 Testing, testing, testing, testing, testing. That's so I can. Okay, I'll just check. I can't hear anything if we are supposed to. Nothing yet. It looks like just the CEDO NPAs has audio. Can you hear anybody yet? No, I just heard Stephen. I heard you. I'm asking you because I don't hear anything either. Yeah, no, I'm not hearing anything. Matt Hulbert is muted. He needs to unmute. It seems. I think they're trying to get it through the CEDO official NPA one, but that is not working. So... If you could just keep speaking up. Yes. Yes, we can hear it. We heard it for a second, but nothing anymore. Is everyone having issues hearing online still? Yeah, especially when we're getting wireless mics. Yeah. Yes, we are, Matt. We can hear you, Matt. Thank you. Nothing now, Matt. I'm going to keep the laptop running. You're going to do it the old fashioned way. Oh, Matt, you're still on mute. I'm going to turn quickly to the folks on Facebook and ask them to announce their names and their works on Facebook, on Zoom, whatever the heck this thing is. Olivia. I'll go first, but it looks like, yeah. I'm Olivia Taylor. I'm a member of the Steering Committee in Ward 7. We're Kathy and Brendan Kelleher in Ward 4. Steve. Steve Hamlin, Ward 7. My other, Olivia. Muffy Milans in Ward 7. And Darren. Hi, everybody. Darren Springer, Ward 7 and with Burlington Electric Department. Thank you, Darren. I think that's everybody on Zoom. And I think we have technology up in the room. So we're going to keep this train moving. Let's take five or 10 minutes and I will put it out to anybody in the audience, community announcements or comments. Should they come? I think if there's a microphone in the audience, are the microphones working in the audience? They're not at all. It's on YouTube. The microphones are for channel 17, not for Zoom. Right. So everybody in the Zoom in here. So I'm collecting my people on Zoom. And Zoom can hear from Galeco. But we have to enable our live calls for the Zoomers to hear us. Just one. I'm attempting to try and make it better. So we can hear people from Galeco. Yeah. So it'll pour people from Galeco. Is there anyone on the table? Whoever is the... Okay, announcements or comments? Everyone. I am from the Conservation Board, but I'm here today from the DOG task force, which is made up of a few members from the City Parks and Rec Department, a few community members who are not at all city employees. And then I am the lone member from the Conservation Board. The DOG task force was formed, I think about a year and a half ago before I actually joined the Conservation Board. And it was spurred from comments and feedback from community members across the entire city who have had run-ins with off-leash dogs who were run by dog owners who were not following the leash laws in certain parks across the city. When the city started looking at this issue and the DOG task force came together, they realized that part of the problem here was that only about 1% of the parks within the city are off-leash areas. And those are the ones up at Star Farm and the park down at the waterfront. So one of the initiatives that we're working on to try to improve outcomes for both community members who are not walking their dogs and the folks who do walk their dogs is to propose a pilot program of new off-leash dog areas within the city. We are currently running a survey for everyone in the city. I'm here talking to our words forum seven and different folks in the task force have been talking to people in other words across the city. So we're looking for as many people to complete the survey as possible to give us feedback on the proposed areas. The survey comes with a map that we've worked on with GIS. So we can zoom all the way in to see the exact boundaries of each of the proposed areas. And there are also some questions in the survey to go on our feedback. I was supposed to have printouts to give to everyone with the link to the survey but I don't have a printer and I've been working my day job all day. So what you can do to complete the survey is go to enjoyberlington.com which is the parks and rec site. And there's a bright red banner across the top of the website with a link to the survey. I think that's running for at least the next month. So you might actually see me in the next concept PA. And I think that's about everything from me. But please reach out to me at K.Tansley at drilling.tv. I think it's over tomorrow. If you have any questions but you can also submit questions on the survey. I'm going to try somebody else in Millerson. Sarah Carpenter. Well, I did one like a mega product. I got lots of feedback on the survey and I honestly do appreciate it. And I've given it to the parks or the culture committee and counselors. I encourage people to do that. I'm gonna try restarting. One thing that is needed and not needed is a little idle. I don't know if it's a yes or no. Like I wanted to know what it was made of. So I hope that has given some consideration. And I found a little lacking in offering alternatives, additional alternatives for fence parks. It's only one alternative. And I've got a lot of feedback that people would like to work fence parks. And where would that be? I'll pass that on to the counselors. But I want to talk to them. And I guess then I will announce as a member of the parks and culture committee that we'll be hearing from the dog task force tomorrow and we'll meet in 645 Point Street. And if you want to make public comment or have a field opportunity to do that there, you want to comment on the dog park or anything else that I would do. Thanks, Mark. Jeff Kamstam? No. Anybody on Zoom in our audience? Raise your hand or speak. No, so we're going to keep moving. So let's just jump right in. It's 7.15. We're right on schedule. Again, we're going to keep it just a very round table, open discussion. We have five topics of conversation this evening. Three were covered in last month's meeting and those were the Burlington School Board budget Proposition Zero and the community oversight for the police department. Tonight we're going to discuss the carbon tax, redistricting, legal resident voting, qualifications for voters, and that will be discussed mostly under the redistricting and then ranked choice voting. So let's start with the carbon tax and Mark Barlow. You are the lead. I think you can stay there with a microphone. Well, the sake of Zoomers. Do they need to come? Does he need to come? Okay. Well, come on over there. I'm told Zoom is not hearing us. Do we have our Zoom participants? We do. Because I have Darren Springer who has kindly agreed to join us as well. I'm just going to move this right over. So I will just tell you about the ballot item. Essentially, we have a carbon pollution impact fee for new construction. So this would be new construction. It doesn't affect existing homes. And it only will apply to large existing commercial and industrial buildings greater than 50,000 square feet if they do upgrades. And is there that feedback? Because I might just have to deal with that. Unfortunately, could you speak into the microphone? I can do that. So the notable thing is that the impact fee will be set by ordinance. If this passes, it'll be up to $150 per ton to sell. But it could be at a level lower than that. And that's something that we had asked for going forward to be able to set that appropriately at the time that ordinance is created. And oh, the other notable thing is the impact fee could be used when paid by these large industrial and commercial buildings to do instead in lieu of paying an impact fee they could do. They could do like efficiency, program. I guess there's like a few different things they could do. I'm just reading my small print. They can basically do energy efficiency. So that they can save energy. So Darren, do you want to weigh in on this? Thanks, Mark. The one-one. I think that was a good summary. I would just mention. We're not hearing. You gotta turn up the house, so for Darren. Can you hear me now? Darren, just speak so we can hear you. Testing, testing, one, two. No problem. No, thanks. I think that was a great summary, Mark. And I would just add that this proposal was developed over really a period of months with Burlington Electric and the Department of Permitting and Inspections working with building owners, working with energy design professionals, building managers, trying to come up with something that would be cost effective and serve to advance the city's net zero energy goals. So mainly just wanted to join because I'm a Ward 7 resident and if there were any questions that I could help with, I'm happy to. But thanks for that opportunity. Then the one thing I'll say what I was looking for in the ballot language earlier is that the building payers could use the, in lieu of paying the impact fee, they could use it for projects that would have, it would result in greenhouse gas emission reductions in their buildings or facilities. Where else at now? Microphones are working. So Matt, you can hear me, I'm trying to hear you. So if you want to speak to your microphones, I think we're all good. James, test real quick, ask them if they can hear you. Okay, this is the test. I'm gonna turn it down here. All right, Ken Zing, hear me now? Thumbs up, okay, we're good. Thank you very much. Good job, Sam. Thank you, Sam. We're gonna keep rolling. There are a couple of hands in the audience for our conversation. You need my email. Brigitte? Hi, I'm not sure to address this question. Is the impact fee, the price of carbon, and who sets the price of carbon or who sets the price of the impact fee? How is it calculated? Well, the city would set the price, but we would do it based on input from experts. And in terms of the starting price, Darren, I think that we would look to what others of the state and what other communities have done. I think South Burlington and their at Word Nets, they are pricing carbon, is it at $100 a ton right now? Yeah, he's not even- That's correct. That's right. Sarah? Thanks. Either one, but probably Darren. So there are a few people in the community who do not accept the fact that wood or renewable gas is renewable and feel that this should be voted down based on that. Seems to me there's a little bit of a disconnect there, but perhaps Darren, you could articulate that because I think it's concerning. I understand there are scientific arguments around the pros and cons of biomass and its relative greenness. I also understand it to be more green than fossil fuel, but it seems to me to vote down number two, which I personally believe is that forward isn't the right way. And so perhaps you could speak to that. Thanks very much, Sarah. I appreciate that. In terms of what the policy proposal that includes this carbon pollution