 And welcome to organization day, the one day of the year when I try and keep up with Max Tracy, because I get to share this meeting. It's a big act to follow. But at least this year I have been in the job more than four weeks. We're going to give it just another minute as people log on. Hey Catherine, I'm just experiencing a bit of technical issues in city hall so trying to sort those out, hoping you can give us five minutes or so to try and resolve. Of course, and maybe we'll factor that into the IT budget for this year. The G's for the delay, but we should be underway here no later than 715. So glad the technical issues worked out. There are city counselors here. There are a do I would like to call to order the city council organization day. My day to shine. The first thing for us to do is the pledge of allegiance so please rise and join with me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. The next item is a motion to adopt the agenda. Is there someone who would like to make a motion. Councillor pine. Is there a second. Councilor Freeman. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say nay. And the motion carries unanimously. This brings us to item 2.01 the swearing in of the mayor. And I am happy to turn it over to city attorney Blackwood. Mr. Weinberger, would you please rise and raise your right hand. Move the cameras. Would you please repeat after me. Under the pains and penalties of perjury. Under the pains and penalties of perjury. I'm a row Weinberger. I'm a row Weinberg. Do solemnly swear and affirm. Do solemnly swear and affirm. That I will faithfully execute the duties of the office of mayor. That I will faithfully execute the duties of the office of mayor. That I will faithfully execute the duties of the office of mayor. That I will faithfully execute the duties of the office of mayor. That I will conduct theBoard official. This will be the best of my judgement and ability according to law. Best of my judgment and abilities, according to law. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. You are sworn in. Thank you. Because I can let me be the first one to officially congratulate you, Mr. Mayor. elected and re-elected city council members. Okay. Thank you. Just the camera again. And the councillors who just elected to rise and raise their right hand and repeat after me. I can't start my video. Okay. We'll wait for you Councillor Barlow. It's been the host. Oh the host is out. Okay. Ready? Here we go. Under the pains and penalties of perjury. Under the pains and penalties of perjury. I state your name. I'm Mark Barlow. I'm Freeman. I'm Jack Canson. Do you solemnly swear and affirm? Do solemnly swear and affirm. That I will faithfully execute the duties of the office. That I will faithfully execute the duties of the office. Of city council. Of city council. Of city council. To the best of my judgment and ability. To the best of my judgment and ability. According to law. According to law. According to law. According to law. Congratulations. Congratulations councillors and congratulations Councillor Barlow. We're very excited to welcome you to this fun club. And now, Mr Mayor, I am thrilled to turn it over to you for item 3.01, the state of the city address. Thank you, C. O. Shad. Good evening to the Burlington community. I'm honored to be here tonight to deliver the annual state of the city address, a duty given to the mayor by the Burlington City Charter. Tonight, I congratulate our three newly reelected city councillors, Joan Shannon, Jack Canson and Perry Freeman. And I welcome Mark Barlow to the city council. Thank you all for your service. And I look forward to working with each of you in the years to come. To the entire city council, I'm looking forward to the day not too far away when we can again be back in the same room together. I greatly appreciated the one-on-one mask walks and phone calls that I've had with most of you since town meeting day. And I'm excited about the many areas of agreement and common ground between us. I'm committed to doing all that I can to ensure that our work together forges compromise and new solutions for all of Burlington, especially in the areas where members of our community have differing views. I expect that Councillor Max Tracy will be reelected tonight as city council president. And I welcome you working with Max and have appreciated our shared commitment to putting the interests of Burlington first throughout the pandemic and the pressure and the pressures of competitive campaign. I'm excited, Max, about what we'll do together in the better times ahead. One of the losses of not being together in city hall tonight is that I can't ask for a round of applause for the city's incredible 18 person team of department heads. I'd like to ask them all, however, briefly turn on your cameras and join me here on the Zoom. I feel so lucky every day to get to work with such a talented, dedicated and caring group of leaders. This past year has placed new demands, unbelievable new demands on each of you and your teams. And you have met those demands with creativity and commitment. Thank you for everything that you do for the people of Burlington. I want to particularly recognize and thank Blackwood, who has served as a city attorney for the past nine years and will be departing the city in June. The position of city attorney is a critical and demanding one. And throughout her service, Eileen has approached the role with great skill, nuance and