 Okay, well, since we already have the quorum and we're just about to six, we might as well go ahead and start the meeting of the regular meeting of the Chip and Kelly regional planning commission. And as usual, we will start a call to order and the attendance, which we know we have everybody on the quorum. And so do we have any changes to the agenda? Madam Chair, I'm wondering if you'd be open to moving Nick Longo and the Burlington International Report update up to after number five, after we've approved the minutes. Certainly, that works for me. That way, you know, he doesn't have to sit through the work, the heavy duty work that we have to do tonight. Yeah, and Nick, you're still here, okay, good. So we'll move you up to five, put you up to five. And that's something that Chris wanted, you know, folks wanted to hear anyway, so we don't want to miss him. Moving on, is there anyone here who has comments on items not on the agenda? This is a public to be heard and it's for people who want to say something for items that are not on the agenda. Is there anyone who wishes to do so? I don't really see anybody's hands. So I guess we're going to go. Moving on then, we get to learn about Lainey and Christine today, or meet the staff, thank you. Wonderful. So, hello everyone, so my name is Lainey Churchill. I'm the Transportation Program Manager at the CCRPC. I joined the then CCMPO in 2007. And so I have a little bit more than 16 years with the CCRPC right now. Prior to that, I was working for veterans. I was hired at veterans back in the mid 90s to do traffic engineering. My educational background is civil engineering. And then I moved into planning and I've done a lot of the policy plans at the agency. I worked on public transit, highways, corridor studies and a number of other things. At my role here at the CCRPC right now as a program manager, I managed the transportation program and stuff, which means that I need to know a little bit about everything that is happening in the, sometimes a little bit more about what's happening in all the transportation programs initiatives as well as stuff in the RPC in order to support staff when they need support as well as assist our municipalities and our communities and our partners. In addition to managing the program, I like to manage occasionally projects. I actually do love managing projects. So one of the latest study that I managed was the ID9 2050 study, which I'm very happy to report that the final draft and all the appendices, all the hundreds of pages that we are now posted on the Envision 89 website. These past few months, I work with staff and this is very much like a team effort and I'm very happy with it and very proud of everybody on the MTP that you hopefully gonna be warning a public hearing this evening. So with that, I'm gonna let Christine go. Does anybody have questions for Eleni before I... Oh, sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. Anybody has questions? I see nothing. You can still ask them at the end if you want to. So my name is Christine Ford. Most people recognize my face. I am the current longest duration employee at CCRPC. I started in 1998, long time ago. I don't wanna count the years particularly. I have a bachelor's degree in... Put your fingers down, Charlie. I have a bachelor's degree in botany and environmental studies from the University of Vermont. My former life, I was a lab technician for the US Forest Service, but when I went back to school, I decided that I didn't wanna spend my time in rooms with no windows. So I got a master's in city and regional planning from Coors University in New Jersey. I worked for about 10 years for an engineering consulting firm in New Jersey and New York City, doing primarily environmental impact statements and environmental assessments for highway projects. I spent a couple of years doing highway noise analysis and noise barrier design. And then in 1998, I started with CCMPO at the time. As Eleni mentioned, we were separate organizations back then. I was the fifth employee to CCMPO and I was hired to manage the Transportation Improvement Program and develop the process that we use for scoping studies, which we called at the time the Project Development Program. So now fast forward these many years later, I still manage the tip. I still work on scoping studies as pretty much all of the transportation staff does. I also work on our annual project prioritization and worked with VTRANS on their core team for developing the project selection and project prioritization process, VPSP2, which is the current system that we've been using for a couple of years. I work, I coordinate the emergency management work that CCRPC does. So all regional planning commissions have contracts with Vermont Emergency Management to provide administrative support and other coordination between VEM and the municipalities and also to staff the State Emergency Operations Center and provide disaster reporting and things like that. So a lot of different things. I live in South Burlington with my husband and my cat who you will probably see before the end of the meeting and that is pretty much my overview. Thank you. Any questions for either one of them now? I mean, we have institutional memory there. All right, well, thank you. That was very nice. So we actually get to move on something that you prepared for us, the consent agenda, which is an MPO action. Move to approve the consent agenda. I'll second that. All those in favor, raise your hand. It looks good to me. Any opposed? I don't see anybody and any abstentions? Nothing, so the motion passes. And as it was an MPO action, so sorry, Garrett. Next is to approve the minutes of the March 15th board meeting. Do we have a motion and comments about that? Move to approve. Garrett, did you second that? I saw your hand up. Sure. Okay. Any corrections to the minutes? Let's see. Isn't that your job? What are you gonna do when I'm not here? I mean, I've got a few more years on me, I guess. Let's see, I had page three, line six. Oh yeah, the only comment I had, Amy, was because we've talked about this before, since we're thinking about other people reading our minutes and we live in a world of acronyms, it would be nice if like SWAT and SOAR were delineated as to what they are because there's no other mention of what they are in that section. In some of the other ones, we do have the parentheses and stuff like that, but if you don't know what SWAT and SOAR are, you would be at a loss. So that's just a comment. So since nobody else has anything to say, I don't know, all those in favor of approving the minutes, raise your hand. Oh no, I'm frozen, so I can't raise my hand. Oh, any abstentions? I will abstain, I was not here. Okay, there's several abstentions. We had, did you get me? Yeah, Brad Baldwin and John Zaccone and somebody else. Jackie? Yeah, Jackie had her hand up. Yeah, Amy, you got all three of those, anybody else? I want Tim and Bakley. Okay, thank you. Thank you, all righty. So we've moved along fairly rapidly then to get to Nick and the airport update then. Yeah, thanks for joining us, Nick. I think I made you co-host, or do you want to present from your computer or do you want me to? I have the presentation open, do you want me to do that, Nick? Yeah, that would be great, yeah, thank you. Let me see if I can share my screen. While you're doing that, I'll introduce myself. My name is Nick Wango, I'm the director of aviation at the Burlington airport, just a quick background on myself. I've been with the airport for 10 years now. Very passionate about aviation, airports, air traffic, you name it. I graduated from college with a bachelor's in airport management, that is a thing, and really, really enjoyed my time through college. I was an air traffic controller for the Federal Aviation Administration for a few years, living on Long Island, and I also love my community too. I'm on my local school board and I love baseball, so I coached baseball quite a bit in my town. But I'm here about the airport, and before I forget, I also wanted to introduce Larry Lackey, he's also on the line as well. Larry is our director of planning, engineering, and sustainability, and he joins us, because much of what we're talking about today is about our future and about our capital program, what we're looking at and why we're looking at a growth of the Burlington Airport, soon to be the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport. And so thank you for having me. Thank you, Charlie, and your team for the invitation and to all the commissioners as well. I'm looking forward to sharing this with you. I don't know procedurally how you'd like me to go, but I'm always happy to take questions during the conversation, and please stop me if there is something that you'd like to pause on. I'd be happy to do that. I'll start out with this image right here. If you haven't made it to the terminal building or to the front entrance to the airport in a little while, this is what you're going to see as you drive into the front entrance of our airport. This is what we've referred to as the Terminal Integration Project. You can actually flip it right there. That was perfect. This is our Terminal Integration Project. We just opened this new building last October. You'll see on the left-hand side there are upstairs, which accommodates larger growth and additional parking positions for our aircraft, which of course needs inside space for our passengers to wait for that aircraft. The exterior of the building over on the top right there, and then the two pictures on the bottom are the new security element of our airport. And those new machines, I refer to them as the jet engine machines because they really remind me of a jet engine, really do multiple