 Hello, Burlington Community. I am so proud to be here tonight and to be with Mayor Murrow Weinberger during the final month of his 12-year service as mayor of Burlington. That's pretty amazing. It's epic in fact. It's a quite a journey. I'm so grateful to the people of Burlington that I've had a chance to serve in this role for that period of time. I'm so grateful to you and so many of our great colleagues that we've gotten to work with on the department, the department head team, which has just been such a big part of the experience for me. I want to say right here in case, so I don't forget later, I'm really grateful to Channel 17 Town Meeting Television for this opportunity of course, but just what Channel 17 has done for the city throughout those 12 years and seeing the organization kind of mature and expand during that period has been exciting and I just want to say that here. We're very fortunate to have this kind of resource to document, cover, and archive what goes on in this community. For that I was excited to get a chance to do this with you, Doreen, and to be able to kind of attempt to sum up the 12 years in an episode feels very, very fake. And that's what we're going to do tonight. We're going to take a look back over those 12 years, what were the challenges, what were the accomplishments, and what are your hopes for the future? Great. And so, you know, I remember back 12 years ago, in case you don't, it's all collected here in this city annual report. You're the only, are you the only department head that has been here from the start? You know, someone told me that the other day and I had thought about Brian and, but yeah, I think I'm the only continuous 12-year, four-term serving, and it's been thrilling and challenging, which I think, you know, tonight's talk will demonstrate some of what those 12 years have been like for us and, you know, I'm looking back and I remember how ambitious your campaign was and what you said you were going to accomplish. It was like really some big items. And, you know, you were going to fix the city's finances. You were going to restore faith in city hall and city government. And you were going to get some projects that had been stalled for over 30 years going again. So I'd love to imagine you stepping back now to that time. And what was it like during those early months and, you know, how did you approach it? Well, you know, those months are on my mind these days as we, you know, we're speaking just on Thursday after the election of a new mayor-elect on Tuesday, Emma Mulvaney Stanek. And I do who I, you know, I've congratulated and I'm going to do everything I can to support her through this transition period and beyond in any way that she would like. And it's a very heady time, I think, for any new administration to be getting started. I do think there was a particular sense that, you know, I promised, I promised those things, you just listen, I promised a fresh start. It was a difficult few years leading up to that election when I do think people sort of faith in that sort of basic functioning of city government had been shaken and we promised to turn that around. And it was, and, you know, we were bringing in, it wasn't changing political parties. It was, it was, we were, I remember the early days feeling in many ways like, felt like a little bit on an island with like a beachhead of this new organization that I was just starting to get into. But that changed quickly, apart from people like yourself who reached out and were very supportive and kind of welcomed me into the team quickly. And, you know, how did we go about it? Well, one thing we did is it was an ambitious campaign and one great piece of advice I got early on in that campaign is make sure you write down everything that you promise to do because you, you're going to be held to it. And we did, we actually had a promise book that we had documented during, during the campaign and we stayed conscious about it and went out and certainly over those first three years really made sure that we were doing everything it could to live up to what we had committed to doing. We'll make you go through, we probably have that promise book somewhere. We stopped, you know, we kind of moved on to other things at some point. But on the big, we had promised first and foremost to fix the city's finances. We had a sense that it was, you know, it was well known during the campaign that we had problems. It wasn't clear just how bad the problems were until about two weeks after the election when the audit for that year came out in mid-March and it was a very damning audit really kind of laid out. It said we were in a crisis essentially. We didn't, we were careful about how we talked about it a little bit at the time but basically if you read that audit carefully it said you are at risk for a liquidity crisis. You're at risk of not being able to keep the lights on to pay the firefighters and police officers and public works folks, BCA folks, if you don't, because we were relying very heavily to a degree that no one really, well maybe somebody, but it was not kind of well understood. I certainly didn't understand. We were relying on this sort of advanced payments on future taxes and there was one financial institution that was still willing to provide the city that level of financing given the concerns that there were out there about the city's finances. Other organizations had pulled back. We weren't able to lease equipment vehicles anymore because there was concerns about making good on those leases. We had defaulted on one lease already. City Bank? Well the City Bank lease we had absolutely defaulted on and no one else wanted to kind of step into a similar situation with new vehicles and what not being made. So that very much got my attention. To make sure it got my attention Moody's wrote a credit, updated our rating about two months into the job. I think it was about 60 days in the job and they downgraded us. Not just one step, three steps to the edge of junk bond status and said we're going to downgrade you further if you don't turn this around the next 18 months. They gave us a negative outlook saying we think we're going to downgrade you again unless you do something dramatic. And that would have been very consequential. That would have triggered very likely that liquidity crisis because we had all sorts of debt covenants that says if you go to junk bond status