relentless hard work. Eileen, you have made Burlington a better city. Thank you for your work and for swearing me in tonight. To the entire city team, what a year. Even in normal times, the city team works very hard and often behind the scenes to provide a huge range of essential and enriching services to the people of Burlington. That has been even more true this past year as the pandemic required us to change the way we work fundamentally and to take on new and critical challenges. Through it all, it has been my great honor to work alongside you. And I can't give a stay to the city address without thanking my mom and dad who are logging on from their home in Heartland, Vermont for their love and their support. And to my daughters, Lee Lynn and Ada and partner Stacy, I love you and I'm so grateful for you. When I delivered this annual address last year, we were in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. And I declared that the state of the city was a state of emergency. In the year since this pandemic has reshaped our daily lives. It caused death, hospitalization, and severe illness. It has isolated us and has badly and unevenly impacted many Burlington families. Across the nation, this pandemic has claimed more than 550,000 lives. I want to pause here to take a moment of silence to remember those who we have lost in the past year. Even as we recognize that great loss and pain today, one year later, we are in a dramatically different place. Certainly appears that the mayor is having some technical difficulties. So I expect that we will get those resolved as soon as possible and resume the state of the city. I apologize for this inconvenience. As for the inconvenience, I have spoken with Chief of Staff RaDell. Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi is not working at City Hall. Would like us to wait just for a few minutes so that he can resume his speech. And this is one of those unfortunate side effects of COVID. But I really thank you for your patience. And she indicated that it would likely not be too long. So thank you again. CEO Shad, can you hear me now? Yes, we can, Mayor. Thank you so much. All right, we have a different computer and a different Wi-Fi system and hopefully this will work better. My apologies to everyone. I'm going to resume where I think I cut out. Even as we recognize the great loss and pain of the pandemic. Today, one year later, we are in a dramatically different place. Over the past year, we have worked together to contain the virus as well as any city in America and found new ways to come together to each other's aid. And now, though the pandemic is not yet over, and it is critical that we continue the strategies of caution through more challenging, high-risk weeks, the end of the pandemic is in sight. As the threat of the virus proceeds, our task will be to redouble our efforts to rebuild from this year of economic and social disruption and respond to the multiple other simultaneous emergencies that we face. The work ahead is vast and daunting. However, we embark upon it with a new understanding of the power of local action, innovation and collaboration to address our greatest challenges and more resources from the federal government than we have seen in decades. City government has already begun to plan for the key pillars of our work ahead, ensuring that Berlin-Tonians get help recovering from the historic recession of this pandemic, addressing the climate emergency at the local level, making progress on our housing crisis and continuing our work to rebuild and strengthen our critical public infrastructure. In each area, we also will need to work to eradicate racial disparities and make Berlin-Ton a place where everyone in our community feels true belonging. For all these reasons and more, tonight, the state of the city is one of great hope. Together, we are ready to take on the opportunities ahead and emerge from this time of historic challenge as a healthier, greener, more equitable and more racially just community. This spring, I will work with the city council to chart a course for the next three years in each of those areas. Tonight, though, I will focus my remarks on the crisis that runs through all of them, the urgency to eradicate systemic racism from all aspects of life in Burlington and to do our part to secure, at long last, racial justice for all Americans who are black, indigenous or a person of color. We must acknowledge that racial justice is our most pressing emergency and our hardest challenge and it is one that we have failed to get right over a period of time that stretches from before our country's founding into the present day. We can see the depths of this failure across every part of our society. We see it in the human toll of the coronavirus pandemic where here in Vermont, residents who are BIPOC have been infected with COVID-19 at a rate two times higher than white non-Hispanic Vermonters. We know that disparities like this one are result of other disparities, like inequitable access to safe work environments, health care, housing and economic security. We simply cannot continue this way. In the Burlington School District in 2019, 16% of the students were black, 12% were Asian, 8% were multi-racial and 3% were Hispanic or Latino. That is 39% overall. These children are the future of our community and we have to make Burlington into a place where they can feel the same joy, experience the same safety and access the same opportunities