impact fee does, it doesn't incentivize any particular renewable fuel or technology, it would disincentivize the use of fossil fuel heating systems and other fossil fuel thermal systems in new construction and in these large existing buildings. And then what we're seeing in Burlington, we don't have a lot of wood heating in Burlington at the residential or commercial scale. We're seeing that a lot of folks who are doing upgrades are going to use heat pumps. They're looking at geothermal systems. That's the vast majority of what is going in right now and what would likely be further incentivized by this policy. At the same time, we did hear from a number of different potential stakeholders and design professionals. And not every building has a one size fits all solution. So there may be instances where having renewable gas or having other options being able to utilize district heat, for example, if we can get that to move forward would be the appropriate solution, particularly in buildings where you have a need for steam, process steam, other types of uses that aren't easy to electrify. And so I think that's why the current definition in Burlington ordinance includes a variety of renewable fuels and technologies. The state is looking at doing the exact same thing with the Affordable Heating Act. And at the same time, much of the work that's happening is really around electrification, really around heat pumps, geothermal systems. And of course, as the municipal electric company, we're really proud to support those systems. Let's go to Jeff. Yes, my question, and forgive me, I'm struggling to formulate this question, but I wanna go back to what Birch had asked about fee pricing. And Darren, you did mention the clean heat standard and being aware of all the controversy related to the clean heat standard in the legislature and the pricing of carbon. I guess I wanna say that I too am sort of concerned about what sort of a mechanism for pricing carbon is going to emerge in the future. That seems like kind of a very big void of, or issue of uncertainty to me about carbon pricing and the actual sort of cost effectiveness of a mechanism like this. Thanks, Jeff. I guess I should mention that really, this is not intended to be a carbon tax, of course. This is not something where, if it was a tax, everyone would pay it. It would be based on the fuel amount, the permitting process. So this is a much more narrow potential mechanism here that would be really more akin to a development impact fee. For new construction, we have different development impact fees. And I should mention too that the carbon fee is meant to be alternative compliance for a building that looks at the various renewable technologies and fuels. And for whatever reason determines that from a cost or a technical standpoint, it would be more feasible to pay the city the fee than to install those options. So really, it's a not prescriptive approach. It's saying to a building, you can use renewable fuels, you can use renewable technologies, but if you're unable to or not willing to, then there's a fee associated with that that would represent the externalities, the health impacts and the environmental impacts of burning more fossil fuel. There's really good data from the federal government, from the state government about what the types of prices should be. And we've studied that in terms of what other cities are using. And in some cases in Boston and New York, for example, they're using well over $200 a ton for similar policies. As Mark mentioned, this ballot question limits it to up to 150 per ton. But as Mark noted, the council would ultimately set the price based on consideration of a variety of factors, potentially including what other communities like South Burlington are doing and what the state of Vermont is doing. So I think that it would be kind of viewed in that context as one option among many options. Whereas if it was a tax, it would be not an option, it would be a mandatory. So I think there's some interesting distinctions there. Borgette, did you have a question? Anyone on the? I'm not seeing any hands. Do we have anyone on Zoom that would like to ask a question? Not that we see. Steve, I'm not seeing any hands. I have a couple, but if you'd go. No, go ahead, Matt. I just have a couple of questions. I'm not sure who to direct it to maybe you, Derek. First, just to understand a little bit better, you say this is going to be an impact fee for new construction. Does that mean I build a single family house and there's an impact fee or is that for large scale development, for a 10 story apartment building or commercial building? So for new construction, the policy proposal would apply essentially for all new construction. With one exception that I should mention, which is for multi-unit housing for water heating, that would not potentially kick in until 2026 because we understand from working with the affordable housing community that some of the technology there needs a few more years to develop. But I think, and obviously we don't see a whole lot of single family new home development in Burlington. So really we are looking at in all likelihood multi-unit buildings, commercial buildings. And really what we've seen, what we did in analyzing this is we looked at the capital costs and operating costs of a variety of systems in real building examples in Burlington. And the good news there is that there are a lot of cost-effective options and a number of buildings, even without this policy yet being in place have opted to use heat pumps or geothermal heating and cooling today. So we have real world examples where this is happening, it's working. And the operating costs are actually becoming more favorable as the price of natural gas has increased and the price of electricity has been relatively stable. So yeah, I think it would apply to essentially any new construction project with that one exception that for multi-unit housing with water heating that would not apply until 2026. Is that in lieu of having electric heat or just any new construction? It would be any new construction being required to use renewable technologies or fuels. And so when I say that it would be if you're building a new building and you're putting in a heating system, if you use, certainly if you use electric, that's renewable. And when we talk electric, we mean heat pumps and geothermal, not the old resistance inefficient electric heating, that does not count. Or you could use a conventional system if you procure renewable fuel for it. So if you have a gas boiler, but you're buying renewable gas that would count towards this under the policy as another example. I just have two more questions. I'll try to keep them quick. I work with a lot of investors and developers in my line of work and Burlington is not known for being friendly to build or develop. And what I'm hearing within my community is that, oh God, they've just got one more tax. So how can Burlington stay competitive to attract growth, to increase the tax base and still be adding new impact fees? It seems like it's making it harder to develop. And I'm hearing that it's making it more expensive to develop. I appreciate that concern. And it's definitely something that we looked at and thought about. We have an existing ordinance that the city council has already adopted a requirement for new construction to have a renewable heating system. And that's as of 2021. And we have a number of projects that are going through the process now and complying with that. And so really this is saying that starting in 2024 if this was ultimately adopted, in addition to having a renewable heating system, we would also have renewable for other thermal uses in the building, things like water heating, things like appliances. And we know that this can be done cost effectively. And we know the market's moving in this direction and there are a number of good examples around the community. And so we really want to make sure that that becomes the standard. And we're definitely not acting alone in that regard. South Burlington has adopted a similar renewable heating requirement for new construction. And as was mentioned earlier, there is potential at the state level with this clean heating bill that the state may be moving pretty strongly in this direction as well. So I think it's important to mention that Burlington's not acting alone or in isolation here, but really helping to move along with the market and with other policy development at the local and state level. And then just one last little maybe comment. Someone also mentioned, and again, this goes back to Sarah's question, is wood considered renewable? I'll call out the elephant hiding behind the cocktail little umbrella with a glass in his hand. The McNeil plant, which may only represent, I've heard six, seven, eight, nine, 10% of the electricity used. It burns wood to make electricity. That's right, that's right. So is that making carbon? Yeah, so it's a good question. And I'll mention McNeil is about a third of our electricity in Burlington. The other two thirds, in terms of generation resources, the other two thirds are hydro, wind and solar. So we're one of the few communities in the country that has 100% renewable electricity is supplied to power things like heat pumps and geothermal. It is considered renewable in Vermont. It is considered to be beneficial from a carbon standpoint. We had analysis done on the McNeil plant from BEIC, which runs the Efficiency Vermont program for the state of Vermont and asked them to look at it from a carbon standpoint, compare it to the natural gas plants that run on the New England grid when McNeil is running and count all of the fossil fuel inputs that mean, how do we get wood to the plant? There's some diesel use in terms of bringing it in via train or via truck. So count all of that. Don't count any of the fossil fuel used to extract the natural gas or to pipe it or methane leaks. So give us kind of a worst case from a carbon standpoint and they said it's 85% better from a greenhouse gas emission standpoint than the natural gas that runs. The other interesting thing with McNeil that I've just been looking at is we had analysis done using forest service data of the areas where we harvest in New York and Vermont. And those areas between 2003 and 2020 added 20 million net tons of additional carbon sequestration in live trees. So we're not actually losing forest cover. We're actually gaining carbon sequestration in the areas where we harvest. And that's the biggest thing I would point out with wood. You could do wood energy really poorly and you would be losing carbon and not regrowing trees or you can do it well and sustainably. And I think we have a good argument locally that we're doing it in a sustainable