 Hi, thank you, Joe, and thanks to the Montpelier Rotary Club for organizing this event. I'm Cassandra Hemingway, I'm the managing editor of the bridge, and welcome to the forum. We've got our three mayoral candidates here, and we developed this forum to give them a chance to share their views and explain why they think they should be elected. This is not a debate, so they won't be questioning each other. Before introducing the candidates, I'll quickly review our format. We asked the public for questions in advance, and we use them to help develop the list of questions we'll be asking candidates. During this program we'll also take live questions from the folks who are here in the room. We are asking people to write your questions down on a slip of paper. I believe Ed Flanagan passed some papers around. He's in the back of the room, so if you didn't get a paper, he's got them, and then he'll bring them up to me at about the halfway point. And we have plenty of questions to ask if you don't have any, but I suspect you do. We'll fit as many questions as we can in during this 90 minutes. And the candidates were not given any questions in advance. Sorry. Each candidate has two minutes to make opening statements, and after that they'll have a minute and a half to answer our questions. At the end of the forum, they'll get a minute and a half for closing statements or to go over anything they weren't asked but they wanted to talk about. And the moderator has the discretion to make adjustments should be needed. We already introduced Donna, who's timekeeping, so we're going to stick to our time frame, and I may have to interrupt folks if you go over your allotted time, so pay attention to the time cards. So when I introduce the candidates, I'll introduce an alphabetical order by last name, and I'll start asking the questions in alphabetical order by last name, and after that we'll switch it up so nobody is asked the same question first with every question. So today with us we have Dan Jones, Jack McCullough in the center, and Richard Shear. And I'm going to let you each start with your opening statements starting with Dan. Well thank you. Andrea, thanks to the Rotary Club, The Bridge, and Orca Media for sponsoring putting this together. So like you, I truly believe that I love our little city, and it's scenic valley, it's historic downtown, and it's really it's pervasive sense of community identity. And like you, all of that is becoming threatened by the climate, economic, and political forces growing around us. You may know from my work of past several years that I've been working to create a sustainable Montpelier where we can foster the local resilience needed to respond to these foreseeable disruptions. But such local resilience needs to start by preparing for what I think will be decades of challenges. It will require a water system that can predictably function for 100 years. We have housing to keep our community safe, including those who we need to keep things running. And I'd like to add those climate refugees who are arriving en masse and bidding up the cost of the housing that we have. We need emergency response capacity, not only in police and fire, but also to the climate disruptions of storms, floods, and heat events we can foresee. We need a responsible tax system that is not threatening the financial stability of many of our citizens. A flexible administration which recognizes the growing challenges and is organized to be responsive to such rapidly changing circumstances. And all of this is going to require engaged citizens who understand that it is all of our responsibility to make the community safe and running. I'm hoping that we can all embody a vision of a forward-thinking people who can prepare and adapt to the challenges ahead. But we need to start doing the hard stuff now in order to prepare for a future that isn't going to look a lot like yesterday. As Mayor, I hope to provide the needed leadership so that our wonderful little city can adapt and prosper in the coming times. Thank you. Jack. Thank you, Cassandra. And like Dan, I thank Orca, the bridge, and particularly Rotary. I really value the good work that the Rotary Club does. I'm running for Mayor to continue the good work we've been able to carry out during the last five years on the council. In that time, we've led the council, led the city through the economic and public health disasters arriving from the COVID pandemic and emerged with a healthy downtown and community. We carried out a top-to-bottom review of the police department, heard from a broad section of our, cross-section of our community, and codified our policies and practices, many of which were already in place, to ensure that our police operations will stay consistent with the values of our community. We've also started to emerge from the critical staff shortage on the police department so we can continue to meet our community's public safety needs. We've added services for our unhoused residents, including social workers and peer support workers attached to the police department and expanded shelter resources. We've planned and constructed an award-winning upgrade to our water resource recovery facility that has brought us up to modern standards while creating energy savings and reducing population. We've committed, completed the downtown master plan, which will reduce congestion by adding a traffic signal to Barrie and Main Street intersection. And this year, we will also begin reconstructing East State Street from the pavement all the way down to the embedded infrastructure. With the support of our voters, we have acquired the former Elks Club property, and we are well on our way through a public process to begin the planning. Beginning in December with Mayor Watson's resignation, I led the council through a successful budgeting process, meeting the city's needs within budget parameters we established to control tax impacts. I know that to have an effective government, we must involve the public, mayor, council, and administration to work constructively and collaboratively to fully understand the issues. Thank you. Richard. Well, if you do, because of them. I'll say thank you to Orca, thank you to the bridge, and especially to the Rotary, and thank you, Donna, for timekeeping. I'm going to be succinct, and I'm going to be to the point. There are problems in this city, and there are significant problems with our infrastructure, and that's what brought me into this is the idea that it is not regular to have whack-a-mole water main breaks around town where council will address them, send someone out to fix them, and then we have another. And basically, what I'm going to speak to, you have three distinctly different visions here, and I think they've been well articulated by Dan and Jack. My vision is better management. My vision is to grab problems that have been allowed to be neglected and tackle them head-on before the next budget so that what we're able to do is realistically appraise what is the total cost that we're facing so that we can build a consensus about an intelligent consensus on how to move forward together. Thank you. Okay. So starting in the, actually, no, we're going to start with Jack for this next question. And we're going to start right in with talking about the budget. So on March 7th, citizens will be voting on a nearly $11.5 million budget for FY24. It raises property taxes by about 7.6%. So given the many priorities reflected in the budget, describe how you plan to control and prioritize spending. In the beginning of our budget process, I started out with one fundamental, I guess two fundamental rules. One is that we would not ask to either the staff of the city, of the city government or the taxpayers to take on any new projects or initiatives that we had not already adopted. Because I just think that people have taken on a lot and it was not a time to add more initiatives. On the other hand, it was also clear to me that we had initiatives, we had projects that were well underway that were high for the city, for the city priorities, and we needed to continue to work on them, to continue to address them. I didn't think it would be responsible to drop anything that we were doing at that time already. For years we've worked on limiting our tax increases to the rate of inflation and that's the goal we started out with. That's the goal I'm going to continue with. Inflation is a fact of life and I think we need to responsibly carry out the operations of our government. We can't say no to inflation because we don't like it and I do think we have an obligation to pay for the services that our residents value. Thank you. Richard? Okay. I'll take off on the last point from Jack, not because I disputed because I agree with it actually. Inflation at 7.5% is not happening right now. It's much less than 7.5%. But we're projecting a budget not now. We're projecting a budget that will start in July of this year, 2023 and run from July through June. Inflation for July is projected by economists, particularly in the Philadelphia region who do this thing at 2.9%. There's a great deal of difference between 7.5% and 2.9%. Taking last year's inflation rate and calling that the inflation rate that will be present in July just isn't true. It's not sound business practice. And I will hopefully later on in this debate be able to debate, I'm sorry to stand in this forum, I will be able to show you savings that can be taken