybe this is a question for the city I mean so the half would be the level 4 and then it's a lesser percentage from there well there's a table of what range of sort of combination of either less time with the same trying to find the actual policy to help you through that each level has a range of awards that can be thank you so so you can see that the different ranges that qualify so it could be a lower percentage for a longer period of time or a higher percentage for a shorter period of time I'd suggest that one half of the 6 years which is kind of right in the middle from a half from 5 to 7 years or a third for 8 to 10 years while we're asking questions of the city on that question of living wage jobs what number are we using to determine the living wage state it's indexed to but it is Ashley you said it is the state numbers I think it's like 13 25 digested the policy multiple times yet if someone satisfies the criteria is the applicant entitled to the abatement or is this purely discretionary discretionary the goal is to have the guidelines of the criteria of the expectations yes Brzee I would just I agree that I think this policy could use some work I want to change the expectations for an applicant midstream there's a lot of things I would like to see in this policy going forward I think we've all had some conversations about that I would encourage the staff to move forward with helping us with that my family has been residents for 20 years and so I'm not I'm pretty knowledgeable about all the operations of the city and the fact that we have a high tax bill but I can assure you that tenants when they're looking at that who are non-residents it is part of the criteria that they certainly focus on okay well I think we should move on so we need to close the first public hearing assuming that no one else has comments the public you have to have a second one I think this would probably be the time if anyone had concerns about reservations about approving and fear technically whether you close the public hearing or whether you continue it to another date then you have another one we have to set the second one and then next meeting so I assume we need a motion just at the second public hearing I don't know if you have to the policy just says there will be two we set this one without a motion well then we'll have a second public hearing on this on May 9th thank you all for your time what does that mean May 9th do we need to actually close I don't think so while this is on I did want to note and it sounds like some of you reached a similar conclusion this policy was written in 2003 reflected reflected values at that time and was something that I had actually passed on to the development corporation last year when Joe came on and said you know it would be nice for you folks to weigh in since it's supposed to be attractive for development it would be nice to get that perspective but also a chance for the council to put its values so whether it's wage rates or types of jobs or what environmental things that I'm certainly protecting housing was a big deal that would continue so I think that would be something we certainly ought to look at the other thing we danced around this with every application we require they have to have permits in order to qualify but then we also say you wouldn't have done this project without this well to get permits you have to hire engineers to go through every applicant is sort of caught in this position of trying to demonstrate a but for after having already invested in going forward and I think I'll say it on camera I think the council at the time just didn't want to do this and so tried to set up a bar you couldn't meet so I think that's just it's a tension point every time we look at this and I think either we say that's it and we should do this before you get the permits or something might be the set a couple of key criteria that we need is the barrier of entry we need to get in the queue I think there's a lot of things but I certainly heard put it on the list of things we'll talk about maybe in our strategic plan okay awesome we are up to the public works presentation and they're still awake and alert and energized thank you as fast as you wanted you know just always worried when you say that hopefully we've gotten out a lot of our questions on the tours wonderful I allocated an hour we'll try not to make this too painful and it was late Phil's checking the Red Sox scores so good evening I'm Tom McCartle to my rights Kurt Modica, system director and city engineer Zach Blodgett staff engineer Corey Lines project manager so decided we would bring I would bring my support group so this is really a team effort in our office and throughout our department first slide is just a breakdown we have within the department we have five divisions and then we're kind of off to the side city hall employees so total is 36 and a half employees so I won't bore you with all of this but the support group that I turned to is a professional association called the American Public Works Association and their nonprofit national organization tremendous support for public works professionals interacting, training so public works is a combination of physical assets management practices, policies, personnel government sustained structures services essential to the welfare and acceptable quality of life for its citizens and believe we are highly we know we are a highly regulated professional at least a dozen laws to comply with just the environment alone the regulations grow across the economy every year so we'll speak more about that as we move along so under under the public works we are only three pillars of sustainable