the entities would sort of call the financing, call the loans that were out there. I mean it's really not far-fetched to say we could have ended up in some form of receivership had we not been able to sort of turn things around. I think you protected some of us from the depth of this knowledge or we certainly knew. We didn't want to provoke a crisis unnecessarily. And we did address it quickly. We settled on in the first months of office the idea of what we ended up calling the fiscal stability bond which was designed to address that potential liquidity crisis. It was designed to replace this kind of ephemeral short-term borrowing that could have gone away very quickly if the one bank in town, Key Bank didn't want to do it anymore with stable long-term financing backed by the revenue stream of property taxes. And that's what we set out to do. The challenge was, as a brand new mayor, we had to go to the voters and get not a majority but a two-thirds vote from the voters to pull that off. And I got a lot of advice from city hall veterans at that time to stay away from that. They sort of said, I'm not saying I didn't point to you because you said that better, but other people who had been around really you're going to try to convince people in your first kind of leadership act that you're going to kind of roll the dice on this new administration on convincing people to raise taxes on themselves to address this sort of complicated financial situation. I was really warned not to do it, but I promised to turn around the finances. And I understood kind of intuitively with what I knew about finances that this debt was dangerous if we didn't do something about it. And I didn't think we had much of a choice. And kind of in some ways just sort of kept campaigning. We had had this big energetic campaign and we turned that right away into a campaign for the November ballot, which was a presidential ballot with a lot of voters coming out. We thought that was the time to do it. That was good, I think, the timing on that. You know, and I got a piece of advice early on in those days too is that someone said to, you know, Martin O'Malley, who ran for president, and I remember the former mayor of Baltimore, I met him at one of those early mayor's events, and he said to a group of us, he said, good leaders make themselves vulnerable and people respond to that. And kind of that resonated with me at that moment. And it made sense to me. And, you know, I just sort of went out there, threw myself into it, campaign harder for that. I've campaigned for a lot of things over the years. We've had 30 some odd ballot items over time. And we've worked hard on all of them, but we never worked as much as we did on that one. We went to every rotary event, every neighborhood planning association, of course, and, you know, dozens of different appearances. And I don't think everyone really understood exactly what they were voting on, but they kind of sensed, I think people felt like, well, if we've elected this guy, we should give him a chance. And 72% of people voted yes. And I do think that's, we did a lot of things after that, but that was the kind of necessary start to it and set the right tone. And we were able to build back from that. It took nine years to get all the way back, but we did ultimately completely make good on that promise. We got back to a double A credit rating. We've locked in something now, like $40 million of savings for taxpayers, for school and city taxpayers and ratepayers. And that will keep building in a sense going forward because whenever we borrow now, we borrow much less expensively than if we hadn't fixed, gotten that credit rating agent restored. And I think you restored the faith, the public restored their faith in you and in city government that you could do it. So you were buoyed also by the confidence that, you know, 72% is pretty significant in terms of giving it support for a fiscal bond. So good standing at that point. Thank you. Yeah, that was, it's, I do think in a lot of ways all of the, I guess worth saying a little bit more, that was a great start to it. The other essential thing though was we, I think soon after we got that done, I think Moody's said something positive, maybe they, you know, I don't remember exactly how to unfold it, but there was a sense that that was important and that was recognized by the financial partners. But it was also became clear very quickly that we weren't going to get very far with this financial rebuilding until we addressed the Burlington telecom situation, that that was this cloud hanging over the city that had the potential to be really a financial catastrophe. We were being sued. We were already out of pocket. The reason we were having this equity crisis is because $17 million had been spent illegally without authorization on BT and we couldn't get it back quickly. We ended up getting a bunch of it back. But the fear of the financial markets, of the people, the bondholders, the Moody's was that there could be another big shoe to drop, which is that we were being sued by Citibank for $33 million plus penalties and interest. It could have been, you know, in a worst case scenario, it could have been substantially more than $33 million. $33 million, a lot of money today, even more money 12 years ago, it was about half the year's budget going, general fund budget, going to a judgment like that. And it was a real risk. It was really uncertain what would have happened. It was a credible claim. It was not a clean claim because Citibank, their hands were kind of dirty with this as well. They had the way in which that financing had been put in place, Citibank had been sort of, I would say, complicit in structuring this in a way that the voters never got a chance to weigh in. And what it was was not debt exactly. It was a, as appropriation lease. It was basically an agreement between Citibank and the city that said the city has to make a payment every year for leasing this infrastructure, this network from you. And if the city doesn't make the payment, Citibank's only real recourse was to ask for it back. Absolutely. Yeah, to sue. And so that made it, that created the opportunity coming in for us, a new administration that hadn't been part of this initial agreement to, I thought, righteously defend the taxpayers who had never, who hadn't signed off on this and to get the best financial arrangement that we could. So remind