 that got us to 705. Yeah, that was great. Invitation. Yeah, thank you for being here. So welcome everybody. I just have a quick little slide to share. So it's a little intro and remind everybody of the agenda. Here is our agenda and just a reminder that the NPA strives to provide a safe and welcoming forum where all residents can actively share their voice about issues that matter to them and where they can learn from the voices of others. And I feel like this is especially important for this meeting where so much of our agenda is focused on community discussion. I'm Jillian Kirby. I live on Flynn Ave and I am a member of the NPA Word 5 Steering Committee and I'm gonna be our moderator for this evening and I am delighted you are all here. So I think we can go ahead. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and start on public forum. So yeah, you can use the raise hand function or actually everybody's promoted to panelists. So you can just go ahead and let us know if you have something you'd like to add to our public forum. We will have our community discussion later but that'll be a little more focused if you have something you'd like to update briefly on before we get into the meeting. You are welcome to do so. Hi everybody. My name is Naila A. Teary. I'm also in the Steering Committee. This is half public forum, half an NPA related thing but as many of you might have seen we were conducted a survey over the past month. We were kind of trying to gauge some community thoughts on how we could best serve you and what these meetings could look like, what our activities outside of these meetings could look like and part of that was that out of all of the respondents, we had a really great response rate. We got over 100 responses, 125 about. So a lot of thoughts were shared and we really appreciate everybody who took some time to fill that out but the fun part of that too is that three lucky people who responded also were entered to win $25 gift cards to City Market. So with some great stage craft from Andy Simon and myself we have, let's see how does it look? We have some bingo balls and we've matched these up with people's names. So bear with us and we're gonna call out those names so that might be like, if that's really, I'll put myself on mute as I do it. And then here are our three winners and they correspond with some names on our sheet. So let's see, got B7, B3 and G49 and that corresponds with. Bingo. Yeah, right, that corresponds with... So we just have email addresses so thankfully the three are pretty similar to someone's actual name. So in Eileen Christensen, Caitlin Brinn, K-A-T-L-Y-N-V-R-Y-N-N-E and April M. Howard. So I know a couple of those names but are any of those people with those email addresses here today? Congratulations, all right. So yeah, we'll be following up shortly with getting you that gift card and thanks for responding to the survey. Yeah, thanks so much, that's crazy. Yeah, I'm glad you were here. All right, and back to the rest of the public forum. Thanks, everybody. Hi, you all, my name is Shirsten Bohm. I'm also a member of the Steering Committee here at Word 5. I live on Dunder Road at the end of Oakledge Park, mom of two kids who are six and three. I work at VSAC during the day. I just wanted to quickly preview our April meeting for you. So we're gonna be lucky in April to be joined by Talitha consultants who have been contracted by the Public Safety Commission and the Police Commissions Joint Committee to kind of solicit input from the community on the needs and values and visions of vision of our community here in Burlington to help with the design of a process to continually kind of collect input on the operations of the police and provide feedback on that proposed plan. So we'll be joined by them early in the meeting next week. And then we have an agenda that's really shaped as well for the rest of the evening around the climate crisis. And oh, is Jillian gonna pull up? Look at that, it's like magic. This is the agenda for next week or next month. There it is. So the rest of the meeting, this is now much more like a teleprompter, how lovely. The rest of the meeting has updates from Parks and Rec, a discussion around the Champlain Parkway with folks from the Pine Street Coalition as well as DPW and a quick update on the Shelburne Street roundabout. So if you're kind of a frequent flyer at our MPA meetings, this will be a bit longer, but we wanted to make room for all of these important requests that we've gotten. And then the folks from Talitha Consultants will also be hosting a town hall on March 30th. I don't have the time from them yet, but we'll be sure to post that on our Facebook page. And I'm sure CEDA will have lots of information about it as well to more broadly get input beyond that one opportunity that we'll have in April. Thanks. Awesome, thank you, Kirsten. Anybody else? We all did? I'm not seeing, do panelists raise hands? I can't remember if it works that way. Yeah, you can. Okay. It doesn't look like we have any hands. So I guess we can dive into our community discussion. So we have two questions that the MPA Steering Committee came up with to sort of spark the discussion, the first of which is what would make our neighborhood community stronger than they are today? And how can we help our neighbors in these years of economic and social uncertainties? And yeah, we have some elected officials here who were delighted to have here listening. And we're just gonna open up the floor for people to start that discussion. I feel like there must be somebody who is excited to jump in. I know we have like some frequent talkers who might be holding back. So if you're a frequent talker holding back, I would encourage you to just go for it. I'm wondering if smaller groupings would encourage more people to speak up. So I don't know if you have the capability to do breakout rooms with four or five people and each just to spark conversation and then could share from there. We did have that idea when planning this. And unfortunately it's not an option with the CEDA webinar format that we use, which is a bummer. We did think that would be cool and helpful. I know they're really broad open-ended questions. It's, you know. Hi, the first question you asked is how to make our community stronger. Is that right? Yeah, what would make our neighborhood communities stronger than they are today? Well, since I'm already unmuted, I'll say something that's on my mind that I think having spaces where community members can gather brings strength. So I think community is coming together. And I think of like coming off the winter where many of us are starting to come outside again and see our neighbors that we've forgot about and we've been kind of holed up that having spaces to do that gathering really brings strength. And just by running into people or being like when we've done on our street, we've had block parties and everybody's in the street or standing in their front yard like early COVID. I feel like that made me feel like I was part of a strong community as opposed to when I'm very, when we're more kind of doing our own individual or family thing. And I think that having the parks that we have and the green spaces, but I think even more of that brings places for community to gather and that that leads to strength of community. That's my kickoff thought. Thank you, I really appreciate the kickoff thought. I totally agree. I do often wish that we had a specifically accessible public space in the south end. We don't have like a south end community center. That's not a thing that exists. When we did the survey and asked people where they would be interested in coming to NPA meetings, the most popular answer I think was city market. And that seems like a failing on the part of our community in a way. Not that city market isn't great. If anyone else wants to bounce off that or jump in with another thought, go for it. I'd love to just kind of build off of what Kate was saying, that I feel like when you get the opportunity to see other people's faces and to step outside, literally step outside of your house and see beyond a collection of houses that make up a neighborhood, being able to see the collection of people and the similarities that exist between, similarities and differences that exist within, are pretty diverse in a lot of different ways neighborhood. So I really think that