 How are you good? How are you? Feel like we've all now moved over to hot beverages from my cold ice water beverages It's officially time for that It's really time Not yet Someone's not freezing yet And it's water Good Jordan and I are trying to see if we can make it the whole month without turning our heat on so Good luck with that one It's not going great No We'll notice when you have the air musk and the scarf on next week Yes I'll get more and more layers I made it through Indigenous People Day. I thought that was pretty good But then I gave up Yeah I gave up because my wife just puts it on once she feels like it I did my dog was like shivering one day And I was like, hmm, maybe rethink this It's been better since then So, but we have three so I will go ahead and call to order our meeting and is 6 o'clock 3 p.m. on October 19 And I am calling to order the regular meeting of the Winnieski City Council Winnieski City Council Please join us for the Pledge of Allegiance. May I invite Councillor Myers to lead us in that Sure I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God in the visible with liberty and justice for all Thank you So the first item, well, next item on the agenda is a gender review. Any questions or concerns about our order this evening? Looks like our presenters are rolling in Welcome, Hal Thank you. Good to be here Yeah Next is a public comment So this is a chance if somebody is here and would like to make a comment on anything that is not included on the agenda Now would be your chance to do so If you are here by zoom you can press the raise hand button if you are by phone you can press star nine I'll give it a moment just to see if there is any public comment Alright, so we will move to the consent agenda. We have our City Council minutes from October 5th and 13th As well as an accounts payable warrant ending at 1019 and payroll warrant for September 20 to October 3rd. Any questions or concerns about the consent agenda? Jim Do we need to separate these items? I believe Councillor Colston was not at the 813 meeting Oh, yes. You did miss 1013, you're right. Okay So could I have a motion to approve the council minutes of 10-5 and the payroll warrant please So moved Second Motion by Jim, second by Mike, all those in favor please say aye Aye Aye And then I will take a motion to approve the minutes of October 13 So moved Second Motion by Jim, second by Mike, all those in favor please say aye Aye Those abstaining Abstain Alright, motion carries. Thank you Can I just clarify for the vote that the first vote was for both the AP and the payroll warrant? Yes Yes, thank you Thank you So moving to council reports Jim I'll start with you Thank you Thanks Mayor, I have nothing to report this time Thank you Mike Yes, I have the Municipal Infrastructure Commission met on last Thursday I believe We went over the master plan review Which I emailed to every to all of you so you guys can review it As a whole the commission felt that we were right in line with the direction of the master plan and in compliance of it There were some goals that we've been meeting Some goals since it's only the first year into the master plan that we haven't really reached yet And being the Municipal Infrastructure Commission A lot of the daily activities that go towards this master plan are operational So we really don't have a say in both sort of areas But I will say that whatever the public or the city council wanted the commission to look into They have met with flying collars in my opinion And the one area I think that the commission really wants to focus on or hear from And it might be a little my fault too is that they want to know from the conversations or the things they discuss If it gets effectively communicated to the council And they want to know where the information that that gets discussed what what's done with that information they haven't really had any feedback from me or from the council so I guess I have to do a better job communicating and maybe as a whole I can get some feedback from from the city and from the council so I can bring it back to the commission. I think that that would help them Feel like they're doing their part in being heard Thanks Mike So as a reminder to everyone we will have at a future meeting an agenda item dedicated to reviewing these progress updates from our commissions where we could take more action on that Actually I got one more thing too. Can I Sure At this infrastructure meeting, it was pointed out to us that the V change job is going to start the summer of 21 of the rotary in the concrete replacement I mean I After the summer that the downtown businesses have had I want to make sure that we're sensitive to downtown businesses and not be an interruptive on When they make their when when they're busy or peak times are because I think the trans is playing on doing this work at night And if it's at night I think most of those businesses downtown. I think that's their peak time of making income I want to see the city And you know, I think John and Heather have talked I just got a message from John With downtown but I want to make sure we're sensitive on this because they can't go through another summer like they did last summer because a lot of them may not make it I think it's our job to make sure we are Right here into that Thanks Mike How council reports I have none at this time Thank you Um, so since our last meeting, both our city manager and myself attended And I think it's the sound committee meeting for the airport. So to receive an update on the noise compatibility program which have been accepted by the FAA so they're The airport staff and consultant were presenting a draft of their implementation plan. So this is still in drafts. We have shared this out or linked out to it's available on BTV sound calm And I know we have offered staff time to help I guess confirm data around our housing and our households here in when you ski to make sure that that is accurate. I would say on a good note, they are trying to The plan does put forward more share more shares of houses every year in when you ski Versus other towns because the impact is so much greater here. And so that is something that we are also hoping to help them push to the FAA to make sure that that happens. So there should be an update. So the sound committee included, you know, we were there there were folks from South Burlington will listen various constituencies and so they, this was a draft of the plan we should be seeing Another version of that which we will share out formally with with residents as well to keep track of where that is at public works and finance commissions met since our last meeting. The members of the finance commission focused on having a values discussion related to, you know, we talk about budgeting and City financing and aligning that to our values will be moving into that sort of master plan check up effort next public works spent their time looking at administrative changes to our land use and development regulations as part of an ongoing effort that has been happening for quite some time now. We also had our charter change hearing last week, there were some new attendees since the previous hearing. I just wanted to thank Ray and his staff and the volunteers who came out today to pick hundreds of pumpkins for the festival of pumpkins that will be happening soon and remind folks that next weekend they can pick up pumpkins at the senior center if they would like to carve some at home to contribute to that. I will pass it to you Jesse for our city updates. Thank you. Just a couple updates tonight. Just a reminder that ballots are out on the street and coming in fast and furious to City Hall. As of today we've received 1466 ballots, which is great. And thanks to Janet and Carol and angel for all they are doing to process all of those. For the community just a reminder to please read the instructions on your ballot carefully if you are voting at home. Over the last week we have installed a new drop box at the city clerk's office. So folks can write at the weaver street entrance to City Hall there's a little window box right under the City Hall sign where you can put right down your ballots in the future property tax payments, water and sewer payments 24 seven every day. Just walking by City Hall and those go right into the city clerk's office so they're very secure and good job to Janet and Carol for getting that done quickly. If folks do feel more comfortable coming in and hand delivering them before election day you can also do that between nine and three Monday through Friday to the city clerk's office. Fire and code continue to do site visits to housing buildings within the city to distribute the cloth masks we received from the former Department of Health. Last week we just delivered 35 cloth masks to scrape cedars and to the veterans housing complex. We're going to continue to do that through the winter. It's great opportunity to go and give general community risk reduction information and bring some masks that will keep our residents safe. And of course if anyone watching is interested in getting cloth masks for themselves or their family they can come again to City Hall from nine to three any day and pick those up. I know a very small socially distanced and mass team of city and school employee employees are hosting us da world development for a site visit with the state director and his staff. As you probably remember us da has been very supportive of them in the last couple of years. They are funding giving low interest loan to the school for their construction projects their major funder of ours on Main Street and they're currently considering a non governmental application here in the city as well. So we will be spending an hour with them tomorrow showing them around those projects and hopefully getting them to invest more here in the new ski. This Friday a team of us will be meeting with the Working Communities Challenge Grant Jerry team to review our application just as reminder those as you have approved those are the funds that if awarded would fund an equity commission equity director for the expansion of the community liaison roles. We hope to know about that grant by the end of November. The city hotel group has started working again on bringing a hotel to lot nine in downtown Wanooski that's the lot right at the bottom of the rotary. Per our past practice as he is looking to submit that active 50 application that downtown association which is not downtown Wanooski but is the