people how you actually did it. Yeah. Well, so, you know, it took a while, but it ultimately ended up, you know, it took a couple of mediation sessions over years, but ultimately the agreement that, the initial agreement that turned around was basically said that Citibank agreed to a payment of only $10 million instead of that $33 million plus. With only part of that $10 million coming from the city, there was also payments made by insurance companies and others who had been involved. And that also, so they got a partial payment. What we got in return was the ability to direct the sale. There was no settling this without the city agreeing to sell the asset. We, however, retained control of the sale, which ended up being quite significant. And we had time to do that. And with that time, we, we were working with a very skilled consultant that had come in in fairness before I was elected, but we continued to work very closely with them. They financially turned the operations around, made it a much more efficient, effective entity and got it to the place where we were able to go to the market and recover a lot of money. The ultimate sale was over $30 million allowed. It got about half of the city's money back. It got ultimately about half of the bank's money back. And we were able to negotiate an agreement, which from my perspective has maintained all of the kind of important goals of Burlington Telecom in the sense of we continue to have a competitor to Comcast. We have successfully kind of broken the monopoly. Most communities don't have that. Many communities suffer from having one cable provider and suffering from all of that. We continue to have two, you know, BT is now the biggest cable provider in the area. And we have... And it was our asset. Very important to this community. You know, it's no longer technically our asset, but there are, there remain permanent protections in place ensuring things like net neutrality, ensuring annual contributions of kind of profits, if you will, back into the community in charitable forms and into local businesses, startup businesses. And this idea that we will never go back to being to a monopoly situation is permanent if BT ever attempts to sell those assets and they're going to sell it back into a monopoly situation the city can block that. So I think it was a far better outcome than many people thought would ever be possible when we started, and I know to some people it still represents something painful that the city no longer owns it, but the fact that there is a... You know, it is in many ways still locally controlled entity, family controlled entity and that we have baked in all these public values. I think of it as a success on that front as well. Yeah, I agree. It was structured incredibly well with all of that intention baked in. Sure it wasn't easy. First big congratulations, but at the same time, just down the hill you had other troubles brewing. I mean... That's right. That's right. Some days like thinking back, wow wouldn't it be nice to be back in the time when BT was their biggest problem, right? Like we've had... The world has gotten darker since and we've... Donald Trump got elected president. We had a global pandemic and then everything that followed that the inflation and the public safety challenges that followed that. So it does in some ways... Looking back to those times, it feels like a very different time, doesn't it, than what we're facing now. Yeah, absolutely. And before we sort of take that curve just a little bit, you know, going down the hill, remember the Moran plant? That was also handed to you the day you came into office where it was sort of, you know, either we're going to build something here or we got to save this building or we got to take it down. Yeah. It was to many people seen as an historic treasure and then to probably just as many people in ISOR that was representative of something that what the city wasn't doing. Yeah. How did you face that challenge? That was a tough one from the start. I came into the office... I didn't know a whole lot about city government other than the airport and sort of housing permitting issues but I did know about community development projects. I knew about adaptive reuse projects. That's what I've been doing for 15 years before being elected mayor and I... that experience was very important. I understood kind of intuitively and then as I got briefed on the situation even more so that the plan that I was inheriting had a lot of complexity to it and required a lot from the city and there was a lot that could go wrong and I, you know, have a lot of respect for some of the people that had worked on it, especially, you know, someone like David White, a local real estate consultant who worked with a lot today and I knew that a lot of effort had gone into this plan but I could also tell that it was going to be totally consuming in the administration for years and that might not succeed to go down that path and I had promised... one of those promises that we had written down in this book was I knew I didn't know enough as a candidate to make and I think I did this right. I didn't want to just make... I kind of hedged as a candidate because I didn't really know until you get into the inside you really don't know exactly what the situation was. I knew that, but I did promise, I promised resolution. I said within 100 days we're going to make a go-no-go decision and on the 100th day we went down to the waterfront and we announced that we were not going to go forward with the pre-existing plan which I will always believe I know at this point in some people I will always believe it was the right decision in that it just would have... I just had... I particularly was right decision at that moment given the Burlington telecom situation given the city's fragile financial position it wasn't what we could put our attention or our resources into in that moment even if there were some certainly exciting elements of that plan. What we pivoted to was I did decide that we... I love old buildings I like adaptive reuse buildings I wanted to see something come out of that I hope there might be something that had represented less risk for the city that seemed more feasible to me that could come out of the opportunity there so we kind of invited a competition really I think in retrospect looking back it was a great public process we said look we got like 10 million