 Jesse Baker is our city manager and she's going to start with instructions on exiting the building in case of an emergency as well as a review of our technology options. I'm sure always a work in progress. So thank you to those who are joining us in the room. If there's an emergency you can go out the rear of the auditorium on the left and right and then turn left and right and go out either way and go outside. For those participating on the phone, thank you for joining us as well. If you'd like to make a comment during any agenda item, please turn your camera on and the chair will call on you or you can indicate to me in the chat that you'd like to address the council and I'll have the chair call on you. Other than that, we are not monitoring the chat for content. All right, thank you. And now it's time for agenda review. Are there any additions, deletions, or changes in order of the agenda items? Helen? No? All good? Okay. We're going to continue on with- No. No. Okay, good. Is there a lag time, too, between, no? Okay. All right. So now this is the time when the members of the public can come forward and speak to us about anything that is not on our agenda. It's time for us to listen. Yes, Michael? Yes. I would like to know where we are with the two conservation easements that are in the works, one for Wheeler Nature Park and one for the Underwood Park. I haven't had an update for a while and I said I would stay away and not waste your time by coming here to ask, but since I haven't heard anything, I'm here. I'd like to add that I think it's a bit of an insult to the citizens as kind of that nothing's been done. You know, this is something that was very important and elicited a lot of public interest, both in the case of Wheeler and in the case of the Hubbard Park. A lot of people put in a lot of volunteer hours, weeks, months to work on the Wheeler Conservation easement plan and presented it to you, I don't know, many, many years ago. I know the last thing I heard was that the survey or at least the boundaries had been pinned. Mm-hmm. So the Land Trust, the Revent Land Trust knew what they were getting into, but it doesn't appear to have any interest by the council in giving this priority, any kind of priority. And it really should be urged now. After all these years, it should be top of the list. Okay. I think that we have been trusting that the staff has been keeping up, you know, with their following through on the, you know, the decision of the council. So the decision of the council remains and stands firm. And last I heard too, we were doing the land survey. I don't know if this is the time for a response or if you want to do that during your update. I'm happy to respond. I don't need a response right now, but I can speak from my own experience in running an organization with 600 odd employees, staff, at least my executive committee, that if I wanted something done, they needed to know that I needed it done in a hurry. And that's a message that I'm not sure is getting across. I think, as I said, I think the citizens of this very, very lovely city deserve more and I'll leave it at that until the next meeting. Yes, please do. So it certainly is a priority of the councils. They've been very clear about that all along. It's a priority of mine as well. I'm sorry, I'm disappointing you personally, but there are a lot of priorities in the city to answer your question specifically. So the Wheeler survey has been pinned. That was a requirement to enter into the easement. It's been up now for, I think, about 30 days. And I think that that's around the time they wanted it up before they would move forward with the legal documents. On the Hubbard Park one, that is a discussion that we as staff will be talking to the council about later on in this agenda. And hopefully we'll move forward. And additionally, I'm very excited to share that we finally, after a year of a staff vacancy in the former Ashley Parker position, that staffed the open space fund have filled that vacancy about two weeks ago. Silken Kirchner joined us. So now we are going from zero staff managing those, that priority to one staff managing that priority. So that's where we are. Yeah. Very good. Any other members of the public wish to speak tonight? Anybody online? I don't see any green lights. All right. Well, then we will move on to number five, which is the councilor's assignments. Happy Thanksgiving, Michael, since I see your leave. Councilor's assignments and reports on committee assignments. And we'll also follow up with our city manager on her report. Who would like to start Andrew. Nothing since Thursday, Megan. I was here Thursday night too. Yeah. Nothing since Thursday night. Nothing since Thursday. Very good. This is true. Yes. We have been meeting quite a lot, but just in case. And Jesse, you said you were going to give them. Bigger report. More updates tonight. Weekly council meetings do definitely cut back on the updates. So a couple of things for the council and community to be aware of. So as folks have noticed, we have a lot of progress happening in city center, a lot of development going up in talking with Snyder, brave, or men who are the master developers of. The South Burlington. South Burlington, realty land. They are starting to lease up the commercial space in the key buildings right here on marketing garden. As part of those lease conversations, they're starting to get a lot of questions about paid parking in city center. So that is something we are starting to be aware of. We're going to bring on a consultant to help think strategically about how to maximize the potential of the parking over time and ensure that we don't miss opportunities to bring in vibrant and growing businesses to those. New commercial spaces. So heads up that that is going to become in your way at some point in the next, I would say. Three to nine months. We are also kicking off our bike, pet master plan. We are now calling it our active transportation plan. That's, as you know, funded through a grant from the regional planning commission. We are convening the advisory group. Now therefore we're naming the advisory group now and their first meeting will be in January. So. Stay tuned to see more of that plan being kicked off. We would encourage council community members. If you know people who are looking for work and our city drivers, we would very much welcome their application. We are currently down five public works employees with CDLs. That is likely going to impact our winter operations. Commercial driver's license. It's what allows folks to drive the really big snow. Unfortunately, they won't let me drive one. It could be trained. Could be trained. Public arts committee is also looking to come to you in January to commission a piece of public art. They're specifically looking at the Chamberlain neighborhood, which I know is of interest to members of the council. So heads up that that's coming your way in January. And then just a reminder on this holiday week that our city hall and library will be closing at 430 on Wednesday. The library will reopen at nine Saturday morning for regular Saturday hours, but will not be open on Friday. And of course, our police fire and dispatch crews will be here 24 hours a day if you are in need of them. That's all I have. Thank you. Or if you do, we will be there. All right. Well, thank you very much. And we are now moving on to item number six, which is the consent agenda. And that includes signing disbursements after we consider and approve them. Approving the minutes from three past meetings, October 2nd, October 16th and October 30th. So we're not weekly. We're not weekly. We also have the September and October financials. And we also have some narratives that we looked at the fiscal year 24 quarter one financial narratives. And ready to entertain a motion to approve. One procedural. I'm not sure I should approve those minutes because I was not on the council at the time, but it is part of the package. You can. There's nothing preventing you from. All right. Excellent. Thank you. I would be approved the items in the consent agenda. I second. All those in favor. Hi. Thank you. All right. So that moves on to number seven, where we have a few appointments to consider. I walked in with Brittany here. And so we're going to be looking at both the energy committee and the CCTV board of trustees, town meeting TV board of trustees, a trustee from South Burlington. Did you want to kick us off? I see your name there. Okay. So we're going to be looking at what we can consider for the energy committee, Brittany and Marley who I don't yet see. And then Corey to consider for town meeting TV. The one comment I would make to the group about Corey is she is traveling today. So did it know if she would be able to join. She was the former communications director for the school district. So it was very familiar with our community and with how much great service town meeting TV provides to. To our neighbors. So I would recommend you consider her appointment if she's not able to join us today. Oh, she is here. I see her name. Yeah, Corey's here. Excellent. Okay. We're 20 minutes early. We are 20 minutes early. Yeah. Well, I said, can we, can we interview Corey? And at least take that up. And we have Brittany here too for the energy committee. But isn't there a second energy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. All right. Yes. We certainly can. So I would perhaps call on Corey. Since she is online. Sure. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah. Yes. Welcome. How are you? Yes. Thank you. Good. And thanks for allowing this, this option tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be interviewed for this. I'm happy to entertain any questions you have. Jesse, thank you for the intro. I am familiar with. Almost, almost all of you from my time working at the other paper too. Before I was at the district. And I, I have the time to commit to this, this committee. I love town meeting TV. It is such a valuable resource. Especially now. I mean, when I was doing the meetings, we didn't have the live stream going. So this is just a real benefit in terms of, you know, access to all of you and all of the things that are happening in our neighboring communities. Yeah. You clearly have an extensive background that prepares you. I think for, for this position, I think come forward with interest as well. And are you familiar with town meeting TV meetings and. How their operations work? Have you been able to get to know Lauren Glendavidian, who is now the outgoing president and our new president, Megan. Not Lauren. Although I am familiar with her work at town meeting TV, but I have been in communication with Megan and Jordan as well. Fabulous. And as soon as I saw the position was available, I contacted Megan and have been back and forth with her a little bit just to get a feel for how the meetings are structured, what the trustee would be doing. And, you know, when they meet for how long. And that seemed to fit well with my current schedule. Fabulous. Wow. See. Give someone who's, who's been dealing with reporting on things, the job. I think you, you did a good job figuring out the facts of the, of the assignment. Yeah. I think that Helen and I can both speak to it. We both are the previous, the previous two trustees. Helen, I don't know if you have any questions. I'm, you can jump in if I'm not seeing something, but the primary function is really to make sure that town meeting TV, you know, maintains a solid footing financially. We work also on policy development to make sure, you know, that there is not only freedom of speech, but also free access, you know, equal access to, to speech, particularly during campaign and election time. There's also equipment. There are always new changes occurring. And so discussing, you know, the needs, the capital needs of, of town meeting TV. And, you know, I, I haven't been able to talk with Megan about her ideas. And I think it's kind of an exciting time for a new trustee to join because it's really going to be, I think a new esprit de corps that's going to be developing with Megan now at the helm. And, and so I think that, that will be something that you will be potentially, you know, I think that that will be something that you will be potentially, and I think likely working on developing with everybody there. But it's generally, I would say a really committed group of trustees committed to, you know, equal access to information, equal access to, to being able to, to, you know, raise your voice and speak up equal access to, you know, your elected officials, all these things are very much part and parcel with what a good journalist does. So you, you're very much fit the bill, Cory. Any other comments or questions or Helen, did you want to add? I would only add that I think, Cory, you'd be great. And I totally support your interest and certainly will vote for you. I would just add that there's also that the opportunity to get to know some other, often select board members in other communities, which I think can be a positive help as the, the group of you really work to continue to make sure that town meeting TV is viable. We are, we did, I think everyone saw them in the notes, did get some, or the legislature did commit a million dollars to support town meeting TVs all over the state. And that's an important conversation with the legislature that will continue. So I think you will, would serve us well in your capacity to communicate and be part of that board. Oh, thank you so much, Megan and Helen. That was actually a question I was going to ask. And I always ask candidates if they have any questions for you. And I know I was, I knew you had both served on the, on town meeting TV and thank you for sharing your insight. Yeah. Yeah. No, they're really committed. It's a great group. Anybody? Sure. So I support Cory for this. Cory comes from that long line of very fair, articulate, extremely good writers for the other papers such as Cory Miranda and Maddie, who attended hundreds of meetings and wrote about some very complex matters when the city was involved in over the years. So I really enjoyed her writing and her accuracy. And so I think this is a good fit. Thanks, Tim. Any other questions that you would have for us, Cory? Yes, just one. And that is, I know that because, you know, the two of you are on the council, but you do your council, you know, reports from committee assignments. How frequently are you expecting a trustee to give you updates? Well, I would hope that if there's something important to share that you either would tune in via zoom to share that or potentially write a little paragraph and send it to the council and the city manager. And we can stay apprised that way. If you have a specific question or need to know, you know, where the council is, then, you know, by all means that would be an important time to speak up and be active at one of our council meetings. Okay, perfect. Does that sound okay to the other, the rest of the counselors? Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't think you need to be there. Right. Once a month, unless it's, it's important or if that's what you would prefer versus just writing a paragraph saying, this is what we've talked about and these are the issues and, you know, does anyone have any questions or thoughts? Yeah. Yeah. No, I would, I would agree that it, we are definitely committed to keeping town meeting TV, you know, actively engaged also in, in our meeting structure, you know, as someone who really relies on that communication as well as using it for information. I know that there are members of the public who do as well. And so it serves both elected officials and members of the public. And so just knowing that we are very much committed to what you do, Corey. So if ever, you know, anything appears to, to require the city's support, I think that's when you could come forward, you know, and really just inform us and give us, you know, enough time to, to be able to, to consider as well. Because it, depending on what it might be. Yeah. All right. Well, absolutely. That sounds good to me. Very good. Excellent. Does anybody just want to make a motion or should we go through them? The full process here and wait till the. I'll make a motion to point Corey to the, as a self-rolling to representative to town meeting TV. Very good. Second. Very good. All those in favor. Hi. Hi. Hi. All right. One more thing to be thankful for. Thank you, Corey. We wanted you to go away with. Thank you. And happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks. All right. Let us keep, we have Brittany Baldwin, who's here for the energy committee. And is there just one spot available for the energy committee or two spots available for the energy committee? Okay. All right. And I do see that Miley now is online. So we have both of our, both of our candidates will welcome Brittany. I think it's fabulous that one of our district teachers is applying to be on one of our committees. That's, that's really meaningful for me as, as a teacher, as someone who, who teaches. So I just want to welcome you and to say that you are setting an example for all of your students. And I think it's fabulous. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And what led you to apply? I, I read about your, your interest of course, but you can develop on that if you want to. Yes. Well, I got to know Carrie and Glocklin who's on. Is the, is the mic on, you can touch the button. It looks on. Yeah. So I got to know Carrie who's on the committee. And I had worked with her a little bit over the summer. And I was able to get a little bit of, a little bit more into the, into the community for some feedback and support with how to reach out and educate children, but also thereby engage more young families and some of the work and education and events that the committee was working on. So we had worked together. I provided some ideas for small lessons that they could do. So we had a small, a large portion of the committee. But the first thing we learned was to communicate sort of the scientific part of what they want to communicate energy wise, but in a way that doesn't, you know, oversimplify it, but deliver in a way that they could understand and engage with. And also just thinking about how to make the events a little you know found out about this opportunity and sort of convinced me and I actually got pretty excited about it. You know I really enjoy giving back to my community and being engaged and feels like a good time to be able to give back more of my time to the community. Of course I do that a lot during my work day as well but I was excited about it and you know she expressed that the work that I did just through communicating over the summer is a need that the committee has as one of their goals is to you know educate and share important information. So I feel that my skills in that way could be supportive to the committee. And does she tell you the meeting time? Was it something that will work with your schedule? And of course all of that is to be again decided upon as a full committee once the committee convenes with it with a new member. Yes. The timing and the commitment all of that. Very good very good. But you've definitely laid out kind of a work plan for yourself. Are there questions that members of our council have for Brittany? Just tell me a little bit about what you teach. Kindergarten. But I've talked through fourth in the past as well. Great. Brittany thank you for coming down and your interest in the committee. I'm just other kind of interested in hearing other kind of wanted to discrete projects that you're thinking about that you love to drive forward. So in terms of like the education projects and sharing out. Yeah. So one thing that she and I had talked about over the summer was thinking about how families could engage more with you know helping them understand different types of renewable energy. There are a lot of hands on experiments that kids can do to explore that. And we talked about pairing that with information that adults would be receiving at the same time about you know resources in our community that they could connect with. So just pairing it in that way. And as well as you know sharing information about activities and events that families can do such as taking our buses and our bike paths and walking and things like that instead of driving. So it'd be like maybe the energy committee like putting on an event where they would do this demonstration and like maybe put it on the website or flyers or something like that. That's definitely where I see my skill set being supportive to them. Okay. Thanks. I'm curious about your role within the district. Is there perhaps a ready and willing audience to help you distribute these things to district families or is that something that you could not do as a as an employee of the district? I would have to find out more about that. You know I'm definitely coming up this just as a resident of South Burlington. Obviously my skill set as a teacher is what led me here. But I would have to investigate more what a partnership would look like in that way. Okay. All right. All right. Great. Yeah. You attended the energy committee meetings today. Not hear that or today. I didn't attend meetings. We were just meeting informally so I could provide some information and support with those processes. Okay. And they meet twice a month, right? Once a month. That's right. Once a month. Okay. Yeah. They should meet twice a month. Just kidding. All right. Helen, did you have any questions for Brittany? No, I think they were asked. I would be supportive of Brittany, you finding out more about how the role or your role as a teacher could get expanded to the school curriculum or something like that. And I understand you don't know that now. And that wasn't the purpose for you to join this committee. But I think that's an important connection that potentially can be built upon and would be helpful. So I appreciate your interest. Can I expand on that for a moment just to let you know there is a school climate task force. And one of the planks is curriculum. Oh, there. Yeah. Right. And you were invited by the superintendent to be on that task force. So there clearly is interest on the part of the school district's administration to have. Yeah. Very good. Very good. Well, thank you very much, Brittany. Thank you. Yeah. Did you have any questions for us? I forgot to ask you that one question. No. All right. Thanks. And one vacancy. All right. So Marley, is it Hauser? The last name? Am I pronouncing that correctly, Marley? Yeah, you are. Can you see me as well? All right. Well, welcome. And we are going to be thinking about just one position, unfortunately. So we have, I know, two excellent candidates here. You also are working on climate equity, the collaboration. And you can tell us a little bit about what led you to apply to the job more, you know, develop more on what you wrote in your application. Yeah, sure thing. And I'll start off by apologizing for not being in person. I was exposed to COVID through my family. So I figured that would be the best option to be online. Thank you. And I'll also add, yeah, of course, also add that from the sound of it, that seems like Brittany would be an excellent candidate for this position as well. And I say that just because I have the utmost respect for teachers and what they do day to day. So recognizing that there's only one position, I am grateful for the opportunity to share with you all. But sounds like Brittany would be great fit as well. Yeah, so as I explained in my application, I grew up in Vermont. I've moved away since and come back several times, and sort of been in and out of the state. But after finishing my master's in public administration and environmental policy, I was looking to sort of put down roots and find a community that I could be a part of. And so I found myself in South Burlington. And some of that was pretty intentional recognizing that there's a lot of expansion happening within this community. And I'm sort of excited to see the direction that that goes because I have a feeling the demographics are going to change. And it's going to bring some new opportunities and new people into the community. And so I, you know, I'm living in South Burlington. And almost immediately when I got here, I started looking for opportunities to be more involved in the community. And one of the opportunities that I came across was on Front Forge Forum. It was a posting for the Energy Festival that MJ Real had put up there. And I was like, that sounds great. That sounds right up my alley. I'd love to be a part of that if I can. And so I reached out to her. And I ended up volunteering at that festival. But then we had a series of other conversations where she sort of was telling you about the Energy Committee and recommended that I look into applying and see if it's something that I was interested in. And it definitely was it's something that resonates really strongly with the work that I do on a daily basis. And in addition to that, I lived at home with my mom for about a year after I graduated from grad school. And she's a member of the Energy Committee first. And so I had a lot of conversations with her about her role on that. And she was sort of bouncing issues off of me. And at one point, she had actually encouraged me to apply for the committee there. But I was planning to relocate to South Burlington anyway. So I figured that I that was not a good fit. But long story short, I found that opportunity and it seemed like a really great way to get more involved for the community and to give back to the community. And I attended one meeting, I think it was the October meeting and having sat through that meeting, I can definitely see that there's real opportunity for impact. So yeah, that's I'll leave it open for any additional questions. Yeah, for you all. Yeah, well, what I see in your application is that you're very interested in inclusivity and in making our policy decisions be informed by what you call human scaled thinking. Could you develop that idea a little bit more? Yeah, I mean, I, and that was actually one of the values that were outlined in the, in the plan that was referenced in the application. But then when I went into the actual plan, I didn't see it as much. But it definitely, you know, it resonates with the work that I do on a daily basis. And I think, you know, it's, it's recognizing that there's that the concept of energy production and usage can be very removed from the human aspect. I mean, it's, you can get into the science and the nitty gritty details of it. But at the end of the day, it's humans that are using it, it's humans that are producing it, and it's our environment that's being impacted. And so I think that there's a real need to ensure that they're consistently centered in how we approach the things we do in this area. And so I think just, you know, consistently centering the human element, remembering that there are real people impacted by these policies that are being made, and potentially voices in spaces that aren't there aren't voices in spaces where they should be. And so ensuring that there are always, you know, the right people at the table, the right voices being heard. So that all humans are being centered in that work. And how would you go about doing that? How would you do that outreach or, or advise the members of the energy committee on ways of bringing more people to the sources of information or to financial resources or to the various things that that we need to do in order to convert, right? Yeah, I think it's, you know, really just a multi-faceted approach and coming at it from as many different angles as possible. And so part of that is tapping into, you know, the early education system, like Britney is talking about, part of it is communications campaigns are putting out, you know, surveys to get feedback from the community, whole posting events to bring people into that circle. But then I think you also sort of have to break it down at the communications level and recognize that different, there needs to be different means of communicating that to ensure that it's, you know, as equitable and inclusive as possible. And so it's ensuring that the communications you are putting out are not so heavily steeped in the science of it that the average citizen can understand what they're reading or that it's written in different languages to ensure that people who don't speak English as a primary language can understand it or having the, you know, curriculum that's geared towards students, but then also having something that works for adults as well. And so really just ensuring that you're checking as many boxes as possible is, I think at the end of the day, the best thing you can do and then also sort of taking a step back and consistently checking to make sure that you have as many voices as possible contributing to whatever input you're looking for. All right, thank you. Are there any follow-up questions? Yes, counselor Andrew Childnick has some, Marley. Hi Marley, thanks for applying. Can you just tell me a little bit about how long you've been with NWF and what you, what you do there? Is that, is climate coagulation like a group within National Wildlife Federation? Is that? Yeah, it's a great question. And it is often confusing for people to grasp we're still working on how to best articulate it so that people understand what we do, so I appreciate you asking because it's an opportunity to practice that. But National Wildlife Federation, if anyone is familiar with it, is a fairly large environmental organization in the U.S. It's one of what they consider the big greens. And Climate Equity Collaborative is essentially an initiative of the National Wildlife Federation, so NWF is one of the core partners that helped to create Climate Equity Collaborative. And NWF is essentially the backbone organization for CEC for the Climate Equity Collaborative. But there are other partners involved in that as well. There's the Children's Environmental Health Network, there's React for Environmental Justice, which is based in New York City. And we're in the process of bringing more partners on board. But essentially, if you distill the work down, the idea is to create as many on-ramps as possible for primarily non-traditional organizations or entities to get involved in the climate action space, particularly centering equity action. And in terms of what that looks like in practice, one of our key partners at the moment, one of the partnerships we're developing is with the semiconductor industry, which is not an industry that you would typically think about taking equitable climate action. But there's a real opportunity for impact there, and it's a massively expanding industry. I think it's global foundries that has their new space here in the Burlington area. And so it's really at the end of the day about building those partnerships and bringing resources and different partners to the table to really work around these issues. That was great. How long have you been doing that, Marley? Yes, we started off as a fellow because it was really the only position that they had the funding for. And I volunteered my time actually for the first four months, and then they formalized the position. So I did that for about eight months, and then I transitioned into a full-time senior coordinator role in the last four months. So it's been going on, I think, two years at the end of this year. