 All right, being 6.01 on Monday, July 15th, I would like to call together the regular meeting of the Wendyski City Council. Call to order. Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Councilor Amy Lafayette. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Our first item of business is agenda review. It looks like we have an adjustment to the agenda. Yes, so I, in front of you, should be an agenda addendum. I would respectfully request that you add this under section 10, regular items, item number eight, discussion of the redevelopment of lot 70. This edition is solely for a potential executive session per VSA 313, the negotiation of real estate purchaser leases. This is just to encase the conversation goes in a way where an executive session would be warranted to enable that to happen. All right, any questions or concerns about that? Any questions or concerns from the audience? All right, so I would entertain a motion to approve this agenda addendum. It's removed. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Okay, so we have this agenda. The next item on the agenda is public comment. So this is a chance for members of the public to make a statement about any item that is not on today's agenda. If you have a comment about an agenda item, please hold until we get to that item. Do we have any public comment today? Seeing and hearing none, I will move to our next item, which is our consent agenda. We have several items on the consent agenda today. We have the city council minutes of June 27, 2019. Oh yes, this was our special meeting to approve the tax rate. We were all present for that. We have payroll warrant ending June 19th to June 29, and warrant ending July 12 and subsequent to pay out for May. We have the trans town road and bridge standards, which is a compliance step. Hickok Street Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund, step one application. This is something we approved at a prior meeting. Pine Grove Terrace Contract Award. Again, we approved this contract at a prior meeting. Main Street Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Fund, step one application. Main Street Engineering Services Agreement with BHB. Again, both of these were approved at a prior meeting. And then a local agreement tax rate for veterans exemption, which is a standard state of Vermont tax exemption item. Are there any questions about the consent agenda from council? Any questions or concerns from the public? Seeing and hearing none, I would entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda items. So moved. Second. Motion by Mike, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Our next item of business is city updates. Great, thank you. So just a couple of updates for you this evening. Just a reminder that our next official council meeting will be August 19th, because that is a month away, we will need to do a midterm warrant the first week in August. So we will be looking for three of you to come in and sign that between council meetings and then we will affirm it at the August 19th council meeting. So just a heads up that we will be sending around that request. And then following that August 19th council meeting, we will be having a special council meeting on August 21st, which will be the joint meeting between the city council and the school trustees with two primary agenda items. One talking about the equity work and then two a what the superintendent and I are calling kind of finance 101 between the two bodies to understand how each is making decisions about big picture budget and debt in the next couple of years. Angela and I continued to work with the state auditor's office on the TIF audit. We met with them this afternoon. It's going well. Angela is doing a great job getting information to the state auditor. This is our every five year audit of our TIF district. We anticipate receiving a draft final audit report from them in October. That's the current timeline. And then the only other things I want to highlight are some fun upcoming family and friend events in Winooski over the next month. Of course, August 7th will be our next Winooski Wednesday event. We do have scheduled an urban camp out for this weekend in Cassavent. If you are interested in that, tomorrow is the last day to register. So bring your tents, bring your friends, Cassavent sleep under the stars with your neighbors. Additionally on July 26th, which is Friday at one o'clock at the OCC, the library is inviting in the Vermont Institute of Natural Sciences to do an animal education event with some of our young folks. So that'll be a great time. We are still accepting applications for Wicked Cool Kids summer camps in August. So if families are looking for things for their kids to do in August, go to our website and think about that as an option. We are doing this summer trying out a youth and adult pickup soccer league at the school district on Tuesday evenings from six to eight. This is a great way for parents and kids to come together and play soccer together. It's free, open to the public. Just no need to sign up. Just stop by on a beautiful Tuesday night and play soccer with your neighbors. And then finally, we're doing a football skills development program the week of August 5th at Landry. Again, this is free. We would appreciate you registering or getting in touch with us, but stop by Landry Park and develop some football skills. That's all I've got. Thank you. Our next item of business is council reports. Can I start on this end with you, Jim? Sure. So since our last meeting in mid June, we did have our final meeting of the UNISC Equity Dialogue, and I'm sure you'll cover more of that than I will. So I'm happy to have participated in that. And other activities include we're about to get going with a tree inventory for the city as part of our urban tree work here in the city. So that's coming up soon too. Thank you. Yeah, so the pickup on the Manuski Equity Dialogue had a very successful series of meetings at four meetings, which came out of the equity summit that we had back in the late winter spring. And out of that, there were two ideas that rose to the top. One would be to create an Equity Leadership Council, which would be a diverse group of community members that will help us as a council have a better sense of equity in the work that we do. And the other one is to expand the role of the multilingual liaisons that are now with the school system and how they might be able to work here in our city to help us be better at connecting with all of the different citizens that live in our community. So I reached out to the 15 people who served on the council. And I had three responses for the Equity Leadership Council. And still waiting to hear for those who might want to step up and help figure out the details for the multilingual liaison expansion. So we hope to get both of those working teams together in the next few weeks so that at our next council meeting, we can hear their findings. An update from the Community Service Commission. They have prepared a draft for their scholarship policy. They're making some final tweaks and they're gonna bring it forward to us at our next council meeting to consider approval. And that's it. That's how? Sure. Since our last meeting, I attended the Housing Commission meeting. They continue to wrap up the Housing Trust Fund, which is in our packet tonight under the housing agenda item, kind of what they've drafted so far. The Planning Commission met to discuss their work plan for FY20 based on the outcome of the discussion that we had at our June 1st, Saturday strategy and priority planning meeting, and then the subsequent June City Council meeting. Nothing really priority to pull out about that, just that they started discussing how they're gonna approach that. I did hear an update that there's gonna be a bike path, like a bike lane pilot on East Spring plan for September. I don't really have a lot of details about that. The Winnowsky Bicycle Coalition is working on that, so there'll be more information to come. And finally, I had a meeting with Mayor Weinberger Burlington and South Burlington's Council Chair, Helen Ryall, to discuss a memorandum of understanding between our three cities as it relates to the Burlington Airport and the Noise Map and Noise Compatibility Programming. We discussed how Burlington can keep us involved as cities that are impacted by this, pulled out some of the items from the public comment that we made on the Noise Compatibility Program, and we should be seeing a draft back, I believe, in late August. The City of Burlington wanted to sit with that and weigh in on what they would be committed to. So they're gonna share back a draft with us in late August, and then we'll be discussing that at Council. I'll move forward with that. That's it for me. I attended the downtown Winnowsky meeting last month, and they are in the process of updating their bylaws to better reflect the new mission of their organization, which is really business-focused. So that was what the majority of the meeting was spent on. They are also in the process of planning for French Heritage Day that is planned for August 11th, which is a Sunday, at the Farmers Market. And just a reminder, the Farmers Market is every Sunday from 10 to two. That's all I have. Thank you. I don't have much. The Public Works Commission meeting was the first Thursday of the month, and since the Fourth of July was on Thursday this month, they got canceled. So I have nothing to report this time. All right. Thank you, right? We can move on then to our regular items. First up, we have approval of an event permit for Wolfscarves. Heather Carrington will join us. Staff has received an application from the sponsors of Wolfscarves to hold the annual Wolfscarve hair out on Saturday, August 3rd, 2019. It's an event where they close down Moosky Falls Way and a bunch of German cars, high-end cars, are put out for spectators to walk among and see the classic cars and the high-end show cars. It'll require closure of the street between Cascade Way and the circulator from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. We reviewed the application in the internal staff review meeting on June 17th and established the following conditions. The event sponsor will coordinate with Green Mountain Transit to reroute the buses during the street closure. And the event sponsor will coordinate with downtown Moosky and local businesses to co-promote the event and ensure that that foot traffic ends up in our businesses as well. This will be, I believe, the fifth or sixth year that they'll be holding the air out here. And it's part of a long week, a three-day event that is the total Wolfscarves. It's one piece of a total event. And we recommend approval for this event. Anything different from past years worth noting? No, no. I don't believe there's really much different at all. All right, thank you. Any questions or concerns from Council? Any questions or concerns from the public? Seeing and hearing none, I would entertain a motion to approve the event permit for Wolfskart. So moved. Second. Motion by Amy, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you. Great. So our next item on the agenda for discussion or approval is commission charters and by-laws updates. So we have been discussing as a Council for several months realigning the commissions to meet our strategic vision area. We discussed this at our priority and planning session back in June. And at our last meeting, talked about updating the language that's in the charters to reflect, to be more aligned across the board, to be more referential of existing documents like our master plan. So if you look at some of the older charters, there's references to helping establish a vision. But we have a vision and our master plan now, so we're just updating that language. In addition to that, we have sort of renamed and reconfigured. So we have a finance commission. We want to align that to our economic vitality strategic area. We have community services and public works commissions. We want to kind of combine forces there to align to our safe, healthy, and connected people area. We have a public works commission. Want to align that to municipal infrastructure. We also have a charter commission that we approved last October, the previous council did. And we wanted to, as we have discussed at previous meetings, expand the scope of that approved charter from just the voting issue to also include some governance issues, as well as finding, making sure that we are aligned with the school's charter where we need to be as separate municipalities that work together. So what we are discussing tonight is moving forward with these charters in this new alignment, how we heal about the new language that's being used. So to be clear, these charters are already all established as is. And we have just made some updates to the language of them. We also have commissioned bylaws here, which have some small updates, I believe, from previous years, again, to be more referential of existing documentation. Is there anything you would add, Jesse? Got some good overview. All right. So I would just like to start by saying that I really appreciated the stronger reference to the master plan to state statute to existing guidelines rather than recreating it in these documents. There's also been added a note to highlight our commitment to equity and inclusion across the board, something that we have been discussing as a council for some time as well. And the language has just been a little bit refreshed to be more reflective of the role of the commissions in helping to guide policy versus operations. I think to approach this, we might just discuss how we feel about changes to language. Do you all feel like this is reflective of the previous conversations we've had that the alignment works for you and this move towards our strategic vision? I will start off by saying that our meeting on 6.17 of 2019, we discussed all the commissions except for the charter commission. And I think that at that time, it would have been nice to discuss getting to that language of that charter commission so we could have had it for approval for this meeting. I reached out to some residents. Many of them are here tonight. One that couldn't make it here gave me an email of some language that I think would better align with the charter commission. And I'd like to propose that to the council for consideration to change the language, to remove in the Winnowsky voters with charter change that would enable non-citizen residents to vote in Winnowsky. I think a better way of saying this for this charter change would be for Winnowsky voters with any charter changes related to municipal elections. I think that would be a better way to say that because it gives it a better broader view instead of just being descriptive to a entity. And I think that's kind of our job is to make it a broader view and not put it in descriptive like this. So for some historical context, this charter commission was established for that one specific issue. We had discussions in the past about whether it should be focused on multiple charter updates or to stay focused on the non-resident voting, non-citizen voting issue that came up. So the existing charter is focused specifically on that task because that is what we have established this commission to do. What we have been discussing is broadening that scope to include some of these other items. It's certainly possible to change the language. At this time, it's also possible to update the language and refresh it as the focus of the commission changes as well. That is something that we can discuss tonight. Do you think the language as written kind of reflects the strategic planning discussions that we had in early June to expand scope rather than changing scope? And so given that we already have this established charter commission charter, keeping those components that were already there and have been decided by past counsel seems appropriate and the expanded scope