some sort of, it'd be great if there was even like a block party series, like over the course of a summer, a summer in the fall, being able to kind of like block party jump from all the way from King and Maple Street down to Queen City Park over the course of, oh, it's Thursday night. Well, maybe not Thursday night because we have these meetings, Saturday afternoon and this week it's over here and just continuing that, as kind of a combination of informal social gathering, but also maybe having some element of collecting feedback on what kind of services are being offered that are doing well and what could be improved. Along the way and maybe that's not perfect, but it kind of could spread things out and kind of get more of a sense of the broader neighborhood that we are a part of. I love that. Thanks, Nate. We have two hands up. Jane, if you wanna go ahead. I can think of the Champlain School as having a big space. And I wonder if there are problems for that. And I know that we've had a movie showing before there and that's where we have, and that's where people go do Earth Day celebrations and that's where a lot of, and a lot of other groups have events. So I wonder if that could be possibly something done on a regular basis or if there are problems because it is a school and maybe there are security issues, but that's the biggest space near. I mean, that's a big space to have something that would be great if it could be regular there. I mean, events. Yeah, absolutely. It's certainly a big public space. I'm not sure what the rules are about using it. Mike? Well, I know I'm supposed to be in listening mode, but I do know that you can request to reserve parts like they rent out the gym to organizations. So I think that is an option to explore. Great, thank you on it with the answers. Andy? It's not Andy, it's Ruby. Okay, great. Ruby Perry, but I think those are great suggestions about both public space and I love the roving block party because it occurs to me that as a community, Ward 5 doesn't, you know, we don't know the bound, most people don't know the boundaries of that. And it would be interesting to figure out a way of, I mean, some of us obviously know, but figure out a way of creating a map that shows what the boundaries and to play with those boundaries somehow. Or maybe how the strengths of the neighborhoods fit into the hole. I don't have a specific idea, it's more of a working thought of how do we strengthen this concept of Ward 5? Yeah, I like that. I feel like most of the sort of great block party-esque events that I have attended in Ward 5 have all been very private business-based. So it would be cool if we could start moving into a more public realm with that. Nancy? This is a request for a specific event. And I wrote this on my survey too, but the first year we lived here, there was a day in the Five Sisters that was like free day, like giveaway day, and people had tag sales and stuff. And that was a fun way to get to know people. We like gave away a grill and then like got a grill. And so like passed things along. And I was just like, and that's also something that could happen soon and be pretty socially distant. I don't know who organized that, so. I love that. Anyone else wanna jump in? This is Billy Clark. I'm also a steering committee member and I'm working with Andy and Nate on the engagement group. So this is something we think about a lot. And I will say that one thing we do have on the horizon that we've been holding back on because of COVID, but we're hoping to do is some sort of outdoor event that can capture at least some of the spirit of what people are talking about here. I love the idea of really extending it into a big block party thing. One thing we were just talking about doing is just having an afternoon at Callahan Park to have, especially the people with little kids, get them out and running around as a community. So that's definitely to come, but it's really great to hear all this and to hear that there is an appetite for people to get together. Who wouldn't have an appetite to get together after a year like this, so. Thanks, Billy. Jasmine? This is actually Hollis, Jasmine's, Ian, where you can see Finley jumping in the background. I'm not sure that this is mobilizable as an NPA thing, but something that we did recently that felt really helpful to us, our neighborhood in Birchcliff was discussing whether or not to have some traffic calming. And we went around and talked to a lot of neighbors in a distanced way, just knocking on people's doors or leaving a pamphlet. And not everybody agreed with us, but what was interesting was that we were talking about a small tangible change that everybody could kind of wrap their heads around. And we had a lot of really good conversations about what people value and what does and doesn't feel important to them in the neighborhood. And I think, especially for those of us who are a little more on the introverted end of the spectrum, individual personal communications like that are helpful in ways that large gatherings may not be. And so I just wanted to throw that into the deliberation. Thanks, Hollis. Yeah, I feel like what I miss most about the in-person NPA meetings is the milling around and finding someone I don't know and going, hi. And having that one-to-one connection and finding out who people are and where they live and et cetera. Lyle? It's support. I feel like I'm that court video where I'm all of a sudden a lion. Lyle is my dog. Right, I'm not a cat. Yeah. I love all these ideas. And this is my first time attending an NPA meeting. So this maybe has already been talked about. But the getting together, and I wonder if we can sort of add to the getting together a purpose. Cause when I think, I agree that I don't know where work five begins and ends, but I'm nearly certain that the Champlain and the new shelter is in work five. And I just wonder about, I don't think they actually need meals, but as people transition out of shelter, I know that they move into houses and they often need furniture. And I just wonder, it won't all happen at once, but somehow an organization. So we can have people who have furniture or that we can call on, you know, like, do you have a couch? Do you have a bed that you're ready to get rid of? Some kind of group that is close by so that we could mobilize. Cause I know a lot of us have stuff in the basement or in the garage that, you know, at any given moment, even just dishes that we could donate. So some kind of, I don't know if that would be a gathering at which we do that or a gathering where we could, you know, people who are interested could talk about that. How a bed actually, There you go. She might have an extra bed to give away then. That's awesome. Thank you. You did have a new place was part of an MPA meeting discussion a couple of months back. And I love the suggestion of figuring out how we could do more to support them as neighbors. Tree. Go for it. Yeah. Hi. I just wanted to say that I think there's a, there's a senior center in the new north end and there's one right around the middle of Burlington. But there's nothing at all down here. It would be great if there was some way to, you know, bring interested older adults together. For various social and helping purposes. And it couldn't be intergenerational as well, but I think there are a lot of older people who are in the south and it would be nice to have something like that down here. Yeah. I love that suggestion. See anybody else. I know one thing that has really helped me feel connected to the neighborhood throughout the pandemic have just been the like little, you know, little silly like suddenly there's bears in all the windows. And, you know, we did so many walks with my son to go find all the bears. And you know, you really stop and you notice each house and you think about some noisy music. Yeah, I see Hollis you're gonna hand up and Andy. Andy can go first. Cool. Or Ruby, it could be either. Go for it guys. Oh, you're muted, Andy. Hi, Andy Simon, just following up on some other people's suggestions, I wonder if we could figure out a way to do like a bike or walking tour of Ward five, you know, or different neighborhoods in Ward five, you know, if the whole of Ward five was too ambitious for people, but the sort of getting to know parts of Ward five that you don't necessarily venture into that much or kind of do like, you know, the