that white children are able to. We also must recognize the national events going on around us that shape our local context. We are meeting as Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd and as we are approaching the one-year anniversary of Mr. Floyd's killing. In that anniversary is a reminder of how much is at stake in this work and of the pain and demand for change that was channeled in protests around the world and here in Burlington. We have also seen in recent weeks and months a terrible spike in violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, which is only the latest in a long history of shameful anti-Asian policy and practice in this country that must end. Tonight I want to speak directly to white people like myself. I know that explicitly targeting government effort and resources toward BIPOC from honors causes discomfort for some. Much of this discomfort comes from a belief that the government should not bias any class or grouping of residents over others. However, this assessment ignores our history. For centuries policies and practices in this country explicitly discriminated on the basis of race in many aspects of our society. These policies created vast and enduring harm and remained in place through much of the 20th century. We are going to need to use strategies that are also race-based to address that harm. When we do that, all Burlingtonians, not just black and brown residents, will benefit. As one example, consider the cost of racism to our society. Last year, the financial services giant city released a report that puts a number to this cost and found that 16 trillion dollars has been erased from the US GDP over the last two decades due to discrimination. I want to demonstrate clearly in these remarks tonight that my administration will place racial justice and racial equity at the center of our work going forward. My administration has attempted to work on racial justice in the past. However, it is clear to me now that our efforts before this past year were inadequate. Further, in recent weeks, I have caused harm to the black community in Burlington and particularly to black women in Burlington and for that I am truly sorry. I'm seeking to learn to make racial justice central to the work of local government and to become an anti-racist leader who identifies racism and works to dismantle it. I hope that this speech can be an important step in repairing that harm and committing to that work. I know that words alone are not enough, so as I speak tonight, I also will detail how I intend to follow up these words with actions in the months and years ahead including and especially by elevating and supporting the work of many partners, organizations, and BIPOC leaders. Tonight I ask all of you to imagine Burlington of the future where we have eliminated racial disparities and where everyone in our community feels true belonging. Belonging is more than merely acceptance. Belonging means knowing that you are valued, included, and part of the community around you. I believe that the city of Burlington has an important role to play in eliminating disparities and cultivating belonging. Doing so will require us to continue initiatives that we have launched over this past year and also launched several major new ones. I want to be clear that the work I will speak about tonight is not the work that is my own, but rather work that we have done together thanks to the efforts of many people on the skilled city team, the leadership of city counselors, and the partnership of many committed and talented community organizations and individuals. Over the past year, the city of Burlington elevated racial justice in our work in new ways. At last year's State of the City, we welcomed Taisha Green as the city's first director of racial equity, inclusion, and belonging, known as REIB, and launched that new city department. In the years since, Taisha has become a core member of the city's leadership team. Too often, she is the only black person in the room or on the Zoom as she holds us accountable as an organization for centering racial justice in all our major decisions. She has done this job fearlessly and consistently and made us a better organization and made me a better mayor. Taisha, I want to again apologize for the pain I have caused you and thank you for the grace that you have shown me. I appreciate all that you have already accomplished and I am looking forward to our work together over the years ahead. Over the last year, we grew the REIB department from one to three people and we welcomed Schuyler Nash and Blaine on Tensei to the REIB team. Schuyler and Blaine, you have already forged important change and the city is lucky to have you. The REIB team's work in their first year has been both broad and deep. Last June, Taisha and I announced that the city's eight-point plan to protect BIPOC communities and ensure a racially just recovery, which has changed and shaped the city's response to the pandemic in important ways. One example is that the city granted $315,000 to BIPOC-owned businesses and nonprofit organizations in Burlington to support their pandemic recovery using both federal funds and local private funds that were raised by REIB. As one of the recipients of these grants wrote to REIB, quote, we always are forgotten until now. Thank you for seeing us and knowing that we are here too. REIB's work also included helping the city and more than 30 other organizations in Chittenden