out of this budget and redirected. Not given back to taxpayers but redirected towards other priorities that I believe that most of us, if not all of us, believe are more pressing. Thank you. Dan. Thank you. I know Richard is trained as an economist, so I hate to dispute him. But CPI comes, the Consumer Price Index is coming between 5% and 6% right now and the projected inflation is actually closer to 7% to 9% this year. So the city's budget is within that same range. What I'm hearing around town is people are frustrated and angry at this because they do not feel their personal incomes are going up anywhere close to that kind of number. I think our budget is like a given right now. It's either yes or no next week on the thing, so we don't actually have a chance to respond much other than turning it down, which citizens very have done. But we do have the chance over the next year to say, what are our real priorities? And I believe that we need a capacity to start getting more of the citizens involved in that process that we need a more vibrant discussion. We have to start looking at what are we actually putting into administration? How many administrators do we need in the city? How many of crucial people do we have in other areas? I don't think we've had that discussion. What projects do we need? Are we wasting money in places like the Oast Club where we could be putting it into things like preparing for real public safety emergencies? So it's my sense that we actually have to broaden the discussion and we have to be serious over the next year on creating what will be a budget that more reflects the real economy and not the hoped for economy. Thank you. Thank you. We may come back to parse this out a little bit more, but I want to move on to a big topic that comes up at almost every city council meeting, which is homelessness in central Vermont and also throughout the state. At last count, there were 450 people who are houseless in central Vermont. There's ongoing controversies around town about folks who are in house related to panhandling, sanitation or lack of the transit center incident where there was a stabbing just last week and most recently elevated numbers of police calls. So what do you think the city's role is in addressing homelessness? And we will start with Richard. This is a difficult one and this is one, the only question that I'll answer by reading. Last week I posted in front page forum regarding the failing policies in Montpelier that resulted in fires, vandalism, public disturbance and even a stabbing. I questioned the city council's selective policing policies allowing some antisocial behavior to avoid consequence and not other. I now find myself attacked in a barrage of character attack postings as well as incredibly abusive emails. A common theme is that I lack compassion. Someone posted a post in today's front page forum. They found a heartfelt eulogy for my son Carson online. Carson struggled through his adult life with mental illness, homelessness and grinding poverty. I spent three decades alongside other agonized parents constantly sharing what worked and what didn't work for our troubled adult children. For most it was structuring consequences that kept our children visiting mental health centers and taking their meds during the good times. Parents strongly support consistent policing. Consistent consequences in life helped troubled adult children in the short term and the long term firm social boundaries. And that's the time to look up Carson's share in the eulogy. It's tough reading. You're taken inside this hard world as well as my ongoing role as his dad through thick and thin. I'll always be Carson's dad. All of the self-righteous, I know what compassion is you don't followed by a string of vicious personal character attacks has deeply hurt both his stepmother and me. It's hurt our close friends who know what we went through. Well, this has got to end. Personal character attacks from either the ideological left or the ideological right have absolutely no place in Montpelier. The Montpelier I want to be mayor of and the Montpelier I am. You're at time. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Thank you Richard. End of sermon. Okay, thank you. Okay, so Dan. Sure. It is a difficult problem and I think we have to actually look at a couple of features that we don't talk about because we are the downtown central Vermont. So Montpelier is like a funnel at the end of the funnel where all of the problems in a 25 mile radius get funneled into Montpelier where the downtown, where the places where services go. Now I am very impressed with what we've been able to do with such difficult circumstances. And I'm friends with Rick D'Angelo at Good Samaritan and Ken Russell of the Homelessness Task Force. They're doing really good work right now in trying to do the best they can within the circumstances and the resources available. The failure that we're seeing is two things. First one is we don't have a regional structure that can help support the work that needs to be done. So we're stuck on our own. And secondly, the state's complete failure after deinstitutionalization in the 80s which has created a circumstance where a lot of people who normally would have been in mental health institutions are on the street and they're creating a difficult situation for everyone. So now it is time for us as a city perhaps gaining with other cities in the state to start asking the state to begin taking its responsibility seriously. And I put this out to our legislators, our Senate and especially our governor because we've been failing in that regard. And that's what I think the city can help start doing. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Jack. Thank you. As everyone recognizes, homelessness is a terrible problem. It's not limited to Montpelier. It's not limited to Vermont. It's limited to the entire country. It expands to the entire country. One thing that I think we all need to recognize is that homelessness is not something that the homeless people are doing to us. They're not doing homelessness to the community. They are suffering often from circumstances way beyond their control. Montpelier does not have within our budget and within our resources enough money, enough resources of any kind to end homelessness even within our 10 square miles. We just can't do it. What we have done is provided as much as we possibly can in the way of services for people who need those services. Social supports from every agency that we can do, shelters as we can provide, both voluntary and city-funded services and we need to continue doing that. We will not ever be able to arrest our way out of homelessness in Montpelier. And the policies that we've adopted reflect that we need to provide the services that we can possibly provide. Thank you. Thank you, Jack. And a follow-up question related to homelessness. I wanna talk about what happened at the transit center last week. And we know that it has been used as a warming space for the homeless this winter as it was last year. It was staffed by another way in Good Samaritan Haven and the Montpelier simultaneously, the police department is saying it has been called to the transit center 175 times in the last year with a large portion of the calls related to the warming shelter or the unhoused. Recently, there have been two arrests as the result of separate assaults. Two different people, one was houseless, one was not. The question is we know that organizations and churches in the community picked up the slack and have opened up while the transit center has been temporarily closed. Should the transit center open to the unhoused again for as a warming center? And what, if anything else, should the city do to help? We already talked about, sorry. But let's just talk about specific to the warming center and should they open up. And we will start with Richard. That's a really difficult question. And I certainly do not want to minimize the pain and suffering that Rick D'Angelo and his partner are going through. All my compassion to that family whatsoever. 