south end of Ward five down to Queen City Park Road and then do the north, you know, find out that, you know, Ward five and all it goes all the way to King Street. And, you know, it's kind of like some, but some way to make it festive, you know, the sort of kids on bikes and block off, you know, lanes and streets and safe and festive. I think that would be really fun. That sounds awesome. And just to piggyback on that while we're unmuted is maybe the individual neighborhood could host somebody, you know, some small group in the neighborhood could host that when they come to get to their neighborhood and kind of, you know, hold the focus there for a little bit as people are moving through. So it'd be kind of a personal interaction as well. I love that. It seems like all of the things that we're talking about, making our community stronger, have to do with making and building relationships. And I know that that's a big deal. And you'd think that we would just do this automatically, but with COVID it takes some real creativity to make that happen. So. Thanks, guys. Hollis, if you wanna go ahead. We had two more things that we thought of that we've been doing. Along the lines of mutual aid kinds of things, if for folks who are interested in that. Sorry. For people who use Facebook, if you haven't heard of the buy nothing project, there's a buy nothing group for the South End and downtown, it just split off from being all of Burlington. And it's basically a place where people can post requests or gifts of items, services, all kinds of things, which can be a great way to pass on things like that, but can also be really effective at just kind of getting in touch with people and hearing people's names and learning who's around in the neighborhood. Sorry, we're having toddler meltdown o'clock here. The other one, Jasmine was gonna say, but I'll just say quickly, something we did early in the pandemic was through Front Porch Forum, sending out a note to people in our neighborhood and just having a sort of rotating block party in the sense of, in our case, we did it if the number of your house ends with an odd number, stay on your porch. And if it ends with an even number, walk along your street and chat with anybody that you find on their porch. And we ran a few of those a year ago now, which is amazing. That was Jasmine's idea. And we met a lot of people that we've lived near but had never seen before, many of whom have become friends. And so that was a low infrastructure, zero money way of sort of building some low key social networks here. Love it. That sounds fun. Lyle? The reason I have two beds is because I have a bunk bed. Andy's idea of the walking tour just reminded me of something we did early pandemic too. It's funny how we got really creative for a while and kind of stuck. We did a scavenger hunt that some friends came up with that got us to walk all around the neighborhood with our kids and a bunch of people submitted what we found. And it was super fun. It was a family activity and it got us walking around and looking for a gnome and whatever, how many 10 flags or whatever. And if there were some kind of walking tour like that could be part of it. Sorry folks, they've been removed to the attendees list. And I also wanted to say that this is also my first NPA meeting in a number of years and I came because I saw it in Front Porch Forum. So I think Front Porch Forum for this is really helpful but I also did wanna say that I feel like that's a really good aspect of kind of community sharing that we have access to and that's really been helpful for finding out about things and posting needs and things that people can give away. So I just wanted to add that to the list of kind of resources that we have. This is a little tangential so I don't wanna lead the conversation astray but just to say, piggybacking on what Kate just said a little bit we've learned in the NPAs that Zoom obviously puts some limitations on folks being able to join but it delights me to know and to see all the kids and families in the background. We've struggled for a long time to figure out how to make this accessible for parents and here we are with kids participating. I love it. Yeah, the kid can get in the bath while we're still at the NPA meeting which is about to happen. Yeah, I do have a hope that well in the future when we go back to in-person meetings, eventually be able to have some sort of hybrid so that we don't lose the access that Zoom has afforded us. Sorry, did you say Ben Gillian? I think you muted yourself. I saw you're saying Ben. I think I said Ben just as I muted myself. Thank you. Well, I all folks, my name is Ben Travers. I'm also on the steering committee. I live on Home Avenue with my wife and five-year-old and three-year-old and seeing a lot of the kids and hearing Hollis and Jasmine what they said resonates a lot with me both because I've been on mute for most of this because I've been multitasking with screaming kids as well. But with respect to the substance of the matter, I appreciate the comment with respect to like the traffic calming study they did in their neighborhood. There's something that resonated there with me in that I have found that city meetings that are dedicated to a very particular purpose of sort of great neighbor concern just brings more people out. I know like Andy and Ruby, for example, participated with me in the Perkins Pier, which is also on Ward 5, I believe Perkins Pier is. The parks department is putting their sort of master plan together for Perkins Pier and had a Zoom meeting that had 86 people come out. The other night for Perkins Pier. And I've just seen other meetings like that dedicated to a very particular purpose, whereas other meetings where the agendas are a bit more nebulous or are bringing a lot of different parties. It doesn't, for some reason, it just doesn't have the same draw. So I don't know, I plant that seed for later thought. The other thought I have is with respect to new neighbors. I suspect that a lot of people have come into our community as new neighbors here over the pandemic and probably have had a more difficult time getting to know people, notwithstanding a lot of the great ideas I've heard here. And I wonder if there's some welcome wagon component that we could bring into play for new neighbors that have moved into our community, not only over the past year, but moving forward as well. So thanks. Thanks, Ben. I would be on a welcome wagon. Jasmine and Hollis. I know we've spoken up a lot of times that there are other people feel free, but I just don't see other hands. So I figured I'd contribute again. I'm wondering about Callahan Park. I know I hear a lot of people talk about Oak Ledge, but Callahan is kind of right in the center of our, Ward 5 area, our house backs up to Callahan. And I was there with my son at some point in the fall and someone came up to me and just asked what we love about the park and what we would like to see at the park. And then the person said, and it seemed a little random and strange. And then the person said that they were submitting a request for proposals about the park. And I've heard nothing since this random person happened to walk up to me and ask me what I like about the park. Maybe it was just a random conversation and doesn't have anything to do with reality, but we love that park and the little kid playground got taken down. And the big kid playground is in pretty poor repair. And I'm just wondering, and now I see people like who also live on the park, but on the other side, Nancy raising her hand, who maybe has information. Maybe this is more of like a public forum thing to ask, but being like kind of a central crown jewel of our ward, I'm just curious to know like what's happening at the park. I'd be happy to jump in on that if that's okay. So Nate, who was talking earlier, Nate and I also serve on the parks commission. And it just happens to be that not only Perkins Pier, but Callahan Park as well are coming up again on these sort of master plan studies which happened once in a blue moon where they bring in different consultants and it's this multi-month process where they figure out, I'm sure we're gonna hear about it in April when the parks department comes to talk about us. Yeah, but sort of how it meshes into this conversation here is I do think, you know, let's go to that meeting and talk to the city about, let's