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Now, Helen, do you have a question for Marley? No, very good. Well, thank you very much, Marley. And I think that since we have two excellent candidates, we're going to have to think about this. Did we want to go into an executive session? Thank you. Tonight or, I mean, now or later? Sorry? Yeah, so we'll do it later. Okay. And then the process is that we will make a decision, and then that will be communicated tomorrow. So you are candidates? It will be communicated tomorrow because you have a quite long executive session at the end of this meeting. What I would recommend is that you can make a recommendation tonight, and then I'll have you approve it on the consent agenda at the next meeting, but certainly I'll let the candidates know to not keep them on edge for two weeks. All right. All right. So enjoy your thanksgivings, and you'll hear from us in December. Thank you very much. Thank you both. Two excellent candidates. This is when we want you both. We'll figure it out. Okay. We're going to move on then to the next item, which is number eight. It is worn for seven, and we are now a little bit late, but hopefully it's okay. Okay. This is our public hearing on land development regulation amendments, number LDR-23-03, multiple principal structures on a lot, number LDR-23-04 updates to the city center form-based code on buildings on outside of road corners and interstate facade standards, and number LDR-23-05 minor and technical amendments. And our Director of Planning and Zoning, Paul Conner. Can you take this away? I sure can. Thanks, everybody. Paul Conner, Director of Planning and Zoning. Do we need to enter into public hearing? Maybe after he gives us a little, he tees it up and then we can enter into public hearing. You have three amendments in front of you, as Councillor Emory just said. One is a minor adjustment to the city center form-based code to allow for buildings to have a little bit more of a setback from the street frontage when they're on the interior of an L. The other two are tidy up items. One is to make sure that we are consistent in with an amendment that we made a year and a half ago related to the Natural Resource Protection District that makes sure that at the time changing it from a allowing three single-family homes to be consolidated no more units but into a single building so it takes up less space. And then the third one is to return to consistency with the state law requiring that municipalities allow for mobile home parks. It was identified as sort of an unintended consequence of changes to our regulations that we had severely limited them previously. So this allows for an exception to the one building, one principal structure on a lot. A mobile home park is defined under state statute as more than two homes on a lot, so therefore there was an inconsistency there. So we just made that a clarification under the allowance for buildings on a lot to return to compliance or consistency with the state law. So you are invited to open your public hearing. We did not receive any comments. This all has to do with S100, the home? No, it actually is a pre-existing law that we identified through some of our fair housing training that we were we could have stronger compliance with. We were not out of compliance, but we were maybe not fully meeting the spirit. Okay, very good. Now, entertainer. Sure. So I'll move that we open a public hearing on the land development regulation amendments that you previously described. Very good. All in favor? Hi. And Helen. Very good. All right. We are now in a public hearing, and we are here to hear from the public on these three as proposed. Linda, service, I see you've turned on your camera. I have given your, Bob, I'm sorry. I'm going to take off my glasses. Okay. Linda Bailey is right below me. Barb service. Thank you. I am combining two names. And I've, please go ahead and identify yourself since I have completely confused our note taker. Okay. Barb service. I live in summer woods in South Burlington, and I had not intended to speak. But if I heard Paul correctly, one of these is to allow a bit more setback from the street. And anytime we can do that, I am in full support of it. It's one of those things that bothers me the most about market street right now is that it is a dark street because things are so close to the street. And there's sort of no place for people to stand and talk and have a conversation or kids to play a little bit. And so I'm in full support of anything that increases the setback. Thanks. Are there other members of the public who'd like to speak? Okay. I don't see anybody else. Would you like to close the public hearing and then we can. I'll move that we close the public hearing. Is there a motion to second? Very good. All those in favor? Aye. Thank you, Helen. All right. So is there any discussion? All right. Would you like a motion? Sure. So I would move that we approve land development regulations amendments LDR 23-03 and multiple principal structures on a lot. LDR 23-04 updates to the city center form based code on buildings on outside of road corners and interstate facade standards and LDR 23-05 minor and technical amendments. I second. Very good. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. All right. Thank you. Thank you. That was easy, right? Very good. So we are running very early. Very much. This is exhausting. Yay. All right. Jordan in the room. No, I didn't think so. In 10 minutes. All right. Let's see. And Tom, DPH was not here. Is it deeper? And we could talk ARPA funds. Yeah, we could. Martha and I are both here. We could have Colin come down and talk about the school request, although I'm not sure if Kate was the pilot we're playing to participate. Yeah. Well, let's talk ARPA. Because we have lots of time here. We have 50 minutes. I'm going to start putting more specific language on our agenda saying times are estimated. Please be here while on the fence. Okay. So we provided you an update to our standing ARPA agenda. On that agenda, you will see we have 2.1 million remaining in ARPA funds to be allocated. That includes the interest earned to date. Martha, our finance director, very wisely is maintaining our ARPA funds in a separate account that's interest bearing and is rolling that interest back into the account. This is one of the very unusual federal grants we got that we were fronted the money as opposed to pulling it down over time. So your and just as a reminder to the council, your obligation is to allocate the funds by December 2024. So 13 months from that now and then spend them by December 2026. So that's that. I did just want to an update that has happened since we last met as we I did mention in a previous meeting we met with the state director for Congresswoman Ballant and asked him about the possibility that these funds would be clawed back at some point if they were unspent. And he thought it was highly unlikely that the municipal allocations would be clawed back since they are dollars sitting in our bank account. It's much more likely that ARPA funds for which programs have yet to be written or things like that would be clawed back before this. So I'm less concerned about that than I previously had been. So at your September 18th meeting and one other background point because that we took this funds as lost revenue, you can use it for any municipal purpose. So your September 18th meeting you talked about a you've got lots of feedback from the community from committees. You talked about a kind of a list of ideas. Those are presented to you here in total. I'm happy to entertain any discussion you want to have tonight. My recommendation would be that because there are ARPA implications in the proposed FY25 budget that we will bring you on December 4th that you don't make additional decisions until you receive that budget. But certainly you wanted to have this come back to you. So here it is back and we can talk through any of these ideas if you would like. Well question I have right off the top is we've been using ARPA and our surplus kind of interchangeably. And I have protested that a little bit. So I would like to know how much we have left in our surplus as well. Okay. Martha can you look that up while we're chatting? Thanks. Are there other questions? I have a question and on this list is I think it's I can't bring it up but it's for I think about $400,000 for child care. And would you refresh my memory? I had forgot. I mean I know we talked about it. But what what were we talking about that we got to $400,000? Does anyone remember? I don't remember exactly how you got to $400,000. It is something that the Economic Development Committee is working on. I think previously how we how the council has talked about it is using those funds the way we use the previous ARPA allocation for affordable housing. In other words issuing an RFP to the community to see how child care providers would leverage funds to expand capacity. Okay. But I don't do you know more about what the economic? I think that they were after hearing about the Woodstock project where they made grant money available to I think a couple of businesses. They were like chicken and egg situations where they they needed money to hire somebody and then train them for six months before they could then give them their own classroom. So in order to take that extra person in they wouldn't be earning any income because they wouldn't have any new kids for six months. Once the person was trained then they could bring in another classroom of kids then they would have income. So it was that type of or else it was the refurbishing of you know or adding in a couple more rooms in the you know in the next unit over of some rental you know some space business space that they had. So you know there were there were capital costs involved and then there were training costs they were trying to help cover. Yeah and my recollection I did go back to look at the meeting. We did not include it in the kind of list that we had come down to. We had included the arts and culture master plan, the village green, the parks capital improvement plan which also included some upgrades at the the Dorset athletic fields, the climate action plan, the system modernization and the pennies for path match. But the rest I don't recall. It's what I recall exactly what you're saying Megan. This list doesn't seem entirely familiar to me. Right. It's not what I recall is agreeing to. Well it might have been discussed but it's not what Helen at the end kind of gave as a wrap. This is what we've come down on. Right. Yeah that's why I was questioning. I couldn't remember. Thank you Tim. That reminds me of what the economic development committee had suggested. But I would agree with Andrew. I don't recall saying yeah that makes the cut for us. And frankly I'm not sure it does for me now. I mean it sounds like a great program at all. I just I guess I just kind of feel like the child care issue is enormously important. But I really that's one thing I don't see personally as a city-centered solution generator. I see it far more as a regional or statewide. But that's just my bias I guess. And the pre-K has just now gone through with the state too so they'll be providing more funding for that as well. And we talked about that as one of the reasons why we didn't put on the list. Yeah. I think that. So that's just you know. So I understand where you're coming from on that. But I think that there are specific localities within the state that if they have the funds available to make them available for particular businesses that want to expand right then there's an opportunity there if there's money. And even though currently the city doesn't have that expertise like you said right which we understand that might be something that we do want to explore maybe not to the tune of $400,000 but if this is ARPA money right. So we've been talking about child care for a long time. So if you want to make a difference this is where we need to try. So I just want to make that point before we we potentially strike it from the list to some degree. I also don't recall. I guess I would in a sense like to know. I mean there's ARPA money that came to the communities but there's also ARPA money that went to the state. And I just in the back of my mind I kind of remember that there was significant dollars in the state appropriation to support child care. Yes to a greater extent. And so you know I think it was 12 million. Am I right on that? That's the number that I don't know seemed like a lot. So that's just why Tim I am holding off a little bit. $400,000 is a fair chunk and when I look at the list I think are the need for a little more capital in the climate action plan would be more aligned in many ways with how the city has positioned itself and gotten ready for and is planning to make some real strides. That's all. You know it's all a matter of priorities I guess. Right I just I don't know what the state's plan is. What their you know structure will be for distributing money and whether they'll favor the rural towns over the bigger cities or not. And I would hate to get passed over to some degree and we have talked about child care inequities ever since the pandemic struck. And you know if we want to take a role we got to do something. And this is this could be the time anyway. You know I think the state would the state would provide child care scholarship with that money more than this more than the city would vouchers vouchers. Yeah I think that I don't I think first pass that this wasn't supposed to be voucher oriented. Okay. Okay well perhaps when we find out what the final figure is or the current figure I should say for the reserve then you know maybe we can parse this out differently. Yeah there was also the habitat for humanity and the you know injecting $400,000 in order to purchase land which would allow them to start that virtuous cycle. That was also a request for use of the ARPA funds. I just want to make sure that that is included here. I think that was $500,000. Maybe it was. Maybe it was $500. And then $150 for the our fund our own affordable housing trustee. If this idea came from the economic development committee can you remind me what their thought was on that and how it was to be used? Well if a family has adequate child care then they will be able to participate more fully in the labor force. So it would be subsidy or voucher? No the idea was based upon this this interview they did with a representative from Woodstock and Woodstock had a similar committee and and what they did was they were able to create kind of a revolving loan fund for new or existing you know health care business I'm sorry child care businesses that needed or wanted to expand but couldn't because they didn't have the seed money to start that process. So licensing requirements so it would be more more long-term capital capital improvements. Capital end or paying for the person to be an employee while they're being trained because they don't create an income if they don't have kids. So maybe a description of this a better description if it is in fact this revolving fund would be a child care revolving fund or a child care center revolving fund. Would you like me to go back to the economic development committee and get some clarity on this? I'd appreciate that. Okay well I definitely would need it. Don't you want to call us agreeing on using opera for the lights? It's a hundred and twenty five million it was just in the other paper act 76 hundred and twenty seven million hundred and twenty five million dollars annually