fashion. Thank you and I'm gonna go to Sarah. Well, just I wanna relative your question, Matt, point out that ballot item two is about implementing a carbon tax for buildings over 50,000 square feet. So if you're just gonna build a single family house, we already have ordinances that talk about heating requirements. So ballot item two would not affect you or a developer of a small development. It's really targeted to commercial developments. I think it would replace an existing ordinance that's very much like the South Burlington ordinances now. But yeah, for upgrades, it would only affect, so for all new construction, but it's for only upgrades for these commercial buildings that are 50,000 square feet or bigger. Of those, I know that Darren didn't mention it, but when we were deliberating on this, there's about 80 of them in the city that would be affected by this. And how did those 80 react to this law being implemented? Now, is the chamber chimed in on this or any other business associations? I, yeah, Darren, have you heard of any? I have not had any reach out to me. We worked extensively. If you think about those 80 buildings, a lot of them are gonna be UVM, the medical center, the city, the school district, Champlain College. And we worked extensively with all of those stakeholders as well as some of the other buildings. And we worked through and adopted a number of their considerations. So I don't wanna speak for any of them, but I think they were aware of the city process and they did not weigh in in a negative way. We're right on time. Can it be really quick? Yeah, it's a quick one. Hi, Darren and Mark, thanks both for coming and speaking. This has been a ballot item that I have really struggled to understand. And I don't think I'm quite there yet. And I heard a piece of information this morning that I'm wondering if you could just confirm if it's true because I had no idea. Is McNeil net zero because of the purchase of carbon credits? No, so with McNeil, we don't purchase carbon credits. We look at it as we have four foresters who help to ensure a sustainable supply and they work with the property owners where there's harvesting to ensure a forest management plan that includes a regrowth, includes a diversity of different trees, wildlife habitat. And so that's where I mentioned we're adding net carbon in the areas where we harvest. It's because we're working in that process to make sure that the properties are being managed sustainably and that there's a regrowth with the trees. I would just, if I could take one half a second just to make one additional point relative to McNeil. I know there are a lot of different feelings about McNeil in the community. The one thing I do wanna say is this particular ballot item doesn't really impact how McNeil operates. We're not, if we use more electricity in the community because we have added heat pumps, our plans at Burlington Electric are to look for new solar, wind and hydro in the New England market or existing resources like those. McNeil is gonna operate based on the economics of the New England market. So this isn't going to increase or decrease output at McNeil just if that's helpful. Great information. Thank you. Thank you, Darren. And I'm gonna move on to question number two now which is redistricting. And I will hand the mic over to Mark Barlow City Councilor next to me and introduce Jeff Comstock who is on the ad hoc committee. Go ahead. Go ahead. Okay, so question number three is on redistricting. Redistricting is an exercise we have to go through when as a result of the decennial census, we determined that the number of residents, the variation in the number of residents in the electoral districts which in Burlington are both wards and districts, the difference between the smallest populated ward and the largest populated ward, the net difference between the target adds up to 10%. And we were above that this last census. So we had to go through a redistricting exercise. It's been a long process. I think it took us over a year and a half probably from start to finish. You know, just a little bit of history. We resolved as a council to set up an ad hoc redistricting committee that Jeff served on and others and they came up with a set of sort of community priorities. And they were things like, in addition to the statutory requirements, things like there was an interest in keeping the boundary lines between the new North End and the old North End sort of clear. There was an interest in getting rid of districts which we aren't in this proposal. There was also an interest in having two counselors per ward. This doesn't have that unless you count me as a district counselor as one of the two counselors in each of the two wards I serve. But beyond that, the other thing that we wanted to solve was the ward eight problem as it's called and people call it the salamander ward. It's sort of the misshapen ward that came into existence in 2015 when we had redistricted 13 when we redistricted last time. And it had a high number of sort of non-permanent residents. It's probably like over 70% of it was UVM dormitory. So we wanted to distribute that, fix that population so that it had more stable residents in it. We had had low turnouts and elections and we had hard times staffing even election workers. So that was also a priority. So into the hopper won all of these different things that we wanted. And in addition to those things, we had people that are sort of very protective of their current word boundaries. They identify with their ward just like we all do as New NorthEnders. And so we had to consider that too. And so we had this long process, many, many maps. We ended up with deciding we're gonna do eight wards. And then it was a question whether it was gonna be 16 or 12 counselors. We ended up doing 12 counselors. So we kept the districts. And then the last part of the process, we ended up trying to figure out where we're gonna put the ward boundaries. And we went through that. We ended up with a map in December that we thought was a good map. And then through public hearing process, there were additional adjustments made. And so we have the map that we have before us. I did print out five copies of it, which I'm happy to sort of pass around. I can hold on. You got something better? Hold on a second. Okay, so let's see, Sam, how do I, I got to unshare here. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Okay, so. That's a great graphic. You want to speak to that? Rock on one. I need the other, yeah, I had, I got to get rid of, so how do I get rid of this? Okay. And Jeff, if you think I missed anything in my ad hoc, I'll just close this one for now. We can come back to this. All right, here we go. So yeah, this is. So one of the things I want to say about the New North End in particular is our boundaries did not change. The New North End ends at the railroad underpass, just south of Cambrian Rives, like it does now. What did change is word seven was the smallest word. And so to make it a little bit bigger, we gave it a little bit of word four. So now everything south of Institute Road, on the west side of North Avenue that was in word four is now in word seven or will be upon passage of this. This will take effect once we pass it, it's a charter change, so it has to go to the legislature. Likely it would take effect next year. So with the map that we're looking at up on the screen here, the orange portion is word seven and the green portion is word four. And so from a practical standpoint, Cambrian Rives is currently in word four and under this proposed redistricting, Cambrian Rives will go into word seven. And as Mark mentioned earlier, that's really to try to balance out the population numbers. And if you want, I can throw those up here, those numbers. If you wanted to look at those, is that something? Okay. And I'm sorry, are these current numbers or anticipated in the out years? No, these numbers are current numbers based on the 2020 census. Okay. So that's what the law requires us to base it on the 2020 census. While you're doing that, Jeff, my concern, my thought here is Cambrian Rives is going to be a very high density residence. So we're and growing, yeah. And I think Sarah has the answer to my question. Well, the law requires we use the current census, but it's also important to point out Cambrian will grow, city place will grow, which is effectively word three, UVM campus will probably grow as well. So we don't know which in the next 10 years is going to grow faster. And this is just a sidebar. I intend to bring up a conversation next year that might allow the city to not have to go to the legislature to redistrict and could redistrict based on uneven growth. That at the current moment would not be allowed, but I hope that we can look at that in the future. Okay. So the chart that we have here answers the question about the current distribution of the population with the proposed redistricting. And as you can see, Ward seven down here is still the smallest ward with the, we're the largest negative deviation from the mean or the average population target. And so if Cambrian, for example, if Cambrian rise does grow, Ward seven actually has a fair amount of growth capacity based on the population numbers to avoid forcing another redistricting in the future. So there was, I mean, the city planning office and the council put a lot of work into, as did Mr. Bristow Johnson over there, into devising the boundaries, all the other boundaries to keep these deviation numbers under the 10% minimum. And then the other, do you wanna jump in, Mark? Were you gonna talk about on-campus housing? Yeah, go ahead. Oh, so as I mentioned earlier, one of our goals in the redistricting process was to apportion the on-campus housing, which are essentially UVM dorms are mostly freshmen and sophomores. They're not as engaged in the community as some others are. I think in those dorms, I think, didn't we see 150 had voted or something and one of the recent... Out of 2200. Right. And so all of these dorms were in Ward eight. Geographically, they sort of split along either what's historically Ward six or Ward one. You know, so what we tried to do was, and we ended up having to divide a census block. The census block is the unit that you have to play with in redistricting and our guiding principle is not to divide them if we don't need to. But in the case of the UVM dorms, we actually did, because there's the thing called the athletic campus, which is like around the athletic campus and all the dormitories up there, ends up being the largest census block, I think in the entire state, right? Yeah. 4,400 people in one census block. So we ended up, but we have good dorm counts. So we ended up splitting that up in apportioning dorms either into Ward