 Welcome to the Ward 5 neighborhood planning assembly that are on this chilly night to hear about the school district budget update and have a candidate forum and public forum. It's going to be a grand time. We will jump in just in just a moment. Folks online, can you hear us okay? Everything good over there? Hoping yes unless we get a message to the contrary. Excuse me, we are going to start out with some guiding principles of the Ward 5 NPA. This is a safe space. We want to have a welcoming forum. We want to be accessible. We are aiming to reduce barriers to participation and engage with all community members. If you've got feedback or suggestions on how we can do a better job on that, please let us know. We are respectful here. We respect cultural, economic, and other differences. We value diverse perspectives. We aim to be relevant, creative, and fun. Again, if you have feedback, please, we want to hear it. And we do not endorse political candidates. And who is the we? This is the steering committee. Myself, Laina Greenberg. Joe Dairy. Roger Brasser. Jason VanDreis. Caroline Street. And Fareed, who provided our delicious food, has stopped out. And also Terry Rivers is on our committee. She's doing the community development block grant meeting tonight, which is important. If you need to find us, you can do that online. We've got our own website. And then there's a host for our info on the city website. Fosca, who's here, helps keep all of that up to date and can answer kind of logistical CEDO questions. And then thank you, CCTV. We've got live streaming for now and for later. And then just a quick overview of Zoom. If you don't mind going to the next one. Unmute and mute. Start your video. Turn your video off. I think we've got this down by now, but just a quick quick review and then feel free to raise your hand either for public forum or if you have questions in any of our any of the parts of our meeting. Sorry, that's okay. Cool. Okay, our agenda tonight is we are trying to be welcoming. We will soon turn to public forum here from folks who want to share. Then we're going to get an update from Nathan about the school district budget. And then we'll have a little candidate forum. That is also me at which point I will stop moderating. And Ben Travers, our current city councilor will be joining us without further ado. We're going to jump into public forum and next slide would be great. Thank you. Please identify yourself. Let us know where if you live whatever you're comfortable sharing us great. And if you are affiliated with an organization, we want to we want to know about that. And we'll have 15, 20 minutes for public forum. The floor is open. Carolyn. I have two announcements. The author, Mary Tedford of Nanny Gold Hill will have stories read from her book and some of her other stories that she's written. And it'll be an afternoon with Marie's stories. And there'll be this Sunday at 130 at the Deborah Rosson Memorial Library in Underhill Flats. The phone there if you want to make a call is 802-899-4962. The stories are really funny. One of them is called Putting on the Dog. Does anyone know what that means? And then my second announcement is that the second volume of my book of street murals is now available. And some of the stories that are selling it are April Cornell, Music and Arts, The Space Gallery, Blind Pig Book Store, Phoenix, both in Burlington and in Essex, Tail Feather in Burlington, Art Hound, The Skate Shop and Next Week Myers Bagels. You can text me if you have questions at 802-238-4213 or you can go to carolinbates.com backslashbooks. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm in Ward 5 and I live on Caroline Street. Other folks for public forum? Someone online. Great. Let's go for it. And to see who it is. But Andy. All right. I think Andy asked me to share something. Great. Thanks, Ashka. Hi. My name is Andy Simon. I live on Locust Street. Getting quite a bit of feedback here. Not sure why. We don't have the live stream happening anywhere else, do we? All of our computers have to be mic off. I'm not in the spot. Anyway, I'm sorry. If he's listening to himself, he's got a chance. Yeah, maybe that's it. I'm sorry not to be able to join you in person tonight. I expected to, but I wasn't feeling well. And I'm sorry to read. I want everybody to appreciate and thank for reading People's Kitchen for the community winners they're providing for us every month. I just want to say a word about voting because in theory, we're all getting our ballots mailed to us, all of us registered voters in, if not already, but in the next few days. And I wanted to bring up the fact, the sad fact that very few people vote in Burlington in fact. These are the statistics I brought just to show you. Has some good news and some bad news. The good news is that in the last three mayoral elections, the percentage, the voting percentage overall in the city and in Ward 5 has increased. The other good news is that Ward 5 is consistently ahead of the city overall in terms of percentage of registered voters who actually cast a ballot. The really bad news and the really important news that we have to pay attention to is that at its best in the last three mayoral elections, Burlington voters still do not turn out in very big numbers. And in fact, in the last election in 2021, the total for the city of votes cast for as in a percentage of registered voters was 38.8%. That's not the percentage of people who could possibly vote, but the percentage of people who are in fact registered to vote in Burlington. And I think that's pathetic and sad. And so what I'm asking you, because the people who come to front to the NPA and the people who read front porch forum are the people generally who vote. So it's our task as people who already are voting to reach out to people we know, relatives of ours, neighbors who may or may not vote and make sure that they are voting, make sure that they realize they've gotten their ballot in the mail, make sure that they actually turn it in either in a drop box or mail it in or take it to the poll on March 5th, and that they understand that this time around for mayor, as well as city council, as well as for school board, we're voting under rank choice voting. And that that's going to be confusing to some people and they may need help figuring that out. There are resources from the city clerk, there are resources online for figuring out how to fill out a ballot with rank choice voting, because it has the potential for being confusing. But in fact, the first step is to get people to turn in that ballot, to realize they have it, to realize there's an election, and to realize how important it is, especially now, this time around, when we're voting for a mayor with an open seat. So that's really what I wanted to say. Vote and get everybody you know to vote, because I want to see our city vote at higher than 38.8% of registered voters. Thank you. Thanks, Andy. Go ahead, Farid. My name is Farid. I live in Word 5. People follow up on what Andy was saying. I do think that people, elections don't really matter, like as much in people's life, because often like people don't really matter in elections. And I am a volunteer for Democracy in Action. We are a group of voters who lost election, brought Question 8 to the ballot. We were narrowly defeated. But we do believe that people have a right to have a say in all the decisions that affect our lives. And we want Election Day to be the celebration of democracy that it is. And instead of just selecting among a few people to make the rules for the rest of us, or approving rules that they propose, we want to be able to follow up what other voters in Vermont have, which is of the power to propose ordinance and to pass ordinance by majority rule. This is a tradition of town hall democracy that Vermont is famous for. And voters in every other municipality except for Burlington have the ability to gather enough petition signatures and put any proposals that have enough signatures to a town-wide vote. So this election, this town meeting day, don't just vote. You're hoping that you would also volunteer with us and collect signatures for our petition, trying again to bring voters' initiatives and direct democracy to Burlington. My name is Farid. You cannot get in touch with me, 802-491-393491. Sorry, say that again. 802-491-3491 is my phone number. And or you can also email me for read F-A-R-I-E-D at workerscenter.org. If you are interested in volunteering for town meeting day, we'd love to have a petition signature gatherer talking to all our neighbors in every polling station on town meeting day. Thank you. What's up, Charlie? So I'm Charlie G. I'm in Ward 2, actually. So while we're talking about elections, there's just a couple of things. So the people should, we just did the Ward redistricting. So people need to make sure before they walk to the polls, you're going to the right polling place because your polling place may have changed, your ward may have changed. So you should just go to the city website, call up one of those maps and zoom down onto your address and make sure you know what Ward you're voting in. The second thing is, because this is a presidential election, your presidential ballot, whichever one you want to select, whether it's Republican or Democrat or whatever, you have to ask for it. As of today, only, as of today, 23,777 ballots were mailed for the regular election, but only 1500 people have requested a presidential primary ballot. To be clear, that's for August, right? Not for March? No, that's for March. So in March, you're going to select on the presidential primary. So the major party for Vermont occurs in August. The major party primary in August is for statewide and for local Republican or Democrat or progressive politics. But presidential happens in March. I think I've got that right. I have no idea. That's slightly embarrassing and also an indication that it's probably more complicated than it needs to be. Who do you request it from? So you just call the city clerk's office and say, but you're going to have to declare which ballot you want. But if you go and vote in person, you don't have to ask for it, correct? You can just show up at the polling place. Right. If you do it at the polling place, the first thing the person checking you in is going to say is, which party primary for president do you want to vote? Only if you want to vote by man. What you're saying, you have to request it in advance. Yes. Check. Sorry. I just want to make sure I get all the details right here. And Charlie, what's your last name again? G-I-A, two Ns and O-N-I. Any other questions? Thank you. Yeah, Carolyn. I thought we were getting absentee ballots a couple of months ago, and I know I got something. They just barely got married. Oh, that was in January. And I had, you know, held on to it. I had no idea. I didn't open it. And finally, I opened it and you're supposed to vote for president. So I vote and send it in. I don't know who sent it to me or who it came from. Does anyone else get one? So the city mailed out the local and statewide races just this week. So those just barely started going. So probably no one's received one yet in the room. But presidential ones you could have requested as early as January. I don't think I've requested anything, but