into early childhood education just wanted I found the number forgot a zero. So just to be clear you haven't agreed on the idea this was the list of ideas you had played with on the 18th and so I wanted to know but it wasn't on the list of things I think that Helen and we all kind of said yeah this this makes sense of the pair down list I don't think it was on the but right but it was discussed it was discussed right right but we had made some decisions with a little more information that's all could we know how much is left in the surplus because the fire the stoplight is three hundred fifty thousand dollars and it's great but it's not as transformative as perhaps it is transformative but perhaps not thank you Martha so I didn't hear what was the figure she's coming to the table now she's getting up to the microphone okay yeah the last console allocation on the surplus one was September 18 and currently we have four point one million four five one yep thousand four point one million but is that we're including the cash the reserve cash on hand nothing that's not so what's the available if we get down to that limit of eight percent so remember your fund balance policy right now requires you to hold a minimum balance so we have the day's cash on hand of I think it's eight point six percent and then you have a range up to sixteen percent that you can maintain without further discussion about returning funds so that difference is really the the amount we would only we would ever ask you to allocate six hundred and eighty nine thousand so how much is left six eighty nine six hundred eighty nine dollars thousand six hundred eighty nine thousand okay okay sorry I need to hear I know she's got those few extra yeah zeros that all right so did you hear that Helen six hundred eighty nine thousand I did yeah it's better than six hundred and nine thousand and it's totally out of disposal more or less more or less I mean it is your active savings account so to the extent that there's an emergency or a big grant opportunity that we need grant match for you know it's it's thing it's I would discourage you from spending that down to zero just because that eliminates any other opportunities you have through next august but it is technically you can allocate it down to that level but what I would say is that the heinsberg and market street light could be seen as something that came out of there and that would give us 350 more right or you could split it too or you don't I mean the same thing with the DPW electric lawnmower I think it's great but ideally you know that wouldn't be coming from our but either to my mind we want that more in fact we want two motors right we want to do oh we do yeah it's transformative but there's transformative and there's very transformative this is what it is I mean we need to be a leader in this how much gasoline is used to mow yes I am not crawling over the importance of an electric lawnmower I'm electrifying my house step by step but I think that the the distinction between ARPA and and what to do when you have more general fund dollars is different to my mind it's you know as it was explained to us too how can we use money to leverage money how can we use the money to right leverage something it's only 18 five compared to I understand I'm just trying to get us a little bit more but my understanding though is Jesse is interested necessarily in us making the final decision tonight no and wait until we see the FY 25 budget so I think this conversation is great and it starts to or help to hone down where we might go but we don't need to come to consensus right no it's more to my mind in knowing how much we truly have left I can give you if if you are interested in keeping going down this path I can give you a quick preview of what you'll see in the FY 25 budget related to these specific items if you'd like if if you're not ready for that I want to wait until the 20th to the fourth that's fine too well give us a little teaser sure so the Heinzberg Road Market Street light study we are budgeting it's about us Tom correct me if I'm wrong or Martha 650 thousand dollar project all in so we are budgeting hundred thousand dollars in the CIP and you have previously budgeted some funds for the engineering of this and then we are using transportation impact fees so we're trying to leverage that project through multiple different funding sources since it was such an expensive unfunded project in the past CIPs in the parks capital CIP we are budgeting that at 200,000 for FY 25 we also have about 100,000 of CIP this fiscal year that is likely to roll over into next fiscal year i.e. projects aren't kind of shovel ready yet so that's a total of about over about 300,000 maybe a little more in parks CIP projects certainly there is almost no limit to what we could do in the park so i'm not saying it's enough but there is those dollars available the parks master plan is one that is a one-time plan that we have previously talked about a lot at council we are hoping to use one-time money for that and not build up tax capacity for it it is about 150,000 dollars to do that well paul is looking at me and isn't the parks master plan in what you included in the parks capital improvement plan because i have i have a different breakdown on mine in my notes from september 18th i have 150 for the parks master plan plus 130,000 for the capital improvement and maybe i was selecting from a list i wasn't doing it all but i recall the same thing i don't recall 400 plus for the parks i recall yeah 280 yeah sure that not my how i capture but great and then on climate action you've received to date the two implementation plans the transportation implement transportation implementation plan and the government operations implementation plan together those funding recommend recommendations for fy 25 were about one point over 1.5 million we don't think we can reasonably bring you that so we've gone through and figured out what are the projects that are ready to go and will be hopefully done in fy 25 and the staffing we need to get there and we're anticipating that's about 600,000 dollars a little over in capital and 150 to 200,000 of staffing so that's what you are going to see in summary on the fourth so when on the fourth is that something you could add to this this list in terms of other sources are there surplus or what we could use this surplus well right just and just so we can match those up because i agree i mean there's overlapping budgeting going on and it'd be good to see if what's left in this what's more or what's more in this fund in these funds right thank you okay all right other things so my calculations just for the arts and culture master plan for the village green for the parks capital improvement plan for the climate action plan for the system modernization and the pennies for path i have one million nine hundred ninety two thousand dollars just so can can you take through those again just so i'm clearly capturing what you're intending the arts and culture master plan the village green the parks capital improvement plan the climate action plan the system modernization and the pennies for path match and a lawnmower since why i put all the ideas on the lawnmower i want that to come out of our yeah i agree with on the lawnmower i'd also like to see the affordable housing requests on the budget thing not a opera thing but how is the lawnmower not a budget thing and it's an arpa thing it is well i think this is a highly highly transformational um the housing committee request is going to be annual right it's an annual ongoing thing no no no no this was one time injection of funds to allow the revolving fund green mountain habitat right okay i mean we really haven't discussed that yeah i was hoping we could he struck the village green we get another million back well i mean i'd love to remove the village green and get another million back for other things well you heard barb service talk about the importance of giving children a room to play well there is a playground right there that they can't use when schools you can use when schools out yeah which happens and there's a park down there and it goes gonna go over with a bridge to another park i have to say tim everyone i speak to about the idea of a village green is so excited and then they don't know it's a million dollars that's what they don't know they know it's it's it's not a trivial thing but it's transformational if we can do it already spent 24 million on this could we so all right if you want to yeah i mean we we have the if the cash on hand is taken out of the 4.1 million and we have 689 thousand dollars and we take the 350 out of that which is the heinsberg and market street light yeah i mean clearly we have limited funds in terms of all the things that jessie listed and what we'd like to do so are we gonna arm wrestle on december 24th you have 13 months to arm wrestle and barb i did see your your camera turn on please feel free does that mean you you do wish to speak up i i i did but i don't want to interrupt the flow of your conversation um i understand what you're saying tim but we are in desperate need of some place the school i always say this carefully um it depends on the day um whether or not those facilities are accessible and i walk on that street a lot and i see children without a place to play and if we don't protect some kind of space we're having all these conversations about open space um if we don't do something we are missing a whole piece of the city plan 2024 that talks about quality of life it talks about recreation it talks about outdoors and i would just encourage the council to think about that really seriously especially as we look at city center and i will say what others have said i am not the first to say this city center does not look like what many of us expected and i think if we don't protect some open space there um is a real disservice to all of the people who were in great support of development of that area i i think city center park is wonderful too but it's not an open field it's not a open green where you can use it for for various things i don't think anybody expected city center to be a large open space oh no that's not that's not what the definition of city center is and i don't want to get into this right now because we're we're trying just let's just let's just take you know we'll agree that on the fourth we arm us all over it i think it's like jerry silver students say something oh no i don't um let me take it and get out of this oh okay your green light was sorry you see things i don't see that i just don't want you to fall it seems to me it keeps it on okay that's fine so if we're having city budget beyond this and integrated into this list we'll have a better chance to arm wrestle with right more real dollars right okay i think that's true yeah but i think yeah we're getting down now to sure it's time yeah this is the tough this is the tough time sure okay i'll make sure it's it's clear as if i can hopefully make it in the budget thank you otherwise we'll be here to let you know all right it will be the hero a long time that evening all right so we're gonna go back then to i'm number 10 and i think that jordan michel you are here yes great and this is the town meeting tv annual report and funding request to jordan michel's the co-director of operations and the digital archivist for town meeting tv cctv and good evening mega norc as well hi awesome good good evening everyone we just gave you a new trustee tonight wonderful yeah sorry that we miss our first go around yeah jordan go ahead cool well thank you thank you for having us as you just said my name is jordan michel and this is megan orc and so we're here to present what is our fiscal year 24 your fiscal year 25 budget and give a little bit of an overview of the last fiscal year so last year town meeting tv produced and supported 1300 programs for our communities and 362 of these programs was categorized as municipal coverage for south barlington we produced 51 city council and drb meetings other general programming included the swearing in of the new deputy police chief uh juneteenth celebration east west crossing a walk bike bridge over i 89 workshop uh in the chitlin county homeless alliance housing meeting that happened here at the library uh the contract stipulates production of five meetings a month or 60 a year and at least one uh general program per month uh we were a little under last year covering 85 percent of the budgeted number of municipal programs covering 51 out of 60 expected meetings uh so i would encourage as you have other meetings that might want to be covered within that to reach out and we can we can cover those i know the city council has been having um some special meetings come up these last couple weeks of course we're covering those um so if there's any other things that feel that feel relevant you know really want to make sure you get the most out of that uh 60 per year um so town meeting tv is funded in large part by cable subscribers of comcast and burlington telecom and then municipal contributions helped to cover other operating costs this year we are requesting an fy 25 uh municipal contribution from south burlington of $23,152 for general operating funds this is a five percent increase from last year's contribution and you can see past municipal support request um on our packet page two not sure what packet page for you all since i know your website's having a couple issues but it's in the packet um so secondly we have an exciting update from the legislator that we're looking for your support to help get over the finish line cctv is part of a statewide organization known as the remont access network or van uh we've been working for the last several years to find a stable and permanent funding source for community members uh community media centers across the state we've been successful in receiving one-time bridge funding for the last few years while we did some research and now we're ready to propose a permanent solution to the legislature um with a bill that would establish a new community media public benefit fund uh funded by communications service providers in the state which would ensure equitable and sustainable financial support for local public education and government access organizations across the state such as town meeting tv to show support for a request we're asking organizations to sign on to a letter of support uh we will share this letter with legislators during the 2024 legislative session uh this is not attached in tonight's packet but i'm happy to share this letter uh i believe i shared it with andrea and jesse uh and we'd be happy to answer any questions uh lastly i want to be sure to thank travis washington in the back of the room when a town meeting tv's field producers um and also howlin who has been uh who was the town meeting tv trustee uh for your continued dedication to municipal coverage and community media so thank you again for the continued partnership and for having us here tonight uh are there any questions can you describe to me do you host your own uh website and your your own um server infrastructure for for all of the the meetings that are then played back yes so meetings are posted to our own website cctv.org um also on our youtube channel which is where they're live streamed so people can watch them instantly versus it takes a couple hours um to get on our website and then they also air on um concast 1087 in burlington telecom and so you don't you utilize any any cloud services at all to to perform your storage and yeah we do yeah you do we do both we have we have a server um and a backup server infrastructure that we share with the media factory