 630, so we're gonna get rolling here. Thanks everybody for joining. Welcome to the ward six, December 1st, NPA meeting. My name is Mills Forney. I'm a new member of the steering committee. So I'm excited to be here and moderating my first NPA session here. I want to kick things off with a call for any announcements from the group. Or online, for that matter. I'd like to read a host that was published in today's from Forge Forum. Okay, you gotta get near microphone. You gotta get near a microphone. I gotta get near a microphone. How's this? Yep. Okay, cool, all right. My name's Bill Riley. I'm a resident of 254 South Union Street. I moved into the neighborhood in 19 November of 1978. So I've been here for a while. And I'm here tonight to read you a post that was that I composed and was published today in this evening's front porch forum. And I'm going to read it. So everything's intact and it's somewhat coherent. So here it goes. And it has to do with 242 Main Street and Memorial Auditorium. So neighbors, this Friday marks a deadline for proposals for the adaptive use of Memorial Auditorium. A proposal to include a revised 242 Main as part of any reuse project has been submitted by a group headed by Jim Lockridge, Big Heavy World, a Howard Street based nonprofit founded to pursue and promote Vermont music. For more than 30 years, 242 Main in the lower level of Memorial Auditorium was an all ages teen centric drop-in center organized and funded by the city of Burlington's youth office. We started during Bernie's administration. With program driven by teens and became America's longest running, all ages punk rock reviewed for local and national bands. 232 was a teen sanctuary. There's thousands over several generations of thousands over several generations, excuse me, that gave young people a community that was mutually respectful, value oriented with the freedom to pursue passions and explore goals. Unfortunately, 242 Main was closed by the city in 2016 due to the deteriorating condition of Memorial Auditorium. Regretfully, or neglectfully, no alternative space was ever provided. It was just closed. Please, when the time comes, support the resurrection of 242 Main. What I'm gonna read next is a quote from a response in 2018 to a save 242 Main petition. This is from a former participant at 242. Quote, the youth of Burlington deserve a space to call their own in which they can thrive creatively, emotionally and become adjusted to the importance of their community. For deeper insights, there's more details on this past Monday's Vermont Digger and you're going to be able to read the full petition or the full plan for Memorial Auditorium. It'll probably be a bit, it's gonna be submitted to Memorial and it'll probably be available next week. But this is something that's really important to the use of our community. Thank you very much. Hi, anybody else? Any other announcements we'd like to make or share? Thank you. My name is Farid. Thank you. I was here at the last NPA with an announcement about Proposition Zero, which is a petition to change the city charter to allow voters to propose and pass ordinances through the ballot. And we had a 2,000 signatures goal which we'll get up in the March on the March ballot. And I'm happy to announce that we have about 2,500 signatures so far. So we will be voting on this proposal in during the March election. I also wanna announce today that we, a second petition that I've been volunteering to collect is for the independent community oversight of the Burlington Police Department. We still need as many signatures as we can get to put this on the ballot in March. I remember last month, Commissioner Seguino was here to talk about some of the reforms that have been going on with the Burlington Police Department. And I see this proposal to have independent oversight of the police as part of that rebuilding of trust in our law enforcement so that we can move forward and address the larger public safety questions. So I urge you to check out our website, the vote for police accountability.com and to support having this conversation by signing our petition. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any other announcements? Do we have information about factors and primary about to come up? Is that in the agenda tonight? Is not in our current agenda. Okay, I just wanna mention that then and I'll send the link so you can put it in our minutes but there's a Democratic primary for South District City Council. Anybody who's watching this is a word six, word five member, you're eligible to vote if you're already registered. And yeah, there's actually a contest. Joan Shannon's our president's counselor for South District. And Jason Dandries, right? Yeah, there's also running their date. Yeah, it's, you can vote online and I think the date is December, between the 10th and the 15th and if you want a paper ballot, they will give you a paper ballot that you can vote online. So I just would like to get that in minutes. I'll send the link to the committee and then I can put it in so people can see it. That's interesting. Any other announcements? Actually, just a question. This is the first piece that I've ever attended which is horrific since I've been in my stuff. So get a little closer to the microphone, please. What was your name as well? I'm sorry? What was your name as well? I'm Mike, Mike Rosen. I live at 283 South Union and I'm going to come to all of these having been active enough. But I guess there are some people in this room who are here as in an official capacity because they hold titles or positions in this group and the rest of us are citizens. Would it be useful to me to put on this and also to have those of you who are the titans in our board and save the board? So I think we know. Definitely not. I don't think it's fresh, but we're steering committee members for sure to help to organize these events and identify the agenda. So there's the Ward 6 NPA steering committee. Correct. I think it's exactly that. Absolutely. I don't think it's fresh. So I'm going to go on to respond. I'm going to make sure to add that. So I would just add often, steering committees have had city counselors, have local representatives and state senators and school board members. I don't see any on the agenda tonight, but oftentimes the elected representatives pretend as invite teams to yes. Yeah. The city's website should be updated with this. The only software names on the steering committee or work sets. I know there's more than three of them. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That means we updated. Any other questions? Oh yeah, it's good. Good opportunity. Yeah. No, you're right. I'm Nancy Harkins. We're just introducing most serious committee members. Thank you. Mills for me. Dale's area. Glad to have you here. And we have two members, two additional steering committee members who are not here tonight. All right. Any other announcements or questions that we can take into our discussion? I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you for coming. My pleasure. Is the sound okay? Can you tell from here? Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Hi, everybody. I'd actually rather stand and sort of greet everybody, but I'll stay closer to the mic for those who may be watching at home. Pull it out. There you go. Makes it easier. Thanks. I can get you a longer cave. I won't stroll around. I could just stand right here. Others would be fine. Thank you so much. Um, So, uh, thank you for having me tonight. Uh, my name is John Murad. I am, I'm the acting chief of police here in Burlington. Um, and I was asked to come and speak a little bit about something that we call the crisis team. And I was asked to come and speak a little bit about something that we call the crisis team. So, uh, as, as I'm sure everyone here knows in, in, uh, June of 2020, there was a lot of discussion about police nationally and here in Burlington. And a component of that discussion was what do we want police to do that is armed police officers. And what do we want to try to find other ways of doing. And, uh, for the police department, what that meant, uh, was a, uh, a reduction in the number of police officers. Um, and, uh, in order to fill gaps in service, what we have done is, is a couple of things. We have created a new position. We have augmented an existing position and we have created a model, a paradigm for how we respond to things. The existing position was something called the community service officer or CSO. We had two in, in history. And usually that would be one on one. So, um, one day where it overlaps because four plus four is eight, not seven. So there's a day in which both of those teams, those sides of our schedule are in. Um, We have augmented that number to an allotment of 12. We currently have seven. So we have, uh, we have, um, we have, um, we have, um, we have, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, I admire tremendously named Lacey Smith. We took her role as the community affairs liaison and we turned it into our community support liaison or CSL position. I have allotted six of those. I currently only have two staff. We're working to hire others. We've got four in the pipeline right now. Lacey is no longer the community affairs liaison. She's now the community support supervisor and she supervises these positions and guides them. They work on issues around chronic mental health issues around substance use disorder and around houselessness. And so these are the tools that we have in-house at the Burlington Police Department to address calls for service that don't automatically require the response of an armed police officer. However, there was also a pronounced desire in the community for a crisis response, something that would go to critical incidents usually around mental health. Our CSOs do not do that. CSOs go to noise complaints, animal complaints, non-injury traffic crashes. Our CSLs do not do that. Our CSLs do a lot of follow-up work. I liken them to detectives. In the same way that if an officer goes to a person's home and that person says, I've been burgled or that person says there's an ongoing series of crimes here, the officer takes the initial report and then passes it off to detectives who are going to do the bulk of the work. An example would be the tremendous number of gunfire incidents and shootings that we experienced over the past year. That is gonna be a patrol response initially because that's who's on and who's going. And then we turn it over to detectives to do the longer-term work. If we don't end up making an arrest in that moment, which sometimes we do, we're gonna turn it to detectives. Same is true of an incident involving somebody who maybe has caused some kind of public order issue that has caused the police to be called, but the underlying causes of that public order issue may relate to mental health or substance use disorder or the fact that the person is unhoused or is in need of other kinds of services. The officer responds, addresses the situation in the moment, renders everybody safe for the best of his or her ability and then says, you know, I don't necessarily have the tools to go farther with this. Can you CSL and passes it over to our CSLs who then take over that case and begin to work with the individual as a manager? There are other things in the field that are often involved with our partners at the Ford Center, including their street outreach team. And so that's yet another tool that we have at our disposal here in Burlington. But the city and people in the city said that they wanted something