build some space there like a barn space or some sort of community room space that could be an area that we use for meeting. There's other parks around town, like Schmanska Park over in the old North end has a barn that can be used as a multi-use space. I like that idea and I'm gonna remember that as they're talking about Callahan Park going forward. Yeah, and just a reminder that we do have an update from the parks department, including about Callahan Park at eight o'clock on our agenda next month, April 15th. Nancy, did you have something you wanted on? Well, my information was much more secondhand than Ben's, but Max, who lives in the neighborhood works at parks and we've been talking about it and it sounds like the park, they're planning it this year and then maybe next year they'll be redoing the park is the timeline, I understand. Cool, Tree, go ahead. I just wondered why we're not recording. I think something like this would be great to have recorded and available to people who weren't able to be here. And also if it's possible to have like a chat or comment place where those of us who are a little bit shy can make comments, that would be really helpful. So this is on town meeting TV and it's available after the fact on YouTube. And I generally share that link to the Facebook page for Ward 5 afterwards and maybe we could also start sharing that different porch form or something like that. And there is a Q&A function if you go to the bottom of your screen on Zoom it should be the right most option and it has two little talk bubbles and I have been monitoring it. So if anybody doesn't feel comfortable saying their comment or question out loud you can certainly use that option and I will be happy to read your comment or question. Yeah, you're more than welcome. I'm sorry, I'm fine. If you want to use the Q&A function you have to be an attendee. I just want to make that clear. So if you want to, you can head back into the meeting as an attendee. Oh, we can't use that as a panelist. No, I just, we hadn't used it before and we found that out recently. So yeah, just making sure that that's clear. Thanks, Liam. Yeah, there's no way to write anything into the Q&A area. Well, that's something to look into then. Thank you. I didn't realize that about the bonus of making everyone a panelist is that we can see everyone's video but I guess that's sort of the con of it is that people don't have the Q&A option. Andy? One of the things, one of the other question that we had to use as a prompt related more to sort of the uncertainties economic and social uncertainties. And I think I keep thinking about what happened in Austin with the power grid going down and the big snowstorm. And I wonder, and I don't have any specific ideas but I also wonder about, you know, somebody that I think brought up mutual aid. And I wonder what kinds of things we want to be thinking about to sort of help each other out in more emergency or unexpected situations for specific families or for the whole area and how we can be more resilient in that way. I love that suggestion. I've even thought about that when we've had like boil notices or when we all lost water for a while. Ben? I'm just curious if other people are comfortable weighing in. If, you know, I know I heard people say front porch form as a means that they learn about events but I'm curious if folks have other means that they learn about events sort of within our own community. I think there's a lot of neighborhoods within our community that are not necessarily as tapped in to front porch form as others. And so I'm just curious if folks have thoughts about how can we be better about engaging different neighborhoods throughout ward five? I think that's a great point. I think there's a lot of people who aren't on front porch form. I mean, I generally- Signs on front porch. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I should have raised me. Oh, that's okay, Jane. Go for it. Sorry. Yeah. Signs on top. Signs, public signs. We're working on them. And what are we, and where is it legal to put, and maybe we need more public places to put signs on because they end up on places like telephone poles and other places where they shouldn't be. Maybe having more bulletin boards where people can put up stuff. Andy? It was Ruby. And Jane said exactly what I was gonna say, public bulletin board. Nate? Yeah, something that I was kind of thinking of and it's tough to, it would be really great if we had a true like, this is a community space that is for the south end. But I wonder if there's even, in the shorter term of possibility for some sort of repository of needs, some sort of centralized place where there's a couple of fridges that are plugged in and that have regularly stocked by the wide variety of mutual aid networks that do exist within our city, both in the south end and just city-wide, connecting with food, connecting with diapers and hygiene products, clothing and things like that. Like I wonder if that's even maybe a closer win before we could get a full, full-fledged community space, just some sort of community accessible place to kind of going back to the resiliency and in uncertain times, you never know who might need these things. So just a thought. Thanks, Nate. There are other people who would like to share. We have about three minutes left. And I love that after our slow start, people really jumped in. I thank you. And maybe just as we close, Jillian, thanks so much to the elected officials who kind of joined us to be listeners in this conversation. And one of the questions that they asked us to ask you was along the lines of this conversation, what's the best way for them to be communicating with you about their work and engaging you in those conversations? So maybe as we close, just your thoughts on that as well, if there isn't anything else outstanding. Andy and Ruby? I just wanted to have a, you know how usually when you have these kind of brainstorming conversations and then it ends and then five minutes later or 10 minutes later, you sort of say, or tomorrow morning, you say, oh, I meant to bring this up. I wonder if there's a way that we can get those further, gather those further thoughts, you know, like a way that those could also be collected. I'm not thinking of an obvious way besides, you know, front porch form, Facebook kinds of things, but if even sort of we had an email address that somebody said, oh, I meant to bring this up and I forgot. Oh, like a neighborhood meeting, a neighborhood meeting, you know. Even for this meeting, it's sort of what I mean. Should we give an email address that people could? We have our NPA group email. I don't know what that is after, it's, I know there's an underscore. I think it's on the CEDA website. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's ward five NPA underscore BTV at googlegroups.com, sort of long, but that is the email that we'll get to all of us. And if anybody is interested in emailing that email, I am happy to repeat it. Great. Well, does anybody have a specific answer to the question beyond bulletin boards and front porch forum and social media of sort of how you would prefer to hear from the elected officials who've joined us here this evening? No, even though I haven't been able to participate in them, I did like when I saw a few times kind of a coffee hour, you know, Tom Flanagan has one for the school district and I think maybe Tiff and Gabrielle may have had that at some point in the recent past. And it just seemed like a good idea to me. You do it once in a while and it doesn't have to be every week or anything, but you know, especially if you could eventually do that in person, you know, it would be helpful. But for now, we'll do what we got to do, you know. All right. Well, thank you all so much, everybody who contributed. I feel like, I love that what we really found out is that everybody just wants to be together. That's what would strengthen our neighborhood is actually spending time with our neighbors. Who would have thought? So up next, we have John Vickery at the citywide reappraisal. And we are delighted to have you here for that update. I saw you here somewhere. There you are. Hi, here. Hi. Thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate that. I have a presentation, a PowerPoint presentation which I'll slip into. And what I'll do, it's a quick presentation about five or six minutes