at 208 flint oh you have your own your own server infrastructure that you share with the media factory what we share a tech core with the media factory and we we have our own server system we um how is that that location um and backup and then we do backup to cloud services as well backup to cloud services yeah have you have you looked at just getting rid of your server infrastructure incredibly and completely and just going all to cloud and just paying like aws to house everything and to play back everything and you just control you know all the indexing and yeah the short there's a short and a long answer to that okay and it's yes yes currently we think that the way we're doing it is pretty economical um believe it or not um to own our own infrastructure and i'd be happy to discuss that with you if you have thoughts we're in the process actually of developing a fourth repository um and that will be um with the internet archive for all of the material that we produce at cctv um and that internet archive service would be uh uh publicly accessible and you know basically free service are you familiar with the internet archive no no i'm not so so did you say that you are thinking about moving to a cloud service well we we're gonna have a we want we we feel to have a we've undertaken over the last year a um process to figure out that to to examine our archiving structure and our archiving system and having four backups right is considered redundant and reliable storage and holding two of those in house one of those in deep glacier storage which is economical and then one on the internet archive is where we're moving towards i'm not an expert in this i'm just curious because you know i was i didn't know if you had your own your own it you know in-house it service and and server infrastructure or whether you used a generic cloud service or not so yeah we have we have in-house it folks who have to do in the world of it they are unicorns because they have to know video engineering they have to know software as a service they have to do desktop support they have to do network engineering and infrastructure and then we also work with clear bearing which is an outfit out of sx junction that provides a sort of backbone support okay i was just curious yeah great question thank you thanks yes ranger hi so thank you for the presentation could you just um explain me the formula for how you allocated the 103,610 request for fiscal year 24 among the six municipalities that's a great question let me look back so this all began originally when comcast um had a there was a gap reclassification so they had a general accounting reclassification and it created a $50,000 deficit just for our access center alone and at that point we went to all the municipalities and we use the same formula that we use for allocating funds which is a number that uh is a what is that word a confidential number around subscribers so um you know we take a look at all the comcast subscribers and all the brillington telecom subscribers and that's how we allocate our resources and that's how we allocated these municipal funds as well sort of based on that same formula um does that does that sort of answer your question yeah just it's just um curious that south broncos these have jumped significantly relative to others between 19 and 20 and that presumably i guess based upon your answer is because you took a look at that point on that data and that's what you indicated yeah i think that's because you know the original in fy 19 we wanted to come with that 24 and the 20 and we wanted to replace that full fund and we knew that that was too much to ask and so we went to to folks and said let's do this half this first year half the second year and then we'll do the regular percentage increases over that and you'll see when new ski opted to do that on a year by year basis at a thousand bucks a pop this is really a way that we are asking municipalities to help cover general operating costs as we see cable revenue declining and that piece that jordan mitchell mentioned about going to the vermont legislature is another way that we're looking to replace cable funding as the way that pays for this service currently for the last 35 years this municipal coverage this community media service has been paid for by cable subscribers full stop so anybody that subscribes to cable pays a peg access fee and that serves at at one point it served the cable community because we had cable channels we now have services that go beyond cable channels as you know and we have services that you know meat needs to provide hybrid support which goes beyond the recording of meetings and just airing them on a cable channel so while we've seen increase in demand for the services and increase in you know labor costs and technical costs we're funding that still just with cable dollars for the most part so this municipal contribution across the board is one way that we are expanding what is that we're diversifying revenue to support this project that we hope is valuable to you in some way and you know welcome and welcome your thoughts and insight as jordan said as well on other ways to cover the community please jesse well the cable surcharge is a federal thing right yes right it's part of the 1986 cable telecom act yeah but there's no surcharge on just a regular internet connection an isp connection well you can't tax the internet and so part of the yeah tax the connection to the internet well you can tax streaming services but the state would have to do that well the state does allocate a streaming tax currently that i believe goes to the general to the education fund a streaming tax mm-hmm yeah what percentage is that do you know i don't know they should add a town tv streaming tax yeah so the legislative so the work that's going in front of the legislature and did i can i mess up the mic um so the work that's going before the legislature is two fund so for the last um three years we've had a general fund allocation to support all of the 23 access centers around the state um so of that um you know that was a million dollars that came and went to the 23 access centers town meeting tv was the recipient of about 45 000 of that alongside that is the legislation that we're going to put forth to come up with a different funding mechanism right now it's considered loosely a poll attachment tax the idea would be to um take advantage of the fact that there's already a way of counting how people attach cables to poles and that we could leverage attacks um that would then be um allocated to support community media it's still in the early days we are expecting that to go into both the house and the senate in january but there's still more to talk about that and of course there's alongside that the potential to rewrite um telecommunications law in vermont um the federal the federal tell as the to the extent that i can understand it the federal telecommunications rules and regulations have not caught kept up with current tech trends and so you have you know 33 states levy streaming taxes in different ways um and vermont does in in their own way and then many states don't and then there are a number of other things that you could tax and some states do and some things don't it so it's going on a state by state basis until the federal government decides to rewrite the telecom rules and hopefully with the public good in mind it almost sounds like something that the communications union district should discuss a little bit they want to get people hooked up to you know either fiber or cable for for isp purposes right but yeah and i said yeah this is an interesting yeah byproduct of the of the erosion of of cable usage right tv cable as we have a cord cutter sitting to my right here recently and and cord cutting is is not the right word to use because you actually didn't cut the cords to your house right you still have the cable the cable's still there you're just not subscribing you're not using it yeah so and and interestingly enough you know because the communication union because the cud's are so new they are they i i do not believe they're going to be subject to this poll tax at this time i think that that would be contrary to the initiative to build out broadband right and just just so it's a p o le tax not a p o l l yes p o l l e yes they're like poll tax it's like no yeah it's p o le telephone pole yeah and anything that i get wrong is solely my mistake in this because this is not um my i'll i'll say and i didn't really introduce myself Megan or work and i'm the code director now of cctv lauren glendavidian who is our executive director has stepped into public policy role so she's working for with the vermont access network to push um she's basically doing her highest at best good work now in the legislative arena to continue to figure out ways to support the work of community media centers around the state and vermont will be a leader in that in the nation so we're excited about that jesse you wanted to say something i just want to echo the praise for travis he is highly competent friendly and dependable and we are very very thankful to have him yeah and he's also heading up our media education program which we're really really super excited about so besides helping you all here he is leading the work too with youth and um in the media education realm which teaches both media literacy technical skills and civic engagement work so it's pretty awesome very good larry did you have any questions oh no i don't okay helen did you have any questions no i just hope we um continue just to support them yeah i think a five percent increase is warranted and um the only other thing i would suggest i know we've talked in the past about having our um planning commission meetings televised um and maybe since we're not utilizing all of our um number of of tapings that we could think about and work in conjunction with the planning commission to maybe identify some critical ones that that they have that might be a real interest to the community yeah and i think we have talked with you and given you a number of what that would cost on top of yes yeah so you have that you have those numbers as well and that can be billed on a per meeting basis or can be you know you can put in a an overall additional contribution right i think too thank you thank you i think to tape all of them was like fifteen thousand dollars does that sound right i think 13 yeah what i said it was 13 13 yeah it's anywhere between and i do you want to sorry go ahead yeah it's anywhere between five and seven hundred per meeting right okay they're they're taped and archived they're not live they're not live broadcast well you could do they're not live broadcast you could do so there's a variety ways that you can look at utilizing coverage so you could have us live stream to youtube the way that we're currently doing right now with titles etc you can send us recordings that are just zoom meetings that we can add agendas to and add to our archives as well so each of those things are all of those things are option and we really encourage you if you do have things that you're holding on to and don't have a way of archiving or are not archiving currently to add those to the town meeting tv archive of self barlington municipal material all right so i would um so consider requests is this where we actually approve it or we wait for the budget discussion to do that formal approval of that yeah so we have built in this request into our fy 25 budget okay all right good thank you helen we're gonna miss you very much thank you helen's leadership i mean yeah um helen not only served as the president but was our treasurer and will be hard to replace so thank you well we're sending you someone good so yeah we're excited about quarry yeah thanks thank you yeah thank you thank you yeah and happy thanksgiving to you happy thanksgiving thank you thanks all right and we have already seen item number 13 um i'm sorry it's so we're going to do 11 says glasses again um discussion and possible action on the acceptance of road and stormwater infrastructure on saty lane and we see our public works director tom d petro is in the room and sorry all right and our city attorney collin o'neill is also going to speak to this good evening everybody good evening tom de petro director of public works uh wanted to chat with you all about saty lane this evening so this is a development off of dorset street it has reached completion and they've got their final coat of pavement down that's been down through the warranty period a two-year period and so the systems out there are eligible for city acceptance we've been working on that for a little while now through a variety of issues but we're here primarily to talk about tonight and what's sort of preventing this for moving forward or why i'm not recommending that council accept the road at this point is generally a speaking of stormwater issue so the development is served by a stormwater detention pond built under some older standards and the city has an ordinance our stormwater upgrade feasibility analysis ordinance where we sort of say here's the standards that something has to be built to if the city's going to accept the infrastructure those standards get changed by the state of vermont periodically and we update our own standards to sort of mimic those so that happened back in 2017 which when the state changed their standards so we in turn updated ours so now these older pond systems across the city require upgrade and this one so in the memo we talk about tier two and tier three things like that but basically taking it from a pond to something that's better or moving phosphorus a real driver for the stormwater technical revisions with phosphorus removal and so the pond isn't there at the moment so that's why i wasn't recommending that we take it over the road and the pond my memo goes on to talk about an alternative path here so with a lot of folks we have agreements that kind of specifies responsibility once we get those signed that allows us to take over roads or become co-primities on stormwater systems typically and so that would be a path forward if council wanted to consider that but we have been speaking we con and i have been speaking with homeowner association representative george is here with us tonight so i certainly i'm glad he's here because he can give you all some additional commentary and perspective from the homeowners and so i think i summarize generally that in the memo but i'm i'll pause now in case there's other clarifying questions you all wanted to ask could you describe that agreement a little more and what our response is the abilities would be what the hoa's responsibilities would be and um what would happen for hoa defaults yep um so we've had this template agreement for quite a few years now um and so whenever we take over some infrastructure whether it's a road or a path any impervious surface those state permits they run with the land so we're required to become a co-primity so we wouldn't want to do something like take over a rec path for example right i'm speaking generically now and then be on the hook for everything that goes along with that state permit and all the requirements so generally these agreements say basically what's on city property or in a city right of way we'll take care of what's on private property the other co-primity or the owner of that property would take care of it um and that allows us to sort of clarify uh kind of roles and responsibilities oh they talks about permit fees um and then if someone were to default so that permit generally speaking runs with the land so let's say the other party on that agreement didn't do their share didn't do the maintenance