 First, please stand and join us for the pleasure of leaving. This is by Deputy Mayor Nicole LeMace. 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. Right. We've got one item on tonight's liquor control board meeting. And after the completion of the liquor control board meeting, we'll transition to the regular city council meeting. So first up tonight, we have approval of first class commercial kitchen and a liquor control commercial caters license with a license also for Southern smoke foods LLC for 150 West Canal Street, Suite 3. So staff has reviewed the license request, and as all said, and Brian is here to answer any questions you might have. It's for a catering liquor license. Awesome. Welcome. How are you doing? Good, I'm good. Good, good, good. So any comments regarding the application, what's going on? Are you doing summer? Well, I mean, we've been doing our catering for weddings and stuff like that for a past bunch of years. And we're now moving into the catering kitchen down at 150, which is hugely advantageous for us to spread out and do our work. And as part of that, we'd like to get into some more like beer and wine for the weddings that we do. And as part of that, that's a lot that's going to start up in April. So, I mean, I'm really just kind of seeing, trying to get the approval and everybody's thoughts on everything before we start telling people that we're going to do this for their wedding sometime in April and then find out that maybe we're not going to be doing this. That's smart. And weddings are sort of their friend in advance. So that's a welcome that you're on this quick. A little bit, yeah, we've been filling 2019 since April. So. Well, obviously, we've seen your work around town. We've seen a truck multiple times now for lots of different events. So it looks like it's always worked out well. Yeah. Most of that type of stuff, every time we're in town, we're always down with Brian at the brewery doing that type of stuff. So most of this is up in the hills and things like that. You know, we like doing weddings out in people's farms and stuff. I like it when they come back from other states to Vermont to show people what it's about and everything. Nice. Any questions from the liquor control board? Any comments or questions from the public? So seeing and hearing none, I would entertain a motion for approval of first class commercial kitchen, liquor control, commercial license. Also, after selling the smoked foods, LLC. This is Southern Smoke at 150 West Canal Street, Suite 3. So moved. Second. Motion by Christine Second, by Halling for discussion. Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We'll look forward to it. Yeah, so hope I see you guys in town. Lots of food. Yeah. And those things too much barbecue. Being 605 on, oops, excuse me. That completing our agenda for liquor control board, I entertain a motion to adjourn. Motion by Nicole Second, by Eric. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Being 605 on Monday, August 20th, I would entertain, excuse me, no, we'll back that up. Being 605 on Monday, August 20th, we are now called to order the Winnowsky City Council meeting. And I ask that everybody please join us again for the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Dr. Mayor, and the full list. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic which is the home nation under God and indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Someday, one of you guys is going to get to do all this. But it's not that easy all the time. First up tonight is agenda review. This is an opportunity for council to make any adjustments to tonight's agenda. Any changes, removals, depletions? So seeing and hearing none, we'll move forward with agenda as presented. First up tonight is public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the public to address the council about anything that's not on tonight's agenda. You can find the agenda in the back if you're curious as to what will be covered this evening. We also appreciate if folks who are attending tonight take a second to sign in in the back so we have a record of attendees. So we'll open the floor now for comments, suggestions, recommendations, questions about anything that's not on tonight's agenda. So seeing and hearing done, we will move on and go through. I think there's a, oh. I was most interested in that. I'm not actually being in that. Oh, sure, yeah. Welcome. Thank you so much. How are you? I'm good. Good. So like for my background, like my name is Prashant and I work for Optum Technology and I work a lot for the Winooski district. So for the school bus project, like we worked a lot with the help of PYC and all. So I was just wondering like being a part of community, like we should also have some something for community, like we can vote for in the elections and all those things. Just a like solution. Because we are in the community, we are working with everyone, we are paying taxes and doing everything, but like duty huge waiting time for the green cards and all. But we still want to make some something for the community. Sure. And so is this in relation to the idea of voting rights? Yes. Yes, very good. Yeah, so we're going to cover that issue a little later in the agenda, but I think it's well appreciated and a recognized issue that we've certainly had a lot of conversations and put a lot of thought into in the past about how we can include that. And now I think the representative of it being on the agenda tonight, there's some real motion and movement and interest in having that discussion about what the next steps might look for for considering that for the community. Thank you so much. Yeah, we really appreciate you coming and sharing your thoughts and opinions and experience too. Thank you. Thank you. Any other items from folks? OK. So seeing and hearing none, we'll move on to city update. Oh, excuse me. Good grief. Consigna. First up, we have approval of the city council looking for 12 minutes from August 6, 2018, also the payroll and warrants from 7.20. 9, 2018, 8, 11, 2018, and the war ending for 17, 2018. I would entertain a motion if there are no questions or concerns on behalf of the council for the consent agenda. Second. Motion by Nicole, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, those in favor say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. City update. Great, thank you. So a couple of updates for tonight. First, I want to start with we've had a busy couple of weeks in Winooski. Last week was certainly a very busy week here at City Hall of Elections. And I want to thank Carol and Janet and Angel, who staffed an election. That was a pretty big record turnout. We had 1,300 voters. Over 1,300 voters. 400 more than town meeting day. It was a pretty busy day. And it was the day before taxes and water and sewer bills were due. So very busy day. Also here at City Hall, and Angel single-handedly covered City Hall. So great job to the team. I think it went smoothly. I think we've heard pretty good feedback from people that things went well. Also in the vein of gratitude, this weekend, the Winooski Fire Department, St. Mike's Fire Department and Colchester Fire Department did, collectively, about 500 hours of training at the 260A East Allen site. So that site where the mixed income project is breaking ground in a few weeks, there's a triple-decker house that is being demolished. So Nate did just, the owner of that property, donated it to the city for fire training in advance of demolition that will happen later on this week. It happened to coincide. And Chief Audie coordinated with St. Mike's during there. They have an alumni weekend. As you know, they run St. Mike's Rescue, EMT, and fire service. And there are alumni, many of whom go on to leadership positions in the fire service across the country, come back for a weekend every summer and train and train the incoming class and whatnot. So we had a captain from the New York Fire Department here, a lieutenant from the Charlotte Fire Department here, training both the St. Mike's folks and our team and the Colchester team. So it was a huge opportunity for the firefighters to have real-life hands-on training. They put a smoke bucket in the basement so the building was full of smoke and able to react to an unknown situation and unknown buildings. It's very important training far beyond what we can do just in the firehouse with barrels and walls and whatnot. So big thanks to the chief for coordinating it and to St. Mike's and Colchester for participating as well and also to Nate Jess for donating the building. UVMMC, UVM Medical Center is doing a publicity piece about the community outreach team, which are the Howard employed caseworkers who are based here out of the police department and our partner police departments. They are doing a publicity piece highlighting the importance of that and importance of prevention upstream from medical intervention and our highlighting specifically. So the piece is highlighting specifically myself, Rachel, who's one of our caseworkers and Chief Whipple of the South Burlington Police Chief. So we did a photo shoot last weekend. The cover is going to be from the Rotary looking up at the Winooski Block, with the Winooski Block writing. So I think it's going to be really, really cool and promoting our city. Just a quick reminder that the Winooski Bridge maintenance is starting on August 27th. And that will include a lane closure between the hours of 9 and 3. This Thursday, Angela and I are hosting VepC here in the city for their annual TIF monitoring site visit. So we have everything together and we're ready to go. That's an important day for us. Next Wednesday, the 29th is the next Burlington Sound Mitigation Committee meeting at the airport. It is expected that they will be releasing the draft of the updated noise exposure map at that meeting. So if people are tracking sound mitigation efforts, it's Wednesday, August 29th at 5 o'clock at the airport. And I will be attending representing us, of course. And then a quick fun update tomorrow is National Seniors Day. In the senior center, we are having a barbecue to celebrate our elders and those in our community who have made contributions over decades. So between 11 and 1, barbecue, I think Chief Heber is flipping burgers. So everybody, all are welcome. 1, 2, 3, Barlow Street. That's all I have. Thank you. Great. Council reports. We'll start on this one this time. My report. Same boat. I think just since we last met, the Planning Commission met on that following Thursday. Made some progress on a couple of chapters of the plan. So the working very diligently in a very organized fashion and clicking through things. And I think we talked a little bit about and are going to talk a little bit later about the housing scheduling piece. That was a point of discussion as well. So I think we're going to start seeing some real progress there. It's been terrific having Regina. I just want to express what a good job that's been putting that team together. And what a great job Eric's done really diving in from my perspective and purview. It's brought a lot of great organization and backbone of that process that is really driving forward in a meaningful way. So excited to see the progress there. And then just want to add, we have an item up a little bit later in regards to the treasurer position. But when folks sort of more broadly that we did wrap up the first round of interviews for that position and progress on that and expect that we'll probably have a recommendation forward. Maybe as soon as the next council meeting we'll see. But that's something we'll talk about too. And then in the executive session we'll get into a personnel matter part of it. But from a public perspective, we wanted to share that information. So I participated in that treasurer review. So I was a really great group of candidates. So we're lucky in that regard. And Hal and I met with Jesse and Julie to talk about options for somebody to work with the council and commissions around more than just bias training, but supports around understanding power privilege and how that manifests itself through the policymaking process. And so we've got somebody that we're going to be speaking with next week, hopefully. So we're making progress. So I attended the public works meeting. However, they didn't have a quorum. We weren't able to get one together. So not much happened. But we did see updated language for the master funding work. So there was a small amount of movement there. Summertime stuff. Hopefully now we'll probably see everybody start to recongeal and have a little bit more regularity to their lives and schedules that allows good participation. But certainly appreciative of all those volunteers and what they do. And with that, we'll close out. Council reports move on to our regular agenda items. First up tonight, we have approval of the Chittenden solid waste district board appointments for Brent Oakley for representative and Candace Holbrook for an alternate. Great. So as you know, we have board C on the Chittenden solid waste district board. Ted, who has been our representative with Brent as our alternate, recently stepped down. So we advertise for the position. Brent is interested in stepping up. She served as the alternate for a number of years. It has a great deal of familiarity with their work. And then Candace is here tonight and interested in being appointed as the alternate. And we recommend those two appointments. Awesome. First up, thank you, Candace. Brent's been up and been grilled a few times. Are you comfortable saying hello? Yeah. Oh, do you want to join us? Awesome. Thank you. Yes. First up, thanks a lot for your willingness to step up and volunteer like this. You're welcome. So the big question that you always ask for this position, we'll get interested in trash. Right. So for my civilian job, I am the recreation manager for the city of Burlington. And for a lot of our events and programs, we handle a lot of trash in recycling and compost. And it's very important to us. And it's very important to me and the city of Burlington. And I would like to, since I live in Winooski and I'm a proud Winooski resident, I would like to continue that work over here. That's awesome. Yeah. Thanks for your time and your offer of energy. Brent's been a really great injection, I think, of new eyes to the board and is going to bring a really interesting perspective to it and know that she'll be awesome in helping you learn to know what's been going on there. And there's new leadership. So it's a pretty good time for somebody to come in with fresh set of eyes and new open areas. So that's great. Other questions from Council? Thank you for your willingness to serve. Yeah. Thank you. Good luck finding a place to buy, too, by the way. A place to what? A place to buy. Oh, yeah. Thank you. So let me have a picture. Gotcha. Good luck. Any questions from the public? Good. So seeing and hearing none. And we also are certainly a brink of joining us tonight, but very appreciative of all of our time to the years now of our willingness to engage as an alternate and now as a representative. So with that, I entertain a motion for approval of appointment for Brenna O'Clyft as representative in Kansas-Hollbrook for alternate for the Chin and Solid Ways to Drink Board. So moved. Second. Motion? Motion? Let's see. Motion by Christine, second by Hal. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Have a great time. Thank you. All right. Next up, we have approval of the Vermont Community Leadership Summit to destiny. Hal Zipperan to attend on behalf of the City of Muskie. Great, thanks. So Vermont Council on Rural Development is doing a community leadership summit on August 1st. You've probably seen it advertised. They're pushing it out through lots of menus, and they have invited all 251 communities across the state to designate a community member to attend free of charge and participate in the learning and sessions that will happen. So we are recommending Paulus Ford, who's the vice chair of planning commission, so really taking a big leadership role, new to involvement with the city to attend. There are a number of others of us who will attend the conference as well, either as speakers or participants ourselves. So this was really an attempt to get other non-elected or appointed or staffed people, or non-elected or staffed people into the leadership opportunity. And we've got a panel together for this conference, too, that's going to be fun, I work with Paul at work and reached out to put some stuff together months ago. So we put the other things panel at his request. So it should be interesting to have more details on that coming out soon, too. I think Palace has been great on the planning commission, really engaged and definitely have current and future leader in the community. So awesome, she was willing to do it. Any questions concerns on behalf of council for just see that process of selection? Any questions from the public? So sing and hearing none, I retain a motion for approval of the designation of Palace Zip Room to attend on Moonee Ski's behalf as a designate for the Vermont Community Leadership Summit. So we'll move to our second. Motion by Eric, seconded by Christine. Any further discussions? Sing and hearing none, I'll just prepare to say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. And of course, if any of you are interested in attending as well, we have a budget to pay for this. So please do let me know. I'll be participating, so I'll be there. All three of you are. I saw you on the list. Have a meeting. Yeah, exactly. Don't talk business. I'll be there, too, but I guess. We actually will be talking on Moonee Ski, but. All right, next up is, Adam C. Approval to request to correct the manifest errors in the grand list. So unfortunately, Ted, our assessor was not able to be here tonight, so I'm gonna walk quickly through these. State statute allows us to, with council approval, update the grand list if there's any errors and omissions made, any essentially clerical mistakes in establishing the grand list. So Ted has presented this memo to you. There are two corrections to be made. One is for personal property for Moonee Ski Family Health, which is a non-profit, so is tax exempt. And the other for Walgreens was simply a duplicate entry, so they are in the system twice. I'm fair to tax them that way. So we're asking for your approval to update those two errors. Any, Ian, for those who haven't seen these before, this is fairly routine. Again, I think as it explains, a lot of it has to do with the personal property. Things have been kicking around and pops up all the time. Where people are getting two separate tax bills, one for $6 for some property that was formerly held there, personal that we used to apply taxes for, and then a general one. Most of the time people just pay it and keep moving on, but everyone's like, except when people start asking questions, they're like, yes, I can crack that for you. So thanks to staff for your work on that. Any questions or concerns from council? Yeah, about the Moonee Ski Family Health one, since they're non-profits that are exempt, is this an issue with prior years that we're gonna have to address too? It was acquired by STHC. It's because of that change? Okay. Any other questions, concerns? Any questions or concerns from the public? So sing and hearing none, I've entertained a motion to approve the request before us for the correction to manifest errors in the grand list. So moved. Second. Motion by Eric, second by Christine, any further discussion? Sing and hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. Item D, approval ecosystem restoration project application for Pine Grove Terrace. What, John, take Billy down this way. Good evening. Good evening. So this grant application is for the upgrade of a stormwater detention basin at the end of Pine Grove Terrace. The background is we have, so we've identified seven potential projects for implementation to meet our DEC MS4 permit requirement. Morehouse Brook is tributary to this detention pond and it's classified as an impaired waterway. So we have a deadline of 2032 to implement this project. So this is, we've previously gone into 3% design with this proposed project. We're looking to go into final design. The grant is for 25,000. We are responsible for, okay. And just add a little to this. So the concept here is we have these collections of projects that we need to do in advance of these permit requirements. So as other funding sources come up where we can leverage grant money into the city for them, we're taking