infrastructure what we are all about we are try to be good stewards of our infrastructure and the environment we are tasked with managing many multiple assets and we have to develop and prepare and use the financial planning to take care of all those assets so it's kind of a picture graph of all the various things that we take care of street signs traffic signals everything really you walk out the door this building everything you look at step on drink everything the roads is somehow related to public works management and maintenance we are producing about a million gallons of drinking water we treat about two million gallons of wastewater so annual daily figures and maintenance of storm water systems we operate a district heat system extensive fleet of vehicles that you all saw during the tours and I'm really grateful we were able to do that and take a look at all that before you hear me and this group talk so we know what it is we're talking about and what it takes to manage all these assets we also have some facility maintenance responsibilities this building as well as our own facilities and our group we are administrative and engineering and we provide oversight of all our divisions we do permitting, project management we staff committees we manage and oversee engineering studies we develop operating project budgets minister accounts receivables payable department payroll and then some so it keeps us busy and so how do we make it all happen is responsible for operation maintenance we have fleet management to take care of and the way we do all this is we assemble a highly competent dedicated knowledgeable and credentialed staff both Kurt and Zach are professional engineers and we have licensed operators and treatment facilities and licensed mechanics so it does take professionals beyond the labor it's a top to bottom performance we have IT skills and you saw quite a bit about the SCADA system that we use we are involved in civil several aspects of engineering civil geotechnical, water resource, transportation engineering not much in structural so there are fields of engineering we do have to go outside as a staff for but mentioned we have projects, grants, studies support construction projects so our operations first and maintenance primarily our primary function is operating and maintaining our facilities and infrastructure we have seasonal obligations in winter summer is obviously construction season for us and we do an awful lot of maintenance and then we have a lot of year round operations that take place we'll do design work we have fleet work CSO monitoring and traffic signals is a year round operation and we also something that maybe some people don't know is we participate in the dig safe system which is a great program we mark our utilities to protect them for excavation administrative and engineering we are here to support the council management goals we provide development support homeowner projects issue permits those that we administer and regulate we provide site plan review we support monthly or live recreation, parking cemeteries, facilities mapping and budgeting and this we believe is really important to know and maybe a lot of people don't know and Bob, Chief Cowan's just left but we also believe we are always there as the APWA model says we are always there we are first responders and the last responders emergency response includes floods, winds, snow, ice storms water main breaks anything that breaks we're there to fix it this is gallison hill in 2011 we were there and had a temporary road built and we were there long time before the emergency has taken place this is a lot of paperwork this particular event was the federal highway under the ER program emergency response program a lot of paperwork a lot of design development and we had the road back and a temporary road within a couple weeks in the project new culvert installed and we were there to make that winter so we take that very seriously that we are always there 24-7 one way or another there is a way to contact us go through this briefly because we touched on a lot of it already but stewardship is really the definition of supervising or taking care of and again that touch our everyday life project management is from conception through completion that is when we believe projects work the best if we get involved at the ground level and are able to see it through to completion project development and project delivery provide the engineering services much of that is done in-house now although we do it always will have to use outside consultants there are permits and regulatory compliance a good example is northfield street project where we have both construction permit obligations and operational permits under storm water so there is a lot of evaluation has to be done daily for erosion prevention and sediment control master planning and studies is really necessary to define projects to obtain funding support for grants and it's a something that some people say an awful lot of studies conduct a lot of planning and that is true but it is very absolutely necessary first step in doing anything to really define what you need to do what you hope to accomplish and then that leads to engaging the public early and often and throughout the project to completion is a valuable and necessary part of what we do and it's time consuming but if we don't engage early and often we're not as likely to succeed in what we're trying to accomplish you guys want to jump in and by the way if you want to ask questions at any point go ahead you don't have to save them to the end it might keep you awake as well so project development timeline is something that's difficult for a