dollars to invest of this economic development efforts to invest on the waterfront we're not going to put it into what the plan that had been existed and we sort of opened it up for ideas on what we should do and what emerged from a little bit of a kind of a chaotic process but we had some great people involved including Peter Owens who was my first CEDO director who was involved in the time and Chip Hart who served on what we call the public investment action plan this kind of committee that kind of healed all these proposals you know you look at what ultimately I'm out of it and it was we were able to kind of commit to a coherent set of investments in the northern waterfront that has over time since 2014 completely transformed the northern waterfront it has gone from this eyesore on the northern waterfront to really I think in a very exciting addition to the city that includes this world-class skate park that includes this really one of the finest community sailing centers in the country a new marina that has kind of met the vision that was laid out in plan BTV this document that was just getting completed as I came in of bringing more people into the city we were the ninth largest marina on Lake Champlain despite being the largest community and you know it seemed like we should allow more voters to come here and that there is this huge backlog and so there are 140 more slips that are there and it has been a new way for people to visit the city and then we got to the bridge and it's a gorgeous sculpture I mean it is this beautiful red calder-esque sculpture that lights up the sky at night I do like to think of it as our calder and it also I think the most about it was the fact that it gave an opportunity for future generations to continue to imagine what that facility can be we didn't lose anything we actually gained the opportunity to imagine something over generations and I always think that's so critical because in some cities things are built and then it's decided that's what you inherit this way there's opportunity yeah coming us back to the actual Moran frame I am proud of how that worked out and grateful for how that worked as well because we got to it was one thing to say no to the initial plan unfortunately I had to recognize that the kind of subsequent plan that I had given some energy and space to the new Moran plan after several more years had passed I thought I had to make a very challenging decision that despite the tremendous amount of community excitement that I had created and the skill and enthusiasm these particularly these young men had kind of brought to that and the non-trivial amount of resources they had been able to raise it just seemed to me like the mountain was too steep and we weren't going to get there and I had promised resolution so I had to bring an end to that painfully as well and that I was sort of in a box of my own creation there of having said we're going to give it this last chance and if it doesn't work we're going to take it down I we were able to find kind of a third way that truly was a combination of those things it was a partial demolition we have taken down the bricks and removed them but it did keep the steel framework there and it cleaned up the site and addressed the environmental issues and it used the funds that we had available that couldn't be used on anything else to I'd like to think of it as a oversized caulder or you know version of the Eiffel Tower I mean these are grandiose versions but it has clearly taken a eyesore and turned it into a landmark and I am pretty hopeful that over the years to come because it continues to have a certain magic about it and inspire community, enthusiasm and most recently with this young man Zach Campbell who's been part of this in one way or another for years who's created an organization called Friends of the Frame and who's helping the city leading these experiments, working with BCA leading these experiments and using the site I think we're going to figure out more and more ways to use the site and we did just recently kind of unveil a vision of what it could become if we can assemble additional resources in the years ahead that really will go beyond just turning it into this landmark and turning it into you know I think really one of Vermont's great destinations that would be beloved by locals and visitors and let's hope the enthusiasm for that grows and builds over time we have a 3D model of it we have some additional funding to put in place a little bit more infrastructure this upcoming summer we have some additional federal dollars to help us continue to experiment with programming at the site for the next couple of years I'm pretty hopeful that over time it's going to you know it's it's going to grow into something even more than it is now it's definitely embraced by the community and as you said it's a source of inspiration and imagination and you know there's a great comparable for it is another grandiose vision I guess but it would have sort of a similar closer to the point the High Line in New York City which was this you know decaying piece of infrastructure but it you know there was a group that kind of rallied around it and kept kept at it for a long time and ultimately has turned it into just this absolutely spectacular public space I think there's that potential with the marine frame growing forward yes exactly so just taking a little turn now again further south Champlain Parkway 40-something years in the making and finally coming to a resolution and you know pretty fast construction this last year and lots of advances lots of excitement as people begin to see how user-friendly it's going to be how it's going to really connect the downtown and the south end and really make it one big city talk a little bit about what it's been like to get through thread that needle yeah yes so I had promised to get these long-standing projects going again and this one in some ways was the one that had been hanging around the longest going all the way back to the 60s the first real steps towards it and and it was it is it's been very hard to get it done I understand why for so many years it didn't go anywhere and I do think there is something systemic about the way this country builds infrastructure that this project represents that needs to change in the future if America is you know we've got to find a way to be more nimble with making our public investments just