up those opportunities. Can you just spell out what those acronyms stand for, DEC, something, something? Sure. So yeah, yeah, there's a lot of acronyms there. So why we have to get them. Especially environmental. So DEC, the Department of Environmental Conservation, they oversee our MS4 permit, which is a municipal stormwater permit that the city is regulated by. DEC has determined where we have impaired water bodies. So Morehouse Brook has been classified by DEC. The impairment is due to stormwater runoff and erosion. So we've identified this detention pond is one potential solution to reduce the erosion and runoff in Morehouse Brook. Thank you. And just from a general standpoint, have we, the source of funds for the city match looked like it could be a blend of cash and in-kind services? Are we built into a budget somewhere? We have it in our professional services. We are looking at equipment potentially as an in-kind service, maintenance equipment. That might be a potential. We have it in our operating budget. Okay, so it's not gonna put extraneous strain on the budget, good. Thank you. Other questions, concerns, comments? Council, any questions, concerns, comments from the public? Yes, sir. Good evening. Good evening. Morehouse Brook actually begins in Colchester. Is Colchester involved in this process at all? Yes, so the flow control plan that was performed in 2016. Wienewski has seven projects. Colchester also has a list of projects that they're required to complete by that 2032 date. When Pine Grove Terrace was developed, there was a stilling basin built at the bottom of the hill and the roadway was built clearly not to very good specifications, but that's a different story. The homeowners at that point owned all that infrastructure. Is that still a part of the Homeowners Association? And if so, what part of the cost associated with the project is part of that Homeowners Association? Sure, so correct. The Homeowners Association does currently own that detention pond. So what DEC is pushing for is all these private stormwater detention ponds be taken over by municipalities, given that we have the resources to maintain them and for this particular case, it would improve the Morehouse Brook runoff situation. So there would not be a cost to the Homeowners Association for this work. Will there be a cost to the local taxpayers? On the grants, in-kinds, on the sewer rate there would be, yes. So basically, the local taxpayers cost is just in-kind services? The local taxpayer cost would be the local share that we would put towards the project. So in this case, it would be $12,500. We were just talking about that's a potential blend of in-kind services and cash. Correct, yeah. My concern is that the city originally approved a street, originally approved a stormwater system, which had a stilling basin, and all of which had no particular cost to the taxpayers of a new school. I'm not against the city taking over the stormwater system, but I'm concerned that we take the developer, the original developer, not the current homeowners, but the original developer off the hook for a whole lot of expense that he didn't spend for a street that he didn't build correctly, and now all of a sudden it's the taxpayers' problem. I think, generally, that's been an issue that we've dealt with, same thing on Orchard Terrace. That street also was not built to the city's best, and the story is probably much better than I do around that, too. We kind of set in a standoff for a while, having that same philosophical conversation about whether to include it in a capital budget or not, and finally just said, if we don't, it's not going to get done. Orchard Terrace is a lot shorter on Orchard Terrace. No, I know, I appreciate that. The expense of fixing up the problems, I guess what I'm really concerned about is, how does somebody ensure taxpayers like Manuski that, in fact, new developments aren't going to end up in the same problem as these older developments? I don't think there's a hard, quick infascience to that other than we don't allow people to do things like this generally anymore, and the PUDs, even that are being discussed, have very different parameters and are hooking up to existing municipal systems in a way that aren't being done like this. The city allowed, from a historical perspective, a few streets, as you're noting, to be built by developers and did not do it with our infrastructure, and the result has been bad. It wasn't a good experience for the people who live there nor the municipal side of things with the systems. The city was in dire financial straits and just said we can't extend our services as part of this agreement. We don't really have the space to have that type of expansion, but for a few very dedicated parcels and potential projects that I think all I can say is we've tried to do the best we can in the conversations with the PUDs to ensure that they're hooking up in a very responsible way, the municipal infrastructure, and they're responsible for what they build. And we have very different public work standards and specifications now about new development that meet, that adhere to those new state and federal permit requirements than we did when that development initially came in. So for moving forward or covered, it's the how do we clean up the problems from the past? And also you'll see that if you go back through records, I mean we've had some pretty blunt exchanges with developers who have come in and we've made people redo sidewalks here and said because they put something down and we said that's not what we told you to put down. Go back and do it again. And the belly aching and the wall never built in here again so we haven't really listened to that. We've said, we told you what the standards are, you're gonna go back and you're gonna do it right and you're gonna do it the right way. And that's an attitude that's changed quite frankly, I think, from the past. And those public works, do you have suggestions mentioned? Benchmark that for us. By the way, my interest center is I have to go live right now. Okay. Nice to speak with you. In Long Park Street, which was not built in any good circumstances. These people who keep, they keep subdividing their properties up there too. I'm sorry. Thank you, George. Any other questions from council or the public in regards to this great application? Always good to have the historical background. I love it. With that, I would entertain a motion for approval of the ecosystem restoration project application for Pride Grove Terrace. So moved. Motion by Hal. Second. Second by Nicole. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, to say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you very much. Next up, we have discussion in Promise communities and O'Brien Center space update. So Ray is on vacation this week, so it's not here. But we had committed when we came to you a couple of weeks ago with the proposal from you, BMMC, UVM Medical Center to come back with some analysis about the O'Brien Community Center and the financial implications, hopefully of new leases with UVMMC and a plan for the library move. Unfortunately, right before Ray left, we got word from the Promise Community Grant folks that they are not allowing, as they previously indicated, us to use those dollars for a potential library move child care hub. Therefore, effectively putting the library move project on hold without those capital dollars, we really feel like we can't move forward with that project. So we are actively moving forward with UVMMC on the use as discussed of the full Y space and thinking about public access of that space outside of the solar therapeutic environment. They are also looking at the kitchen and community center space and how we can better partner to provide increased services there to get a new revenue stream. And when raised back next year, we will, or next week, we will actively start marketing the teen center space. There has been interest in that space from other tenants in the building. We haven't heard from them in a little while, so we will start exploring all new creative options. Those are, the updates were really disappointed. A lot of people have done a lot of work to, that we're not gonna move forward on. So we wanted to, I thought it was important to give you that update, even if it's not the update that we had hoped to give you. Just opens right up for questions, yes. I don't wanna say my condolences, but that's appropriate. And I, in the communication from the state, it sounded like we needed to use the funds for previously budgeted activities. So I'm just wondering what those are and how we might, I mean, it's substantial on funds in a pretty short period of time. And if you had, I know, maybe we can talk about it with very more in depth, but if you have any thoughts about what's likely to transpire with those funds. Yeah, so we need to dig into that math. The original budget that they are referring to is the support of Kirstie's position to be that Youth and Family Coordinator, and then some of the other support to the childcare facilities, or the existing childcare providers in the city. So we do believe that there is an opportunity in the next six months to ramp up some of that supplemental funding. I think we will still be returning quite a bit of that money to the state. Yeah. I don't think there's a way we're gonna spend, what's the 130,000 that's remaining. Yeah. We don't have a childcare center in the city. That's why that's where we focus our energy. And so if that means our only other option is to put funding into home providers, that really goes against the entire purpose of the grant, which is to try to build some sort of a system to support early childhood. So I would, I'm interested in a discussion about where those funds are going to be used. And if it's better to send them back to the state and say, you can't build a system with this kind of money or these kinds of restrictions, or we need, rather than putting them into, I don't know, it just seems like a not, it's not the vision that we have for the funds. That's a fair point. So, we probably do need to wait for a return for some of this, but when I was looking at the information here in the packet, it looks like everybody's down, but I can't recall exactly which year. Like in the next year, we're gonna be in the hole on that fund. So what, so Angela and I have put together this spreadsheet. So if you have questions on the spreadsheets, we are more than happy to answer them. So I might ask you to come up, Angela. So what we tried to present to you in the past when we presented these budgets, we presented them with both what is currently under contract or happening and what we anticipate with projects we're actively working on. Given this change, we've amended this spreadsheet to reflect solely what we know. So if we, I think one of the frustrating things that's happened in the last year is as we presented those models to you with anticipated revenue growth that hasn't happened, we've essentially been presenting a false model. So Angela and I want to present to you what the reality is right now if nothing else happens. So in FY19, which I think is the year that you're, well each year is showing a deficit, but just immediately in FY19, this deficit is assuming we don't lease the teen space any time in the next fiscal year, so in the next 10 months. And we don't lease up the kitchen and we don't lease up our portion and turn to a kind of compatible lease with the community room. So it's kind of a worst case scenario projection. And what you see in the starred boxes below the items of no Angela has called out at what rate we're subsidizing if those leases aren't in place. So for example, if we don't lease the community room, we're subsidizing that it's about 6,000 in revenue a year. And you see those three boxes. Does that answer your concern? The other thing that I was thinking about is, so you were discussing working with UVMMC with the commercial kitchen space, but I know reading through this that that plan was like further out for them. They didn't actually move on that. And I recall Heather sharing in a previous, like some community survey dated that there was a need in the community for more rental properties with commercial kitchen space. So I could see, I know we've talked before about trying to keep like the community room and parts of the center open, but put like soliciting for a tenant there as well. I wonder if I would not taking that step right now. So we have been moving forward with the vision of trying to get tenants into that space that allows some public access of that space, some as much access for the entire community as possible. We did have a restaurant look at it, but given the opportunity to have a private commercial kitchen and restaurant versus partnership with UVMMC where they would have nutrition classes and could partner with us on cooking classes and whatnot, we went in the other direction. Given this reality, we certainly can shift that marketing at this point and say, is there interest in putting more of a commercial restaurant space in that location if that's the interest of the council? I mean, I do think we have sort of held on the spaces with the notion that it was going to work out. And then it doesn't work out and we are losing rental revenue on the property and it's more than unsustainable. It was unsustainable when we had more tenants building. So I guess my, I don't think we can afford to be choosy in terms of tenants at this point, but it seems to me we're probably more likely to be able to lease that segment of the building as a package than we may be able to the teen center space. I mean, that was also a vacant for a long time and we tried to fill it and we couldn't. So can we convert that to some sort of a community space in lieu of the front room? I don't know, but I'm just feeling like we've hoped these certain partnerships were going to pan out and they haven't and I don't know how much longer we can do that. Right now it's not doing any good for anybody, frankly. It's sitting empty doing nothing. So that's, to me, I'd rather see a private entity in there than it not be public. It's just right now, I think there's probably just not the things that we've just had a string of things that have not worked out that have come here and it's challenging. And I think that there's been this idea and this promise to the community that that's what that space would be and what it looks like. And I think we have to have a really honest conversation at this point about what that future isn't sustainable or not because as you said, this doesn't work. And I don't know a lot about marketing properties like that. I don't know what from a local perspective isn't working for partners and people with good value or if we're not pursuing the partnerships correctly or what the reasoning is behind that. I don't know enough about it, but there's, I think at this point or we need to reopen that whole strategic conversation. And I think it might end up warning some community feedback in some way, shape, or form too. It's hard and frustrating, right? I mean, this space was, and again, not to rehash it because it just, it was sold to the taxpayers of this community with an unrealistic vision that it was gonna cash flow itself and that the rents would offset its expenses. And that's never been the case. It's always drawn from reserves. It's never been sustainable. So that's, we just, that can go right on the table and people who have listened to budget conversations have heard that now for several years. So now the question is, do we wanna continue to subsidize it at, I mean, you're talking two cents, right, next year after the next fiscal year that we're gonna have to plan on investing into the building just to keep it doing what it's not doing for the community right now. So I think we need to have a really honest conversation about that again. Yeah, especially when you think about all the other pressures on the general fund that are coming. What other pressures? I mean, we just don't, we don't have, yeah, I agree. I'm interested in learning more about the, not that I, you know, we are not in-house commercial real estate experts. I know we've been working with somebody, but, you know, and I'm interested in learning more about the dynamics out there in terms of why it's, you know, what we need to be doing differently in terms of, is it how we think about the space? Is it, you know, what would, what would move the needle in terms of moving tenants into some of those empty rooms? We had, last time it was mentioned that VIA gave some feedback to us that we'd worked with Asher and his group again. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? I know this, I think this might be right. I know that I hate them. And that's what I was gonna say. I don't remember actually seeing any work from that hit our desks, but if something exists that they've provided in regards to their most recent visioning, and if it was in a pack and I read it and it was part of the context of the conversation, I'm sorry, but. So the work they most recently did for us? Yeah. Like in the last couple months? Yeah. So that was really about the library move and if we could make the space fit and work. And the feedback at that point is the hardest thing about the teen center space, whether it's for the library or for another lease is that there's no storefront. So there's no, you have to know it's there. You have to use the lobby windows to pull somebody in. It's not well, it's not set up well for other things. I think that's why Ray was going down the path of another in building tenant who already had the storefront. And connecting over to that parcel. So you didn't lose that kind of commercial advantage of the storefront. And that was the Winooski Family Center, correct? No, technically that's the dental office that's looking to kind of come in the back. Yeah. So we obviously don't need a decision tonight but wanted to give you this update and welcome this conversation. It's really helpful for us as we think about how to move forward and what kind of options to bring you. So we will need to do that. Yeah, I think I would just add that I think that we need to have, I think next time we talk about this, we'll talk but I think we need to bring this forward in a way that opens the door for this body to reassess any guidelines that we've given you into tenancy in an informed way. Because I don't want you guys working in this box that's not workable if that's what we've set you up for. And I want to be clear then back to this group what the real options are and what the repercussions of opening whatever door may be. Does that make sense? Yes, sir. As your commercial real estate booker since May 2017, when I look through the most interested parties, the individuals where we had price and terms and fit up discussion, the individuals that actually made offers, none of them crossed the finish line. Obviously the most recent was SNAP Fitness and that was a cost issue with marrying a private and a non-profit, a for-profit and a non-profit together and then next to each other, that proved to be too much for the SNAP Fitness prospect, too expensive. We had Karuka bars, which is a honey protein bar in conjunction with the cricket powder, protein people, flourish farms and that was viewed as, I think, as too far out there, although they're flourishing. It was the cricket powder people wanted the kitchen and the community room in the worst way, but that was a no. Ali, Nora's Cafe, he wanted the kitchen and the community room in the worst way and that was a no. Carbon catering, wanted the kitchen in the community room together, that was a no. Chocolate hollow, which is a local entrepreneur that is extraordinarily successful and just brilliant in every way. She wanted the kitchen in the community room, that was a no. The community room has been a component for that kitchen on almost everyone we've had for the kitchen, they wanted both of them and I think we came a couple times to this meeting and the community room was going to be set aside and for the community and not least that privately. Mr. Shwarma, the Shwarma guy, he's down on Route 15 in Essex, I think over the line into Essex, but he wrote an offer on the commercial kitchen but that was a no. Just to make sure, when you're saying that was a no, you're saying that we died this evening. In that case, no, I couldn't get a hold of Ray for an answer on his offer in time and he jumped ship on us. So I think the point here that Esther's trying to make is that there may be private commercial interest