major property owners in the TIF district had a meeting last week to review those plans. The team felt like there are still a number of open questions about agreements that need to be reached between the developer in the city parking agreements land use agreements public way agreements. So we will be working on those over the next couple of months and may bring that development back to the council this winter or this fall or winter. And finally, as the mayor said Halloween in Wanooski is upon us sign up to get your pumpkins as the mayor said or join us in the rotary next weekend. Thank you very much. Thank you Jesse. I'm moving to our regular items. Our first item a is introduction of Nathaniel Eddie our new library director. I think Nate is here. So, just by quick way of introduction Nate started last week and is currently making plans to reopen the library. As we said in our cover memo to you Nate brings 15 years of library experience with him in the Philadelphia, the free library of Philadelphia working in communities much like Wanooski. We got actually amazing applications for this position and had really great community participation from the library trustees and from a student who participated in the interview panel. And we were all just blown away by Nate's experience and his creativity around how to increase new and old access to library so we wanted to bring him here and introduce him to you tonight. Nate, take it away. All right, thank you Jesse it's so nice to meet everybody here. And I'm so excited to be here. I am actually quarantining in Alberg right now. Arrived to the state last Tuesday so have a COVID test tomorrow at the O'Brien Center and hopefully pass the flying colors. And then we can get, I can get back into the library. As I said I'm coming from Philadelphia. I've been there for the last 15 years I started there as a librarian working in neighborhood libraries throughout the city. Philadelphia is a large and diverse city as you all probably know there are 54 libraries scattered throughout the city, serving communities large and small and a lot of communities similar to Wanooski. It's an opportunity to work in a lot of neighborhoods with large new American immigrant and refugee populations and that's one of the reasons that this position here really drew me and particularly interested me in Wanooski has a similar population makeup is a lot of the neighborhoods in Philadelphia. I worked in our neighborhood libraries for about 10 years and then following that I joined the library strategic initiatives department which is a department, more on the administrative side, largely tasked with developing and monitoring the goals of the library strategic plan. We also did a lot of work around library data and all the data that the library collects, looking to that data to demonstrate impact to our various stakeholders both internal and external. And within this position I also had the opportunity to work a lot with our library staff and helping them to develop and support new and innovative ideas that they were interested in piloting at their neighborhood libraries. And if those ideas were successful we looked to ways to scale those larger throughout the library system. Personally, I grew up in Rutland. That's where I'm from I'm born and raised in Rutland tended Rutland High School went to UVM live for a time being in Wanooski. And I'm just so so excited to be back in the state to be back in this community. And I can't wait to get started with work at the library so thank you all. It's nice to meet you virtually. If you have any questions for me, I'm happy to answer those now or you can always shoot me an email or I will see you in person soon. Thank you. Appreciate you telling us about your background and what brings to our town. Yeah, absolutely. Hello, you have a question. Yeah, I have a question. So Nate, welcome and glad to have you on board. I first landed in Philly in 1971 when I went to college. What are some of the neighborhood libraries that you work at I'm just curious. So I worked in I started in Feltonville, which was in North Philadelphia. And then after that I worked in a library in West Philadelphia in our Mantua community. Oh yeah. And following that I lived in South Philadelphia so position opened up at our South Philadelphia library and so that's where I was working. Prior to joining the strategic conditions department so I think I had a good and then of course you always fill in at different libraries throughout the city, depending on staffing and things like that so I think it was a great experience I got to work and meet a lot of different people from different walks of life and different neighborhoods throughout. Great. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. I think like you have a question. No question just want to say welcome back to Vermont and welcome to one of the ski. Thank you. Thank you for a lot of our residents make use of our library and we can use some strategic thinking there to help us make the most of it so welcome aboard and I hope to to see you soon someday. As well. Thank you. All right, thank you. Thanks mate. You're welcome. So next on our item is our Chittin County Regional Planning Commission's annual presentation. We have Mr Baker and Mr O'Brien here today. Yeah, so well, Heather brings them over. I'll just set this up by saying, as you know, CCRPC supports the city of when you see in a bunch of important ways through planning and transportation initiatives. And we fund them with small dues every year and so Charlie is here to walk through to give us an update on those. As you know, probably know Mike O'Brien is our appointed representative to his board and Abby Blything is the alternate. And just to be clear, no relation. Charlie Baker. Excellent point. Thank you, Jesse. I would have forgotten to say that. Yes, no, no relation that we know. So, so I think you had our annual report in your packet. And I'm not going to read the whole thing to be thankful for that. But this is also a customer service call for, for me, for us, we want to make sure that we are providing the services in the way that you expect so I'll just do a quick review of the report. The first page is really background. Kind of give you some background about what their regional planning commission is and our 29 member board are funding. As Jesse just mentioned, we do get municipal dues that covers about 5%, or five maybe five to 7% of our budget. The rest is federal and state dollars that we bring into Chittenden County and use to help our municipalities. And then it has your representatives which Jesse just reviewed. And then you have a number of staff on other technical committees, which we really appreciate and your representatives on all the committees are very active and thoughtful representatives of the city so thank you for that. The next page is more specific, when you ski activities, the impact the transportation impact the project we've been working on the East Allen scoping study that we worked on with you last year. And then a number of things water quality I'm not going to review all these, but quite a few emerged or water quality items. I'm happy to take any feedback on any of those services or for things coming up. I think the, the big thing coming up is finishing the phosphorus control plan but also the wooden ski parking inventory and management plan which is kind of a big issue for when you see some glad that we're able to help there but any feedback for us on the work that we've been doing with the city. Thanks for coming in today and I know I hear great things from staff, I know I see a lot of value in the support that CCRPC provides us, you know you've helped us. Those products you mentioned getting towards our transportation master plan goals. And your organization also provides sort of a higher level regional viewpoint that we might miss here and keeping that in mind is really important. I'm looking forward to seeing the outcomes of the parking study to finalizing our impact fee recommendations and being able to continue moving forward. I also just wanted to call out a couple of things for any residents we have watching at home, who may may not have reviewed this report but you know your participation in the refugee immigrant service provider network and opioid alliance is not something that comes to mind readily with sort of the broader area of work that usually CCRPC is focused on. There's energy planning happening you mentioned the water quality work overall transportation management for our region. I think the ability to have that sort of access to a regional viewpoint is is just really important and and that a lot of folks don't see this work happening so I want to make sure to call it out. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, sorry. No, go ahead. Yeah, I was just as the end of the report does get into some of these regional activities and you just mentioned some thank you for that. I wanted to just kind of mention specifically, you know where we're I think trying to think about more of a regional view is the building homes together campaign and you know where we're, we're trying to push more housing production and 20% of it being affordable. And just to kind of give you a quick update on that, you know we I think we're four years into the five year campaign so 80% of the way through that we set a target of building 3500 homes and we're at like 3200 so like, we built about 90% of the homes that we were targeting and in the 80% of the time, which is good right sounds good, but two issues that came out of that one is that the we're only at 13% affordable instead of the 20% target so we know there's still a huge need I know this is nothing new to to you all. And then the second thing is, and this is kind of a bigger picture housing market issue is that you know we were kind of hoping if we built 3500 homes or 3200 homes that we would start to really influence the vacancy rate, which has been you know really low under 2% for a long time. And again, this is not new information like our housing market in Chittany County is very tight. It's expensive. People can't find housing that's affordable here so they end up driving long distances to find a house and then they commute back to Chittany County. And even though we are getting close to that 3500 number, the vacancy rate is just creeping up a little bit I think we're over to to maybe two and a half percent now, and really closer to 5% would be a healthy market. So I just say that just to