it is stunning to me I guess that I'm sitting here almost at the very end of year 12 we have been trying to get this built from the beginning we had big press conference that first summer was another one that I had to make a decision are we going to keep moving with this are we going to do something else I decided that this was worthwhile although it was a flawed project I thought we could improve it and I wanted to get it done I wanted to prove that we could get these big projects done and it is pretty stunning to me that despite that prioritization and focus and enormous effort the lawsuits and just the the laboriousness of the federal processes can mean that we didn't get it started and get it actually in construction until about a year ago and there will be some work left for my successor to determine there is a second phase of this that could start construction as soon as the summer but there are some decisions and effort that still needs to go here and you know as a real state developer there is this phrase that always stuck with me former real state developer that said time kills all things and I do think we just have to find a way to make it easier to build you know maybe highway projects isn't so much but the future of this country depends on us being able to build housing a lot more easier a lot easier than it has been and electrifying everything and meeting the climate challenge is going to require an enormous amount of public infrastructure to be built and if we don't find a way to improve our systems and make it you know make it possible for the government to actually get stuff built once a decision has been made I think we are we are not going to meet our climates and we are going to continue to struggle with the second worst homelessness problem in the country so you know I think at the local level we have done a lot to try to address that and that is a big part of why a lot of housing is getting built now and that should continue but these infrastructure projects using federal dollars we got to find a better way we are counting on you that is going to be a long term struggle and it is a federal state municipal collaboration a lot of people engaged in that process and getting them all aligned and agreeing is part of the challenge for sure and the way money flows to these projects definitely I think if we just for a moment stay on infrastructure because I do want to make sure that we start to talk a little bit more about housing and these are connected clearly but we have taken on the great streets project seen the first phase of it on St. Paul Street real excitement real community engagement on these streets a completely different feel we talked for with a lot of departments coming together to work on what was the difference between a good street and a great street and how do you achieve it and it turns out they are quite expensive to build so it is probably going to take a few more years than was originally imagined but now we are going forward with great streets on main streets so talk to me about what that has been like this is I am really excited that we have been able to get this in construction in the last few weeks this is also something that we worked on for years the this so one belief I long had is that we should think of our streets not just as places for cars to drive and park but that these are important public spaces and that the difference between one that is really devoted to just the parking and driving versus something that thinks of this as a public space where there are other certainly the parking and driving is a essential part of it but that there are these other public goals we should have for this outdoor space you get to a very different design and you get to a very different experience of it that way and we you know this is something I will say credit Peter Owens at first CEDAW director with having a big role in we hired one of the great street designers in the country we had inherited here a real potential from the KISS administration that had done the heavy lifting on creating a downtown TIF district that created the opportunity for tens of millions of dollars of public investment without putting a burden on existing taxpayers using future development taxes to make investment and we in this case it has taken years but it is years of hard important work we've been creating new standards we've been experimenting with these two blocks on St. Paul street and learned a lot from that process we went to other communities and got a sense for how the kind of rebuilding the main street could impact that they could have on communities personally a very impactful experience was going to Greenville, South Carolina and seeing the absolutely transformative redevelopment of their main street that they had succeeded with in which no one it was clear that everyone in that city looked at that as a turning point for the community and there was no second no one doubted whether it had been worth doing so we did those years of work we motor several times finally this this just you know just at the beginning of this year in 2024 we were able to start this construction to the point I was making before we're trying to meet the best way to kind of encapsulate how transformative this is if you look at a kind of a profile of and you can do this and go to great streets BTV and see this transformation on several of the current main street blocks so much of the real estate has been committed to parking and travel lanes that you have in the 99 foot wide right away we only one of just a couple streets in town where we have that much right away of that 99 feet before we started construction 73 feet 3 feet it's escaping me I think 73 feet of that is devoted to asphalt for you know for the parking and travel uses by making the simple change of going from diagonal parking which takes up an enormous amount of space to parallel parking you cut that profile down to 38 feet and that allows you to do so much else in the space it creates opportunity for protected bike lanes for wide sidewalks for outdoor eating and space for the arts where there's going to be wonderful public art and due to the hard work of your team that has led this competitive process there's an opportunity for rain gardens for street trees to have enough space instead of being sort of shoe horned into spaces where they don't thrive they will have coastal soils and irrigation so that