if we are to market it accordingly to meet a business's needs. The community room was crucial. That's the strategic conversation. And I think from my perspective, what I would be interested in hearing is to think about is there a way to leverage a public-private partnership? What would we, let's use the example that we negotiated with potential space coming across the street. We very openly negotiated in public use of that facility for a certain number of days a year where we said, yes, we're giving you this right to develop these development rights, but in doing so, we also expect that the community's gonna have access to the space this many times a year. You can meet those definitions by doing this if it's holding high school graduation or recitals or opening yourself up to nonprofit fundraisers, et cetera. I think there could, I think we're at the point where we need to explore those types of partnerships that it sounds like maybe we've, and look, we've been given guidance on what we wanna see there too, so it's not, you know, I'm saying this is on us too to maybe be a little more flexible. Can I just run down some of the, just the last few? I think, and I- Because they were very odd, some of them. Well, no, and I appreciate that. I think, I don't, I don't, that's for you guys and Jesse and the team to talk about in terms of vetting those proposals specifically. I think you've given us really important context to understand. We have another set of offers. What's out there? Yeah. Just on the rest of my sheet. And that's, that's, that is useful. And we appreciate, we know you've done a lot of work, Esther, and we appreciate it. But for you guys to understand the offers and what they wanted to use the spaces for and what their budgets were is really kind of crucial for the future. And I don't disagree with that. I think there's a way for us to do, have that conversation in a more coordinated, organized way that has additional context to it. And I just think we'll use a lot of time, we could use a lot of time hearing that and going through that now without kind of setting it up in a way that's valuable. So I think that's interesting though, Jesse, from a feedback perspective. Yeah, absolutely. Because I don't, I certainly personally didn't have that context that there was that much pinging from the private sector. And we had tremendous response on the community center for the last year and a year and a half and tremendous participation with other brokers. It's been absolutely wonderful. Yeah, and that's really good to hear because it certainly has felt like, this is so hard at least. Right. But none of the uses were matched. Understood. So let us put together some information for you and change our thinking about it in these motions. Thank you all for your work tonight and your time. Thinking about it in the community room as we just got a cool project. The creation of a kind of room. I don't have a cleaning room, so there's also the senior center that is often used as a community space. And there's the fact that UVMMC is not interested in leasing with Jim, which is not a great, again, not, doesn't have that storefront appeal, but we may be able to do more creative things with that space from a municipal auction perspective. So I think we have spaces in a matter of reframing our thinking about how we're going to talk about them and use them. Right. Got the line space. You're good. Okay. Thank you. Thank you all. Let's open this back up to other public comments concerning these questions. Mr. Cross. Just one quick comment on the community center. Any redevelopment of it or recreation of it certainly needs to consider expansion of the wide world. That's the hard part is in this latest proposal we had one for expanding the library, was it about 1,000 square feet, right? It was 900 some odd square feet expansion of the library by moving it over. And unfortunately, the use of funds were denied by the private entity that gave us the funds initially to expand childcare and that we were trying to repurpose creatively after not being successful in recruiting an early childcare provider there. So that, but that's absolutely recognized. And we've taken the feedback on the size, scale, composition of the library and the needs that maybe could be met with more space. Thank you, George. Other questions? Yes, sir? I'm not sure if the software is on the desk or not, but I was talking to Sean, Sean, the director of the school board. He was like interested in opening some kind of preschool thing, some. So are you still considering on that? Yes, so we received funding through this. It was a pool of funds, $200,000 to the promised communities grant. And part of that grant had us put together our early childcare, what was the name of the committee? It was the Walnuski Working Group. The Walnuski Working Group. And their real job was to look at how could we best use those funds and how could we best inject them in the community? And we wrote the grant around the idea of building early childcare capacity in the form of a center not investing just in private entities. So the final decision from that group or direction given by that group accepted by this council too, was to try to invest in setting up a portion of the community centers and early childcare center. And we offered to do substantial physical alterations or leasehold improvements to the building in order to make it functional for their childcare center and eliminate that cost barrier for somebody opening up the center. We had long discussions with a couple providers, but unfortunately in the end, they all ended up backing out for one reason or the other. So we kind of became exhausted with that. Our time was running short with funds, so we shifted and tried to repurpose them, but that was recently denied by the funder and they said you're too far from the original application essentially. So now we're back to the drawing board on both issues. A lot of work went into it, a lot of time, a lot of staff time, a lot of community time and effort. So it's not something that we'll lose the ball on, but something we're gonna have to change our direction on. Other questions, comments, concerns? Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Next up is item F, Myers Memorial Pool renovation project. Is that a renovation? That's what we've been calling it today. I know. So we haven't approved bond votes as of last week, so we wrote up a very brief memo for you about options for moving forward. What we've learned is that the, so as you remember, the bond necessity resolution is a reimbursement resolution that allows us to start work and reimburse ourselves with the bond proceeds as they come in. Part of why we did that was the unknown of whether there would be a winter bond pool or only a summer bond pool. Historically, there's only been one annually. In the recent years, they've moved to doing two. So there will be a winter bond pool. So we would need to know if we want to go into that bond pool, we would need to know by the end of November what dollar value we anticipate bonding for. So from an operational project management perspective, there is the option to move forward immediately and then turn to an architectural contract to complete design, to move into permitting and pay those dollars out either through existing revenue, existing budget pocket, budget dollars we have or from a bond anticipation note. And move forward in anticipation of going to bond in the winter and staying on our schedule. Option two is to allow the fundraising and other finance discussions to play out, not move forward with design and permitting work and pick that back up once final decisions are made. So hopefully welcome your feedback on how you would like us to move forward. So as I recall from a previous conversation when we talked about whether or not to put this forward in August or November, the actual bond vote, it was determined that that timing wouldn't impact construction or opening day anyway. Well it, you mean if we had bonded in November? Right. So it really depends on how much summer work is done next summer. We think that there is a potential pathway by which we start engineering in the winter and can bid it out by the summer and therefore get in the ground enough in the fall to be able to keep going through next season. So we believe there is a pathway. Having said that we weren't, since we have a positive bond vote, we wanted to lay out the schedule that's a much more accomplishable schedule. But it's certainly at your discretion. I would like to have more information on financing personally, option two, or spend some time now really talking about it because I'm not comfortable taking out the full 3.9 million. I think given the tax rate there and what we're talking about next with Main Street, it's too much altogether. And we need to, I would like us to talk more about how we can reduce the cost overall. I'm gonna hit just a quick pause. I want everybody to remember that with absolute clarity. I wanna stop and say the bond, the vote was successful. In the sense that the taxpayers approved it, I wanna give staff a ton of acknowledgement for all the work that you did to put that together, the work that went up and deleting to it. And I wanna give a big shout out to Eric Nicole too for all your presentations and public outreach on the issue. I just don't want that to get lost in case we devolve into a lot of conversations. Thank you all very much for all of your work. So you bring up a valid point in the sense that we had, we had a random source of potential financing fly at us out of nowhere this week, right? Kind of cold words like, well, nobody's, nobody knew about that because nobody's used a program that exists out there before. And somebody read about this in the newspaper and said something to us about it. And it's like, have you looked at that? And it's like, no one knew that existed, right? And that's nobody's fault, not lack of research, but there might be some things like that that could come out of the woodwork, I don't know. But yeah, it's a great question on option one and two, and I'll leave for students to comment out there. Very fixed your thoughts. I don't feel comfortable having this conversation in isolation because this project and the Main Street project are on a similar timeframe in terms of the tax impact. And I don't think it serves any of us well to not look at it as total costs together and total revenue that can be brought to offset the tax or the impact to tax payers. So I guess I agree. I'm interested in looking at scaling and financing both projects in a way that leverages what's out there in terms of non-tax revenue doesn't delay, overly delay the implementation of these projects, but doesn't have us spend a lot of time looking at how we minimize the pool or maybe redesign the pool or whatever when two months later or a month later, we may find that the Main Street project is not gonna have as big of a tax impact as a result of other revenues. So I think, I guess I'm interested in hearing where people sort of threshold is both from a timing standpoint and a tax impact standpoint and how we might structure our meetings in order to make some decisions in a timely way. I don't have an answer about how we do that, but I don't wanna treat these projects necessarily in isolation. I think we've done that to a certain extent to this point in the interest of keeping the integrity of the conversation around the particular project sane, but I appreciate the fact that we're at the point where from a financial context standpoint we can't anymore and that they have to happen simultaneously in this staged manner. And to be honest with you, I have even had that have the chance as a result of last week's vote to sit down and really have that conversation with Jesse about how we plan out those meetings, for example. So you're right that that's something that we kinda need to shape up. I have an agreement. It's hard for me to look, to give a commitment to option one right now without having that holistic discussion and also even just seeing the individual financing happen through the vote. So I feel similarly. I think for option two, it's really important to understand from the fundraising committee, what feasibility work they've done, what is potentially possible to raise is really critical to understand what's the goal that's realistic that they can hopefully achieve for the fundraising piece in order to have a full conversation. Well, and I think that there, I think from my engagement with them that there is a high likelihood that we are going to have to give some more direction back to that committee in terms of information about where the funds may go, about this concept of what the baseline pool the city is going to do. So for example, there may be an advantage to the city saying we're going to do this and if you want this and this, you need to fundraise for it because it gives them a directive, not only for themselves from a benchmarking standpoint, but to actually talk to fundraiser or potential funders about that there's a specific thing that connects or a specific line that they're trying to get across because I think in the absence of that, right now I have heard nothing anywhere close to a strategy that's built around actual execution or amounts. And that's, look, everybody's doing the best they can. It's just, it has not reached, in my opinion, that level of organization from anything I've heard back. Just hasn't. So I think that's interesting and it's not a conversation we can have on the fly tonight productively. But it's one that we maybe can structure in a more thoughtful way in the future. This idea of internet and contract for engineering and design on September the 21st, how much time from a lead up perspective in terms of entering into that contract for September 21st would be needed? Does that question make sense? I'm basically asking what's our deadline for making this decision, right? So I'll have John come back up. This is an interesting kind of project development standpoint because it's, we're a bit pivoting from this being a community services driven, conceptual community values project to a capital project and a public works run project. So John and Ryan have started to really get engaged on that side of things. I mean, putting together a full and A and E contract for the life of the project, which is what we would be entering into, is not small work that takes a couple of weeks in negotiation and outlining scope of services. We need to make an argument for why it's a sole source of appropriate contract because they've done the work to date, but we need to go through our procurement procedures about that. I think it would be, if we didn't get the go ahead to at least start working on that piece tonight, it would be hard to have that accomplished by September 21st, solely entering into putting that contract and correct me if you have a different opinion, putting that contract together. You know, that's a bit separate from saying, okay, start going and designed by this deadline and whatnot. We could put that contract together with an unknown timeline. So the work could be done to put that contract together with it being executed under option one or two. The work doesn't go stale. It's just, it changes the urgency of it, essentially. Right, okay. Well, and it does leave, there may be some, not repeated work, but delayed work in that under that scenario work, we're not giving them a timeline. We're not saying, do this work with a pool to open on the state. We're saying, do this work for a timeline that's going to be determined at some point in the future. Okay. So are you saying that we can move forward with a contract without actually initiating the shift to the bond yet? The development of a contract. Yeah, no, no, no, excuse me. Yes, we can, so what option one is allowing, what we're trying to capture with option one is how do we move the timeline as fast as possible while we let the other financing conversations play out. So certainly, assuming we are going to build a pool, which is what the voters just told us, we are going to need an A&E contract for the life of that project. So we can do that at any time outside of the conversation of how specifically is that being paid for. Once we execute that contract and start incurring costs, then that question becomes bigger for you all of are you comfortable with us spending up to $310,000 before that decision about the financing structure is made? And so I just want to put the additional context in here that there's a statement at the very, in the middle of option two, right, is that it could delay the opening by a number of months. And I think that's an important concept that we need to understand from this group if that's a trigger, right? I'm hearing very specifically with parents who have children of a very specific age that they don't want to see one more summer go by for their specific individual children to not have a swimming facility. I'm very respectful of that. I'm also respectful of the fact that we are assigning the city taxpayers up for obligations of 20 plus years of expenditures. And that, you know, from my perspective, we might have to make a decision at some point that they could do that, but everybody may not feel that way. That could say, I'm sorry, your specific children child might miss one additional year in the interest of us making the best decision. With that being said, I think we need to have a real reason for doing that that actually has a benefit to them, right? It can't just be because we're dragging feet or kicking the can as how we're doing here, but. Can I have a timeline clarifying question? So for the completion date of actually entering into the contract, that's September 21st, but what we're saying is that we can still work on developing the contract because we'll need it for no matter when we actually enter into a contract. We have a council meeting on September 17th. So for some reason, as we're having these other discussions of being presented more information on financing between this and the Main Street Project, we need to pull the plug on jumping into a contract. What are the implications there? Does that make sense timeline wise? And then we'd still have the prep work for that contract for if we're putting it off by a little bit. Yeah, and so, might you're seeing and Angela would correct me if I'm wrong. So the contract would have to come in front of the council for execution. So we could work on it with the consultant and work out scope items in the interim and then when appropriate, you could bring it to the council for approval. So there's no risk of us, besides just resources, spending time with the consultant, working out the scope items. There's no cost there. It's just once that contract is executed, that's when we're at risk. So what is that September 21 date come from? Is that a hard and fast day for it? That was just if we bring you a contract on September 17th, we would sign it on the 21st. That was that. But if we give guidance on the 5th, Tuesday the 5th, instead of waiting until the 17th, I don't know how we give guidance because here's where I'm stuck. It's where's the, when are we, what's the timeline for the information that's going to help us help inform what time frame we pursue. So I think two different conversations here. I think if you all are interested in having an on the shelf, any contract ready to go for whenever decision is made, we'll start working on that now. It's easier to do that over four weeks than crunched it to two weeks quickly. In terms of the timeline and the, how do we get, how do we, how do we, I think what you were saying, Nicholas, what are the questions you ask and what's the information we present to get you comfortable with a, come to a financing package we can all agree to. And I think the challenge with that, if we are really linking the two projects is we may not know about the build grant on Main Street until December. And that's, that just is a grantoriality. And how we, I don't, I don't know how we feel about that. There could be funding sources that come in. We can do worst case scenario on that, would be my feedback. I think the more important thing is to log, get a log of things as you looked at these two projects in the package today. If there are specific finance items that we want to bring forward for that conversation on the fourth to be more focused on what are the potential tax thresholds and what are the potential, what's it look like when we really put these two things together? Right. Because I think the discussion isn't just revenue