say, and I know, I'm sure your residents feel like, Oh my God, when you've been building so many housing units. I haven't heard that personally but I wouldn't be surprised if you hear that sometimes, because we hear in other towns to. And, and I hate to say this but it's not enough. We still need more housing units. So that was just one point I wanted to relay that it was kind of a regional view as the Bayer was just alluding to. And the second thing, and this is much more, we're at a very early stage of trying to figure out how to be most helpful as a regional entity is really on the racial equity work. You know, that's obviously been a major conversation this year in lots of venues. We've had something in our regional plan since 2013 about this is one of our eight key strategies to improve racial equity in our region. I would say that we have not been doing very much about that. Except we have it as one of our strategies in our plan. And so we are really looking forward to figuring out how to advance those conversations and how to be helpful to our municipalities in achieving better results in that arena. And I think I just kind of opened that conversation to say you have thoughts about what would be most helpful for us to do. We're all ears and I know Mike, who is our current chair, you should mention that Mike is the chair of the board right now is, you know, and we're very interested in this topic and figuring out how to be helpful to the region so I'll kind of leave the report at that and Mike I don't know if there's anything you want to add on to that. No, I think you covered it well Charlie, hopefully you can hear me I'm wearing a headset new microphone because I haven't been able to talk on zoom meetings in the past but anyway. No, I think I think Charlie handled it perfectly. The racial thing. Yeah, if anyone has any thoughts on what we can do to help out or ideas for we're looking internally at the CCRPC what we do and how we can be better. You know, in the role of racial equity and equity in general, but anything that we can do to help you out any thoughts you have. Please, you know, feel free to contact Charlie contact me whoever you know Charlie the I'm going to put you on the spot here a little bit. I was thinking as you're talking regionally things that people still ask me is about exit 16. The man. Diverging the intersection. Can you just, if you if you know, can you give a little timeframe what this construction schedule is for that. Yeah, and I'm wondering, let us know if we can help have a conversation with be trans you know I was listening with curiosity as as Mike Myers was talking about the circulator concrete reconstruction. Next year, because my understanding is that probably exit 16 work is going to start next spring also. I think that's probably a full two construction seasons 21 and 22 but you know that is going to have some implications for the city, especially if you have other construction going on at the same time. Mike that's the latest I think the last I've heard was we trans is hoping to be able to start construction, you know next construction season spring 21. I just want to remind that, as I recall when that was approved, not only sidewalks, going connecting with with shots and and died. Let's go with us. So signals, all the way through. I'm not sure if it's going to go all the way down to the circle but at least Tiger Street, coordinating that into the traffic signal. Thanks, I, and I'm glad that you highlighted some of those specific projects. How has his hand raised. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you Charlie and Mike for for your leadership and trying to make our community a better place in our region as well. My first point. Charlie, I think. I guess I'm just curious, what is your thoughts for trying to close that gap of from 13% to increase it to 20% for affordable housing. And when we started the campaign and I should really give more credit to Champlain Housing Trust and Housing Vermont who were our partners in that campaign, who are our partners in that campaign. Housing Vermont has now changed her name to ever north. So if you start to hear ever north. Thank Housing Vermont. But when when I talked to those two organizations and the reason I brought them up is because they bill and maintain affordable housing units. Their response is almost always resource money. And so when we started that whole campaign. We advocated for a housing bond. And that ended up getting supported by the incoming governor Phil Scott at the time. And in the legislature, we were asking for $75 million bond it turned into like a $35 million bond. But that made a significant difference. But pretty much all that money is allocated now and it's all. So we're really kind of hoping that there is another housing bond considered by the legislature. So if you have a chance to have a hallway conversation about that in house that would be awesome. And I wish there were some other answer than just money, because that's always, it seems like too easy to an answer or too hard of an answer. They're really and the real difficulty right now is that the construction costs have been going up crazy this year. So I guess I'm hopeful that the market for materials and things really settles down next year and we can actually get more bang per buck in the affordable housing arena. But but actually they're kind of concerned and we share the concern that the housing bond has been completely used up and there will actually get even less than 13% not for all units going forward in the next few years. So. Great. Thank you. And my other response to your question about how do you as an organization achieve racial equity or support racial equity in our community. My suggestion is to consider doing your internal work first. So looking out for their number of different organizations consultants that can help with that. But you know you got to kind of look in the mirror first and like okay where am I with this and how am I shifting my attitude, my behavior. How does that impact our policy and how are our practices so that's my suggestion is to look first inwardly as an organization and then you can find ways to connect out in the greater community with your new found understanding about how do we achieve racial equity. Yeah thank you that's that's that's what we were thinking and understanding as well so appreciate that we started that work with the board last month and I do think we'll probably because it's I think we'll end up bringing on a partner and you know paying as a consulting team or or network or however works but I think we're going to bring on a partner to work with and actually I think sometime in the next few weeks there'll probably be an RFQ out on the street so if you know anybody and we've already started those conversations with a number of organizations so and I think my hope is also that what we learn we can also share with our municipalities. We have some resources that particularly the smaller towns don't so we're hoping to make progress not just not just internally but also with our members so great. Thank you. Thank you. Jim, I see your hand is raised. Thank you Mayor and thank you Charlie and Mike for this really informative list it was great to read through and realize how much we're getting for $6000 so thank you and I'm just I'm very impressed with the work that CCRPC does for our community and for the region and I'm I'm glad that you provided a little extra update and thanks to Councillor Colston for asking some more about the building homes together program that's the one that kind of jumped out at me as well and one thing that we've been coming up more often is the issue of single family homes or larger units or more units per more bedrooms per unit and I look through the quickly the data the most recent report on the program I didn't see a break down of how many type how many bedrooms are being provided in the general I see it's largely weighted towards multifamily housing which I understand why I'm just curious if you've had any discussions as part of that program on that balance and mix between larger number of bedrooms per unit single family house housing versus multifamily housing and kind of what the the perception of need and meeting that need is for the building homes together program. That's interesting we have not you're right we have not been tracking bedrooms per se and yeah if you looked at the numbers you would have seen that the predominant type of new housing unit is multifamily attached housing, which are smaller right and probably is mostly one and two bedroom units. And yes, so this is kind of off the cuff reaction, which may be proven wrong later, but you're part of, I think what we were campaigning in response to was a few decades of largely suburban rural single family housing and you're going back into the 70s 80s and 90s like about we have 30 to 40% of our housing units were happening in the rural part of the county. And so one of the other parts, you may be aware of in our plan is to have at least 80% and we actually ramp that up this last couple years to 90% of housing units happen where we have infrastructure and services, like when you see. And we've been at 8687% the last few years. But what does that mean that does mean that they tend to be more multifamily if we're trying to get housing units in the urbanized area. So if I'm understanding your question, are you saying they're like what in when you see there's more of a demand for larger units with more bedrooms. Yeah, we've been hearing from some residents who say I can rent a house for my with three bedrooms but if I want to purchase or access a bigger place I have to leave when you see to go somewhere else for those units are better supplied. That's just been discussion and I don't think that there's necessarily a clear need or shift articulated yet but I'm people are talking more about counting bedrooms as opposed to units and starting to look at how we're splitting out how many bedrooms were creating per unit. That's a that's a good thought I'll see if our data actually contains that and maybe we could, you know, put a little more nuance on that. You know, and like even we've been tracking demolitions also right like in Essex there was a pretty large apartment complex that got demolished for them to build a new apartment complex and, you know, but even though the new one was I'll say it was 200 units. It didn't add 200 units because they tore down 180 right it only added 20. But we should be tracking