eight or Ward six and Ward one. And we ended up with this split. So Ward eight still has 53% of the on-campus population. And they include Champlain in that count. But we did do a better job, because Ward eight before was up in the, I think it was 74% or something. It was, it was. So we've done, we accomplished that. And we hope that in addition to that, we added more stable residents to Ward eight. So we're hoping that that will help, we'll know, I guess, it's sort of an empirical exercise and we'll see how this goes. And then we can have another crack at it in 2030 if it doesn't go well. So does anybody have sort of questions about the proposal where we are now? I'm just thinking that in the three summer months, if anything is going to take place in the city, Ward eight is going to be in trouble because everybody's going to be gone from there. I don't know how you could fix that. Just an observation. Well, Robert. Well, I was going to say that the way to fix it is to exactly undo what we did, what I did nine years ago. And there was political things happening. Here happens to be, this is what Ward eight could have been, but it didn't become that because of some last minute, I don't know, politicking, I guess, in the city council. But we ended up putting all of the Redstone campus and all of the athletic campus into Ward eight nine years ago, including all of the Buell Bradley district and which made it super student heavy. We were basically sweeping a problem under the rug. And which was good for everybody else because what we accomplished nine years ago was all the other seven words, 82% of the city got to stay in the same Ward. And everybody liked it, except if you were in Ward eight and they hated it and they had 20% turnout, it was bad. And I had to admit that, but what they did, I mean, it looks gnarly, but it's legit. They carved up that athletic campus into three different wards. I would have maybe done it with two, but they carved it up into three wards, put a little bit of it in Ward one, put a little bit of it in Ward six, put a little bit of it in Ward eight. And so when the students are gone, wards one, Ward six, and Ward eight are gonna see it, but it's better than if it's all in one. It's not perfect and everybody under- It's a solution, I just brought it up. It's what we have to work with, it's where the density of those populations are. And we also are trying to keep our wards sort of compact and meet some of the other requirements. Oops. Do you have anybody with questions on Zoom? I just wanted to say one thing about the Cambrian rise thing. Because, and they pointed out Ward, here's the problem. The new North end is 24% of the city. That's almost one quarter of the city, but not quite. 24% of the city is above Yankee, Medi-Color. What used to be, what's now gonna be the weed store, I guess. But that's 24% of the city now. The problem is that wards four and seven then are the least populated and we had to divide them as equally as we could because whatever was the smaller of the two was going to be the driving factor in this problem of our 10% problem. It turns out it's Ward seven. And then I don't even remember, is it Ward six or Ward eight that are Ward one that's the most populated? But what has to happen is whatever is the smaller of those two wards, wards four and seven, they better not be more than 10% smaller than whatever is the largest of the rest of the wards. And so we had to, drawing that line between Ward four and seven was kind of critical in order to balance that as best as we could. I would have preferred to maybe put Northgate into Ward seven and I think our Ward seven council would have really liked it but it was too many people and would have involved dividing another census block. So the second biggest census block unfortunately is up in my neck of the wards and we're North Shore and Northgate is 1,200 people. Once census block, I do not know what those folks at the Census Bureau are smoking. I'd like to know so that I can stay away from it because there is all sorts of trouble with the way that the lines were drawn for the census blocks. Let's put it that way. We had to cope with it. So I guess just to sort of jump in markets from our very, if I can use the word parochial perspective here in the new North end, as a group we are pretty much the least impacted of everybody else in the rest of the city in terms of how redistricting impacts us on this question. And I pulled this map back up, Mark, if you wanna quickly jump to sort of the citing of polling places. Sure. Question and Sarah, Charter Change Committee was very much involved in that. So if you wanna utilize this map for that conversation then go ahead. Well, what I'll say about it is one of the consideration just as I described earlier, people were very sort of protective of their word boundaries. Well, it seems that people really like where they vote as well and they don't want that to move and what there's been, so there was that and there's also been discussions around even out here in the new North end we were talking about moving from St. Mark's at one point and trying to find a good solution. Generally what we'd like to do is have more flexibility in the citing of polling places. So like for instance, the big question that came up during redistricting was around Edmunds Middle School and that's where Ward six votes. Yeah. It's right here in the middle. Right, they wanted to vote there. And so there were maps where it wasn't part of it. Is it still there now? I forgot this one, this version two map. It's in morning. It's in morning. So if without this, they would not be able to vote in Edmunds Middle School. Ward six would not be able to vote in Edmunds Middle School because there's a, that right now under charter, a polling place must be within the Ward boundaries. And so we wanna give more flexibility so that we can have polling places that are proximate to the Ward, but not necessarily in the Ward. It will help us out here. There's talk if we end up moving out of St. Mark's at some point, we may wanna consolidate all the new North end voting at either, maybe here at the Miller Center, maybe at the new high school when it's built. And so it'll give us more flexibility as well. So the intention behind this ballot item is just to give us the flexibility. And it sort of goes hand in hand with the redistricting exercise so that we can have, once if they both pass, and I don't know what we do if they don't, I guess we find new polling places, but I mean, if the redistricting passes and the other one didn't, but there's no reason to think it won't. These things go hand in hand. And I don't know if Sarah, do you wanna add anything? No, it's pretty straightforward. It's really just to give flexibility. And we didn't want, I didn't want, it to be the total driver of setting a Ward boundary, a building. The language says it should be approximate or adjacent, but we had so many 29 versions of it. And I think at the end of the day with mill and voting, I think in a few more years we're gonna see even less need for eight ballot places. Running a ballot in eight places is expensive. So it just gives us flexibility to look at options. And we actually added language for any of you running for Ward clerk or a specter relation that they will be consulted about the place. And prior to that, I guess we didn't consult you. Yeah, I can't see all the screen, all the Zoom participants. Do you have any questions over there, Matt? From Zoom folks? Do we have, yeah, it's small, but I'm not seeing anybody. Is there anybody on Zoom with a question related to this topic? Raise your hand or speak up. I don't believe so. Do we have any more to cover, gentlemen? Oh, Deb, thank you. Deb Boudin. Hi everybody. I'm sorry I'm not there. I just wanted to say thank you to everybody involved in this process. It's been a big, big thing and I appreciate all of the work. And I am just really grateful that you're doing the work and that we're benefiting from it. So I wanted to just say thanks. That's it. Thank you, Deb. Anyone else? And Mark and Jeff, did we cover everything that you needed to cover? Yeah, so we just gained about 15 minutes on our agenda by we squeezed two questions into one session. All right. A lot of efficiency. Yes, discussion. You are dismissed, Mark Barlow. Thank you so much. And Jeff Comstock. So I'm gonna move on to the third question, which is legal resident voting and in place tonight of Gillian Nanton, we're going to hear from Scott Rogers. Thanks. I was involved with this as a member of the charter. Oh, I'm sorry. And Sarah Carpenter. Committee. I'm sorry. And Gillian Nanton is in the CETA office but has wide interaction with many of our non-citizens in the city and runs programs that affect them. So she was integral in this, but unfortunately had a conflict and Scott's in the office and has also done a lot of work and the outreach of this. We've been working on this really since I think 2015. It came up and was a valid item at that time and did not pass. Subsequently, before my term on the council, a lot of work was done that on it, a lot of outreach to community members. There's was a lot of kind of misunderstanding about it. And we were sort of poised to do something at really the beginning of 2020 and then low and behold COVID came and it got sort of shelved again. So it was sitting kind of on a to-do list with the council and the charter change committee in 2020 and 2021. Meanwhile, a couple of communities in Vermont sort of sped ahead of us, Winooski and Montpelier also began examining it and did pass legislation that will allow legal non-citizens who are here on a permanent basis to be able to vote in local elections. This has not changed state elections or federal elections. It's only local elections and you must be here legally and permanently or indefinitely. And so we're trying to be very clear about that. And it has been through a court case and was supported by the court. So we feel very comfortable about the language on the ballot and the ability to implement that. And as I said, we now are working with Montpelier and Winooski to iron out any of the issues they've got on it. So I feel like we're in a good place. Scott and Jillian have been working, really trying to educate folks who would be affected with that. I was at a seminar and Jeff Clark was at it just sort of again, most of the attendees were new Americans and wanted to understand it. The ballot item and the materials are all translated. So if you know of anybody who wants a translated item, we can get that to them. There was keen interest by the group. This was a group at the Universal Unitarian Church really in wanting it. And we had a very poignant speaker from a fella who I believe was from Vietnam who is a