that would be more crisis-oriented. Currently, crisis is the purview of police. If there's going to be an element of crisis or danger, it is going to be a police response. And what we do as police officers is we will call the street outreach if we believe that the situation can be dealt with by street outreach or if our work can be augmented by street outreach, we will call up CSLs if the CSL has a knowledge of the individual. But the CSL isn't there to deal with the actual crisis at hand. They're there to deal with the sort of the aftermath of it or addressing it after it's been rendered safe by the police. And we also work with Howard Center's first call. And first call is a part of the Howard Center that addresses critical incidents and also does more extant mental health issues than street outreach necessarily, and they are clinicians. But other communities have other systems. And the one that has gotten the most attention, I think, although not the most research, and very little is known about how it actually works, but it's very popular because it's got a terrific name and it branded itself very well and reporters dug into it during the days of the police reform movement in summer 2020 and it gained a huge amount of attention. And that is the Kahootz model out of Eugene, Oregon. The Kahootz model involves the deployment of a clinical social worker and the person who has some sort of medical expertise, usually an EMT or an RN, and occasionally somebody is as well tasked and skilled as a paramedic, but most of the time EMTs. We essentially do that right now. We do that with our outreach workers, the street outreach team. They routinely deploy with fire joining them at the scene, but they don't co-deploy together. And the Howard workers are not clinicians. First call is our clinicians. They too routinely respond with the fire department. But again, not together, they're not housed together and they're not doing that work together. And the community has said it wants something like that. So the Bruins and Police Department put together an RFP or request for proposals back in spring of this past year. And that RFP went out to the public to say, can you help us build a program like this? And it is a crisis team that would have clinicians and medical people corresponding to incidents where either police aren't necessary or police have said. We responded and we don't believe we aren't necessary anymore and we think you would be better for it. And trying to work on the part of this crisis team to go out and find these kinds of incidents and address them themselves. People responded to the RFP, including Howard Center. And we have worked to try to make the project square and funding has been an issue. The city and the mayor, the mayor is very supportive of this. The city council is very supportive of it. President Paul is very supportive of this. The city's money was not what Howard Center estimated the program costing. And so we have now gone to the state which also sent out an RFP of its own. And so while we presented the first RFP in the spring, we're now responding to a different RFP that the state put out with grant money that is available for these kinds of programs around the state. And we have submitted an RFP. We're waiting to hear back from that. I have hired an implementer to take over this work, to shepherd it in ways that frankly, I was not able to do over the course of the summer owing to the fact that I had four murders and was being called out just about every weekend or two times, you know, two times some weekends in order to address shootings, in order to address a tremendous uptick in different kinds of crime. And frankly, I did not move this ball as far down the grid iron as I would have liked. So we hired an implementer to take over that role. She was formerly our opioid coordinator when the city and the Burlington Police Department were really invested in fighting the opioid epidemic. That too is something that we have sort of lost a little bit of ground on unfortunately for a variety of reasons. But she right now is working on this project with us. And the task now is to bring together the various myriad participants and stakeholders, including the police department, including the Howard Center, including UVMMC and other entities in order to really see if we can build a program like this for Burlington. The big piece is going to be, what is the actual work volume? I don't know whether the work volume is going to turn out to be, because we know that we have people in distress in this community. We know that substance use disorder is higher than it has been. Certainly our overdose numbers are much higher than they've ever been, but we are addressing a lot of these things through existing systems. Street outreach, the CSLs now. First call, other entities of Howard Center. Howard Center is woefully understaffed, and they want to be better staffed. They too, like we at the police department are having a hard time finding folks. That's a problem that is a woeful song that is sung across the country in almost every economic sector. Where do we find people? Where have that people gone? But are we going to have enough of real crisis incidents to justify this team? That's open. That's open for discussion, but we certainly want to build a team. Our constituents have been telling us they want it. Again, the mayor, council president Paul, very enthusiastic about it, and that is where we are with that. So that was what I was asked to do, to sort of brief on that, but I'll open it up to any questions about that. Anything else that has a public safety bench for anyone? Sir, with the programs, Greg Eppler Wood. My name is Greg Eppler Wood. All right, I guess I got you having something to accept. Thank you. Greg Eppler Wood, South Union. Couple