the bedrooms to because I don't know if they built 201 bedroom, replacing 180 two bedrooms. That's, that's a big difference right like. So, I'll see. I'm going to ask that question to see if our data has that. It's not anything we reported out or that I've asked before so it's a good question. Thank you so much. Hey Jim. Excuse me, were you asking about single family homes versus multifamily as well was that part of your question. No, because I see we call them single family or multifamily but doesn't imply the number of bedrooms and I and I see the split is largely weighted towards multifamily. And for the reasons that Charlie outline that makes a lot of sense. But I my presumption is that many of those are lower unit. Sorry, lower bedroom count units. And so I was just kind of curious mostly about how many bedrooms are going in per unit, not so much as a question of how much should we be building more single family standalone houses. I think I'm assuming is driven by the decisions that have been made already. I'll bring that up because I know on the planning commission we we talk a lot about, you know, do we need to do something to get more single family homes in the city convert, you know, old homes homes that were cut up into apartments back to single family and it's a tough balance and when you come to new construction it's difficult because of the cost of construction. New single family affordable homes, you know between the land cost and the, and the building costs. It's very difficult. Thanks. Thanks, thank you. Christine can I jump in for a quick moment while we have your attention on this issue. I think it's a great question to Charlie about what's needed. Absolutely resources are needed. I think it is beyond just bonds. I think it also has to, we also have to be looking at, you know, state permitting policies we have to be looking at who has access to new market tax credits or low low income tax credits as you all know we've had a lot of success and when you scan the last couple of years getting access to low income tax credits through some in a private developer. And I think that they are they are building good affordable housing for families and looking at the policies that enable that to happen and enable that to happen in denser urban areas where there is municipal resources and where there are there's walkability and there's community connections and there's opportunities to, you know, work to work and not and meet energy goals. Just by very specific example of this the challenge of this conversation here and when you ski. I did with you a couple of meetings ago or meeting ago that the Champlain Housing Trust project of the OCC is moving forward and we hope to be bringing you development agreements about that in the next couple of meetings. So what you will hear and you will hear much more about this at a future meeting is that they are looking to develop 24 perpetually affordable condos so home ownership opportunities for when you ski residents at the front of the OCC parking lot three really targeting that you know family housing not simply one bedrooms right now the cost of construction on the current design is running about 360 $370,000 a unit for a resale price of 170 $170,000. So when you think about that you've got to fund $360,000 of construction on $170,000 sale, you need tax credits you need bonds you need resources in that project to make that to lower that that consumer cost. So you'll hear much more about that I just wanted to kind of tease you with that while we're having this conversation in anticipation of hearing that receiving that update in the future and Heather, who just came right on has really been the point person on shepherding through that that development project. Thanks for letting me jump in. Thank you, Heather, would you like to add on the only thing I want to add is, you know, having had Charlie give overall what the results have been with 13% coming in affordable, I just want to give kudos to Council and when you ski because for us since 21% of new units that have come on have been affordable. So I think when you ski is absolutely performing well on this and continues to perform well and we'll tell you more about CHT so to flag that and say hey it's going okay here. Thank you, Heather. I don't want to take any more time but thank you very much. Appreciate having you come in and talk to us. The annual update is nice. Thank you very much. Charlie, you didn't mention the most important update which is you are now a Winooski resident. You are now a constituent. I am renting at 50 West Center Street so I can I'm like halfway between City Hall in my office I can get either one in minutes. So we're waiting for you to buy a house now Charlie. I know. I'm looking forward to those maybe 170,000 sounds about right. I'm in. No, no, no. Welcome. Yeah, thank you. I'm glad to be here. It's a great city. Thank you. Thanks, Charlie. Have a good night. Thank you. So our next item is our annual presentation from Green Mountain Transit. We also have some representatives here. Thank you so much for joining us. And as Heather was bringing them over as you know, Green Mountain Transit provides our public transportation service throughout the city. We fund them annually through an appropriation as well. John Moore is the general manager and is here and Austin Davis is our representative to that board with, I believe it's still raised. Yes, good evening, everybody. Thank you for having us. I'm the director of Green Mountain Transit. And awesome Davis is the board rep from Wanooski and yes, Ray is still technically the ultimate and has done a lot of great work with us in the past. I do quickly want to give a shout out to CCRPC. We do a lot of work with them. They're a very supportive partner. And all of our federal planning funds actually flow through the CCRPC. So they're great to work with. And Charlie is a rock star. Jesse, am I able to share my, my screen? I was just looking at that, John, I can't immediately figure out how to let you do that. So I do have it up on my screen. Do you mind if I just share and you can tell me what to click through? Yeah, that'd be great. So I just a very brief overview of our organization that I'll get into some Wanooski specific information. And then I'd be happy to answer any questions and probably more importantly, take any comments or suggestions that you folks may have. How we can provide better service to the folks of Wanooski. So quickly kind of who we are. We were formed in 1973 as the Chittenden County transportation authority. We are still the first and only transit authority in the state of Vermont. Back in 2016, CCTA and Green Mountain transit agency, which provided service down in the Washington County area, then also up in Franklin County, which is a county combined into one organization. And we were renamed the Green Mountain transit authority. We provide service in six counties. And we're directed by a 13 member board. And in total, we have about 180 employees, 160 revenue vehicles and almost a thousand bus stops system wide. So just a quick snapshot of who we are. So if you want just the next slide. So just our mission, I won't read this, but I did highlight some of the keywords. You know, one thing I will point out for Wanooski specific is that transit orientated development. I think downtown Wanooski is probably the closest thing to that that we have in our service area. So the routes that provide service to downtown Wanooski are definitely routes that are targeted for investment in the future as we have resources available. So transit largely works and there's density where there's mobility and certainly downtown Wanooski provides that. So we want to provide the best service we can to that area. Next slide. So just a real quick snapshot of our kind of financial summary. So in total, we have about a $21 million operating budget. Roughly two thirds of that is in our urban area, which is the Chittenden County service area. You can see about 50% of our revenues come from the, the federal government. This is a little skewed. This is fiscal year 20. We did receive some cares funding. So in FY 20, our fed share was about 10% higher than normal. And then our passenger fare and our state revenue, both are about 5% lower than normal. But as you can see, we've got about 14% in state revenue, 22% from our local municipalities. And I'll give a breakdown here specifically for Wanooski. And then about 12% for the passenger revenue, we are currently operating without a fare. We've been fare free since March. So that's the reason that that category is down for the quarter four. We did not receive any fare revenue. And then a few other miscellaneous revenue sources, advertising, selling of old vehicles, that type of thing. Next slide, Jesse. So we do provide multiple types of transit service. So, you know, the service that you see most often in, in Chittenden County is our, you know, fixed route city bus. So in Wanooski, that's the, the blue line and the green line. But we also do provide multiple commuter routes that connect Burlington to some outer regions in Chittenden County and beyond. We also provide multiple types of demand response service. So we provide the Americans with disability act, ADA service in Chittenden County. We contract that with SSTA. So you probably see their bands running around. We also run what's called the E and D program for elders and disabled participants, essentially mirrors the ADA program, but they don't live within the geographic area that the ADA program covers. So we provide a supplemental service, but it's a very similar service type. GMT provides the non-emergency medical transportation through a Medicaid contract in our rural service areas. And that service is provided in Chittenden County and also by SSTA. We also provide weekly grocery shopping trips. So in Wanooski every Wednesday, we have a bus that picks up at Barlow street and on spring street. And at the courtyard and brings those folks to the price chopper on Chauvin road, free service, very personalized. So they easily can get their grocery bags on the bus and, and do that weekly shopping. We also provide seasonal mountain service to support the tourism industries in both Stowe and also in the Mad River Valley. And we are starting a pilot project for something that's called microtransit, which is essentially transit services provided akin to something like Uber or left. So it's something that's very interesting. We're doing that in Montpelier. And I'll speak a