or whatever was required uh they'd probably be subject to enforcement by the state of vermont wouldn't go back to us well so i think that would be a discussion there's always a risk there when there's a state permit and we're co-primities the state may or may not recognize the agreement we have right um that's not their agreement that's our agreement that's there for sort of city and protection of sort of everybody that's paying into the rate system right those shared costs so yep 10 or 11 9 this is a larry and leslie williams nine house sub active 50 development right correct yeah why is the stormwater pond can i can i ask of course where whose land is the stormwater pond on yeah that way people at home can whoever's watching can hear you there's a little green identify your please yourself too please uh my name is george thompson so i am uh part of the board of the hoa um so currently lot one which is seven city lane is the owner of the pond and frank they're they're the owner of all the land where all of our stormwater exists um we have an easement to operate the stormwater so all the maintenance and everything like that is what we're responsible for as the association um and that's part of the agreement that was set up by larry williams city lane llc and the association so that stormwater pond is on the the inside of the of satie lane to the west this it's this correct south west it's north and west of that okay because it's it's in the corner and that's on the williams property that's on the well it's on uh it's that that has been sold by larry and that was sold in 2016 okay so somebody else bought it somebody else bought it okay and but they're not part of the hoa they are not part of the hoa no but they are on the infrastructure so they're on this the sewer system and they're obviously part of the stormwater so part of their of their property stormwater goes into that pond yes the pond and the forebay and okay everything everything the the wetlands and everything that's on that side of satie lane goes into that pond so i'm going to ask a naive question is it possible to subdivide that stormwater pond out into common land for the hoa if the owner agrees certainly they could subdivide so that's something that needs to be discussed or yeah i will i'll typically say so we don't take land over right when we agree to manage stormwater systems we typically get easements right so someone else would own the land and whoever that is i guess as long as we have access we're fine but but you say here that um because the land does not appear to be on land owned or controlled by the hoa yeah that might have taken longer that might so we had a meeting a two or three weeks ago and i think one of the one of the things that came out of that is is i was like we don't own that pond it's not ours to deal with and i think subsequently over the last few weeks meeting with our lawyer that the pond is ours to maintain the association is responsible for that but we have no ownership of the land whatsoever okay because it belongs to this other lot it belongs to that lot okay is that does does that land owner part of the hoa no oh no and they've expressed to me that they want the pond so they're not inclined that they had an opportunity at first when they bought to subdivide that and do something with that um but i had a subsequent meeting with them after ours and uh they're not inclined i'm speaking for them but i i'm just saying our conversation does that complicate the the improvement to the stormwater capacity if if it sounds like there's a third party involved in making that decision correct um if the hoa can't give us an easement to access that pond for maintenance purposes the other the owner would um and then we would have to bring them into this agreement in some fashion so that's a detail to certainly be worked out right well so from our point of view uh there's there's a irrevocable offer a warranty deed that grants you that right without that owner being involved so that's that's what we have right now we have we have the easements and this uh the document that transfers that to the city um brings that forward to the city so you just assume those easements so the the underlying issue really is this moving the pond or upgrading the pond from uh tier three to tier two and tier one and who pays for it so um the document that uh you know was uh agreed upon by the city and city lane llc which is larry williams uh says that the city will take the infrastructure over whereas as is sorry as is whereas um and there's no documentation or no verbiage in there that says the city has any any ability to dictate different terms meaning you really have the choice to take it or not take it and that's kind of where the association is because the agreement on the storm water really just leaves us with the entire maintenance cost of the storm water itself so which is we're nine house community it's hard for us to uh it would be hard for us to upgrade the pond so why why would we take it under those provisions of is that the agreement as we understand it so yeah why would we want to pay for it all let me just back up a little bit so so as part of the approval process for this development they were required to give us an irrevocable offer of dedication for city lane uh and the storm water system um that is included in an irrevocable offer which has been given to us back in 2016 i believe 1516 when this development was approved um since that time we've we've looked at this issue we've determined that it's likely that this deed that they've given us includes the storm water pond that that we think needs a lot of maintenance that tom was talking about and so what we proposed is we'll take over the the city lane uh of the roadway itself but exclude the storm water pond exclude this infrastructure that is not to our standards by ordinance um and our understanding at this point is that the homeowners association does doesn't want it to be parsed out that way essentially they're saying if you're going to take over city lane the roadway you have to take the storm water pond with it um and kind of and so that's why we bring it to you tonight because um we're at it you know a bit of a roadblock if you will um in that in in in mr. de petro's memo he he references that because the storm water pond isn't up to our grade we're not recommending taking this accepting this deed as is what you mean that we're not accepting city lane at this time um and so that that's where we are right now maybe this is a question for executive session but i'm not sure you answered megan's question i mean and maybe the executive session i i'd kind of want to know what our obligations are versus their obligations and that would help me then be able to figure out what what i think we should do i mean have we ever denied uh request for the city to take over a public road what to take a road a private road and make it a public road have we denied that before yeah we we've had many conversations where somebody will build a road and then we'll go out and do an inspection and we'll give them a long list of uh things that don't meet the approved plans uh or don't meet you know our standards for roads or will be maintenance issues and things like that so yes uh we've also told folks in the past that we wouldn't take over these older systems um so even before our SUFA document our ordinance got updated you know there were ponds out there that were just for flood control but then had to provide better treatment for smaller storms right so as the state storm water rules evolved so did ours um so we've said no to folks as well um typically those upgrades have happened uh i think the the issue here is that the upgrade of this one now the upgrades that are required to take an existing storm water pond from that tier three to a tier two practice are more expensive than they were previously right uh so you know have to go to a gravel wetland type system so a little more significant under the new treatment standards than they were previously for sure um and well i'm speaking i just want to say one other quick thing add on to what collin said so it was sort of just one line in my memo but there's a number of developments around the city that are um this issue will come up so i don't i'm concerned about setting a precedent uh because there's other storm water ponds out there um and so if we start taking them over um then we're going to have those costs added to sort of the the rate payer rates for storm water in the city to those upgrade costs and is this specifically linked to the state improvement in the statute or are there other factors that would require upgrades um yeah so we we just referenced the vermont storm water management manual which got upgraded again in 2017 they're actually working on another upgrade now uh roughly every five to i don't know or more years i guess they they go through an upgrade how did the no one farm road storm water improvement work who who paid for that and did the um pinnacle association pay part of that yes um so at that particular one if i remember correctly tim i think we had already owned that road and so there was cost sharing involved there and there were grants involved there right a couple of grants if i remember correctly what about dorset park when they they um put in all the stone in those ponds and improve the dams right there is a there's a dam at the end of it yeah um basically the same answer so we had already owned that road uh we did some cost sharing right uh got significant grants in that case as well did the upgrades and then took over that infrastructure and the cost sharing is usually like normalized by the amount of area that each party is responsible for whether it's their yards and the roofs or it's the actual acreage of the roadway is that correct yeah it's impervious surface so we if we own 50 percent when we own a road we pay 50 cent right percent yeah okay so is there opportunity here perhaps in the future to to follow that same path if there were grants available to to upgrade this pond certainly yeah i mean you know assuming future grants right um and you have a you have a i think last time you were here at a previous meeting you said that there was a a pretty good model for an agreement like you have the spear metals for for plowing a road that you haven't taken over yet right yes um so we recently put that together spear metals was the first one we brought to you but we're discussing a few others to clean up that plowing situation yeah well we're currently plowing roads that are private roads uh with sort of city equipment without kind of a clear right to be on those roads um Sadie Lane falls into that category so i was hoping we could resolve this whole road issue so that we wouldn't be in that situation any longer um and that's at the end of the memo i did right in you know if we're still working towards a resolution here we should probably put together one of those agreements with Sadie Lane just to clean that up well we work out the rest of the the other issues um but if there's no intent uh to move forward and make this a public road then we should also have a discussion about how we separate from that responsibility without leaving them kind of short here it being late november already because your interest um mr. Thompson is to have us take over both it's when you say all or nothing you really want all i mean that's correct yes yeah i mean per the document and the agreement that was made by the city um you know that said the grant of property will be used for a road and b storm water and it says that the uh the grantee of the city acknowledges and agrees that it has received all the necessary as built certifications test results and performed all performed all investigations it needs deems necessary to accept the above mention improvements as is where is condition and that was in uh february of 2016 that that was entered into the city so based on that you know i mean it's our opinion that the city entered into agreement freely knowing that there would be expenditures assigned to that the only thing that they didn't know was that when those expenditures would happen and what they were and the only difference today is that you know what they are thank you and andrew and that's our main argument is assuming that we believe the city is not responsible to upgrade the storm water um what is the benefit of us becoming a co-permity it sounds like finding a solution liability for us if we were to do that if the hoa defaults the benefit for us for becoming a co-permity yeah what would be the benefit of that solution to us to the city um so i think it gets to more of a general question i guess to answer that i'd say the general mission here of the storm water utility is to help kind of improve water quality by working with the associations to upgrade and take over these systems right going back a bit so i think the benefit is more of a community kind of global watershed benefit um but if you mean from like a financial benefit right there's no financial well i mean you're suggesting that we become a co-permity because would maybe help us reach some kind of agreement because if we take the road we have to be a co-permity um on the state permit but why would we want to do that why would we want to why would we want to take the road then so i think that goes back to um mr. thompson was talking about so when the drb approved this right as part of that approval process um the applicants required to submit warranty deeds and irrevocable offers of dedication right for the proposed project uh that we can then later use and to take over that infrastructure so so those were part of the final approval right for the final plat that's the right but that doesn't imply that the city has has to take over has to accept that irrevocable offer right no not in my opinion that's a separate agreement has to be signed later on right am i is that correct colin not a separate agreement we would just have to accept the deed that we have been given accept ownership of the road accept the deed right but we haven't accepted it yet we have not okay and i guess i'll just note maybe folks aren't familiar with the process entirely um we often get easement deeds where we have to modify the one that was approved at drb level right before we do a final approval because something changed during construction or you know an easement or a property line had to move so it's not uncommon that we edit these deeds and iod is that that happens frequently well so it sounds like the immediate thing is that we snow is coming and we don't want you to have to shovel your own road would you agree with that well yeah i mean that's one aspect i mean it's really you know is the city moving forward like i said as is whereas or not and we need to make our decisions financially with uh what we need to do with snow removal and everything like that um you know certainly the the city has been plowing our roads since 2019 um frankly we thought this was a done deal back then um and it just has come to light i'll say recently but within the last year or so there's a gentleman who wants to develop two houses extends Sadie Lane south and developed two houses across the other side of the bike path so um that's kind of how we you know because we got asked the associates to get asked why haven't you uh signed over the roadway to the city so i mean i will add that there's there's four offers so there's there's also the infrastructure for the water mains the sewer that is under the rec path and the rec path itself so those are all bundled in this thing um so what do you mean bundled in this it's the whole that's what define the whole development in the first