175 times they responded, is that what you said? Can I get that correct? We don't know how many times they responded, police and fire, to that Hubble that city council placed next to the art store. I mean, police were there repeatedly. The problem is that city council didn't respond in either way. 175 times the police are there and city council didn't have a single hearing on this? I mean, where the entire community could participate and vent their concerns. That just seems incredulous to me. And it was the same thing with that thing that was next to the art store. The merchants were repeatedly concerned about stating concern. City council didn't respond. If I were mayor, it would at least make it on the agenda so that the community could sit and voice their concern to council and we could try and sort it through. That those are my feelings. Thank you. Jack. Okay, thank you. First off, you mentioned the stabbing at the transit center. It's important to point out that the person who's accused of doing the stabbing is not one of the people who has been identified as someone living out in the street in Montpelier. Not one of the people who's a client of one of the agencies that provide services. And I think it's important to say that this is not an attack caused by homelessness and criminality. I think that's important to keep in mind. During the years that we've been talking about the homelessness crisis, we have had many, many, many occasions when homelessness, homeless services have been on the agenda at the city council. Not a single meeting, but many. And we've had many members of the public, although not my opponent coming to address the council on those occasions. What's gonna happen with the transit center really depends as much as anything else on the willingness and the ability of the agencies to resume services on that location. We can't do it without them. Thank you. Dan. I am afraid to actually take a position on this one, admittedly, because I think this is something I would like some guidance, like I said, from the homeless task force. I'd like some guidance from the people at Good Samaritan. And I would, again, like to see what other services and protection capacity the state can help with, because as I said before, I think we have been abandoned by the state and by our region, and stuck working with a problem that's way beyond our limited resources to provide. Yes, Jack was right. This kid was from Marshfield, okay? We don't know why he was there, but this was a gathering place. So we have to then be careful in reopening the transit center. And by the way, I do believe it should be reopened as a warming shelter, because it gets cold. People are freezing. We have to figure out how to be able to help people stay warm. But we've got to do it in such a way that there's some level of protection and guarantee. What that is, like I said, I would like to go to the homeless task force and ask what they think, how we could do this, how we could manage this, and other parties in the city, because I think this is one of those issues that is now coming to the fore, that we have not been doing a good job of actually addressing or saying, well, okay, what are we going to do in the future here? So again, this is a community problem. The council has to be part of it, but so are other parts of the community. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Okay, so our next question is on a different topic, but related. I wanted to hear from you all about Confluence Park, a planned park whose cost projections have tripled in the past couple of years from one million to $3 million. The city council recently voted four to two to give park advocates another 18 months to find grants to help pay for the park. And just to fill in the gaps for listeners, this is also a place where folks who are experiencing homelessness gather. There was a shelter there at one time that was removed. So given all of that information and the city's various needs and priorities and the past use of this site, how would you vote on, let me rephrase that, can you just speak to your thoughts about building a Confluence Park in the space where it's currently planned? And we will start with Jack. Thank you. When the advocates for the Confluence Park first came to the city council, and I should point out that the planning for the Confluence Park goes back to something like 2002. But when the advocates came to the council, I thought it was an exciting prospect because it's in line with one of the city council's goals, which is to develop Montpelier as an outdoor recreation hub and have that be an opportunity for economic development in the city. The voters supported an allocation a bond of $600,000 for Confluence Park. And as we went way above $600,000, I heard from a lot of people who thought that there was just no way they were gonna support. $2,000,000 or $3,000,000, and I completely agree. The reason that we had the discussion at a recent council meeting was because the supporters of Confluence Park recognized that nobody on the council is going to agree to spend $200 or $3,000,000 of taxpayer money to do this. I can't tell you what we're going to do because we're talking about what might be a year to a year and a half from now, but we're going to be looking at what the prospects for funding are and what all the rest of the circumstances in the community, including where, what our housing resources are for homeless people and what our recreation needs are. We're not going ahead the way it is now. Thank you. Dan. This is a painful subject for me because when I organized six years ago, the Sustainable Montpelier Design Competition, a number of the best-loved entries all had some use of our riverfront more than parking lots and steep faces. I believe a really dynamic city would be able to make use of its riverfront, but that was before the realities of what's happening in the economy began to crash in on us. And so we're now in a situation where the costs of this project have escalated beyond what we can afford. Like I said before, I think we have some real issues that have to be done in terms of what our planning is, what we're going to prepare for, et cetera. And I think the Confluence Park, as much as I would love to see some recreational development along, I really love to see it. I don't think it's in the cards in our near future because we have other choices that we have to make in terms of our planning and recreation dollars that do not include what is becoming a impossibly expensive project and we don't have the money to support it. Thank you. Thank you. Richard. Well, I'm not going to be unambiguous about this. This is the capital budget we're talking about. It's not the operating budget. These funds wouldn't be going over to help the homeless, not out of the capital budget. These funds go to paying for sidewalks in our communities and for bridge repair. No, I am not going to put off sidewalks and bridge repair and other capital projects that are needed in neighborhoods for Confluence Park. I just, I didn't support it. I didn't vote for it at the time and I don't support it now. But keep in mind, you use the word, how would you vote? The mayor doesn't have a vote unless council is tied three to three. But we're a council tied three to three. My vote would be against it. I just do not see why we would do that. I mean, we're going to talk later about pushing off infrastructure under the ground. This is the equivalent of pushing off infrastructure under the ground when you're pushing off sidewalks. Thank you. All of you at various times have pointed to housing as a pressing issue in our city. Lack of it and lack of affordable housing. How will you use your position as mayor to address the growing housing crisis? And we'll start with Dan. Oh boy. The, I guess I'll start by saying the current crisis demands more than hopeful long range planning. We have an immediate need for workforce housing. Okay, something that has happened in the next couple of years, not something that's 10 or 15 years in the future. Otherwise we don't have teachers, healthcare workers and the other people that we depend on every day to keep things running. So we're looking at a rear view mirror also if we expect developers to step up and provide the density, high density housing even on the else club site because the cost of construction and development and interest rates have gone so far up that a lot of what we have now assumed in the past is no longer going to be happening. So we have to start looking at other places that things could happen. Now my first one, which I'll probably get in trouble with is saying, I think we ought to zone VCFA dorms as housing and turn that into a place where low cost efficiency apartments could be created fairly quickly. Now how that gets paid for is an interesting issue. We need to make Airbnb's that are not in owner occupied homes illegal. That will open up some more housing available. We've got to look at our downtown office space and what could be turned in there. I can also go on on parking lots and how we could work with the state to create housing. There is a big issue here. There's lots of possible approaches, but we're not going to get there by pretending that somehow things happening 10 years out in the future are going to make a difference. The crisis is now and we have to pay attention. Thank you. Richard. Boy, this is going to dovetail with the inevitable question about the Alks Club. So I'm going to stay away from that. But I will say that infrastructure for housing and last year going in the core city which we have, we're a mature city with very few vacant lots available for housing. We have Alan Goldman's property way out on terrace. We have the golf club potentially way out there. But in between there's very little except for Sabin's pasture. And Sabin's pasture sits in a tax incremental finance zone that could pay for the under street infrastructure required because it paid for the under street infrastructure across street and Bar Hill. We didn't pay for the water and sewer for that. But the taxes in that tax incremental finance district I would suggest that we seriously start working with the Zorzi family and Alan Goldman and get housing and Sabin's pasture. When we moved here in 2001, our first vote in 2002 was to purchase Sabin's pasture for $700,000 for low income housing or something on that level. Well, our kid is post graduate school now. So yeah, it's a very, very complex issue but you can't think of it simplistically. It's not a binary, well, we need more so we're going to get more. Thank you. Thank you. Jack. Thank you. You see, this is one of the problems here and one of the problems we addressed by proposing to buy the golf course and that is that we can spend a lot of time looking at property