it came. That's possible. That's very possible. My mom's not around, but she would have done it. Yeah, I requested one from the secretary of state office and I've already seen it for the presidential prior. Okay. Sorry. You're saying you requested one from the secretary of state. Didn't you just say requested from the city? Yes. So you could go into the secretary of state of the state of Vermont. So that's the statewide site. And you can order one there. Online. Online, yes. But most people just call this city clerk's office, clerk's treasurer's office and ask for one. Or just show up. Or just show up. So actually, let me say one last thing. So what's, so I just said 23,000 got mailed out, but only 1,500 have been requested. So what's going to happen on election day on March 5th? Like you're going to have hundreds or probably a thousand or 2,000 people are going to go to the polls just to vote on the presidential. Okay. So you lost the whole advantage of having the thing mailed to you if you still go to the poll and wait in line and get a ballot to vote in the presidential. You see, so I guarantee you there's going to be hundreds and hundreds of people that go to the polls only to get a ballot for the presidential because they neglected to order a presidential primary ballot ahead of time. I guarantee you there's going to be hundreds and hundreds of people that do that from past experience. Sounds good, right? I mean, that's bigger turn out. It's better to go there in person and vote. I would suggest then not to vote at all. But if you just request the darn thing, they'll mail it to you, which is a lot easier than going to your polling place, waiting in line and voting unless you'd like to talk to your neighbors or whatever. I'll put it in a plug for going to the polling place if you have the flexibility to do it. It's super fun and you always see people and I don't know, maybe I'm just a geek for voting. This is, and this is the, I pulled up the website, the city website with all the election information so you can find all the info there. And there's, like Charlie said, the annual city election ballots was mailed to everyone or is being mailed and the presidential primary has to be requested. And you can also look up your ward. You can look up like Burlington, Vermont wards and then the first link, city of Burlington, and then press the first link within that page and you get to this and you can type in an address and see which ward you're in. So like, you know, 800 Pine Street, DPW is 645 Pine Street. And then, and then you get brought there and it says the polling location as well, Burlington Electric Department for a ward five. All right. Well, now is a great time to say thank you to all of our election workers who are going to be managing all of us in droves, hopefully, on on March 5th. Anyone, anything else? Yes, go ahead, Jack. Hello. My name is Jack Tiano. I live in Ward Five on St. Paul Street. I just kind of wanted to give like a brief comment on the neighborhood code. I know that this is something that has been bubbling up on the front porch forum and a lot of people have been having a lot of questions. As someone who's been like deeply involved in this whole process as a housing advocate, I wanted to just say in person to anybody who might have questions that I think this is a fundamentally fantastic thing for the city of Burlington. There are a lot of confusing aspects of it that might make it seem scary or not good. I would be happy to have conversations with anybody who wants to kind of get into the weeds on that. But ultimately, the takeaway is that I will hope that if that goes against maybe how you've been thinking about it, that you kind of look for some of the people who want to explain or answer some of your questions. The city planning staff, I believe, has a kind of like information session, I believe on February 20th. I don't actually remember where that is, but there is something coming up where they'll be talking about it in depth. Again, I'm also always happy to kind of chat with people about the technicalities around zoning in Burlington's housing crisis and where we need to go from here. But I would also really encourage anybody who is excited to see the first step towards legalizing more housing in Burlington to show up on February 26th to the city council meeting where there'll be a public hearing and just really show support. Ultimately, this is something that will re-legalize the types of neighborhoods that we have here in Ward 5. I mean, the five sisters neighborhood, I think, is a prime example of what real kind of like Burlington-style urban density looks like in the city, just like the Old North end. Those are some of the most beautiful and historic and lively neighborhoods in the city. And that's the type of development that this is kind of re-legalizing. And I don't think that that should be scary hopefully to anybody. So again, just kind of wanted to pitch that out. It's really important. It's a first step. There's so much more that we need to do on housing. I'll end it there. Thank you. Thank you, Jack. Keep it quick. Oh, comment. Yes. Just wanted to echo and reinforce what Jack said. The neighborhood code is awesome. It basically undoes 60 years, 60-year-old error of zoning Burlington as if it were the suburbs and moving our zoning back to city-appropriate zoning. And Jack has done a huge amount of work on that, and that's been awesome. So yes, support the neighborhood code. It is very much what Burlington needs. All right. And Fosca, too, because more public form is better than less, even though okay, I'll be quick. But I was asked by some colleagues at CEDO to talk about the consolidated plan. I think what a presenter was, but this is brief. There's some papers around with a QR code, but basically every five years, the city of Burlington creates a plan for housing and community development priorities. The plan will direct how the city uses federal funds it receives from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. And the plan includes information about Burlington's demographics, housing, economy, strengths, and needs. And so this survey will help the city understand what the residents of Burlington think are the city's greatest needs, especially related to housing and hopefully influence how they decide to use this federal money. So there's a QR code and a link on this sheet. You can also find it on the city website. And so you can fill it out online if you haven't already, or else I also have some paper survey copies. It's very brief. Basically, you get six dots, stickers, and you put them wherever you think the city should prioritize resources. And there's a few different options on the front and then there's a little back. But you could put six dots on one or you could spread them out as you'd like. So I'll just put a few around. And if you want to fill it out, that would be great. Thanks. Wonderful. Okay. Always always good to have a robust public forum. We are shortly going to move on to our budget update. But first, I just want to walk us through the sample ballot. Thank you for putting this in here. Sure. This is the ballot. It should be arriving in your mailbox sometime soon. We've got all these all these bubbles because we can do ranked choice voting. I know town meeting TV has done some really great tutorials on how to vote with ranked choice voting, which is awesome. And these are your candidates, lots of info out circulating about all of these folks. And we're going to hear from two of us tonight. And then would you go to the next slide, please? And then this is the, I believe, the other side or maybe the bottom is the bottom. And this is for our school commissioner and inspector of election. These folks are so important. They make things we rely on function. And next slide, please. Thank you very much. Back of the ballot. And there we go. This is the back of the ballot. These are ballot questions. There's a question about the school budget. There's a question about a public safety tax. And then the last question is about a change in the credit limit for the electorate department, which is a charter change. Lena question. Is it true that you do not have to rank all of the candidates? That is correct. You could if you want to just put a first choice or just a first and second or whatever you like. Yeah. And yeah, thank you for bringing that up. You shouldn't rank someone you don't want your vote to go to because the way that ranked choice voting works is that if your first choice candidate doesn't get enough votes in the first count, then your vote will get redistributed to your second or third choice. So if you say, oh, you could vote for all four candidates, but if there's a candidate you don't want, you should not vote for that candidate. Then you're voting against the person you want. So yes, great question. And I really encourage folks to check out the town meeting TV tutorials about how this works. Okay. Okay. Time for our school district course. Update. I believe that these slides came separately. Yes. And if we want to switch them over, Nathan. Hi. Welcome. Come join us. Anywhere there's wherever you want to be. I've got some handouts too. So one day at the risk of having to read these instead of really slowly, right? Here with the mic is great. It's not going to amplify your voice in the room, but it's really important for the folks online. So you don't need to like. Hey, Johnny. And who's running the show on the screen? Okay. Great. Thank you. All right. Give me a signal when you want me to go on. All right. Good evening, then, Mike. Watch all of these. Make their way all the way around here first. Okay. Good evening, everyone. My name is Nathan Lavery. I'm the Burlington School District Executive Director of Finance and Operations. Thanks for having me and us. If you will here tonight, appreciate it. As you just saw, the school budget is the first of the kind of ballot items on the backside of the ballot there. And as it is every year, the school budget is a topic of conversation throughout the city. It's a complicated process. It's a lot of money that the District of our size spends. This year, it's extra complicated for reasons that we'll talk a little bit about during the presentation tonight. But I'm going to try to move fairly quickly to leave time for questions. But if anyone needs to slow me down, go ahead. So again, at the beginning of our presentation, there are some general slides here that talk about the guidance that we used to develop the budget that our school board provided us. And this guidance is roughly the same as it was last year. It involves making sure that we're having a staffing model responsive to enrollment, that we are limiting our growth in our budget because of the major expense associated with the new high school and tech center that we are building. You've probably seen some of that progress up on Institute Road. And there's a few other things here. But the real one I want to draw attention to is the last nugget up on the screen there about investments that serve our vulnerable students. Because the school board in Burlington were major champions and leaders on an issue to change the way the state finances education specifically by providing research-based weights to Vermont's system of weighting