and how revenue offsets the project costs, but also some of the options we talked about before of delayed principal payments. So looking at those options and seeing that modeled out with both of these side by side, I think would be helpful. I'm in support of the development of an A&E contract so that if we are feeling comfortable and ready to pull the trigger on the 17th, we can. Agreed. Yeah. So, what else, I mean, I think we can come up with a way of putting the information back. Similarly, looking at the difference between the two years of implementations from a tax perspective as to what it would look like with Main Street more substantially hitting this year's tax rate versus potentially more of the load of the bond payment debt hitting next year's tax rate. What that stage in would look like, we could do a comparison option one or two, I think fairly easily in terms of what the stage tax impact would look like between those two fiscal years, both from everything hitting at once perspective and everything potentially hitting in an incremental staged fashion that the conversation just alluded to. What else, what else would be good to inform that conversation? I think the itemized portion of the, I'll call it the stripped down, but I think that's something that has to come back in some form or fashion at some point to give guidance on fundraising. Yeah, I mean, I feel like we're getting back to the original discussion we had of having specific fundraiseable items so that we can give guidance to that committee, which then impacts us, you know, how much money we're actually taking out in the bond. We need that information for that decision. I think getting a report back from the fundraising committee to House Point is key to see if they've had any progress in setting a specific benchmark and, yeah. I mean, yeah. Have they identified a list of private donors that they're going to schedule for meeting with them and would it be useful to have a counselor come and join somebody from the committee to sort of win the political, because we all carry such weight. I would like to have a conversation. I'm also, Jessie, I know you sent us at some point after the last meeting our fund balance, but I think that also has to be, can be part of the discussion. I think, I mean, this bleeds into our next conversation, but any revenue conversations regarding TIF and 1% local options, I would just say that we've got two weeks you're kind of being put on the spot on constructing what's needed. If there are other things that come to people's minds, we don't have to think of everything right now, if you want to shoot them over, and as we start to work through this, I'm sure there'll be stuff that'll pop into our minds, too, about how we should definitely throw that in. Yeah. End of that? Go ahead. I think similar to the pool having that different breakdown of fundraising items only, which is a point I was gonna make in our next discussion is I'd like to see something similar for Main Street, like a more broken out scope of the work so that we can think about scaling there if we need to. And that's the other thing I would add into that conversation is whether or not any funding sources we select impact scalability. So in other words, if there's a specific funding source that due to restrictions, et cetera, it says you can't do this piecemeal. You've got to do it all. Beth, I'd like us to do that. Maybe two, I guess, staff's recommendations on priorities for those different components. What is, from your viewpoint, what would be if different sections were to be scaled back or brought offline, but we wanted to move forward and others, what would you say are the essentials to move forward on first? Like, if X didn't happen, there's no point in doing any of the project to begin with at both conversations. So, hearing your professional opinions there. How many pencil so far, Janet? Super helpful. You've got a lot there, you're well-stocked. Should be throwing them at us by the end of the night. I think that list is really helpful and as you guys all think about this more if there are other data points like that, so far away. You know, I guess I would just, the other context I would just say is just if we could have any identifiable, this is a big question, right? So, this isn't asking us to create a budget on the fly. If we could have any identifiable budget escalators in the coming years that are just good for us to have from a contextual standpoint. If we've got apparent budget escalators looking at us, where we say, you know, coming down the, I see that. Yeah, so if you could just shake that eight ball. What I would just say is, you know, we've done a penny, a penny point seven five, two pennies. I just think from a contextual standpoint, the expectation that this is gonna be the only demands on our tax rate is foolish on our behalf and not asking you to do crazy projections, but I just think we should have that conversation as well. You know, because as we move into this at some point, this group is gonna be setting thresholds for ourselves. You know, and there could be conversations about and in those same fiscal years, we wanna try as hard as we can to budget, to hit this as an additional cap impact on the cap tax rate coming from additional operations, to try to give some budgetary guidance in the course of also making these decisions. For fiscal improvements. Make sense? I think the more realistic way of the better. Yeah. About what's, what the ask is gonna be. Is if we're saying, hey, just so your heads up community, next year we're gonna be adding another four cents for this and oh, by the way, there's another five cents for operational stuff. And we're talking about nine instead. That's, and again, I know that's impossible to predict, but I don't know. I just think we need to have that conversation too. Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. You know, you can't just think stuff up, you gotta pay for it, that's the pain. Mr. Crox. No, I won't bore you with the questions that I asked in my post at the front horse forum. But I do want to suggest that the combination of these two bond issues is the largest bond issue that was ever set forth in the city of Manusia. And how the council handles, and how the city management handles, these two bond issues will have an impact on every bond issue that comes before the voters in the next 10 to 20 years. And there's going to be additional bond issues that come forward. So I would urge you to get out in front of the public and have the public be a part of this. I fear right now what happens is the city council, the city administration, and the committees that you've formed are ahead of the general public on these issues. And consequently, the backlash hasn't happened yet. But it's there. My telephone is wrong. My emails have come. It's there. And so it is very important that you slow down the process, make sure everyone understands what all the issues are, where the money is coming from. If you already know that there's highway money, that you identify that, that you identify what the tax impact is going to be, that you set goals for fundraising, you won't move off those goals. Those are all important issues. And if you don't do it, I'll guarantee you that the impact will be on the future bond issues. Appreciate that, George. Thank you. Wow. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You know, there's a metaphor there. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, boy. Other questions, comments, concerns from the public? Like it. No, I just say that I think there's great appreciation for that that, you know, we tried to do a lot of outreach on both projects and make where we were as transparent as we could be. And the reality is with the funding sources being what they are, it took some time to get to the main street, not even finish line, but to where we can now give really good detail, which is what we're gonna be ready to talk through next about what the potential funding sources are and what the impact is to the taxpayers and the project itself. And now we're in that phase of, okay, we've got to go from the public, let's do the same thing with the pool. So I just wanna say, I think people can expect and we are following the timeline by coming here today that we set forth in those public meetings by saying by the end of August, we feel strongly we're gonna know how main streets being paid for and what it looks like. There's a little wrinkle in that, but we know generally how we can pay for it now with the potential of another grant coming into play if we're lucky enough to get it, but we're not hanging our stars on that and you'll hear us talking quite a bit more about what we think the realistic package looks like and what that's gonna mean for the community. So thank you for that, those comments and they are well heard. Okay, so we'll be back next time. Any other comments, questions, questions for you? Okay, so sing and hearing none, just got the agenda up. All right, next up we have item G which is discussion of Main Street Realization Update. So we've already started talking about a bunch of this. Really the intent with the information in your packet today was to give you an update on what we know for sure about funding and then talk through our anticipated next steps. Other information we anticipate bringing on or bringing to you and some other action items around potential ordinance changes and whatnot. So we're gonna stop talking and let John take it from here. So as we mentioned during the bond vote, we're gonna do this August check-in and see where we're at and we were expecting to hear back from one of the financing agencies and we did. So pretty exciting news, we received notice back from USDA on the funding package. The USDA water resources side, they have fairly obligated the funding for the entire water resources package if the council decides to move forward with it. That includes 3.59 million in grant funding for the project. So total water resources project is 8 million 670,000, 3.59 million in grant funding. The remaining balance would be covered by a low interest loan at 3.125, 30 year on the sewer fund, 40 year term on the water fund. So that's pretty amazing news. I mean they really, it was a better package than we anticipated. So 41% approximately the project grant funded on the water resources side. So the other package that we received from USDA is more on the general fund scope of work. We did not expect a grant for that community facilities program, but they do offer a 3.875 interest loan for the city transportation assets. So that's the sidewalk streetscape that piece of it. It does not include the utility undergrounding because that is a private asset. So in the package that you received, they mentioned a commercial loan. So we have reached out to commercial loan lenders to get some ideas on funding. They would provide a 10 year loan for that utility underground work. That works six and a half million dollars. So we need some cost share on the utility provider side to make that work. So in the memo we provided, we did do a debt service breakdown for each of the different funds. The water resources fund includes that USDA funding package that was mentioned. So what we're showing is an example of if we use say a 4% utility rate increase annually as a maximum, what that would look like with the debt service. That 4% utility rate increase equates to roughly a $20, $30 annual increase on an average three bedroom house. And that's still lower than Sierra neighborhood utility providers, those rates. So any, I guess I'll stop there. There's a lot of numbers thrown out. Do you guys have any questions on the water resources side? As is appropriate to you, I just want to disclose that I am employed on a daily basis by USDA Rural Development and Housing Programs Division. We do not underrate or touch my division, water, wastewater, or anything to the community facilities. And if there's ever votes on items, I do recuse myself from those votes as a kind of employee. Just noting that for the conversation. So I have a question about what the water and sewer work actually entails. So we have the budget for the water work, the budget for the sewer work, and then the budget for all the streetscaping work. But like if we only did water and sewer, does that funding already cover some amount of money for replacing the things that you're tearing up? Like sidewalks and streets. So the water and sewer work would be basically your curb, face a curb, face a curb. So because we're trenching down to that water and sewer, it would replace, say, the pavement road surface. So when we're talking about the water and sewer work, we're talking basically about the roadway, the asphalt roadway. And then there are utility connections to the building. So that work would also be covered. But picture a five foot trench into the building, that's the scope of work that it would cover. But I think it is important to note that would only replace, that would only, that funding source would only pay for replacement of what's there. It's not any improvements or any storm water upgrades or anything like that. It's solely, if we were to only do the utility work, we would rip up the street and repave the street. Yeah, and that's why I mentioned earlier that I'd like to see a more detailed scope because I don't understand what all is included in the streetscaping work and how it is that much money. Yeah, yeah. And I would just say that I don't know that we need the level, I don't know if others feel like they need that level of detail like in the next package. So that might be something that can be delivered to Councilor Locke to individually. And then if there's a specific conversation behind it, we can frame that up. Well, I mean, this is an example and we don't need to get into this right now. I remember at a previous meeting, when this was presented to us in April, there was a note in that packet that we might value out silver cells because it was $1.37 million. So that's a significant chunk of that 7.45. And I'd like to know if there's other large pieces that are potentially could be value-engineered. And I could tell you that one is the one that's a highlight of something that could be, we'd have to replace it with some kind of structural backfill for the trees, but that is probably the top one. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not looking for like every item. Break down. I do think that you have a specific line of questioning that's really, I think could be really informative of the group. So I think it would be awesome if you had us sit down and went through that because I know I trust you to report back on what looks, the senses of scalability, concerns that you do and go ahead and move and talk about that. If there are specific items to tee up. Okay. I think that that would be really being on the public works commission too is a totally appropriate. Perfect for you. Perfect fit. I have a question about the utility. You go first. Thank you. I know that we haven't been able to initiate formal discussions with the companies, but do you have any sense based on other communities where undergrounding has happened, what the relative share we might expect to be? So we've seen it varies, unfortunately. Yeah. Because we've seen examples where same municipality will enact an ordinance that requires undergrounding. And then it, you know, there's been court cases, court cases, unfortunately, where the Miss Pelley is one, but it's a long drawn out court case. Or there's instances where they come to a cost share agreement with the utility. I have not been able to get any of that information, fortunately, of where they'll, the utility provider will cost out what a standard aerial relocating would cost. And then the premium for undergrounding that delta is what, you know, we could be responsible for. So that's what, I'm getting ahead of myself, but that's what we're gonna be requesting. Talk to you guys about to start that negotiating with them and get a sense of what that cost is. I think it's a fair statement to say that there would be some cost share. It's not likely that we would have to foot the bill for the full amount, but what the scale of that is is the unknown. And how do we position ourselves to maximize the utility's contribution? Right, so I guess that's my question. Is there anything we can do to better position ourselves for that negotiation or discussion? Just something to think about. Yeah, so one of the... Yes, there is. Yeah, there is. You're ahead. So when we get to next steps, one of the things that we're proposing is to enact a utility undergrounding ordinance. There's municipalities around us that have done that, where especially for the TIF district, or sorry, the gateway districts, it's pretty important because we're putting those buildings right at the property line, and it's a safety concern to have those utility poles right on the line. So basically, if we can get an ordinance in place that requires just for the gateways, if we're reconstructing the street, those utilities be undergrounded. It gives us kind of a foothold to discuss with these utility providers, to force them to go underground. But those have resulted in court hearings? Few that we've, yes, that we've seen. Yeah, yeah. I'm not recommending anything like that. Right. But the municipality has been successful here in Vermont, so there is existing Vermont. Yes, case law. And it's also looking at those ordinances and considering those ordinances doesn't mean we have to adopt that ordinance. Be under consideration. Man, just that personal reflection, it drives me insane every time I walk up Main Street and see those trees in Hawaii with a power line running through the middle of it. I mean, talk about poor execution. I mean, that's the most staggering view you can have for that argument to me. These giant, beautiful trees that are cut with a giant V in them, so the power lines can get through this. Could you, I don't wanna break up your, but I think a lot of people, and myself included, will be most interested in the discussion of maybe talking through with a little bit of a narrative, number four, five, and six on here, on the sheets. And you know, specifically too, noting that the annual percent increase, like with the justification behind that is, based off of number five, and the fact that those are static increases, not year-to-year increases. So you're looking at the general fund spreadsheet? Yeah, yeah, so I'll... Is that okay, time to go to that, or do you have a different one? Yeah, yeah, no, perfect. So if I'll go through the general fund model. So as mentioned, general funds, the USDA community facilities alone, unfortunately there's no grant portion of that, so it doesn't have the funding like the water resources side. So what we're proposing is, in the large model example that we gave you, is basically we gave a breakdown of the two different scopes, the utility under grounding and the USDA scope. What that service would be if it started, FY 21, say, and then potential options below that for offsetting revenue to mitigate the tax rates. And then basically what we did is we worked back to target say a 4% annual increase, property tax increase, to determine what the cost share from a utility provider would have to be to meet that maximum 4%. So that's what we're showing here as an example. John real quick, I think the volume might be kind of low. I don't know if you can pull the mic forward a little bit closer. Sorry, is that better? Better. Sorry, thanks. So the tax rate increases under number six reflect basically, I'm just trying to figure out whether this modeling maximizes all the available revenue that we can imagine coming into the city coffers. Yeah, yeah. The hard part. And making it therefore unavailable for other products. Yes. We might have an interest in it. There you're going. So this is the best case scenario, leveraging rooms and meal local options, taxes and directing it all, all that revenue towards this project. Correct. So what, but to clarify in the, in the set of box five, the new revenue options. So it doesn't. So it does include the two local options, taxes, it does include only 15% to have set aside down to 0% over 10 years. So that's a large amount still staying in the general fund, but the, to John's point, we set the boundary of an annual tax rate increase at 4%. So I think really the big question, well, obviously each one of these one through nine is something you would have to consider as a revenue stream, but seven is the utility cost share. And that's assuming a 72% contribution from the utility. So that is an unknown right now in what we will be able to get from that. And also what I'm interested in, the main street grand list growth set aside. So can you talk about where those numbers come from and what the assumptions are built in there? So I'll start, but jump in. So this is an attempt to do, to not do another TIF district, but to acknowledge that we're going to see some grand list growth on main street as a result of improved infrastructure and how we set aside some of that grand list growth to fund future capital. It is a modeling technique. Yeah. It's essentially a synthetic TIF. I mean, that's exactly what it is. So it's in other states, it's a really often used model or people set up debt and you can actually go to private banks in other states. I don't know anybody here who does that work, but they will basically build a TIF model for you based off of the increment difference that's expected to be gained and value of the properties based off of a project. And they'll base your debt service coverage off of that. Very similar to the way the TIF is designed and constructed. It's just the state doesn't get involved property education tax. Right, I understand. I'm just wondering where the numbers come from and what the assumptions are. Is the assumption that we're gonna have a full rebuild of main street and those properties there or is there a 30% of the parcels get built up or what's one of the assumptions? 