 Hello and welcome to the Burlington Mayors Live at 525 show. This is the first time we have done one of these shows in more than a year and a half. It is great to be back in the Channel 17 studios. I'm not using the right label now. It's town hall television, right? Town meeting television. Town meeting, back in the town meeting television offices. Thank you for tuning in. This is a live show right now on Wednesday afternoon. And those of you out there, if you want to call in, we will be taking calls. And I think you should be able to see the number up on the screen. And what we are going to be talking about, we'll take calls on anything that you're interested in talking about, anything Burlington. But what we're going to focus the show on and what I'm joined by Chapin Spencer, our Director of Public Works and Martha Keenan, who works basically, has been in a variety of roles for the city and working on special projects. And the two of them for years now have been the head of the team that has been refreshing much of Burlington's public infrastructure. And we have a big decision before us of a community to take another step towards that coming up in a special election. We hope in early December, and we can talk about it's an unusual time for election. We can talk about that in a moment. We're broadcasting this show a week before we are hoping the city council is going to give approval to this package to put it on about for a special election, a $40 million infrastructure plan, which is basically people who will remember, we did this four years ago or five years ago. Six years ago now? 2016. There was a vote in the fall of 2016 to support what we call the Sustainable Infrastructure Plan. And I guess why don't we try to get in, we'll go over the history with the slide deck. We'll go a bit of the history and then I'll turn it over to you, Chapin, to kind of walk people through the current plan. So in some ways this work goes all the way back to 2014 when I put in, kind of announced a major goal in the state of the city back in 2014, first term as mayor, feels like a long time ago now, that we wanted to make a real push on infrastructure. And we wrote what we believe to have been the kind of first modern infrastructure plan for the city. The first draft of that was approved in 2015 and 2016. The council acted and then we went to the voters for a piece of the plan, the overall plan was about $50 million and involved a number of different sources including philanthropy and money from the big institutions, UVM, Champlain College, some from the hospital even, and we also had some water bonding money there. But the biggest single piece of the plan was a $27.5 million general obligation bond. Voters overwhelmingly supported that. 78% of voters voted yes on that in November of 2016 and for the last five years we've been putting that money in the ground and have really made a change in the trajectory of a lot of Burlington's public assets. So big picture, we rebuilt the entire eight mile bike path, the greenway that is the final pieces, just about the final piece of it is taking place right now in Oakledge Park. If you've been down there last few weeks you'll notice that it's much of it's closed because that work's going on right now. We have tripled the amount of sidewalk investment that we had been making for many years leading up to 2016. We doubled the amount of money that we're putting into our roadways and we have after too many years of deferred maintenance with our buildings been making significant investments in everything from the library to fire stations to city hall to the hockey rink. But we're not done and we knew we wouldn't be done. The plan was for five years of fusion of efforts and here's some additional bullet points on what we just went through. I think we kind of covered all that. I think we can keep moving. What video security system, asset management system, but we are done and we knew that we were funding with that first bond just the first five years of this effort. We had planned to come back in 2020 with another vote. The pandemic got in the way of that. It was really impossible to focus on anything else from March of 2020 on and I think it would have been a very challenging time to go to voters with the financial uncertainty of a year ago and we have to acknowledge this is still a somewhat challenging time, an uncertain time but things are on the other hand there's a lot of signs that the economy is strengthening again and we want to go to voters who have continued to say this is a priority as recently as the budget survey that we did while making this year's budget. Infrastructure is very much on people's minds and we're going to go back out to voters and ask for support for another bond. If we don't do it, we will lose another year of enhanced construction, fall farther behind in certain areas and there's another advantage as pointed out here on the slide is that by bonding now we are still in a historically low interest rate environment. Hopefully that continues for a while but there's really no guarantee of it. Final point is we do expect that, well, I think that's a good start for now. We also, another advantage of the bonds is that there will be, by putting in some local dollars, we are expecting to be able to leverage tens of millions of federal dollars for a variety of both established projects and then potentially even additional new projects that might be possible to get funded in this federal infrastructure bill that's being talked about right now. I've been talking for a while. Let me turn it over to Chapin next to maybe hit the big picture with what are people going to benefit from with this next round of bonding if it is approved. Great. Thanks, Mayor. As you had noted that we're proposing to use some of these bond funds to really leverage a significant amount of state and federal dollars and kudos to the team in the city and my department and others who have really chased these funds and we have secured funds for Champlain Parkway for a rail yard enterprise