of questions. First of all, do you have enough detectives? Where does the funding for detectives come from? Are you having enough of them? With this program that you're developing, hopefully with the state fundings, because Kahootz, would you have a different name for it? And is it similar to the model that Kahootz represented? Thank you, and great questions. I'll go for the second one first. No, we will not call it Kahootz. I think Kahootz is actually proprietary to the Whitebird Clinic in Eugene, Oregon. We are calling this a crisis team. And that is what they do. They work on the crisis. And the Burlington crisis team, if someone comes around with a great model, that's only gonna happen. It can be good branding. Again, as I said earlier, I think a large degree of Kahootz, Cache comes from their terrific name. There are programs that are being done as well. There are programs in Denver, there are programs in Missouri, there are programs in Texas, in Houston. There are other places where we have co-deployment of clinical workers and either first responders in the form of police or first responders in the form of EMTs or medical workers. We do, that's the plan here, is to become that model that Kahootz exemplifies. Kahootz is not well understood in a data-oriented way. We are actually working with a company called RTI, which is a data institute along with other municipalities around the country that are running out programs like this similarly. And the reason RTI is interested in getting in at the ground level with these entities, us included, is because there is not a lot of data on what Kahootz has actually done and how it functions. And so, we're hoping to have our piece be something that is going to be something that can actually be studied by other municipalities trying to do the same kind of work. Your first question was around detectives. So we, I think everyone knows, we used to be authorized for 105 police officers and we routinely hovered in the very fine 90s. That was changed in June of 2020 and the department was reduced from 105 and was to 74 authorized. I mean, it was reduced by attrition, not really off. And how to turn it, the police officers attritted, they attritted it very, very quickly. And we lost the number of officers and now they're over that 74. We are actually at 62. However, the city council in October of last year weighs the cap back, not to what it is, but higher than it had been. So from 105 to 60, excuse me, from 105 to 74 to 87 now. And we are looking to grow the department again from our 62 to that 87. The 25 additional officers, how quickly can we do that? It's going to be a challenge. But we have a terrific budget from the city council that the mayor worked very hard to get. He's tremendously supportive of this initiative. We have a really strong police contract. And so the hope is that we will be able to rebuild in the course of the next, hopefully not several years, hopefully a few years, not several years, but it will take time. There was a lot of damage done to this police department with regard to headcount and resourcing and we need to get it back. How many detectives do I have? I currently have 10. And that is more than I have. I'm more functional in my detective bureau than I am in my patrol bureau at the moment. I'm required to my contract to have 10 detectives. And that number didn't change even as the overall headcount shrank. So the piece that has suffered the most is our patrol capacity. I have officers at the airport and I'm required by law, by federal law to have a certain number there. So I can't really reduce my footprint at the airport. I can't really reduce my detective footprint partly because of contract and partly from efficacy. And this past year has proven why I need good detectives. We have an 80% solverate on our shootings where persons are struck and 100% solverate on our murders. And that goes back many decades. This is an exemplary police department with regard to that kind of work. So I want those 10 detectives in there. But what suffers is our patrol resource. And our patrol is down right now to about 22 police officers, non-supervisory police officers on patrol. That is inadequate for a city of our size and our scope. We are working to fix that. I was just wondering whether or not the same part of money that was reduced with the armed officers was the same part of money that the detectives, since 1987, includes 10 detectives. That's correct. It's a similar, it's a similar sort of personnel measure is for the small officers. And the 77 includes me. That includes the 22 police. It includes our retentents, our sergeants. It includes officers at the airport. It includes officers who are detectives. It includes officers who are patrol officers. And it includes, I have three specialized rules that I have, I used to have more specialized rules. But the first thing I lost are the specialized rules because when you're freezing in the winter, the first thing that starts to go are your fingertips, right? And you've got to bring those things in so you have your core still working. We lost our community affairs officer. We lost our emergency response officer, but I've kept our domestic violence prevention officer incredibly important role, makes life easier and work easier for other roles. And so the win of taking that officer and putting that officer on one shift on patrol is not worth the loss of a person who is able to follow through domestic violence cases, which are uniquely difficult. And so we've kept our DVPO. We have a recruiting officer because if we can't recruit, we are simply gonna wither. And our challenge right now is to retain the officers we've got to stop our blood loss and then to regrow. And that recruiting officer is incredibly important for that. And so those are sort of