80% is what we use excluding like the properties like the school and some of those, the areas that are not gonna be developed. But and the values are based off of the two developments that occurred recently, 396 I believe, the two most recent developments on main street. So we're assuming 80% of main street will be redeveloped along the lines of the way those two properties. That's where these numbers come from. Based on working with previous planning director what he felt. I think it's 80% of the developable parcels. Yes. So we went through and indicated which ones we thought there was development potential on. IE obviously we're not gonna redevelop the school. But there's a number of them along that parcel that we're not gonna redevelop. But of the ones we thought had development potential. For example, the block where Fodang just moved out of. We estimated 80% of those parcels and we can share that analysis with you so you get a better sense. It was based on the plan as well as the project. Right, I can see. I mean, you can see that, yeah. Just from a number perspective, 80% doesn't make sense. Like the number of parcels from a build up perspective it would be higher. Okay, I get it. Yeah, it would be way higher. Well, I'm just interested in the what's considered a developable property versus a non-developable property. So for example, we didn't assume that there's two very significant WHA properties along Main Street. We assumed that those would stay. But we can certainly share that breakdown with you. Okay. So I think this goes back to this other, I think, I actually think this sheet is one that we should bring back to for that next conversation from the previous agenda item and have a discussion about all those revenue stream pieces again. I think that's a great place to bring that information back and set it up. The other piece I think that needs to be reopened up, I mentioned the TIF in the last conversation, but this 15% number, that's a new number compared to what we've talked about in the past. And then subsequently has a different impact on the tax rate. And I think we need to have a comment. I certainly wouldn't have a conversation about that because that's the other thing about this project that's very different from the pool, is that there's a lot of different things we can balance differently that then result in a different outcome to the taxpayer. The pool's very straight line to play. It's debt that General Fund is gonna pay for up here at the end, by and large. Whereas this, we're talking about a couple of different streams of income and how we can balance those a little differently in terms of what percentage of it is being paid by that most flexibly the TIF. And that's a good question. I think it's exciting to think about the fact, as you just said, it's, we could retire the dependence upon TIF revenue fairly expeditiously to get that money supporting other things and growth in the community and city. With that being said, the money spent on infrastructure and development going towards paying for infrastructure and positive, again, tax base support is sort of chicken egg, one investment leading to another. So to just brag about the staff a little bit, so this spread, if this spreadsheet is useful to you, I, so Ryan and John and Angel have done an enormous amount of work to build out this model. And we've had a lot of conversations about how the logic of it flows and how we make it as easily presentable as possible. And if this works, I think it's a spreadsheet we can apply to lots of projects in the future so you can see how, as things are turned on and off, things change. So huge kudos to the three of them for building this. And if there are other ways you wanna see this presented, so I think this is a way we're going to be talking about capital projects as we move forward, please do let us know that as well. I was saving it for the end. I think this is the best thing that I've ever seen us produce as a city in regards to these types of conversations. We're in good direction. There is. John and Ryan. Most of them are gone, but I can tell you during our capital budget presentations in the past, we've had total meltdowns because they were, they were hard conversations where it wasn't always clear what was going on, so thank you. And I think you're right, the whole moving things and metering them, so why don't we just bring the live spreadsheet in next time? And we'll tinker with numbers live. Let's do this. Let's do this. I will say that the updated modeling here, one of the things that really changes this from what you guys saw last time is that 10 year term for the utility underground debt. So that's one of the reasons you see the TIF only putting in 15%, because we have to cover that massive utility under grounding debt before the TIF expiration. Now that leads into potentially phasing. So that's another option that could be on the table is if, as we're looking at these two projects together, the potential of phasing the streetscape work to align better with the TIF expiration. So that's something that we could talk about further as we get in the utility provider discussions. I think having that phasing as much context on phasing that's available for that next conversation on September 4th would be really helpful. I mean, again, there'll be limitations to the detail you're gonna be able to get into and the amount of time and professional work that should go into that bluntly, but what else? Can we talk about the pre-construction property tax or reserve fund? That's a good one. So that is one option that was thought up. So potentially if the tax rate was increased, in this example, we're using a 2%, and that tax rate revenue increase was earmarked for a main street reserve fund, that money could be banked until the debt payments start and use it to kind of buffer that tax rate increase. So in this scenario with the local options tax, the projected main street growth, a 2% tax rate increase in FY20, that total of $447,000 would get banked and then distributed to buffer the tax rate increase over I think four years in this case to the TIF expiration. That's the 111.919, it's this total sum that's raised in FY20 spread out each of four years. No, so in the FY20 column, if we do the two local options taxes and raise the tax rate 2% to fund main street in FY20 before we start incurring costs, that total was 447 up there and then that gets spread out. Is that what you were saying? Right, that line nine. Is the distribution of that 447? Sorry, yes. So again, I think having the pool project and timeline be in here as well is would be very useful in terms of evaluating the timing of that impact. I don't really see all of these other moving pieces. From an annual. Yeah. Because it's the sheet of Eric reference where we came up with a potential stage tax impact and what those two could look like if we put them up on the old laminator. Right, so I don't know whether it's a separate sheet with the different revenue options we've considered for the pool. Fund balancing, fundraising being another, I'm not sure. And then the staged in financing. I think we should probably have two separate sheets, one for each project, but then some way to compare to add them together. You know what I mean? We can free this all out before community dinner in January where we have to stand in front of a bunch of people and explain this, right? So and that leads to the built grant which we are expecting announcement in December 18th is their proposed announcement date. So if by chance that did come through that definitely changes the dynamics of this debt service. So we did provide some numbers at the bottom of this chart of what the projected debt services would be with a build grant scenario. So the build grant that was submitted for 15.5 million grant funds, which is roughly 70% of our eligible costs. So in that scenario, the city transportation streetscape that would be $138,400 versus the 422. And then the utility undergrounding would be 276,900 for just that service. So fingers crossed. And that's versus the 1.053? Right, so 415,300 would be the expected expenses. The total expense versus 1.475. I don't know, I'm not quite clear what year we're looking. Is it FY21 or FY23 that we're comparing it to, but that's a substantial. Yeah, yeah, so that's that 415,300 is it's an average over the life's alone. You guys did a tremendous job of jumping on that opportunity and putting it together. And when I give great thanks and I will tell you that everywhere I go and conversations I have with people, they have been effusive in their praise of working with you guys in the Public Works Department. And I don't mean guys as in males, you collectively, Jesse, John, Peter, thank you all very, very much. You guys have been amazing. The Build Grant is massively competitive and usually the Northeast between the three states gets a couple. And there's several projects in the running in Vermont even that are repeat applicants. So it's a. A long shot. We can probably say it safely as a long shot, but I think it's awesome when I went after it and still fingers crossed and very hopeful. That would be great. I think something we certainly can say no to. I think the other important point to make here is we have analyzed other potential funding sources because part of the decision here and the way the memo is constructed is, are we gonna accept a specific type of funding from a specific entity and a specific type and configuration of debt? And we can assume that given the recommendation and title here that we've looked at other options and feel comfortable that this is the best opportunity from a funding perspective and debt perspective that staff has arrived at from a package perspective. Let's see, yes or no answer. On the water resources side, yes. General Fund, two we do turn with you. Okay. Yeah. I mean, cause you could potentially do a, say like a geo bonds where you're paying interest only to get to that tip expiration. Pending interest rates. So we would have to look at what's the predicted interest rate at the time of when we take out that loan and compare it against this locked in 3.875. Okay. And I think with that, if there's something you need from us for guidance from a tax rate impact, that's a great discussion for next time too is if there's guidance you need from us to help make that decision from a guard rail perspective that that's something we would wanna have a conversation about quickly and be able to provide feedback on it. Just so you're not wondering in the wilderness of how do you stage or post that? Cause that there's an endless number of options at that point, right? In terms of staging and debt. Yeah. I will wrap up by saying, just going through kind of next steps that we've highlighted. So we've identified seven potential next steps, main next steps. One would be similar to the pool looking at engaging in a final design, any contract or at least starting the proposal discussions. So I will say we did in the estimates that were shown for bonding and just preliminary estimates 1.85 million was the kind of 10% cost. You basically take 10% of the construction costs and that's your proposed engineering fee. We do not expect that it's gonna be 1.85 million but we can start working with the consultant to figure out what that next final design engineering cost is. So that's similar to the pool. That's question if you want us to start looking at that. I think that's... The same question again here is just, can you start looking at contracting and we're not actually committing to paying this yet or a date? Yes. Yes, is it repeat? Yep. Everybody in agreement for my movement standpoint? Okay. Item two, private utility negotiations. So I think we need that information to come back to you anyways. So we'll start talking with them to kind of try to get that cost share price figured out. Three kind of up coming. So the ordinance updates that we were discussing. So one, utility undergrounding to help us with utility providers. Two, the water and sewer service utility ordinance. So for the water resources grants in our current ordinance, the property owner is responsible from building to the sewer or water main. What we're proposing is the ordinance be changed for the gateway districts. So the city owns those laterals and therefore would get compensated for replacing them. So that's something for discussion. What's the entity that's responsible for overseeing that ordinance process? Is it the public works commission or the planning commission? Public works. So I think technically that is at your discretion. Our recommendation would be that it would go through the public works commission for initial vetting and then straight to you. It's not in land use ordinance per se, it's a utility ordinance. So I don't think that the planning commission needs to land but for your direction that they do. I think it's something the public works commission can and staff can send directly to you. I think it should be presented before them and allowed for comment. I don't think it needs to be something they need to touch, feel and direct. Does that make sense from a process standpoint? What is the timing from a necessity standpoint for those changes? So I think the only timing standpoint is if we, I don't think we're under the gun to do this ordinance because it would only come into play when we close on the loan. So we have plenty of time to. Just an interesting, I would just say the word, if we can package it with other potential ordinance changes that we're gonna have a conversation about, for example, on the loan or two. But we've talked about the fact that doing repeat ordinance changes comes at a cost. We love seeing Mr. DePalma in the audience and love his time and energy. Out every 15 increment of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. You can go ahead. I was gonna say, so item four, I think I should move that to item one. That is proposing the full picture capital plan with pool and projected future capital costs, putting that together for your review. Yeah. Do you feel like you have enough from us to do that in terms of the discussion we had earlier and now? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And then the final three, we're working with CCRPC right now on starting on the transportation impact fee framework. Looking at how that could get implemented, local options, tax decision. So that is, you know, as I don't, we don't need a decision about that tonight, but as we move forward, that would require a public vote. So thinking about, we'd have to put that on the town meeting day ballot. I think we talked about when we voted to move the bond vote forward, I think we understood the context that a lot of those things were contingent on it, especially when we started throwing numbers out to the public that we were doing so with a financing package that included us committing to some more steps too. We hadn't something previously authorized in terms of local options tax, but we never used it. We didn't do it right. Okay, so we have to redo. Yes, there needs to be another step. So what you accomplished was you got permission from the legislature to do it, but it's still from the legislature, but it still requires a local vote. So a local vote, a charter is changed to allow for us to call for a vote. Exactly. So if the voters approve it, it can be implemented without having to go back to the legislature. No, if I'm just going to air space tax. And I see affordable housing, our industry viewers should find that in there. I just, number eight in here is something we've talked about several times. I just don't want to slew aside on it. We have you going a billion miles per hour on several projects of a lot of direction right now and very focused work. We've talked a lot about that comprehensive plan for streetscapes and addressing obviously not just the main arteries. You know, we spend a lot of time in zoning and now an infrastructure project on these main arteries and people in neighborhoods rightfully say what's it look like for my street, you know, in my sidewalk. And just want to reassure folks that you guys have put a lot of thought and work into that and that that's in development and moving forward. And I think any chance we have to share updates and reassurance on that and continue to work so that the community knows that there's work being done in neighborhoods to ensure that we're taking care of those long-term as well is really important. So not something I know is lost upon you. We just want to add it to these because there's some long-term stuff there. What else? That's it. This represents a tremendous amount of work and a tremendous amount of really, really good work and a lot of time and energy and working with partners and cannot thank you at all enough for all of the work and time that went into this. And people will never recognize the full just small impact of how much something like this means and how important it is to making something like this actually happen. So thank you, thank you for all of this and for putting together the really great budget sheets and the narrative, thank you. I think we are, this is again definitely the work of John Ryan and Angela. I think having the caliber, especially in somebody like Ryan that the expectation should be that our Public Works Director can do this work but to have a city engineer who is as well versed in this kind of analysis and supported by Angela's we are extraordinarily fortunate, the right people. Can I just make a request and want to echo Seth's thanks that some of the revenue options appear to be on the optimistic side or best case scenario specifically thinking about the utility provider which then has obviously a huge impact on the bottom line and I just, I don't feel that same level of optimism has been brought to the financial modeling for the pool and so it tends to be sort of worst case scenario on the pool and maybe a better case, more optimistic. So I'd like just that same lens to be brought to both projects. Like we need the most realistic outlook. I think a more realistic outlook on the pool may have more revenue coming in than was previously modeled. Maybe a more realistic approach here has the utility provider coming in. So I just, I want to make sure that we're treating both projects with the same lens of realism. Not that anybody has intentionally not done that but I just, I want to encourage that type of the same level of creativity and optimism for this project to be brought to the pool project. No, great. And I will say on that, so the, I think we are fairly conservative with almost all the numbers except for that utility provider. I think that's where we said this is what the utility provider is going to have to kick in. In order for the numbers to work the way we said we want them to work. In order to stay at that no more than a 4% tax rate. Okay, thank you. I think that's great content for next time too is challenging question revenue sources and how they're all coming into the projects. That's great. And I just want to add to that, as George Cross made the point earlier, it's important that we get out in front of this with the community