with a handful of slides. I'll sort of go over some basics about this revaluation of all properties in Burlington. And then I'll just open up for questions and I will try to answer questions as best I can. So give me a minute. I will pull up, I think we have screen share. Does everybody see this presentation? Okay, good. We are conducting a citywide revaluation of all properties and it's the first one since 2005. It's been a long time. And the market for property values has changed quite significantly. This revaluation was mandated by the state of Vermont to reassess so that we can fix inequities in the tax burden of real estate. That's the purpose of the revaluation is to put back where there may be some inequities in valuation as it relates to taxes. This chart here is a little demonstration of how the market has changed over since 2016 from 295,000 heading up to 392,000 as the median value in Burlington for a single family home. Here are some other points about the Ward 5 and Ward 6 one-in-two family statistics. The median household value in 2020 was 564,000. The high sale along the waterfront, I'm sorry, the high sale that's not a waterfront is 1.25 million and the low sale was around $330,000. This is higher than the citywide median average in the south end here. We're doing this reappraisal mostly because the state has required it, but also because we are not meeting statistical measures of equity taxation equity based on state and national guidelines. And the valuation tables and the software was out of date and needed to be updated. And again, I mentioned that the last reappraisal was done over 15 years ago and that is too old. So we're resetting valuations so that tax equity is here in Burlington again. The timeline for the next several months is that we will be putting out our change of value notice letter likely by the 31st of this month. In April, folks will have an opportunity to meet in front of the board of assessors for hearings mostly all of April. And then after that, the Tyler Technology reappraisal company and the city assessor's office will resolve those reset certain values of folks that have appealed and review all of those properties that were asked to be reviewed. And tax bills typically go out at the beginning of July. That will happen again. Here's a little bit of information for you. The date of value is April 1st, 2021. I'm John Dickery, the Burlington assessor. Tyler Technologies is the contracted company that is doing the general residential property valuations. Safeguard Organic Analytics is specialized is in commercial properties. They are doing the commercial portion of the evaluation and change of value letters will be mailed to all property owners. And if you are a property owner, please read the letter. Have a ton of information. We'll have our website updated. And we want this process to go very smoothly. Here's some website information on our website. The property database that has been on the website for over 10 years, that will be updated by April 1st. There's information on how to appeal a property value that has been set or asked for a review. If there are errors, the company really wants to be able to have a correct databases we do as well. And property owner's input is important. So if you do decide to appeal, there's certain steps that you would take. And what I would suggest is that you review your property online and you can file the hearing request electronically at the assessor's website. After that is done, a Tyler Technologies administrator will call or email the person that provided the request to have a review. And then a hearing date will be determined and the hearings will be on Zoom, the same platform. If someone is not computer-oriented, if someone is not computer savvy, they can hold hearings by phone. That is my presentation. So I'll go back to, I'll do the stop share here. And if anyone has any questions, please I'm happy to help out. Great. Thank you. Go ahead. Don't know, I'll jump in at once. Thank you. Thank you. So I've done the, I've appealed and we did a video walk through. Great. Is that the final word? So if the assessor comes to a decision, is there an appeal of that? There can be. Okay. This process is, all the values are going out to the 11,000 properties and property owners can appeal in the month of April. And the letter will give guidance on how to go through that process. Then after the determinations are made by the board of assessors, there'll be another option for folks to move beyond that process. And then there's another process after that as well for it sort of moves its way towards the courts. But by and large, most values are settled and both parties are happy with the value. And everyone learns a little bit of something about the property. Thank you. Great. Jasmine. I'm John, I'm wondering what the previous median value was from the 2005 study. So I think right now you just said it was 370. So I guess just wondering what it was previously. It was 260 for a single family home. Thanks. Tree, go ahead. I just wondered if we can get a copy of your PowerPoint somewhere. Thanks. Yes, you can. I haven't posted it on our own website, but I'll share it with the coordinator here. I think I might've already done that, but happy to do that. I'll post it below the meeting minutes when I upload the meeting minutes for this meeting. Thank you. That's great. Thanks, Liam. Ben. Thanks for your presentation, John. I'm just wondering what the impact will be, will there be any immediate impact on property tax values based on the valuation? I'm paying $8,000 in property taxes right now. Am I suddenly gonna be paying a certain percentage more because my property value has gone up that much more, or will property value taxes stay flat? And if they're changing, do you have any sense sort of on average in word five and six, what you're anticipating property tax values will go up based on the reevaluation? Yeah, we're seeing that most valuations are going up throughout the entire city. So this is common that values get reset to what they would sell for. That's the object of the reevaluation. And what happens is the tax rate drops. In other words, the city is not supposed to have a windfall of money so that they can tax more. Rather, there's an offset lowering of the tax rate so that the amount of taxes collected are similar, not quite the same because it's not entirely revenue neutral but it's basically revenue neutral. The caveat here is I have to admit, I'm a South Ender myself at word five. The South End has appreciated at a greater rate than other parts of the city of Burlington. So there is that. You can be thankful that you've had greater appreciation of your property likely because of your location than in say the New North End or other parts of the city. So there will probably likely be some shifting of the tax burden to South Enders as well as other types of properties. So can I just glom onto that around the tax rate? And so a lot of it, so I'm on the school board and we've had a lot of discussion about this and about what the reappraisal will mean. And exactly what John, what you said is what we were told is overall the amount that the city is paying into the education fund should not change in theory but it just gets moved from neighborhood and house to other neighborhood and house. And so when we see the tax rate drop, the adjustment that John that you're talking about, there's something called a common level of appraisal that adjusts it the other way. So in theory, if your house compared to the rest of Burlington is the same value comparatively, your tax rate shouldn't change or the amount of tax that you pay shouldn't change. Is that correct? That's correct. That's nicely described. Okay. Yes. And I can elaborate on that if you'd like but that's great. Ben? No. I should raise my hand. You go ahead, Joe. I already asked a question. Oh, well, I just had a simple one. I think you mentioned in the pitch that on the third, some of the letters were starting to go out. I guess it probably hasn't all happened yet. You said it was tens of thousands maybe. So do you know when the end point of that is anticipated to be? I don't think we've gotten a... No, we haven't sent letters out yet. Letters, we've had meetings, multiple meetings in the past several days. We... And we determined that today, we determined that we will have the letters to the printer