lot of people to understand what it takes to develop a project and there's a lot of different things but that can influence and affect project delivery and completion but the first thing you do through those studies and evaluations is to define the project and what is the problem, why do we need to do it what are we hoping to accomplish and what we don't have here is oh yes is it a desired improvement or is it a maintenance project again we talked about the feasibility studies preliminary engineering we have to identify the project constraints right away environmental those are two of the often time consumers time trainers you never know where that's going to lead you particularly on the right away side of things and it's always best to look at your alternatives one alternative that should be in every evaluation is to do nothing and so you can compare the selected alternative to just leaving it the way it is not investing at all there's God's benefit what are the maintenance demands I think is a lot of frequently overlooked it's only new for the day you turn the key over after that it requires maintenance and an ongoing maintenance commitment so what is the level of maintenance that we're obligating ourselves to do the shared use path is one such obligation where it's another mile and a half of path and we'll be maintaining that asset for a long long time so think about that materials, access all of those things need to go into your consideration in developing your project final design getting to securing your final permits you're pitting it, that's the fun part pitting the project finally after all that planning and then you're scheduling we are Vermont, we have seasonal limitations we have to decide whether or not we're going to inspect the project ensure specifications contract documents are followed or if we're going to use somebody outside to do it give you an example of three to seven years is not uncommon for project development longer if right-of-way environmental permits are required the coming street bridge which will start this fall did have a right-of-way snag just trying to secure that because these projects do have significant impacts on people's properties so that is why the right-of-way is so difficult to resolve but that coming street was begun in 2012 will start construction in 2018 and finish in 2019 so that's pretty typical these guys somehow managed to put together the Northfield Street project from deception design to completion next year and three years that was driven mainly by trying to coordinate with the state paving project and so we didn't have right-of-way we moved through the environmental piece and went pretty quickly so what drives or influences our decisions and how we move forward again we have the regulatory things we have to consider one of the policies and goals the asset management piece and our master plan recommendations we have a few master plans out there now for say bike and pet or water sewer streets environmental influences can drive decision making that might mean we do something now or differently and certainly public opinion what is the desire of the community what is the preference of the community and under the regulatory world an example there is we have a water main master water system master plan change in regulations and serving fire hydrants no longer allow six inch water mains everything has to be an eight inch so that drives a decision it may be a still functional water main but we have to allow that to drive our decision and get approval from the state when we're going to make those changes CSO clean water act Americans with disabilities act safety improvements all of those pieces in the regulatory world will impact our influence our decisions on when we do it and how we do that certainly policy goals here particularly city council level the steady state infrastructure our desire to reach 70 PSI for our roadways public opinion public opinion certainly comes into play on things that they deal with everyday roads sidewalks and you know the service expectations we have under the public opinion side of things even construction materials and aesthetics are things that are important to people what are we building this sidewalk is it asphalt or concrete walkability bike friendly again all factors we have to consider making these changes or improvements every street we pave today is under the Americans with disabilities act considered a substantial alteration and so we have to bring everything into compliance with our standards so we are going to touch on asset management in the later slide but asset management is really what drives our master plan recommendations we use asset management to really identify where our systems are and what the cost is and then we then use that to make long term master plans so there are ideal times when we should maintain or replace cycle all of those aspects within asset management another influence that we should be paying attention to such as resurfacing streets or applying a preventative maintenance treatment before they get beyond that and require more money and more effort so that's an asset management strategy again influencing our decisions I think this is in fact put this slide together and it's really I can find it on my sheet it's very telling of you know just the breakout of where these funds are coming and how they're but if you look at capital improvement on your far left compared to the amount of grants we have currently outstanding and active it's small but it's still a significant amount of money in the capital improvement plan over a million dollars is invested in how that in maintaining our infrastructure but that also is