provides more room for the charter commission to focus, I think, on things nimbly and reflexively rather than getting a pretty broad mandate. So personally, from keeping with the past work already done by the council and the existence of this commission on the books, I think this is a good expansion of role, but I don't know that it needs to be made more vague at this point. Given my role as a state representative and serving with the government operations committee, which oversees all charter changes, the more specificity, the better. So keeping it vague and nebulous, I don't think, makes a lot of sense. Well, Hal, it doesn't keep it vague when it says municipal elections. It just takes out the non-citizen resident voting because it's not, I'm confused about this whole non-citizen voting anyway, because the state of Vermont's constitution states that you must be 18 years of age and a resident or a citizen of the United States. So I understand that there's people out there that want to see the non-citizens be able to vote. My view on that would be, why aren't the citizens becoming non-citizens becoming citizens? I'd like to stop you because we shouldn't be debating the actual concept right now. We're debating the language on this. We are debating the language. And I think this should be stricken from the language and it should be held to municipal elections. Pizzas. I have a point of clarification. Our state constitution gives the legislature the power to oversee all local elections. We decide it's a policy issue. It's not a constitutional issue. It is a constitutional issue for state and federal elections. You must be 18. You must be a U.S. citizen that does not apply to local elections. It's a policy issue that the legislature will take up as we're taking up now with the city of Montpelier. So you're not correct when you say it has to be what you said for local elections. That's not true. I think it's also important to point out that the way this is written, the phrase examining options to present to a new ski voters, this group is going to look at all of the options and maybe they'll find something that they think is gonna be worth putting forward to voters and maybe they won't. But the way this is written is really about examining options. And I'm fine with that. Yeah, so that's a good point in that. This is, the point of this charter commission is to open up a discussion about an issue in Wyniewski. It is not designed to say we are going to put this to a vote, right? Like the commission's purpose is to do public outreach to discuss this issue and to decide if there is something that we want to put to a vote. When we actually set this in motion, have this commission meeting, that is what they would be tasked with. Is that outreach and the communications? This is something that would come back to us with updates. At some point, if they reach a decision about something they want to recommend, it would come to us to vote on and then it would be put to a ballot. This is something that we would have to end up on a ballot that all the residents of Wyniewski voted on. So the action we're taking tonight doesn't say, like we are moving forward with this, it opens the door to have the discussion about whether or not we should. Will there be a public hearing? There would indeed, for sure. Multiple public hearings. If we say that. Okay, if you do. Now, who gets to vote on this? Only current registered residents. Yes. It would just be those who are already registered voters. And then it would also, as with Montpelier, it would have to go through a review in the state house for their approval. But we would have a say. Yes, definitely. With another throwing on the ballot and said, okay. It's not like the bond votes. It's like five votes and it's like, okay, but who voted? Yeah, this would be a direct vote of the residents of Wyniewski. So yeah, so let's take public comment on this issue, on this agenda. I have against, you know, I have some in the homeowner and then Wyniewski for seven, seven years, definitely have an idea. I mean, the higher Wyniewski is got, okay. So I mean, it's like, we've lost so much and I would like to at least keep something, okay. And able to go and vote on the issues that mean something to everyone. Yes, I would agree. But people who are going to understand what they are voting for. That's a good point too. And something that we discussed. You know, when this issue first came up, there was a possibility of just moving straight to a vote. And the previous council did not take that action, wanted to establish this commission to do all that public outreach and make sure people really understand what this means. Because it's not cut and dry, black and white, what a change like this would mean. So this is a process that would take a long time. Good, hope I got that right. I think, and again, it's something that would either show up on town meeting day or general election in the fall, right? So there's a lot of time before we move towards this. It's one time all of the sudden it's on the ballot. Right, correct. And she knows it's there and it's under this other situation. It's an issue that we would wanna have the broadest, you know, on one of those broad voting dates. Talk about others. Other public comment. Question. My wife and I heard this from federal and state laws that say if you're a non-citizen, you're a non-voter. And speaking locally, citizens pay taxes. So to have someone as a non-citizen affecting our tax, what we own taxes doesn't seem quite fair on a local level. So we support the federal and state law. If you're a non-citizen, you're a non-voter. Everybody comes to America and welcome to apply for citizenship, so welcome to America. Thank you. I appreciate that. Sir. Two things. I've been through two naturalizations ceremonies. One young man from Vietnam, the other from China was a very inspiring event to attack. Again, you have the option of becoming a citizen. We're talking about non-citizens. Does that include people that are here legally? They're legally or what does it encompass? So that is one of the charges of the commission. The Montpelier Charter Change is very explicit about legal citizens, or I'm sorry, legal residents. And so that's one of the reasons that we didn't move this to a vote, right? Because there's a lot more research to do. And this commission would be charged with saying, who are we expanding this to? Is it legal residents who are not yet citizens? Is it folks who are on the path to citizenship experiencing significant delays, right? So there's a lot of gray area there that this body would work on sorting out what makes sense for our community and how community members feel about those different scenarios. This, what we're looking at tonight, establishing, actually not establishing, updating the language in the charter document, doesn't say that. It just says that we can begin that discussion as you see what we might do in the future. As health pointed out, federal and state law doesn't matter here, that the legislature has the right to make this decision. That's right. As far as I'm concerned, it's a non-issue that people who live in this community, all people who live in this community should have the right to vote. The issue of taxes, every single person in this room pays taxes whether they own home or they rent to, because rents are raised when taxes are raised. And so renters make their own contributions to the tax base in this community. And it's a false dichotomy that we have consistently made here in Winooski between homeowners and renters. But that actually means more than that. It actually means more than what we are acknowledging in this home. So as far as I'm concerned, I wasn't born in Vermont, right? I mean, I'm a relatively recent resident of Vermont. I live here and because I live in Winooski, the votes in Winooski do not reflect the population of Winooski. And the population of Winooski needs to be represented by more than those people who currently have the right to vote here. Sir? So I just want to add one more thing. There are two types of immigrants, citizens like me. I come from India. And I'll probably get my green card in next 110 years or 20 years. And there are other people who are refugees who came here. And anyway, they will get their green card in a couple of years maybe before your next election itself. So people like me who can never vote. But we are still paying taxes. We are still contributing in every part of society. Like many of you know that thing. I own a house in Winooski, but I cannot vote. I cannot raise my issues. So there are two types of immigrants we need to consider. Thank you. Is there any data on how many non-citizens live in Winooski? I did some research. It's maybe up to 12%. I haven't... I wouldn't say that's factual data that I saw. I would, it's not verified. Sir? My name is Robert Mulan. You guys already know where I stand on this issue. I sat back there and supported this issue. But the point I would like to make is that this issue is not going to get figured out here. That's why you push... That's why the previous council put this commission together. And this commission needs to go forward and do the research and put something together to present the voters. And I'm a legislative hearingsman. Thank you. We are here to say, approve an artist group with a charter, correct? So the charter is already approved, focused on the voting issue. We're trying to expand it to also include some government's operations tweaks and making sure that we are in alignment with the school and their charter. And that's why I brought this language up because we're supposed to make some tweaks to it because we didn't discuss it back in our last council meeting on the 17th. We discussed all the other commissions except for this one. Yeah, and that was a bit of a clerical oversight because the agenda item was about the realignment which was focused on matching our strategic vision. So this sits outside of that realignment. Okay, but we were gonna establish that conversation to bring to the next council meeting's approval, correct? That's why I'm just confused why it was left out. And you're saying it was an oversight but it should have been brought up for conversation because this council meeting we're supposed to be approving it. We don't have to approve it, it's a discussion item and something we could approve in the future. You know, Jim did point out at that prior meeting that we had neglected to include this in the packet and that's an unfortunate error. And just to be clear, that's my error. That's not the mayor's error. That was my interpretation of what you all wanted to see on that agenda item was the alignment to the master plan commissions which don't include the charter change commission and because we had talked about the charter change commission at the council retreat, I thought what we were talking about was the realigned commissions. So I deserved the fault for not putting that on the June 17th council meeting, June 17th, whatever that June council meeting was. Did I say hand? Yeah. Why are we challenging what the federal government says about voting that should have to be a citizen? Why are we challenging it? We're not challenging it. It's the purview of Vermont legislature to change policy that oversees local elections. That is done in Montpelier. It has to come from the city in terms of a charter change that has nothing to do with state and federal elections. Those are in the constitution and they're not even being touched. We're looking at local elections. And why are we looking to change something that has been buying for how many years now? Well, when you look at a community like Winooski, we're probably around 19% people of color and many of them are foreign born, new Americans who have no voice. It's similar to taxation without representation. If they're here, then they can become legal citizens. Takes about five to 10 years for that to happen. Well, then they take five to 10 years. Well, we'll have the commission decide that. Why are we handing down to them? We'll have the commission decide that. Thank you. Sir. I agree with what the lady says. I'm a, I have all the license with the Treasury Department of the federal government. And if you decide to allow the election of local officials, you're gonna have to have a separate ballot. You're gonna have to have the separate documents in regards to check off because the individuals will not be able to vote for your senators at the federal level. The president or representatives. The other question I have is in your bylaws, I noticed in there you referred to, let me just refer to it here. It's like to say, this is obviously, it's not a racial issue, it's a legal issue. It's all it is, it's a legal issue. The laws are there in federal state. I say just follow the law the way it has been. Despite, I think Mnuski has a fair share of taking refugees in, that's great. But you know, they're welcome to America, these are our laws. And that's where we should be, and just continue. That's the problem. So. He was first established, he had the Irish, he had the Italian, he had the French, and we became a native to Europe all together. And we all were citizens, but we were different nationalities, and I'm not against the different nationalities. I had to go to school to learn English because my family was French. But again, I mean, we need to be able to have people read the book and what they are hoping for, not tell us, and the interpreter telling them what is on it, a person cannot read what they are signing to Mnuski's. I mean, you have to be 18, but by that time, you should be able to read it. I mean, this isn't one of my other situations that I had. I mean, yeah, we were a diversified city when it first began. I had a friend who was Italian, and then it was Indian, I mean. I'm not a fan. No. No, we're really, we're just as French as I am today. But anyway, it's just, you know, we were diversified, we came through, but we came through as if we were not against, and we were all American citizens. That's what we need. And that's the bottom line. That's how I'm trying to reach to, and I was kind of. I have truly maintained five, 10 years, and the children of the nationalities are coming up, and they're not going to become citizens, and if they're not, then why? Should they be able to go? We should be looking into more. We can't use to come and grow, and I know some people, you know, who are a little, you know, my grandmother, she passed away and spoke French. Okay, I mean, she had lived here all her life, but I spoke French to my grandmother, and my grandmother, they're not both, because she didn't understand. I mean, true, I agree. Voting is a very, it has become a lot stronger thing than when I was younger, but again, I wanted to vote. I did what I needed to do to be able to vote. So if someone wants to really vote, the fact that all they have to do is become a citizen, then so be it, do it. Thank you. Ma'am. Oh, sorry, did you find what you were? At the end, the other thing I mentioned, I have a daughter-in-law that actually came from Romania, and she has to get a green card, and every year, no, she had to go back to Romania, and then reply again as such. So individuals that come into country legally as the lady indicated, they can go through the process. Now, I know it's a process that was almost eight years, or even longer than some cases. I believe that it needs to be reduced down to at least five, as such. The other thing is, in regards to the charter, you indicate one area, legal voters, and then another area you indicate qualified voters. Is there some reason for those two different terminologies, but there should be a definition indicating what each of those actually mean? To where you're referring? Which document? That's the charter. The city charter, or the charter we're discussing right now? The city charter. So that is one of the things that we want this body to do, is clean up some of that language, because there's more than one instance