that's owned by other people and saying, well, I wish you would do something with that piece of real estate that you owned. The city has been working with the owners of Sabin's pasture and we've amended our zoning bylaws to enable it to facilitate its development but we still do not control it. The fastest way to get housing is to put your money on the horses that are already at the starting liner have already left the gate and so we have projects that have been proposal and are in the planning and development process like a couple of projects in the Northfield Street area, the Habitat for Humanity project. There's a project that's in the planning process on Isabel Circle and we've got the Country Club Road which is well into the planning process. Beyond that, I would look at all of the downtown buildings and the upper stories and talk to the owners and say, what does it take to turn your upper stories of your building into housing? Thanks. And you don't have to be clairvoyant to guess the next question is about the Country Club Road property and so I'm reading it as it was sent to us from the public. Whether or not you supported last March's bond to purchase the former Elks Club, the Country Club Road property, do you favor building affordable housing there and do you see that property having potential to be a legacy for future generations? If so, in what sense? And if not, do you favor reselling the property? I realize that's a multi-part question. We will start with Jack. Thank you. I was gonna start my answer with absolutely but then I recognized there was an or there but absolutely I support developing housing in the property. We've engaged with Whitenberg to plan and study for all the possible uses on the property and the survey is still open so anyone who's not replied, please do so. I think we need a substantial amount of housing every place we can put it in Montpelier for all income levels and all types of housing, single family housing, condominiums or other cluster type housing and rental housing. We need that all there and I think that my number one priority for the use of that property is to put housing there. I recognize we also have enough room to put a new recreation center there although we're not there yet to make that happen and there's plenty of open space that adjacent to conserved space that we will be able to conserve. I think this is absolutely a legacy and I think if we do not proceed with the proposed development of that property that 50 years or 100 years from now the residents of Montpelier will be cursing us for our short-sightedness in not doing it. Thank you. Dan. I was not a supporter of the Oaks Club purchase. I am not now. I think it was not part of the master plan. I thought there was no planning attached to it. In fact, backing into the planning once you bought it was sort of the opposite what any sensible city should do. Nobody even talked when they offered it to the populace about what are the road and infrastructure demands that are gonna be required on the property if you want development there and that's going to be millions and millions. And so I look at it as saying if we could find a buyer I'd sell it again. I don't see it as a future possible development because as I mentioned I think the actual costs of creation of housing right now have become so high that the construction materials costs that we are not going to be seeing much happening at all. It's also not walkable from downtown. They say, well, it's on the bike path if you have two and a half miles you want to do. So it is not actually part of what would be downtown Central City development. It is not cluster development. It is an area that I think is a dream without a reality. And like the Taylor Street units which took 20 years for free property to be developed by Down Street because no commercial developer wanted to touch it. I think we're in a position where we have to really take a hard look at the property and figure out what we want to do that would actually save the citizens some money. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. I lost track of Richard. Richard, there's one other, who is it? Please. Okay. There were two things in that that caught my ear and one was affordable and one was legacy. Let me stop with affordable to who is it affordable to the city taxpayers and to water and sewer users to be constructing a whole new set of water and sewer under that that will be borne by people who are gonna be paying at the same time for the remediation of the mess that's in Cormont Piliar right now. Is that affordable? But let's take it to a different affordability. Yeah, all of you who are sitting in the room and all of you who are watching who are homeowners I have a reappraisal coming. And when you see the reappraisal you're gonna be amazed at what the level of housing goes for. Yeah, it will be affordable. It might be 10 or 15%, 20% below appraised value. You're talking over $300,000. These are going to go at market rates or you're talking about state, there's state funds available to help with subsidy but every community is chasing those same state funds. I hate to say it, we need to make sure that this project first of all is feasible. Can we provide city services to this? Can we afford the streets, the sewers underneath? Are we dueling with repair of existing sewers? We don't want our legacy to be continuing a busted sewer system for this. Thank you. And water system. Thank you, Richard. Okay, well let's talk about the water system. Should the city spend more in the future than it has been on replacing water main pipes and street repairs? And we'll start with Richard. One more is the verb. So we're asking if the city should increase the annual spending on water mains and street repairs. I thought you said should. It's not should, does the city have to? I think it's a proper way of putting it. The city has put this off for years, has neglected routine repairs, and the result of this is whack-a-mole, our water mains busting around town. It wasn't planned, it's not in our plans to have the water main bust in front of TD North Bank, bust behind Positive Pie, bust on Langdon Street, bust on College Street within a two or three week period. The water mains are telling us something and they're telling us you can't simply do spot repairs. There's a day of reckoning that we have to come to. And that's what my entire campaign is based on is realistically bringing that day of reckoning so that we understand intelligently what's in front of us. We can't continue infrastructure denial. It's not a choice of should or could, it's a choice of have to. Thank you, Dan. Okay, look, you cannot have a sustainable city without predictably clean water, okay, and that's threatened. A quarter century of deferred maintenance, as they call it, has led to an increasingly fragile infrastructure. As Richard says, we're playing whack-a-mole and we've got to demand better. Now, I entered the race because my fear that Montpelier was not addressing the water crisis within the urgency. And I told, well, we have a 50 year plan for doing this. Yeah, right, okay. That's another exercise in kicking the can down the road and leaving the next generation to deal with it. I've actually reviewed that plan, okay. It's an $83 million plan. And it actually does a little more than emergency repairs until 2040 when then it will kick into something more resilient. By that time, most of us will be gone and the whole system will just continue to deteriorate. The supposed plan has no actual priorities of locations because as Richard noticed, we don't actually know where the pipes are, okay. So now the state is telling us we have to fix a whole other dynamic, which is the pressure of the system because it's running at 200 pounds per square inch while designed to operate at 90. Now, Montpelier has promised the state remediation plan by May 1st that I really will be looking forward to seeing what that says. But the pipes keep bursting. We're already spending over 1.3 million a yearly cost just for the repairs. It's time to have us for us a complete picture of what's going on with our water system and we need a plan, not a 50 year fantasy. Thank you, Jack. Thank you. The answer is yes, we should spend more money in the future and we will spend more money in the future. Our current expenses for the water system are based in part on our repayments of the bond that we invested into established the water treatment facility up in Berlin. The payments on that bond are about to fall off the budget and when that happens, it has always been planned and it continues to be the plan that we will invest the amount that we're paying on the bond to more maintenance and improvement of the water system. We are engaged right now in a study of the hydraulic needs of the water system. I've heard people talk about, well, we need to get a report within six months about what the state of the water system is. In fact, we've contracted with an outside engineering firm and that's to do a hydraulic study and that study is about 90% complete now. So we will have a report well before the timeline that we've talked about. And finally, the entire system is mapped contrary to what people have said. Thank you. So going along with that, what do you propose we should do about our city paving policy? This question came in from Steve Cease in Montpelier who lives on Northfield Street and he asked, what is your reaction to the