things for the experience of a passenger going through that security position. Not only does it really increase our efficiencies and our processing of our passengers, especially during our peak hour demands, which as you can imagine, and as if you've experienced it, really is around that 4.30 a.m. to around 6.30 a.m. in the morning. We're processing sometimes 2,000 passengers just on an outbound flight within very short periods of time. So these new machines help accommodate that, but it also increases our security element of our airport. These are brand new machines on the market. You may have seen some at larger hub airports, but this is a rare instance for a small hub airport to have these style of machines at the airport. I wanted to start with that because that's the latest, the greatest, the newest, but really, really exciting for our future, which I'll go into on the next slide, well, in the next couple of slides here. Here's just an image. This is the 950 acres plus of the airport and we're extensive. And I'm sure many of you have seen, driven, come through the terminal, flown back in. I hope you have, if not, I hope you do. We are all the way from the Williston Road corridor on the southern side, Airport Drive, Airport Parkway, curving over to the Patchin Road connection over to the Colchester area and the Lime Kim Bridge. So an extensive area, we also have to really work with closely with our municipal partners, not just in the surrounding areas. Larry actually was over in the Shelburne and the Richmond area because we also need to work with those folks on flight clearances and height restrictions into the approaches of our airport. Not significantly, but an example of even the things that we have to coordinate outside of our fence line, so to speak. And if you, yep, there you go. One of the things in that 950 acres over the next five years is truly a historical capital program project. I know Larry is sweating behind the scenes over there because we have a very aggressive and historic capital program moving into our five-year next period of time. Some of them are relatively straightforward and necessary for the safety requirements of the airport, rehabilitating and refreshing our runways. That typically is viewed by the Federal Aviation Administration as a major priority. Hence the reason why you'll see $25 million plus on really rehabbing both of our runways. We have two runways at the airport. We're also looking at increased capabilities and capacity, I should say, of our cargo facility. I'm sure you've seen the FedEx aircraft, the Boeing 757 every day. They're really good on being on time, coming into the airport. We have a great demand for increased cargo and we do track that by the pound of how much lands and departs the Burlington airport. I won't mention any names, but we have FedEx coming every single day right now. There's another major carrier of cargo that really also wants to work with us and incorporate their facilities with a large aircraft on a daily flight. And we need to prepare for that. And that's one of the reasons why we're designing a new cargo, not only apron or car mac area, but also a common facility for cargo operations. Same with runways, we're looking at taxiway rehabilitation. And of course, the FAA is very stringent, and as much of your planning efforts go into the design of certain areas and the planning of certain areas, we too have to be very particular on that geometry out on our airfield. We're also looking at a new maintenance facility, $20 million facility that accommodates truly the snow equipment that keeps our runway clean. Our major runway, which typically accommodates all of the military flights, commercial flights, cargo flights, and then we have a secondary runway, which is a much smaller runway, which is mainly for general aviation, single engine, piston powered aircraft. That primary runway is a mile and a half long and 150 feet wide, which we have a requirement to clean that runway of snow within 30 minutes. So as you can see that mile and a half times 150 feet, we need to have the equipment and we need to properly store, maintain, and house that equipment in the off season and into the future. New facility coming online and we're going through that design process right now on the Northwest quadrant of our airport. The major and the ongoing and the commitment of the federal government to help us fund a recurring annual program is our sound insulation program. This year we are constructing, just shy of 20 houses out in the South Burlington community. And when I say construct, we're really rehabilitating between 75,000 and $100,000 per house of improvements to reduce interior noise levels. That may mean new windows, new doors, air conditioning units, possible insulation or wall systems again to reduce that interior noise. This is a federally sponsored program and the FAA has committed around $5.5 million in project costs on an annual basis. Currently, as I mentioned in this slide here, we are working with over 100 households right now, less than 20 that'll go out for that rehabilitation actual contractors into these homeowners houses this spring. We are fully designed and ready to go for another 50 houses and we're constantly looking at an additional 50, somewhere in that range, 50 houses for future design for next year's program. So again, combining all of that, we're working with a significant amount of individual homeowners households right now currently in the South Burlington area. However, that'll expand as there are eligible properties both in Winooski, Williston, South Burlington and Burlington that we will be working with over that period of time. All of this, obviously it all doesn't add up to 180 million but there is major capital programs on our horizon that we're constantly looking to invest in the airport. I'm good for the next slide, Elena. I wanted to show just a quick example of our maintenance facility and our commitment to the community. We recently did request, this was last year, a rezone of particular areas adjacent the airport. That rezoning request through really great collaboration, feedback from the community, the neighbors, as well as the planning commission and the subcommittee that was sponsored by the planning commission, realized that we did need to adjust our footprint just a little bit, adjust our design efforts on what the future of the Northwest quadrant of the airport is. If you're familiar with that particular area, this is the corner intersections of Herbie Road and Airport Parkway, circling around over to Lyme Kiln Road. There's great potential for future use, aeronautical use in that area. However, we originally were going to site a maintenance facility in that space, especially close to the airport parkway. We've reinvested and we really looked at this in a different light and a different vision and we're now looking to move that maintenance facility as northbound as we possibly can so that we can accommodate the feedback that we looked at. This was actually part of the bipartisan infrastructure, law bill, the bill itself, and this is given to us at a $4 million per year for five years in addition to the, typically around $4 million a year of entitlement funding that we receive on an annual basis. So this was an increase, doubling of our annual allocation for the airport, which is how this maintenance facility, this consolidation of our snow equipment and infrastructures being located. I think you can skip to it, because I think I just have a quick site plan of the maintenance shop, but I don't need to go there. Part of that $180 million of capital also looks right at our terminal building and what we can do next. You can see a grand opening of the images that I showed in the beginning of the slides there. That was our terminal integration project, brand new, open right now, but we need to look at what's coming next. What are, and literally that's what we're calling our next project, which is BTV Project Next or the North Expansion Terminal. This is a very critical component of both safety, passenger experience, as well as aircraft working positions that we're looking at to accommodate and be flexible for the future of the commercial aviation sector at BTV. I have a couple of slides coming up that'll show a little bit more in detail. That project is funded or appropriated with a $34 million Congressionally Directed Spending Award. And we are now fully engaged with a design effort and hoping to start construction within the next couple of years. We're also looking at really looking at a South Terminal design, which is a multi-phase project. Again, I'll explain that in just a second with some images and a new general aviation ramp. Most folks don't know, of course, that we have commercial aviation terminal, we have military operations, and we have a major component of the airport for general aviation, which could look like corporate aviation, small cargo operations, hobby aircraft, as well as the next generation aircraft, like beta technologies, or developing all electric aircraft. So a very high mixed complex system that we need to make sure we're growing and looking at all of the components of the airport. And then the final one there is a new $2 million JetBridge project. Reason I brought this up is, and one of the prime reasons that our name changes happening relatively soon here is because of our congressional, federal, congressional partners, specifically Senator Lay, we were able to really see an additional $45 million to look at the major components specifically, obviously 34 million is a major component of that 45, to look directly at our terminal building, a small hub airport, which is what we're classified as, very, very difficult, really unheard of to