students. And historically, Vermont has weighted students, particularly students who are identified as free and reduced lunch or multilingual learners and a few other categories. They've given them extra weight in the funding process, but that was just kind of a legislative decision. It wasn't based on any analysis or data or research. So the General Assembly in Vermont commissioned a report done by some researchers, including out of UVM, that evaluated what those weights should be and then adopted those weights. They put that into law. And what that means for Burlington is that our students are now recognized in the state funding formula at a more equitable way than they ever were in the past. And what that translates to in terms of dollars for us is the ability to spend literally millions of dollars more without increasing tax rates. So that was a major, major victory. And, but as you'll see, it kind of came at a time when we're also phasing and spending on the high school. So I'll kind of describe the impact there as we go through. But I want folks to know that there was major victory, if you will, progress on that front over the last couple of years, and it was driven largely by your school board. I won't spend a lot of time here, but just know that if you're interested every year, the school district gets audited, where we have an independent auditor come in and look at our finances. That happened again last year. The information is up on our website. It's relevant to budgeting in particular, because every year we turn a little bit of a surplus and we get to funnel that money back into our budget so that we don't have to ask taxpayers for that money in the next year. And so at the end of fiscal year 23, which is the year that ended this past June, we had about $2.4 million left. And that means that the budget that we're voting on this, this town meeting day or, you know, as soon as maybe the next couple of days, if you get your ballot in the mail is, going to utilize that $2.4 million, so we don't need to ask taxpayers for that money this year. So they're major cost drivers, some of which are common to all school districts in the state, and some of which are one major one that's unique to us. Common major increases in the cost of wages and benefits. We've just been through an inflationary period, so we have certainly increased costs associated with that. But the one that really jumps out off the page at you is the increase in health insurance. That is a number that goes up by a lot every year, but this year it was especially large number. And I think what's important to understand when considering the impact of that on the budget is that that's a variable that the school district essentially can't control. The state has, through state law, has assigned bargaining over the health benefit and its associated cost to a essentially a state level process. So Burlington School District and all other school districts in the state are essentially required to just take the results of that process. So we as a school district locally can't control that number, but it's a big number that we have to manage to. So I think that's important to stress. Just jumping down to the bottom of what you see on the screen there, that ESSER funds, that's an acronym that refers to federal money that was granted as part of the COVID relief effort in a series of branches. That money's going away from Burlington and for all other districts in the state, largely by the end of this fiscal year, essentially by September, it's pretty much gone. And by law, meaning it has to be spent by that point. So one of the challenges is that even though that money is going away, there's still a level of need that has persisted in the wake of COVID, particularly for students who missed some of their first years in school. And so Burlington and other school districts around the state are struggling to figure out how do we continue to meet that need while this major source of federal money is going away. Fortunately in Burlington, we were pretty careful to minimize the number of positions that we funded through ESSER so we don't have a lot of essentially people losing jobs and positions being eliminated as a result of this. Some districts are in a tougher spot, but that's still a major source of funding and activity that's not going to be part of our FY25 budget. And lastly, the one that before I go on, that is unique to Burlington, but probably familiar to all of you is the high school technical center project. And specifically in this coming fiscal year, for the first time, the budget includes a major increase associated with paying for the money we borrowed to do that work. So $9.5 million is about the amount of money that we're going to start paying next year. And that's going to be in our budget year after year going forward, but obviously it's not going to increase by another $9.5 million each year. So this is like a big jump up. There'll be some little increases in the future, but this is the big step where we start to see from a budgetary perspective what we as a community voted to support in terms of building the new high school. So that's a high level overview of the kind of situation. I'll jump through some other slides very quickly here. I talked about the impact of the bond. You can see there's some information here. I think what's important to understand is essentially this is driving a lot of the tax rate increase that you see in terms of the variables that are unique to Burlington. It adds about 10 percentage points to the projected tax rate increase. And what you'll see later is kind of in the mid-teens. So if you take away or take out the high school, if we could do that, you'd be right back to a number that would probably look more familiar to us as a community in the kind of four to 5% range. Next slide, please. So this is the slide that the superintendent used to recommend a budget to the school board. I'm going to talk about the three major categories on this slide. There's operational investments on the left. We just talked about some of those cost drivers there, but those are essentially costs that we have little to no choice in terms of needing to perform those services. A few that I haven't really talked about, but the lease of the downtown high school space increasing our lease for a Rock Point facility where we're locating some of our alternative programs. Sarah Holbrook lease is only a one year, but it's a lease, a cost associated with relocating some students to Sarah Holbrook because we're doing a major renovation to the Integrated Arts Academy. We got to put those students somewhere. And so some of them are going to Sarah Holbrook. The YMCA rental is because we don't have a gym space in the downtown high school, so we have a partnership with the YMCA so that students can access their facility for physical education. Safety at the high school is something that we've had for a couple years. That was an example of something that we had funded with the ESR money that is going away, but we felt like given our downtown location, it was important that we retain the positions that we have at the high school to offer an extra level of safety and security there. And then finally HHB and Title IX investigations, which are federally required processes. And we have just seen as we've gotten better at complying with that law, we've seen that the number of investigations that we are required to perform has gone up. So that's the operational kind of investments in what's driving, as you can see, $15 million of addition. The next two columns are programmatic investments and reductions and I'll kind of zip through some of them. But I think the important thing to note there is these are the things that are more optional that we can kind of choose to. It doesn't mean they're less important necessarily, but they're not necessarily legally required. So we had some flexibility here and what we sought to do during the budget process was by and large offset all of those new investments with reductions somewhere else in the budget. Because we felt like in a year when the pressure on the tax rate was so high, it was important to show that we were doing all we could to make sure that there's not new pressures we're kind of choosing to put into the budget that we wanted to offset all those increases with responsible reductions. So there's a number of items on there and I can come back to the slide if people want to ask about some specific ones, but in the interest of time here, I won't go through each of them. I'll just ask one specific question. What is the executive director of school leadership? Yeah, that is one of our leadership positions that essentially is the person that all of our school principals and directors report directly to. So we have six elementary schools, two middle schools, a high school, a tech center, preschool program that the leaders of all those programs report up to this position, which then reports directly to the superintendent. Okay. So next slide, please. I like this slide just because I think it helps convey the degree to which the debt service on the bond is driving the increase in the budget. So that chart on the right is not our total budget. It's reflecting essentially the total increase in the budget. So of our budget increase, how much our budget's going up, you can see that the vast majority of it's associated with that new bonding, that new debt service. And then there's some other large chunks associated with wages and benefits, the operating leases, the things that we've talked about right now. And I think what it helps to do is illustrate how much of that growth is really driven by those fixed costs. There's a few nuggets at the bottom that I'd point you to. The tax rate is identical under current law whether or not we were making those new investments. Like one natural thing someone might say is, well, just get rid of those new investments and keep the reductions. And then the budget will be a little lower. Okay. That's an idea. The way current law is written, there's a cap on tax rates that means that when we're developing this, that essentially means even if we got rid of the new investments, our tax rate wouldn't be any lower. However, subsequent to passing this budget, legislature's considering getting rid of that cap. So there's a lot going on right now and we don't really know where that will land. But just to let folks know that during the process, we did explore like, hey, what else could we do to bring the cost down in this budget? And so that was one of the things we looked at. And then you can see the last two nuggets, tax increase without the bond there, around 4%, and tax increase without the CLA, which we'll talk about later. That's about 5%. That's subject to the cap existing. Okay. So cap, I just mentioned it. What is it? As part of that law that I mentioned earlier, that really helped Burlington and gave us a much higher weight for our pupils and it gave us much additional tax capacity. One of the things that the legislature did to try to ease the burden for the districts that were essentially facing higher taxes as a result of that law was give them a tax cap so that they could kind of ease their way into the new approach to school financing. But a confluence of events, including