the positions that we have that are outside the regular roles of either patrol or detectives or airport. All right, we'd be about two minutes left. Okay, sorry. So any other questions for Chief Muir? Sir. Just very quick and it's probably way too long. Give me your microphone. Cover it. Yeah, so we've got police, recruiting service officers, meaning there's liaisons, we've got this pricing team that we're talking about. It would strike me as very difficult. I'm just out of curiosity to present and serve less. Something. Not my forte, but I'll try. Sir, something. You know, at which level to attract. That's a tree. That's not for you as the caller. You call 911 and let dispatch know and dispatch will triage it. And it will be triaged both by dispatch and if not by dispatch, it goes to a supervisor. We have implemented a priority response model. I started it in May of 2021. I modified it in May of 2022. It limits what we go to. We do not go to as many things as we used to. You can't reduce something by 50% and expect it to do what it used to do. So our model and it's available online. You can look at it. You can see it takes the 120 and 130 call categories that we have in our computer aided dispatch system called Valkor. And it says, these are the ones that police will go to no matter what. These are the ones that they go to when they can. These are the ones that they probably rarely go to. Here are some that we're only sending CSLs to, excuse me, not CSLs, CSOs and the community service officers, noise, animal complaints, non-investigatory crashes. And here are some that are gonna be online. That if it happens to you when you call you're gonna be told to do it online. And that stinks. It stinks. I hate it. I hate that people are calling asking for police to come which used to be our default. We sent police to everything. It didn't matter whether it was a life safety incident or whether it was late reported vandalism. A cop would come to your home and find you and take that report. That is not the case anymore. It's just not something that we can do. And so that's how we're addressing those kinds of issues. Thank you. Any other, we're gonna take one more question maybe. Oh, you go. It's been reported several times that there's disagreements on the methodology of how Sarah George decides what is prosecutable and are not with your police. Are you in personal contact with her and do you work out those details? So I have lunch with the state's attorney pretty regularly. Once every two, three months, it's been a while because of the campaign. It's been more difficult for us to meet owing to her campaign. But we need to get back in the swing of having those regular meetings. And those meetings are opportunities for us to talk about these things. Some of her policies are clearly stated. She's articulated elaborate memos around what she thinks is the threshold for vehicle theft and prosecuting that for other kinds of criminal possession of property. And then there are, she and I share a belief that in many instances of mental health, even when there's criminality that ensues because of a person's mental health are not appropriate for a criminal justice outcome but ought to have a psychiatric outcome. Our problem is we don't really have that as a state anymore. We do not have a custodial psychiatric healthcare capacity. And then we default to jail. And one place where I do believe she and I disagree a bit and I've spoken to her about this is that when that disconnect happens, I'm going to default to what is gonna keep the public safe and what is gonna work for victims. And I'm less concerned with what the person who did these things is how that person is. I want that person treated compassionately. I certainly want my officers to treat that person compassionately. I want your police to be good, caring police. But what I care about is the public safety element of that. And not necessarily saying, I'm not gonna jail this person just because jail is going to be worse for this person. If jail is worse for the person but better for the society and the public, that's where I'm gonna go. And that is a difference but I don't control that decision. We arrest who we can arrest when appropriate site who we can site and we do what we can to intervene in incidents as they happen. And then we let it fall where it falls with regard to both prosecution with regard to the courts and a significant component of what we've seen over the past two years with regard to a slowdown in prosecution has not been the prosecutor. It has been the fact that the courts until August, this August, we're still under a COVID emergency when the rest of the state had abandoned it more than a year earlier. Thank you very much, Chief Mura. Thank you. For your time and for your service. We appreciate it. Next up, we have the Burlington Community Justice Center a parallel justice program. Is Bridget here? Great. Thanks so much for joining us. I'll work with you. We're sticking my tickets in a minute. Oh yeah, no problem. Yeah, I imagine that's all right. You know, people can chicken with another and chat for a bit and then we'll work it all over again. Right? Good to bring people in, so everyone. For the folks who are here. It was fun. I was just about to do that. Yes, good idea. For folks who are here, there's fantastic pizza and then samosas as well from Paris, right? So thank you very much for running that. Thank you, Chief. Thank you. It's all right. Thank you. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're your. Yeah, I think that I remember. I know. No, we'll just. Yeah, but there. Okay. The audio. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let me get hooked up to the wifi. Yeah. I don't know what actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We just, we have some animations on the PowerPoint. I need to be. Can that really be real? I mean, I heard that I've read that too. Can I really be a real thing that she said? I can't believe. Yeah. How are you? Your questions to that. Yeah. You know, that's, you know, that's, you know, that's, you know, You know, they should be opening up. They should be telling us what pressure on the courts go. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're going to get started again. Everybody can take their seats and not quite down. We'll get started. So happy to welcome. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to community justice center. It's going to be presenting on the parallel justice program. Where's yours? Hi folks. How's it going? Hello. Welcome to the community justice center's first community information series. On community based approaches to public safety. My name is Lauren Monica Eddings. I'm a restorative justice practitioner and a victim services specialist. My name is Bernadette Blasek. And I'm a victim services specialist as well along with Lauren. And I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you all tonight. I look forward to discussing public safety as it relates to Burlington and how our role intersects with other resources in the city. We're super excited to introduce this presentation and what we hope will also be the first of many presentations to the community to support a local and collective effort that responds to the challenges created by the community in the community justice program. And also to our community members who have experienced crimes and harm in a few different ways. Through our parallel justice program, we provide emotional support, resource navigation and systems advocacy to anyone who's experienced harm, regardless of whether or not they go to the police. Bridget is based at the BPD and is an invaluable resource and is an invaluable resource of people who have either made police reports or people who have questions about the criminal justice system. And I'm based at the CJC, where I work to support our community through self referrals and community referrals, wherein people are looking outside of the criminal justice system. I also work with our youth team, and I support teen and young adult victims and survivors when their cases are referred for a restorative process. Our presentation today is community-based and it's evidence-based. Over the last three months, Bridget and I have met with community members, as well as local, regional, and state-level stakeholders and representatives working in the field of public safety in a variety of roles, from direct service providers to researchers, to our very own state's attorney, Sarah George. Any research reference in the presentation will be available on our community information session page on the website. Thank you all so much for being here and for allowing us into your space. I'm super excited to be here. We also anticipate that there are going to be some questions and also some contributions from you all. And we kindly request that you save those questions and comments until the end when we're going to have a Q&A. And just a little overview of what we're going to be looking at today. So we'll be reviewing current climate of crime in Burlington. Know what to expect after a crime happens, understanding the root causes of crimes identify community-based approaches to public safety and harm, become familiar with community resources. And as Lauren said, a Q&A. So because we're community focused, we're going to begin this presentation by offering up a few statements from a diverse group of community members on what public safety means to them. It is not criminal to be poor, to be mentally unwell, or to have an addiction, and yet we treat it like it is. Mutual respect between police and people. Yes, to more community-based social workers. Not jumping to the conclusion that an unusual situation is a dangerous one. Community doesn't jump to fear-based reaction. Decriminalization of substance use addiction. I think one of the places we could really improve is in providing well-funded alternatives to the police. Huge fractions of our city budget gets put into Burlington police, despite the majority of calls to 911 not demanding an armed response. Mental health response does not need people with guns. Neighbors knowing each other, saying hello to each other, not being afraid of being friendly to each other. Police departments that are supportive of progressive police. So as the chief, this is like a perfect segue, I guess, into this presentation. And we are going to try to pack as much information as possible into the presentation. Like I said, there's going to be a Q&A afterwards. And as we can see, folks are interested in community approaches to community violence, which typically involves a relatively small number of people, but has a lasting impact on the entire community. We also know that violence is learned, which means that the circumstances that increase a person's risk of becoming a victim or perpetrator can be undone. We will discuss prevention later in the presentation, but first we wanted to take a look at the current climate of crime in Burlington here, which this image shows reported instance of crime as of mid-Devember of this year. We recognize that this depiction does not capture unrecorded crimes, but is a good representation of the general climate of crime. I was a small, sorry. The arrows might be helpful. It's really just pointing to the fact that these are some of the considerable increases we've seen, such as gunfire, larcenies, mental health issues, overdoses, and stolen vehicles. So this is just another depiction. So yeah, this might be an easier graph to read. This is another depiction of the previous slide that shows percentages of those