naturalized citizen. But he said, the real test of being a citizen is not whether you pass a test or answer about questions, it's whether you're engaged in vote. And he really struck me. And that's what this would allow is folks who are here legally permanently to be able to vote in our local elections. They can vote on the eight ballot items that we're all struggling to understand. And other, for city council or other offices. So based on for sure you have here, it says and pay taxes is that's not a requirement because that would eliminate somebody who's renting, right? No, no, no, yeah. I think it was intended to just validate why we think it's important to allow those citizens to vote. We do have a number, fair number of legal non-citizens who pay taxes. And so that is really shouldn't they also be able to vote on tax issues? That's the intent of it. I didn't write the brochure, but that's the intent I think. So it's paying taxes to whom? No, it's just an editorial comment to say why should we allow non-citizens to vote? We should allow them because they're members of our community and many of them pay taxes. So that's, it's just a rationale for why we should allow them. I mean, they pay property taxes, they pay other taxes just like we all do. And it was only to highlight a rationale around why should we allow them to vote? Renters pay taxes too. Understood. Why they're rent. It's an editorial comment to just say why should we allow non-citizens because they participate and some pay property taxes, some pay taxes through their rents. That's all it's saying. The landlords pay tax. Some of our community members are landlords as well. I mean, you can be a landlord and you don't have to be a citizen. Yeah, and I think the idea around that was that they send their children to the same schools, they come to the same community meetings, they're actively engaged in the community. So it was going along those lines that these are very active and engaged people. And one thing I've worked with the trusted community voices and what you find with our immigrant refugee communities is that they are very active in Burlington. They love Burlington, they love being here and they just really want to be part of the process. I'm gonna go to Kathy on Zoom with her hand raised. Yes, thank you. This proposal certainly makes sense to me but I'm curious in terms of what the numbers are or the estimated numbers in terms of this population or the percentage of wards four and seven that it might represent. I don't have data on the percentage percentages of wards four and seven. I do know that according to the 2020 American census, 5.5% of the city of Burlington's population are non-citizens. Additionally, this is interesting as well as 5.1% of the city's population has been through the naturalization process. So we're looking at just over 10% of the population that is foreign born and has come here to settle. Thank you very much. It's helpful. Just anecdotal because I've been around forever today. We seem to forget how many citizens we have in this community that also came from Canada and in my work with elders, I knew lots of permanent non-citizens, very active and had lived the better part of their life in the area and so there's lots of folks who for whatever reasons are not able to gain citizenship, I understand it's a fairly arduous process but they still wanna be active in the community. One comment, one question. So something really interesting I learned a couple weeks ago is that the Burlington Police Department allows non-citizens, permanent residents to join their force. So I thought that was really interesting and I think most people would support police officers being able to vote which is just kind of a cool thing. So you just touched on kind of my question is if either one of you could explain about is there like a, do you know of like an average time it takes to earn citizenship? A common question that I hear and reply to this ballot item is oh, like why not just become a citizen if you want the right to vote? I mean, Scott may have more perspective and Jillian certainly does but I think it depends on the family. It depends on your English speaking skills. It depends on time and money. So I think it's very different for families. I just encountered a family here that is moving into Cambrian rise and the father's been here for six or eight years but he really wanted to wait for the rest of his family to come to do the citizenship project or the whole naturalization so they could do it as a family. So I think it's quite varied and I understand and again, Scott may have more anecdotes than I do. It's a prickly process. I mean, it depends on who you're working with and you know, I've never been through the process. You know, you can fail the process. It's like getting your driver's license, you know, start money time. So I don't know, Scott, if you have anything to add. Yeah, I think going along with what you said, it is a, it can be a long arduous process. It can be very expensive and again, a lot of it comes down to, you know, maybe what country you came from, how you came in, originally came into the United States. Sometimes you're gonna need to have an attorney involved. It's gonna be a legal process. But again, it costs thousands of dollars. It's not uncommon for people to wait, you know, over five, six years, even decade to go through a process like that. So it does certainly expedite the situation if someone would like to vote in local elections. Deb Boudin on Zoom. Hi again, thank you. I just wanted to throw out that I, you know, with all the workforce shortage that we have, I think anything we can do that makes it more appealing to people to move to our communities, we should do. And I think this would make it more appealing. And I totally am in favor of this and hope that people will understand that it is really just kind of a basic right of people who live here. I feel it should be their basic right even. So if they're not a quote citizen, and it will also foster more involvement in local issues. So I'm totally in support of this. And that's all I have to say, thanks. For history, Burlington walks. There's a fabulous book called We Americans written in the 30s about the history of Burlington and how it grew through immigrants and immigrants coming in from the turn of the century through the 30s. So you probably have to get it through the library, but we have a vision of how Burlington started, but it really grew up on the backs of a lot of immigrants in the 10s, 20s and 30s who came to Burlington. That's interesting. And I think it's just fun to think about over history, you know. Great points, it's very true by immigrants. Thanks. Thank you, Deb. Not seeing any more questions on Zoom. Anybody else in the audience? Just keep going. I'm gonna move on if there's not. Next for right choice voting. Sinead Murray was supposed to be here tonight from the part which is remote public interest research group and is unable to attend, but Sam McGinty is here on her behalf as well as Robert Burstow-Johnton. We're gonna get you a microphone. If you wanna. Robert, I see more time. I'm gonna be the cause of Dennis's trip. Go on, Sam. Everyone can hear me okay? Yeah. Great. Yes, Sam McGinty. Ward 2 resident, democracy advocate with Deeperg. Here speaking about question six. I don't have the exact language in front of me, but it's a question to bring right choice voting to Mayoral School. School board and ward election officers in Burlington. As many folks know, back in 2021, the city of Burlington passed a charter change to use ranked choice voting in all future city council elections that had an overwhelmingly positive vote. 64% of Burlington voters supported that charter change measure that was passed on the legislature and people were gearing up to use it for the first time on town meeting day coming up in a couple weeks. Councilor from the East District, Jack Hanson resigned and the city of Burlington had to use it and the special election for 12-6 in the East District. And by all accounts, it ran really well. Deeperg did some voter education ahead of that and also worked with the city in terms of getting them some resources from national experts who do non-lobbing on ranked choice voting, but strictly on voter education and helping municipalities actually run ranked choice voting elections at the municipal level. That's the ranked choice voting resource center. We also conducted some, all of its non-scientific exit polling. We couldn't actually afford to do a full scientific poll, but we were asking voters as they exited what their experience was like and folks were extremely positive, resounding support for the system. They loved the ability to rank their candidates in order of preference. They were really empowered by having more choices. I recognize for Councilor Barlow's race he's running uncontested. So a lot of all folks here in the New North End are not actually gonna have that ability to rank candidates. Actually all of our candidates. But you could write in, you could write in. You could write in, that's right. But even so, ranked choice voting tabulation wouldn't come into effect unless there were more than two candidates running and in the first round of votes, no candidate surpassed that 50% threshold to win. And if no candidate surpasses that 50% threshold of first choice votes in the first round, the bottom vote getter is eliminated and candidates who put that as their number one choice will have their vote go towards their second option instead. And that process continues until one candidate prevails with more than 50% of the vote. Important thing to note in terms of voter education, do a quick plug for that. You don't need to rank all of the candidates. You can vote for as many or as few as you want. So if you only felt strongly about one candidate, you could just vote for one. But if you had an interest in another candidate, if your top choice was no longer viable, you could mark them as your second choice and include it third or fourth if those were options as well. Now we have to have some questions. Do you want me to? Robert, why don't you speak? All right, so some of you got this in the mail and it's hard. I'm in a very peculiar situation because it may not look like it. In fact, channel 22 said that I was against ranked choice voting and it's wrong. I'm actually for ranked choice voting, more so than anybody, but I feel a little bit like Liz Cheney and how angry she is at people in her own caucus and because they're not telling the truth. So on this card, I'll say, ranked choice voting is simple, but it is different than how you voted in the past. That in fact is not true for us. 14 years ago and 17 years ago, we had ranked choice voting, it was called IRV then, but it's the same thing. And so we do have some experience with that. Another common falsehood is that the process of eliminating candidates continues until one candidate gets 50% of the vote. That didn't happen 14 years ago. 14 years ago, these numbers are burned into my head. We had 80,076 voters. Half of that is 4,488 voters. That's the threshold, but in the final round, 4,313 voters marked their ballot that Bob Kiss was a better choice than Kurt Wright and 4,061 voters marked their ballots that Kurt Wright was a better choice than Bob Kiss. So Bob Kiss got more than Kurt Wright, but he didn't get 50%, he got 48%. 