of conflict. I don't disagree with the terms, but I think there should be a definition so that everybody understands what that means. Yeah, and so that is also an item that this body could look at, should we expand the scope of your work? There were some other hands, sir. Oh, ma'am, I saw you first, sorry. I'm just confusing, first of all, who made the law that it takes 10 years or eight years to become a citizen, and how can we change that? I mean, I think 10 years is a long time to wait. I've heard plenty about immigration reform at the federal level for many years, and seen no action. What's that? That's something that we have heard our federal government discussing for many years, is immigration reform, and we've seen no action there. But there's nothing we can do about that? Registration. Yeah. Right? Sir, did you still... I saw your hand earlier. I just felt that opening is a reward, privilege that comes with citizenship, and yes, it may take several years, but that's the reward. I have no issue with people getting representing themselves, but there's a process, and anything that just gives somebody a chance to cut in line to those weeks, that may not be the best phrase, but it's just sacrilege, you know what I mean? Because voting is precious and to be earned, that's where I see it. Thank you. Our voting votes are not earned. My parents and my grandparents were born in this country, and they did not have the right to vote. We were citizens of the country, and the reason that we can now vote is because caring and concerned human beings understood that there was something unjust about that, and people needed to be represented in the place where we live. We are not talking about federal elections. We are not talking about state elections. We are talking about a population that lives in Manuski, that has no voice, that is not represented, and other populations make decisions for them. I don't care about federal. Is voting a privilege? Yes, it was a privilege, and people stood up and said, I should have the right to vote. Laws were changed, and sometimes laws need to be changed to team up with what is currently the current climate, current population in any community. So, and what I would say, too, is that this commission can facilitate this discussion on a broader level outside of these walls with more members of the city of Manuski to get to a point of, how do we wanna approach this idea? To your point about being able to read, that's certainly something that could be discussed. What are the parameters that we would work within that would be amenable to everyone here in Manuski? So there's, again, I would reiterate that we are not making any decisions about this right now. We are trying to start a community conversation to carry this out and see what we want as a city. How will the city council go about 11 to five members and two alternates? So we receive applications. We interview those applicants with whoever is like the council liaison and staff liaison would interview those applicants and then bring them forward to a city council meeting for a possible appointment, which would have to be approved by the body here. And that would be, of course, a public activity as well. Yeah. This council you're proposing, I think I should go door to door explaining to some of the retired people in Manuski what's going on. They could. They would be charged with public outreach. That's certainly a method they could use. I think it's a one square mile. I know when Robert Jumper and my father was on the city council, we went door to door during voting season to talk to him, hand out pamphlets. As did several of us. Yeah. So I suggest if you do do the council, you send them out on the streets. Thank you. Any other public comment? All right. Circling back, so we clearly have a question about the language in the charter commission charter. Are there any questions about the other charters that we need to discuss? I felt like the other charters reflected what we talked about at the retreat and at the previous meeting. Absolutely. As I am, I'm wondering if, are we gonna set forth and approve those other commissions and can we do it separately? Or are you gonna group them and try to, are we moving for a vote tonight on this? Yeah, so this is a discussion or approval topic. If there's a motion to approve these documents, then we will move forward with that. So my question is, are we able to move forward on the commissions that we discussed on 617 and leave the charter commission out for another discussion? There's no, yes, you can absolutely vote on the piece, Matt. We can, that would be at the discussion of the. I'm sorry, what's that? Are we able to have a public hearing on that charter commission, that specific charter commission? I feel like we just did. Okay. And we discussed it last fall at several meetings. Yep. You know, this isn't new information that's coming out. It is a new council though. I feel like this kind of is like a public hearing, but you guys, I mean, the council, this was just added on to the agenda and a lot of the folks in Winooski didn't know about it. So I think if we held off, maybe to the next council meeting, got more of the public engaged, more community involvement, you know, we'd probably get more people down here, practice place out. As this charter was already established, I don't feel the need to do that because this was already voted and approved in the past. What we are doing now is adding some language. Thank you. Great question. How are some of these agendas promoted to the people so they know what's going on? They're pushed out by the city website. They're shared on front porch forum. They're posted at city hall at the library and at the school district. Well, I worked from 6.30 to 7.00 to 6.00 that night. Don't get a lot of time to come down to the city hall. I think you guys will do everybody justice if you think we're a little better with your promotion than these things. There are a lot of people that they know what's going on tonight. Where would you like to see us posting? Front porch. You do it on the front porch? Yes, we do. Every meeting is on there. Sir? Everybody in here probably has a cell phone. Why not use some kind of texting system? I believe we, I don't know if it's called texting, but you can sign up to get the email every time you push something out. If you go to the city website, there's an exile alerts on there, which are what you can get for road closures. You can also sign up to be alerted whenever an agenda or a public item is released. It certainly sounds like we should do a push to tell people what all the venues are. Ma'am? When is he at school? Who's this letter? Why aren't they joining in with them and putting it in there? So we don't have an agenda until the Friday before a meeting and that newsletter requires six weeks lead time. We do put updates in there on what is happening in a broad sense. So Mike has shared with us some alternate language. We have the possibility of separating this item out. If that is our desire, I also would take a motion to approve the items as is tonight. So moved. Second. Motion by House, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. All those opposed, nay. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you everyone for showing up. It is always really exciting to hear from people. And I hope as this commission moves forward that we see this kind of engagement the whole way through. So we do end up with a recommendation that fits our community and the broadest part of the community that we can. I mean, I have to admit until I spoke with Mike yesterday, I didn't think this was going to be a big deal since it was already something that had been approved in the past. So I certainly learned a lesson here about. This is a moment in quite a lot of cities across the United States. So it's going to be a big deal in each city. You know, this is implemented anywhere, you know, so. Understandably. Yeah, absolutely. Sir. The other problem too is there's an awful lot of litigation going on because I know I'm bound with something. But that's a federal level. And also that's a state level in regards to sanctuary cities and what you're attempting to do as well. That's something to keep in mind because if you go too fast and hopefully Congress starts carrying out a financial responsibility and start doing something, it's very sinister that we actually have in this area. We are not trying to move through this quickly. That is not my desire. I don't believe it's anyone else's up here. And we are also fortunate to have Hal on board as he serves in the government operations committee in the House and has access to legal counsel there as well. So it's definitely something that we're aware there are legal ramifications here that we need to continue to monitor. And I want to be clear on something too. I'm not against non-citizens living in our community. I think they enrich our community. What I'm trying to state here is there's a due process. And the people that come, that have done that due process, they know the sacrifice they've made to become a citizen of our country. So I don't want it to be misconstrued that I'm anti-non-citizen. I'm not because I enjoy conversations with them. I enjoy shopping at their shops. And I think it makes a community enriched. So I just want to be clear and I want to state that I'm not anti-non-citizens. I just think they need to follow the process that our country has followed for X amount of years. Thanks, Mike. Thank you. With that, we are on to our public hearing for Chapter 28 fee changes. A public hearing has been noticed for the consideration of the Chapter 28 fee changes. At this time, I'd like to open the public hearing for any public comment. So this is, we had previously voted to approve a change to our, the way our fees work. So we have our Thrive After School program. The fees were listed in there like where we keep permitting fees and stuff. At our last budget session, we wanted to remove those from this document and do that by resolution each year so that as the funding changes for that program, we're able to nimbly adjust what we are charging. There was also an addition of a mixed use fee for development review board appeal. There's a fee for, I believe, residential and commercial use, so we added a mixed use to address a gap. We also pulled out some fees from renting space at the O'Brien Community Center. Now that we have North End Studios leasing that space and actually managing that, we don't really need to have it in there anymore. Does that cover the changes? Yes. Good summary. Okay, so does anyone have questions or comments about those fees, this public hearing item? There's still gonna be meeting space available? Yeah, but you would do it through the North End Studios and not through the city. And they would love to provide meeting space to people. If there is no more public comment, seeing no additional comment, I will close the public hearing and we can then, if we have any questions as the council discussed those, we don't need to re-approve it, right? You do need to officially approve the ordinance, yeah. Did you all have any follow-up questions or concerns on these changes that we did approve of already? No. All right, so I would entertain a motion to approve chapter 28 fee changes. Summable. Motion by Mike, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Let's take a two-minute recess so that folks who are not looking to stay in attendance can leave the room. We will reconvene at 6.58. Sorry, I was late. Oh, no worries. I was looking down my dinner. Oh, my God, yeah. Legal residents in the process of getting the courses. Thanks a lot. At least you're putting it on the right. No, actually, you can't. I think that would be okay. Well, I think it's right. Yeah, it's actually a discussion, I think it's great to have. Thanks for putting it on the right. Thank you for catching up. Well, that's why I was trying to get it on the right. All right, I would call to reconvene the regular city council meeting. It is seven o'clock. Getting back to our regular agenda items, next up, we have discussion and potential approval of a request for a proposal for the redevelopment of lot 70. Do you need to bring anyone? Yeah, so I'd like to invite up Heather and John Rauscher as well. So as they're coming up, setting the table a little for this agenda item. So lot 70 is the last significant law in the TIF district that the city has control over. We are bringing you tonight to this draft RFP. For our policies, you have no, you do not need to approve RFPs. There's no requirement for that. But ultimately for the charter, you are the only body who can dispose of or sell or swap land. So to the extent that ultimately you would need to make a decision about what we do in the future with lot 70, we wanted to bring you forward this draft RFP to kind of gauge your interest in how we've laid this out before moving forward. So that's the kind of legal foundation and why we're bringing this to you tonight. More specifically in content. So as you know, back last winter, actually for three, two and a half, three years, we've been working with a development partner to bring a hotel to Winooski. For the last two years, we have, those conversations have focused around 70. Last February, the prior council approved a potential permit for a parking structure and a hotel on that parcel and a subdivision of that parcel. The voters on town meeting day approved the bond vote to build that parking structure. In May, we were told by the development partner, Winooski hotel group, that they are no longer interested in 70 and they want to explore, re-explore options to bring a hotel to lot eight, which is the lot right at the corner of Winooski Falls way and Cascades way. So kind of in front of waterworks, not at the bottom of the rotary, but in front of waterworks. There's currently a bus station there, a little bus shelter. So while we continue to remain committed to working with the Winooski hotel group and understanding what the possibilities are for them there, we think we've heard pretty loudly from the council and from the community that they are, that we all are interested in moving forward with the redevelopment of 70. So we, our team is proposing that we put out on the street an RFP to look for other development partners to redevelop 70. And the way we've outlined that and Heather gets all the credit here for drafting, John and I have just been, and Eric has been kind of other sets of eyes on it. We're laying it out with three different options. So option one is continue the subdivision plan, build as the community envisioned with the parking structure and the hotel option and the proposers can propose building both or just building their structure and we will build the parking. Option two is same subdivision, same parking infrastructure and another use for the bottom, for the lower part of the property. So for example, housing would likely be the other use. Or option three is a total redevelopment of the whole site in which up to 300 parking spaces are developed and owned by the developer but long-term ways back to the city to operate. So we're trying to both see what the market will bear for the community's vision but also give enough flexibility that a developer with another creative idea that we haven't thought of yet can bring that to the table. That's the general concept. Have I missed anything significant? Very well explained. So really what we're looking for tonight is just your feedback on that. As thank you for at the beginning of the meeting adding that agenda addendum for potential executive session. If you wanna hear more about the potential to negotiate once we receive RFP responses, we're happy to go on to executive session to talk to you about it but we're pretty far from that effort at this point. And I also wanna reiterate that we are still very committed to working with the Winooski hotel group. So if they want to come back to the table or participate in this RFP