by the 31st of this month. So I think what folks will probably receive their letters, most everyone will have them by the 5th of April. That would make sense. Or maybe even before. And I really want to encourage people to, they receive the letter, read the entire letter, go to the assessor's website and review their own property through our database that we have. And if they still don't understand the valuation or how it is this fair or not, they can start looking at other properties because we're going to update the entire database. And if there are errors with the data collection, or even strong questions, or if you have evidence that the value should be something different, I would encourage you to file an appeal. The appeal is going to hopefully be totally electronic this year. In other words, you file online, it goes into a spreadsheet database and they will have a team of people that will be holding the hearings. And there will be an administrative person that will be setting up those hearings. And then the hearings will happen in April and resolutions will happen a little bit in April, but mostly in May. And hopefully we'll have resolutions by early June. And that's how it's gonna work. Okay, thanks. You're welcome. Ben, did you still have a question? Yeah, I did. And John, I apologize in advance if you already answered this, I'm still sort of multitasking with kids at the moment. But in light of what you were just saying there, I anticipate that an issue you may hear on appeal among those appeals is, well, wait a minute, the value of my house right now is artificially inflated by the pandemic over the last year. And that values right now are not following normal trends. And I'm wondering if you can speak to whether or not your assessment process took that into account in any way that just housing prices are sort of out of whack with what would be normally expected in 2020 absent a pandemic. Well, one thing that happens is that the interest rates dropped and that always spurs on people refinancing and people deciding to go out and buy. And so the market's really strong. It's really about supply and demand and that the supply of properties has dropped. I don't know if the demand has increased or not. That's hard to measure, but certainly we're seeing growth for sure. And to follow Vermont law, we are supposed to appraise property as of April 1st of each year. And this year it would be April 1st, 2021. So values should represent that. Now, if the market, if we are in a bubble, like we were in 2008 and the market were to drop, I think what we would have to do is reassess things and maybe do a statistical update in a year or two if there's some sort of readjustment overall. We don't wanna have our values over what they would sell for, that's for sure. And I would put out a request explaining that we have some error and it needs to be fixed. And the state of Vermont would probably encourage that as well, the tax department. Hope I answered your question. Thank you so much, John. So one minute if anybody has a last question for John. Thank you for being so prepared for your time and questions. We appreciate it. Well, I'd like to say one last thing that's coming to mind here. I hope that if folks do file an appeal that they're a little bit patient on the first few days and wait for the call from the Tyler Technology Reappraisal Company, they all will get the call that we do have a database. So everyone will have to be a little bit patient. I guess it's like opening up vaccines to another age group. There'll be a little bit of delay, but everyone will get heard, okay? Thank you. Thank you so much. That was really helpful. All right, so the last part of our agenda tonight is the BHS Renovation Project Update with Tom Peterson. Thank you so much, Tom. Hi, I don't know if... Can people hear me? Sure can. Okay, good. I've been having my just got a message that my internet connection was unstable. So if things seem unstable, it's not me. It's my internet connection. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. My name's Tom Peterson and I'm the owner's project manager for the BHS Renovation Project. And what we're doing really as part of a permit requirement locally, we're required to present our project to the ward in which the project exists, which is ward four. But the district has the philosophy that this high school project is a city-wide project and every ward should, every ward NPA should be able to hear the same presentation. So that's why we're here tonight. That said, what you're gonna see, I wanna make sure that I'm presenting the same information to every ward. And honestly, to be able to get on the schedule for every ward NPA, it's the better part of a year. And a lot can happen. A lot has happened with this project in the course of the year. So what you'll see in the presentation is a snapshot of the project as of July 2020. And I'll go through the details of that. Then I'll be able, if I have time, I'll briefly be able to go over some of the changes between what you're gonna see in this presentation and where the project stands right now. I know a lot of people have had a lot of questions about this project. So I wanna make sure I leave time for that as well. So I'll share my screen now and start the PDF. And then we'll have time for questions. And is that visible to everyone? I can see it. You can see it? Yes, okay, great. So as you see, this was the presentation to the NPA's last July. And there were, at that time, there were some major changes from the original conceptual design. And today, there are some changes from this particular design, but not nearly as dramatic as the changes from the concept to the design development. In terms of stages of design, this arrow says we are here. Actually, we're now here in this area called construction documents. Design development is complete and the team, the design team, is moving into the construction documents phase. It says here scheduled for completion early 2021. That is not the case anymore. And it's because of that next line. Details are subject to change as we move through the design process. There have been a lot of factors that have slowed down the design process. Not the least of which was the pandemic, but I think one of the bigger factors was this evolving issue of PCBs in the building. And I'll make sure I leave time for questions about that. This is the current schematic design of the high school renovation. I don't know if you'll be able to see my cursor. It's a little light, but this is the existing auditorium. This is the gymnasium over here toward the left. And the areas that are in the darker gray represent additions. So this is an addition that joins the A building with the East End of B building. It's a three-story addition. And the downstairs, the first floor at ground level will have administration, counseling, and the library. And then the upper two floors are classrooms. In the bottom picture, it's basically the same view, but it's showing the alternate for an auxiliary gym. That was one of the wish list items as the concept was being developed several years ago. The community and staff really thought an auxiliary gym would be a great addition to this campus. So the gym is shown here. It's going to be an alternate. It's actually going to be bid as an alternate, meaning if the bid's coming in low enough and we can afford it, we'll build it. It's going to be designed and bid. We seriously doubt that there will be funds for that addition at this point, but we can hold out hope there. Another thing I wanted to point out is over here on the left side is a new stair tower and elevator that will be serving the kind of the southwest corner of A building. And then there's this little one-story addition here that is off the south side of the gym part of A building. This is actually a connector that provides better circulation on the lower level of A building and it also provides better access to the band and chorus rooms. One of the goals of the project was to improve circulation and accessibility. You can see here a different perspective. This light gray area here is that AB connector building that we were talking about. That has the library and then admin and classrooms. This is a new connector between the A4 level and the B2 level. It doesn't look like much, but it will have a very big impact on circulation for the campus. This is a