52% of the voters that actually voted did not want Bob Kiss in any way. Now, yes, Bob, between two candidates, there is always a simple majority. A simple majority means a majority when you exclude abstentions. And so if there's two candidates, there's always a simple majority unless they tie. Now, the fact is that between Kurt and Bob, there was a simple majority and Bob had that, but Kurt and Bob weren't the only people running in the election. There's Andy Montrell and there was Dan Smith. And Kurt Wright had a majority against Dan Smith. There was a majority of people that preferred Kurt over Dan Smith. Why wasn't Kurt elected? Well, because Bob was preferred over Kurt, but using the very same measure, Andy Montrell was preferred over Bob Kiss. So it was, I don't remember exactly the numbers now, but there was about, well, I do. There was 4,064 voters marked their ballots that Andy Montrell was a better choice than Bob Kiss, whereas 3,576 voters marked their ballots that Bob Kiss was a better choice than Andy Montrell. But because Bob Kiss didn't meet Andy Montrell in the final round is why he wasn't defeated by Andy Montrell. What this did is it made Kurt Wright the spoiler. He didn't mean to be the spoiler, but that was the role he ended up taking because Kurt Wright displaced Andy from being in the final round. So then what happened is most of the people that voted for Kurt Wright, they were Republicans, they didn't prefer the progressive candidate that marked Bob Kiss's last vote, but simply by their act of marking Kurt Wright as number one, they actually caused the election of Bob Kiss. That is what we're trying to avoid with rank choice voting. We're trying to make it, we can use some examples. There was the 2014 governor's race, Scott Milne, Peter Shumlin, and Dan Flee-Siano. And we can speculate, it turned out that the margin was very thin. It was 2,400 votes difference between Milne and Shumlin, and 8,400 votes went to this Dan Flee-Siano. And if only, if they split two to one in favor of Scott Milne, we would have had Governor Milne inaugurated in 2015. A more recent example is our last mayor's race. So, and Oli's online. So there was a nine-tenths of a percent difference between Merleau Weinberger and Max Tracy. It was 42.1% for Max and 43% for Merleau and Oli got 13% of the vote. Now, we don't know how those voters would have split, those Oli voters would have split. If they were 50-50, Merleau would have still been elected. But it was 54% for Max and 46% for Merleau, we would today have Mayor Max Tracy. So it can make a difference. But we don't know, we speculate about what those second choice votes were because we didn't have ranked ballots to do it. That's why I'm for ranked choice voting. But in 2009, we did have ranked ballots and we know how people's second choice votes would have got. And we know for certain that if Kurt Wright hadn't run and Andy Montrell, we've gone into the final round with Bob Kiss, he would have defeated them by a margin of 588 votes. Go ahead, Jeff. Yes, so aside from the history lesson, can you elaborate on, so is there a, what is the distinction between instant runoff voting and ranked choice voting? So is it, aside from the nomenclature, does it have to do with the tabulation method? Is that what this debate is really about? I mean, either of you, you know. Instant runoff voting and ranked choice voting are the same thing. It used to be called instant runoff voting back in 2006, 2009, when it was used in Burlington. And then they changed the name to ranked choice voting. The tabulation is still the same. There is one accepted method that's called ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting that's used across the country and around the world. Right now there's 63 jurisdictions across the US that use ranked choice voting and that includes two states. So both Maine and Alaska use it for virtually all statewide elections by eliminating the bottom vote getter and reallocating those votes for second choices. Robert supports a mathematical theoretical alternative that's not used anywhere in the world. I would like to represent, and you're wrong. You're provably wrong. So in fact, it's more history. When IRV was repealed in Burlington in 2010, it was also repealed in four other places in the country, Aspen, Colorado, Pierce County, Washington and Kerry North Carolina. And IRV got a little bad cache. And so the organization fair vote simply changed the name. Now in the scholarship, we have been using RCV ranked choice voting to mean any method that uses ranked ballots. And there are different tabulation methods. Right now there are four government jurisdictions in the world that use another method other than the method that Sam mentioned. There's two cities in Italy and there is a city in Spain and there is a borough of London. Now that uses the correct method of ranked choice voting and it is not the method that VPURG and Fair Vote is selling us. They repackaged this like new improved IRV but it's the same thing. It's just a different, they usurped the label, the RCV label that was used in scholarship for any ranked method. And they basically are trying to change the semantics so that when we say ranked choice voting it must mean their method that they're selling. They have one product on the shelf and they don't want to change the product. They just want to sell us that same product. So there is another method. It is named after a French mathematician named Condorcet. He precedes Thomas Hare by 50 years. Thomas Hare was a British barrister from the early 19th century who came up with a concept called single transferable vote. And that is the basis of what this IRV method is based on. Condorcet basically said this, if more people mark their ballots prefer candidate A over candidate B than the other way around then let's not elect candidate B. Here's what happened in Burlington in 2009 and it also happened in Alaska last August in 2022. In Burlington 2009, 4,064 voters marked their ballots that Andy Montroll was preferred over Bob Kiss. 3,476 voters marked their ballots that Bob Kiss was preferred over Andy Montroll yet Bob Kiss was elected. And we don't have to do that. That's an unnecessary mistake. Now, here's a little bit of news for you. There's a new bill that's in the Vermont legislature right now sponsored by Bob Hooper and Carol Odie. And we, there's what happened last August or last April for the RCV charter change. I went to House of Government Ops and I talked with them about this and they took out the method and they left the method to be at the ordinance level so that it isn't in the charter level. And Jack Hanson tried to slip that back in again but fortunately there was more wisdom left in the charter change committee. I think Ben Traverse saw to it that didn't go back in. And so this is why I'm gonna be voting for question six. I'm voting yay because they didn't put the method back in there. It is left unspecified and the legislature is considering changing that. And there's a reason why, and I wanna explain this and then I'm gonna, and it has to do it's greater than Burlington. It's a bigger problem. It has to do with these state elections. You might notice if you're following Alaska in the November, the November third election or whatever it was, they didn't announce results until the day before Thanksgiving. It took them 15 days to announce results. Now, another lie that RCVRC says, they said, does right choice voting affect how long it takes to know the results of the election? And then say, no, computers can tabulate these results. Computers are fast. There's no problem with the speed of computers and tabulating these rounds. The problem is you can't even run round one until you get all of the ballot data consolidated into the same computer. And Alaska, big state, how are they gonna get all this ballot data to Juneau? Maine, big state. They have to get all this ballot data to Augusta. They can't announce a result. They don't even know the results until several days later. But right now what we have, when we have an election, at the end of the day, we press a button on the machine and we print out a ticker tape and it has tallies and we post it in the back of the room right over there. And candidates can come and read those tallies. You can add those numbers up from each one of the polling places and you can know who wins the election on election night. But unless somebody wins outright on the first round, you don't know that until the ballots are tallied centrally. Go ahead. My overriding concern with this debate is that our core mission as NPAs is community and voter awareness. I mean, that's really what drives us in all of this. And I feel like this debate between the RCV camps is really leaving the voters absolutely confused and in the dark about what the heck we're actually voting for. And I mean, nothing irritates me more than people who vote for crap that they don't understand what they're voting for. And so, I mean, it intrigues me that you say, you are in favor of ranked choice voting and yet, the two of you are duking it out over this issue locally in the legislature. And I just feel like the rest of the rest. The difference is voting done wrong and the right choice is devoting done correctly. Okay, so I mean, it's just, my point is that while the two of you are squabbling over this, I just feel like it's in some way, it's not really serving all the people who have to vote on this. But Sam, let's hear from you. I really appreciate that comment. And I think you hit the nail on the head. It is really clear right now what the method of ranked choice voting that Burlington citizens are using. It is the method that's used nationwide. It's the method that you rank your candidates in order of preference. If a one candidate gets more than 50% in the first round, they went outright. If no candidate gets more than 50%, the bottom vote getter is eliminated and voters who pick- That's the hair method. Robert, bottom vote getter gets eliminated is the mistake because Andy Montrell was the majority choice of the city of Burlington, yet he was eliminated even though he could have defeated any of the