used to leverage grant money and match so within that grant fund is five million dollars on the bike path for for Taylor so there's significant dollars that are leveraged from through the grant grant programs and we have currently and this is a little sad because we don't sometimes have to count them 17 active grants one way or the other right now several of them storm water a couple of shared use paths actually a third of those have come out since since the Clean Water Act was approved Tom can you spend a second talking about but how does the staff time work on grants do you guys actively go after a grant or do you have a project and you say okay how are we going to fund this what are the relevant grants and then I assume you spend time writing them and I'm just curious how that all works or if you see a grant announcement come out and you say what can we apply that to so no grant is created equals they all have different requirements application side of things I talked earlier about planning studies master plans some of the storm water things came from the storm water master plan there were recommendations within those within that plan to address chronic problems I see the Clean Water Act as a great for the clean water world but having dealt with a lot of disastrous flooding events this helps also to build resiliency so we go after these grants for for that side of things so driven guided by the master plan personal experience or professional experience and dealing with some of these issues for a long time few of these grants we received gain assistance from the Friends of the Winooski great partnership with that group the conservation commission is getting involved in that so there'll be recommendations there and helping actually with the grant application and a couple of them are doing that we have the bike and pet master plan and a few grants related to that do we have our higher grant writers or do we do all that in-house unless we have a partner well yeah we haven't had to really we did work on that complex we did get some help with the roof drain grant rarely we do anything that can help a couple of the V-Trans grants are really quite straightforward they're very competitive the class two town highway and the structures grants are pretty straightforward they streamline on those the environmental side of things and then the new stormwater stuff some of the new grants that they put out are much easier than some of the bigger ones like the ERP which we're talking about industry project so some of the smaller stormwater grants they've kind of designed so that it's much easier to apply for an application they're encouraging this pushing and we get emails and plus so this last application around there was 350 applications that they had to review and we did not get approved we've got a few outstanding so I wasn't terribly disappointed the planning department also will apply for grants that buy subsistence one of the grants that we applied for that we weren't successful in getting was a college streets grant for stormwater management because we're paving that street this year so we did get some grants for northfield street stormwater which was a nice match because we're doing that project and we had to deal with additional impervious area that we were developing Corey's got a couple on transportation alternatives program and we heard a lot and saw a lot of them talk this winter about Barry Street in that quarter study that's taking place going to speak to that Corey in that whole just in terms of the grants transportation grants they're pretty straightforward did you get closer to the mic Corey just touched on the revolving loan funds that's so late for northfield street those are state administered loan funds at low interest so the city still has to bond for those but we just sort of broke it out because it is a lower interest what we can get on the open market but right now northfield street is our only current project that's utilizing those those funds but it is out there for both water and sewer that's right it's for utility improvement clean water or drinking water under the CIP for FY19 we'll talk about that in the next slides so it's a little more than a million dollars under the bonds that were approved in March a little more than a million each for water and sewer and one for the bike pad here but also Taylor Street included in that it was two 1.3 million dollar bonds one was for some bike for Taylor Street and then the other bond was directed really to do water and sewer to do other operating funds to help support projects but just the overall package this is how it's all paid for some of the grants we do want you guys to notice that sewer operating budget is by far the biggest operating budget in the city just over four million dollars it's a pretty big part of our just as they were talking about earlier with the energy we got a lot of that that's to do with the Septuagen Leachate receiving it's a pretty significant revenue source for the city which we're looking to build on with the project we'll talk about next time May 9th we'll be talking about that on that beyond your agenda so the importance of assets and we have tracked assets we have managed assets and so it's really responsible for where is it how old is it what has to be done to it and how often how much will it cost when do we need to do it how important is the asset and is it a priority we prefer that our approach to this is planned, predicted and consistent and not reactive we have been working on improving our developing and integrating asset management tool to help us with that and Zach has he's going to just develop his own software or what but