same categories. Data like this basically informs community-based approaches to public safety and community violence intervention programs. For instance, stolen vehicles has the highest increase you see there at the bottom. What we're noticing is that the recovery rate for stolen vehicles is actually pretty high. So the likelihood that you'll get back to your vehicle is high, but it may not be in the same condition as you expect. It may have needles, bodily fluids, stolen items, and personal items from the person who stole the vehicle that are left behind, indicating that possibly the car is being used at shelter or consumption room for substances and then left abandoned when gas runs out. The data of stolen cars indicates a need for housing, support for substance use, and in a few moments we'll discuss the root causes of crime and how to use data to do program implementation to address the needs of folks in an effort to deter them from using crime as a solution. We will make all of our sites available to you all so that you can take a look at them a little bit more deeply than you're able to now, and we apologize for that because a lot of this presentation is actually going to be focused on some of the data that we wanted to share with you all. The red box is just a highlight of those are the incidents I had mentioned previously to show that those are like maybe of note. I do also want to just share it is not going to be a distraction to at least me if you want to go up closely to that screen, you know, get up now, go and take a look at any point, I will not be offended. So if that feels important to you, you can take a look at it now, but we will also make everything available at the end of the presentation. Sound good? So this is a very simplified flow of what to expect after crime happens when there is a suspect. We recognize that some of you in the room may be very familiar with crime in Burlington and know all too well what happens after crime occurs. We at the Burlington Community Justice Center realize the incidents of crime and harm in our city have had a tremendous impact on individuals, families, neighborhoods and community at large, and these impacts have been significant. The losses have been emotional, tangible, physical, monetary and traumatic. And we are sorry that some of you have been victims of assault, larceny, burglary and stolen vehicles to name a few. And we hope that you have felt supported by the community in the aftermath. If you have not felt supported, that's also partly why we are here. As Lauren mentioned earlier, we have had a lot of discussions with folks of the last several months and a sense of community is feeling disconnected and mistrustful of their neighbors and systems in place to help them. We want you to know that there are resources available, which we will get into at the end. And I apologize I can't zoom in on this. But so this, like I said, is a simple flow for maybe those who are not as familiar or who are confused about what happens with the process after a crime occurs when a criminal investigation leads to a suspect. So after a crime occurs, an arrest is made after a report. An officer can refer directly to the community justice center for crimes such as like a simple assault, retail theft and larcenies. Once it goes to the community justice center, it will go through the restorative justice process in which the restorative justice process includes somebody who addresses the victim's needs, as well as the person who we consider the responsible party similar to a defendant in the criminal justice system. Any more immediacy after a referral, and even if there is not an arrest parallel justice helps with the more immediate needs and safety planning. The officer also can refer to the state's attorney's office for review. The state's attorney's office reviews cases and they can bring up the prosecute, decline or send to diversion. If a crime is prosecuted, a case is picked up, the victim advocate at the state attorney's office will address the victim and help with their needs and help them know their victim rights throughout the criminal justice process. If the state's attorney's office declines and doesn't send to diversion, parallel justice is still there. That's our purpose is to fill that gap. And then diversion, which is also a CJC based program. Again, it kind of goes back to that victim liaison. And we've included a line here that links crime to no report over to parallel justice, just to further emphasize that we are a resource to people wherever they are at with the criminal justice system, whether they have questions about how to file a police report. What is the criminal justice system? We have a lot of new Americans in our community or folks who say, I'm not really sure I want to file a police report and I'm hurt. We're there for each and every one of those stages, just the same. And so we have that line there to really emphasize that, that our door is always open, even if you're not sure if we're an appropriate resource for you. We welcome the call, we'll talk it out, we'll figure out whether what you're sharing with us will stay in house or if we can make a referral to somewhere else. And so next, this is an even simplified version where there crime happens and there is no suspect. Not all investigations lead to an identifiable suspect, sorry, which can be frustrating and discouraging but a real possibility. In those cases, the beginning of the process is similar. So as you see, a crime is reported either online and with an officer, an officer conducts a review, the online report or opens an investigation. But if the investigation turns up no leads and no solvability factors, the case may lead to no arrest. Solvability factors include things like date and time, witnesses and supporting