the ESSER money going away and other factors in the state's education fund meant that virtually every school district was exceeding the cap. So it's one of those situations where if everybody's getting the subsidy, like there's no one to pay it and it kind of creates a major problem at the state level and they're working to address that right now. And one of the things they're considering is repealing the cap entirely and replacing it with a more targeted relief. So the natural question is like, what does that mean for Burlington? And fortunately, the difference between us being capped and us not being capped is not very significant. So in short, it's about one and a half percentage points higher tax rate increase if the cap goes away. So that is more. But given where we are, we're talking about going from about 13.97% to 15.6% tax rate increase. So that's the scale that we're talking about with the cap. So sorry, if they repeal the cap, it gets worse for Burlington. Yes. However, and this is, I'm not going to go deep, deep into the weeds here until, unless you guys ask me to, but if they repeal the cap, depending on what else they do and the way the education fund works, repealing the cap means there'll be a lot of communities, not just Burlington, that are sending a little bit more money into the education fund. And when that happens, it actually brings down everybody, including Burlington's tax rate a little bit. So it's a funny system where it sounds kind of circular, but essentially like, you know, if you were kind of doing it sequentially, you'd be like, okay, the cap goes away, your tax rate is going to go up a little bit. Ooh, but now there's a lot more money in the education fund. Everybody across the States tax rates going to go down a little bit. It wouldn't go back down below the capped level. So we would still be a little bit worse off, but there's a kind of iterative process to calculating it. Okay. Next slide, please. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. How long does Burlington have to pay the bond for the preschool? The, well, we haven't fully bonded it. So there's going to be a few more years, but, and I have to go back and look, but we're talking, I think about 30 year term, but I have to double check that 20 or 30 years, a long time. Yeah. So common level of appraisals. This is the other challenging element that we faced when developing this year's budget because the common level of appraisal is an approach that the state uses to determine the extent to which a community's property is valued at market value. And the idea in, at the state is if you have property at a fair market value, that's the same as someone else in the state, no matter where they live has the same fair market value and your communities both choose to spend the same amount per pupil, you should have the same tax rate. The common level appraisal says, okay, but we want to make sure that districts who maybe, or, you know, communities who haven't assessed their property, perhaps as recently at Burlington are still paying their fair amount. They're not just letting their property values decline from fair market value by not reassessing them. So the impact of this is that when the CLA goes down, meaning our property values have gone up and therefore for tax purposes, your taxable value hasn't gone up yet, but your market value has gone up of your property, this mechanism adjusts for that. And everyone in Chittenden County essentially got hit by this because property values over the last few years in Chittenden County have gone up significantly, which means that the property value on the tax bills that Burlington sends out is below the fair market value and the state adjusts for that through the CLA mechanism. But as you can see in the bullet that's highlighted there, the blue one, the CLA drives their total tax impact from whether you apply the cap or not, essentially from five to almost 14% or from six and a half to a little over 15 and a half percent. So the difference between those two numbers, which is around nine percentage points, is driven by the CLA. It has nothing to do with school spending or anything that we control. It has simply to do with the fact that the fair market value of property in Burlington is much higher than the assessed value for tax purposes. I know that everyone's totally with me on that, but if we need to come back to it, we can. But just understand, if you understand nothing else, understand that it's a big change to the number that appears on tax bills. And it's another example of something that the school district can't control. So I asked this question when two of our school board reps were here last week, and I didn't understand the answer. Maybe you'll have a better shot at it. Where is that extra 9% going? So all the tax revenue from the state goes into the education fund. Are there districts somewhere in the state that are actually seeing their tax rate go down? If you took the 5%, is there someplace where it's 5% minus 9% and they get a negative 4? I couldn't say the exact. There are likely some communities where the common level of appraisal is above fair market value, and therefore their tax rates going down slightly. But the more important thing to under... Actually, I'll give you one example. Right after Burlington reappraised, our value for this was over 100%, meaning the state looked at it and said, oh, your properties are now actually valued a little bit above market according to their statistical analysis. And so it actually reduced our tax rate a little bit. But I think the crux of your question is the CLA doesn't generate more or less money into the Ed fund overall. So much, is it just make sure that it's coming to the Ed fund essentially in a fair way? It doesn't generate an overall surplus. No, it doesn't generate an overall surplus. What it really is trying to do is ensure that if there's another community that's spending just as much per student as Burlington, but let's just say that they haven't reappraised their property in 20 years or something like that. And therefore their property only is valued at 75% of the market. They're going to have an even bigger increase to their tax rate such that again, we would be paying the same for a property that has the same fair market value. So it's really an effort by the state to a fairness mechanism. But when you go through a period where property values appreciate rapidly, that means that the associated tax rate goes up a lot. I think the challenge for a lot of people is just because you're in a property where its value appreciates or increases over a few years doesn't necessarily give you more cash to pay your tax bill. And that's really, I think, the crux of the challenge people face. Okay, next slide please. So the recommended budget is like the high level stuff, right? The number you're going to see on the ballot is that $15.46 million figure. The equalized tax rate, which is before the CLA, is 6.51%. And if the cap stays in place, that's going to translate to a tax rate increase of 13.97%. If the tax rate goes away, or sorry, the cap goes away, then our tax rate will likely be higher, probably in the order of 15.6%. But like I said, the tax rate is never fully set until the state legislature passes laws about each year as they do about what some of these various inputs will be to the education funding formula. So 15.6% is our best guess at the time. So it's 13.97%. But those numbers could shift. I think they give a fair approximation of where we'll land, but we never know exactly what number it will be. And we never know that during, even after we vote, to be honest. Spending per long-term weighted ADM, that number is the number that drives the tax rate when I talked about communities spending the same amount, having the same tax rate. So it would be comparing that 13.901 figure to another community that was spending that amount or about that amount. And or sorry, the total budget is the $119 million. That's the number on the ballot. I think I said it was the 15, but 15 million is the increase, the $119 million, 604 is the number that will be on the ballot. What does that mean for taxpayers? We provide a couple of examples here. So in the first example, the tax on a $370,000 homestead, right? That's an increase of $749 a year. And a $500,000 homestead is estimated to be an increase of a little over $1,000. One thing, that question that's come up, these numbers are roughly in line, or at least the portion of these numbers associated with our with our bonding are roughly in line with what we projected when we were considering as a community the bond vote. So we're pretty much in line with where we thought we would be, which is, it's a lot, but it's at least encouraging that we go as you know, kind of in line with the estimates and what people's expectations were when they were voting. And on the next slide, we show the estimated impacts, hypothetical impacts for payers who are getting income adjustment to their bill. This is a little complicated because what you pay is still based on your property, but it's, you get then an adjustment based on your income. And so when one of the common misconceptions is that people who are income adjusted can won't feel any impact to budget increase, that's not true. They do get an impact. It's just felt differently. And as you can see here, a hypothetical payer who has a $50,000 income and that's the basis for their adjustment would see $134 increase. And if you were at $120,000, which is toward the top of the eligibility for that benefit, then you'd see a $321 increase per year. Okay, we're just about, is that the last slide? Do we have one more? We have one or two more? Okay, well, there's the ballot language. You saw that. So yeah, I think, yep, no, other way. Sorry. I think we have one or two more, one, two, one more ballot language. So that's just what the language is. I'll keep jumping back. Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, not much to say here, that's the ballot language. And I think that may be, that may be it. So yeah, I'll pause there and take any questions. Thanks for sticking with me. I know it's a lot of material and there is a lot of material on our website too. So if you really want to dig deep and look at some of the other information, Jason Shakin has said no, but it is available to you. I gotta ask, are you buying Advil by the bushel these days? Yeah, yeah. Hey, I enjoy this. I'm happy to talk about it. Wow. I have a bad board power too. Yeah, I'm impressed. Thanks. So what happens if the budget is rejected? So short answer, if the budget is rejected, then I probably do buy a bunch of Advil and we have to go back and figure out what we would do to come back to the community. And it's difficult to say because we don't yet know how the legislature will change the law. Under current law, if the budget was rejected, it would be really hard for us to do much that would actually reduce taxes because the way the cap works and so forth is such that essentially what we did some analysis and we said, what would it take to bring, for example, the tax rate below 10% and because of the way the cap and even without the cap because of our bonding, we'd have to lay off a significant number of teachers, like a number of teachers or positions district-wide that would be probably untenable. So we don't have a lot of options in that regard. Certainly, we could tweak a few things here and there in the edges, but we couldn't easily move the projected tax rate increase from where it is now to like 3% or 4% without massive layoffs. So the school construction would not come to a halt? School construction would not come to a halt? We borrowed the money so we're on the hook to pay back. I mean, we could stop the school construction, but it's not going to change the amount of money we have to pay back to the bank for it. So there wouldn't be a good reason to stop the construction who calls. Hi, I'm Mike Fisher. I live in Birchcuff neighborhood. See you again. Thank you for your hard work on this. I know that the budget work is, you say it's fun, but for most people it's not. We're very grateful for people like you. Very grateful. So I used to be a school commissioner and this guy has really done a lot for our community. So he deserves our thanks and appreciates. Thanks, Mike. My question is on the legislature is working on some way to address this 5% cap that had unintended outcomes. What the school board is putting forward is just ignoring the stuff that's going on in Montpelier saying we're going to put this amount forward regardless of what's happening in Montpelier. Is that correct? I wouldn't say ignoring it. I would say what we have elected to do thus far, although the board could kind of 11th hour change their mind on this, but essentially when we presented a budget the board debated that we talked about what the options were. And an option that is possible is delaying a vote and waiting to see how the legislature, what solution they work out. So there's law around that. It can be done, but there's a couple, I think, pretty powerful arguments against doing it. One of them, as I talked about, is to the extent that we know the or can reasonably predict the impact with or without the cap, the difference for Burlington isn't very big, right? So we're talking about 1.5 percentage points on that tax rate increase versus the challenge of essentially having all those ballots having to be reprinted again at some future date and holding an election just about the school budget, kind of the logistical challenges associated with that as well as just the kind of messaging communication. And because we don't know whether that any change in law would actually prompt us to try to propose anything that's different. So I think at this point we're on track to go forward with this, knowing that there is some uncertainty about the tax rate impact, but there's always uncertainty about the tax rate impact. It's just that it's kind of more pronounced this year because of this issue that developed with respect to the caps. But yeah, so I think for that reason I'd say there, I wouldn't say they're ignoring it because I think everyone's aware and thinking about it, but definitely, you know, I think there are some communities around the state that will probably delay depending on their budget situation. I think in Burlington's case, particularly because so much of our spending is driven by the bond, there's not a great incentive to delay. Bond and the CLA, right? Well, the CLA is not spending, that's tax rate, but spending driven by the bond. The reason, I mean two of the big reasons why the taxes are going up that they are is the bond and the CLA. Yes, that's correct. So the Montpelier, what's going on in state government is not looking at adjusting the CLA in any way. I wouldn't say no one's talking about it. I've heard that people are talking about it. I've even heard some school districts are kind of asking the state to examine that, but the major energy right now in the legislation that's being debated that you're reading about in the newspaper, that's all associated with getting rid of the cap. So it would do nothing to change the CLA impact, at least as I've, you know, the latest I've heard on it. Thank you. What would you recommend we tell our state reps and Senate about this whole thing? Which, what should, or how should we direct them to take care of the laws that we want taken care of? Yeah, that's a great question. So we have been in conversations with our legislative delegations, so they have heard from the district and from your school board. Generally speaking, while we don't love the idea that the cap's going away, because obviously we had some benefit of it, I think that the reality is that the cap as it's designed at a state level is like not going to be functionally effective. So it's got to go away. And I would say that, again, your board and your superintendent were pretty careful in crafting the budget so that there really isn't a major impact. We're not far over the cap to begin with. And that being over the cap again, it's just driven largely by those fixed costs. So the message that we've been saying is, hey, if you've got to get rid of the cap, we understand. But what I think is important for us to, and what we said, we thought was important was when you fix the problem, right, we can't make it worse. What the cap was intended to do was to provide a kind of little bit of a glide path, if you will, for those districts that were historically over-weighted, historically advanced, historically had more capacity to spend than places like Burlington. And so we're saying if you replace the cap with something else, and right now they're talking about replacing it with just kind of like a direct tax subsidy, like those districts that were losers, if you will, getting a straight reduction in their tax rate, we're saying, yeah, but don't let it last for five years. The current cap was designed to be in place for five years, which means that effectively places like Burlington would continue to subsidize those other communities that are historically advantaged for five years just to let them adjust to the new rules. And we're saying that's a really long time to be subsidizing communities that have had an advantage since the beginning of Act 60 and so forth. So our message is essentially if you need to put a mechanism in place to help those communities ease the transition, give them a year to do it so that they can plan their next budget. Don't kind of pull the rug out from under them either, but a year should be enough time. We don't need a five-year. And maybe it would be two years or something. We'll see how that works through the legislative process. But the idea is like that we don't feel that as a community, Burlington should have to continue being kind of a subsidizer of many of these other wealthier communities just to make it easier for them. We operated with historically or kind of a underweighted, kind of an inequitable funding formula for a long time. So the sense is like, we understand you maybe need to do something, but keep it brief and targeted so that doesn't cost us a lot of money. Questions? I use up all my time, or should I? Okay. Well, thanks for being here. I know it's a complicated issue. There's information on the website. School board reps are happy to talk to you about it, I'm sure. But it's something that we appreciate you taking the time to study and understand because it's really messy this year. And as you'll see, Burlington and many of, if not all of our surrounding communities as well, are facing double digit tax rate increases, which is not something that I've encountered at least in my like nine years of budgeting, I think here. So it's going to be a challenging year, but we've got a good reason for it in my view, particularly when we think about the high school that we're building for our community. Okay. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Should we give them a minute? All right, Roger. You're on. Any questions? Yeah, I can. That was just the next slide, so I put it up. I don't know if you guys want to go over there. Oh, yeah, sure. In terms of recording this part, are we going to be okay with you on opposite sides of the room? Is that annoying, Charlie? I'm going to speed it for the camera image. Wait. I can take that seat. Thanks, Ben. I didn't want you to get too comfortable. Okay. I didn't hear it. Oh, should I just stay? I think you could probably stay there. Is that okay, Charlie? Yeah. I think they should be next to each other because you could see that both of them in their full face. Let's see your facial expression. Yeah. Otherwise, you were looking at sideways and be sure you look at what's in your band, too, so you don't have to fight. How's it going, Ben? Did you see the band? Well, that's not what it's supposed to be, so it looks like Ben had hair out of it. It's your next look. All right. Good evening, everyone. My name's Roger Brassard. I'm going to try to moderate this operation here if we're putting on tonight. We have Ben Travis is our Democratic incumbent and Lena Greenberg, who's an independent. They're running for award five councilman. And we have ground rules. I guess we'll try to see if I can't read through those. Yeah, should read them. I told the candidates about earlier about basically two minutes to introduce yourselves and, you know, get into whatever low level of elevator that you want. And then we're going to have some question-answer session. We've prepared probably more than five questions, but we'll try to keep track of the time and two minutes, basically, to each of you to answer the question. And then at the end, two minutes to reflect each. So I did write down the ones, the questions that you wrote down. I don't know if I get the exact order. Okay. Well, it doesn't work. We're going to start with your introductions first. So I don't know if it's the rule, but well, Roger and Ward five NPA steering committee and the whole ward five NPA. Thanks very much for having us. It's always great to be at an NPA meeting. As you mentioned, my name is Ben Travers. I'm currently the Democratic City Councilor for Ward five. And after my first term, I'm here running for reelection. My wife, Becky and I moved to Burlington more than 10 years ago. We started off as renters in the five sisters neighborhood on Hayward Street. We decided we wanted to raise a family at that point in time. And lucky enough, we're lucky enough to be able to purchase our first home here in Burlington. And we now have three young kids, our two oldest, our third graders and kindergarteners at Champlain Elementary. And we feel very privileged that they're able to walk to school in this great community. And our youngest is a two year old who goes to preschool right here in Burlington. I work as a local attorney here in Burlington. And I feel like I have an understanding of many of the opportunities as well as the challenges of raising a young family here in our city. I've always found time in my life for public service. When we first moved here, I started coming to NPA meetings. When see Alec Bauer here was moderating those NPA meetings. I joined our housing board of review and heard security deposit disputes and upheld minimum housing standards for our tenants. I then joined the Ward 5 NPA steering committee that I was on for five years. I spent some time as our chairperson for our Parks and Recreation Commission. And then when the city council seat opened up a couple years ago after Chip Mason had held it for a number of years, I