get this amount of funding for a terminal project. The funding typically goes to the immediate needs, the safety needs, which typically start at that runway center line and then work its way out. So very, very fortunate to have received this. And I'm good for the next slide. So here's a concept of the terminal building. If you go back just one slide there, here's a concept of what we're looking at and what we're looking to redesign as part of our three phase terminal project. The blue or the purple center area, and then the yellow wings of the airport, that's what exists today. The terminal integration project, which was phase one of our terminal program. That's the orange building right there. That's the pictures that you see up operating and fully functional today. That helped us alleviate a lot of our security concerns, like I said, but also our additional passenger seating areas and consolidating our TSA checkpoints. If you remember before that building, we had two separate TSA checkpoints. This now brings it back into a single checkpoint and a much more efficient and better passenger experience as they go through. The future, the next phase, which is the North Terminal Improvement, is the right-hand side pink building. What happens next, and this is what we're under design, that's the congressionally directed spending appropriation, is the yellow wing on the right-hand side of the picture, that actually gets demolished. Removed from the building today and the pink area or the new wing of the airport gets built to accommodate and allow the flexibility of the changes in the industry that we've been seeing over the last decade and what we're about to experience in the next few decades. The whole premise of what we're designing today is to make sure we have the flexibility to allow different sized aircraft to come to this terminal building or maybe even vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. We're trying to be as flexible and look into the future as far as we possibly can to use this facility as long as we possibly can. With the issue with that yellow building to the right and even the same thing on the left, the two yellow buildings, is they're far too close to our taxiway systems that is not allowing us to fully utilize the entire terminal building. On the left-hand side, we also have that terminal is on the ground level floor and the planes are getting bigger. So that means the maximum throughput or the peak hour demands that we see through the terminal instead of a 50 passenger plane, we're now seeing a 200 passenger plane. Not just one, United Airlines, for example, they're bringing in three, what we call mainline aircraft, three, almost 200 passenger planes a day, all at the same time, 600 passengers going through the security checkpoint into proper seating area and comfortable seating for that amount. The hallway on the right-hand side, that yellow is just far too small and was designed in a time period when there were small regional jets or turboprop aircraft that could use that aircraft. So we need to look at that future to accommodate all of those, all while bringing us a little bit farther away from our taxiway system and allowing parking positions to grow. The south terminal is the same exact concept, removing the left-hand yellow image there and adding the left-hand pink image. So if you flip to the next slide, you'll see that we're looking at a longer, linear new terminal building that can accommodate those size aircraft up against the face of the terminal building. And if you remember or see when you're pulling up to our terminal from the airfield side, you can see the original brick face of the 1950s, 1960s terminal building. The issue that we see or the challenges that we see today is from our brand new building that we just opened all the way to a relatively newer section on the north side. Everything in between is the original terminal building which does not accommodate passengers right now. There's no jet bridges, there's no seating and there's no jet bridges to, excuse me, yeah, there's no jet bridges that allow aircraft to be loaded from those positions with these future phases that all melds together, to allow greater capacity, higher efficiency through a terminal, greater parking, better efficiencies through security checkpoint and allow that passenger experience everywhere from parking to the gate itself to the aircraft itself to flow in a more efficient process. And while during the day, you don't see the aircraft lined up like this every morning for many years now, but every morning, every parking position is filled and we need to make sure we're ready for that. There's a great view looking over towards the Burlington side, Lake Shimp Lane in the background and then of course our new terminal. The next slide is just the opposite image looking towards Mount Mansfield from the parking garage side into the new terminal and into the airfield. And if you go to the next slide and if you need me to move along or you go faster, talk slower, stop talking, cut it off, just let me know or give me a signal. I think many of you have seen and heard of or read about or saw in the news or saw in person, I hope so, but I wanted to highlight one of our newest BTV tenants. We have a lot of great tenants everywhere from small individual pilots and aircraft owners that are there. We have Pratt & Whitney Canada, one of the largest engine repair stations in New England, even further than New England, Heritage Aviation, which supplies all of the fuel at the airport for any aircraft that is landing here. And then of course we have Beta Technologies who is now investing and growing and supporting a massive system and also reaching some of the goals that we as an airport are also trying to fulfill like geothermal, solar, green spaces and some of our net zero and sustainability goals. Beta Technologies has just signed that 75 year, it's actually 75 plus year, depending on what thresholds they hit over certain periods of time, 75 years, but investing over $300 million into major, major facilities. If you do have a chance to go down Williston Road or over to that side of the airport, you can definitely see what they're building today. It's substantial. It's only half of the building that you see in this image today. They're not yet building the other half, we're preparing to do that in the next few years. And just to give you a concept of what that half looks like, you can see there about 355,000 square feet. That one white building on the image there, 355,000 square feet, that's twice the size as our terminal building if you've been in there. So just to get a concept of what that really feels like. They're also building a new general aviation facility, a 20,000, 25,000 square foot hanger for smaller aircraft as well as their electric aircraft. And they've invested in other's airport property and airport buildings with additional $20 million of infrastructure improvements at their headquarters, which is where they're stationed today. The big building, 355,000 square foot, that's where they're gonna be manufacturing these state-of-the-art next generation, 100% electric aircraft. Again, I'm sure you've seen it in the news. They have two different versions today and they're hoping to start really manufacturing these and putting them out on the line over the next year or so. So really, really excited to see their future grow. And they're over 400 employees right now. They started just maybe six or so years ago with a handful of employees, a really, really exciting, high energy and technical company right here in our region. And if you go to the next slide, just wanted to touch base on the other part of the airport are really great partners, diverse air carrier mix. You can see the major three United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, really leading the pack. These are the legacy carriers that as you can see perform very, very well for BTV. We have many, many non-stop destinations. We're always looking to increase those destination or expand those destinations because of the demand of what we see every single day. And you can see many of these, including new destinations like Minneapolis, St. Paul, Denver, Miami is back this year and we're going to Dallas, Fort Worth, non-stop as well as some of these major, major big cities, Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte, New York, Washington, Philly, really, really exciting. And that's made a major role of me and my amazing leadership team to always look for new ways to expand this so that we can meet the demands of our region but also meet the demands of what the ticket prices are at the airport. How can we still have a competitive airport with the airline's healthy competition is really, really good. For example, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Sun Country and Delta both go there. Chicago, American and United both go there. So that healthy competition really helps set the tone and the competitive nature of an airline ticket price. If you've traveled recently, you'd probably see that BTV does tend to have about average, if not a little bit higher average ticket prices. But so this competition and introducing low-cost airlines is really, really important for the mission and for all of our passengers for our region. And if you go to the next slide, just a quick overview of our in-planements. An in-planement is a passenger boarding in aircraft. So these are all the outbound passengers leaving BTV on those outbound flights. You can see back in 2019, which was our biggest year in about that decade period of time, just shy of 700,000 outbound passengers. An equivalent amount of inbound passengers, 700,000 back in. So around 1.4 million travelers in and