other two that were in the final round. Could have defeated Kurt Wright by a margin of 10% and he could have defeated Bob Kiss by a margin of 6.5%. But because of the mistaken tabulation method, he was eliminated. Yeah, I would like to just finish my piece here. There is a method in city ordinance. That is the method that I am talking about. It's the method that's really the entire academic community and all the advocates work for nationwide. That's really clear. There is one method that we're using in Burlington right now. It's the method that voters will be using this time around on town meeting day. It's what was passed on the city council in terms of ordinance. And that's really clear. The city clerk mailed out clear voter instructions as well how those votes are tabulated. That's the method that we're using. Robert wants to continue this debate, but this debate has been had going back from the original proposal for bringing to city council elections. Robert was there and every step in turn making this argument, the city council decided not to advance that method. It was put in charter to the voters, the Burlington voters overwhelmingly supported the tried true and tested version of ranked choice voting. Trying to fail. Tried, tested, and failed. Rather than the two of you continuing that part of the debate, I guess I would just say that that sort of proves the point I'm making and that people aren't aware of sort of the distinction in the choice to be made around method. But yeah. Councilor Bauer. Well, thank you. I'm not gonna leave my preferences out of this, but I will say that I talked to a lot of constituents who are asking me about this question. You know, like my parents, for instance, they're older. They know how to, but they are confused by ranked choice voting. I know that in the mail and ballots, there was instructions and it was helpful, I think. But, I mean, one of the issues I see is we have a demographic that is confused by the older folks that I talked to on a regular basis. They like to vote the way that they voted. So my question is, is VPurg planning to do additional education on ranked choice voting? It's with us on the city council elections, regardless if whether or not it passes for school board and mayoral races. So that's one question. And then I had a question, a general question, is even though we say a person voting can vote for a single choice or they can rank their choices, if there are multiple choices and they don't rank, but other voters do, isn't there an inherent undervote in that somehow that it changes, it could change the outcome if you have voters that are voting the traditional non-ranked choice way and full of voting a single candidate versus, and having them mixed with ballots where people are ranked choice voting. So you're gonna have, if you understand my question, it's really about one of undervotes for the second and third choices. Is that an issue? Or void of other voters choosing to rank all of the candidates. Yeah, thank you, Margaret. I guess that goes to the part of it. There's a microphone in front of you, Bridget. Oh, sorry. That goes to the heart of my question. I'm with fingernails holding on to this conversation. But that was my question, what Mark said. There are going to be a proportion of voters who will not rank their vote, their candidates. And so that can translate at the end of the tabulation and either an over-representation or an under-representation of what all of the voters wanted. There will be, whatever Mark said was my question. Yeah, yeah. So kind of the question unpacks whether this is one person, one vote, right? Like that's part of this debate here. And just to be clear, rank choice voting firmly is one person, one vote. That has been constitutionally held at both the state and federal level. And in terms of ranking multiple candidates, ranking someone lower will never hurt the chances of your first-choice votes. If, go ahead, Robert, if every voter ranks. But ranking your first-choice candidate can hurt your second choice in that. People who rank Kurt right as their number one, they were promised that if their first choice didn't get elected or couldn't get elected, that their second-choice vote would count, but their second-choice vote didn't come. Why not, Robert? Because Kurt went into the final round, the loser, if you vote for the loser in the final round, your second-choice vote never counted, even though your first choice lost. If you vote for the loser in the final round, your second choice is never counted, even though he was defeated. And there was 1500 Burlington residents that voted for Kurt for their first choice, and they covered their butt with a vote for Andy Montrell because they didn't want to see Bob Kiskin elect. They covered their butt with a vote for Andy Montrell. That second-choice vote for Andy Montrell never counted. Maybe I could just interject because I've... But it could have if it was a different tabulation method. The correct tabulation. Let me just think out loud, sort of for the silent minority one-third that didn't support this. I guess I would have to ask the question... Well, first of all, let me state, if there are three candidates, typically one of those candidates is the underdog and two are typically the favored, stronger candidates. So it's not rocket science to suggest that the third and fourth candidates in races pull votes from one of the other two. So what I will put on the table, and I'm not convinced that I support ranked-choice voting, what the heck is wrong with voting for your candidate? For all three? What is wrong with voting? Everyone gets a vote, and you vote for your candidate. And if the candidate wins, they win by the most votes. What's wrong with that? Spoiled election. But why is it spoiled? The third candidate chose to run... Okay, Ollie Jang ran for mayor and a 54%. Can we get Robert a microphone? I don't know if anybody can hear him. And then Jeff, we're gonna come to you in two minutes. So when Ollie Jang ran for mayor, he got 13% of the vote, but there's only nine-tenths of a percent difference between Marot and Max. Now, if a very small majority of Ollie's voters, if Ollie didn't run, and they would have come to the poll anyway, and if only 54% of those Ollie voters had liked Max better than Marot, we would have a different mayor today. But again, I have to say, people voted for who they chose to vote for, and the people voting for the third candidate... When there was a spoiled election. ...are aware that I wouldn't, I don't know that we'd call it a spoiled, though. But we don't know. Everybody had a vote and they voted. In the case, we don't know because we don't know what their second choice votes were. And I'm not arguing, I'm just raising a point, and this is a point that I've heard other people raise. So I'm going to, yes, I'm gonna go to Deb Bhutan on Zoom, Deb, you have a question. Oh, my goodness. Okay, sorry, I'm off the screen for a moment. It's all right. So I have a question. I don't know if I've missed something. And Robert, I'm gonna ask you, and I'm gonna ask you to be very brief, please, because your audience is driving me nuts. But if you keep going through all of these things and all the things that are wrong, and then you say, but I'm gonna vote for it, can you explain that in five sentences or less, please? Because it was the wisdom of the Vermont legislature to pull the method out of the law in the current thing and to leave it at an ordinance level because there are some legislators in the state legislature that understand this as I do. And two of them are right up here in the New North End. There's also some senators, Tom Chittenden, Irene Renner. They're starting to figure this out. And it may happen that Vermont might make history again like we did with the billboard law, like we did with civil unions. And we might become the most progressive ranked choice voting jurisdiction in the country. We're too late for the planet. We got scooped by two cities in Italy. Okay, that's good. Our city in Spain, but we might become the most progressive ranked choice vote. Thank you, Robert. Did someone else, I saw a hand and I lost it in front of me. Jeff Clark. Jeff, I'm sorry, no. Mark, yes, please. I just want to say, I want to clarify for those who don't understand, by leaving the method at the ordinance level, it means we can make an easy change by swapping out a voting method and ordinance rather than having to go through another charter change. The charter change specifies we need ranked choice voting. The ordinance says how we do it. So there's less sort of approval required for an ordinance change. I'm pretty clarify for the voters, especially what method is going to be used and what is that ordinance right now? Right now, I believe it's called the hair method. That's a hair R.C.V. Hair R.C.V. Not only can we change the ordinance, state law might force us to change the ordinance. Right, so and it is in fact, the same method we used in IRV back in 2009. At an ordinance level. I do appreciate Robert's advocacy on this. He's clearly very passionate. I do appreciate it. Just to be clear, there is another bill in Senate government operations that would bring ranked choice voting for presidential primary 2024. That is a bill that actually has potential to move. It has support from the Secretary of State's office and support from a wide range. From a wide range of senators. And that's a bill that actually could see movement. And that is the method, the quote unquote hair method, ranked choice voting method that's eugenation wide that's supported by the Secretary of State's office. So I understand that Robert has gotten the support from a couple of representatives from this area here, but in terms of the Secretary of State and the broader support in the legislature, this is the method that they're keenly looking at. We are educating some legislators. That's what we're doing. So about S32, this is the presidential primary thing. We have to, I spoke before, Senate government ops myself about this. There are three different kinds of categories of elections that are really different. There are single winner elections. There are multi-winner elections. And then this thing with the presidential primary, this is actually allocating or apportioning seats, just like we do for Congress and stuff. And they work differently and different methods might be appropriate for things. About single winner, about multi-winner elections, we try to be proportional. Like if we had a three member Senate district and if 65% was party A and 35% was party B, we might expect two of those members to be party A and one to be party B. That's proportionality, not majoritarian. But when you're electing a single candidate, single winner election like