little bit more about that in a few slides. So just a snapshot of our ridership. So I did use FY 19 data for this, just because we did experience some pretty significant ridership reductions last year due to COVID. But in FY 19, we provided just under three million rides system wide. As you can see, the breakdown is primarily on our fixed route services. But I will mention while the E and D and the Medicaid and some of these other programs, much lower ridership, these services are connecting people to life saving activities, dialysis, cancer treatments, that type of thing, much more door to door personalized service. So while it's a lower percentage of our business, it's a very critical piece of what we provide to the community. And generally speaking, our FY 20 fixed route ridership was down about 22% in FY 20. But that will fluctuate. You know, we're hoping to bounce back at the end of this fiscal year, but we are still down about 50% over last year through our quarter one of fiscal year 21. So slowly, but surely we're hoping that ridership rebounds and we can do that safely. So just for some Winooski specific information. So Winooski is a member municipality of Green Mountain Transit. So with that, they do provide financial assistance. So for the fixed route assessment, it's about $108,000. And so that basically provides the local share for the green line route and the blue line services. And I'll go over some details for those routes in a minute. Typically we do assess a three to 4% annual increase in FY 20, largely due to some of those federal funds that we received. We were able to flatline the FY 20 assessment. For all of our member municipalities. And we'll be developing our FY 22 budget. You know, by December, so we can notify the city what the increase will be. So we're still not sure what that will be. But we will try to minimize that to all of our member municipalities, understanding, you know, the impacts of COVID while meeting our financial obligations to operate our service. In addition to the fixed rate assessment, there's also a number of additional funds that we received from the city. In addition to the fixed rate assessment, there's also an ADA assessment. So again, that's a service that we contract with S S T A. And essentially the federal regulations require a three quarter of a mile buffer zone around any fixed route service. And if anyone lives within that buffer zone, that can take the fixed route city bus for any sort of disability or other reason, we provide door to door service. So that's a very complex calculation, but essentially per our charter, what we do is we take the total program cost for ADA, which was 1.34 million in this fiscal year. Budgeted in 50% of that comes off the top. Our charter provides a 50% discount for all of our member municipalities. So for FY 21, the total budgeted program costs were 670,000. And then we simply just apply the ridership percentage for each community to that total dollar amount to come up with the, the assessed amount. So in FY 19, which was the last completed fiscal year, there was about 5,400 Wenuski resident ADA rides that represented about 12 and a half percent of the total program. So if we apply that to that 670,000, that's how we came up with that assessment for FY 21. Again, through our FY 22 budget development, we'll be projecting the FY 22 ADA costs, which will be a little tricky because we have seen some significant COVID impacts, but we do know that Wenuski had 14% of the ADA rides last year. So that suggests that the overall assessment should be somewhere in the ballpark. We likely will be projecting a lower total program costs just because the demands down. So I don't want to make any promises, but there's I would say a decent chance that the ADA assessment for FY 22 will be equal or potentially even a little bit less than it was in FY 21. So that's a process that we're undergoing now. And then lastly, Wenuski does provide some local match for the E&D program. That's the elders and disabled program, which kind of operates outside of the ADA requirements. So they provided about 20, you guys provided about $2,400 last year. And that served 371 Wenuski residents, largely traveling to a dialysis treatments outside of the window that the fixed route services were operating. So again, very kind of a critical transportation services. So just a quick overview of the fixed route services we provide to Wenuski. I'm sure you folks are aware of this, but the blue line is the old number two S extension line. That is our busiest route. So in FY 19, over 457,000 boardings. That route connects the downtown Burlington, downtown Wenuski out on route 15 to five corners in the Amtrak station. We do provide our highest highest level of service on this route. We operate seven days a week. We run that bus every 20 minutes during rush hour on week days. And we operate evening service to almost midnight, Monday through Saturday. The other fixed route that serves Wenuski is the green line. That's the old number nine Riverside Wenuski route. We did go. I mentioned last June. So a lower ridership level of about 120,000 boardings, but still a very important route. And so we did invest in that route pretty heavily back June of last year when we had a next gen service plan. So now that route operates every 30 minutes from 6 a.m. until 7 p.m. We do operate later service Monday through Saturday. And all the trips now provide service throughout the entire route before June of last year, multiple trips a day ended at the Champlain mill. So there was no service other parts of Wenuski when that was happening. And that route connects our downtown transit center through the old North end down Riverside Avenue into Wenuski, Tygan Weaver Street, and then down to the flats on Hick Hocken Elm. So definitely a very critical route in our system. As I mentioned, we do operate every Wednesday a weekly shopping special to get folks to the grocery store. Again, it's much more personalized. So folks that may have more difficulty bringing on two or four bags of groceries onto a packed bus. You know, this is a much more personalized service. There's not that pressure of, you know, getting to the bus stop on time, that bus waits for folks and helps them load their groceries. So a very important service. And then we also have multiple commuter routes that provide service, you know, in Wenuski to St. Auburn's Milton and also Jeffersonville. So Wenuski residents have good access. Commuter routes. So just some quick initiatives, which we're looking to achieve going into the future. Number one, we have a strong goal of technology improvements. We do have a new bus tracking app. So folks can go on their phones and track where the bus is and what the estimated arrival time is their bus stop. That also helps us track our schedules and provide better printed material and increase our reliability. We're also working with T mobile on a, on a pilot project, two year pilot project to offer free wifi and all of our buses. So we're hoping that's rolled out sometime at the start of the calendar year. And then that micro transit is what I mentioned. It's essentially Uber or lift service operated with a public transit vehicles. So our first pilot project will be starting in early January down in Montpelier. So it's really on demand transit with the app-based technology and also a call in options. So folks that don't have a smartphone can, can call into our call center and, and request that ride. And we think there's a lot of potential in Chittenden County for that type of service too, for that first mile, last mile. In low density application, you know, one thing that comes to mind in Winooski is the grocery store access. You know, we do operate service on our Milton commuter up to the Shaw's on Mountain View, but it's only a handful of times a day. So I think that's one of the things that's really important. So it's really important that you know, we don't think that this micro transit, you know, worked out, we could have a potentially a system where folks could take the green or blue line to a centralized point, likely downtown Winooski. And then they could request this micro transit service to pick them up and bring them to Shaw's and then bring them back to, to get back to the main route. So really that first mile, last mile application, we think there's a lot of promise in that. And we're excited for the potential to roll that out. And then we can also plan for the future. So we're going to be working on that. We're going to be working on that. Essentially a 10 to 15 year planning document to guide the organization. A lot of visioning and value creation with that. And then it will be a kind of a prioritization of our investments over that, that time period. One thing we're also working very hard on, and this is a priority of mine is a fleet replacement plan. Besides labor, our top cost pressure is certainly our remaining costs as we do, and so we're not sitting as many new buses as we should. So I've put a strong emphasis on, on trying to catch us up to speed. And so we've had 17 new buses since 2017, and five more on order. And that's roughly 33% of our fleet in the last three years. So that, that drives down costs. And, you know, helps us be as cost-effective as we can. the bus fleet. We do have two zero-emission buses in service now. We got those last winter and we run those on all of our Chittenden County routes and really analyzing their ability to meet our service needs and hopefully expanding that program into the future. Quickly, I'll mention that we are developing a public transit agency safety plan. This is a federal transit administration requirement, but we're really excited that this could culturally change your organization so safety is kind of paramount in everything we do. So we'll be rolling that out at the first of the year and are very excited about that process. And I'll quickly just mention, obviously, like everybody else, we've spent a lot of our time recently with COVID response. We are currently operating a fare-free service on all of our buses. We do have a face mask requirement, rear door boarding. We have hand sanitizer on board all of our buses. But one thing that our board has spent a lot of time discussing is the continuation of that zero fare service that was kind of on the radar prior to COVID. So that will be something that we continue to discuss and see if there are ways that we can potentially operate all of our services fare-free into the future without having to