proposed city budget for paving? How do you decide which of the worst streets get fixed after the good streets? And again, multi-part question. Let's just stop there. There's a couple of other questions in there. And we will start with Dan. Okay. If one thing Montpelier was in agreement on is the quality of its streets, which have inevitably been picked now I'm lucky enough I lived on Northfield Street which was a mess, but a few years ago it was rebuilt. It's now lovely, but going up North Street it is a mess as many of our streets. As I've told others, however, I think it's a priority. I believe that we're actually facing a future in which we have to make some hard choices about our dependency on the car to get around. I know this doesn't endear me to many folks. But we're going to have to start thinking about other ways of doing things. So if it's a choice in our funding between fixing the streets and fixing the water system and going for the water system and I'll drive on bumpy roads. On the other hand, if we're in a situation where we want to keep some level of good maintenance going, then we have to be a lot more clear about what we're doing because what they did on Northfield Street was actually go down to the bed and build up. What they've done other places is basically skim over the top and then put a new layer on, which works for about two years and then starts going up again. So this is where we're going to have to have a hard discussion within the city, not just the council, about what are we demanding for our road system and how much do we want to pay for it compared to the other needs that we've got to face? Thank you. Jack. Thank you. Over the last several years through the administrations of the last two mayors, we've had a goal of expanding the amount of money we've put into our street maintenance program so that we can bring streets to the level that people in Montpelier expect and doing that we have been quite successful. As Dan said, we completely rebuilt Northfield Street which has not only provided a good driving surface but also has provided upgraded and stable and secure water and sewer systems underneath. We've, in the last few years, repaved College Street. We've repaved Main Street and we've repaved a number of neighborhood streets. It's not everything that we need to do. This year, we were looking at our budget and we were thinking, well, what can we do? How much can we afford in light of the other demands that we have? And we're not quite back to the level we want to be but we want to keep putting money into it. And I should also say that we devoted most of the first year's worth of ARPA money that we got from the federal government into paving and capital maintenance. Thank you. So this question comes from, oh my gosh, Richard. Okay, we're gonna move to audience questions very soon. But you get a chance. I'm so sorry, Richard. Yes, go ahead about the paving. My wife and I have actually addressed the question of North Street paving. We stopped driving to Mary Hooper's house. It's very difficult to get there. But on a more serious note, the paving budget under John Holler was much different than the paving budget the last two years. I mean, that's a statement of fact. John Holler's council was working towards a constant replacement policy that was displaced. And I'll make one more elaboration on Jack to help him. The ARPA money on East State Street is also going fundamentally for sewer and water as well when that project happens. It's not simply straight paving. It's a lot more elaborate than that. But in terms of street paving, finding the specific funds for that within the existing budget, the Elks Club has $250,000 projected for fine detail planning when they haven't even discussed feasibility yet. If you were to take feasibility and study it, it would cost about 25,000. I propose that 225,000 be taken from the elaborate planning that could be done later if it's feasible and put it straight into street funding this year, paving funding this summer. That is when Jack talked about budget priorities, that was a budget priority rather than the street paving was advanced planning on the Elks Club. Thank you. So I have one more question and then we're gonna take some questions from the audience and just a reminder for folks in the room. If you haven't yet written down a question, you can hand it to Ed Flanagan. Ed, can you? He's in the back and then he'll bring those up to me. So this, and then I have, then we'll start asking what folks in the room wanna know. So the last question on my list for now, all three of you running for mayor this year are in the same demographic, older white men. And if elected, how would you use your privilege as being a person in that demographic to make more room for and lift up the voices and leadership of women, folks of color, young people, LGBTQIA plus people, and working class people in order to truly diversify city government. And we'll start with Jack for this one. Thank you. That's a good point. When I came on the council, I think that Donna Bate and I were the only members of the council who were not in our 30s and there's been a bit of a change since then. I support bringing more people into city government. I've supported the younger members of council who've run and have made great contributions on the council, Ashley Hill who was here before me and Lauren Hurl who I sat beside for many years until I moved to the middle chair. We're gonna continue to do that. We've done a number of things already to address this. We have created the social and economic justice advisory committee and that has done great work to address people feeling left out of their city government. We have adopted a policy to pay people stipends for serving on city committees because we recognize there are sometimes financial barriers to serving on committees. And finally, one thing that I would like to do is we always have vacancies on committees. What I'd like to do is have like a city committee fair where all the city committees and we would reach out to the major employers to say we want people to come and serve on our committees. Thank you. Richard. I can't see bringing more people into the city government when our population is stable right now, if that's what they were talking about. We don't need more city employees. But in terms of our city and making sure that everybody feels that they have their say, no matter who they are actually, that comes down to city council and that comes down to how city council communicates with people and with all due deference to Donna, that comes down to the two minute rule, which I think that when you've heard a presentation from one of the subcommittees and you step up to speak and you have two minutes and council people are told not to respond to you, that simply has a chilling effect in terms of your feeling that the city government is open to you. I've also felt like again in communications, a city council meeting happens and the results aren't even published online by the next Friday. There's a communications breakdown between the city council and the rest of us and I feel like as mayor, it's one of my few duties. I break the vote, I break the tie, I show up at meetings representing the city and I am the person who establishes the protocol that opens up city council meetings to everyone and I intend to do that if I'm elected mayor. Thank you and before we go to Dan, I just wanna give Jack just about 30 seconds to respond just because I thought I heard you say you were looking for a fair for city committees. Absolutely, we're not talking, this isn't new employees, this is making sure that all the members of the public get to participate in all the committees that often what they discuss on committees winds up coming before the council as policy questions and so we need to hear from everybody. Okay and those are volunteer committees. Yes. Okay, Dan. All right, I could tell you just preparing for these debates, okay. There's just a whole lot of stuff you need to know in order to be responsive, it's a constant learning curve. Now if you're a young family, okay, and you have to worry about the kids, the budget, everything, being able to take the time for doing a city job like being on the council or being mayor is a lot of commitment. So yes, it tends to, not always, but it tends to flow up to us old folks who have that extra time. Also we have that commitment because we have not been building a system that engages people to be involved. I agree with Richard on the two minute rule, I think that's a problem. But I also think we need other mechanisms that are going to engage our people in discussions of the key issues. And I have some ideas on that that would say, I'd like to see expanded, we'll call them town halls where both the mayor and the council would be able to listen to people on critical issues and over enough period of time that they can be brought in and actually have an impact on what's being thought. I'd like to see us being able to look at the ways of recruiting young people. And unfortunately, I think the city committees are not working the way they should. And I think we need to rethink them so that they're more conversant with the challenges the city's gonna face. And I'll leave it at that for now. Thank you. Okay, it's now time to see if we have any questions from our audience who's here in the room. What did we do? Yes, okay. Thank you. All right, and this doesn't have