out of the airport. Pre-pandemic. We're not quite there yet at the end of 2022. This is about 80, 85% of that traffic. However, even in these first few months of 2023, we're seeing almost 90% of our traffic pre-pandemic when we look at it month over month in 2019. And then you can see those trend lines. What's really important and what's really exciting for us, I've talked about many elements of the airport, commercial aviation, military aviation, general aviation cargo. We are now the second busiest airport in New England. The only busier airport than us right now is Boston Logan. And that's on the number of operations per year. And operation is a landing or a takeoff. So the second busiest airport in New England. And it goes beyond that, of course too, but New England is a great comparison. That's busier than Manchester, New Hampshire, Portland, Maine, Albany. I know that's not New England, but busier than Albany, Providence, Rhode Island, Bradley, Connecticut. These are major airports, medium halber airports because of the diverse amount of operations that we see every year. The growth of beta, the growth of general aviation, the growth of the air carriers and commercial operations. So that's really, really exciting for us and also helps us fund many of these projects that I referenced earlier. Really, really exciting to see that growth. And we need to be prepared for it to by adding those new elements, new tarmac, new apron, new rehabs on the runways, et cetera. So it's very, very exciting. From a financial standpoint, if you go to the next slide, awesome. You read my mind. From a financial standpoint, we're really strong. We just completed our fiscal year 2022 audit. We're incredibly strong. This is a public document if you're ever interested in reading another audit report. Really happy with the progress over the years, the recovery after COVID. We're working with our incredible airline partners on new negotiations and a new agreement with those airlines to grow here, but also to help us to succeed financially through this period of time, especially with a historical capital program. And I mentioned we're not quite there on passengers, about 90% of the 2019 pre-pandemic numbers. However, our revenues are much higher than 2019. Hudson News, for example, they're heading 140% revenues over 2019. Car rentals, which is almost a $30 million gross entity, there's multiple companies here, almost $30 million a year, just right there at the Burlington Airport. They're up 125%. A parking garage, you might have seen it. We're busy in the parking garage. Our revenues are around 105% over 2019 numbers. This is a rolling chart there showing prior 12 months. So you can see a nice historical number, obviously the decline through the pandemic and then the growth and recovery after the pandemic. We're now exceeding those amazing numbers and amazing projections. And if you go to the next, just a quick overview. This is all in the past, I'm so happy. We're past 30 minutes. So if you can wrap up in a couple. You got it. I think this is the, I believe this is the last slide. Just wanted to show that we're recovered. We're out of COVID. We have funding, much funding, over $20 million. And then if you go to the next slide, another quick partnership with VTANG, they support us in so many different ways, including providing our aircraft rescue and firefighting service. They are the only firefighting service at the Burlington airport, which saves the airport, saves the airlines, helps us succeed with our growth by not having our expenditures include a $4 million annual salary, a $20 million station, a $4 million equipment cost, and they provide a significant amount of mutual aid responses outside of the airport as well. Great partnership with the Vermont Air National Guard. And I think that's it. Yes. Yeah. So thank you very much. And I'd be happy to answer questions or however you want to. I didn't realize it was going. I could talk all night. So I apologize for taking so much time. Can I ask a question, Catherine? Yes, I was getting ready to ask. So I used your hand up. Thank you. Nick, I'm Chris Shaw, the South Burlington Rep. And I had, if Catherine and Yol can, or Bear, I probably have six detailed questions, which hopefully will be quick, short answers. Number one, Nick, what is, you mentioned operations per year, do you have an approximate split between military, commercial and private percentage-wise? I do. So we just, we're hovering around 110,000 operations per year. General aviation is the majority of those operations, probably around 40, 45%. Commercial aviation comes in second, maybe around that 20%. Military operations is only 7% of those operations. And then there's a handful of other elements in there, split between air carriers and air technology. Let me move on quickly. Beta technologies, you mentioned two versions of their production facility, which seems to be where they're gonna be, hopefully making return and money, is one passenger and the other cargo, do you have a fix on that or not? Not that I'm aware of, I'm unsure. Right now, I think they're just developing the vertical takeoff capability, a fixed wing capability. I know they're working with a couple of their clients and partners on what they wanna do, but I'm not aware of exactly what the use is. Don't know whether it's cargo or passenger or whatever. Thank you. I think it's a little bit of both, but yeah, not specifically, I'm not aware. And then in your airline routes, we used to have Toronto, I didn't see it on your map. Is Toronto still seasonal or in the off thing or to be negotiated what? Yeah, we do talk to Porter Airlines quite often. Toronto hasn't been at BTV for around five years now. It was, of course the pandemic didn't help, but it was a complicated complex process, especially bringing in folks and trying to clear them. We are a part of the tree. No problem, I got you where you're at. I wanna move on. You mentioned a hotel north and south. We had one we heard about on the south end of the parking garage, is that still, where's that? Negative, so happy to report that Monday night, we got an approval from our city council that a new hotel is going up and we have a signing of an agreement coming soon. However, it's on the north side of the parking garage to the opposite side. All right, so moving on the Chamberlain School. When you talk about houses being retrofitted with insulation, is there anything in the offing on the Chamberlain School? There is, that was actually our first program. We have fully insulated added new products, new air conditioning, everything to that school. And then the one final piece is there's often a contention about ongoing sound monitoring. Do you have a quick answer for where that rise? Because of course, Burlington doesn't wanna pay for it. South Burlington doesn't wanna pay for it. The feds are somewhere in between. And then I had one final suggestion after this. We have three active ongoing noise monitors currently in the community, one in South Burlington, one in Wailston, one in Winooski. All three are available online and we'll continue to offer the data and the sources for that sound monitoring. Do you have a link for that? That you can send us in the chat at some point? BTVsound.com, absolutely. I'll put that right in the chat. Very good. And then the last piece would be the maintenance facility and a plea for if you wanted to provide a benefit outside the fence there. We know that the connection between Cold Chester and Airport Parkway is needed for both bike and pedestrian. We're very interested in that and the CCRPC. So anything you can do to assist in infrastructure along that route would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Very excited in the next six weeks, we're gonna be presenting a new multi-use bike walking path for all of that green space to connect to the South Burlington systems. Great meetings with the city and more to come on that. Thank you, Chris. Amy, your hand was up. Do you still want to say something? Okay, next is Dana. Yeah, great presentation, Nick. Thanks, really exciting stuff. You might not know the answer to this, but it just occurred to me when you were talking about the cargo improvements, if there was any kind of correlation or link when airports do major cargo improvements, does it help get 18-wheelers off the road? That's a tough question. We try to coordinate the ground cargo versus the air cargo operation. I don't think it will, but well, maybe it will. It might not come from New Hampshire or from a far distance to be delivered to the larger packaging or sorting facilities. Instead, it'll come by air. But that's a tough one to understand. It would alleviate multiple smaller aircraft from landing and consolidating it into a larger one and then still being put onto the larger trucks. Got it, thanks. Andrew, you have a question? Hi. Can you hear me? Yes, I think so. Nick, again, I echo the sentiments of fantastic presentation, very informative. Just a couple of questions about airlines that we're seeing. I know that Boutique came in for a minute and then they didn't last here very long. My understanding was that they weren't closing the door on Burlington, but that it wasn't feasible at the time. I don't know if they weren't selling seats or what, but I was curious about that. But I also was curious about efforts to try to secure if it can be discussed budget airlines like Allegiant, things like that. Other airlines were seeing some new ones like Flare I've seen, that's another new one, and quite a few others, Swoop was one. Are there efforts to try to secure these new budget airlines that kind of serve those more vacation routes, things like that? I know Plattsburg has a flight maybe once a day to