project for bike pedestrian projects such as the intervail shared use path, waterfront shared use path improvements on penny lane. We're bullish to find other sources of revenue to really reduce the impact on property taxpayers in Burlington. We hope to really continue the success of the last five years and as the Mayor indicated, doubling, paving, tripling, sidewalk work and there is a, there were a couple areas in the first five year plan that we realized that we didn't focus enough on and one area was police and fire communications so that is being addressed this round. Bridges were another area that we did not fully address last time around and I think near and dear to Martha's interest is also our facilities and many facilities we have been keeping them going with band-aids and we need a more structural, fundamental approach to weatherizing our buildings to really move us towards that net zero goal. So I'm really excited by the mix here of multiple departments, multiple different types of assets that really will improve the sustainability and resiliency of our city. That said, we know it is a large ask in an uncertain time which is why we're here engaging the public in this conversation, want to hear your questions or concerns so that hopefully we can earn your trust as we come forward with this special election. So, Chapin hit on many of the bullet points up on the screen here already. This section here at the bottom out advancing net zero goals, there's really two elements of this that would be funded by the bonding package one is transportation improvements and I think can we, there we go the one of the ways we're going to get to net zero to be essentially a emissions free community by 2030 which is our official goal and backed by this road map that was passed a couple of years ago by the council and that we've been making progress on about 5% of the plan that plan involves a reduction of vehicle miles traveled and really the way you get there is by making it easier to walk and bike and get around the city through active transportation and there's substantial dollars in this bond that would allow us to do everything from continue to upgrade intersections, people could think back to the intersection in the south end where Howard and St. Paul slash Shelburne Road converged a five very convoluted five-way intersection that we've recently completely changed the curb lines and made a much better safer easier to navigate intersection everything from that kind of work to continuing this effort to build a network of dedicated bike paths that we've come so far towards over the last five years. That's right and we're really excited to continue that work. We started on the Winooski corridor implementation last year that the council approved with a lane reconfiguration in the downtown and now we're working with the old north end community on extending the bike lanes from downtown into and through the old north end which will connect to the shared use path on riverside so we will soon have a city of Winooski to downtown Burlington connection on bike lanes and shared use paths that kind of connectivity is really important to giving people a safe and convenient route around our community and as you noted mayor there are additional investments that we're proposing as part of this bond. Three fire engines are at their end of life. My department of public works maintains our vehicles and once a vehicle is at its end of life it costs more money to keep it on the road than it would for us to be paying a lease payment on a new vehicle. It's fiscally irresponsible for us to try to maintain these large and complex fire apparatus when they're past end of life so we're really pleased to be tackling that and I think mayor a last key item here really is Memorial Auditorium I don't know if you want to touch on that approach. Yeah great so Memorial Auditorium one clear theme of this round of bonding is this would allow us to take better care of the 25 major buildings the city is responsible for as well as dozens of smaller structures we have of all the city assets that the local government is responsible for we're probably farther behind in terms of maintaining and investing in our buildings that we are you know we have a lot of work to do there in general and Memorial Auditorium is a great example of that we for decades declined to make significant investments in that building there are a number of patches that were done over time but it has been engineer after engineering studies going back at least to the 80s I believe has indicated that very significant investments needed to be made and there's never the city's come close a couple times but never been able to put together the kind of political will and vision to really have a compelling plan for investment there I was at one point I believe a bond vote that failed we're now at the point where the building's been closed for a couple years because it's safe to continue to inhabit it we were working towards a redevelopment plan that we were going to take to the voters back in the beginning of 2020 that too was interrupted by the pandemic the situation we're in now as it's clear over the next couple years we need to do we need to go in one of basically three directions with the building one we could just basically stabilize the building and reopen it and it's more or less its historic form modernized with sprinklers and fire you know I'm kind of modern fire alarms and whatnot but without a kind of major redevelopment just sort of restoring its historic use another possibility would be if the if to transition the site to some kind of other use and then the third possibility is one that's starting to get attention is we could we I've proposed to the school district that we look together at a dual use facility that would serve as both a gymnasium and auditorium for a new high school on that block as well as a public assembly space when it's not being used by the school district which is a vision that you know is exciting to me and is there's lots of precedence for