place i may be saying that incorrectly but maybe tom can the the bike path is not part of this there's there's four irrevocable offer i believe it's four irrevocable offers one is for the roadway one is for um storm water infrastructure that's not included in the roadway one is for a rec path um by mr sorry yeah it's the roadway is the road in the storm water then there's the water main that's in the Sadie Lane right away there's the rec path that runs along Sadie Lane and hooks up to the bike path behind cider mill and then uh and then there's a sewer main that's underneath the rec path or to the side of that as well those are the four offers yeah that's correct i misspoke the sanitary sewer line uh and a water main in addition to the rec path in the roadway so are we going to be seeing this in the future then the rec path and the water main and i think so what we've had conversations about all four i think one of the things that i just wanted to highlight just to answer a question that maybe came up earlier is the irrevocable offers of dedication each one uh has that's something that was accepted by the city that was signed by the by the city uh and it does have a section in that it says nothing herein or in the development review board's approval shall obligate the municipality to accept set offer or to assume any responsibility as owner or otherwise have said public roadway stormway stormwater infrastructure and easement um so there's no we signed an agreement but yes there's no obligation in that agreement for us to actually claim ownership of these until we actually claim ownership of them mm-hmm so so yes i think it there's a there's a potential this could come up before uh you again each irrevocable offer um as we've been discussing maybe has a component that the city isn't interested in taking that would require a little bit of of uh massaging and so if if we're in the position of you have to take them as is or not take them at all that that's that's where we are right now it sounds like that's where mr. thompson is right so i don't see that yours your recommendation as a possible third way is is actually being entertained by mr. thompson being a co-permitty that's something that's being entertained by the homeowners association well i mean the the agreement that was presented to us uh no um the agreement uh you know split the stormwater fee the state stormwater fee uh 55 45 um 45 for the city um but put the onus on the association to maintain everything else which is not what the irrevocable offer says the irrevocable offer says the city would take the the whole infrastructure as is so when we decide to i'm sorry when we decide to when you decide to yeah and we're saying we're going to decide to do that after it's up to you know state code right so right so i guess your answer is no the answer is no i guess that's i have another question i'm not trying to so is that really the issue that yeah it really comes down to the association doesn't feel that it should have to pay to upgrade this pond and based on conversations i had and i don't remember her name with the stormwater division but this could be upwards of $100,000 so it's not money that we're looking to spend there is no financial benefit for us to upgrade the pond at this point in time are the two proposed houses uh part of your development will they be they wouldn't just so it's separate be part of the association they won't okay so they're not going to be affected by this stormwater they they wouldn't be served they can't they don't have access to the lots unless it's through saty lane that would also hold up any uh future development going north as well helen so is one of the is the rub here that when saty lane was developed there was a uh you're going out you've been perfect until now helen you froze yeah you might want to try going out and coming back in or turning off your camera to save some of the bandwidth helen yeah we can't we can't hear you very well yeah if you could just turn off your camera and try again about what the rub is a particular um root storm environment and that built and then this that was built in the course helen all right so you didn't hear anything i said we did not yeah if you could start with this okay this is what the rub is my question is is okay so it's the rub that when saty lane was developed and the requirements for the stormwater pond were x and now over the cool helen we're not hearing you someone's watching a video yeah we're we're we're encouraging you to to put into the chat your comment and question okay we can i actually will close out and try again okay while helen's doing that so is the problem that the association then will have no incentive obligation to otherwise upgrade the stormwater and so we're just gonna have stasis and basically not a great stormwater situation there unless we do something um the concern would be that at some point the state of vermont like they've done in past old permits will say okay anybody who's got any of these old detention ponds from the mid two thousands that's no longer acceptable so you have to upgrade them to this higher level of treatment right now and so at that point yeah there will be costs but associated with upgraded required to incur those costs if we don't accept the offer is it the on the homeowner association the permittee it would still be ours yeah okay okay yeah it would still be ours so you see no interest at all in and sharing that responsibility i mean you might well with all honesty i mean once we lose the roadway we let we lose any leverage whatsoever on getting the stormwater taken over by the city that's the way we read the agreement there would be no incentive for the city to take over the stormwater permanently i'm talking about the incentive for you i mean if you're going to be you know the one who's responsible ultimately and it's just getting more and more and more and more and more and more and more expensive where does it get painful enough where you say you know what i'm willing to negotiate city well that's what we're doing here today right because because if we go under the current agreement it's still regardless of when that stormwater pond gets upgraded it's still the association the current agreement though was not agreed upon so that's that's left it's alright i mean to interrupt no no it left it left the upgrade of the pond solely on the association so whether we enter in the agreement or not we're in the same boat we have a stormwater pond that we are legally obligated to maintain right through the agreements that were set up when the when the um when city lane llc set up the uh the underpinning documents for the development all that infrastructure maintenance was written in that it was passed to the association so regardless so the only way the association doesn't doesn't uh remain responsible for all of the infrastructure maintenance cost is if the city takes it over otherwise we have it both ways or that there is some cost sharing that's not what the agreement was the agreement well the agreement can be taken or left so the city's saying we're going to leave it but here's another agreement and that's where you might be a little bit you know think think again about how how we might want to renegotiate but we're operating on the agreement that was presented i understand but i yeah basically 200 bucks a year of cost uh re uh reimbursed to the association yeah helen do you want to try again well you may have touched touched upon it but and i think you just did it seems to me the rub is what was built as a stormwater retention pond with when the development was built has is now is required to to be improved to a better level and that's more costly and and that seems to be the rub no nobody really wants to pay for it i guess if the city if we could find some funds to help pay for it that would help worth their grants but i agree megan i think we need to negotiate if they're willing some kind of shared payment if this is going to go forward right because i think that the agreement they had i mean it you still have to i think you still have to attain the state requirements and if they've changed in the interim they've changed and you need to improve them but is that right colin excuse me yes uh i'm sure you're correct and i think tom can speak to that a little bit too about the standards that were in place when this was built as to the standards that are in place now please do tom yeah no um that that is the rub right it was built under an older standard uh there's a newer standard the ordinance that council approved requires that newer standard right in the sufa document the stormwater upgrade feasibility analysis and so it's really that cost sharing um in other positions like tim had asked we'd already owned roads right we'd already accepted roads so we were already a copermity um and some of these newer cases were not was that pond was it sufficiently designed when it was originally built i'm just curious did it did it meet the standard at that time it received a state permit it did receive so it was an existing pond right um the engineer added a forebay for pre-treatment before it got to the pond okay and they added a new outlet structure so they were able to get it permitted this existing pond is sort of their stormwater pond right and the outlet is to the south underneath city lane underneath the path yep okay i mean it's our understanding that there is actually no requirement right now we are not obligated to upgrade the pond there's nothing that says we have to do that i think if you're over three acres you have to so we're we're at one point two that is correct there's nothing saying they have to upgrade it yeah the state of vermont that permit is not saying that city lane has to upgrade right now that that discussion is being triggered by the question of city please accept the road and then again going back to our ordinance and our standard which is the current treatment standards right yeah right i'm sorry i thought you said though at some point the state will come in and require an upgrade it's my expectation yeah i mean it's happened numerous times i'm even during my you know time here in south burlington now so we're willing to negotiate but we need to have a partner willing to negotiate i think that's what i'm hearing from my my fellow counselors mr johnson well if there's another uh agreement we certainly will uh entertain that okay you know review it and go through our our discussion internally so i mean we met as a community on this on october 1st and everybody in attendance it was seven seven out of nine six out of nine maybe to zero were absolutely this the way it was set up the way it was presented to us was not a benefit to the community at all it was it was a financial burden that we didn't feel we needed to uh to do one one more question is there enough area to to improve this store water pond the way that you think it should be done that's a good question to um no one has looked into what it would take okay all right done the engineering to say if we were gonna you know retrofit this pond to the new standard i so i wouldn't want to hazard a guest that that's a really good question but presumably but yeah that's a presumption right right what it could have and it would have to be done on the man who owns the pond right he doesn't want to give up his pond because that was a pond when he built his house and then it it became also became a storm water pond right correct is that right yep so i think anything to do with the maintenance stormwater maintenance of that pond the association right now has the right to do it without that homeowner's yeah permission or not it's it's in the document okay but i think what tim's question has to do is if we have to in order and we as a collective right um to increase the size of that storm water pond in order to be up to state code you know that's that's something that just maintenance won't do right so that would require even perhaps a bigger easement i mean is that possible that's not uncommon um but again i wouldn't want to say what exactly would be right in this case until we you know spent the time and effort to look at it with an engineer right i mean i could speak on the homeowner's behalf on this one thing they are uninterested in spending any money on that pond and you know they they bought the house from lary williams with their documents saying that they are not responsible for any maintenance of that pond i believe specific to storm water that's not one that's not one with the pond that's not one yep and i would also comment that there is a um and i don't know if you ever looked into it but there is a there is a lot of storm water that comes off the dorset street all along there all the way up to the cider mill so the cider mill next gen a couple more houses um then you have a lot 10 which is part of ours and whatever that is running along a ditch cutting making a 90 degree easterly turn following right down to saty lane and draining right into that pond already so which actually floods during storms floods around the lot one barn that's that existing fixture that's there as well so there is probably about 50 percent of the storm water rough gas maybe 40 uh that's coming from the city of south burlington's um roadway and what not already going into that or the other properties of the that front there i'm sorry or the other properties at the front there right not just the road right correct the road and the properties that are there plus the cider mill plus next gen it's either going in through that ditch or it's flowing backwards into the wet lands and coming down that way on the eastern side on the on the western side of saty lane you've got okay right you've got two right yep okay well what i heard you say is that you're willing to look at new language that the city might propose so i guess that's where we might have to leave it and we we hope that there can be some room for agreement and it i it sounds like there will be a maybe a few back and forths but they're maybe yeah do we want to ask if it's a good idea to proceed with a temporary plowing agreement like to have for spear meadows is that something that we want we agree on that so let me jump in so that that was my recommendation if we are going to talk about future different agreements that we move forward and get this plowing agreement in place we can do that pretty quickly um if the answer is no we're not interested then you know we would want to talk something different but it sounds like we'll talk further so i will also put together that plowing agreement there's a fee that goes along with that right george it's nominal but um so i'll put that together as well and you can consider that and then i would bring that agreement back to council at a future meeting all right and if you know i think that sounds like a good plan people sorry helen that sounds like a good plan to you i said i think that sounds like a good plan very good all right well thank you very much mr thompson for coming in thank you very much tom and collin and happy thanksgiving all right so yeah collin is staying um we had a request for and not from the school board it came from a community member for us to take up um the one of the conclusions of our charter committee to increase the size of the school board and so uh helen and jesse and their meeting with the superintendent and chair of the school board raised this um the school board is um has not yet come down to any specific request to to make of us so tonight is basically uh to give anybody in attendance that i don't see a member of the school board here um but also us um what we wish to do um you know with this final report from the charter