to be the end folks. If anything else crops up, just hand your question to Ed. Okay. How will you make Montpelier more affordable? Property, taxes specifically, and rent. That's what's written down here. So let me look at my chart here. We're gonna start with Richard for this question. I don't believe that rent control is gonna work here. If it doesn't work in other cities, I don't think it'll work here. In terms of rent, there's very little that the city can actually do, except for perhaps restrict work in our planning committee to make it possible for more rental side units and things like that. On the margin, we can increase the number of existing structures that have side rental units on the margin. But unless you're able to really flood with brand new apartment housing, the market rate is gonna be the market rate. I mean, these things are under tremendous demand when an apartment opens, it closes very quickly. I don't wanna overstate what government can do on this in terms of property taxes and the like. I fully agree that new projects need to be stopped, but projects that don't have feasibility that are already in the pipeline, we need to take a serious look at those and like, and I'll name names, like the Elks Club and like Confluence Park. We need to sit and revisit things, and it shouldn't be all we voted on this years ago, we need to stay with it forever. That's just not good governance. Thank you. Let's see, Jack, the question is, how will you make a pillar more affordable and specifically around property taxes and rents? Scarcity creates rent increases. It's as simple as that. We have right now a rental vacancy rate of 1% or lower. There's nothing that's restraining upward pressures on rents, and there's no way to prevent that as long as we continue to have the limited amount of housing we have now. So we need to build more housing. We need to build more housing for homeowners, so they can afford to buy houses in the city, and we need to build housing for renters so they can afford to rent houses in the city. Doing that, I think we can expand the city of Montpelier or the population. I think that we, for 100 years or so, our population has been around 8,000. I think we could easily accept a population increase over a period of a few years of up to 10,000 without a change in any of the quality of life that we all love in Montpelier. And that's more taxpayers, more people to support the expenses of providing services to the city. And housing development and economic development will help meet the budgetary needs of our community. Thank you. Dan. Oh, how many, oh, I only have a minute and a half. The problem we have with affordability is that we're living in inflationary times, and it's not about monetary policy. So prices are gonna go up on our food whether we want it or not. Okay, they're gonna go up on the energy whether we want it or not. So the areas we have to control is basically what we're spending on city government, okay, and what we're spending on housing. Now, as long as we're living in a so-called free market, housing prices will continue to go up because there's no other alternative for doing that. Bernie Sanders has basically just released a new book on the failures of capitalism, so I recommend that because I think we're gonna have to start looking at more socialized responses on how we do things. We don't have a mechanism for doing that right now. The city only can operate in local property taxes and zoning, so we have a very limited palette from which we can work. On the other hand, we can start looking at some hard things perhaps with other cities about what we're limited to or not limited to in non-owner occupied investment housing. We can start looking at what's available to people like I said, whether it's VCFA or downtown offices, that we could get stuff happening quickly. 10 or 15 year plans is not going to solve the inflation problem for people. So we have to start looking also at what is the city expenses? How many administrators do we really need? How many other special projects do we need in order to keep the city functioning at the level we all want to have it happening in? So this is a big problem, it's one that's not gonna go away and it's gonna require constant communication within the city to talk about this, thank you. Thank you, Dan. Okay, this person asked two, I'm gonna start with one and if we have time, we'll come back to the second one. Can you please respond to John? This assumes you've read this article that appeared in the bridge. It was John Holler's commentary about infrastructure spending. Did everybody here read that? Okay, so essentially he spoke about he felt that the city government had a plan that's gone off track on infrastructure spending. And so we will start with Jack. Thank you. Building a budget is a struggle, it's a constant balancing act. It's refreshing to hear someone say, well we need to spend more money on some particular part of the budget because mostly in our budget hearings, we don't hear a lot but mostly what we hear from people is you're spending too much. And they're not even saying redirect it from one thing to another, they're just saying you're spending too much and don't raise our taxes. The policy that the city council has followed under Mayor Ann Watson is essentially the policy that John Holler established of maintaining investments in infrastructure over the years. We lost revenue, we lost a lot of revenue when the pandemic hit and you'd be surprised. We lost, we zeroed out our parking budget completely, you'd be surprised that that's a significant contributor in our budget but it is. So we're doing what we have to do, we're not up all the way to where we want those investments to be but we're on track to doing that. Thank you. Sure, I thought John brought up some interesting points. I noticed that the city manager two days later had a rather impassioned response back. So obviously he had ticked off some issues that were critical. Part of what he was saying is that there was a question about how we're managing those monies that are being assigned to various projects. And I think that is actually a fair question that has to be looked at because I believe we do have a situation where there's some critical infrastructure needs like the roads, et cetera, that really require more in-depth management review than what they've been getting. Now we've had changes in public works department, et cetera, so I can understand where some of that happens. The other part of it is that we are requiring a, we've given up, I'm sorry to say, some of these management things by kind of a diffuse management structure where this people do this thing, this people do this thing and there's not a centralized control that thinks about what is the budget that is being required. Okay, and so we have, and no concept that actually people are hurting. So the 7% increase in the budget is basically saying, well, everybody just can pay more because it's Montpellier and they can pay more. So it's now time to actually start looking and making hard choices about where are we doing things. If the infrastructure is failing, that's our critical point, that's what the city has to do and we don't have any choices. Thank you. Richard. Yeah, I read John Hollers. In fact, I referenced it a few questions ago. John was totally right. The path that his council set was not an easy path and it was abandoned by Ann's councils, partially abandoned. We were furloughing people during those years. We had federal funds coming in during those years. It's not as if, oh my goodness, the city fell apart during those years. We've, in terms of paving, we simply have abandoned that goal. It's black and white, the numbers are real. We're spending less than what had been projected and that just given the amount of need in the community, that's just not right. And in terms of under the ground, we have not done the systematic studies. The hydraulics will tell us about the water pressure, but it won't tell us about the condition of the pipes in every part of the town and it won't tell us about the locations, which are in some parts of town strictly guesswork. In Harrison, when they did the work, the work was paused in three, for two to three weeks because they couldn't find the pipes. They couldn't find the pipes on Northfield. That is not my speculation. That is what happened. I'm gonna give Jack 30 seconds to respond to the comment about abandoning that. It's just not true. It's just not true. We have continued to pursue the funding levels, the appropriation levels, established under Mayor Holler. And as I said, even if we'd had the money during the pandemic, we didn't have the workers. We brought the workers back, but we continue to do the paving and we will continue to do that paving in the future. I'm hoping that in the next year and the year after that, we'll be able to get back up to the appropriate budget levels we need. Okay, thank you. Okay, we have a great question here. There have all been good questions. This one is a totally different tack. Why would you want to live in a city where you were the mayor? So we'll start with Dan for this one. Sure, well, because I'm the mayor. It's gotta be great. The fact is, I think you wanna live in a city where I'm the mayor because it's a city that's now going to look forward rather than in the past. It is now going to be understanding that there are going to be challenges coming down the line