decided to throw my hat into it. It was very honored to have the support of my neighbors then and would be honored to have the support of you all again in this election. As I promised then and as I've worked hard over the last couple years, I have worked hard to, even though I'm running as a Democrat, to cut through political divides and to collaborate on items wherever we can to the end of making progress on really important issues related to public safety and on housing, on climate, transportation, sustainability. I feel like we're making a lot of great progress and a lot of great issues. And if re-elected, that we're going to be able to see a number of those issues through. I suppose the last thing I'll say and then we'll turn it to Laina and Laina, I appreciate your being in the race as well and the discussions that we've had and the discussions that we'll continue to have. This is a really interesting point in time for our city council. If, you know, Joan Shannon were to win the leadership, that's 20 plus years of experience in the city council that's leaving. Karen Paul will no longer be on the city council. Ali Chang and Zariah Hightower who are among the most senior members of the city council right now will be stepping down as well. And if I'm re-elected, interestingly enough, I will suddenly find myself as, even just after the first term, being the third most senior person on our city council. I think as we're dealing with a lot of really important issues in the city, that I have the experience as well as the partnerships that I've built with other stakeholders for us to continue to, again, make progress and a number of really important issues. Looking forward to the discussion tonight and I'm hoping to gain my neighbor's support. Thanks. Thank you. Laina. Thanks, Roger. Thanks, Ben. Hey, everyone. My name is Laina Greenberg. I use they them pronouns. I have now taken off my NPA steering committee hat and I'm putting on my candidate hat. I live up on Maple Street in the King Maple neighborhood, the north end of the south end. And I absolutely love this community. I feel so lucky to live here. I would like to live here for a long time. But when I'm thinking about paying my property tax bill or maybe starting a family, it's kind of hard to picture the big future unless we make some notable changes in how affordable it is to live here. And really getting at some of the complex intertwined problems that our city faces. Some of my background is in food access. I've done a lot of work in direct service supporting folks who are struggling to meet basic needs as well as urban planning and communications and climate education. I'm a millennial. It's hard to have one job that pays you enough to stay alive. So I've had many. And I hope to bring experience from all of that work in saying, okay, we have folks who are struggling to meet basic needs and we have systems that have determined how hard or easy it is to meet those needs. How can we help folks out while we change systems that make it possible to move towards a more stable and safe and livable community? Whether that's in Burlington, New York City, where I grew up, all that's really important to me. I know that there is a lot on our city's plate right now. Again, all of these things are connected. And we, I think, have been looking at the drug crisis, the housing crisis, the affordability crisis as not as connected as they are. What our council has been doing, I know, is hard work and is insufficient We are no longer living in a reasonable time, if that was ever the case. And the challenges of this moment require not just a continuation of the way we have been doing things and making decisions, but real bold creative thinking and ambitious problem solving, which I'd hope to bring to the council. So glad to be here with you tonight and looking forward to the conversation. Thank you, Lena. Okay, first question. Would you consider housing the most important issue for the council in the next two years? Go away, Lena, if you want. Sure. Yes. And it's tough to choose only one. And again, all of this is connected. At the same time, yes, I do think the fact that we haven't meaningfully built housing in 50 years is really hurting Burlington. It's constraining our economic growth. It's really hard to move here for a job and settle down if there's nowhere for you to live. It's really tough to say, oh, keep living in Burlington if you've been stuck in a rental apartment with poor conditions, and there's nowhere for you to go. So, yes, this is essential. And we have seen the population of Jitenden County really go up. And the population of Burlington has not, which is, I think, harming not just our local economy, but the shape of our city and the shape of our county. I would love to see us embracing density, building the 10-minute city where you can walk and get your basic needs back and go to the grocery store. Bless you. You can walk your kids to school. You can go to your house of worship. And all of that is possible if we build in a way that brings us together, instead of sending us apart through the sprawl that we've seen kind of pop up in Jitenden County. Thank you, Lena. Ben? Yeah, I think when I get this question from voters as to what do you think are the most important issues before the city right now, if I had to pick two, the first two that come to mind is the state of public safety right now in Burlington and housing. And I completely agree with Lena with respect to housing and this being an issue that's really intertwined with a lot of other issues that are very important right now. When we talk about affordability, when we talk about the climate, when we talk about being a more walkable, and bikeable, and sustainable city, when we talk about transportation, these all tie back to what our housing policy could be and should be. And as chair of the ordinance committee on the city council, all of the zoning amendments that the council has been working on have come before our committee and I have really dedicated myself, I think perhaps more so than really any other member of the city council, to seeing that we not do things the same way and that we do take bold and creative steps to fix housing as an issue here. Very shortly after I joined the council, we took a really bold step to, for example, eliminate minimum housing, excuse me, eliminate minimum parking requirements in the city. That was to the end of our creating greater density and creating additional housing opportunities and for us to promote more transportation along the city's most major corridors. After we did that, we spent a lot of time in standing up what we're now calling the South End Innovation District, a new district in the enterprise light manufacturing area, where all we have right now are surface parking lots and what's better than surface parking lots while housing. And the work that we've done in the South End Innovation District is opening up opportunities for a thousand plus additional housing units over the coming years. And right now the council is considering a South End redevelopment agreement working with private property owners as well as affordable housing agencies to build up housing in that neighborhood. And I heard folks in public comment when I was zooming in and driving in here talking about the neighborhood code. I've been working hard with other members of the council with community members like Jack and others on the neighborhood code, which citywide is in decades a great opportunity for us to stand up additional housing opportunities there. Perfect. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate that. Okay, let's just changing that. Okay, I'm listening with you. That's all right. Very good. Okay, this week we received an announcement of changes in downtown city place project reducing the number of housing units in favor of 350 hotel rooms. This was followed by a publication of a major investigative report in seven days about persistent security problems in Decker Towers in Ward 5. Could you comment on both of these events? Ben, I'll let you go first this time. Sure. Well, first of all, I heard someone comment about Decker Towers and being in Ward 6. Decker Towers is in Ward 5. That's right at the northern end of Ward 5, even with the redistricting. It's the biggest building right now in the state of Vermont. When the city place development is finished, that will be the new biggest building, but right now it's Decker Towers. I read the report in seven days have known for some time now about the really troubling reports and details that are coming out of Decker Towers have been in communications for some time with a number of folks in the Decker Towers community and it's very troubling what's happening there and what's happening in our ward. Clearly there needs to be changes in those buildings to improve the quality of life for the folks that are living there and our neighbors right here in Ward 5. I think immediately with the time we have, what can I speak to? Clearly we need to continue to improve the public safety picture generally here in Burlington. We've been working on the city council to address recruitment and retention issues within our police department, but one of the problems that I continue to hear time and time again from neighbors, including those living in Decker Towers is that when they call for an emergency response, we don't have enough police officers to give them the tailored response that they need. We need to fix that and that's not acceptable. The building leadership in Decker Towers I think needs our support in terms of being able to remove folks from that building that are ruining the quality of life and so we'll look forward to doing what I can in the city council to provide them my support. As a city counselor right now our ordinance committee is reviewing our trespass ordinance in the city to see how that can be improved. I also think in looking at the minimum housing standards here in Burlington that there's a number of areas where we can improve that so I saw that story. I appreciate the question from Andy Simon here and think that there's a lot more we need to be doing to improve the quality of life there. In terms of the downtown city place development, I sort of reject the notion of the question that says that housing units were reduced in favor of 350 hotel rooms and I think anyone in the city council favors hotel rooms over housing. If there was a way for us to move that project forward that prioritized more housing we would but after exhausting other options the local developers of that project made it very clear to the city council that in order to keep this project moving forward which mind you is still the second largest housing development in state of Vermont history that we needed to approve an amendment to their development agreement that brought in a partner such that this project has additional financing and that includes additional hotel rooms but by not including hotel rooms you know and voting against that development agreement I actually think that would have been an anti-housing vote because it's by voting in favor of this amendment that we're continuing to move ahead with this project and progressives, democrats, independents on the city council it was a unanimous vote. Every member of the city council