Florida, but I don't think they're seeing a whole lot of action over there. But I'm just curious as to how you foresee that constant initiatives to bring in what are referenced as ultra low cost carriers and low cost carriers, especially this time of year. Me and my team are on the road going to airline corporate headquarters to encourage the growth at Burlington to reduce ticket costs, to serve our region in different capacities. And the initiative never ends and where we're continuing. And hopefully this year I'll have some exciting news for everyone. Great, I know you're working on it, I'm sure, but I just, the curiosity's inside of me there, so. Yeah, hope they bite. John? Nick, yes, thanks for all your hard work there. Facilities looking good, I fly frequently and all the improvements. It's been very welcome. Just curious, from a passenger standpoint, Canadian-American split, what are our neighbors to the North? How much of the passenger airline business they make up these days and do you have any plans there to try to increase their participation in our facility? Yeah, great question. We have a highly scientific way of studying how many Canadian travelers come to the airport and that's by counting license plates in our parking garage. It's a challenging problem that we have. I actually meet with the consulate generals of Quebec's office to try to encourage the growth. Not Montreal is really important, but it's really those Eastern townships that we really wanna encourage growth. And we want that Highway 35 to be built. It's been many, many, many years from the border up to Route 10 or Highway 10, the main throughway there. That way, the Eastern townships in Chabrouk can come down straight through the border to Burlington. Right now, through COVID, of course it was highly declined. We're around 12 to 15% Canadian travelers. I should say parkers today, obviously we don't know how many people are in the vehicle. And that's a significant increase over the last couple of years through COVID. So seeing that recovery is great pre-pandemic, around 20%. So we're almost there and that equates to around 100,000 Canadian travelers a year. So I think we're easily gonna get there and both domestic and Canadian partners up there, I think we're looking at a forecast of over 700,000 passengers per year this year, which would be a pretty all-time record for us. Thank you. Any other questions for Nick before we move on? I don't see, well, thank you very much, Nick. It was a really informative presentation. I appreciate it. Thanks, Nick and Larry, it worked. Yeah, thank you, reach out anytime and thank you again for having us. Do you have a question, Garrett? Because I saw your hand move. No, okay, just wait. Thank you very much. Thank you all and have a great week. Thank you. Thanks, Nick. Moving on, we need to warn the public hearing for the FY24 UPWP and the budget for the May 17th meeting and this because it is both MPO and RPC will be two different votes. Now there's an action item after discussion. So who will be talking to about this as a Marshall? Yeah, well Marshall started off and then maybe I'll dig a little bit deeper into the budget. Sure, yeah. Hi everyone. We had three UPWP committee meetings this year, January, February, March and was pretty smooth process. All projects were funded with the exception of one that came from VNRC and that was actually removed in our executive committee meeting recently. Other than that, smooth process as usual. Any particular questions that anybody has? Boy, are you lucky. He has every single line. Yeah, and if you see the memo in your packet, you can see Marshall has a table in there. Yeah, we're like at about $9.4 million of, so we're already at that all-time high. That sounds like the airport's getting to. And I was gonna just maybe walk through the budget a little bit. Obviously this is up for a vote to warn the public hearing and it will be an action item next month. But let me share my screen and just let you all see what the UPWP committee and executive committee have seen. You can all see my screen now. Yes. With the budget, okay. Sorry, I'm just blowing up my other screen so I can see your lovely faces. And for, I'm gonna walk through this. I think we maybe have a couple board members that haven't really seen this process before. This is the draft budget and we kind of divided up the budget. This is the revenue page and we divided that up further to municipal, regional. So this is kind of our, more of the land use planning, regional planning grant funds. A couple notable items here, you'll see a 26% increase in our regional planning grant funds. That's due to the one and a half million dollars that got added to the regional planning grant program last year. And we're really, last year, we didn't count on all that revenue. I think when we passed the budget or when we were at this stage, the legislature wasn't done, we didn't count on our bills. So we didn't, we didn't book it all as revenue last year. This year we're booking much more of it, 540,000. And there's also, I'm gonna kind of note, there's another chunk of those funds down here on line 24. This fiscal year we used 100,000 to match MPO funding. Next year, we're proposing to use 35,000 of the regional planning funds, which are state funds to match the MPO funds and take some pressure off of our dues. And you can see the, that increased number of MPO funded projects is putting a lot of pressure on our dues on line eight here. You see we only have $1,300 of dues left after we do the matching for MPO work. So just, if you wanna know where your dues are going, they're pretty much going to match the MPO funds plus $1,300 left over. Any questions on that? I don't know if that was, I'm talking a little inside baseball, it feels like, but does that make sense? This is a very new phenomena for us of using the regional planning funds to match the MPO funds. There's a couple of items here that are colored yellow, housing navigator. There's a proposal in S100 for funding for RPCs to help housing projects move forward. It's yellow, which means tentative, but we did book some revenue. There's a rural assistance program that passed through the Budget Adjustment Act a month or two ago to help under resource towns, access federal funds. That is a brand new program. We aren't under contract with the state yet, but that is coming soon. And I'm happy to answer questions about that. There's also a CUD assistance here on row 18, which is we're providing some staffing for the CUD, the communications union district, sorry. And then turning to transportation, you can see this kind of budget getting bigger if I looked at this bottom line here. Just on the staffing side, we're going from 1.7 to 1.9 million. The consultant line here on row 26, we're going from 3.5 million to almost 4 million. And so that was partly what you just heard Marshall talk about the 2.1 million of consultant funding. There's even more than that when we add in all the continuing projects. And the other thing, which we had a little bit in our last year budget is the raise grant that we're just getting close to getting under contract with FTA. Thanks Marshall for your help with that. We're booking a million dollars to pass through us to consultants for that work in FY24. And then a pretty big section here, natural resources and energy, EPA, submitted a new grant to EPA. We'll see if that gets funded. That's tentative. And there's some other various programs here around energy work with the public service department or with other partners to do some energy work. Pretty sure line 41 is not happening. So we might do a little tweak to the budget before you see it next month. And the same thing with this line 53, the urban and community forestry. So that's probably not happening. So we'll probably shift some hours into some other tasks. So this will be more than two rows. We'll change a little bit here. And sorry, Tracy. And then the last section is around emergency management and health. The one thing that we haven't seen is we've been passing through a big chunk of money from the health department to the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance. We expect that to happen, but just haven't started under contract yet. And then emergency management. So any questions on the revenue side? There are some questions there, but, and yeah, here again, you see close to 9.4 million, which is by far the biggest budget we've ever had. I don't know what to say to that. A part of me wants to say I'm sorry to the staff. And then congratulations to the staff. I'm not sure which that other partners and state agencies have that much work for us to do. On the expense side, a significant increase in salaries. There's really two main components. We are in our mid-year adjustment this year. You all approved an increase in staffing of adding one person. So that is a good chunk. That's probably a third of this increase. And then there's another chunk of this budget to deal with really the just inflationary pressures on salaries, et cetera. So that's, but it is significant. Same thing with benefits. The rest of the expense budget is pretty much the same. We kind of right size a few things. We do have more money in here for internal consultants down here in line 104. And that's really two things. We're gonna do a compensation study, which we do every few years, five, four or five years. So that's part of it. And then we're also just trying to up our human resources administration game. So we have some consultant dollars there to help do that work as well. And the budget does look a little negative. And I guess the one thing I'll say to that is that is pretty much our SOP to have a little bit negative budget at this time of year. And I'm