reduce any service. So there may be more to come on that point. So that's kind of where we're at. And I'm happy to answer any questions and take any suggestions or comments from you folks. Thank you for joining us today and welcome to your new role. Thank you. Appreciate the presentation. I am going to pass it to Hal. I see his hand is raised. Thank you, Mayor. And thanks, John, for the presentation. I have a couple of questions. In terms of the micro transit program, which I think is really interesting, given that Whenuski is the most diverse city in northern New England, how might you communicate, connect with our new American community service? And if it's successful, how might that challenge your thinking about expanding it in terms of smaller buses, more on demand service, making it more convenient and hopefully usable for monitors? Yeah, great questions, Hal. So to your first question, I think the key of this micro transit in my pillar and anywhere we roll it out is really community buy-in. I think what we've learned in my pillar is that the stakeholder engagement is critical for the success of these new programs. I think there's certainly some apprehension from current riders of having to go to an on-demand model, while there's high excitement for maybe non-passengers who think it's the greatest thing since transportation. So really balancing those things and making sure there's a key connection with the local stakeholders. So I think in Whenuski, any of the stakeholders we can outreach to and work with I think would be critical to make that successful. In terms of the on-demand transit, this is something that V-Trans strongly supports, at least the pilot project, with the understanding that running a 40-foot bus to meet demand is not always the appropriate way to meet that demand. So in my pillar even where there was a decent amount of ridership, we had a route that was basically riding around and not picking anybody up. It was not a good use of resources. So this can really provide that potential of matching supply to demand. And if there's peaks and ridership, we can very easily adjust our staffing and meet that. And then it does allow for the potential of smaller buses, which again is better for the environment. It's better for our budget. They're usually cheaper to operate and just less problems in the community in a lot of ways. So again, a 40-foot bus is not the solution to every transportation problem. I think microtransit is kind of an awareness of that. Great. Thank you. I'm also excited to see where this microtransit project goes. From what I hear from resident feedback, I've specifically had quite a few folks tell me they don't ride the bus because they can't rely on it to make it to work on time. And so having a public transportation service that they can feel more secure and making it to their job site on time is one of the more critical needs that I hear. And one of the things that is maybe a deterrent for use. I also wanted to just share a couple of other things that I have heard over the last several months. You mentioned Shaw's. This is something that comes up over and over and over again. Why the bus line doesn't go up from Taigen to at least Shaw's or somewhere up at that spot in that area. Not just for grocery access, but there are folks who've also mentioned to me that they see this as an employment opportunity. There's quite a few folks, businesses on Watertower Hill. There's the Bowling Alley Costco. So I would urge you to consider an extension of the actual fixed route to include that stop on a more regular basis. The other piece of information that I wanted to share is I have heard from students that they would like to, they often ride the bus home from the Winduski School District. The green line, right? I think goes on the green line. And would it be possible to run a reverse route once each school morning for them to use it to get to school in the mornings as well? So these are just some things that I would like to share with you as you consider changes to routes. Yeah. And those are all things we hear on a fairly regular basis. And I know Austin brought up the school transportation. I think it would be difficult to reverse one trip directionally, but there's always options of adding another trip in the morning. We have to identify some resources, but we're happy to look at all options. And we understand especially public school transportation how critical that is. So looking at options, we can see what we can come up with. Thank you. Are there other questions from Council? Is there anything else that would be helpful for you to hear from us? No, I don't think so. Not that I have. I know Austin does a lot of communication for us. So thank you for serving that role as well. Well, thank you for joining us this evening and appreciate the time. You got it. Thank you so much. Thank you, John. All right. This moves us to item D, which will be annual presentation from the Wynuski Valley Parks District. Ray, do you want to introduce this one? Yeah, sure. And can everybody hear me okay? Great. So yeah, definitely happy to be here to introduce my colleagues here from Wynuski Valley Park District. We have spent a lot of quality time together over the last year plus working on our parks plan. So Nick Warner, Executive Director of the Park District, Lauren Chakodi. And Lauren, remind me what your new title is because it changed somewhat recently. Yes. Yep. It's a now operations manager. Nice. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And then Aaron Dupuis, who's here, who is our Wynuski rep and has been an awesome addition to the Park District Board. And so, you know, again, I just from a while, while the Park District doesn't currently manage any property within the City of Wynuski proper, you know, I can't say enough in my role about how helpful they have been just in terms of technical assistance, you know, helping me think through some of these big picture projects, you know, bringing and I'd say all the way up to a Parks and Open Space Master Plan all the way down to I think you should put this type of surface material on this trail, you know, that the really granular stuff as well. So I think certainly Nick, Lauren and then Tim from their team have been really helpful. And then I think it's also just really important to remember that this is a regional organization that has a lot of parks and open spaces that they manage outside the boundaries of Wynuski that our residents have an opportunity to go take advantage of. And I think I'll speak for myself, especially during COVID times with my kids at home and needing to get the heck out of dodge every once in a while. We used a lot of the Park District facilities throughout the last six, seven months. And it's been awesome to have just as a regional resident. So so with that, I'm going to stop buttering these guys up and turn it over. I think Nick, you're going to sort of take the lead probably on presentation and go from there. Yes. What Ray said, no. I think it's useful. Some of you are familiar with us. Some not just a quick sketch. We're a hybrid 501C3 and inter municipal corporation. So we carry both statuses. We have seven member towns of which Wynuski is one. Each town has a trustee that serves and the trustees meet monthly. And I can testify along with Aaron. It's a very active group. So I get a lot of feedback, which is, from my perspective, great. And I was just going to ask if my Lauren wish to jump in. Yeah, I wasn't sure if he had totally froze on everybody's screens, because that was kind of happening with a few other presenters are just kind of glitched out. Yeah, so hopefully Nick will be able to join back in. But as he was saying, yeah, we're a regional organization. We have great representation from all of our member towns now through our board that are very active, providing lots of feedback. As you mentioned, we meet monthly, which is great because it's just it's constant feedback for us to get information on town's perspective and how to keep going. We manage 18 parks and natural areas throughout our seven member communities. It's just under 1800 acres of land that we now manage to roughly 27 miles of trails, I believe, and about 13 miles of shoreline along the Winooski River. Most of our parks are located right along the river, including the Ethan Allen homestead, which is just kind of upriver from Winooski here in the intervale, along with McCray Farm Park that is actually pretty close to Winooski as well. And then we also manage Colchester Pond out in Colchester and Old Mill Park in Jericho. So I'm sure that those are hopefully places that people have visited. In addition to managing those, we have done education programs in the past, including working with JFK Elementary in Winooski, providing kind of supplementary environmental education to second grade and fourth grade classes. We also ran a, up until this year, ran a summer camp program for youth in the community. So it looks like Nick is coming back on. It's called loss of internet. Sorry about that. Lauren, what did you tell them? I just kind of gave them a little bit more of a rundown of how many parks we manage and acreage and programs. Okay, I'll keep this short because I've already used a lot of time offline. But just what I was going to say, it's very instructive of how we've all responded to COVID and just quick overview of our experience in that. At first, we didn't know it was even safe to go to our parks. So the first couple of weeks, we're working very closely to find out if you touch a post, you're going to get sick. I don't remember those days. Then we decided to keep all the parks open and then we got slammed with people. And we realized that our number one job this year was to be a good host. We had already made a very well-considered decision before COVID hit that we were going to phase out our direct programming and Lauren might have touched on that. She probably spoke about the camp that we used to run. It was a decision that in the end that I made, it was based on the fact that we needed to do a better job of our core roles and work with other organizations and bring them in to provide that programming. And we renovated a room in order to do that. And there's going to be a punchline associated with that in a minute. Then COVID hit, we were actually kind of happy that we'd already made that decision because we were not responsible for canceling programs. But we found ourselves not knowing what our future was. We decided not to hire seasonals. So