these trees can thrive and we've got some years of disruption and where people are going to be unhappy about street closures and whatnot but when we get to the other side of that it is going to be a completely different main street it's going to be as transformative I believe as church street the church street marketplace change was it's going to connect church street to the waterfront in a new way to inspire private investment that will bring create new homes and businesses along main street I think 20 years from now it will be a very different downtown as a result of that change and we've also a silver lining of the pandemic in some ways I haven't quite thought of it this way I hope that's okay to say it that way the recommitment of the federal government to contributing to infrastructure means that we are going to be able to that plus the fact that we took on the city place, the ambitious city place projects means that we are also going to be able to rebuild Saint Bank Street and Cherry Street to these standards in the years ahead as well as the two new streets through the old mall building and so we have a pretty small downtown when all these projects get done, about a third of the total downtown blocks will be completely brand new and rebuilt including all the subsurface that really ancient infrastructure that wooden pipes exactly so I'm proud that we are able to get it to this point where the project is underway and where we have tens of millions of dollars of funds secured to complete that transformation in the years ahead and one of the things I thought you were going to actually say this when you were talking about the changes that happen from when we began this is that the pandemic also created a greater importance to our streets and to the way that people created community and shared and the way we opened up streets to having restaurants outdoors and activities that could take place and creating play areas and making safer pathways so people could spend more time in the streets together and so I think that vision is very much a part of the Great Streets Plan when you look at it it is real public space for multiple activities and 24 hour yeah so well I think the pandemic also showed that like government can actually do things and do it quickly and and that that lesson of the pandemic has stuck with me I hope it I hope we are able to remember that as a community as a state, as a country when government really focuses and works hard on big problems it can marshal an incredible response you can do it when you have great leadership and turn maybe our attention a little bit to some of the challenges of your administration with a pandemic racial reckoning and a time that we were constantly living in an unknown where people were looking for answers and turning to government in ways that they hadn't for maybe even decades since the depression and your leadership during that time was very significant in how we shaped what this community became how it came together it was like mutual self-aid everybody took care of each other there were programs that were really unimaginable for a town of our size talk a little bit about what it was like for you and those early days when you woke up and knew things were going to be different yeah thanks Doreen I'm glad to get a chance to talk with you about that time it was certainly the most significant months of my time in this office I'll always think of it that way I my experience in some ways started years before in that I'm not quite sure why this is the case but when I'm a little bit of a student of history I like reading history stuff and whenever years I had come across references to the 1918 pandemic I just which had happened I don't know a handful of times in the years leading up to 2020 I was always just stunned shocked by the levels of devastation I just couldn't quite believe that I guess I believed it it was hard to imagine what it would have been like to have the estimates of 30-40 million people die in the course of it and I sort of understood that there was no guarantee that we wouldn't experience that again I didn't really expect to experience a pandemic like that in my lifetime but I knew it was a possibility and so I was alarmed and concerned about what we were starting to hear coming out of China in January and February and reached out to the Department of Health and asked what we should be thinking about and kind of got a limited limited response and so there was a moment I believe it was I think it was February 28th when I asked Brian Lowe who was my chief of staff at the time was like Brian like I think my gut feeling is we should be doing more can you go look at what happened in Burlington 100 years ago in that pandemic can you find out what happened here what should it doesn't matter what cities do if this pandemic doesn't it was still an if at that point and Brian was one of the great doers of this administration so grateful for his service he worked in the administration I think 8 years he came back the same day and with having found an obscure case that since then has become famous but he found it early on before there was a lot of tension on it that was a kind of case study looking comparing St. Louis and Philadelphia during that 1918 pandemic and what he found what the case found is that city action absolutely mattered that the mayor of Philadelphia had sort of given in to business pressures and decided to keep everything open have St. Patrick's Day parades, theaters open and the St. Louis mayor had done just the opposite had done everything they could think of to try to control the spread of the virus both cities had their first death I believe on the same day but they had very different experiences from there the St. Louis experience my memories was about through the kind of heart of at least that first wave of the crisis the deaths were I think about half of what they had been and on a per capita basis in Philadelphia so from that moment on we just decided I've never been kind of a big slogan guy but we did actually kind of boil down the way we were going to respond to this in a global pandemic local actions matter and you helped us emblaz in that on these templates of these briefing documents that we went and just from that point on we just decided that our focus needs to be doing everything we can to control the spread of the virus and with that ethic that led to things like buying a