that in modern high schools around the country serving both high schools and the community so we in this package is $10 million it would allow us to to move quickly on one of those three directions it would take further action by the city council for us to commit to one of those directions voters can make it clear by supporting this bond though that investing in Memorial Auditorium is a priority and that people recognize that we can't continue to defer action why don't we go on to the next slide Martha why don't we let you jump in here let me let me introduce Martha as we move to this next slide Martha has been a huge part of the City of Burlington team for six seven years now Martha how long has it been eight eight years January all right wow so you know Martha enjoying in the the first the first term that I was mayor we created a position to work on on basically capital projects recognizing that we were under investing in our projects that we often had projects that were sort of on the books and then never went anywhere Martha has changed all that she's been responsible for dozens and dozens of projects in just about every corner of the city over the last eight years so thankful for her service to the city and one of the reasons I'm really excited about this bond is to make sure we can keep Martha busy and keep keep the momentum that she has really in a lot of ways single-handedly created and why don't you talk you know we've hit on some of these Martha but anything else on this sort of list that makes up the 40 million that you want to add some points on so I think thank you mayor I think you made some really good points as did Chapin we talked sort of about continuing that enhanced funding for both the streets and sidewalks one area is is our IT area is that now with the pandemic we learned how important IT and security is so we need to continue improving that system throughout so we have money for that in this we also with all of these grants and the possibilities of the infrastructure bill we need to have money there for those matches we could get as much as 30 40 50 million dollars in grants and we need to have money there to have our portion of that match it's a great way to leverage our dollars to get other dollars out there in our previous plan we did not talk about bridges and the city has quite a few bridges and they need work and so we do have money in this the let's let's dig in on that just because I think when you say the city I think that might be surprising people what I mean some of these bridges have been a surprise to me like for example when we took control of the bike path back in the 80s I think a kind of hidden liability is by taking over responsibility for the rail property there was a there is a bridge over the rail lines there that connects rock point to the mainland essentially and that is a the city's responsibility to replace it as an old bridge and it's becoming a safety hazard so that's one bridge there's another bridge to the bike path this will be really the last element of the bike path in the full renovation is the north beach bridge people can envision when they drive to the parking area north beach to you know to go swimming you go through this sort of tunnel that is quite an age facility and is in need of replacement and just on that one bridge is that they're actually going to make it wider so that fire trucks can fit through it and two-way traffic can go through it so it makes it more accessible for those people camping there to get to and from the beach so it's a great improvement that will be done the ambulances do right like ambulances yeah right so hopefully we won't have too many fires down there but certainly there's some reasons why the ambulances need to get through there to the absolutely um so there is um for all of these projects there's project management you can't get it done if you don't have the resources and the consultants on hand to make it work uh the mayor touched on the civics buildings and we still continue to have deferred maintenance on them we have a number of historic buildings and they're more expensive to take care of than your more modern buildings so we need to attend to those um the parks you have penny for parks and impact fees however they have some areas that are larger projects or are not necessarily in a park there is a boat house that is actually on water and so it's not considered a park but it is a part of the park system and it needs work and so there is money in here to attend to those different areas I believe Chapin spoke to the various fleet items and the public safety infrastructure is that the city has its own public safety infrastructure that covers only the city for their cell towers their repeaters their radios and that system is at end of life and needs to be replaced I think that's kind of an interesting topic that probably I certainly wasn't totally clear on how this worked that the reason you know I think one thing that Brawantonians are appreciative of and proud of is that fire when when there's a call for medical services when there's a call for some kind of security issue um we are able to respond very quickly um historically I mean we have this issue going on with policing right now of course but let's not go over there but the there the um the fast response time says historically been something voters have been very uh aware of and committed to that's why we added a third ambulance um just earlier this year the way that we you know a key element of actually being able to serve every corner of the city and do it quickly and skillfully and in a coordinated way is to maintain good communications linkages from dispatch um you know from the from the sort of central operations out to all these folks in the field and it literally takes our own set of cell towers and repeaters and to ensure that there is um that that there's good communications and immediate communications throughout so that's what this investment you know substantial investment is is keeping that level of service possible um here's