our park superintendent and Tim Larnad and Remy, his assistant, have basically done the work of five people this summer without complaint. We've all pitched in. We're all picking trash. We're all doing trail work. And I discovered an incredibly supportive network of agencies, nonprofits, trail organizations across the board and from what we all connected pretty early. As a result, we were able to get some resources through DHCV and hire a consultant to help us survive the COVID thing. A big part of our income is through leasing. We have two major tenants. The consultant was able to get paycheck protection for the museum, even our own museum, and able to get assistance for the daycare center that operates from preschool that operates there. Preschool was getting slammed as well. So we offered what used to be my office as another program space. And they immediately said, yes. So we spent a lot of energy and time and getting special permission from Burlington City Council to change the zoning to allow them to expand. So they're now up to 33 kids a day. We were able to reprogram some of our small grants into operational income. And along the way, we're still developing our new park at Zurich Cove on the mouth of Manuski. We're still working with the city of Williston, kind of Williston, on a new park. It's called the Jacob Parcel. I'm doing all the pre-development legal work around the easement with that. And we are still plowing forward incrementally growing our park system. We've got another donation of 10 acres to add to Colchester Pond. And all of these, you know, all the associated work that goes with putting protective mechanisms on those. In terms of our work with Manuski, we really have developed a symbiotic relationship, which is really interesting. Lauren just worked directly on the parks management plan. Ray and I have been working together over the last six years on the number of things, the canoe launches. We have had conversations about next steps. Does the park district become an owner, manager of Cassavent or Memorial? Does that make sense for the city? We don't have those answers yet, but we put ourselves out there very clearly saying that we feel that we should be more directly involved in taking the load off on natural area management for the city of Manuski. Some of you may know that Cassavent Park is one of the most highly rated conservation areas in the entire Northwest Vermont region. It is an astonishing, you might think it is the wetland next to Riverlog, but when it comes down to the amount of endangered species, the wetlands values, floodplain values, it is an astonishingly important conservation area. So I'm just putting that out there because you should be very proud of that being there. Similarly, Catlin Island is a very similarly rated place. So our plan with the city is to continue what we're doing, which is to offer our technical support and sometimes on the ground support, mostly on a gratis basis, but occasionally we have gotten hired by you guys to do work, and that's part of how we make our money for our budget is we do side work with South Burlington and Williston and you guys, and to continue the conversation around how you guys are going to manage your natural areas, and then ultimately potentially have a conversation about whether it makes sense for the Park District to become more involved as a landowner in the town. That may or may not happen. We understand that, but I think the case could be made that it would be more efficient for us to take over one of your natural areas at some point. None of us are ready for that conversation yet. You want to get your park planning done, you want to have a better sense of how that all comes together. And in the interim, we're continuing to be really aggressive with grants. There's been some very generous grantsmanship this year, just some key elements here. We charge nothing for entry to our parks, so there is no fee basis. For instance, Burlington Park's 70 percent of their income is through fees and programs, ours is zero, so we rely on you guys to support us in grants and our side efforts, and that's not going to change. You're always going to be able to have full access to our areas. All of our areas are protected by either a conservation easement or some type of restriction that keeps them in conservation and perpetuity. When you work with us, you work in an agency that's protecting lands that are protected forever, that you have political control over, and that we are also reliant on you guys for supporting. It's a good model. It's meant to be rickety at times because we all need to reinvent ourselves, and it's been really fascinating this year, Lauren. Lauren has been at the Park District longer than I, and she has morphed into, really, she's our business manager, our operations manager. Tim, when I first got there, was the parks manager, now he's a full-blown asset manager. Everyone's raised their game, so I just want to make that observation. As I saw Charlie with his COVID beard, I'm thinking he's probably making it up as he goes along as well, because you lose your staff, people leave the office. Currently I work in the office, but Lauren is working remotely mostly, and Tim and Remy are in the field mostly, so it works for us in a way that other organizations can't. But that's the overview. I think the materials I gave you are pretty self-descriptive. The annual report really gets you an idea of what's happened over the last year and how we operate. Our ask is a little over 4% higher than last year, but our overall operations budget is a little over 4% lower, and the reason for that is that we have a lot less program income, but we also don't have the expenses to go along with that program income, because we basically got rid of the summer camp. And I feel like the system is really working, because we're now moving into our new model of really focusing on our core efficiencies of park acquisition and management. Forest preschool, frankly, is a much more solid regular income for us than running programs that rely a lot on us recruiting people in. And we are looking long term to do additional renovations at the Ethan Allen Barn and the Colchester Pond Barnhouse and Barn, and those will also be future sources of revenue. So that is groundwork that we're laying for the next steps. And I hope next year actually to have some pretty significant reports about progress with those two things. So that's the overview. I didn't want to give you too much to consider. We all have Zoom fatigue, but I'd love to have any questions or concerns or observations from you guys. Thank you for walking through that and for revisiting each year. Absolutely. I know the idea of your organization owning or managing one of our natural areas has come up before. I will just say to staff that I would be interested on hearing more from your perspective on that at some point. And I am curious if there's any, so I know you're providing technical support to our staff here, which is clearly appreciated and have worked with us on a canoe launch. I just wonder if there's anything else that you see in the pike for Winooski in the near term. I think there's a lot of intriguing things. Ray and I have talked about this a million times to jump into these, but I'm really intrigued by the connection between Riverwalk and Essex going through Casablanca, which is a hugely expensive time-consuming project that would require an engineered, elevated sidewalk. The reason I bring that up is because we work in concert with more developed issues. My feeling is similar to what happened at the mouth of the Winooski River with the elevated boardwalk on the Colchester side. We were able to preserve the land under it better because there was better management of people going across it. The reason I bring that up is because Winooski is a densely populated city. There's going to be more demands on these parks. There's already some impacts on Casablanca Memorial that really over the last two years have substantially increased in terms of usage. So at some point there's going to be a need for more attention paid to management of these sites with better parking, better signage, improved trails, boardwalks, so on and so forth. So there's a lot of work to do just with the assets that you guys own and manage right now. They're doing okay, but it's the next level so that you can invite more people into the resource without having a negative impact on the resource. So look at Casablanca and the potential of the new community launch and Memorial as being really the three main things that we could be helpful with and the stewardship of those and frankly all the legal and planning work that goes along with it you know the natural resource inventory working with a third-party non-profit out of potential conservation easement if that's seen appropriate by the city. All of those that's what we do on our side of the business. So you know that along with just you know regular maintenance of these assets at some level when you guys need help and I think that's the way we've been operating all along. I see Ray nodding. I mean to be clear the staff has been very cognizant, very proper in their approach in talking to us about you know whether the park district becomes a landowner and it's just time's not now because you guys really needed to look at your recreation and park assets and have done that study with Ami and I know it's still ongoing and being tweaked but we knew that that was part of the process and meanwhile it hasn't stopped us from being you know a good partner with the city and other areas. Yeah I would echo that too Christine just you know I think a lot of the things Nick said there from certainly those those long shot you know riverwalk connection type projects which you know I think obviously are the far end of the possible spectrum for things that we will accomplish but you know again some of those more current short-term you know getting natural resources inventory in our more sensitive areas so we know what we're kind of working with and supporting down there in Cassavent Memorial. I think you know one thing for us is that we don't have the expertise on staff around techniques for trail maintenance especially in sensitive areas that are you know traveling through wetlands you know getting near to river banks I think that's an area where Tim's expertise in that sort of field has been really huge for us and he's even been able to sort of bring in a game plan for us that we can then turn