and the city is going to be mobilized to meet those challenges. Rather than assuming that tomorrow was gonna look like yesterday, we're gonna take a hard look at our future and figure out how to manage that challenging future in such a way that we're going to be safe, humane and comfortable here in. Okay, this is not easy stuff, it's hard stuff because we don't know what's coming down the line but we have seen enough whether it's bare ground, unfrozen in February that says, oh, climate change I guess is here. Whether it is the number of workers who cannot find housing in town that says, oh my, we have a problem, that we actually have to start talking about real problems and stop talking about pretend solutions. And that's going to mean that a city with me as mayor is going to actually start paying attention to that and paying attention to how do we engage the entire citizenry in the problem solving in town, not just leaving everything to the city council because that's unfair in a small town like this. Thank you. Thank you. Let's see, Richard. I have an advantage that others don't have. My wife owns the pet shop and basically she sees people from out of town each and every day and talks to them and she knows why they came here, what they love about Montpelier, what brings them here, what is the Montpelier that they think we are and they think we're a pretty darn cool place besides being the only capital without a McDonald's. I mean, basically they see a community as we don't see ourselves and she brings that home to me every night. That's what I would like to see Montpelier be. I'd like to see us be what they think we are and what we could be. This is not the Montpelier when we moved here 20 years ago and things change but that wasn't the Montpelier they think we are either. The Montpelier they think we are is a friendly place, more friendly than others, where people care about each other and where the streets are good. Basically it's a great place to be. Of course they're not here after nine o'clock at night or seven o'clock and looking for something to do but that's a wholly different question for another 90 seconds. Thank you. Jack. That's an interesting question. I was calling some voters on the phone just yesterday and I talked to someone who's a young woman who hasn't been here. Well, I guess she's been here all her life but quite young, less than I've lived here. We'll put it that way. And she said that she thinks that Montpelier is not the way it was that she remembered that it used to be more like a family. And I said, you know, I think you're right. I think that what we see when we have a family is a group of people who help each other out and take care of each other. And I think that that's what we wanna see in our city and part of what involves in that is doing the planning to address the issues that we're faced with. And as we confront who's gonna be the mayor of Montpelier, one of the things we consider is who's the one who's actually been doing the work who actually knows how city government works and who has been doing the planning for our needs now and in the future. And that's why people would like to have me be and myself included be the mayor of the city. Thank you. Okay, switching gears. This person asks, are there big problems with our current city manager, city council form of municipal government? And let me consult the magic chart. We're gonna start with Jack. We've got, we've always got a challenge of figuring out how we're gonna provide services in a city. Given the fact that we're a city of 8,000 that grows by 20,000 during the day or it did before the pandemic, but it still grows significantly during the day. So we have a substantial need for services beyond what you would think for a city of our size. In my view, the most effective way and most efficient way to do it is to have a professional city manager and professional department heads and professional city employees who know what they're doing, who are know from top to bottom the operations of each one of the city departments and can provide those services. What the city manager does is sit down with the city council, listens to the priorities established by the city council every year and we do work on developing our priorities every year. And then the city manager takes his lead from the city council and does what we tell them to do, applies the priorities for the city. And I think that's been a very effective way for the city to operate during the 40 years that I've been here. Thank you. Dan. Unfortunately, our weak mayor, strong manager system leaves a real problem as far as the capacity for either the mayor or the council actually to do things because both are so dependent on the managers feeding them information, creating the decision system. We are, I think the state in general, okay? And this has to do not just with Montpelier. The only town that has a strong, two towns that have strong mayor seems to be Rutland and Burlington. So we've got to then start looking at, okay, what is the actual role for the mayor? Is it just to sit and preside at meetings, follow Robert's rules of order and hear when something has to come on the agenda? Or is it something where the mayor has to, and the city council have to be more an appropriate part of the actual decision making? I've been watching now for the time I've been here. And the city manager basically gives a seven decisions to the council the Friday before the meeting, has a meeting with each city councilor before each meeting, and basically lays out the agenda of what needs to be done. And it's up to the city council then to sort of rubber stamp what's being asked for. I think there needs to be other ways of the citizen engagement and the creation of power within the city so that there's a wider variety of inputs than just the manager's management of what the agenda is. Thank you. Richard. Well, this is gonna be one of the rare cases where I agree with Jack. I agree with Dan. I think those are perfectly valid, particularly Jack's description of the current system, but the current system depends on oversight. And it depends on meaningful oversight of the city manager in the departments. And that's where I believe we've gone wrong. And I think that the pinnacle of oversight lacks oversight is the streets and the infrastructure and the idea that you would have this whack-a-mole and the city manager would talk for a couple of minutes about what construction is going on where. That's not oversight. When we had the discussions with the state over the water pressure and went in to talk to Bill, as you should have, there were no minutes of those meetings. There's no emails back and forth. Bill addressed the council afterwards in a very extensive discussion after the fact. That's not meaningful console oversight. The strong city manager works when there's oversight, when there's strong oversight. And that is the element I think has been missing. And that's the element that I see my role as mayor being. It's not grand vision. It's making sure that the city is properly, see oversight is properly done. Thank you. Okay, this person asks if the Country Club Road property is developed, a robust, consistent and regular transit system will be needed between there and downtown? How can that be achieved? And we're gonna start with Richard for this one. Well, we currently have my ride that Dan put together. But on the other side of that, again, that's dependent on state funding. We're right back to the state again on that. I would say, let's expand that discussion. Not only a transit system, we have to educate those kids. If we have a significant influx of new kids, we could possibly handle it at Union. We certainly could handle it at the high school. That middle school is the point. That's the choke point. You can't expand that middle school. If you're planning for a significant number of school-aged children, you have to plan for how that middle school can be moved. We did that back in 2005. We planned to close the middle school, move them to the high school and expand the elementary school. The price tag for that inflation adjusted would be $30 million. That is a hefty tag. I don't know what the price tag for adequate transportation would be. I have no earthly clue. Okay. Dan. Yes, I do think we need to rethink our transportation system a lot. After the design competition a few years ago, we had this one wonderful winning design that actually showed a linear city, going down along the Wenusi all the way to the traffic circle there. Key to that was a reintroduction of the streetcar system, if you will. Now, then one local entrepreneur in Burlington, David Blittersdorf, went off and bought some Budcars, which could operate on that. Well, where you get into it is that actually those would work. They could become a very viable Barry to Waterbury rail connection. But the state doesn't like that because the rail system that now operates on there only wants to operate with their granite trains. They do not want any public transit operating. This is because we have a state that's dependent on roads and cars. You can look at what the governor makes his money at and you can see why that might be reasonable. So if you want a transit system, it would have to be multimodal, okay? I believe a train could work from Burriam up here, which would get people from that point into town. I then believe we need my ride, which would be a vast expansion of the