pretty confident we will get more positive as the year goes on. But, and the last, I'll just show you kind of the, we have a couple of sections down here in the bottom. One to show capital budgeting. We are probably going to need a new server in FY24. That's why the depreciation number went up. And also to give you a little insight into our indirect rate. So we worked very much like a consulting agency. We bill every single hour and bill an agency or a municipality to recover our costs. And then we have an indirect rate which follows federal guidelines that I'm not gonna bore you with. But also you can kind of see how we ended up each year. So like over the last five years plus 116,000, there have been some years where our indirect rate was too high and we had a negative year. But that's where we are. And here's kind of where we are as of March 31st in terms of cash balances. So we're in good financial shape right now. I think that was my way to try to reassure you about the negative 18,000. I don't know if it worked or not, but any questions? Sorry, I just covered a whole lot of details that maybe you didn't care about, but no questions. Most of you look like you're still awake. So that's good. So we just need to vote? Yeah, if we could vote, I'm sorry, let me stop sharing. And yeah, we need a vote to warn the public hearing for the UPWP and budget. I guess, Madam Chair, whichever you want to do the RPC vote first or the MPO vote first. You can do the RPC vote first because it's the most straightforward. Yeah. Do we have a motion to do so? I would so move. Who did that first? That's Andy Watts. Okay, and then Garrett wait, rave to stand. So he's the seconder than I saw him. Okay. All those in favor of passing the budget and the UPWP along to the public hearing for it, raise your hand. Alrighty. Any abstentions? Well, it looks like the motion passes. That's great. Now we're going to take the MPO vote, which is a weighted vote and only, where the communities involve. Do we have such a motion? I'll move that. Chris Shaw, second. Did you get that Amy? Cause it was sort of quick together. Good. All right. All those in favor of warning the public hearing for the budget and the UPWP for the meeting in May, raise your hands. Again, where it looks like everybody did the right thing. So the motion, are there any abstentions? Okay. The motion passes. Thank you very much. Well, the next discussion and action item is MPO. And that's to warn the public hearing for the MTP plans for the next meeting, which is May 17th. Right. Eleni, you were the one talking to that one? Yes. I will do that. And I'm going to start with a very brief presentation. All right. So let's see if I can share my screen again. I hope you all see this. Not as full screen though. Yeah. What about now? Oh, I see it. Oh, that's better. Okay. Great. So hello again. You have, you received the draft public hearing kind of like document and MTP document for your review. Happy to just answer any questions that you have now on that draft report. Or I'm happy to, you know, just talk to you over the phone in person, reach out to me if you have any comments on concerns or questions. But I'm just going to go, you know, you also have a memo that indicates all the votes from the TAG and the LRPC and also recommendation from the staff about the public hearing. So I go through this presentation really quickly and then we can go get to discussion if you would like. So again, just a little recap of what the MTP is. The MTP is a long-range plan, our principal transportation plan for the county. And it sets, you know, original transportation vision and goals, which I'm going to talk about a little bit in the next slide. The MTP is one of four key responsibilities that the CCRPC as a designated MPO needs to develop and accomplish. The other three is the TIP. I think Christine mentioned that in her introduction, the staff introduction. The other one is the UPWP, we just worn a hearing for that fiscal year 24. And the fourth one is the public participation plan, which we will be updating this fiscal year at least, you know, in-house portion of it. The MTP is updated every five years and it's a fiscal constraint document and I will come back to the fiscal constraint in a few slides, so I will leave that there. There are also a number of federal regulations that we need to follow and they mandate what needs to be in the plan and we included everything that needs to be in the report that you received. Talked about the vision, you've seen this vision before, this is a vision that was helped, we helped develop with, you know, TAG members, LRPC members and various other stakeholders. So our vision for a transportation system in the county by 2050 and hopefully, you know, earlier than that is to be a safe, efficient, reliable and resilient. We also want a system that provides mobility choices. This is the multi-modalism. We wanted to support our communities and our, you know, way of life. We want a livable, equitable and healthy communities and we also want with our transportation, you know, actions to address the climate crisis that we're in and a little bit more about that in a little bit and also support the economy of the region. We developed seven goals and there are numerous objectives after each goal and they're all in your plan. And those are, you know, vision and goals are very important because when you develop your actions and your strategies, you are trying to accomplish your vision and your goals. So I talked about the, that the MTPs say a Fiscally Constrained Plan and we developed, when I say we, Christine developed a financial plan for fiscal year 24 MTP that basically starts with, and what Fiscally, you know, I'm just going to take a step back. What Fiscally Constrained means is that every single project and program in this MTP must have some funds identified and available for them. There is a very long list of projects and programs at the end of the draft that you received that indicates all the, you know, projects and programs that we're going to be working on in the next few years to hopefully accomplish our vision and goals. But all of those had identified funds next to it. The way to develop how much we're getting as a Chinatown County, we start looking at the state. So we're looking at historical data and then we just basically estimate how much Vermont is getting. And then based again on historical data, how much Chinatown County is getting, what is the per percent of funding that comes to the state that flows into Chinatown County by 2050. And once we determine that, then the next step is to determine the percent of funding that goes towards maintaining our system. We have a robust system in the County and we want to maintain it in a state of good repair. And then once we determine that, then we see how much money we have left for new funding. For our current, you know, NTP, the financial plan estimate that by 2050, we're going to have approximately a little bit more than a billion dollars to fund our existing, to maintain our existing system in a state of good repair. And a little bit more than 440 million for funding that is going to go to new projects that we call modernization enhancement projects. So that the split is 70-30. So that's kind of something that we determine also by looking at how much spending went into maintaining the system over the years. So these are important numbers and the 440 million are the number that we are looking when we are actually adding all the projects and programs to get us to 440 million. So a little bit, talk a little bit about land use, which is, you know, as we all know, very important in the transportation planning. And if we wanna accomplish our goals, we are looking at density where we want density. So just a little bit of a history here, 2013 and 18 ECOS plan, I had the land use goal of 80% of households going into the existing areas plan for growth. In 2018, the MTP, we determined that we needed a little denser communities to accomplish our transportation goals and our, you know, so we increased that percentage because that density provides us with communities that we can actually invest a lot more on biking, walking, transit is much more viable in dense communities. So we basically increased that percentage in 2018 MTP. In this MTP, the 90% of the new households going in existing areas for growth holds, but we added another layer, we added a transit-oriented development overlay to basically reinforce our need to have more dense communities and development around the primary transit routes. And I know this is a very small map, but you have a much bigger map in your report. And the TOD layer is generally within a quarter of a mile from the GMT primary and commuter routes that they're within the areas plan for growth. And this map, the map to the right, all the areas that they're non-green are areas plan for growth. And that includes, you know, anything from a center to enterprise area to a metro area, and a couple of the other ones that I kind of don't remember in our village maybe. So that's what's gonna really help us accomplish our transportation goals is to reduce VMT, increase walking, biking, transit, and also make much more livable communities in our region. We evaluate it and in a previous presentation I went through, we went through a little bit more detail in those scenarios, happy to expand on them if you want me to. But we actually developed and evaluated four scenarios for the fiscal year 24 NTP. The 2020 is basically current conditions, it's our base. The 2050 base with plan projects, it means that we increase the employment and population and households for 2050, but the transportation investments were minimum. We only included the TIP projects in this. The 2050 MTP for the 2018 plan was a plan that actually included a robust increase in investments in biking, walking, infrastructure in transit services as well as TDM programs. But in the I-99, the fourth one, the I-99 2050 study, I did mention this study before when I talked to you is that we developed a very aspirational scenario, but it's a scenario that brings us, it takes us to the right direction to, again, goals, reducing VMT, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and then just increase, and we're gonna do all of that through increasing and TDM investments, walking, biking, and transit, and other kind of investments as well as policy shifts. So this is a summary slide of what the I-99 2050 study scenario is, which is our proposed 2023 MTP scenario. So just quickly you see on the slide, we talked about the housing and employment growth is 2050. We talked about the 90% of households going into the area for growth in addition to the TOD overlay. 