the broader $150 million plan that Chapin referenced I think this is important to see that you know we are working very hard to secure other sources of money other than you know we we essentially go to property taxpayers as a last resort I know people doesn't always feel that way but we it is uh it is the um it is the most stable source of city funding but it is it is also one that we have worked very hard to um stay within our means and stay uh within good responsible borrowing standards and we have a graph on that in a moment as well as ensure you know we're very sensitive to affordability every time we make a a decision that impacts property taxes so in this graph you know we won't go through every cell of this but you can see how there are many different sources that are being drawn upon to try to fill this ambitious $150 million vision of infrastructure investment in the city over the next three years and the bonding piece of it only makes up this bond makes up 40 million dollars of that so less than a third of the overall goals this is a kind of wonky graph which I'm probably I'll take this one I love this page I find very reassuring and I think it's an important page but what we won't go through every cell on this either but what this I hope well here's what people should understand about this is that we are in a period in which both the school district and the city need to make major capital investment we had a major discussion policy discussion 2018 about what how much is too much borrowing what are the limits of what we should borrow responsibly um and we came up with this policy that is reflected on this screen which is we will not borrow more than 1.75 to 2% of the grand list for city municipal needs and that the overlapping debt the combined debt between the school district and the city should not exceed 4% and what this graph shows is that with this 40 million dollar bond we will stay underneath that 2% cap where there is what's the highlighted cells there show that we are exceeding our target for a brief period for three years here and then we because of debt retirement and growth of the grand list we will then be back within a target at the end of three years and what the bottom half of the graph shows is that there is substantial additional capacity left for the school district to pursue the new high school and that of course i know on many people's minds an important part of this conversation so what does this all cost japan you want to or martha what do you want to take a shot at this i've been talking for a while sure so our um taxpayer the median home is around 379 thousand dollars and what this shows is that there would be modest increases with this bond um somewhere in the area of seven dollars a month to 13 dollars a month maximum in 2025 and you actually see as as the mayor mentioned in the previous slide it starts to go down after that because we are retiring debt so it does go up for a few years and then your actual tax increase would be reduced over the final years yeah it's really it's two significant factors that really kind of compound in a crew over time it's that that um retirement of other debt as well as there is pretty consistent um growth of the grand list through new investment um so you start you know it only needs about uh one percent a year but that does add and compound and does start to you know share the number of uh the the tax base that these costs are spread out over so that's why it peaks out at 13 you know just about 13 dollars a month in 2025 and then and then goes down from there and and you know i think it's a fair question that people like like is it what are you what are you getting for the 13 dollars a month and again the what i think people should have on their minds you know if they if and when they go and get a chance to vote on this is for 13 dollars a month you are getting continued major historically high levels of investments in our streets and sidewalks you are getting three new fire engines combined with the two that we just bought means that we will in this period have refreshed this six truck fleet all of which were nearly at the end of the life five years ago we will have almost all of them would will be essentially new or near new um we will have resources to finally uh resolve the situation with moral memorial auditorium and bring or vibrancy and life back to that that part of the city um we will be making progress towards our our net zero goals will significantly improve active trans the active transportation system um and um you know and so much with facilities and parks all across the city so is that you know to me when i think of the other things i spend 13 dollars a month on i don't feel like i get anywhere near that kind of value but it is you know it is it is a it is a real cost that people are being asked to take on here and our goal is to make sure people understand as well as possible what what that value is over the next couple months leading up to december 7th we're almost out of time i think we're almost through the spreadsheet as well here the next steps martha you want to finish this off sure um since july we've been talking to all the different commissions and committees we're going to keep doing that we have received letters of support from most of those commissions and committees that we have met with either through a motion or a letter we are seeking approval from both board of finance and city council on september 27th we'll continue meeting with everyone and getting the word out there helping educate everybody understand why we need to keep our city vibrant and on december 7th there will be a special election we hope awesome great doing this with both of you guys thank you for all your hard work to get this ready for the voters to weigh in thank you to town meeting television for giving us uh making this venue possible and for being backs covering city council meetings and and helping us bounce back from this pandemic period plan is to be back next month with another mayor's show thanks for tuning in