he's pretty skilled at this working with the our existing ESRI mapping and using manager plus so if we had time tonight to show you what he's done it's pretty neat clicking on your asset he can jump right to the next one so of all these these are just the statistics of what we take care of but within so some of the asset management program for example sidewalks really consist of 24, 25 miles within that there's 500 assets and 4,000 assets within that so there are water valves or fire hydrants there's gates pump stations so it really doesn't tell the full story of what we're actually managing and I think one that maybe people aren't that aware of is we have both for street lighting we have both an inventory of leased lights but we also own several lights of the downtown and on the bike path around about all our city owned lights so our projects on the CIP plan upcoming projects for the season continue to work on northfield street this is phase 2 we have in the bond a slope stabilization project complete on legue quite a bit of work in that particular neighborhood at the end of state street the paving program for this year includes Liberty street Sherwood drive and college in legue college is from Woodrow to east state so all these are within that million plus of the CIP plan the pavement mark is crack ceiling then we have the Taylor street project some funding from that from the bond we just got word on the shared use path Winooski east is from granite street out to gallison hill that our act 250 permit is finally coming through which allows to get our core of engineer permit and finally we'll get authorization to go to bed great news big milestone finally ready to go with that the summers what's the pedestrian path I know you've been saying shared use but we still end up with bike path on a lot of places shame on you but you have pedestrian path at pool so that is actually something that we worked on with the rec department they needed to regrade their driveway but it's really pedestrian walkway is that the one that goes around the front? it's wide enough because it also needs to be a fire lane truck student we started it last year it was going to be a simple paving job then we found some not just for paving so we put it off and we'll just excavate it and replace it and do it right so others stormwater work a biggie that we're kind of excited about I'm sure the school isn't anybody on main street happy to see we'll be replacing that water main on main street finally so that has been notorious for breaks broke on us again this winter so finally get that taken care of and also the work is done on the calisthenia spirits project the water main replacement we talked about that a little bit the old water main on berry street that's the first piece the river crossing was done back in the 70's now we're up to the roadway so we've covered a lot of this just some active projects that are going on the actual grants the design work that's working that we're working on in our office I won't go through them all, you have the list but if you have any questions about those so we have a very full play we've made a lot of commitments we've been applying for these grants there are deadlines there's quite a bit of reporting that we have to do potentially another project we talked to you on the 9th about the wastewater project what's Winooski east and what's the second share use path it's Winooski west so that's the connection through the one cali law two separate projects east and west side of town somebody came up with that the planning office years ago so other parts of this we do have new demands that come up and we have to have some capacity to take those on we do have we talked about the asset management when things should be replaced we have some things that are problematic that we have to move and bump up in front of other things so some recent changes that we've built and tried to work into our management with the existing resources that we have the heat district heat system the complete streets law and the transportation committee is working on that I see the climate extremes and our stormwater resilience that is really a thing that we have to be prepared for and I talked about the use of the queen water funds and really developing some resilience we are a flashy town as far as flooding goes it's one of the major very flashy in a lot of ways but in stormwater world it's they're flash floods so we're very hilly steep terrain and it comes down these stream channels quickly and very erosive and so it causes a lot of problems I don't worry so much about the main river although that's a bigger threat in the winter time from our perspective the stream channels that are flashy where we have the biggest problem so we have the queen water act and we have the municipal roads general permit that will have to be covered by this summer still haven't seen the permit come through yet but that's coming quickly I think we're in really good shape with a lot of help from the regional planning commission on that net zero is a policy that's ongoing and now we've heard about TIFF tonight and the economic development support that a lot of infrastructure development that we need to consider and to work into our operational so we have some impacts to our service deliveries some decisions that are made that benefit the community but they do affect how we operate what we have to do one of those major ones is the winter event the decision to have an event based parking rather than full time we're managing it but it has changed how we go about our business it really limits us sometimes just to clear snow banks off the street we have to somehow get those cars off