process, they are more than welcome to do so. Thank you. So what we're looking at here is option one which aligns with the vote that, what people saw before they approved the vote for the new garage bond. Option two reads to me like, maybe a hotel doesn't work, they wanna do something else. And then option three is very different. I think what comes to my mind is there was in the past this dispute about parking, right? And so if we create the new garage, does this still keep the rest of our downtown business owners satisfied about the parking situation? And what is the financial impact of option three where we are leasing back the parking and operating it? I'd like to hear more about that. Sure. So both of those are great questions. So taking them one at a time, the city has committed to property owners to build additional parking infrastructure. So any of the three of these result in more parking inventory downtown. I think that whatever you decide to do with 70 in the future as long as there is new parking inventory included will satisfy the needs of the downtown property owners including the new parking demand that will be developed by the redevelopment of the bottom of 70. Does that answer? Yes, yes. And then to the long-term lease question that's an excellent point and something that you would need to look at over as we negotiated a development agreement and a parking agreement that would be required as a result of this RFP and in any long-term parking budget before you executed those agreements. What we have heard from the developers to date is that the cost estimate that was done on the garage as currently designed, we could pay for the debt service and the operations costs of that garage with the contracts we either currently have in place or anticipate having in place with the new users. If we long-term lease it back, part of that negotiation will be this is the amount of money we have for our parking agreements. We don't have more than that to pay for. And then the question for the developer is there are some, they are pro forma and what their pro forma will handle. So while we can borrow money at a lower interest rate, a developer may say, well we'll borrow that construction money at a higher interest rate but we know we have X number of dollars to invest up front so we can put that upfront, buy down the cost and not have that long-term debt but have a guaranteed revenue stream for 20 or 30 years the life of our initial investment in this infrastructure. So what this RFP is really hoping to do is kind of test that market, test the waters, see what the development community can put together. And what is our role? You know you're gonna receive, typically you receive the proposal's staff would review those and bring something to recommendation. We're really opening it up here for an option that is very far from what community vision currently has agreed to. What's our role or recourse there to say what you propose really just isn't in line even if it sort of meets the RFP requirements? Can you say that one more time? So you receive a proposal that meets the requirements of what you've outlined in the RFP and then we feel or the community feels like this is not a good idea, what can we do? Okay, got it. So an RFP much like a Bonvo is not obligation to do something. It is essentially a permission to do it. So just because we issue an RFP and see what the market will bring us does not obligate us to award. And in fact, there's a clause in the RFP that says we reserve the right, well one, we reserve the right to negotiate. Two, we reserve the right to reject all the proposals if they're not in the community's vision. I think it's written in here three different ways actually. And then additionally, we do intend, maybe Heather, you could do an overview of the process you've outlined because part of that process is very clearly in the RFP and in their response period to have opportunities to sit with the developers and answer their questions and help them understand what the community's vision has been. I just want to call to your attention under section method of award selection criteria. It specifically says decisions to sell the property are at the sole discretion of city council. This RFP process shall not create a binding obligation on the part of city council to sell the property unless and until a purchase and sale agreement has been executed and all pertinent city charter and policy requirements have been satisfied. If a written agreement cannot be negotiated with the selected bidder within a reasonable period of time after selection, the city reserves the right to terminate negotiations and select another bidder from among the other finalists. So that's just one place where everyone says it, multiple places. And in terms of walking you through the evaluation process, all complete submittals will be reviewed by a staff team. So that will be probably Jesse, John, myself and Eric Roelwald. So we'll go through those and come up with a slate of finalists and the top three finalists will be called in to have an interview with us before we make recommendations on that. We'll be looking at evaluation criteria that include completeness of the proposal, qualifications and experience of the project team and proven Vermont developers will receive the highest ratings on that particular criteria. The proposed approach to development aligns with city goals. So again, that's a place where we're weighing that. The contractor team demonstrates a clear vision of the proposed development and demonstrates possession of the resources necessary to successfully complete the project. The proposed development maximizes the development potential of the site and proposes the highest and best use of the property. And that really leaves us an opportunity. There may be things we haven't thought of that may actually be even more aligned with the city's value. So it leaves us that opportunity and ultimately the benefit to the city of the proposed term of sale for the property. So once we've gone through that process, then we're able to bring a recommendation forward to you and you can review that and make a final decision on that. And we can begin negotiations. And again, if negotiations are not working out the way that we want them to, there's nothing stopping us from moving to the next one. Thank you. One other thing I just want to call out that is different about this process than the process we have been going under to this state is that with the Winooski Hotel Group as a development partner, what we'd always, what the city had previously committed to was a land swap between lot nine that he currently owns and the bottom of lot 70. Under this scenario, we will sell that subdivided or the whole lot to somebody else. So there's a revenue stream there that we haven't taken into consideration in any existing budget or projection thus far. In some of the scenarios, it talks about different options where the bidder could either construct the garage or the city could construct the garage. Is there a cost savings to be had if we allow the bidder to take that on? John, do you want to answer that? Yeah, it depends. It really depends what the package they submit is going to look like. So again, I think it gets to reviewing all the RFP responses and going through the performance and see which package makes the most economical sense for the city. So it could just be preference for some construction companies that they would want to be managing both projects? Is that why we're putting it? So for example, like you could have a CM that wants to take advantage of that 5% sort of overhead and profit. And so their overhead and profits can be much larger on say a garage and hotel project versus just doing the hotel. So that could be desirable for a CM that wants to take on both projects. And why that's desirable is that if they're going to make a profit on building something for us as well, they may put some of that profit into their offer to purchase the property. So the dollars would come back to us somewhere else in the pro forma. But we don't know that until we see the pro forma. One of the things John and I in going through this process with the developer to date, one of the things that has been a preference for us is having the same CM and subs on the site at the same time. It's, it is a large site. It has a lot of development potential, but when you're trying to build two different structures it's actually not that big for bringing in cranes and whatnot. So I think we have seen a preference thus far in having one person or one, not person, one entity build both, but we don't feel so strongly about that that we want to make that a requirement of the RFP. If a developer wants to do something else that's more in the community's vision then we want to leave the door open for that. For the parking lease that could occur under option three, is there, it seems like we could be opening the door to problems down the road if the parking lease is not renewable. Like is that an vision that we have a long term first right of refusal renewal option to keep those leases going or could we end up jeopardizing our parking agreements 20, 30 years down the road? If the developer or the owner at that time says not to lease back to the city, those parking spaces is that a realistic risk that we run under option three? So yes, in theory, I think the park, any long term leased back agreement we would bring to you would be for the life of our current longest parking agreement and for the life of our debt service commitments. So we would cover ourselves and our ability to, if we were taking on the debt and needing that revenue stream we would take on that risk and then we would require that that capacity was available through our current parking agreements. Could we be in a position to ensure that that garage uses the same access methods or program or whatever so that all of our parking is aligned for users? Yeah, so that's the advantage of having, of long term leasing it back to ourselves that it would be part of the total inventory plan of parking in the city. Right, since we've been operating it. Yeah, so we would be operating it, we would be maintaining it, we would be enforcing parking there. And we think that there's still a need for a parking garage if a hotel is not the entity that ends up on that lot. I know obviously parking is at a premium down there but I think a big piece of why voters approved it was because there was gonna be hotel guests coming and if it's, I don't know, like a concert hall or whatever ends up there that may not be using it all the time is there still that need for parking? So that's a great question. So I think there is still, certainly what we hear from the downtown property owners is that there is still very much inventory need to support what's current, the uses currently in the downtown district. The advantage of the design of the garage currently is a hotel is a very high user of parking. So for a hotel that could fit on that site, they need about 100 parking spaces, about 100 parking spaces. If there was a housing bill I'd put up, likely they would need closer to 50 or 60 spaces. I'm speaking very rough numbers at this point. A lot of determinants. We don't know how many units. Yeah. But the way the parking is designed, it's in half floors so we could actually go down, we could build a floor, half floor less depending on the use going in at the bottom of 70. Does that make sense? I think so, yeah. Any other questions? So these are really great questions and I just wanna be clear that you are not committing yourselves to anything tonight other than going out to the market and seeing what might be viable. Anything that is viable will need to come back to you both for approval of development agreements, approval of parking agreements, approval of a land transfer, all of that. So you will have many opportunities to keep poking holes in this. This is a really great discussion. All we're looking for tonight is essentially a head nod of yes, you want us to go out and see what the market will bear. Before we do that, I have a question. Sorry, I wanna know, is this gonna delay this project? Is it already delayed now because we have to redevelop it, we have to rebit it? Or is this gonna affect the TIF bond at all? So that's a good question, Mike. So I would say yes, this is already delayed with the Winooski Hotel Group walking away essentially in May after the March bond vote. Our initial thought with them is that we would be in final engineering now to be under construction late fall or early spring, we're not there yet and it will take us probably that much time just to bring on a new development partner and get back to final engineering. So yes, I think it is a delay. I think it is our best chance to move something forward. I think our other option is to just hold onto the property as a parking lot as it is now and see what the hotel developer does on law eight. We are, Angela and I have been looking at the TIF projections and we're still very confident that even if this, it doesn't come on the grand list for another year past what we had previously projected, we will still meet our one-to-one debt service coverage ratio in the TIF and be able to retire the debt on time. And as I said earlier, one of the things we have never envisioned in that TIF projection is the sale of lot 70 and this will come with a sale price and that proceed will be committed back to the TIF fund. Okay, cause I know there's some people out there that's waiting for that and there was a sign of relief when everything got passed in March. I agree. But now I think if they start reading into this, they might get a little nervous now. Yeah, it's disappointed, it certainly is disappointed. Are there any questions, concerns from the audience? So yeah, so I would entertain a motion to approve the redevelopment of lot 70 requests for proposals as we move in. Second. Motion by Mike, second by Amy. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, John. Thanks, Eric. Our next item for the agenda is a job description for an assistant fire marshal, fire captain. Chief, how would you really do it in us? I'll come up to Julie. Pulling Julia up to all of us. Yeah, more of support. Do you want me to start? I'll work. Go for it. You know it's- Good evening. Yeah, so we sent out a kind of re-updated job description as I indicated in the memo. Courtney Brown has been our assistant fire marshal is moving on to other opportunities. So it leaves a huge void in our inspection, the fire marshal process that we do here, the strong rental registry, the commercial inspection, the municipal code enforcement side. So I indicated in here with her leaving, we kind of looked at what the needs are and our department now is not just code or fire, it's code and fire. So the opportunity presented itself to have the current fire marshal that does not respond to fire to just start to respond to fire during the day and be part of our emergency response. So as I indicated, it will further strengthen our ability as we move forward with possibly bringing a planned review here into the city and that work is all very much interconnected with what we do with fire and what we'd be doing with a planned review. So I guess I would open it up to questions or thoughts. I mean, we lined out this year's budget, FY20. Also in the memo we indicated this was not contemplated, this was not planned for. I know it was certainly, it wasn't something Courtney was actively looking for, it's an opportunity that we should all be very proud of. She's kind of done very well here and is someone that others seek. So we should be proud in that as much as it hurts to see her leave. It's a great opportunity for her that she just can't pass up. So we lined up FY20 and then tried to forecast FY21 moving forward. Again, we don't open it up to questions. So sorry, Julie and I are bringing you another document. So I'm so sorry for the scuttling wrap. So the upshot here is that with this staffing change and the opportunity to, you know, the best practice is always re-looking at the positions. We're making two positions that used to have a slight differential in grades, essentially the same grade and doing so within the current budget. That's what she used. So what is in the policy requirements is for you to approve the title, purpose, and funding source of these job descriptions. So what Julie just handed you is that purpose statement and it's planned for those two assistant fire marshals and fire captains and again, done within this year's budget allocation. So I think of course we have financial questions, but first I wanted to ask you about the position itself. You know, what is the, as you said, the current assistant fire marshal does not respond to calls. What is the impact of continuing with the new hire still being in that position if they did not respond to calls as well? So it limits what, at any given time, if one of us are on vacation, so essentially it leaves two of us here in the city to respond to daytime calls. Certainly we have our valued part-time staff that are here when they're able to, meaning if they're able to leave their full-time job or if they happen to be on vacation or be in the area, but we can't predict that. So during the day, we try to maintain two of us here, that's myself and the current assistant fire marshal, fire captain that we created a while ago. And we end up with days that assist, it's just the assistant fire marshal, captain, if I'm away at a meeting or if they're on vacation, it's just me as fire chief and that makes it pretty difficult to respond to calls. Do-able, but again, we rely very heavily on our mutually partners. So this would bring a third person in the mix to help create some depth and some stability in our daytime response and beyond. And if I could just add one thing to that, because the chief serves, all the leaders in the city are working leaders, but because the chief is on that one or two alarm response, it's not unusual for the chief to be pulled out of the meeting to respond to a call during the day when we're trying to do project planning or develop new procedures or whatnot. So this would allow him to fall down when both of them were on to the number three C and hopefully more often be able to stay in that kind of high level policy program management position. And furthermore, I would say that again, their work is very connected. One of the big challenges that we had with Courtney being on fires, she's working with a new developer, doing a several million dollar project. And those are, you know, as that project, we're there every week. She's there every week. And there's lots of decisions that are made that are 34, hopefully 30, 40 year decisions of that building, hopefully it's there that long. So things like how we get a fire truck in and out and how we connect to the building's FDC, the fire department connection, how the sprinkler system works. That's all stuff that firefighters, it's all interconnected, our knowledge. And Courtney did a fabulous job in trying to bridge that. But this again, would create some more depth and consistency. Is this hybrid position something that's pretty common in other departments? Or is it more generally separated out? So other fire departments. So, you know, there's no one around us that has fire and code connected like we do. Certainly the fire marshal positions, you know, the city of Burlington, their fire marshal's respond to fire calls at different levels. There's a battalion chief that's the fire marshal in Burlington. And then they have two or three. So depending on what the alarm is, they're pulled into the mix. Burlington has 22 people to send before they have to tap their fire marshal. You know, South Burlington has a fire marshal on. And again, he responds to fire calls. So we are unique in the way that we tie code enforcement and fire together in our community risk reduction vision. But we're not, you know, we're not trying to be unique in having these positions be dual emergency response and be the fire marshal in that role. I think again, sorry. I think it's also really important to note that we are one of the few communities in the state that actually does a rental and commercial registry. That is not the case in the vast majority of Vermont communities. And what Winooski has leveraged far before my time and before John's time and before Julie's time, not before Carol's time. It was her anniversary yesterday, I should have called it. Yeah, that's okay. Is use the rental registry staff as a way to not need a professional, not need a full time staffed fire department. So because we have staff who are in the city doing inspections, making sure we're ensuring the quality of life for our residents, making sure we're reducing the risk for our community. We also have first responders who are available to respond when there's alarm but otherwise have other work to do. In most cities that have that kind of daytime response that aren't relying solely on volunteers and on call folks, you're paying a full time staff to do that. We're not doing that here. Was Courtney in the fire department? No, that's what we've said is not on fire. Not, okay, so I'm looking, so we're gonna combine the fire marshal and the fire captain. I'm looking at your chart here. You have two fire captains on this chart. Do we lose a fire captain or are we adding a fire captain? We're adding a captain's position. We're adding a captain's position. And we also have a captain for operations. That's what I was looking at. Yeah, that's the part time, you're free. So I think that the spread of information, you know, having less siloing, having more cross training is really important and what you've described here about kind of leveraging the French Registry staff with that. I am concerned about the funding that's proposed here. You know, there's this item here about inequities in current billing, that we have some large properties not participating in the annual fee that public building registry does. I understand that's primarily the Winniesky Housing Authority. And that they have in the past not been really on board with participating. If we don't receive that, if we don't receive that money in the next fiscal year, what is our fallback then to continue to fund this position? So a couple of clarifications. It's not just Winniesky Housing Authority. There's some large properties that when this program was created, it was with essentially one person and then went to two people. And so some of the large properties are on kind of a rolling year to year. They may have 200 units in the building but they're only paying for 45. And that's where I'm saying the inequities that we need to have a discussion with you folks of how you wanna address that. It was never been, there's not a lot of backup for me when I look into this program, whether it's the inequities in the payments or the billing or the commercial inspection piece that I also mentioned in here. There's not a lot of documentation that I can go to and try to figure out why. So we're trying to build that and certainly that is something that will come to you folks. By adding this other fire responder allows me to not use per diem people, per diem shifts and so we identify some large savings there in our part time and our per diem wages. Right now we hire somebody in on Mondays because the current fire marshal, assistant fire marshal captain works Tuesdays through Saturday. So every Sunday and every Monday, we're paying per diem people to be here. By creating this position, those would go away, it would be part of, these folks would be part of the daytime response. So there's savings there. And is there gonna be any impact on the rental registry side of things? Are we, it sounds like what's happening is we're not actually inspecting every unit in the city and the schedule that we would like to be ideally. Does this help us get closer to that? So it does, it adds eight hours a week. Courtney was 32, this position would be 40. And we know that bringing firehouse software online, it's created some efficiencies that we are now two years into firehouse starting to realize through, instead of handwriting reports, we bring the iPads, we're able to email their inspections, we're able to, our follow ups are automatically scheduled. So we're touching those pieces of paper a lot less and improving our customer service. And those efficiencies, we will turn back into more inspections. You know, the ratio of fire versus inspections here, there's not a community that can grow like Windowski does. And I say that with 29 years of doing fire. Our inspections are growing. We did about 1278 unit inspections last year, whether it was residential, commercial follow ups and our fire calls continue to drop. So we're increasing the numbers of housing, we're increasing the population, the traffic's more. Why are those fire calls going down? It's not by luck, in my opinion, in my professional opinion, over five or six years, we start to see the trend drop. It's because of the programs, the inspection programs we're doing and the vision that you all are supporting with the community risk reduction. That's what's keeping a lid on the times we need to roll out the door with those super big expensive pieces of equipment. It's excellent to hear. The commercial inspection program, is that gonna involve the state too or is it just gonna be the Windowski fire marshals? So it's just Windowski. So it's a lot like the residential landlord registry program. So each landlord pays a hundred bucks a unit annually. And the commercial building inspection program has been on the books for years, almost as long as the landlord registry program. And we picked it up about two years ago. And again, I mentioned in here, we're close and with Courtney leaving, it's gonna be a little delayed. So Courtney's been about a year and a half of doing commercial inspections with what's on our books. So it's done by square footage and a category. There's five categories. But again, I was referring to there's no backup for me to go figure out what those categories are. So if you're over 2,000 square feet and we think you're category that's in the, that's what you're getting built. So we've gone back into NFPA and picked up a piece of, you know, a piece out of NFPA, which is a national recognized code and essentially applied that to the commercial registry and stood it side by side with what's in the ordinance to make sure we're not going way left or way right. And it allows me to bring to you guys very soon some very well documented structure to that program that I feel will be fair to the business and will continue your vision of community risk reduction. The inspections we're doing, we're doing matter. I mean, we find stuff. We're, I mean, it's amazing what we find. And I say find, it's, and we're educating. And to have two fire marshals in the city when there's a need, you're saying that one person doing a fire marshal job in the city, they can't handle the load. We do over 1,200 inspections and then the property complaints. There's a lot of things coming down the line. There's two major things, Act 48 from the state, which is they're trying to create a rental registry program statewide. We're way ahead of the curve, but we are part of their reporting structure now where we have to go back one year and report. I spent the day with it and it's 42 points that we have to report to them as they consider rolling this out. So that's, again, it's more work for us. We have most of the data. Next year is a mandatory recycling of food scraps. That's gonna fall on the municipal code enforcement. That's gonna be a big deal here in the city. How we roll that out, how we enforce it, how we educate, certainly we have partners that we can lean on. And another thing I would say is the work we do is we could go write tickets all day. I could write you violations. My philosophy, and certainly the council's philosophy has never been that. It's about figuring out where the person's at. Understanding where that person may be at at any given time that we encounter. Trying to educate and trying to get them resources through our external partners. And that is an investment in time, but that's a pretty important piece of what we do here. Chief guy, just to clarify, you're not adding a second fire marshal position, you're adding a second captive position. And assistant fire marshal. But there's already an assistant fire marshal slash fire captain and an assistant fire marshal. Correct. And that person is the second one's getting elevated to be a slash position. So what are we doing to work with two assistant fire marshal? I mean, technically three, I jump in when I need to. And all three of us have, I mean, we're all certified building inspectors. We're all part of your health officer, they're deputy health officers. We're all building inspectors. There's a whole host and there's lots of reasons to have those appointments. Because it just again allows us to bring resources to whoever we're encountering, whatever that problem may be. Just the fire marshal, I may struggle to be in the department of health code and find you some resources. And do you see any potential negative impacts from reducing the per diem part time funds that you have available on our existing, like if we don't recover costs from inequities in current billing or the commercial inspection program and making those cuts this year to those part time and per diem dollars going to affect the department next year? No, I mean, certainly we're trying to, you know, the part time stuff that we rely on heavily. Meaning the folks that we know on a national trend are usually gone from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. That's when someone usually leaves for their full time job and deals with family stuff. You know, they're usually worried about work. They're not gonna respond to the typical fire call at 6 a.m. until they get back in the city and get their family settled for the evening, 6 p.m. That's a national, it's kind of a national benchmark. So we've spent a lot of time looking at the data or call volume day to day time and tried to specifically plug in the staffing with the per diem. You know, we all have left here at four o'clock on a regular basis. Well, my heaviest call volumes are four to 6 p.m. Seven days a week. So it doesn't make sense that we all leave here at four o'clock because we're not gonna, our part time folks are gonna feel very successful. Again, they're not available usually until 6 p.m. if they're just not here to answer those calls. Not good for them, not good for people that are calling us for service. So the per diem folks allows us to plug some of those holes. This allows us to plug that hole but also adds some additional access to our part time employees to people that have a little better understanding of what's going on here in the city day to day. Part time people are someone that's certified somewhere else, comes here for a shift and then they go home. It's a value. I'm not trying to downplay its value. But this position would understand a lot more what's going on in the city. So if anything, this provides consistency in that fire response rather than per diem which can have a much higher turnover rate. Somebody does it for as long as they can then family and other issues come up and then they're not a per diem firefighter anymore. Their own choice. So what we're being asked today is to approve of this sort of job change as well as there's additional funding but coming through revenue and existing funding. So it's not necessarily a budget impact. Are there any questions or concerns from the public? If there are no more questions up here, I would entertain a motion to approve the job description of the assistant fire and commercial fire captain. So moved. Second. Motion by Hal Sik and my mic all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you. Great questions. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is the AFSCME contract. Julie, you have this for me, David. I can start and then you can fill in. Of course. I know you will. So when we sat down to begin negotiating this contract it had only been about 18 months since the last contract was signed. So we didn't, there weren't a lot of changes. The majority of the changes are really clean up. They're not super substantive. We did also make changes to make the current, the contract congruent with current law and also some decisions that happened in the Supreme Court around union dues and union membership. And then of course we codified the salary for the next three years, which you can see in the contract that you have in front of you. Well thanks for negotiating with that. You know I look through here to the red line changes and as you mentioned they're pretty operational and basic. There was one question I had specifically it's page 22 of the document itself refers to peer-mitting of time. And I wasn't sure what that meant. Let me find the line. Let her see. It's under, okay yeah. Let's me see. This is for one question. Oh the old seat, yeah yeah. For all work performed on the sixth or seventh day of their regular work week, however there shall be no peer-mitting of overtime. I'm not clear what that means for moving that. So I think the simplest way to describe the way peer-mitting of overtime happens is that employees take turns to take time off but then also have overtime at the end of the week. So in the way that this contract is written if you take vacation in the same week that you work 32 hours so if you take eight hours of vacation on Monday and then you work the rest of the week or you work over, your vacation time counts towards overtime. So the statement about peer-mitting of overtime means you can't say to your buddy essentially why don't you take Monday off and I'll take Tuesday off and then we'll both end up with overtime at the end of the week because we'll switch shifts around and that's in such a way that that happens. So that essentially what we were seeing and I think we addressed that in the last round of contract negotiations as well. Thank you for clarifying that. And to that end, are there other details that you all want to clarify about? Yeah, I mean I saw some adjustments on overtime holiday pay and on call, the color adjustment, salary. Everything here looked pretty standard. I mean we looked to really clarify things partly for payroll processing so there'd be fewer questions and how we execute the contract really. Any questions or concerns from the public? No more from the council? I would entertain a motion to approve the SB contract. So moved. Second. Motion by Amy, second by Mike. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Thank you. Next item of business is approval. A grant from PSEIF for police and public work safety equipment. Oh, I didn't even see you back there. Thank you. I am hiding. I'm a little under the weather. Good evening. I see a lot of faces I don't know and don't know me. My name is Steven Vova. I work for the police department downstairs. I've worked here for about four years now. A lot of people probably haven't seen me since the last four years that I've worked the midnight overnight shift. So not really around too much during the day. We don't want to see you there. Yes, yes, it's probably a good thing. So recently the police department recognized a couple items one of which we actually just don't have all together and another of which needs updating or just replacements. We came across the PSEIF grant, which is a program for members of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns and for some community members that might not be familiar with it. PSEIF is the Property and Casualty Inter-Municipal Fund for the Vermont League of Cities and Towns members. So the items that the police department is going to be requesting or applying through this grant is a wall-mounted emergency eyewash station. Typically the eyewash station is used pretty self-explanatory, but most cases besides emergencies, individuals that we come in contact with that might need decontamination from OC or commonly referred to as MACE, but not just that, police officers, staff members in general commonly do encounter other things in the field and require medical attention for the eyes and we currently do not have an eyewash station altogether. Both items are found at most PDs, police departments, I'm sorry, they're not unique in any way. Most police departments, it's common practice to have these. The grant in particular, the PASIF grant, is specific to risk management, facility improvements and also reducing liability especially. Currently the drug take-back box, the other item that we're gonna be requesting is in very poor condition and I believe that's a large liability on our part as well as the city's part. It's not very secure, the security features are very minimal and I think we're kind of fortunate so far that we haven't had any incidents as far as individuals from the community are such taking things out of that box because at times it's not very secure. The drawer that inserts the items is called a hopper and it doesn't have a lock on it and it malfunctions quite a bit. Also it's placed in the lobby of the police department but in that particular area of the lobby there is no surveillance cameras so it's kind of hard for dispatch and other members that are viewing our security cameras to even see that area when individuals access that area. I just wanna maybe pass over real quick. The, I do have just the face sheet of the grant, if I may just pass it out. That just gives a breakdown of the items and the cost. So the two items are obviously somewhat costly which is why it was good. We came across the passive grants. The passive grant is a 50% match grant so essentially we would be responsible for 50% of the cost. So the cost of both items totaling installation, shipping and the cost of the items altogether is 56.53. We would be responsible for 50% of that which breaks down to 28, 26, 50. The items, the security features of an updated drug tape box, back box are significant. They would allow members of the police department to keep a much better eye on it. It has much better locking mechanisms. It has much better security features that would greatly reduce liability for the city. So I do also have just a couple of photos just in general, if the members don't really know, just to get a better idea. I wanna talk about, this is a very kind of generic drug tape back box in that photo. So we would have it upgraded with the security features. It would also have the city's updated logo on it. The company does that for us as well. Yankee Plumbing, the local plumbing company on Main Street would be doing the installation and has given us an estimate for the installation which I've submitted to the city manager's office. So they have submitted a quote for that but the costs are all included in these two, the two line item lines here. So, excuse me. The deadline for the grant is August 31st. It's an annual grant as long as the funds are available for the Vermont League of Cities and Towns members. So it's something we're hopefully gonna to utilize in the future. It's fairly new to myself. This is the first year I've had any involvement with it just with retirements and such. New people have been tasked with new things and hopefully this is something I'm gonna proceed with in the future and hopefully identify some other avenues and grants and such to help the police department and the city as well with funding, fundings of items that we need. The grants is also a one submission per year per city grant. So with that being said, we always annually have to make sure that other departments within the city either wants to be included or do not need any items or equipment as such. I know that the Department of Public Works is gonna include some items and John here is gonna discuss those items if there's no questions for myself. So with these safety and security upgrades, will it have a positive impact on any of our insurance rates? That I'm not sure of. I'm not, I can't speak to that. I'm not sure if insurance right now either examines something such as that or. So that's the goal of the passive grant program because we get our liability and turn through passive where eligible for these grant funds. It's very possible. Stop that our insurance rates will change because we've done these two things. It's that these two things have been identified by us and passive agrees that they are likely to reduce our liability in the future. So because we have an eye wash station, perhaps our workers' cop claims will go down in the future, for example. So it's not, it's not, we do this and our rates go down, it's a preventative measure. I also, from a big picture, wanna comment and thank Bova for being here tonight not only cause we got him out during the summer, which is amazing, but clearly he has done an excellent job. This is also a demonstration of a change that we as an organization have made over time standing up a safety committee and getting the humans who are doing the work in our teams to identify areas where we can make safety improvements. So the police officers have identified these areas through the safety committee and have identified as Bova just outlined the funding source for those and instead of us kind of top down saying this is what we're gonna do, those ideas are really coming up, which is much better for all. Right. So thank you, Steve. Thank you. Yeah, the grant, it's very specific to reducing liability or the potential of liability in claims. Common practice right now, whether it's staff or an individual that is in our custody, if there are any medical issues with the eyes, we have nothing in the police department to remedy that, aid them very quickly and provide better care, which an eyewash station would do. The two items seem very mundane, but as far as a liability standpoint, I think we're kind of fortunate, especially with the issues we have in today's society all around with prescription medications being abused so much. I'm surprised. And I think it's just because the community isn't aware of the kind of the failing integrity of our drug take back box in that lobby. And it's something that's in there 24 hours a day. There is a, the DEA on a federal level has a special day each year. That is a big day for individuals to bring in their unwanted medications, but we commonly have individuals from the community coming in all the time to drop unwanted medications that they do not want in their homes because of obvious reasons, if individuals realize they're in their homes and they're at risk of people to try and take those. So it is all about reducing liability and those two items would, I think, greatly reduce our liability. Is that takeaway box going to be relocated to the existing location of the security box or is this going to be an outside? Because they're looking at an outside in the lobby. It would stay in the lobby. It would just go in the very same location, I believe as the current one, I believe as far as the space we have available for it. And I believe if it was placed outside somewhere, it would certainly be a little too accessible, I think for the general public. What else getting? Yeah, it would go right in the same spot it's in now. That decision wouldn't ultimately be up to me. It would be up to the chief of police, but I believe it would just go in the same spot and just replace the aging one now. Thank you. Absolutely. The manhole toppers? Everyone stole my thunder. I got a lot. Do you know how many pitchers? Yeah, I know, right? No, so I do just want to mention that, so we did pursue this last year. It's an annual offering. And I think historically we've gone off of this grant for safety related equipment. And now that we have this safety committee stand that stood up, it's a good opportunity to kind of assess what we need and help our workers and help community members reduce our risk. Yeah, on the DPW side, we have identified a manhole cover lift system. I still have pictures of it, but as you can imagine, it's sort of a cherry picker system that helped protect our staff. We have had some injuries from, you know, there's large manhole covers coming off. And most recently this summer we had someone injured a toe injury because of the manholes. So that's one that was identified through the safety committee. I will mention, I don't know if we talked about, there's a $5,000 cap on this grant. So if they're, you know, depending on passive and what they may or may not approve, we'll have to look at it budget wise if we do go over that five grand threshold. We do have safety line items in our operations budget that we look at during budgeting season that, you know, as we know we're gonna go after these grants, we add a little additional money to those budget lines for this. So I got nothing else. These guys covered it. I didn't know. You had the $5,000 cap though. I did miss that. Thank you. And that $5,000 cap is direct plus cost share like the grant funds plus the city cost share. Yeah, I mean, essentially it would, so as far as the line items, you'd be asking for a total, you'd be able to ask for $10,000 worth of items and you'd split that difference and they would cover the $5,000 max cap. Okay, so it's $5,000 direct funds from the grant and you'd have to match $5,000. Correct, correct. And how much do we think the man will cover with us this time of the day? It's $2600. Oh, oh, it's in the package. I'm sorry. It's just like in the paper. Any questions from the public? I would entertain a motion to approve the grant from passive for police and public works safety equipment. So who? Second. Should my mic second by Jim? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you very much. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Yeah, I should. Before we get this party. Thanks. You like that one. You like that one. Everything's fine. Thanks. Mike Myers. Nice meeting you. Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming. Nice to meet you. Thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming. Nice to meet you. Okay. Right, so our next item of business is discussion of the goal update from our housing strategic vision area. As Jesse mentioned, we aim to have each vision, each strategic area provide a recurring regular update on goals progress. We are here with housing. Good evening. I have been asked to apologize for Jessica Bridge, who is one of our housing commissioners who just had to leave, unfortunately. So you won't get the pleasure of meeting her this evening, but I do have Robert Millar with me, who is the chair of our housing commission. So I've given you a memo, and this is a much longer memo than you'll usually see for one of these reports because this is our first presentation to this council looking at the 2019, 2020 policy priorities and strategies. I wanted to give you a chance to have a little update on the background of what the housing commission has done today. So we're not starting from ground zero here. We've done a lot of data analysis. So I wanted to give you a high level idea of what data we've looked at and what we've found thus far. The matrix that you're looking at here is pretty consistent with what you'll see throughout these updates. So you'll see the policy goal that we set at our meeting and then the priorities that you've established for the commissions to go forward, or for staff to go forward with or the commissions to go forward with, as the case may be. In each case, we report with color blocks on what the status of the work is on those. So proceeding is planned, proceeding but slower than planned, started but not proceeding well, or not yet started. So you'll see this pretty consistently for all of these updates. And I think what I'm gonna do is while I have my housing commissioner here, I think I'm gonna have him kind of walk you through the data analysis that we've done and the key findings that we've had today as a housing commission. Boy, it's a little later than I anticipated being here, but so I hope you had a chance to look this over. Heather is great at these memos, she really keeps our meetings functional. So if you had to take, how to chance to take a look, I don't know how much I'll dig in other than just the top line items. Number one, Winooski's far outperforming the region for affordable housing, both in home values and in rental pricing. So looking at, where did we find census data? For the most part, you can see we're coming in quite a bit lower than the county average. The other thing that we looked at is, John had spoken a little bit earlier about the rental registry. So we are uniquely positioned to be able to get very specific data about rental housing pricing here. So over the last two years, this will be my third year, I've been asking landlords to voluntarily provide that information and we've had unbelievably high response rate. They've been really great. So it's about 70% of all the units have been reported. So that gives us really, really good data. Yes. Affordable, item two, affordable rental units for households earning less than 80% AMI, make up a much larger share of total housing in Winooski than our neighboring communities in Chittenden County as a whole. Again, much of this is from the, 53% of the city's rental units are actually subsidized affordable units. She just pointed that out. That is a very important number to keep in mind. And again, far higher than surrounding communities in Chittenden County as a whole. And this is also from rental registry data or? That is a combination of the housing needs assessment that was done in 2016 and also census data. So item three, Winooski median rental rates fell below the HUD fair market rents for 2018. So that's the most recent data we would have available at this point. But if you take a look at the chart, you can see that. If I can answer something, I'm just gonna add, just for your comparison, the, you can see the Winooski median rents. So a low income household would be, which would qualify as below 80% area median income. They would make, just so you have it in the back of your mind, 53, $52,380 a year. So below that would be able to afford up to $1,309 a rent per month or in mortgage per month. So those would be people like firefighters, nurses, teachers. That's who you're talking about, about that range. So following up on that, there's, we found there's a gap in housing available for moderate income households, which is 80 to 120% AMI. So that right in the middle of there. And item five, housing in Winooski has significant health and life safety issues based on rental registry, housing code inspections. This is a very important thing that we found. And thankfully that we're able to find again, thanks to the rental registry. Poverty is highly concentrated. Item six is poverty is highly concentrated in certain block groups in the city, which you can see on the next page. That's right. Yes. So those are our census tracks and the level of poverty in the various tracks. And you can see where the concentrations are on that. So we'll go into the goals or... Yeah, yeah, if that's... Okay. Can I just ask a question? Yeah. Absolutely. What is the gentrification indicator? Is there a level that we should be monitoring for on this map? Yeah, I actually took this from a different presentation, which is the gentrification monitoring, which is why it has that banner on the top of it. So that it really wasn't specifically talking to that, but within people who study gentrification, study concentration of poverty, generally say that at about 40% of individuals within a census tract or a block group, when 40% are in poverty, you see impacts to quality of life in a wide variety of ways. So it could be school performance, it's crime, it's just a broad spectrum of the things that you would expect in stressed neighborhoods. So some people would argue that's at 30% that you start to see those impacts. So that was the really why we were specifically looking at the concentration of poverty within those areas. And in terms of gentrification, the reason that I was comparing it is because one of the problems that has been talked about in comparison with gentrification is which is a bigger problem, gentrification or concentration of poverty. And so I brought it up as part of that conversation. And is that a presentation that this council has yet? You will see that presentation in January when I give it annually. So we will continue to monitor for that. Thanks. Can I ask a question about the finding number four? Is this going to verify my assumption that finding that gap in that 80 to 120% AMIs based on knowing what the rental rates are and computing that there are just fewer that's weighted more towards the 80% and lower? Like how does that determine that there's a kind of a gap based on our population and the rentals available? There are a couple of things. So there's a smaller percentage of the overall housing that is within the range that would be affordable for that income level. But in addition to that, when you have a higher than average percentage of the housing that is specifically income restricted because it is subsidized affordable housing, that won't allow people who are at 81% access to that housing. So with 53% of rental housing being specifically income restricted, that leaves a smaller percentage that's going to be available for people who are above that level. Okay, so based on that data that we've looked at we're going way back now. But some of the goals that we came up with, wow, going back again to January of last year now. But maintain current level of subsidized housing units based on two and three. So given that we do have such a large percentage at the very least we wanna maintain that baseline. Rehabilitate existing subsidized housing to improve the quality of the rental stock. So looking at the high level of life safety issues that seem like something that we wanted to focus on. Encouraging construction of rentals, affordable to household, households earning 80 to 120 cent area median income. So based on that gap. Now I would wanna say on that though, as we've gone along, that was our initial observation and our goal. But there's no, we haven't really found a way that makes sense to encourage that. And in fact, that's where most of the new building is anyway. So it's kind of fallen off as a main goal because it's just not, because it is what is happening. That's where most of the new construction is coming in. And on allowing that kind of new construction, I think, and there are several things that we've put in place that have made it more likely that people would be developing that housing here. And we need to be part of that being the neighborhood development area form-based code with the expedited permitting process. It's more predictable. It can be done in a faster period of time. And so I think that allows people to come in fairly certain of what their costs will be as developers. So continuing to be as much as possible, a development friendly community allows us to encourage that kind of development. Yeah, I guess that's the point that I was making was that as a commission, we've kind of moved past trying to figure things out since that seems to be what is happening. Yeah. Are there other programs that are encouraging that development as well, aside from form-based codes? Or is that pretty much the way that that we get 120 scheme bills? I think people want to develop a market rate housing. And so much of that, because we have a community that is known for being affordable, I think that's considered the market rate sweet spot in Winooski. So becoming a, being a development friendly community, that's where people tend to think up, putting in the housing in Winooski. That's been my experience thus far, so. Goal number four, expand and balance the available rental stock and encourage economic integration of neighborhoods and the city as a whole. So that's looking at where some of the concentration of poverty is, how we can deal with that. Give access to the city. Yes. I like that. And goal number five, encourage creation of new opportunities for home ownership. Didn't really have any data about that, other than just that about 60% of our housing is rental at this point, so. Yeah, it's something that we've heard strongly in the community. In community conversations for a period of time, we've heard strongly that we want more, that people want more opportunities for home ownership in the community. So it's certainly something we added a little bit later in the planning process. Any questions about our key data findings? Are any of these goals that you just reviewed giving you any challenges or are you going to track with achieving these goals? That's interesting. I think all of them to some level, and let me kind of run down this. I think all of these we're trying to address currently in the housing trust fund policy document that we're putting together. So we're building it in to various components of that housing trust fund to make that an incentive for performing these goals. Would you say one is more a challenge than any of the others? Well, I mean, just kind of what I got into with three, the way it's sort of evolved. I mean, the idea of encouraging construction in that middle gap, evolving from more to more recognizing that existing conditions are doing that, whether we want to adjust that. More moving away from that to the other goals. Okay, so the second thing that we were asked to do was to set affordable housing targets. So after we had done all the data analysis, we used that data to establish what we as the Housing Commission believed would be sustainable proposed targets. And we looked at, I believe it was four different models of different percentages. And the one that we landed on, and I'm sorry, these were all based on the assumption of construction of 30 new units per year, which is what we had built in the prior two years, and really projected out what would be the potential total number of units, what would be the breakdown of percentages of low income, moderate income, and upper middle to high income units based on meeting those projections. And we proposed a target of 15% new, affordable low income units, 75% moderate income to really hit that gap. And then we kept 10% as our target for the higher end luxury units, which is what we currently have in the city. So just maintaining that same baseline. You go on to the next page, you see a comparison of our currently permitted development and the housing targets. And while I can't break out for you how many of them are moderate income units, because I don't have the pricing for all of these yet, I do have the number that are planned to be affordable units. So currently we're exceeding what our target had been set at, which was 15%. So currently permitted, we have 22% of the units coming in as affordable to low income. But even without the exact numbers for your census there, that middle income. Yeah, I believe they're almost entirely that moderate income. There may be some on the higher end, a couple on the higher end, but that's just a guess for me. I don't have numbers on that. That is just background for you. Any questions about background? How do you track that, like is this gonna be something that's got a one or two year delay in tracking those moderate income, the ones that aren't designated affordable? Yeah, as the pricing comes out, I'll catch them in my rental registry. And I also have an insane tendency to watch Craigslist. And look, I just monitor housing. So I'll be watching for them when they show up. Thanks. Yeah. And also, I do speak with developers regularly, so I can just ask the question. Yeah, that's a good answer. And more open about exactly what they're bringing on. Absolutely, we have a pretty cooperative community as far as that sort of thing is. So in terms of our priority housing efforts, we've been working on the housing trust fund for quite some time. I did give you a draft of that document in your packet. I don't think that we need to go into the finite details of that right now, but if there were specific things that you felt were moving in a wrong direction, we would love to have that feedback now so we can adapt to that as we move forward and finalize some of that. Yeah, we haven't taken a final vote on that. No. It's evolving. When do you expect to be taking a final vote? We're pretty close, but I'm gonna be running a few models on what that means, what the current iteration means on the ground in terms of how many projects we could fund, how that money breaks out, what that means on the ground is in terms of how many down payment assistance, how many new projects, how many home improvements, and so we can make adjustments when we actually see what that looks like. Yeah, I think one of the things that we spent a lot of time on the last meeting kind of coming to grips with is that it's not really a whole lot of money, even moving what funds that we had from the, what was the previous one? Home Improvement Loan Fund into this fund. It only goes so far, especially once you actually start looking at real costs for the kinds of things that we'd like the housing trust fund to do, and it's likely that much of that is one time, at least right now we're not looking, we don't have the sense that there's going to be a whole lot more money coming into that, which I would propose is something that we should be looking at as a housing commission going forward, but I think we can discuss that further as well. I think John discussed the firehouse and using data to inform housing discussions. Certainly it's been very beneficial to us to have the rental registry data and the firehouse data, and I think we'll be able to, as that gets further built out, we'll be able to draw more data from that, and certainly we'll be looking to do so and use it. In the housing trust fund, we have used the most frequent violations, as well as information that I received back from a survey of landlords about what they would like to be able to use funds for. So I have that data combined with the most frequent violations, and that really was put together to come up with some of the high priority criteria in the housing trust fund. I think I'm gonna stop there, because it's late. Can you help me close the door? Oh, yeah, I will do that. So implementing the Champlain Housing Trust Fund pre-development agreement, we just recently met with CHT on that was on Friday, and there are a couple of things that we would like to explore moving forward to assist them in the development work. So really looking at shared use parking and how that might work with the current existing uses and the proposed uses, kind of nailing down the footprint of what we had been discussing as Moves City Hall down there, and while that's out in the future, having an idea of what that square footage is will allow them to better plan how much they have available, how much parking might be needed there. Excuse me, and also looking into ways of accommodating the green space requirements on the site is something that they're working on right now. So we are moving forward with them, and we'll be continuing to partner closely with them in trying to get this done. So the last thing I'll mention is on each of these goal updates, we give you the final section as what you can anticipate seeing in the next couple of months. So you kind of get foreshadowed what we anticipate bringing to you. Questions? So at this point, you'd like us to reserve questions and comments on the housing guidelines, the housing trust fund guidelines for our future roles. If you feel that there are big areas that we're moving in the wrong direction, we would love to know that as soon as possible because it will help us to refocus our efforts. But if it's fine details, that will come back to you for discussion and for feedback. Yeah, right now it's mostly more like what was the rationale behind certain decisions, which I can totally, we can talk offline about