voted in favor of what I consider to be a pro-housing vote downtown. Thank you Ben. Thank you for that. Lena? Yeah well this is there's so many parts of this question I'm gonna start with Decker. I was there pretty recently chatting with folks both on the new resident advisory board as well as Steve who's at the head of BHA. It seems like everybody's kind of been screaming for help from Decker for a really long time and it's troubling that it took a reporter from an independent newspaper to raise this to the level of getting attention. I've heard an assortment of a challenge in fixing the problems at Decker it's not just one thing there's the ADA requirements that make the door stay open it's the high cost of private security maybe there could have been a community development block grant for that but we missed the window because that you know those dots were not connected. I was chatting with the fire chief who said you know we have folks go in as part of the community response team they don't want to go into Decker without a police officer but there's no police to accompany them it's again it's not just one thing so really taking the time to to see all of the ways that things get worse and all of the levers with which to make them better will really will really help us out here and and again you know listening listening to residents in supported housing shouldn't be a special occasion this has to be normal for our city it should not take all of this outcry and all of this danger all of these older folks and disabled folks literally arming themselves and setting up resident patrols for the city to have supported Decker being a safe and healthy place to live so that's tremendously disappointing and I've had wonderful conversations with residents since um since learning about this and hope to be involved in in whatever capacity they required to improve those conditions um they are my neighbors I really care about them and live around the corner from Decker um and then in terms of the city place project I I understand this choice excuse me and I'm really sad you know we've lost housing to hotels when we lose housing to hotels in a situation like this it's about it's clearly about financing and when we build at this scale we are stuck in the kind of paradigm that finances buildings of this scale which means we need to make it easier to build smaller buildings that are more you know outside of that that paradigm and and better suited to community needs um whether that's you know community development or or ever north or otherwise um thinking about creative financing is really essential in such a tough environment and we could do that um as a neighborhood we have to do it in the south end innovation district if we want to make sure it should not not keep losing housing um and I I will say I I understand the financing constraints and also was was sad to see Ben introduce an amendment in the south end innovation district uh zoning vote to allow hotels they are not housing we are converting hotels to apartments and continuing to prioritize building housing and figure out that creative financing at the city level at the state level in coordination with federal dollars is so essential to alleviating the tremendous housing need we have may I respond to that certainly as I was just called out by name there um so again even in the south end innovation district I mean keep in mind that the intent there for that district is to build a new neighborhood to build a mixed use community for folks to live work and play in and I think when you when you think about a neighborhood when you think about downtown when you think about Burlington you think about housing you think about coffee shops and cafes you think about gyms and bookstores and shops you think about hotels as well it's an important part of the fabric here in the city now to be clear I don't think anyone favors hotels over housing I think if wherever provided that binary choice between hotels and housing uh we're clearly going to err on the side of housing but but right now we're in a picture where if you are building a large housing project in Burlington or really anywhere in the country particularly given the high cost of construction now in terms of interest rates in terms of labor costs uh you need to present a project to banks in order to get it financed that's going to pencil out and unfortunately right now uh large housing projects it's it's difficult to secure that financing because there aren't they they are not penciling out in that same way uh so I did introduce an amendment to allow housing to allow hotels as a permitted use in the south end innovation district but again not to the end of favoring hotels over housing but to provide housing developers another tool in their toolbox to to build more units here in Burlington and here in the south end so I was disappointed that that amendment failed but we still have opportunities to build housing here in the south end I just don't think developers have the same tools available to them that they otherwise would have I mean we go back and forth on this online I want to make sure we get to questions I'm happy to respond if folks want me to respond okay thank you thank you for that okay um yeah so yeah we are we are a city of 50,000 people who will be funding our new high school what can you suggest to the council for them to apply pressure to our state government to assist us in paying for this school Lena sure um glad we just heard so much about the school budget one more time the first things that come to mind are the the state certainly should support us the construction aid that ended many years ago is is sorely missed and I would love to see the council not just say to the state hey we need some help um paying for this huge construction cost but also I've mentioned this before would love to see the lawsuits against Monsanto proceed that's the corporation that created the chemicals that made our high school toxic to be in in the first place they should really fit the bill um that's hugely important otherwise there's other parts of the school budget that keep getting more expensive and the one unshakable piece is private health insurance the cost of private health insurance is going up for everyone in Vermont um this is a huge expense on top of those big property tax bills and if we if we say oh we need some help right now with this tax thing so that we can get through the year that's important but what we really need is a new way that we tax people and we also need a new healthcare system I know these are these kind of lofty goals but there's an an piece of legislation act 48 um in Montpelier right now that a number of our representatives are championing that would bring affordable healthcare into the mix for Vermonters this would be great not just for helping pass our school budget but also for making sure that people have the healthcare that they need um regardless of your financial situation this is an economic justice issue it's a health issue um for everyone in the state um what else we we need to tax folks based on their on their income which I know is connected to the school budget not exactly the question but is worth mentioning if we don't fundamentally challenge the way that we ask people to pay for services we're giving folks an impossible choice you should not have to choose between affording to live here and affording to fund city services that is simply not fair thanks so I I agree with Lena that if we could find a way to pay for this with lawsuits through Monsanto if we could find a way to cut private health insurance costs by standing up a universal healthcare system here if we could find a way to pay for it through an income tax weighted more towards wealthy individuals here in the state I think that those are really laudable goals that we should consider exploring but all of those goals are goals that are not within the control of the city of Burlington right ultimately standing back up a statewide education fund switching our taxation model to an income tax based model changing our healthcare system these are all goals where we're going to need partners at the at the state level in the legislature to accomplish I'm really proud that I've developed relationships with a number of those partners in my first term on the city council in my reelection bid here I have the support of both representative tiff bloomley and representative Gabrielle Stebbins we've built a great partnership and relationship over the years and if reelected we'll look forward to continuing that work and on our school budget it's one of the main places I think where we're going to have to leverage those relationships it's really troubling to me that Burlington taxpayers are almost solely on the hook for having to pay for the cost of a new high school that our state mandated to be closed on top of that as we just heard from Nathan we now have a 14% maybe 15.6% apparently tax increase on the ballot well more than half of that proposed tax increase is mandated by the state because the common level of appraisal system I was at your last NPA meeting talking about just this I think our statewide education financing system is broken we need to find a way to stand back up a school construction aid program we do need to find a way to come up with a different taxation models such that school districts aren't surprised by a 9% plus increase that we just learned about in the first week of January leaving our school board just two weeks to figure out the impact before they had to send our budget to the ballot so we need partnership at the state level to fix this we have been applying pressure through the city council on this matter at our last city council meeting I did introduce a resolution that did just that asking our state legislature and our governor to take a look at our statewide education funding model to stand back up the school construction aid program and to try to provide communities like Burlington some immediate relief to the astronomical tax increases we see on the ballot this year perfect all right thank you guys are really hard to take notes for because there's a lot to get all right I'm going to just add a number of this one here I'm going to add a little bit I'm 78 years old I've lived in Burlington all my life and I can remember the very first time I saw a murder in the paper and I thought wow I was a little kid and now we see it every day and let me get into this with that the governor stated that violent crime has drastically increased in the state we have been witness to a number of drug-related murders and other forms of violence in our area what can you bring to the council to make our city safer Lena can I go first again Ken all right Ben yeah let go I'm sorry I lost my I lost my I lost my flip-flop here thank you for keeping me honest Lena so as I mentioned the very beginning I think if you were asking what are the two biggest issues facing our city one is housing and the other is the current state of public safety so I appreciate this question very much Roger and like you I'm deeply troubled by statewide the rising rate of crime I'm troubled by the extent to which that rate of crime is related to an increased drug trafficking market here in Burlington and we need to find a way to turn the corner I