the street so we're still not fully keyed in on how to do it well and it has been a major change for how we operate we understand the importance of it the need for it still haven't fully adapted to doing it right and doing it well with cars parked on the street we have diversified our staff from simply operation and maintenance to doing a lot more construction it's really a financial necessity a lot of things that we can do ourselves are very expensive to have a contractor do so we do a lot of project support or we'll do smaller projects on our own again we can design, get to the order supply permits and can build Harrison Avenue it was one such project and one of the work in the drive, Gaylord will be done by DPW rolling that in but also being mindful of the maintenance obligations that we can't lose track of we got a little bit out of ourselves last year so trying to find that right fit and that balance being construction is a commitment it's a necessity to make the master plan work really financially we have the equipment, we have the staff we have the engineering, the project management people to do it so working at it questions? you got to throw other questions Rosie, yes so not tonight but at some point and it could be a written update I would be really interested we had our goals last year to get down the low cost high impact recommendations from the storm water and I would love to know where we are on some of those but again, not tonight low cost, high impact that big, the low hanging that I've read that whole plan and I'm interested in all of those and the conservation commission we just met with them the other night they're looking at that as well about half of the stuff in that master plan is private property so they're encouraging property owners Friends of the Manuska is going to do a lot of public outreach that's what they do and they educate the public on that side so actually along those lines unless you had something you wanted to add I'm just going to say three of the active grants that we have now are projects that were identified as the low hanging so on that no, one of the things I was interested in is in the email that you sent us I mean you got the PDF of the projects over time that you all are working on this massive spreadsheet of yeah, that thing and I appreciate that it's broken down in the different sections but one of the things that I would find useful and I think this maybe gets at Rosie's point is you know from master plans like the storm water or from the Montpelier in motion plan there are projects that are identified in those documents and where do they, I mean probably wants those projects to be fit into here somehow even if it's just as an aspirational you know because I mean that's a choice that a council would make to fund an additional project or not and recognizing that that's an increase but if that really is something that we have as our master plan it seems to me that we ought to be laying that out in this context right because this is when I see this giant spreadsheet this looks to me like the list of all the things that you know more or less DPW is going to tackle is that a fair assessment it changes but this is this particular spreadsheet is the actual working document on how to fund each of these projects and where the money is coming from the old spreadsheet that we still use is the there was a seven year plan this is a five year plan is really the identifying what that project is trying to come up with a dollar amount an estimate and but it's a placeholder and so I hear what you're saying that's what it's for but sort of plan is for and how you're going to finance it as Corey we were talking tonight about you know we really don't have some dollars I got a lot of questions about what is this stormwater master plan that are going to cost I have no idea same with the bike I don't know but start to break it out into some sort of launch of a dollar increments and put them out there but realize that the most accurate set of figures is in the first column everything else is so one hypothesis is that the Montpelier in motion plan should have its own section here another possibility is that those really should be divided up into the sections that they belong in terms of sidewalks or transportation I'm not sure there's what is what funds it so Montpelier in motion has a different funding mechanism than sidewalks so sidewalks are generated through specifically the CIP sidewalk but you wouldn't fund something that was proposed through the Montpelier in motion and plan from the sidewalk fund like if it was a new site it could be not just bikes I guess what I'm saying is I would love to see that to be built into this graph somewhere either called out as its own section or integrated into the rest of it if it's a sidewalk and it's under sidewalks and maybe even tagged with something like this is a part of the Montpelier in motion plan or if it's from the stormwater master plan does it belong under stormwater probably but again it could be as simple as putting SWMC next to it there is a budget query does for the MTIC transportation infrastructure group so part of my hope in talking through our strategic plan is thinking about how we are tracking those other documents and just to see where we are with those things and even if we're not getting them done that's obviously not the goal but even if we're not getting them done just having a tracking mechanism so that we know where we are with them I think would be helpful on the transportation side specifically the Montpelier motion it can be difficult to put it in a spreadsheet like this because a lot of it is dependent on grant dollars and not