and we really need to have realistic numbers as we present it to them as well. Any questions, comments, concerns from the council? Any questions, concerns, comments from the public? Seeing and hearing none with gratitude, thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. Can we take a short break? Absolutely, we can take a two minute recess. We'll reconvene at 812. I'm good with that. They've had a really good update just now. Yeah, we're good, yep, we're good. He's already got a bunch of comments. Being 812, we'll reconvene tonight's city council meeting. Is there a way to queue? Mm-hmm. And we're gonna keep on municipal infrastructure and ask for a little update from John and Tim. Sure, so I think we hit on a bunch of this stuff already, but I'll just hit on a couple of quick points. Capital improvement planning, so we have gone through water and sewer, our fixed asset inventories, calculate some useful life and anticipate coming up with a sort of that overall CIP program for water and sewer by the end of September. So a draft CIP program and that would be used to help this main street pool discussion. General fund, similar, we're starting with some of the easier assets to quantify. So vehicle and equipment replacement, road replacements, putting together that road replacement program and having a cost and annual and having a date when each road would be repaired. That's on our work plan for fall completion. The other sort of quick update asset management, so we implemented municipal infrastructure asset management program. This season, our crews have begun using it for work plans. So anytime they're doing any work, they log in asset management, log, if they're working on a pipe, that asset so that we can better manage which pipes need to be replaced and tracked. And we have a picture of where they're allocating their time. So we're starting to collect that data. We don't have a great data set yet, but the database that we'll get from that will help us better manage your crews and assets. I'm gonna turn it over to you. Are there general, I think that it was a great update and we really appreciate these. I love reading them and you touched on a lot of these items in the last conversation and the last number eight that I added in the last list you addressed right in the very first one on the CIP plan about the holistic view of the community and the infrastructure needs on every street and every corner in the city. So I appreciate that. Appreciate all your work on this. Are there questions from council on any specific items you wanna cover? Any questions or concerns from the public? Thank you for providing the update. We really appreciate it. The time we're spending on it is not reflective of that. We're talking about the construction just a little bit. Yeah. Great, okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right, we're gonna move on to item I, discussion approval of the housing policy implementation plan. So I'm gonna have Eric and Heather come up as well. So the purpose of this discussion tonight, we heard. So first, at the last council meeting, I think this was a very hard conversation and I think quite frankly, housing conversations are going to continue to be hard for a long time. I think this is housing and Hukui, be as a community and who our communities and up of is probably the most personally held thing we're going to talk about as a group. So I really wanna thank you for being willing to have those hard conversations with each other and with us. And on some personal notes, speaking for the three of us at least, and kind of stepping outside of my traditional ICMA code of ethics hat a little bit. It's really feels like an enormous privilege to work for a community that values affordability as a something that we're actively working towards and trying to maintain and values are resident so much. And it's, they're really hard conversations but I feel really proud that we're having them. And it's one of the main reasons I wanted to work here. So just wanna say that on a personal note. So the point of the conversation tonight. So during the last conversation, we heard some requests for data about where we currently are in developments. We wanted to share those. And then we want to outline to make sure we're all on the same page of what the timing would be to move forward with implementing a housing, affordable housing trust fund of our placement ordinance. We would like to spend some time this fall doing some education of ourselves and the housing commission and planning commission and the council if you're interested with some community partners. So we concocted this fall housing series concept of bringing in some thinkers in the field to help guide some of these conversations. And then comments and recommendations about inclusionary zoning, which we've heard very clearly from you all that we should look at. So really we want to just outline what we anticipate to be the timeline associated with that body of work that would result just at a high level here and that would result in bringing you housing trust fund recommendation in November, making a recommendation for some monitoring systems, educate doing this housing series over the fall, having some community conversations as a result of those housing series conversations and then having the planning commission in the next couple of months look at fine tuning the replacement ordinance and considering inclusionary zoning concepts to pick up a public hearing process after the master plan draft is complete in November and then have their public hearing process run in conjunction with the master planning public hearing process to bring to you in the winter for your processes to run in parallel for final adoption in February. And I will just note that those two public hearing processes in advance of ordinance adoption are very prescribed by statute. So there are notice periods and the hearings have to be there have to be two hearings with notice periods and blah, blah, blah, both for the planning commission and for the council. So that's what we wanted to outline for you tonight. I'm not sure we're not looking for, unless you want to take a different vote in a different direction, we're not necessarily looking for a vote as much as kind of some thinking that this timeline is acceptable. And I'll just say, I think in the interest of tonight's conversation discussion, there's a lot of content in the memo and really appreciate all the work and thought that went into that. I think the biggest thing for us to walk away from tonight is this timeline understanding and any concerns around that specifically. And ensuring that we have a clear joint understanding about the timeline in which some of those decisions represented information is going to be done and no work was going to be done by staff so that there's consistency out there. Yes, please. So the timeline, there's essentially two timelines. Okay, I personally was confused like we're not going to do an ordinance until next August or is that this? So I think there's two different approaches that are being put forward and they impact the timeline. I'm not sure which timeline we're weighing in on. So, sorry, I think I wrote this in a confusing way. The first box, so in the timeline section, there's a box on the bottom of one page and a box on the top of the next. The first box that's labeled staff recommendations. These are the things that we believe we have to do regardless of what kind of ordinance is adopted. We have to set up a housing trust fund to receive funds and to be able to incentivize development. We have to create some monitoring systems. We have to do some community outreach and some education. The second box is meant to be this August, this September, but we were trying, we believe we're moving forward with the replacement ordinance as discussed last time and exploration of inclusionary zoning, but if you want to give us direction to do something else, that's why we put the X here. So these two timelines are the timelines we would be following, but for you giving us other direction. So what outcome are we looking for from the fall housing series in terms of input and how does that relate to ordinances? So what we were, this idea we've had of the fall housing series, what we were looking to do in that series is have, bring some resources to the community, both for the housing commission and the planning commission and council and staff of people who do this work for a living, affordable housing developers, other developers, financiers to say, here's how this works in other communities, here's the things you should be thinking about as a community, as you finalize your master plan, as you adopt replacement ordinances, as you adopt inclusionary zoning ordinances. Here are some of the triggers here as the role of the municipality in bringing infrastructure improvements that can offset the cost of development, just bringing knowledge to the community so it's out there as ordinances are considered as ordinances are adopted. It's really an education series. It's not meant to necessarily dictate what we do. It's just a lot of these conversations are happening a lot in the region. CCRPC did a series, a couple of meetings, series a couple of months ago. These partners are willing and able to come and kind of give of their expertise and having those be open sessions where we take over the senior center for an evening and bring some experts and have them present some concepts. I think we'll just, we're hoping we'll get more people engaged in these conversations and give ultimately quite frankly, you all some cover to adopt the ordinances we want to adopt. So is it for us as decision makers or is it for the community? I think it's for all who want to attend. So our idea thus far has been that we kind of roll out this as a series and invite the council, the housing commission, the planning commission and the general public. And which we think we may also get some developers interested in attending as well. So open community meetings. Pining but we've already decided, we already have a recommendation from the housing commission about what to do. So that's when you start to set up processes for community input, but you've already kind of know what you're gonna do that leads to frustration. So I just think it's important to be really clear about what it is we're hoping to get from these. I also thought too that the planning commission was feeling at capacity. So if this is also setting up joint meetings, I guess that confused me a little. So they discussed that their last meeting on here. Yeah, so the planning commission at their meeting on August 9th talked in quite a bit of detail about the discussion that occurred at your last meeting as well. And I think part of their discussion revolved around the fact that they weren't feeling as though they were properly educated on some of what's going on with the different ordinances, with the different options as far as inclusionary zoning versus replacement housing. And so they were looking for some more information themselves in particular on just getting up to speed on what they will be asked to do in the future for some of this implementation when it comes down to it. So I think that was one of the focuses of having the housing series as well is to be able to help educate the planning commission as well as the community on what all these different options look like. I guess just to turn the question back a little bit is the last time there was a, I think some pretty clear direction that there was interest in hearing back from some of those organizations. And if there's an alternative preferred format for presenting that information, is that a good question I think to, I mean, it seems like that's what this was geared at trying to address, is that correct? Okay, so is there a different mode for doing that that people would prefer? I mean, I think I'm interested in ensuring if it is a community input process that we're treating it that way and making sure that particularly folks who may be impacted by 80% of the parcels on Main Street being developed, for example, they're in the room, part of the conversation rather than the development community educating us about the dynamics around development. And just as an aside, my understanding was that the reason we created a housing commission was so that that group would support the knowledge base of the planning commission. I think they also feel like having more support would be helpful for them from experts like Michael Monti from CHT, for example, coming in, CCRPC coming in, could really help them to understand. I've heard back from them a little bit that they'd like some more support as well. I'll just say too, I think some of it is the pace at which they've had to complete that work may have caused the informational inputs to be what they are. That makes sense. It's just from where we stood when they picked up the issues. Kind of the feedback was the housing commission. I mean, the feedback was, hey, we've got a very narrow scope of policies. We don't want you to go off the rails and come up with all your own things. We had a housing needs assessment that included community outreach surveys and connection with a lot of these partners here with the results of it from a policy recommendation standpoint. We want you to look at these policies. I think the reality that we're seeing is then just having those policies as potential recommendations, even the housing needs assessment, say you want to look at this, you want to study its potential impact on your community, what it looked like, and that I think it's been about trying to bring resources in now to help put context in that conversation and satisfy, I think, the desire that was expressed here that there'd be more of those voices added to the conversation. But I think what's different about this, in my opinion, potentially, is that it's not going back to square one on this issue. It's picking up where the issue is and saying this is the issue and what's being considered and having those professionals there to talk about it and less about saying, hey, everybody, let's open up the issue of housing generally from this really basic perspective. Right? That would be, you're right, we can't just go back to square one and say let's recreate everything and start from the beginning about the visioning when we're already this far down the road and rightfully so because we invested a lot of time in getting out. Well, and we did, let's just remember, we started with a housing needs assessment that had a pretty robust public outreach and input and survey, I mean. So I don't know that we need to revisit that. I think, to me, the important part is that the stakeholder group input process and if this is the format you all feel is best for that, I'm on board with it. But yeah, I agree. A lot of what this could be has been done prior. That to me would be the most important component of it is those various players for that stakeholder group. And yeah, so if the rest of the body decides that this is the right process, great. That stakeholder group meets with the Housing Commission, Planning Commission, another format, great, but I'm fine with the proposal. How does that connect, sorry, go ahead, Christian. I was just gonna say, I think that where I see the connection here is this having someone from Champlain Housing Trust come in and speak to us, the Housing Commission, et cetera, is like a check on the thinking that they've been doing so far. Are the things that they're prioritizing like from that point of view, are they actually gonna be effective? I feel like maybe that's what they're looking for. So, but then there's all these other additional next steps and I'm just not sure how those fit in with the housing series in terms of the time. Frame, because as you said, Jesse, they're pretty prescribed in terms of the deadlines and process. So, is it, I'm just trying to be clear about what you're envisioning or what this is proposing. Is it proposing one path is to have a series where we all increase our knowledge base and then sort of reconsider what's happened today and come up with a new potential approach, which some of the memo seems to suggest we should do, or is it, we're moving forward with what came from the Housing Commission in terms of a recommendation with the replacement ordinance and Housing Trust Fund. And we're also, I'm just not sure how they'll two fit together in your mind. So, in my mind, how they fit together is we are not, so I think Seth said this well, this is not an attempt to start over. We have heard very clearly thus far from you all that you are interested in moving forward with the replacement ordinance and moving forward with the consideration of inclusionary zoning. So, I think the housing series would be couched around, this community is considering these two big tools. These tools are confusing and have been implemented in very different ways in different parts of the country. Let's bring in some people who know how to do it and educate us all on both those tools and just generally how communities that have been successful in maintaining and growing affordable housing have done that and have those conversations as those tools are being fine tuned. So even though, for example, we had the conversation at the last meeting about the replacement ordinance, as you remember, there's still a lot of details in there that need to be decided. So to give the housing commission time with some experts to learn about those details and those nuances of those ordinances as they're being considered at the commission level and done before a final draft of that is given to the Planning Commission for consideration in November. So the housing series would be in October with any fine tuning as the Planning Commission looked at the final drafts of those ordinances. Thank you, that's helpful. I think additionally, we also wanna make sure that the people that are gonna be impacted by the regulations understand what's in there as well. So both the renters and also the developers so that they understand the processes that are gonna be involved as far as notifications, as far as the timelines for when they'll be able to have the replacement housing completed. So to make sure that that education is also a component of this process. I would just add into this, this isn't a public property that we're making crisis decisions about there are people who own those properties and I'm talking about individuals too, right? You have a single family of homes on the street that hopefully they have an opportunity to do that. Because I'll be honest with you, I think because of the complexity of this issue, going back to these sessions, trying to make them more accessible is it's not an easy thing for somebody who owns a house or a duplex or a horror unit on a ministry to step into from an informational barrier standpoint. So hopefully we can get some more engagement around that, that would be good too. There are people with expertise as well who are really grounded in the research. So an inclusionary zoning ordinance is not the same thing from city to city to city. So there are places that have been more successful with it and less successful with it. So in a comparison, one of the research articles that I read about Boston versus San Francisco, they have very different outcomes because of the specifics of their IZ. So having people to guide us in doing it well so it has the outcomes we want would be helpful. Something I think that's been challenging about this to date is I don't know if we've ever voted on anything to do with this issue. Like a single time. You convene the housing commission. We convene the housing commission. You give them a charge? Yeah, no I don't. But I think in fairness too from a communication standpoint so that we're consistent in holding ourselves and expectations clearly too. I hope if it's not this meeting, the next, if there's tweets, people think need to be done with the schedule, but that we can agree on it and accept it. I think that's a really, I think that's a big thing. And if there's interest in accepting the schedule portion of it and giving that okay to staff and having a formal schedule come back next time that they'll at least let the work get started. That's fine, but I do think that taking that action in a step will be somewhat cathartic. And a good thing for us to do from a standard standpoint. So it will be helpful for me to do that with to see a schedule that integrates these two approaches because the way it's written right now, it leaves, it's not clear. I mean what I'm