County declare racism a public health emergency and commit to a sustained and data-driven effort to eliminate racial health disparities. In between, REIB did much, much more from developing the city's nearly complete racial equity strategic plan to supporting vaccination clinics in Burlington specifically for BIPOC for monitors in their households to helping Burlington launch a task force on reparations. Going forward, we should make permanent many of the successful innovations of this past year. To that end, by the end of this month, I will issue an executive order to formalize the racial equity toolkit that REIB has created, make it public, and require its use every time we develop a new policy or initiative to ensure that those policies positively impact racial equity as we have attempted with every new effort during the pandemic. Further, over the next year, all city of Burlington employees will go through an intensive anti-racism training curriculum developed by REIB. In the fiscal year 2022 budget, I will include funding to make the city's trusted community voices program permanent and implement the city's first comprehensive language access plan, which the city council approved last November and which was developed in partnership with Councilor Ali Jain. Also in the year ahead, our work will accelerate to eliminate race-based disparities across all social determinants of health. To forward and guide this work, the city has recently hired our first-ever public health equity manager, Mariel Matthews. All of this work and more is a major undertaking that will need to be properly resourced to succeed. And so, there's another action for us to take going forward. As part of the fiscal year 2022 budget, I'll be bringing to the city council a proposal to substantially increase the size of the REIB department. Even as we work to institutionalize and build on the lessons of 2020, we also must do more. And that is why over the next year, the city will also pursue three major initiatives to promote a greater sense of belonging here in Burlington. The first of these initiatives will be to sponsor the city's first annual Juneteenth celebration. The Juneteenth holiday celebrates June 19th, 1865, when the news of the end of the Civil War reached Galveston, Texas, and the enslaved people there finally learned that they were free. More than 200 cities across the country now host Juneteenth celebrations to promote knowledge and appreciation of Black American resilience, culture, and history, and to celebrate the day when independence can finally be enjoyed by Black Americans. This summer, as a result of the REIB department's initiative and leadership, the city of Burlington will join this national movement and host a major celebration with free events, free food, and entertainment, and also educational opportunities that speak to work we still have to do to ensure that everyone in America can access the foundational rights of this country. The second of these initiatives will be to develop a new focus in the city on increasing Black homeownership. Homeownership is one of the most powerful indicators of belonging in a community. But in Vermont, the rates of Black homeownership are alarmingly low. Here in Burlington, according to 2019 census data, out of the 6,000 owner-occupied homes in the city, just 18 of those homes, 0.3 percent, were Black-owned. This is no accident. As discussed at the mayor's book group in September 2019 when we read The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, federal and local laws and practices across the United States were worked systematically and explicitly to deny Black families the opportunity, safety, stability, and generational wealth of home ownership. This was done around the country with tools such as property deeds with racial covenants, discriminatory federal financing, and zoning laws that made certain neighborhoods accessible only for single family homes. These practices created exclusionary and racially disparate land use and settlement patterns in cities across the country, including in some respects here in Burlington. Today I'm announcing that this summer we will hold another housing summit with a strong focus on expanding our collective understanding of housing inequities and centering racial justice in the solutions. Our goal coming out of this summit will be to deliver to the city council by this fall an actionable plan to eliminate the disparity in home ownership among Black Burlingtonians. The third of these initiatives is that over the next year we must continue to grapple with overcoming the history of racial injustice and law enforcement. To be a city where all belong, we must become a place where all Black and Brown Burlingtonians are safe, protected, and not threatened by our public safety systems. We have made several committed attempts at this work and our police department has repeatedly shown itself to be a professional, skilled, and able to successfully embrace significant change and improvement. Despite this though, our public safety reform efforts in the last couple of years simply have not succeeded in achieving the cultural and structural change that is needed or in forging the new consensus on public safety in Burlington that we all hope they would. I know that this is an issue on which Burlingtonians have been divided. There are some in Burlington who fear that changes to our public safety systems will make them less safe. There are also neighbors in