truckload of denim to start fabricating our own masks in mid-march when at a time when the federal government the state government were still saying masking doesn't really matter we knew it was going to matter Brian had we had formed this analytics team that was looking around the world for best practices and what was going on and we saw what had happened and we knew the masks were going to be an important part of this we started we teamed up with the Lyric Theater and other locals and started fabricating these masks with the goal of getting them to central workers and to Alburone Tony and she needed them by the time we reopened in May and we met that we met that goal you know I'm we were organized talk a little bit about the EOC because that was really very critical to the success yeah so we we we did create an emergency operation center very early on initially it was a physical place at down at the police department where we went but we kind of you know came to understand that that was a risk in of itself and so we shifted to having zoom meetings the department heads as well as partners with the hospital and the school district met initially and you may remember some of it's better than me initially I think we were meeting by zoom almost daily ultimately we kind of dialed that back to to weekly we so I've never felt sort of better connected with the department heads and that we were all sort of working towards a common goal and working together and it really and that I think in part as a result of that it really it did become a full city I think every department had a role in helping us through this crisis whether it was BCA helping with the communications side or the library teaming up with the school district to help make sure there's a way for books to get out to kids even when they were at home plants for the people protective quarantine that was supported I mean there were dozens of programs that just when the need arose the city was there to you know pivot quickly and to make decisions and I think that decision making was critical that you were able to be decisive and not be afraid of the backlash because people were wavering in terms of how things should be and you were so decisive on the direction that we needed to go it really I mean it saved lives at the end and I really felt very strongly about that and I think it also gave it created many new communities because everyone understood their interdependence on each other and retooling what it meant to be a city I think it strengthened us in our fiber and sort of like who we were about what we were capable of doing and the care that we could have for each other Thank you for saying that I think that's right and I mean in terms of what the community impact was I it was it was an incredible team effort and team effort that went beyond city staffers I think the way we were able to team up with ALV and other partners to very quickly respond when there were outbreaks of the virus in our recent immigrant communities we were able to working with ALV, the National Guard we were able to very quickly get testing centers set up in those communities, get the word out to those communities they need to come in and get tested and we were able to quickly contain the virus when they did pop up you can a little bit see it on the chart that just went up here that we did have some significant spikes in that 2020-20 period but they were brief and we were quickly able to get the level of infections back down to low levels really if you compare how Burlington did to other cities during that period and obviously part of that was being part of Vermont but I think we inspired Vermont in some ways too and it was basically the safest place in the country being in Burlington and Vermont during that period and I do think the city effort was part of that one other element of it maybe that was part of the pandemic experience and I think one thing we did get right is we did understand very early on that the impacts the virus was having were disproportionate that there was very serious racial disparities to them and we had newly created in 2019 we had created a racial equity inclusion and belonging department and we disagreed the first director had started in April 1st of 2020 it was basically the day that I gave that Zoom state of the city was also her first day and we settled on this idea that we were going to have a racially equitable response to the pandemic and the recovery we announced that in June I think worked really hard to make good on that the principles there and recognized that properly protecting and vaccinating our BIPOC communities was going to take extra and different efforts and we did that those clinics that were set up and run yeah we had an ambitious idea of what we could accomplish tonight there were many other things I was hoping you could share with our community but I want to make sure that as this hour comes close to an end we give you a chance to just talk a little bit about the future and I apologize that we didn't cover so many other important aspects of who our community is that's all my fault of course but you know here you are last month 12 years how do you look out what are your hopes for this community hmm well certainly a lot of what has followed from the period we were just talking about has been really hard we the the wound of the pandemic even though we did so well with respect to containing the virus and deaths it was a very disruptive event that hit this community and the rest of the world and I think something I didn't fully anticipate I had a little bit of a naive thought I knew going back to April that we had a long difficult road ahead I actually said in that state of the city I said I upset some people at the time I said look I think we got 12 to 18 months of our life being completely abnormal until the vaccines get here we got to prepare for that we got to hope for better but we got to prepare for being like this for a long time I did think that once we were all vaccinated I did think we would sort of snap back bounce back I had that kind of belief in the vaccines and didn't fully understand all the damage that had taken place all of the disruptions all of the loss of systems the enduring kind of fear from the pandemic that would mean even with the vaccinations that it would be very hard to go back to normal operations and so didn't didn't know that we would face the kind of inflation