mayor or governor or whatever, that person isn't 60% party A, 60%, it's winner take all. So then the only ethic remaining is not proportionality, but it's majority rule. And that's why a different method for single winner elections might be appropriate over multi-winners. But this thing about the presidential primary, that is the allocation of seats for delegates. And the method that you use for that is really should be the same as what we use for Congress to allocate seats to each state knowing the population of that and that has a name. All we have to do is we have to figure out how many seats, how many delegates get at least one seat and how many presidential candidates get at least one seat or one delegate. And then we have to allocate that number between and there are other ways to do that than what is in the bill S32. Robert, I've got one more question from Jeff Comstock. Yeah, this conversation, now I am envisioning a train wreck because if this ordinance passes, you know, town meeting day 2023, it will go into effect for town meeting day 2024 because there are no other elections on the calendar for us in 2023. Our presidential primary election is also town meeting day 2024. So the potential train wreck is that we could have two elections occurring on town meeting day in 2024 using two different methods of rank choice voting. And so that's why I see if... No, it could be the same. No, no, no, it could be, okay? But that would require the thoughtful coordination of the city council and the decision that the legislature makes. So I just throw that out there in terms of if you look at this debate and the upcoming election calendar, it could make understanding this question all the more complicated. It's a huge complex. Yes. But I can say I will read it very, very carefully. I will because I think they're both sides. Great thought. Your microphone, Bridget. I would love to hear more of it. It's a 200 year old argument. I think I appreciate all the work both of you put in on this but this is gonna be very, very helpful to me, Robert. So thank you. So I've printed out four copies and if you're serious about it, take a copy. And I do agree it's a lot of work, it's complex. It got published in a journal called Constitutional Political Economy. I have a copy of the published version but they may even take out the color figures and they may even take out table one. And so I believe my submitted version is better if you're in the published version. And I don't have copyright problems with the submitted version. I can give that away to anybody I want. I'm not really supposed to distribute this one, do you? Sam has one more thing to say. And just to make it really clear to voters and to anyone who's listening to it, this is a completely theoretical debate or debate that's happening outside of city ordinance. It is really clear what method that voters are gonna be using on town meeting day and it's the method that was used on the special election in 12.6. It's gonna be used going forward unless for whatever reason the state decides to abandon all precedent in terms of using a certain election system and adopt a theoretical method. So I do appreciate the arguments and I do understand and I appreciate the time that Robert is taking with it, but please voters make no mistake. It is really clear what method voters are gonna be using to cast their ballots and that's the system of ranked choice voting. If you look at fair vote, ranked choice voting, resource center online, lots of videos from any city that's implemented it, that is the method that voters use as well as on Deeper's website or on betterballadvermont.org. Thank you. I'm so out of my depth on this issue. But Debbie, hold on, I'm with you. But Sarah just said, there's a difference between the charter change and ordinance language. And to Jeff's point, sometime in 2023 before 2024, there is going to be a conversation about the tabulation, the calculation of the local level election and the presidential election. So it's not clear to me what's gonna happen in 2023. It's not, I understand what the past experiences have been on ranked choice voting, but it can change. It can change. I am not a big ranked choice voter proponent, but having said that, the city has adopted a method. It's the method until we change it. My sense is if the state changes it, then we will bring the discussion back up again. So for today, the valid item you're voting on is to add the mayor and the elected officials to the ranked choice voting process. Right now it's only city counselors. We had hoped we'd have more time to educate, but that's not the way. So what you're voting on is adding the mayor and other election officials to the ranked choice voting system. As we know it. As we know it, and we have adopted it. We can change that in the future if we choose to. And for more clarification, do you mean just for offices held in the city of Burlington? Yes. So it wouldn't be on. We don't know what the state will do. So the state would just for everybody listening and wondering we currently do not have ranked choice voting for governor. Right. We do not. We only have it for municipally elected officials. Right now we only have for city counselors. Burlington decision for Burlington office. The ballot item would add in addition to the counselors would be the mayor and elected election officials and school board. Those will be added and we will continue that way. If it passes until we undo it. If it does not pass, it means it would just stay with city counselors. That's really the outcome. If the state does something different, my guess is then the city council will reignite this conversation at that time would be. I think this was important to come full circle because we've gone off the tracks with so many different and they're good conversations but to bring it back to the purpose this meeting tonight. This vote is for adding the mayor and school board and city elected officials. Thank you. I just want to add to what Sarah said that I can't envision a scenario whereby we would want to have two ranked choice voting tabulation methods on a single ballot. I can't imagine that we would do that. So if the state were to change or adopt a method that was different than the method that's currently used in Burlington, Burlington would probably look to be forced to. I mean, we would probably want to take a look at what we're doing. And then you can sit through this whole conversation again. Thank you for clarifying that. Deb is happy about that. I want to thank you both so much. This is another topic that I haven't wrapped my mind around yet and this conversation is broad as it was was really helpful. I'm really glad it's recorded. So I can go back and watch it a few more times. Can you both list a source or a resource to go to if voters want more information in either direction? You can go to betterballotvermont.org. That's kind of the VEPER website that works on ranked choice voting. For national information, fairvote.org. Betterballotvermont.org or fairvote. And to be really clear, all of the information on those pages is the method that Burlington voters will be using with ranked choice voting. And that is the method that is used nationwide and around the world. We are not voting on ranked choice voting. We are voting on who it covers. So that forest left the barn in 21. This ward was the lowest voting, just about 50% and voted four and 50% against. Ward seven had more against it. So they were 53 against and 47, four. But citywide it was about 64, 5%. So the city as a whole adopted it. It's a done deal until we undo it. As we did in 2005. Robert. We had a big. Do you have a resource for people who might be interested in the history? I would suggest go to Wikipedia. And if you want to just go to voting systems and they have a big table that compares a lot of them. Now there is a property called the condorsay criteria. And you can look, there are multiple methods that do it correctly. The one that's the most widely used in organizations throughout the world. It's called the Schultz method or Schultz. And the Schultz method is used in two cities in Italy. One city in Spain and one borough of London as we speak. So we have been scooped. If we had been smarter, like in the last decade, we could have been the most progressive ranked choice voting jurisdiction on the planet, but we've been scooped. So that's before we adjourn cause we're getting close. Can I make just one announcement? I should have made it in the beginning. So we all had the conversation on ballot item seven, which is the community control board for police. And as we all know, complicated, complex and divided. And I just wanted to, it's been a, Mark and I put it on Facebook, I have to give the Vermont Institute of Community and International Involvement had a two part series. Last week they had Councilor Jean Bergman speaking for it. Tonight, earlier this evening, Councilor Ben Travers spoke against it. And while we've missed them live, they are gonna be on YouTube. So I just, I'm really wanting to get that out cause I know we didn't have enough conversation, I think at the last NPA. So I encourage everyone watching to go on the YouTube for Vermont Institute of Community and International Involvement. And I'll put it up on my Facebook, that's my best and I'll try to post it out there. So those of you who didn't watch either of them might want to go back and watch them. Maybe you could even post on the New North end Facebook. I'd be happy to just to let people outside of this know what, I don't understand exactly where to go. Okay, I will definitely put it on the, once I get the YouTube link for the thing that was tonight, I'll put them both up there. I think it's good to have both perspectives. I'll plug the YouTube channel for TownMeetingTV. It's where I get all of my TownMeetingTV material. So if you go to YouTube and you search TownMeetingTV, you will see a channel for TownMeetingTV popped up. Everything's pretty nicely organized in municipal meetings, NPA meetings, and then all of the TownMeeting programming. It's great. Awesome. We are right on the threshold of exactly 9 p.m. So I will thank everyone for their time. Great conversations. I think this format was kind of cool. So I would just invite anybody that has witnessed or participated to reach out to anybody on the steering committee with a yay or nay on the format. We meet the first Wednesday of every month. So we'll be meeting really soon. But I think any feedback would be appreciated. But I feel like this was comfortable, casual, neighborly, and maybe we'll continue this way. So with that said, I will thank everybody and we will adjourn. See Chris out. Have a great night. See you next month. Thank you very much. Thanks for all. Thank you.