Burlington with the lived experience and fear that our public safety systems have never kept them safe. My fellow Burlingtonians, this is an issue we must address and one we can only successfully address with a mayor and city council that work together to forge consensus. This work must include engagement with both the community and our officers in listening intently and with purpose to those most impacted. After the many conversations I've had with councillors since town meeting day, conversations that were open and genuine, I truly believe we share a desire to heal this division and work to become a genuinely anti-racist community in every sector including law enforcement. I want to speak to some of the work this will entail. Right now the city has several police transformation processes underway including critically an operational and functional assessment of the police department. This assessment is designed, is outlined in the RFP, to give us a roadmap to transition to a new public safety system. It is my strong hope that this report and ensuing discussions will give us the tools to collectively understand our public safety needs and help resolve the disagreement that has existed since last summer over how many Burlington police officers we should have. If we get this work right we can replace that tense disagreement with empowering clarity about what well resourced and professional public safety services should look like here in Burlington. Relatedly I'm excited to be meeting later this week with community leaders and and Bob Bick the executive director of the Howard Center to explore how best to bring an initiative like the CAHOOTS model that is in place in Eugene, Oregon as well as other cities here to Burlington. I believe there's also broad agreement that changes to our system for administering officer discipline will increase trust in our police department. Despite that agreement the details of how to get this right have eluded us. I am committed to trying again on this issue as one of the first orders of business ahead and I know my city council colleagues are equally committed to finding common ground. As we embark on another year of this difficult and critical work it is clear that we also have considerably more to do to ensure that our officer recruitment training retention and performance review systems are aligned with the values and goals of this community. Another part of the way forward to a new consensus will be to improve communication and understanding between our officers and the community. I attended the most recent community conversation at the YMCA and thought the dialogue was rare important and healing. We must continue and expand these kinds of conversations in the year ahead. Too often over this past year racial justice and public safety have seemed in tension with each other. Going forward I am convinced that we can and must find a way to achieve both. As I'm speaking about the ways that the city of Burlington will work towards racial justice I know that our success will rely on many other organizations and individuals being part of this work as well. And indeed this is the work that all of us including and especially white Burlingtonians like myself have a stake in for the simple fact that we will not realize the promise of this country or this community until everyone enjoys the dignity and opportunity that will come from achieving racial equity. Last summer at an outdoor event in front of City Hall when we declared racism a public health emergency and committed to ongoing action City Councilor Zariah Hightower spoke and shared words that really stuck with me and many present that day. She said quote our job is not to be saviors but to be but to find areas where you have embedded racism in your institution and remove it. That is what I'm seeking to do in the years ahead to find the places where the city of Burlington has racism racism embedded in our institution and to remove it. We will continue this work and tonight I also call on all of the organizations and individuals in Burlington and our area to work to do the same. I say this knowing that many organizations already have embarked on this journey and in some cases are well ahead of where the city is. I'm grateful for your efforts. Hope that you will continue or start them and then we can work together as committed partners. I'd like to close tonight with a with a personal story. This past weekend my family celebrated the seventh anniversary of the day when my daughter Ada officially became part of our family. The celebration marked in pandemic style with takeout from one of Burlington's many great restaurants brought back powerful memories of the amazing process of becoming a family through adoption. It is a process that involves all of the typical preparations for parenthood as well as many things that biological families often don't experience getting fingerprinted having social workers visit your home and for us considering whether our interracial family would belong here in the very white state of Vermont. My family has been fortunate that Ada and her older sister Leland have enjoyed an inclusive community throughout their public school experiences but the question still weighs on me as a community leader. My daughters will always enjoy certain privileges that many do not. At the same time I fear that they will encounter discrimination that Stacy and I don't and I know that there is only so much that I can do to protect