issues that we would face and so it has been a hard three plus years now I guess it's I mean we're 20.4 now I guess we're into the fourth anniversary of the start of it I knew it was really because of the pandemic that I decided I did run again in 2021 I knew it would be kind of a terrible time for there to be a transition of government in 2021 in some ways we are still suffering I think from the pandemic but four years later I do think the city that that I'm going to be hitting off to Emma Mulvaney Stanek on April 1st has in many ways recovered from that period as a city team we have gotten we are not back to the strength that we were before the pandemic but many of the workforce challenges have been addressed the police department the biggest most challenging area is on the path to being rebuilt and being rebuilt in a new and better way the what we talked about a little bit this infrastructure effort that has been such a big part of the last 12 years will continue for years to come because of the resources that we've been able to secure I'm proud to be able to hand that off I hand off a city like an infrastructure that is in much better shape than it was 12 years ago in the resources in certain areas to keep going we have other challenges given the fact we've also had to build this new high school at the same time that I have not been able to solve and that will be one of the big challenges I think for the next few years is how do you get through this period in which our ability to make public investments in additional infrastructure is beyond the federal resources is quite constrained that's going to be a challenge something else that makes me optimistic is I think so many of our problems in Burlington and Vermont you know almost name your problem is a housing the solution to it is housing and for a long time that solution eluded us because we had created a system of local and state permitting that made it very difficult to build new housing we have come a long way towards improving that system here in the city and the state has now started that effort as well at the state level there is one big additional decision that I am hoping is going to be made while I'm still here and in some ways I think it may end up being the most significant housing reform of these 12 years if it passes which is this neighborhood code is going to be in front of the city council on March 25th I but it goes beyond the work that we have done and accomplished where I also see in the communities the community now sees and believes that we if we are going to be the community that we need to be that we want to be we need to build a lot more housing and the young people in this community are coming out and with incredible eloquence and passion are making the case that we need to build a lot more homes I I think we've I think we've turned the tide there and the sea change the years ahead will will be exciting and will allow I think Burlington to fulfill its potential as a city in a way that was sort of hanging on the balance in which we hadn't fully done and I think this will mean we can continue to be a real city a place where people come to start their careers to make a family to start a business and that it you know will continue to be what Burlington has been for more than 100 years of this place of opportunity but that you to continue to be that it needs to be a place where there could be investment and housing and I think I'm hopeful that maybe more than anything else I've done that that will continue well that's an enormous piece of a very big puzzle I think you've also left or are leaving at a time where you understand the partnership with the state is a critical element in the resolution we can't do it alone we're just a tiny little city and so many of the decisions that are made you've said this over and over that with that collaboration that partnership has to be there and you've worked hard in this last period you always have but in this last period to really make that known and to bring the partnership and deepen it and that goes into the whole public safety issue that is housing is a part of that piece and I think we're poised to begin to or continue to address in a much bigger way so thank you I know we didn't get a chance to really go deep into some of the issues that some of our community would have loved to have had we could do a part two but thank you so much for sharing this time with the community and with all of us and we only wish the absolute best for you and your continued devotion to this community Well Dorian thank you for doing this this was a lot of this was fun and emotional to get to do this and it's fitting to get to do it with you really the only department head that's been with me from the start and I got to have some fun too I mean can we end with the last is the photo back there can we possibly show the festival of fools I'm not sure we made there it is you did learn to juggle for that occasion and there have been only you Dorian can get me to such outlandish outfits and there's some that might have been even more outlandish than that one it's a it's a joyful time when the community comes out in the throngs and laughs together yeah completely it's a great gift that you've given to the community that festival I'm a part of it to do what I could to continue it you know maybe we should actually that's what we should close on things that's gonna happen after me is a week later the skies will darken for three minutes and it's gonna be one of the biggest events we think the city's ever had and we're planning with all of our city partners with state, local authorities setting up going back to an EOC set up so that we can work to ensure public safety to welcome the 50 or 100 or 150,000 visitors into Chintin County and hope they have a wonderful time love this place as much as we do and come back because it may be a little hard getting around during that time I'm gonna take a lot of patience but we've got some wonderful things planned for the community and we'll be celebrating in the south of Burlington not just in the downtown and on the waterfront but in parks around the city yeah thank you for your leadership on that our great team at throughout the city many many departments coming together to make this possible it's gonna be great and kick off the new administration in a great way buy your t-shirts online well thank you thanks for doing this thank you