90% of the vehicle fleet is electric by 2050. This is one of the assumptions that we make and based on some federal regulations that we see coming out as well as some state laws, I think that is achievable by then. New exit 14, so exit 14 is one of the, like bottlenecks on our interstate system and it's also very challenging interchange. We analyze the exit 14 and when we did the I-99 study, we came up with a DDI as a preferred alternative, but we are gonna be moving diverging diamond interchange as a DDI as the preferred alternative in that study, but we actually need to finish a scoping study to have an official preferred alternative for the exit 14. We will be doing that in fiscal year 24, starting in July. We also have numerous improvements at our high crash locations. All TIP and MTP projects, we achieve all of them. We also looking for a different way to fund our transportation system. So we are thinking that the mileage-based fee is the way to go, even though there are some other options and choices. This is a conversation we need to have with the state as well as the legislature. So those conversations are ongoing right now. I believe there is a proposal to put some fee for electric vehicles right now. So that's one step forward. This includes all vehicles to go in the mileage-based fee, you know, direction. And then we have significant transportation demand management investments. We have a 50% increase in teleworking from what is apparently is, you know, what we think it is anyway, the teleworking right now. We are doubling trips made by transit, tripling transit services, doubling participation in TDM programs and increasing cost of parking in villages and downtowns. I just wanna emphasize again, this is an aspirational scenario. These, especially the TDM investments that we are including here need a lot more evaluation and thought. We don't know what tripling transit means, how much more money and what does it really, how this translated into operation. So those are all the things that we're gonna be doing in the fiscal year, 24 TDM study. So that we're just gonna be looking at these recommendations and figuring out what is visible for our county, for, you know, and for our funding that we receive. Some scenario results, which is, you know, I mean, it's something that you can see that from what you saw before in the previous slide, you can see that the proposed 2023 MTP, the transit walking and biking mode increase, the shift, the mode split increase tremendously based on those assumptions we made. And, you know, it also translated into a lot less VMT per capita in the county. Similarly, we see a drastic decrease in the work trips, the daily vehicle work trips. And that is because we are doubling teleworking. Again, this is a trend that we're gonna be investigating next year because unfortunately there are some indications that teleworking and working from home doesn't really help our VMT, but we're gonna be diving into deeper next year on this. And finally, we run the EPA's moves model and we are, you can see that because, mainly because 90% of our vehicles, the vehicle fleet is electrified, then we can see the drastic decrease in the greenhouse gas emissions. Again, this is just a summary of all the MTP investments. I did talk about this a lot. I don't wanna go over it. I just wanna just, you know, just stop to the, I mean, I talked about the shift of gas diesel vehicles to electric hybrid. And just the bullet before last is also important. And that is we are looking at enhancements is our rail infrastructure to actually help with the, you know, with diverting freight from tracks to rail and support our passenger rail, especially now that we have the Amtrak service into Burlington. And finally, we wanna implement our MTP projects, which again, they're all included in your, in the draft that you received. Just a quick summary of what are our new projects, the modernization enhancement projects. Again, remember we have 440,000, excuse me, 440 million dollars in federal funds by 2050. At least that is our estimate. We have identified 121 projects. Over 95% of those projects include bicycle and no pedestrian improvement and enhancement. And this can be a small enhancement, like, you know, adding pedestrian crossing or pedestrian signal, or it can be a big, robust project that is, you know, a shared use path or something like that or on street bike lanes. Over 95% of our investments are in areas planned for growth and that includes, that excludes paving and bridge projects that they are included in the maintenance bucket, not the new projects. So that does not, you know, so that 95% does not include that. We're improving our high-crush locations to save the improvements. And 24% of our investments are in census areas that they have a big percentage of people that identify as non-white, with incomes below the poverty level and also with limited English proficiency. This is a good direction to go. We have a lot more to do, but this is a good start. And I am finishing up with the proposed motion for the board. We were asking you and also not just the staff, but also the TAG and the LRPC to warn a public hearing for the 2023 MTP at your next main 17th board meeting at six o'clock. So with that, somebody moved it. I'm sorry, I couldn't. John, of course, I'll second. Jackie, thank you, Jackie. All right. Any questions, any comments? John, did you make the motion? I did. Well, I don't see any hands for questions. So you did a very good job, Eleni. Thank you very much. So we have a motion on the floor and a second. All those in favor? Then this is an MPO vote. Raise your hand. Okay, thank you. Anybody opposed on this one? Abstentions, don't see any. Well, thank you very much. The motion passes. I don't know, a lot of exciting work there. The next item on the agenda is the equity update. Hi, everyone. I'll try to be quick. I'm still working with two UVM interns, one on a community engagement guide and one on a residence guide. Equity advisory committee meetings are still running. We have another one next week and we're working on digging into some more details around exploring how to use transportation funds to build civic infrastructure to increase participation in CCRPC projects and starting to explore participatory budgeting as a process, what it looks like and whether the EAC could support a participatory process to distributing these funds. I am still meeting with equity advisory committee members and building relationships with them and with representatives from different municipalities to get a sense of what equity work is happening elsewhere in the county. I'm planning an all staff, CCRPC staff equity meeting, still working on this equity action plan, getting involved with the ECOS plan a little bit and working on integrating equity throughout that and getting pulled into some kind of specific projects, the South Burlington Climate Action Plan, the Battery Street Project and Manuski Bridge Project to think through public engagement efforts there. I think that was most things. Anybody have any questions? Chris? Yes, since we just saw Lamy's presentation on the transportation plan, do you have any thoughts on that? I noticed there was 24% of the last two bullet points you talked about were in areas, both bullet points seemed to address folks who weren't proficient in English and I forget the other census tract that it was referring to. And then 95% of each of the projects seemed to have a component that addressed either bike or ped. Do you have any observations on your take and the strength of the plan and what more could be done perhaps? If it's strong enough or if it could be stronger? To be honest, Chris, I have not dove deeply into the MTP enough to have really thoughtful comments on equity as it relates to it. I just haven't had the capacity to do that thus far. Lamy might be able to speak more to it. Thank you. And yeah, I would actually, maybe I'll follow up with you once I have a chance to dig into it and answer your question via email or we can chat more. Does that work? Aline, do you have any thoughts that you wanna add to that? I'm sorry. No, I mean, so Chris, I think that we are definitely gonna be working closer with Ann Nelson as we move forward. But I mean, at this point, it was a lot to add to her plate and the MTP is a bit complicated. You know, like work and we also just thought that, you know, we were thinking that we were gonna bring you to the equity advisory committee, but that was not possible either. No, it's a heavy lift. There's no doubt. It's a heavy lift. I wanted to hear if she was horrified or where we could go. Oh, God, I hope not. I really hope not. Of course, I'm just pecking at the details that you showed in the bullet point. And, you know, oftentimes, just