saying here is that these first tasks about the housing trust fund education and input, all that work is completed by November and that's when planning commission then recommends final language. Like I think that's how it aligns together. Well I think you're right, but then there's also stuff here that says direct stat, August or September, we're directing a specific ordinance. Is that not what we did last meeting? I thought so, but I'm not sure that everybody's clear about that. So I think that is the, as staff was trying to debrief the meeting, we believe that you gave us direction to move forward with the replacement ordinance and consider it an inclusionary zoning, but we have never had a vote on that. So we were trying to write this in a way that said, if you feel like that's not how you wanna go and wanna give us other policy direction, either tonight or at a future meeting, we wanted to allow space for that to happen. So yeah, I think let's also just put that, let's stack those options, what those things are instead of X, let's put those things back into this schedule very clearly so that there's a clear understanding that all those items functionally will be addressed from a policy decision standpoint in this timeframe and then from an ordinance implementation standpoint also done at the same time in a batch. And that would maybe clarify it. Yeah, I think it's just helpful to have the roadmap and I really appreciate putting that together, thank you. The other thing, I think this is great context, all this information and data and the recommendations or it's good information, I think what we vote on can just be the schedule. I think that's the content that we're voting on, is that and with the specific items on there. So one specific question, how do we get to adopting the ordinance in February? Is that not something we would wait for town meeting day for? No, council adopts the ordinance. Oh, we don't need that, just the public hearings. Okay. And I would say that that timeline is pretty important because if the composition of this body is going to change in any way, shape or form, it's important that this body have seen this work through. Number one and number two, we do get the advantage of having a lot of meetings around that time in budget and it allows us to pick your shoes. Brace yourselves. There's not gonna be much going on in budget season this year. Does that sound good for a bring back for everybody? But I think generally, I'm hearing that there's approval to move towards this general timeline and path, so the work doesn't have to be paused until next time and we can get formal approval of the schedule next time. Yep, thank you very much. Thank you, thanks for all the work that went into this. Any questions, concerns, comments from the public? Great. Thank you. Thank you, appreciate your time. Thank you, thanks for your work. All right, next up is Discussion and Special Approval Municipal Charter Change. My name's on this. Would you like me to say what I have to say? Yeah, I think really the big addition here is that you are, we opened up this issue because a couple years ago we held a charter change committee and there were a number of items that were put in the parking lot that were considered non-operational essentially and items that the committee felt, you know, hey, we're really here to look at what are the rules of the treasurer? How long should the term of a counselor be? And some of these questions that were really more cleanup, we had a bunch of technical things we had to open the charter for and that by opening up issues that had broader social, political and deeper nerves in the community and had sort of a broader impact weren't really appropriate for the composition of that committee to take on that point in time. So the recommendation back to council from that committee was we think you should address these issues but we don't think we should do it right now in this technical charter change. That happened a couple years ago. Time has gone by and we have had a couple counselors especially, you know, bring up the fact that there are some of those issues that we need to come back and address. It's easy to let time slip by quickly. So rightfully so we're bringing back that issue now to have that conversation about it. In last week's discussion, your last meeting's discussion, the idea of the timeline came forward. Eric shared what he felt was the optimal timeline to get it accomplished and some of the reasoning behind that and certainly Eric, I'm sure you have opportunity to talk about it. The other thing that we kind of asked was for staff who really hadn't had a whole lot of warning that that was, you know, was gonna be a direct request at this point in time. Go back and look at the schedule where Eric provided to and think through if there's any other items to emerge in from a municipal perspective and Jesse provided us now with this memorandum. So I think I'll just, if you wanna summarize anything or go through any key points on the memo. Sure, so, I mean, this timeline is basically what Eric had put together with the administrative steps added in, so the public hearing the notices and the frequency and stuff like that, just so we were sure that on our side of the table we weren't missing anything to achieve the November ballot. It is feasible, so just to kind of highlight the biggest concern for us is that it would, well, two concerns. One, it is if we move forward without some of those other administrative changes, we're losing the opportunity to do that. And from my role, I think it's important to acknowledge that there are other things administratively in the charter we'd like to change too. So hopefully we can have time at some point to do that. And then two, and more importantly for the public to some extent, this schedule does delay, or it doesn't delay, but it produces the municipal ballot almost a month after the statewide ballots are available. So there's going to be a period of time where there's early voting, where people may come in and vote and we are going to need to communicate with the voters that at some point in the future we're gonna be sending them another ballot and they need to return those votes. It is possible, we can do it under our administrative procedures, but it is a little bit of a communication challenge, but it can do. Otherwise the schedule is the schedule. Okay. So I think summarizing the differences, or not the differences, but what the concerns were from Alaska around was this presents a schedule that's condensed to get this on the ballot and for a November general election, which Eric will let you explain the reasoning behind that. And then I think what I heard and took away from the last meeting is that there's unanimous philosophical support for this effort and that there's interest and will in seeing this address and seeing the issue taken on. I think the question is about this timeline and not just from a technical standpoint, but I think from a broader sense. So I think that's the conversation tonight. And Eric, Jesse and I talked one time, so Jesse. Just after you're done, sorry. No, that's it. I was gonna turn it over and see if Eric wanted to share some. I just from an operation standpoint also want to acknowledge that we have our city attorney Bob DePalma here tonight. He's actually here for the executive session, not for this item, but I did brief him that he might be asked a legal question about timeline. So he is here as your resource if you want to ask him questions at all, as well. And one thing that also came up last time was this conversation of the difference between council taking action to put something before the voters on the ballot versus community petition process and how that not only impacts the timeline but what the enforceability of the community vote is by and large in Vermont, it's not a referendum state. So votes on issues like shall we say the federal government related to the basing of an aircraft or advisory, and then council has to take that advice from the public in the form of a vote and take action on it. This is an issue where we actually believe that if the public were to file a petition on a ballot and it was successfully passed in the ballot that would actually just go right to the legislator from the public. So I want to put that context in there in terms of legal homework that was done following the last meeting. I, Eric, I think it's appropriate. You've done a lot of work. It's been a lot of time on the issue. Sure, well, I love the timeline. I really appreciate all the work that you put into setting it out. I also think that it does provide an adequate robust public input process. I'd push back and saying that this is a condensed timeline. I think it runs really similarly to timelines we've seen on other really important issues that hit the city like the Main Street Revitalization Project and the public hearings that went in advance of that bond vote. And I think the timeline that you just shared in regards to the number of years that have gone by before, since the Charter Change Commission initially reviewed some of these items a long time ago is really impactful. So I think this timeline is adequate to get this issue in front of voters to have a robust public engagement process beforehand so that the community can feel good about going to the ballot box. I'm happy to dive into and recap some of the stuff I talked about last meeting in regards to why I think it's so important to move forward with a November election. But one of, I think, the most incentivizing reasons is that this is a big decision for our community. Unfortunately, a lot of people are really impacted by this decision because of the nature of what the decision is won't have the ability to weigh in on that decision. However, I think that we owe it to the remainder of the voting community right now to ensure that this is on the ballot during a time when voter turnout will be higher, during a November general election, than pushing it to an election farther down the road where just as a result of how election turnout works, less people will likely be at the polls and have the opportunity to weigh in. So I think that there's substantial reason for that as well as just in regards to if our community makes the decision to move forward on this issue, I think moving it to a different election farther down the road would have an impact on our ability to even get it passed, which I'm sure that'll be another discussion we can have. But assuming that we were, it would delay implementation, meaning that we are extending the number of years in which valued members of our community who right now don't have a voice, still would be unable to weigh in and be a part of our community decision-making process. So I'm a firm advocate for the schedule as it's presented here in the memo and would really like to see us move forward as a body to adopt that schedule and allow the community to weigh in on this issue. So if you want to push back on condensed timeline, I want to say that I don't, the matter of years, the alternative discussion was potentially as having it on a March ballot. That was what I heard from the last meeting. It wasn't a delay of a matter of years. And for context and reference, the public voted two years ago on the charter changes. It was a charter change committee that we put together that executed their work in that December of 2016. So that's, I understand there's a political perspective as to trying to read the tea leaves as to whether it may or may not make it through a committee at a particular pace and what's gonna happen in global politics in the state political room. But the conversation that I think was had here was concerned about do we take until March to have it on the ballot or do you push to have it on November? And that was the conversation. Right, I agree with that. So I think though too, just like logistically when we were looking at timelines for the pool and how they're seasonal construction and non-constructional seasons that impact a timeline. If you shift a few months here or there that could impact years on a project, the same exists for the legislative process. So I just wanna... The legislative process doesn't end in March. No, but I think so, and I guess we can get into that discussion because there's a lot of detail there. So I think my big worry in waiting until March is that this is an issue that will take a significant amount of time to go through the legislature. It's not like other charter changes where it's a little administrative fee change or something that they'd probably approve pretty quickly on the spot. This has to be worked pretty thoroughly through committee and it will get political. I think if this is in front of them at the start of an off election year session, there is the much greater likelihood that they'll be able to work at that session if they don't get this until sometime in March as session is coming to a close, which is when things are really picking up. I think that that, I think it's a near certainty that it would of course get delayed until the 2020 session. There's no way they're gonna be able to work this by the end of the 2019 session. So I believe there's a strong likelihood it may get referred to committee put on the wall for the 2020 session and then there's a lot greater likelihood it would never come off the wall. And if it does, because the 2020 session is an election year session, things in general are about to be a lot more hyper political and that would either impact because everybody's posturing themselves in a lot of ways and there's just a lot more on their schedule to actually be able to accomplish in that period of time. I think that it would either not get the attention it needs to come off the wall and say we can't deal with that this year or it would become so political it would dramatically harm our ability to actually get it passed. So I think delaying it to extend the process which I don't think is necessary. I think we have adequate time for a really robust public process. But delaying it to increase that amount of time and move it to a march, Adam will make it very unlikely we'll actually be able to pass it. And then even if, which will be an uphill battle anyway, if we are able to pass it because they didn't take it up until the 2020 session that could mean depending on when if it was passed in 2020 through the legislature, if that was after March or with not enough time for implementation for March, we'd be looking at the first town meeting day that people most impacted by this being able to vote would be 2021. And we just went through two gigantic important community votes where already people had no ability to be a part of that process. And I, it would really bother me for us to look at a potential timeline that would put us another three years away from being the inclusive community that we pay a lot that we speak to really often. Part of that is we have processes for community input in the development of an approach and we haven't had this conversation as a community. As Seth said, we're all philosophically aligned with the importance of non-citizen voting. George eloquently said earlier in the meeting that we're out front of our community on a lot of issues. And this is a really big issue that if we get it wrong, there could be a lot of backlash that is actually not healthy and productive. And I'm not willing to let predictions about the political dynamic in Montpelier drive what I think is good process in our own community. So I think I'm reluctant to sign on to an expedited timeframe. And as Seth said, if the community get a petition and it gets on the ballot, then that's a vehicle for people to pursue this who want it to be decided in November, I think we ought to treat this with a seriousness that it sort of deserves in terms of bringing people around the table and having a conversation about what that could look like and what it means so that you build the kind of understanding and buy-in from across our community about why this is so important. And that fear that it will be perceived as sort of another big item that's being start coming out of nowhere when people don't, don't feel like there's been. And, you know, Main Street did have a pretty big public process in terms of the visioning around form-based code. And there was a lot of time spent on developing that vision. Same thing with the pool. So yes, some of the bond vote processes were expedited, but it wasn't a brand new conversation for the community. You know, Burlington, they voted on it and it failed because they didn't do, I don't think they had, they didn't have the support within the community for that change. And so my fear is if we rush to get on the ballot in November and we don't have some community dinners and created a charter committee, or we can attend to some of the other issues that need to be tended to, we're still moving forward. We're still gonna send something to Montpelier in March. And if they don't take action, that's on them, it's not on us. I do think though a charter committee discussed this previously and we just heard they decided that this was not the type of thing that was appropriate for a charter committee. And I also- For that charter committee, given the other issues that needed to be tended to? It's not what we asked them to sign up for. It was like a technical one. Yeah, I mean we pitched it to them as we want, you know, we grabbed the lawyers and George. Seriously though. But I mean that wasn't what we pitched. We said, you know, we have a bunch of technical changes we need to be made around finance and budgeting. And I think who you asked to serve on that committee really should reflect the types of changes you're looking for. So I personally would want George to sit in this position. But I think we need to have a bigger committee that was a pretty small committee that was looking at very technical issues. Having a charter change that would allow for non-citizen voting, I would think would have a different type of committee involved. I would say though, I think that this schedule does allow for a significant amount of public interaction in what- We're also talking about a housing series. You know what I mean? I just feel like when I think about the priorities and the timing, you know, I don't know. What's the harm if it, we don't get enough of a conversation and it doesn't pass in November? Can we just recycle that and do a lengthier process? It can be a pretty ugly conversation if we don't frame it well, I think. And then you've burned a lot of- I think the part of the point of that is there's something else other than just having it pass. But I think that's, hold on. There's something different than just having a majority of vote on things, right? I mean, I take no credit for this, but five years, six years ago, we were a community that was approving budgets, 53 to 47, we got 70 what percent last time around, they included an increase. That's the community buying into an overall vision and a lot of legwork and time that went into crafting those visions and the investment patterns that were done. And the pool and mainstream are good examples of multiple year conversations that took place to lead up. I think we are talking about having this conversation in a really compressed way just to get it done into March. And just because you can pass something doesn't mean that what's left behind from a community perspective and the way that the conversation took place is gonna leave behind a good environment. And that's, I think that to me is the question that we're trying to balance here. I would say that what's left behind to what you just said is that people who already feel terrible about this because they're being taxed and don't have any say in how those tax dollars are being used. So to say that this process, because you don't feel it's robust enough would make members of the community feel resentment about how it was done. There are already a lot of people in the community that are severely impacted from this that I would imagine feel a lot of resentment because it hasn't been done. I don't disagree with that, but that doesn't then necessitate that you do the policy development in the wrong way for the entire community. I don't feel like it's the wrong way. And I appreciate that, but my concern is from what the lingering effects are. And that's okay, we don't have to agree on that. But I think just saying the perspective that people are negatively impacted and we're not acting six months sooner, four months sooner, five months sooner, if there's a good argument on the other side that