new connector connecting B building with D building. And this will have about six classrooms associated with it. This addition here is a connector between the lower levels of A and B building connecting into F building. That is not currently in the project anymore. We can talk about that a little later. So the project highlights, and I'm happy to say that, sorry, very sensitive scroll wheel here on my mouse. I'm happy to say that these are some of the basic requirements of the project from the very start. And throughout all the budget challenges and the PCB challenges and schedule challenges, we've been able to retain better accessibility, consolidation of classrooms, creation of maker spaces, addressing deferred maintenance, new windows and better energy efficiency, new HVAC and including air conditioning, much better stormwater management, which is not necessarily elective. That's being required by the state. Enhanced building safety and security and new sprinkler system for the whole facility. So those elements are still in the project. In terms of the overall site plan, there was a lot of discussion about circulation, vehicular access, pedestrian access, bicycle access, safety, aesthetics. And a lot of that gets wrapped up here in the parking area. If you go out to the high school now and you go into the main parking lot, when you're driving, it doesn't, it seems like a big flat parking lot, but really it's tilted on two planes or two directions, two accesses. And the slope of that parking lot does not meet ADA. So even the handicap parking spots are not technically compliant with the ADA because of their steepness. So the new parking lot is gonna be adjusted. It's gonna be shifted to the east. The northeast corner will be dropped a little bit from where it is now and the southwest corner will be raised. So the whole effect will be to, it won't be a perfectly level parking lot, but it will be, the parking areas and walking areas are gonna be flatter, much flatter than they are now and will be ADA compliant. The existing bus loop will stay. We've got good circulation in and out. We've got lots of parking here around the edges for drop off and visitors. Accessible parking here closer to the door and we also have electric vehicle charging stations that will be built into that area in both standard parking spaces and the ADA spaces. Tremendous amount of bike parking. Probably, I think we're increasing bike parking by a factor of three or four. I mean, this one bike parking lot is for about 64 bikes. We have a little bit more bike parking here and down here as well. We have improvements to this southwest parking area on the southwest corner of A building. Of course, the parking lot will have islands and trees. So it'll be, it'll be much more shaded than it is now. There's zero shade at that existing parking lot. So we're really happy with the way the site plan has evolved. I should have prefaced this by saying that this presentation is available online on the project's webpage. We can find that through the Burlington School District website and this will give you a better idea of how the departments are laid out and they're all color coded here and we don't need to go into the fine detail here. It's gonna be a little hard to see anyway but I did want you to know that this is available for your perusal. Okay, so in terms of existing square footage, the existing is about, in round figures, about 240,000 square feet, the proposed new construct, with renovation and new construction totals about 270,000 square feet and there's the breakdown. So we've got 192,000 square feet of renovation and about 79,000 square feet of new construction. We have a, when we're counting general classrooms, we're counting the non-lab classes. So classes where history, English, language, math, social studies, that sort of thing would be held. Those are standard classrooms. For standard classrooms, there are currently 39 on campus and we're proposing 42. And it's not necessarily that the school doesn't anticipate a lot of student growth in numbers of students, but I think commissioners Wick and Fisher are on the call. They might be able to shed more light on that. There are no small group classrooms currently on campus and the existing, the new plan proposes four small group classrooms. So here we go. Number of conference rooms. It says, I think that there exists one conference room. My theory is that it disappears when somebody wants a conference room. So if you want a conference room in that building, it's really hard to find. But the new design is showing six new systems. A total of six conference rooms. So extracurricular and lab spaces, that's growing by just over 12,000 square feet. BTC would have been growing, but the board made a decision a few months ago that BTC is gonna be out of the project, partly because F building needs a lot more work than we had anticipated. And the PCB contamination in F building where most of the BTC program takes place. The PCB levels in that building are so high that we're not 100% sure that we'll be able to save that building. So instead of pursuing that, we're taking F building and BTC spaces out of the project. Some of the scope reductions that we've done to try to meet the budget is we've eliminated the canopy over the bike parking, although we're gonna bid that as an alternate. Gym floor replacement still has a lot of life left in it and it's not a real big ticket item. So that's something that the facilities director feels he can get a lot more years of life out of it before it really needs to be replaced. Auxiliary gym we've already talked about, but that'll be bid as an alternate. I don't wanna go through all these numbers. Again, this is available for your perusal at your leisure, but this shows the schematic design estimates that were done by our construction manager and a third party estimator and how those numbers were reconciled to come to a cost of work. And you can see the date there on the upper left that this was done back in April of 2020. Hey, Tom, I'm sorry to interrupt, but it is 826. I wanna make sure that we leave time for questions. Yeah, I think that's a good point, Mike, I appreciate that. So right now, the bond amount, as you know, was $70 million. We've, with the executive director of finance, Nathan Lavery's wizardry, we were able to find an additional approved funding of 3.6 million through other programs or other grants and bonds that were available, which brought our budget up to 73.6. And we're currently able to keep it at that level. And like Mike said, it's time for questions. I'm sorry I rambled on a bit. You're way into it and you're a great advocate for the school district and the city. And I just wanna add something, I think that's really important. And especially parents who have been receiving the communications from superintendent plan again, know that we continue to test for the PCB chemicals throughout the BHS campus and we continue to find them in different places. And to answer the question that has been asked constantly is we don't know what's gonna happen with the BHS campus. We're still doing testing. I know that the board has received a lot of feedback. Hey, can we just build somewhere else? Can we stay at Macy's? Are we gonna continue with this project? And I think the simple answer is we have not yet made a decision because the testing and the information we need to make that decision is not yet completed. Is that right, Tom? That is correct and it's a daily hot topic. We are really pushing our consultants. We have two environmental consultants who are working on the PCB and hazardous materials. They're both very good, but the scale of this is just enormous. Among our consultants, we had probably 100 years worth of professional experience and none of them have seen the kind of levels that we're finding at BHS. So academically, from their point of view, as a professional, it's a very interesting project, but it's also a very challenging project as far as the levels that we're finding. I see a hand up. Is that Joan? Hi, Joan. Yes, thanks. I'm sorry, but when you say levels, do you mean levels of PCBs or levels, the different levels of the building? Oh, that's a good question. Both, that's really, but primarily we're talking about the levels of PCBs. And it's a very, very complicated, complex set of rules that we're dealing with between