because a project has a bike or pet component doesn't necessarily mean it's robust enough, but... Right. No, I appreciate the question, Chris. It's a good question. And I will let you know. Any other questions for Ann Nelson? I don't see any hands. Well, thank you very much for your equity update. Looking forward to the next one. Eventually, you know, you're gonna have your action plan all organized down the road. But there's a lot, you've got a lot on your plate. No question about it. Next is the chair and executive director updates. And we're working our way through the legislative session. So I mentioned that since I've been part of it. Yeah, thanks, Madam Chair. And just to follow up that equity conversation. Yeah, there are a lot of things on Ann Nelson's plate that she's trying to dig into. And, you know, we're kind of constantly caught in these cycles of like, you know, the MTP has a five year clock, which expired in June. And so we're having to move that along. And, you know, the equity work isn't quite caught up with those other cycles. So, but we're also trying to be cognizant of the fact that all of our work is iterative, you know, so we're gonna go through an iteration. The next iteration will do better at it. So, but thanks for asking about that, Chris. With regards to my report, just really a couple of things. One, just staffing to let you know, we have an ad out there for land use planner, regional planner, entry to senior. So if you know anybody who might be good that you want to encourage, you know, we probably don't want to steal from another town unless we have to. But, you know, sorry, apologies again, Essex, but thank you for allowing Darren to come this way. And so that's staffing. And then the other thing, yeah, Catherine, as you mentioned, legislature is in, you know, they're getting down to their last few weeks. I think they're trying to get out of there by May 12th. Two things that we've been pretty engaged in, and really on behalf of all the RPCs statewide, one is funding. If you remember a couple of months ago, we asked for people to kind of sign on to a letter asking for full funding per the statutory formula. The House Appropriations Committee did include $1.5 million increase, which was great. That's in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee right now and under discussion. Had some discussion Monday or Tuesday this week. And so I'm cautiously optimistic that that will stay in the budget when the Senate Appropriations Committee gets done. But I'll definitely know no more at your next meeting next month. So stay tuned. And then the second thing is the housing bill. And you saw that got a little bit of a media attention in the last number of days. It's in house environment and energy. The bill is called S100. It passed out of the Senate a few weeks ago. It's in the house. House General and Housing is looking at the money portions of that, the programmatic side, really, which funds a lot of affordable housing programs. And then the other side of the bill really has a lot to do with trying to remove municipal zoning barriers and other kinds of municipal barriers to housing production. And the frustration that bubbled up over the last week in the house was that it wasn't doing enough to address Act 250 barriers or state barriers. It's very focused on municipal barriers right now. That is a decision that the house had wanted to do. They wanted to focus on municipal work to reduce housing barriers this year because there's a couple Act 250 studies that are underway on our due to the legislature in December. So the legislature intends to go back in 2024 and address some of the Act 250 provisions. So I could talk a lot more about that, but I did just testify there on behalf of the RPCs this morning in house environment and energy, trying to give them a little bit of language to make some of the sections of the bill a little more functional and effective, but happy to take any questions about that. In general, I do believe a housing bill is gonna get up, get through the house and that the whole legislature will adopt a housing bill. I do think there will be folks still frustrated that it's not dealing enough with Act 250, but I've at least personally have accepted that that's what's happening. Any questions on any of those items? Staffing, funding, housing bill? Not on the housing, but there seems to be a whole lot of issue on the Affordable Heat Act. Yeah, I have not been involved. I think it has a television from the fuel dealers, but then all the energy committees and all the climate action committees within the community, you know, the ones that I'm aware of there's this push to talk to your legislatures and get them to support the heating act and then it iterates the reasons, but so there's clearly a whole lot of play out there on that particular bill. Yeah, I know the house environment and energy is also making, it seemed like a final couple edits to that bill and I just happened to catch that because I was in the room today. So I think there are a couple edits going on and they're trying to get it through the house, but I'm not following that one as closely. Maybe somebody else knows more detail about that or maybe not. Sorry, Catherine, I don't have any more help for you there. Yeah, I mean, it seems that there's a lot of pressures on the local committees as well as what people are hearing from the fuel dealers on television ads, which are pretty scary. Yeah, and the administration also articulated concerns about costs and et cetera. I'm sorry, Garrett looks like you have a question or suggestions? No, actually it's another bill. So finish up with that one. No. I think it's about as far as it can go. Okay. House 480 moving reappraisal to the state instead of having the towns do it. I'm waiting to hear back from Senate folks. The house has already passed it. The Senate's taking it up. And to say I'm strongly against it is an understatement after the nightmares fuel score had with the state imposing what they thought was right and actually upon appeal was it turned out not to be. So anyway, I'll let folks know if anything comes to that. I don't know if the Senate's gonna act on it this year, but major problem of consolidating power into the hands of just a few people. Yeah, that did come across our radar. As a matter of fact, there were some listers in other parts of the state that actually came to the RBCs. Basically asking if we wanted to take on the appraisal function for multiple towns because there's a lot of, there's just a staffing challenge, I'll call it with appraisers and listers. So, I think what they're talking about is one approach is not the only approach. I haven't, yeah, Garrett, I'm sorry, I haven't heard much about that in the last few days, but- No, I haven't either, if you do hear of anything, I would appreciate it. I think it's mostly on reappraisal, not replacing town listers- That's right. But when a town does a reappraisal, for example, Essex is about to embark on one. And towns now currently hire that out and the bill would have the state takeover the entire process. Oh, that's right. And I think the other dynamic going on is because of inflation and the housing market. I think I heard some crazy number, like 75 or 80% of towns were gonna pass the threshold requiring reappraisal. And that- 160. Oh, yeah, 160 of the towns? Yeah. Yeah, when their CLA gets too high, that triggers it automatically. And we all know how nuts real estate prices are and that will trigger it. And it is a cost, but at least the towns currently have some control over what happened. So anyway, just that's one that I'm watching fairly carefully having had such negative experience in the past. Yeah, fair enough. Well, I think a lot of the towns that have to be appraised above the 160, 165 are also looking at because Jericho's one of them and it turned out to be a little more controversial than we ever thought it would be. But based on the bill, they have to create a whole new essentially bureaucracy to be able to do that process. And that's not exactly gonna be easy to come, easy to do within a short period of time, given the number of towns. But what has happened is that a lot of the appraisal firms either are no longer doing town-wide appraisals or they are, I think there's only six now that are doing town-wide appraisals. The rest are just doing simple municipal updates or things like that. And because of that and the aging out of the qualified, because they have to meet all kinds of qualifications, the aging out of them, it's getting harder and harder for towns to find qualified appraisals. Even if when you send out an RFP or an RFQ and you only get one and you send it to every one of those six that are qualified, then it's a real problem. So I mean, the state is trying to solve the problem, but that may not be the best way to do it. Most definitely not. Catherine Benjamin has his hand raised. Oh, thank you, Benjamin. Yeah, quick question. Was there a bill number on that so that one could kind of see the actual detail of what's being discussed in the legislation? Under appraisals? Yeah. Yeah, it's H480, 480. 480? Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, that's all I have, Madam Chair, so. Thank you. I obviously didn't have anything. As usual, your committee and liaison activities and reports are either in your packet or by link depending on your preference. And so it looks like we may be coming to the end of the meeting unless somebody has something else they want to talk about, but otherwise we need a motion to adjourn. Yeah, adjourn. I think that was Dan. Yes. And Garrett raised his hand to second it. So all those in favor, raise your hand. And have a good night and a good weekend all. Thank you.