three port buses that we've got now and have something that would be much more with many smaller units that would actually operate much more efficiently. But that's a whole question that requires state input and we're not allowed to do that right now. Thank you. Jack. Public transit is essential. I have talked to many people who rely on my ride regularly for their day-to-day transportation needs. Most people find it works very well for them. Some people who, for one reason or another, do not find it works well for them. And I think those people can't be left behind. I think we need to address that. We clear, I don't see us. I went over to Barry. I went for a ride on the Budcars with Dan, in fact, and the mayor a few years ago. And I think that's a very attractive idea for a commuter line between Barry and Waterbury, possibly even up as far as Burlington. I don't really see us establishing streetcars from here to Country Club Road, but I certainly agree that we will need a robust public transit to meet the transportation needs of the people living on Country Club Road. And I'm gonna follow that question up. We have one more audience question, but I just wanna get to this one that was sent in by Rebecca. And because it's related to transportation, she asks, will you push, as mayor, will you push Green Mountain Transit to re-establish the Hospital Hill bus route? We need a regular dependable bus route from downtown to the hospital, the Berlin Mall, Shaw's, and back to downtown. And then the question goes on, my ride may work for folks who don't live on a regular bus route, but it is not reliable enough to get people where they need to go on time. So that was a comment, but also a question, will you be pushing for that regular bus route to Hospital Hill and around? And, oh my gosh. I don't know about, my magic solution is a little muddle, so we'll start with Dan and we'll go around. Maybe. The idea is that, yes, I understand, people, elderly people, people with disabilities, find my ride difficult to use because it isn't as predictable as before. They say, well, I don't have a smartphone, I don't have this, and they may be true. So you have a small number of people, as Jack mentioned, who do not use the my ride efficiently and it should be reconsidered how that could happen. Problem is the state only puts as much money into the system as it put into the previous bus system. So if we're gonna try and operate something that's both on demand and have some fixed route, there's gonna have to be an expansion of the bus service, of the services that are available. And that's not Green Mountain Transit's decision, that's the state's decision. And as I've often said before, V-Trans is where you can take good ideas and send them to die. Where we need to start looking at other options that we could have for creating something that would allow the state to then have, once an hour up to a bus, up to the mall and back. But otherwise, if we're gonna expand my ride, there has to be other ways of organizing it, financing it, et cetera, because it's not gonna be effectively done with Green Mountain Transit. And I think that's one of those areas of inventiveness that our city could be a leader in, but we're gonna have to take some effort to make that happen. Thank you, Jack. I know people rely on my ride to even get up to Hospital Hill. Not everybody, but it still works for people. I think that for access to the hospital and the shopping up there, there are two main problems. One is, what do we do for the people who cannot realistically use my ride? And for whatever reason, they need to be listened to, and we need to figure out what we can do to provide those services. The other thing is that given the low density of the population and the small population, people sometimes have to be up there, particularly at the hospital and the medical offices, later than any service we can predict is gonna be running. And so we need to address both of those to meet those needs, and I think it takes study before we can say what the absolute best option is to do that. Thank you. Richard. I'll create space for another question. I concur with both of them. Okay, we're actually at time, well, we're not at time, but we have just enough time left for your closing remarks. So I think we'll do the closing remarks in the opposite order that we did the opening remarks. So we'll start with Richard. Do you think Richard, are these two minutes or 90? These are 90. Okay, just wanna make sure. I wanna open by saying that it's been my absolute pleasure to be in the same platform with Dan, with Jack, people I've known for a long, long time, very thoughtful people. And a vote for Jack or a vote for Dan is a perfectly valid vote. I think that I'm running for a reason. You can listen, after you've listened to this, you know that there are three distinctly different paths. You can stay the course, you can go into comprehensive visionary planning, but what I'm saying is the problems of pressing and the solutions need to be coming very quickly, particularly in the infrastructure. We simply cannot go at the pace that we've gone at. That is, we can't do paving at the budget that we have for this summer. We need to find extra funds. It's very clear, it's clear to everyone that what we're doing isn't working. And staying the course just doesn't seem prudent. So you're stuck with two paths. Either you're stuck with a long-term vision path or you're stuck with the path of let's address the most pressing problems immediately. And when we do that, there's gonna be a lot of hard discussion. I can promise that and I can promise that your water bills are gonna spike. We've just put it off far too long. That's the truth. And I think that that kind of truth, that facing truth is something that Montpelier will benefit from in the long run as well as in the short run. Thank you. Jack. Thank you. Before I went on the council, I spent many, many, many nights and many, many hours sitting in council meetings, listening to presentations of various kinds and advocating before the council on housing in many other areas. At one point I was saying I'd probably spent more time in city council meetings than anyone who was not a member of the council. And I think that's probably true. But even at that, what I found when I got on the council was there's so much that I did not know and it really was a learning process to get on the council to see what we're faced with and issue after issue after issue and how we would address those issues. How we would do something as simple as allocating the time that we could spend on each of the items on the agenda. And how we can have a mayor who can, how we can establish a collegial atmosphere so that people on the council can work with the mayor, with the city manager as a team to get the work done of the city and not descend into bickering or unproductive discussion. Because of my years of experience on the council, I think I'm uniquely qualified to lead the city to complete the projects we're already working on and to meet the challenges that face us in the future. And I hope you will all vote for me on March 7th. Thank you, Dan. Okay, well, like Richard, I'd like to offer my compliments to my fellow candidates here who are willing to give up their time and provide their service so that Montpelier can be honorably governed. But I believe this is a crucial moment for our city where old assumptions on the ways of doing things is not sufficient to the challenges that are coming our way. And this approach is really hard to state in a state that is famous for, well, shall we say not embracing change, but the changes are coming whether we want them or not. Up until now, most of us in Montpelier have not demanded a robust response to growing challenges because we're comfortable and tend to assume that our tomorrows are gonna look much like yesterday. However, this winter reminds us that climate change is real and here inflation will continue to fray our downtown merchants and our personal economics. Our infrastructure is much more fragile than we wanted to admit. And our assumptions of continued economic growth prevents us from seeing how grand plans for parks and developments are assuming a tax base that may start shrinking. So the list of challenges just keeps growing. My mayoral campaign is aimed at asking difficult questions about our city's future and the choices that we should be making while we still have the time to adapt. It is time for a new more disciplined approach to the challenges of municipal planning, finance and governance, but this is hard stuff. But I do believe that exploring with you, the citizens, the difficult public policy choices now can help spark a municipal commitment to building a humane and resilient future for all of us. And that's why I'm asking for your vote and thank you very much. Thank you. I wanna thank all of you. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Jack. Thank you, Richard. Vote. Thank you, everybody who showed up here in the middle of the day on a Monday. And thanks particularly to the Rotarians, the Montpelier Rotary Club. Voting is on March 7th at Montpelier City Hall from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Registered voters can request to file or file for mail-in ballots from the Vermont Secretary of States. My voter page at mvp.vermont.org. Thank you for joining us. The best thing you can do to protect the democratic process is to vote.