the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Vermont Department of Health, and the EPA. In general, though, for air quality, we're talking about levels of PCBs in the air measured in nanograms per cubic meter as far as the level of the building. Is as far as PCBs and solid material like building materials, caulking, mastics, paint, that sort of thing, we're talking about parts per million. And the state of Vermont has extremely low, or I guess you would call them very high standards, which means very low screening levels for PCBs in air. Their screening levels for taking action is 15 nanograms or higher, 15 nanograms of PCBs in the air per cubic meter. As far as we can tell, that's the most stringent standard anywhere on the planet. And I think it's important to, this was a hot topic when last fall, when the campus was shut down. And as the Department of Health said, the screening level is the level at which you need to start figuring out what's going on. It is not a hard level that says, you must be below this in order to occupy the building. It's just, hey, you need to start figuring out what's going on, which is what we've been doing. But the levels were significantly high in some places, especially in the F building, which houses the Burlington Tech Center, over the EPA limits. Am I right, Tom, in F building? Both EPA and state. And the difference between EPA screening levels for air and state levels, I think the EPA screening levels are somewhere around 600 nanograms per cubic meter. And so that's a pretty big difference between 600 nanograms and 15 nanograms, but we have to go with the more stringent stand. Caitlin. Thanks. So I was going to ask if you had any sense of timeline and it sounded, Mike, from what you said, like not at all, really, when this might start, the construction might start happening. And so I guess my revised question is, is there a possibility based on where we are right now and what you're finding, that all of these plans will be scrapped and this isn't going to happen? I would say, yes, is the simple blunt answer. There is that possibility. We just keep getting news and updates. And as someone who needs to vote on this, I don't, I can't promise you that we're going to renovate the high school in some way. From what I'm hearing personally, and I'm not speaking on the board, there is a possibility that what we're seeing today is not going to happen. And I can add to that the timing, well, what we all want to avoid, we don't want to spend $70 million on renovating this campus and then go in after the renovation and check air samples and find that we're well above the state screening levels and are not able to use our newly renovated campus. That would be tragic in terms of time and heartache and dollars spent. So we need to get to a point where we have to answer the question, can the air levels be brought down to a safe level? Is it physically possible to do that? We don't know that yet. How much or how can that be done? If it's physically possible, how is that done? And is that going to be cost effective? So we have to answer those three questions before the board can make a go or no go decision. We've spent a lot of time talking about schedule. In fact, today we're in meetings for hours about this. We are trying to get to a point where the board will have enough information to make informed decisions by sometime in August. But that's not a hard date, but that's a date that we're really shooting for. If we find that we can bring the levels down to a manageable level and safely occupy the buildings, the board says, yes, go. We want to be ready to go. We want to be able to have contractors already bidding on the project. The day after the board says, yes, we can do this. We want to have contractors ready to go and have the abatements started. Thank you, that's helpful. And I appreciate how difficult this must be that you're ready and you've done all this work and you have to wait. So thank you, I appreciate that. Similarly to Kate's question, I'm wondering, Mike, is it possible for the board at this point to be contemplating a plan B or is it really more effective for everybody to stay the course and consider the results before you make that decision in August? And I guess related to that, I'm wondering if between now and August, and maybe it's premature to say this or think this way, but is there an opportunity to discover opportunity in the kind of model that you all have created with the downtown space functional and up and running? Does this give us time to kind of continue to evaluate how that's working for the students, for the communities, et cetera, or is it just too much to manage kind of both two plans simultaneously? So I think it's a good question. And I think that the simple answer is that we're looking at plan Bs and Cs informally, but once we start to say, okay, we really need to get some details, that costs time and money. And so we've been really focused with our facilities team to get the downtown BHS up and running and the finance team as well. And Tom Peterson and the team focused on the re-envisioning have to continue their work in order to, if the news is good and we can remediate in a way, we wanna move forward with that construction so that the kids get back to the BHS campus in as soon as time possible. So again, the answer is informally, yes, we're talking about, well, if we can't, what happens, where can we build? Can we stay amased? Is all that stuff has been discussed informally, but not we are not spending money on that yet? Sure, that makes good sense. And I guess I'll just say, and I know you and I have been in touch offline just on email, I feel really confident in just the leadership over the past year managing kind of all of this and getting the high school up and running at Macy's. And so I really appreciate all that everyone is doing to keep your minds open and also manage kind of this really big undertaking and bring it to a successful conclusion, whatever that may be, but it feels really good to know that you're able to kind of do both at once already in bringing the high school to life downtown while remediating this. So thank you for that. Thank you. That was an impressive feat. We, I wish we could have claimed a part of that, but we were focusing on the main campus, but what the facility staff and their team did was miraculous. It was really impressive. And I'll just glom onto that again and say, I was told by community members who have experience in renovation and architecture and these kinds of projects, there's no way that they can get it done in 10 weeks. And look at who you're dealing with. They have, you know, this is the same people who had a lot of conflict with city council. And from what I've seen, just from my perspective, they did amazing work to get it done in 10 weeks. And the local partners, especially Dave Farrington, really stepped up personally to make sure it got done in that time. Yeah. And I think that the staff played a huge role in getting it fit up and operational so quickly after the last painter left the building, they were up and running so quick. And it's, you know, the staff was pretty incredible in that regard. Staff and we had volunteer, parent volunteers. There's one parent volunteer I heard about who was there every day during winter break. So the whole community pulling together to get this, the building ready for students. So I'm happy to take more questions and I'm also available anytime if you wanna email me or call me. I'm not hiding. You can find me through the website. We also run the building construction oversight committee meets every month. And we've, in fact, we just finished our meeting at seven o'clock tonight. And that's open to the public. And we're discussing schedules and budgets and those kind of details. Thank you, Tom, so much for your time tonight and Mike for being available for that Q and A. I know it's something people have a lot of questions about and there's a lot of open questions about. But I just wanna, I don't see any other hands. So I guess just wrap up for this evening. I'm excited. There are some folks who were here who'd never been to an NPA meeting before. That's what we're always hoping for. I'm gonna share next month's agenda real quick. Just as a little plug, this is what you have to look forward to next month. April 15th, I hope to see you there. And I hope everyone has a lovely evening.