people feel strongly about that there's maybe a different holistic approach that takes place that leaves behind a stronger community, that that's part of our job too. It's not just political calculus and counting votes to me. That's not the way we make decisions about what we move forward and the pace in which we move it forward. It can't be, not to me. And that's my reflection in my beliefs, and that's okay, it's not the same. But, sorry, you were asking questions. Well, last time Eric spoke about this, he was, I don't know if this is confirmed, that Montpelier is also putting forth a similar motion for November. There was us doing that last F-35 thing with other communities that made a difference, having more, having other communities on board like got the information out better, your news stories about it. There's more, we didn't get what we wanted, but there's more response to it. I think that is a valuable thing to consider here. I'm also not a fan of rapidly pushing through stuff, but I think there's some value to that key piece of timing. I also don't, and I don't really know why I have a good reasoning for this, but I don't really want to put this on the ballot at the same time as the local options taxes. I feel like it's a weird combination and could drive some people to respond differently. Yeah, and I would say I think part of my concern is the overload that we've put in front of the community in terms of participation and big decisions and that any amount of time we can buffer people to process, be engaged, ask questions and be thoughtful about it, while also not coming off the tail of a couple other big, complicated asks that we clearly still have a lot of education to do around them, has merits. So that's what I think about that too. Even though there, yes, are gonna have several complicated items on their ballots in March having that opportunity to, but that's making people engage in two separate conversations at one time. There's no focus there. Like here you could do the two separately. You think we're not gonna be talking to them about things leading up to November? You think we're not gonna be out educating, having a housing series going through the process of talking about the details of these financials between now and November? Where's it gonna sit by then, so I know. The other thing I'll just say is that if Montpelier does move ahead, and there is a bill in the legislature and action is taken in March, we are not foreclosed from amending a bill that has the city of Montpelier's language. I mean, there's ways to join forces who won't have missed the deadline for if testimony has been taken on that issue for Montpelier. It's similar testimony. I can't imagine the charter change language is gonna look fundamentally different even if they're two different bills. Yeah. The content will be. I just think there's weight to having two communities pushing it at the same time. I think two months delay is not being part of that conversation. Yeah, and I would also add that those are public sessions that are open and we've commented on other communities charter changes before and had an impact on those conversations. So we took a formal stance on Burlington's right, for example, to put some restrictive rules around firearms in the charter change. So we passed by resolution and counsel a supportive measure. We said, we're not pursuing it right now ourselves, but we appreciate the fact that a community should have a right to do this and it reinforces it. So there are alternate ways that you can participate in that process. I guess what I wonder is, what is the alternate timeline to get to March that is not as conflicted? Like if we're saying that we have these large decisions right now that we've just been going through, we have conversations to have about those, it kind of just mirroring exactly what you said. Like, it's not really a different discussion than in that sense. No, it's four months, it's about time. It's also what we're going to be doing intensive work around the budget with the community around the budget. And I don't disagree, it's about having four months. It's about having four months for a conversation to play out in a more holistic way in the community. Not having a committee do the work. I think though, if it was a difference of how do we do this large thing, we need a lot of very specific details on that would feel a lot more appropriate to me for a charter change committee in a longer process. If it's a, should the community do this? Yes or no? I think that the community would be really ready after multiple public hearings and a lot of discussion between now and November and two and a half, almost three months to be able to vote and to vote confidently regardless of which way they vote. I guess I see this as a different issue and no pun intended because we're the most diverse community in the state. And in my conversations with our citizens and our non-citizens, there's urgency about this. It's like, why wait? And it's, I think of, and even as we agree philosophically, we're all behind this, I think that speaks for the community. I mean, we're, you know, we are not walking the walk. We talk the talk. You know, we want to have an inclusive, participatory community and a large part of our community can't come to the table. So now's the time, I support this and I think we'll be surprised at how much support we will enlist through the hearings for this kind of policy. Any other comments, questions, suggestions? Yeah, we can open it up to the public. Any other comments, questions, suggestions from the council? Good. Comments, questions, suggestions from the public? Mr. Cross, who was this name for? It's a very difficult situation for me. I doubt very much if there's any family in the school that's spent any more time on refugees and immigrants and new people to the school and their life alive. However, having said that and having enjoyed the fact that we are an inclusive community and having been a part of the most inclusive school dessert that there is in number one. There are two parts of this question that are extremely troublesome to me. One is I think Nicole is correct. The city council is out in front of the community. And you're going to need to get with the community soon, but frankly, you're not going to be there. Secondly, which is the more difficult part for me. Allowing non-citizens to vote and I assume that's what the topic is all about. They haven't done a very good job of explaining it. Is it really difficult to think about historically? Is a certain set of privileges and rights that come with citizenship? And voting happens to be one of them. So I would find it personally very difficult to support the charter change that allowed non-citizens to vote. On the other hand, I support regularly any number of individuals and have been to any number of citizenship at times when people are actually become citizens. Celebrations, I've been to parties to celebrate citizenship and feel strongly that anyone who lives in this community or lives in this country for that matter, with exception of one by anything, ought to desire and want to become citizens and want to be active participants. Now, when does he start a good job of bringing people into all kinds of committees, organizations, all kinds of different avenues for people to participate in the community, regardless of whether they're citizens or non-citizens. But this is an issue that you really need to make sure that you're with the community in terms of putting it on the ballot and having it fail means that it's not gonna come up again. Putting it on the ballot and having it pass means you've created another device of peace. You can't win on this one. Sorry. George. This isn't a political argument, it's political. I mean, is there something specific like from an address standpoint? Yeah, well, I just say, I mean, I think it's pretty common in public comment that you and the rest of the council respond to public comment that occurs. But we just say, George, there actually is, you mentioned the history of voting. There's a really long history of non-citizen voting in the US that occurred up until the 1920s and following World War I and a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric that sprung up. It was wiped away. So there actually is, there's a longer period of time in the US than non-citizens were allowed to vote specifically in local elections than there's been they haven't. Yes. Sister Pat. I have a little different point of view. You know, we do talk about inclusive community and community building. And I think that the more we involve people and allow them to make decisions, the more responsible people are for supporting the community, for being involved. And these are people, we're talking about municipal business. Am I hearing that correctly, municipal voting? So I think the educational component I think is really important that people know and understand. But I think that these are people that are paying taxes and that have no input into making any of the decisions that impact their lives and impact their kids. And I think it's really important if we say that, we talk about being a centrally city and I understand the difference. But that also to me is a part of being inclusive and being supportive. And because things work that way in the past doesn't mean it can't change now. And I think it's really important to say what is best for our community right now and how do we include the most people so that we can move together as a community. And I do think it's important for people to be able to make that decision. I do think it's important that they be well prepared. And you know, I don't know how much time that takes. And you know, I think that if we wanted to do something for the rest of you could do it. But I just wanted to share that, thanks. Thank you. This man. I have a couple of different perspectives to bring to this. One is as an attorney who partly practices immigration, I appreciate that so many immigrants would like to become citizens. And often that choice isn't theirs to make. It's the choice of you guys customs and immigration who ultimately decide if a person is a high preference enough immigrant to warrant coming in under the TV program or if they are lucky enough to, as from what I have, find an American husband. So we see this in our practice all the time, individuals who come to be doctors, attorneys, nurses, teachers and then say, what is my hook? How do I get in? It doesn't seem like the US wants me and I'd like to stay here and I would if I could but either I can't afford the high filing fees or I'm not gonna get selected in the diversity lottery. And so it's, I think it's more complicated than to just say why not apply to be a citizen because as I said, the choice isn't always the particular immigrants to make. The second would be as someone who can't myself vote in elections as a non-citizen president will lose my husband and I who lived here in about one three years. We pay our taxes, we attend to the events. I sit on multiple city commissions and yet we, well, I shouldn't say we, I can't do vote on the pool or in our primary or anything like that and it would be meaningful to be able to vote on policies that might then come before my commission. And the last would be, Jesse told us in the recent planning commission meeting that going forward, this is gonna be branded as the opportunity city. And this feels like a way to attract a class of people to Winnowsky who see this as a opportunity. Conveniently today, I got a handwritten thank you card from a student at Vermont Law School who we have provided some pro bono immigration help to. He mostly just wanted to be comforted. He feels uncomfortable in the United States. He thinks about going back. He spent all this money on a legal education here. And he thinks, I don't know if I can use it here. I feel like people don't want me. And I was able to say to him that this is something the city council of Winnowsky is looking at today that there aren't people who want him and there is a reason he should stay. And I hope that the meaning to give to someone like him and to someone like me would justify engaging with the community on a as quickly as possible or to make sure that that can happen. Thank you. Luis. I'm here to address the floor for non-citizen voting and in his full collections and also for getting on the ballot in November. All of our neighbors shared interest in making Winnowsky a great place to live. But it's not just that folks who own homes, pay property taxes and send their children to Winnowsky schools don't get a voice in how those tax dollars respond to our education system. I hope that all of our neighbors who wish to gain US citizenship achieve that goal. And in the meantime, voting in municipal elections is a great way to get familiar with the responsibilities that US citizenship has to deal with. Placing this on the ballot in November is the best time to engage the community when we have that high turnout. As someone who works in electoral politics, I hear that risk of blowback of maybe moving too quickly but at the same time moving these ballot items towards less active elections like kind of meeting day or primaries is kind of what you do when you want to push something under the radar and to me that as the most risk of getting some negative feeling left over. I really feel like November is the best time for our community to move forward on this. Thank you. Thank you. Some public comments? I'll back up what she said. Thank you so sir. I'm the second one. I'm a staff member but I'm speaking as a resident of Lewesky. I think this is a really important issue to address right away. As someone who works with members of the community who are non-citizens who are active in our community or children who are old in school or homeowners who volunteer frequently in the city and are active participants, I think it's really important that those people have a say of where their tax dollars go and how their money is spent in the community that they have chosen to live in. I work frequently with high schoolers who are learning about the specifics process and about how all these things work and wouldn't it be wonderful if at the end of that they could actually vote with their peers instead of being told to wait? I think historically we've had a lot of tough conversations in this country about non-landowners, about women, about African-Americans voting and we've constantly told people to vote their turn and pause those things and keep them down the road and I think that we would be on the right side of history if we said now is the time to make this happen. Thank you. Yes ma'am. I'm speaking from that legislative perspective and how Eric laid out that timeframe and I really critical of you, the position, the separation of powers and the necessity for you all as city councilors to take the action that you see is fit and from the legislative perspective of how that fits in with the timing and that with the, what we don't know who will get elected in the legislature and the member, we do know that there is continually to be on the national politics level some tension and that here in Vermont we are really doing what we can at the state level to address and ease that tension that we're seeing particularly around anti-aggression and so at the state legislature the first year of biennium is the best time to move things forward and Seth you mentioned the Burlington City Charter and the gun restrictions and how that was a very hot topic and really was very divisive in the state house and it was at the end of the session because it was after town meeting. We needed to get pushed to the next year. It really was used as a political tool and not actually move forward. So I think if you all really are interested in the possibility of moving this forward in this coming biennium, getting it in at the beginning of the first year in the biennium is your biggest opportunity to do that and so I wanted to just bring that perspective for food for thought as you all decide what it is that's right for our community at this time. Thank you. Any other comments, concerns, suggestions? Okay, turn it back to council. You need final items from councilors? I'll just say in summary I think a lot of comments that are very reflective of the values that I think I hear from five people up here in terms of the interest in seeing this through and having every member of our community be able to participate in elections. I think quite frankly maybe I'll say the separation in perspectives here is in my mind exactly representative of the concerns that I have of exactly the way it's gonna look in the community and that actually we all agree but from a process standpoint can't agree on this timeline and that's too bad for me and I do think it's going to put community members in a place that's really challenging and is gonna put the community making a decision in a way that's gonna cause more conflict than there needed to be on the issue and subject. So I can't let it go without stating my reflection on that and I hope it passes and we'll certainly work as hard because I get the idea of the way this vote's gonna go. I sure hope it passes and we'll certainly work my heart out to ensure that it does because I think it could be a wonderful thing for the community. I just also think to the point that one commenter made about making sure we're trying to bring the entire community into these conversations moving forward that that's to me actually the benchmark of what's made us so successful and why we're pointed to as a model of a community that's growing in the same direction and is reflective of how we've gotten so much accomplished and I don't know that I think it's gonna be important for us moving forward so and I don't mean to reopen the argument but that's my personal reflection ahead of the vote. Any other comments, thoughts, recommendations, suggestions? I'd love to make a motion. Help yourself. I'd move that we adopt the proposed timeline in the memo to place a charter change ballot item on the November general election ballot regarding non-citizen voting and municipal elections. Second. Motion by Eric, second by Hal. Any further discussion? Seeing, hearing none. I am Tina. Seeing, hearing none. All those favor, please say aye. Aye. And those oppose? Motion carries. You okay with the counts? Great. Okay. With that, we have come. Sorry, for your upland. If, so my charge now is to work with legal counsel to bring you a charter change. So if you have language that you would like us to start with from a baseline, if you could provide that to me, that would be fantastic. Yeah, and I think part of it would be a talk and fire in regards to, yeah, we'll talk. Yeah. Great. Okay. So next up, we have two items on tonight's agenda that are listed in an executive session. We have an item that's related to a problem of litigation which our city is involved in and also includes a portion of a conversation related to real estate negotiations the city's engaged in to conduct either conversation in public with put the city at significant disadvantage from negotiation standpoint and also would put us, violate our attorney prior client privilege opportunities to speak with our attorney regarding a matter of litigation. Second, we also have a, and just in relation to that first item, it's connected to the TIF district which is our downtown financing district and a current lawsuit that is a public matter that you're welcome to Google and read about all you like. So that's what it's related to the issue. In addition to that, we have an employment matter. I mentioned earlier that we conducted treasure reviews. We're gonna discuss the potential section of treasurer candidates. And again, it's an employee action. We're gonna be discussing applicants for a job that again, it's a personal matter that's conducted in executive decision. In both matters, any type of action or decision by council has to be done in public and will it would be done in public by vote but tonight neither item has any item of consequence that requires a vote or action by council. And as such, we will reconvene only to adjourn and it will conclude tonight's public meeting. For the executive sessions, cumulatively we are gonna request to bring in of course, Jesse Baker's always this year we're also bringing Robert to call my attorney and Angela to the area staff calendar as well. Anybody else? Great, so I'm gonna motion to enter an executive session to address the two previously stated items. Motion by Eric, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. Yeah.