them from a racist world. And so I've resolved that I must do more to change that world and to make sure that Ada Leland and all other children of color in Burlington know that they fully belong here. This work will be challenging and it will be long. I am sure that I will continue to make mistakes along the way and that I always will need to strive to do better. Tonight I commit and I recommit to this work and I ask all of you to join me. As I said at the beginning of this address the state of the city is one of great hope. We have hard challenges ahead but this is also a moment of promise and opportunity to rebuild a better city in the years just ahead than the one that was hit hard by COVID a year ago. Together we can realize the potential that potential for the great city of Burlington. Thank you and good night. Thank you. If you could just give me a minute to enable the councilor cameras again. Of course. In the meantime I will just say that the next item on the agenda is item four which is public comment. This evening it was announced in the agenda that public comment is limited to city council action items so that is election of the city council president and election of board of finance members. We only had one member of the public sign up and we have already communicated with her because it was not one of those agenda items so she will speak at next week's regular meeting. Excuse me. So that does bring us to election of the city council president when the chief of staff has finished enabling the cameras. I'm not sure. I think we should be all set. Great. I don't see them all so I'm just going to change my view really quickly and give everyone a chance to turn them on. Excellent. So I am pleased to ask for nominations for the election of city council president and also chief of staff Rodell. I note this message from councillor Barlow who cannot turn on his video yet. So I'll just give it another minute. I also see that councillor Cheng doesn't have his video on yet. I think he should be able to he just perhaps needs a moment yet. Councillor Mason. Oh great we've got him. Beauties of zoom. It works so much until it doesn't work. Okay. councillor Cheng. I think we're seeing your ceiling maybe. Yeah sorry. I'm not sure but I'm definitely not going to be able to tell if you make a motion so just fair warning there. Wow friends I guess we should not have me facilitate these. Maybe it's my jinx on the IT issues. So let's get through this. I am going to ask for nominations for the election of city council president please. Councillor Pine. Thank you. I'd like to place a nomination councillor Max Tracy and I'd like to give some words to proceed that. On the heels of a recent election during which two among this council sought the office of mayor it is especially important that our next council president bring this council together and for forge a shared sense of purpose between the council and the administration. On many issues there is more that unites us than divides us and we should always strive for common ground but when we cannot find common ground despite our best efforts at collaboration and compromise I believe that we must remain firmly rooted in our principles and always vote our conscience. The role of council president is to set the tone for the council and how we interact with one another the administration and the public and I believe Max Tracy has done that job very well for the last 12 months. When Max and I spoke about why he wanted to serve as council president a year ago he shared his view with me and his view that the role of council president is to provide advocacy for and support to other counselors so that they can leverage their skills effectively while also serving as a bridge between counselors and the administration again something that he has done people tend to think the council president has lots of power because of the title kind of like a local version of speaker of the house that's just not the case in our community. The role is facilitator mediator and thought partner and while the president sets agendas science committees serves as the council's official spokesperson even gets the mayor's parking space when he's out of town and runs the meetings they also have to take a step back from debate committee work and introducing their own resolutions in order to ensure that others in the body are able to govern effectively in this sense I see the role of council president is very much one of facilitation that enables the other 11 counselors to achieve their governing goals and to best represent their constituents. I'm supporting max again for election as council president because he shares believe these beliefs and goals and I trust him to carry out the role in a way that builds our collective capacity to govern this community in a fair respectful transparent and democratic fashion. Please join me tonight in casting unanimous support for max tracy for city council president. Thank you counselor pine. I have been instructed by city attorney Blackwood that I need to ask for any other nominations. Are there any other nominations? Now this is going to get awkward because she told me I needed to ask for nominations several times. So doing my duty max tracy has been nominated. Are there any other nominations? Excellent. Let's vote all in favor of max tracy for city council president. Please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any oppose please say nay. And that passes