committee um and that is just kind of an open discussion kind of exploratory we we had told the charter committee that this was going to be something that we'd come back to and uh can i make here we are one please do so the school board during the charter committee process did um submit a statement of support to extend the school board right um what they haven't weighed in on is the separation of that discussion from the expansion of the council conversation so the idea of moving one ahead of the other is what's kind of in question right now not the school board has previously stated that they would support more members oh i see okay um so i am i'm just going to remind the last time that we discussed this this council did not appear ready to um discuss expansion of the council for any change or or make any change is that something that you took away from the meeting that if we our position is to decouple them that that is no longer an active discussion for the school board or they just want clarification on where we sit um with regard to the charter committee recommendation so what and i see that elizabeth fits jail just turned her camera her icon yeah um i think the quit from me i agree with 90 what you said i think from staff's perspective um the last time you talked about the charter committee recommendations the decision was made to pause and have additional conversation in the future about representation broadly right um so then community members asked the council to move the school board expansion forward on its own right for town meeting day and so the question for the council is are you interested in decoupling those and because this got on the council agenda last week the school board hasn't had a formal opportunity to weigh in on it so i think that the process question for the council is we are now under a really tight timeline to get something on the town meeting day ballot right so if there was a majority of the council that wanted to consider decoupling we need to give direction to the city attorney to start drafting language and that would also you don't need to take any other action tonight other than ask him to draft language and that at a future meeting if the school board was interested in coming in and providing testimony um they could do that before you warn the public hearing and i think you would need to warn the public hearing no later than your second meeting in december and you would likely need to have a special meeting in january to hold that public hearing okay that's just a process so moving okay so moved what you said okay all right so we'll see what that takes us all right and discussion uh lisabeth did you want to say something this is a member of the charter committee and a former school board director of course yeah i actually i'm not really authorized to speak on behalf of the charter committee but i was when i saw this agenda item i was going to encourage the council to consider decoupling that because i think there's been a lot of consensus um to move forward on expanding the school board and given the runway to kind of have public hearings and then get this through council into the legislature um we're still looking at even if it's decoupled for the school board alone i think we're still looking at probably a 2026 implementation so i would encourage the council to direct staff to at least develop the language so that there's the potential to get this on the ballot okay all right thanks yeah thank you any other discussions all right i heard a motion in a second right second yeah okay uh helland oh oh callan please i have a question it you can wait till after but my my question is more formed if you if you do like to to move forward in this way um right now that the charter is doesn't speak to the number of school board members it refers to state law state law allows for three scored but three school board members and if you have a public vote you're allowed to have two more uh with one or two year terms so right now the school board has five school board members according to state statute yes and they're limited at five they're limited at five so under state statute the limited at five um the charter would obviously if it's our charter uh it would also become state law and would become the the controlling precedent for that um it would override the current state law uh so the so the decision that would be helpful to make right as well back up a little bit as you know the the city of berlington i believe has 12 school board members that is under their charter which allows them to have 12 school board members um so in a way that if we're considering a charter change to um include the number of school board members the world is it's kind of our oyster um but at the same time that's a that's a big um ask for to have me draft something um without more direction so it it would be the number of school board members maybe what their terms are um in terms being the the number of years that they would serve all that information i can come up with and come back with something but any guidance you might want to offer it would be helpful well i think the two to three year terms is generally you know something that is usual or expected at least for our community um and i don't know i haven't done the math that puzzle of having seven as opposed to five but it seems like there could be some rotation there just by adding two more people who would just be yeah so right now just uh under the state statute rules there's three school board members with three year terms and two school board members with two school two year terms right um but as we're changing as we're coming up with our own um number of school board members we're not bound by that you can come up with your own um terms would it be on towards to ask column to work with the school board chair to see how they would like to set it up i think it would probably streamline it if he came up with something then they could vet it at their meeting that's what i would suggest because she probably would want to speak with the school board before representing the school board on this just based on past two more people one three one two yeah that's kind of how i feel too and see how that goes i like that idea too yeah and then an ability to add two more after that and then two more after that and do we want them both entering in the same year of 2026 say the first year that it's adopted so we want to have four members of the school board elected all at once you don't want to stagger it one one year the one the next year i sort of think you want them if you're going to increase it you want to increase it okay and while you know might be problematic and have for running it could happen on its own we should have room for it on the ballot yeah we might charge them for the extra printing on that ballot just kidding okay yeah i guess for me it just seems like that's a lot of training to do you know let's say you get four new members out of a seven-member board that's a lot of training to do you know it's the majority as opposed to i guess then it would be an odd number as opposed to an even number for that one year right right right some people might get reelected okay yeah i think so but if tim could just repeat what he had said about what the terms are i i didn't catch it two new people one three and one two three years one two years yeah one thirteen and one twelve no that'd be good a thirteen year yeah that would all right well thank you very much and we still need our vote all those in favor hi hi very good that's all of us thank you very much Colin and we have already had our discussion of the use of the ARPA fund so tune back in on December 24th to see us wrestle and this moment for other business um just one thing i've i've been talking to people at work and they're like what the heck's happened to wilson road you know it used to be two lanes this way and one lane and when they're like and they're like going it's different now but it's good i they think it's better yes so yeah so that's interesting yeah and as somebody know pointed out that flowing north on dorset street seems to be a little bit less congested now maybe because the lights are changing you know maybe but and the warranty period's over then the sensors will take over then we might get even better flow right so and i notice that aspen drive is just blinking yellow right now so maybe that because they're getting ready to do something there but thank you for that because i hate that light because well because it's like it sees me and it goes oh tim turn it red so i would just if if the counselors are getting questions about this if you go to uh the city's home page to the scrolling news there's an article on lane shifts including um a really lovely video um that andy romper our communications coordinator and erica callan put together and voiceover so if if people are getting questions please point them in that direction that helps make sense of the patterns in one's head nice yeah andrew can i i know um the council used to um a lot a little bit of time to talk about climate change updates and can i can i give a quick one so the fifth national climate assessment came out a few days ago it's the it's every five years it's commissioned by the federal government to give the state of climate change in us just to read a few of the things so i didn't realize this climate change is costing the us 120 billion dollars a year they've now concluded the science is irrefutable it's the first time i've ever seen a statement where it's all the scientists are saying yes we are causing climate change used to hedge a little bit like 90 percent 80 percent now they said yes we are doing it irrefutably so that was um an advancement as to what the science is willing to say and the conclusion is we must swiftly reduce heat trapping emissions enact transformational policies in every region of the country to limit the stampede of devastating events and the toll that these events take on our lives and the economy while the us has made progress our progress is woefully insufficient so i'm really proud of the efforts that we're taking on that front particularly given this report and one law more well we're doing a lot more than one law more i think we want two law more yeah i and and the curve conversion we're we're now gonna we've just uh agreed to solar so our house incrementally is becoming electrified but what we learned through the process is only so many households can be approved for that at a time otherwise the converter can't take in that much elect right the transformer thank you so there's just a lot that we're working against there's a lot we're working against and on top of that the fact that there might not be capacity in a neighborhood for charging electric vehicles because then a lot of houses don't have the amperage right with the service so if you increase the all the services then you might need a new transformer you might need something else on the pole as well so right it all goes hand in hand and you know we're getting there right slowly right but something i would really like us to consider i know that it's happened in montreal where they have taken existing neighborhoods and added geothermal and that a neighborhood is in fact you know the climate control is is dealt with through a neighborhood geothermal i just i think that there's gotta be something in addition most of those systems are owned by the municipality and in vermont we don't have the authority to construct or do one of those but there is a bill right now in the vermont legislature to give municipalities that authority oh good who is introducing it it's being introduced by the geothermal alliance good is it because of destructing in from burlington from the you know primarily it may be related to that um i'm not sure how what they're doing they may have separate i'm not i'm not sure tim i haven't heard it linked up like that i've heard it more generally in the state as a as a problem a lot of so there there are new developments being built in the country that and around the world other countries too where they it's a planned you know geothermal bus that's included to every house right so every house gets a flow of fluid that's that constant 50 degree underground water temperature that they use in their heat exchanger you know for for their heat pumps right because you're either you're either shedding heat from your house into this 50 degree so heat sink or you're pulling that that warmth out and heating it a little bit more to get it up to 70 right as opposed to trying to use air on a cold night you know or hot air on a hot day right so i i would love to see more excessive accessible geothermal for residential i but it's that means digging drilling yeah messy stuff some places you can't do it um and it's expensive yeah so there if there was a a technology breakthrough that somehow made it a lot cheaper so once they put a heat pump in they put some sort of ground based you know heat sink in as well that'd be great but we're waiting for that yeah something else and since we had a teacher here tonight i want to give a shout out to mr basden seventh grade fusion social studies teacher who showed seventh graders including my daughter a video about the the DACA textile factory that collapsed in 2012 in Bangladesh and had the kids think about where their clothing comes from and then think about the cost um that goes into everything you know where these people make so much money and this item of clothing makes this much money for the company um but also to think about on the other end how it's important to employ people and how it's important you know to to get people um to to contribute through their employment to you know the the the wealth of a country anyway i just i thought that asking those big questions of seventh graders is is really important thing so when we think about energy and we think about educating the end user like our people in our schools and their parents um i think it starts conversations at homes and i think that there has to be a culture shift i mean as i said to my daughter i said you know we read the little house and prairie book series and they probably each had two outfits each and they're nightclothes right like two unbelievable and i said well you know maybe that's where we have to go you know that's maybe something that mr basden might be opening your eyes to um that there there are things to that are invisible to us in terms of our energy consumption you know having things shipped from all over the world and and made in the in one country you know globalization has has probably done a lot to increase our global emissions so having seventh graders you know really wrestle with that i think is an excellent exercise and also thinking about those people in Bangladesh needing to be paid needing to have you know a livelihood so it's it's all a big picture that i i think that uh you know in addition to thinking about how we heat and cool our homes our our consumption practices and all these things that we have to think about as well and it starts at home right all right so would you like a motion very well yes so i move that the council enter into executive session for the purpose of discussing the negotiation or securing a real estate purchase or lease options relating to the scott and long properties inviting jesse baker steve lock paul conner and collin cabinell into executive session and should i also say that we will be making we're probably voting on the energy so i would just ask you to add the and to consider appointments to public and to consider appointments to public committees second okay all those in favor hi hi we will not be coming back all right very good