knowing if you're going to get those grant dollars it's hard to put it in a spreadsheet like this or what the actual cost it's in the plan as as part of these larger projects as we go pay the street we look ahead and say well there's a grant for this can we do this so it's in there but it's not called out but complete streets like the ADA like code compliance it's an alteration and we actually have to do reporting now say that we consider that other modes of transportation we do so when we pave College Street we will fill out the review and that's because we've done the analysis we have the master plan that guides us another thing to think about is projects are frequently linked and we have to keep those connections clear to us a water main project should follow it's a critical path sort of thing water main project should follow the paving that I've built before it and if you're doing this sidewalk you want to do the sidewalk to expand and curve it before you pave it so we put them in different categories but we can never this one should follow this one or it should go with this one if we had those separate categories but then crosslink that makes sense to me and I also want to respect that some of these projects that are in these plans are really difficult to enumerate like how much are they going to cost we don't really know and some of them I guess I would assume that some of them we do know there's a range or there's it's easier to guess anything to help us track that would be useful because one of my fears is that if it doesn't show up on here then it doesn't get dollars and it doesn't get done which I hear you that like you're doing the ADA thing and complete streets but particularly with this storm water like if I can't see it I don't know I want to be able to see it and know that it happened yeah it was Tom I was impressed on the tours like your staff they're like Swiss Army knives you know they could do anything and I like seeing in the presentation that by like diversifying their duties it looks like you might be reducing your reliance on contracting and I guess the question is is there any thought actually increasing your staff as a cost savings measure to sort of further that just for the next budget you saw the nods right the increase really has been within engineering project management so we added a staff person recent graduate so he's a good field person under Northfield Street under project inspection that one project of what was it 4.2 over $300,000 in project inspection services being done by Zach and Ryan and we brought in a retired guy to help us too so from that side of things we're always going to need bigger contractors that specialize in heavy construction so I think we'd be at a limit you know we lease an excavator we really doesn't make any sense at all but I hear what you're saying I appreciate that I think we're kind of moving towards more of that oh just an example of a paving contractor adjusting the elevation of a little or gain value true up to the surface you have a little out chance to take care of all the hardware and the prices we get we can do it ourselves and we do so that's something we can do we're going to add it but it's a coordination piece we get their schedule that we're going to jump so there's a lot of that I do want to also just say that there's Berlin, New Hampshire they've recently moved to HDPE and they're doing HDPE is a type of water main but they are doing in-house construction as well and they do hire out temporary only for the summer just to get projects done that is something that we would consider maybe in the future we certainly could do it we don't have profit margins to worry about it's just like that we have staff to take care of when we do that we're not paying for that side of the equity thank you for sticking with us well and likewise we do a lot of work alright so moving on to council reports we have a pool oh yes Donna do you want to Donna you pulled it I did I pulled the committee term time timing of terms and the staff recommendations are a couple are on the 15th of the month one is on the first one is on the 27th and I either felt like we should do everybody the first of the month and then make sure that the month before it expires we're advertising instead of people's terms expire but they're still serving because we're late in advertising and maybe the committee of committees wants to talk about this I don't know but it just seemed people should start the first of the month then everybody is doing May noon on all the committees I would suggest we refer this to the committee okay I'm fine with that I don't have strong opinions other people gosh what is our formal action there are we just we pulled it off the consent agenda then okay so we'll just bring it up for a future meeting that's fine alright so now I think we're at council reports so I forget where we started last time I think we started over there so start Rosie we went to emergency management training regional planning commission and it was wonderful it was three hours Sue was there and I was asking Bill to get everyone this booklet and this little hand and it's really worth reading the slides this is the whole slides to get an idea of what an incident command station is what the flow of responsibility it was very impressive when you get those emails try to grab a couple of those workshops they're really worth it the other thing we may have a special council meeting but I am going to be gone I fly out on Thursday actually tomorrow morning yes I knew it was going to be a late meeting and come back on Tuesday Tuesday night so I would hope if you end up with a special meeting for the farmers