those for my own education. I'd be happy to any time. Okay. Yeah, it's not a final document on our end, but getting back. So one of the things that has popped up is funding of this housing trust fund. Stepping back first, I would like to say, hearing you point out that the housing trust fund actually is attempting to get all of those goals, I think is important to realize. The housing commission had at some point kind of multiple options, like policy things to look into about how to get at these goals and has spent the majority of the past year focusing on this housing trust fund as it is addressing the life safety issues, development of more housing, trying to encourage home ownership. As you point out, we don't have a funding source identified ongoing for that. I would be curious to, it could be, pretend for your consideration for the work plan for the housing commission to look at how other municipalities fund this. Absolutely. Something that's also been brewing in my mind is thinking back to that 80 to 120% gap, we're seeing that being built. We've had a discussion as counsel with the planning commission about there is an incentive in the form-based code to build that income level that nobody is taking, right? So we kind of test the planning commission with reconsidering those incentives. But I think the bigger question that comes up for me is these developers are already doing that, I think because of state incentives. I would be curious what is happening at the state level or regionally that either can we build upon that or is it something that is very successful and we should focus on something else? I think there's a role for the housing commission to play in looking at that incentive from what I have heard and discussed the 80 to 120% area median income bonus is unsuccessful due to parking minimums, making it ineffective. So I think there could be a role for the housing commission to play in doing some research into demographic trends and market conditions to make recommendations or to feed information to the planning commission to start making some of those decisions about parking minimums, looking at precedents in other communities and compiling some of that information and moving it along to them. So I think there's a role we can play with that. I do think that there are very successful incentives currently at the state level, particularly the priority housing project act 250 waiver that can be offered for neighborhood development areas. So I think we're seeing some projects go for affordable housing. And if you do 20% affordable housing and you're in a neighborhood development area, which all our gateways are, having that waiver is a lot of time and a lot of money that is saved. So when it really comes down to it, it's about saving time and saving money. So if you can provide that incentive, then people are going to go for it. I don't know that we have the money to improve on the money part. And I think we're doing what we can currently with form-based code to really streamline the timeline for a permitting process. Yes, we were joking. We needed to complicate things further so that then we could not have any sense of it. I mean, you bring up a good point of in community discussions about form-based code. I think that we have missed an opportunity to share that bit of information that this streamline process that I think doesn't sit well with some community members actually does have a benefit in addressing our housing situation here and creating more housing that we need in Winnieski, in the region, in the state. Certainly. What I would ask is if, when you all look at these goals that were set last year, do they make sense to you? Do you feel like they're still relevant? Is something missing or more urgent than something else? I would share that while going door-to-door this past spring, I definitely heard a recurring theme about quality of housing. So that is one of the aspects of this housing trust fund is to try to give more financing, make it easier for landlords to address that. So I think, for me, that would still set as a goal that we want to continue to focus on. 42% of our housing stock was built prior to 1939. That is far above Chittenden County as a whole. I think that's 18% for the county as a whole. What was that percent? 42% in Winnieski, and I have the exact numbers I'm going to share it with you. But our median housing construction year was 1952, and for the county it's 1978. And I think John alluded to how, in terms of these sorts of issues, we try to work with landlords rather than just be punitive, and this is the housing trust fund, but it would really help with that once we get it where we want it. Any questions, concerns from the public? Is there any more specific direction that we could give you? I think, I mean, obviously we want to finish up the housing trust fund policy. I think probably I would recommend that we continue to monitor incoming housing developments in comparison with the affordability targets to help us make decisions about that. We look at doing some research into the parking minimum changes for form-based code. We'll start reviewing and making recommendations on housing trust fund applications, track housing trust fund outcomes, and investigate methods of further funding the housing trust fund. That's my plan thus far. So, if that sounds about right to you, then... I think the Planning Commission would love your assistance. Happy to take other recommendations for things that we should be looking at. Personally, I think that sounds like a great slate and a big slate, so I think that it would be, I don't think it would make sense to ditch any of those for any other priorities. And I think that you are, it ties both the housing goals and to the overall path, so thank you. It's just really helpful to get these numbers, because I think affordability is something that is a priority for all of us, and it's really helpful to see the progress that we've made and to get these updates. So I look forward to more of them. Absolutely. Thank you. Well, it's well organized, thank you. Yes, Heather is in terms of data and organizations. And I would, yeah, I would like to say that this is really well put together, considering how new some of us are to this information. And I'd love to see the other, as the other goals start, updates start coming through, having some background for that first go around. Thank you. All right, so this is a discussion item, and you can just move on. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for coming over. Thank you. Thank you. Our next item on the agenda is a potential approval of a fund balance request for temporary summer staffing at the O'Brien Community Center. And if you want to share this. She's got it. Well, contact handouts, and I. You can see on her website. Thank you. So we are here for this item, asking for some support through fund balance, one-time allocation of fund balance, to cover some part-time summer staffing. We are seeing significant volumes of youth down at the O'Brien Center throughout the summer months. At this point, we've made a real concerted effort amongst our staff to be more proactive and have folks committed to shifts where we're serving exclusively in a youth engagement role. But what that has meant is that our entire staff, myself included, are spending pretty significant chunks of the week just engaging with youth. And as we all know, there are a lot of other elements of our jobs, program planning, a lot of the things you're seeing here tonight, budget management, et cetera, that are not happening as effectively as we would like. So we are hoping that we can add some boots on the ground, get some local folks engaged, and I think continue to try to do good proactive work with kids at the O'Brien Center, in particular, getting them funneled into more organized activities. So we're viewing this very much as a summer pilot. I think it's not an approach we've taken through REC in the past of hiring summer staff, but we feel pretty strongly that it's a good approach and something that might be worth consideration in the future. But yeah, just as an example, Friday we had some volunteers in to help run activities. We had 29 kids show up and then that's drop-in. That's not registration-based and those kids range in age from four to 16. So it's really a pretty significant management responsibility for us down there to do that well and keep kids safe and keep the building functioning. So we're here tonight asking for support for that and I don't know if there are any pieces. And I just want to acknowledge to Margaret, Alicia, Sarah, who are all here have been very much part of this conversation and part of the proactive effort trying to do better with kids down there. So I just want to acknowledge their efforts as well. And just to underline your file point, I think those 26, 29 kids who are showing up on a drop-in basis are very hungry for something pro-social to do. They want all their kids or adults to be interacting with them and to be giving them safe opportunities to connect. So we feel like this is the not an emergency, but an emergent issue basis. This is the best way to kind of pilot something and get them involved in doing something productive and hopefully linked into programming down the road. And additionally, as we go into next summer where our service delivery model is going to change quite significantly given pool operations, it's also a way to test out some of that staffing, some staffing models around that. Yeah, I want to say too, and I say it in here, but just to say it out loud on camera, we view that the fact that there are 29 plus kids showing up unforced to that space really fabulous. Like that tells us something that we're doing something right, but we want to make sure that we're able to manage that success. So we feel like again, it's a good way to do that. My biggest question for you would be the timeline, the fact that you're looking to hire someone or two people by July 22nd. Yes. Is that, do we think that's a realistic timeline and do we have candidates in mind already? So we've been approached by a few folks kind of organically through the community. I know Margaret's got a few connections that she's worked with in her arena. So we definitely tend to post in, but we have some folks that have approached us already and that we think could be good candidates. It's aggressive and it's definitely a short window, but I think the other thing to know is that in August, a lot of the school based programming falls off. And so August is also a time we start to really see a lot more drop in activity. It's the end of the summer, kids are getting squirrely. So it does tend to be an uptick in youth behavior in August. So we also feel like even if we could get somebody on board by August 1st and run a four week pilot, that would really help us bridge because the school closes down to do their maintenance. So the summer school ends, thrive ends. So that's a time when there's kind of a gap for families and we do tend to see an increase in the number of kiddos. And is the pay rate that you're offering gonna be sufficient for someone who can operate kind of independently, but with a team? Yeah, I mean I think, so certainly it's an entry level position and I think we are very much viewing this as a position that will be scaffolded with other staff support. So we're not seeing this as a person who's gonna be just sort of thrown to the wolves without other staff around, and also with some good training up front as well. So we're really viewing this as supplemental staff to be engaged in playing basketball, playing a board game, sitting in the lobby and listening to music with kids and kind of being more interactive and engaging in that way. Not so much doing program development and planning and kind of that next tier up, if that makes sense. Do you have enough time to do all the background checks on these individuals? Yep, so our system that Julia has left, but typically it's a three to five day turnaround for our background check system. So yeah, that is definitely something we would do in advance. Any other questions or concerns? Any from the public? I'm excited to see how this goes. Likewise. There's a little bit of a pilot. Yeah. I'm happy that we are able to do something for these kids who are hanging out in our space. I would entertain a motion to approve a fund balance request for temporary summer staffing at the O'Brien Community Center. So, second. Motion by House, second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. It's good to hear that they're hanging out. It's good, it's a good thing for sure. And do we need, just to clarify, do we need to do a separate vote for the position, which would be good. So our next item, you'll be staying with us Ray for a request for a fund transfer for capital investment for community services at the O'Brien Center. Yes. So as stated here, this is essentially a reallocation of existing capital funds that were initially slated to do office rehab and improvements here in the City Hall Building to make space for a particular new staff coming on. Olivia and myself, as folks probably know, have moved to the O'Brien Center to a new space there, thus making more space in this building. So we're asking to essentially reallocate those funds instead of doing rehab work on this building to do some fit up work for a new community services suite at the O'Brien Center. And it spells out here some of those pieces that are included. And so just another sentence on that. In the capital budget, you have the authority to move the intent of the spending across lines. We don't have that authority to do that on the staff side. So even though this is a kind of a facility upgrade, it was specifically designated for City Hall. So we need your approval to shift to that facility expenditure. Money we already allocated to some work, changing locations. Any questions from the Council? Questions from the public? I would entertain a motion to approve the fund transfer for capital investment for community services at the O'Brien Community Center. So moved. Second. Motion by Amy, second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Motion carries. Thank you. And last up, we've got a potential approval of Vermont Buildings and General Services grant. So annual grant program here through the state that we had looked at for a couple different options. And I think ultimately landed on the HVAC project as one where it really ties nicely back to some of the capital investment objectives of the grant program. Obviously as we discussed in early May, on this project it's a pretty significant need for us. And as we looked at the different entities that would be benefiting from this, there's a lot of human service elements that are gonna benefit from this project overall. So we are seeking approval to go for this grant to help offset the cost of that HVAC improvement that had been previously, funds had been previously allocated in May. So this would be a $25,000 grant. It does require a one-to-one match. But again, there's 72,000 that's already been allocated towards that project. So hopeful that we can have a successful application. So I think this is a good example of a priority that the city has raised team being creative to go out and look for an outside revenue source to hopefully keep some of those local funds here in the city. Looks pretty straightforward to me. Any questions from council? Questions from the public? We would like you to go forth and attempt to get this done. We've spent all of our money. As much free money as you can. On that note, I would entertain a motion to approve the Vermont Buildings and General Services grant. So moved. Second. Motion by Mike, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thus brings us to the end of our agenda. I would entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. Motion by Mike, second by Amy. All those in favor, please say aye. Motion carries. Meeting adjourned. Thank you everyone. Thank you.