unanimously and congratulations president tracy and I am so pleased to turn over facilitation of this meeting to you. Well thank you very much CEO shad and thank you counselors for your continued support as your council president for this coming year and I think back on this moment last year and what I said in that moment which is that I felt the weight of the council presidency in a way that was perhaps that I didn't understand necessarily what all I was entering into but that it was going to be a very intense moment and that I felt a sense of weight. I didn't know quite how heavy it was going to get or how challenged we would be as a community and specifically as a council and I've appreciated over the last year the sense of collaboration that I've been able to to have with many of you with the mayor with city staff and with so many community members it has been an absolute honor and a joy to serve as council president. It's something that has been really despite its difficulties just something that has been very very much something that that I have relished in the last year and that I'm very excited to continue especially given that we are now in a moment of I think where we have significant reason for optimism and where we may be on the precipice of a great social and cultural rebirth as a city and one where maybe just maybe I'll get to leave a city council meeting in person at some point. I think that those in person meetings and that transition to back to being in person whether it's in the context of our full council meetings or committees will be part of our shared work together and something we'll have to work on together understanding that council meetings in person may not look exactly like they looked in the past and I think I'm going to be certainly welcoming of ideas that you all have for ways that we can continue to make council accessible and open to the public in ways that we're not necessarily the case prior to the pandemic. And I think that this will be crucial in service to all of the unfinished business that we have as a council whether it's crafting an inclusive budget that advances our values in meaningful ways whether it's really truly and meaningfully addressing systemic racism in all of its manifestations whether it's transforming public safety and specifically bringing independent real community oversight whether it's economic empowerment whether it's cultural empowerment there's so much work to do on that front in addition to the climate crisis in addition to issues that our community faces with substance use disorders as well as things like housing that have remained intractable and very challenging for us going forward. So I look forward to a year of shared partnership with the administration with counselors and of course with the broader community and thank you for your continued support this evening. With that we'll move on to our next item which is the election of the board of finance for members of the public if you don't know the city council has a number of standing committees one of which is the board of finance which which helps review and vet spending decisions for the city of Burlington that board is composed of several members of this council and the administration with the mayor and the council president serving on that board but then also in addition to that three city counselors that are elected at this meeting on organization day as is our as is our city tradition and is as is the the rules under city charter. So with that I will open the floor to nominations I believe that counselor Stromberg is prepared to offer nominations go ahead counselor Stromberg. Thank you president Tracy I moved to nominate counselor Ali Jang counselor Karen Paul and counselor Brian Pine to serve on the city's board of finance. Okay so we have um counselor Stromberg is moving a slate of the three candidates so counselors Paul Jang and Pine counselor Stromberg did you want the floor back? Yes please briefly. Okay go right ahead. Thanks so much um yeah so I feel that um this particular group of people um has you know only proven to work so well together in such a balanced and healthy way on the board of finance and I think um you know this level of dedication does not you know it's a rare it's a rare thing and I and I really think that um these individuals um have really led our city in such a way especially in this past year so you know I'm very inspired by each one of you and um I think you're doing a phenomenal job and I don't think there's you know reason to change anything um I think it's a really strong board of finance so um I am very proud uh to nominate this this group of people and um proud to be able to work with you um so yeah thank you. Thank you for that counselor Stromberg are there any other nominations for board of finance? Are there any other nominations for board of finance? All right I'll go one more time. Any other nominations for board of finance? Okay hearing none counselors we'll go to a vote all those in favor of adopting the slate of counselors Paul, Jang and Pine please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously and now we now have a board of finance with that a motion to adjourn is in order may please have such a motion. So moved. Moved by counselor Pine seconded by counselor Mason all those in favor Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? We are adjourned look forward to seeing you all next week when we get back to business. Thanks counselor.