around and use volunteer kind of labor to implement so I think those kind of short-term examples are really helpful you know examples of current work but I think work that will need to continue and I think to Nick's point you know I think use of local recreational resources is not going to to let up anytime soon and I think for better or for worse COVID has really driven folks to recreate closer to home and I think folks have really discovered our parks which is great that's what they are there for but you know more more boots on those trails means more impact and more work to do to kind of keep them in good shape and and keep those parks you know around and ready for generations so I definitely think we've got plenty of short-term work too and you know again like Nick said as we kind of move through this park's plan I think looking at what some of the priorities that ultimately come out the other side are I think there's definitely some places where park district will be a huge partner in the in the work. Thank you. Any other comments or concerns? Not seeing any other raised hands from counselors. I think the the elephant here is the funding request that we we did increase a little bit last year. I am not sure where we are at in budgeting so I will I will just share Nick with you and your staff. We did have a goal setting meeting recently and council decided that we wanted to we wanted staff to present a budget that provided basically level services so we're not looking at any large increases. I think we have talked in the past about small increases trying to get closer to the ass that we have not been able to meet for your organization and others. So this is the right time to bring us that information as staff is working on that budget is is where I would go with that. I am curious you know the previous year's increase was I think showed in here like 2% around there and you said there was a 4% increase this year why it was a little bit higher. You mentioned programming but I didn't quite track. Okay we last year we made a fair amount of money through our eight week fully subscribed summer camp program and at the same time we realized a lot of expenses for our seasonal health that supported that program but it was a good money maker for us but it it the wear and tear on our people and our facilities and our ability to develop and acquire new park lands was being dinged a little bit so we made a very difficult decision around that. The other reason is frankly things cost more. Insurance is costing us more materials are costing us more. I must say that every year I do the budget I shake my head a little bit because the amount of output that we are getting I think the bang for the buck generally is I'm not just patting myself on the back I think it's pretty outstanding that you're getting pretty money. When I look at you know I do this every year because I'm a little obsessed about it and look at other organizations what their budgets are how they're getting their revenues and how many acres they're managing in certain stances you know our operating should be more half a million six hundred thousand dollars that would be a realistic budget we manage but our role as a municipal as an inter municipal agency is to keep our budget as long as possible so we treat ourselves like we're you know your city a department of your city so we come to you saying we really cut this down as much as we could we've kept two seasonals in there for next year we usually have three so I've already told our you know Tim our park superintendent we don't know how long COVID school lasts we don't know what the towns are going to be experiencing from a revenue standpoint and I've been really trying to track that and talking to each town over the last few months so we felt it was responsible to a come in with a really tight budget this is very tight for us and second of all you know tell you that there are options in an emergency to slash more but it's not sustainable for us to operate for much less so we really in fact the board rejected our first learn and I put it together a bunch of this is no no it's got to be even you know skinnier than that so this is about as low as we can go and still have a rival operation but what makes me feel good about this going in is first of all that we are responding to the current situation second of all that we have successfully made the transition from trying to be more you know a programmatic agency really to a fully of parts management acquisition agency with partners that do programming and somehow we came up with the idea last November December here we are almost a year later and it's working exactly the way that we thought it was going to so I feel like that revenue is going to increase over time we're going to be able to create more space to lease we're going to increase the lease for existing tenant actually pretty soon and we see more revenues through the Colchester Colchester bond renovations in the future so we're trying to set the stage so that we're less reliant on municipal funding but we are a municipal agency it's what we it's how we operate it's it's where we get our revenues it's who we answer to so it's a long way of saying we really cut it as close to the wires we could in terms of numbers for next fiscal year and I it was striking I was actually it was a little bit of a relief to see that Mike the person before me was a Joe who did the presentation on on the transit agency I mean they're not going to have a budget till December and I don't blame them I mean it's it's really tough to figure out right now what things are going to look like and we took our best stab at it we're going as far as this fiscal year we're going into the winter in pretty good shape because basically all the towns are saying yes we're going to pay you this year so there's no there's no recession for this year and we've tried to under spend so that we can find ourselves in February and March and much you know in a strong position so you know plan for the worst and assume the best you know we're we're trying to you know trying to do that and this budget really was as low as we could bring it um that you know my first three years was level budget and it really started to back into us a little bit so we've been you know in terms of our capital assets which is really for any agency like mine the big deal is we're really going to get the money all the capital large capital projects are coming from grants and outside sources so what we're not going to do is come back and say well we need another 25 grand to you know purchase a tractor or repair a building we're not going to do that work unless we have outside resources and we also have no loans whatsoever so what you see on here you know there's we're not buying down anything we pay cash for everything except for our credit card which we pay off every month so it's a very efficient lean operation and we got as low as we could with those numbers I appreciate that um and the hard work that's being put in there I think I mean what I what I can say is that as we have talked about keeping level services that we can maintain the commitment of what we have paid in the past I certainly don't believe we're in a position to to meet the full assessment yet um but we have discussed you know trying to get closer to that over time um Jim I see your hand is raised thank you mayor and thank you Nick for providing a lot of kind of background on where these numbers come from and I I share the mayor's concern with trying to meet that full assessment it seems like a big lift for this year but I also hope that we as a council can um continue that upward trend so that we're not so we're paying at least a higher proportion of our fair share over time for these resources that you know your park district is the namesake of our city and our river and I know that the work that's being done on all these properties are to the benefit of our residents and that this is a endeavor that I hope that we can find a way to support as much as we can so um I hope that we can keep and start and continue to increase this in whatever way we can the location to keep this organization going appreciate that thanks Jim any other thoughts or questions I'm not seeing any um but thank you for talking through you know sort of the where we're at now and what the the future might look like for services here absolutely thanks for your time and thank you Erin for your service for us yes she's great thank you Nick thank you so this brings us to our final item on the agenda this is up for approval is a grant from center for tech and civic life award for elections oh tenet you're muted hi i'm here on behalf of the clerk's office tonight um let me just give you a quick background about the month ago four weeks ago we received an email from um the president of the clerk's association saying that she had been contacted by the center of tech and civic life saying that they had a pool of money that they were putting out for the clerks to aid in the cost of the elections any um added costs that we had to to modify our polling places or to maintain the safety for our residents and the poll workers we immediately jumped on this and um found out that we were awarded 5800 and change and we are here tonight to get your approval to accept that money we plan on putting it towards the balance of the new drop box that we had installed and the computer that we currently use on the election is quite ancient so we intend on upgrading our computer and and the balance will probably go to the sign that we're going to put on the building saying that the drop box is there thank you janet you're welcome thanks to to you and all staff for continuing to look for outside sources of funding for these um sort of i guess sort of capital improvements i'm i was excited to read about this wasn't on my radar i'm glad that we're able to provide better um you know better a safer way for people to to get their balance for things to us um given the situation any questions concerns from council all right uh would someone like to move to approve this grant so moved second motion by mike second by how all those in favor please say aye aye motion carries thanks janet please collect that money you and we will all right this brings us to the end of our meeting can i have a motion to adjourn that will second motion by mike second by jim all those in favor please say aye aye motion carries the evening is adjourned thank you everyone good night everybody thank you thanks everybody