think at least in part the the public tick in in violent crime and in drug trafficking here in our community is because of the staffing and recruitment and retention problems at our police department you talk to law enforcement officials prosecutors in our U.S. Attorney's Office for example who have been here for some time and and they will tell you that that Burlington used to be a place that drug traffickers knew not to come to they knew not to come here because they were going to get caught and unfortunately you're not seeing that being the case right now and it's by no means the fault of our of our police department and the folks that are here it's it's the fault of the folks that are not here and the staffing challenges that they've been facing because of folks who left our police department the last few years we we lost for example our street crimes unit this is a unit of about five police officers that really are the eyes and ears of the police department that are out there on the beat so to speak we lost that we need to bring something like that back so in my first term on the council I've been proud of the steps that we've taken to help our police department address the recruitment and retention challenges we approved they're standing up a position specifically dedicated to recruiting new officers we signed off on a new police contract for our police union as well as every other unionized city employee that that has helped them with staffing and we've seen it sort of the proof is in the pudding so to speak at the end of 2023 we had one of our largest academy classes in recent memory as we hired six new police officers here in Burlington if you talk to the police department they now do have a staffing plan to stand back up our street crimes unit and I think that we're on the right path there I will say though that not every single one of these instances is appropriate for a police officer's response I think that one of the issues that we've had is that we're asking police officers to do work that steps outside of what traditional police work should be so I've also been proud of our efforts on the council to stand up additional positions to complement the work of our police department this includes community service officers and community support liaisons it includes urban park rangers and the drug issue in our city certainly is not limited to those engaging in drug trafficking perhaps even even worse than that it's folks who are suffering from substance use we've stood up a new critical response team within our fire department and are now working on standing up a new cares team in our police department that will be staffed with behavioral health professionals and other medical professionals who are really able to get to folks the tailored response that they need and deserve if we elected to the council looking forward to continuing that work Roger thank you Ben later first we certainly need to reduce the demand for drugs in our city the vast majority of these crimes are related to drug use the drugs on our streets are incredibly dangerous and incredibly potent and reducing that demand comes from an assortment of strategies I think really three the first is we need to provide mental health support and you know structure and accountability for folks who are struggling with addiction the second is housing we need low barrier shelters and detox beds it places for people to go if you're trying to get clean and you can't go somewhere where you can get support you probably are not going to get clean we have to help people out who are struggling and then the last piece is economic stability helping folks meet basic needs so there's no need to steal and we've seen so much retail crime and addressing that is really going to make sure that people can meet their basic needs is going to bring down that crime hopefully help us intervene we also we have so many wonderful folks and services already in Burlington they are not well networked there's the community response team the police the cso's and csl's the Howard Center you know the list goes on and this is a beautiful thing those services are not networked and connected well so often a lot of folks are getting services from many providers and some people are not getting services from any so as to best use our resources we need to make sure those services are coordinated and also make sure that we have resources hopefully by drawing down more opioid settlement dollars for the community response team and others to make sure that folks can get service even when they're not in crisis when if you're a service provider mental health care worker whoever you are if you only see someone when they're in crisis it's really hard to intervene in those cycles of addiction and trauma and poverty if we have the resources to say oh let me help you when you're not you know way down at the bottom um then we can really make some change it's also worth noting that the police department has not just had trouble with recruitment it's also had trouble with retention the chief I don't think has necessarily created good conditions for folks to work in and often escalates himself and other officers have needlessly escalated in in situations causing not just harm and trauma to folks but also yielding taxpayer lawsuits um at taxpayer funded lawsuits excuse me and we need to make sure that folks who are joining our police department are coming into a safe and welcoming work environment I have some questions about how leadership and training and support for officers can shift so that we make sure that this is a good place for for people to work and they want to stay here because we need them um and then last but not least there are other crimes that are not drug related um that are about having weapons in the home that are unsecured I'm really glad that the Howard center has locks um and safe safe places to store firearms so that we don't have um horrifying accidents with firearms in the home happening it's worth thinking about the full slate of why why danger happens um and why why firearms get fired and that's a certainly a part of that picture I think we've uh pretty much gone to the end of the line with this we gave you five questions right we gave you five and then we got the five we said they looked now they're only cuts it back on a couple eight thirties so yeah I want to take an opportunity to thank both Ben and Lena I think the uh the uh answers were fantastic um does anybody have any questions at all that they want to bring up to either one of the candidates at this time wow there we are all right thank you all very oops I just want to thank both of them for the time that they're committing and uh and then just thank them very much for absolutely absolutely I think they've got I think they're doing a great job uh there's gonna be an interesting uh it's gonna be an interesting race we'll see how things go uh I wish you both well um and thank you all for coming this evening um how do we close we're gonna we'll give you a moment to do you want to say a quick closing do you want to close out first in the opening okay yeah I'm happy um let's see what else do I have to say um it's been such an honor and a pleasure to run thus far I've gotten to meet so many neighbors and hear from so many folks who are in different parts of life and you know having having different victories and and challenges and really feeling like I get to know the the breadth of folks in this neighborhood has been so wonderful that's really I really don't want to look at my face on the big screen it's really so unsettling a nice smile Lena thank you Roger um totally lost my train of thought all of that is to say I I love this community so much and I want to make sure that we are moving with urgency and boldness and we are not afraid to try new things this is such a complicated time to be alive there are so many challenges that my generation is facing that are you know only going to become more acute for you know the the children's and grandchildren's generations in front of us whether that's you know when's the high school going to be ready or are you able to afford your property taxes or you know how many times does do we see catastrophic flooding across our state there's so much on the table right now and this is such a critical moment for us to say let's not keep doing the sort of incremental baby step stuff that we do because change is scary change is scary and also let's see this moment as an opportunity to build a Burlington that is you know in our image as diverse as the community that we already have here as you know as embracing of all of our various needs and supportive of our of our assorted dreams and I hope to bring that you know vision and and ambition to the council and I'm so grateful to this community and to y'all for your time thank you Lena yeah thank you Lena and everyone here at the award five NBA and especially the steering committee Roger nice job as the moderator so it's it's been a true privilege to represent this community on the city council the last two years I will tell you two years have gone by in a flash here it's surprising to find myself already running for reelection here part of me feels like I'm just getting started there is a learning curve and joining the city council I feel like I have my legs underneath me now and I'm hoping that the community will reelect me for another term to keep going on what what I actually think have been very bold steps that we've been taking on a number of really important issues I mentioned some of them earlier but like in removing our minimum parking requirements and standing up a whole new housing district here in the south end in the south end innovation district to see through the first real up zoning proposal in 50 plus years in something like the neighborhood code in working on the ordinance committee to stand up what really is one of the most if not the most progressive climate policies of any small city in the country we've taken incredibly important steps on these issues and I look forward to continuing to address them while also working to address the matters that are immediately before us like showing up our public safety here in our community in our community like making sure we still have really beautiful parks and open spaces for our kids when I first ran for city council I ran for our community I ran for my kids and your kids and I continue to run for them as well I totally agree with Lena that we have an amazing neighborhood here in ward five I'm biased I think ward five is the best ward in the city everything along pine street from the new businesses that have popped up to our neighborhoods it's just a great place to be and I would be honored to have your support and continuing to represent you all in the city council thank you thank you so much I have to agree I can remember when pine street was the street that you drove through now it's a street that you drive to exactly so there we are there's a bumper sticker think of that thank you all everyone for coming tonight I wish you all safe travels on the way home rod fantastic food thank you again for everything you did and that's it ladies and gentlemen thank you all have a good night thank you Roger thanks Roger please don't need to come back if you have to go to dinner if you want to