market Paul said Mayor I'll say again what I always say in council reports I'll be at open hands cafe tomorrow 8 30 to 9 30 to talk about anything that anyone would like to talk about last week it was a great conversation we talked about transportation and trees among other things and Lynn Wild of the tree board handed me something to show everyone in council reports photos like this one are going to be up in the Kellogg Hubbard Library for Tree City which is a month long exploration of Montclair's unique trees this one is my favorite tree in the city it's the Ginkgo on Barry Street and it is incredible keep an eye out for that display and other tree city actions for the month and yes see you tomorrow at open hands cafe Christchurch Parish Hall 8 30 to 9 30 every Thursday great so I just wanted to mention Greenup Day again is Saturday May 5th I'm pretty excited for that and then there's going to be a bioblitz in I believe it's in July with the North Branch Nature Center so keep your eyes open for those things they're going to be great and besides that I have nothing further to report yeah just what do I want to mention that the meeting discussing the potential of non-citizen voting in municipal elections was bumped to May 1st which is Tuesday so I just would note that we're going to have Dan Richardson there to talk about you know the implications in the context of Vermont and also going to be skyping in a fellow named Doug Chapin it's a really long thing of the program for excellence and election administration at the Humphrey School for Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota so we'll be there just dropping by will that be on orca I don't know the other one was going to be I haven't actually brought that up with this one I almost have mixed feelings about it because orca goes to so many communities and it would be nice to keep the discussion here in our community because there was a recording I won't be able to make a meeting but I would love to see a recording well maybe you can talk to those folks and see what happens and that'll be here yep next Tuesday so I'm jumping back in so one of the things I just wanted to check in with you all about I know we're going to have a lot of time in our strategic planning session to talk about directions that we want to go we might have some traction is the possibility of a plastic bag ban in Montpelier and so I just wanted to check in with you all is that something that you're remotely interested in yes and straws can I just shout out to Bev Alan who brought this up before the council some work was very serious on it about going to go and a lot of folks I love on that council but they didn't even give her the time of day so it's great to hear that it's going to be at least taken seriously oh yeah okay cool I just wanted to take the same picture on that thank you Red Sox 4 Blue Jays 3 Bruins 7 Maple Leafs 4 Bruins 1 before we go into executive session we are members of EC Fiber which is a community internet service sort of based down at the upper valley we've been members since the inception I think we've understood that it was unlikely we were going to be served by them at any time soon if ever given the fact that we're not even contiguous with them plus we already have a lot of service we're going to reach the underserved areas and as you know we recently joined the center for the internet two part question one the question keeps coming up whether we should remain a member and I think that's probably a conversation that we shouldn't have right now but I think we should have I got a call from the chair of the board today basically our terms are representative terms are expiring at the end of the month so they have to be appointed before May 1 so our current rep is John Block who has not been attending he's been ill our alternate is Rob Chapman who attends sometimes I think he's recently moved out of the city but this guy recommended he said just appoint Rob as your rep and then if you want to advertise and replace him but at least you had a rep in time for the person and check with him and see if he wants to do it and then we can take that up or have a conversation whether we even want to stay in but if we were going to appoint him we would have to do it or somebody else so unless anyone here is interested in being the EC5 or rep I know you suggest that we don't talk about whether or not we should keep somewhere in there but I'm just as inclined to let that term expire the question that's I'm not sure why we need to stay in either and maybe we are just going to do this but I would think we don't need to have a full discussion of whether we stay in members anybody opposed to just letting that lapse there's no I did speak with a long conversation with the chair today and I said is it going to hurt you if we pull out he said no he said we were helpful when it started and they're going and our folks haven't been that active so it sounds like they could take it or leave it whether we stay I'm not sure what we're getting out of I think the one thing we may get out of it would be whatever we can learn from them whatever CVI can learn from them about how to do it but that's really up to them to do so fine I'll just tell them we're going to initiate separating okay and then we do have two items in the executive session which hopefully will be fast so I move that we enter into executive discussions well not that fast to discuss the two matters yeah and they're it's the real estate statute yes I copy so I keep the coordinates with the one DSA section 31332 beautiful I'm just going to put in accordance with statute you'll stay that's not one that we have all in favor of two say aye