evidence, which were not clear in all cases, such as a larceny from a motor vehicle or vandalism that may have taken place a week ago and there's just not being realized. Even when an investigation leads to no suspects, victim services are still available through parallel justice. We offer information and resources as well as other supports, which we can always get into later. So I'm gonna check one thing. Yes. So I'm with CCGV. Yes. So if anyone wants to review this again, you can literally go home from here. And if you have access to YouTube, you can immediately replay it. Wow. You should have interrupted us earlier. Well, you're always so steady. I mean, one thing that I think is in a few days, so probably by Monday, you'll be able to go online to cctv.org. If you put in today's date, this will pop right up. So everything recorded today, which is right up, you'll be able to watch it again. So you can either watch it on YouTube tonight, or you can wait a few days for the next 100 years, you can see it. Thank you so much. In the room, cctv stands for, not closed circuit, but Chippews and County. Yes, the public access television in, in the world. Thanks. It's about a channel 17, but. In a minute. It's time to tell it is enough. Thank you so much for that. I look forward to seeing myself and criticizing what I have to say. Great. So what we have on the screen now, the title of the slide is called, to prevent crime, we need to understand and respond to its roots. So there are a few things happening on this slide, including a chart in the middle that was compiled by the prison policy initiative with using data from the substance abuse and mental health services and ministrations national survey on drug use and health. And that chart shows people with multiple arrests have serious health needs. So to prevent crime, we really need to understand and respond to its roots. And people who experience multiple arrests, which make up for a quarter of all arrests each year, are people who experience significant health needs that are overwhelmingly unmet before, during and after criminal justice system contact. Fortunately, in Chinanan County, we have a growing emphasis on services for people with mental health and substance abuse disabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system. This is a step in the direction of treating substance abuse, mental illness, poverty and houselessness as public health issues. And I'm excited to live in a community that has increasingly shown its support for its community members who experienced such significant barriers in health equity. Using nationally representative data from the national survey on drug use and health, the prison policy initiative found that for the at least 4.9 million people that were arrested and jailed in 2017, at least one in four of those individuals were booked into jail more than once during the same year. The graph that's shown on the slide tells us that the people who were booked into jail more than once had a substance use disorder. A third of folks that were booked more than twice had serious psychological distress and 25% experienced a serious or moderate mental illness with 27% of those booked more than twice having no health insurance. The report also concluded that people with multiple arrests are disproportionately black, low income and unemployed and that the vast majority of the arrests for that year were for nonviolent offenses, low level offenses such as drug abuse violations and disorderly conduct make up over 80% of arrests with serious violent offenses accounting for less than 5% of arrests in this data sample of 2017 and this is national data. Another way to put all of this is to say that most of the people who are arrested multiple times don't pose a serious public safety risk and folks are instead being punished for not getting their most basic needs met. I can't help but wonder and consider how at present we are relying on a system of punishment to address an issue of health and life chances. Research, information, relationship building and understanding however, can direct public and community investments in care. This includes employment assistance, education and vocational training, financial assistance, mental health and substance use treatment and checking in on your neighbors. These are investments that can help heal the conditions that lead many of our community members to police contact in the first place. So on our next slide here, we have a graph. It's a depiction of a tree and there are roots at the bottom of that tree and it shows the pair of aces and for those who don't know, aces are adverse childhood experiences. That's the original assessment and then in addition to that, the other pair is the adverse community environments and so that's a tree there and I'm gonna go into what all of that means now. So I was surprised to find that there is a lack of research on the relationship between adverse childhood experiences also known as aces and adult criminal justice system contact. Considering that exposure to trauma, particularly in childhood has been associated with a greater risk of substance use disability and mental illness and that a significant amount of adults who go to jail each year experience these adversities, then the lack of research on this relationship is a critical limitation and a key area for crime and harm prevention. Aces are determined by an assessment created by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The assessment uses a scoring system that attributes one point for each category of adverse childhood experiences. The questions each cover a different domain of trauma and refer to experiences that occurred prior to the age of 18. Higher scores like four or above with the highest score being 10 indicate increased exposure to trauma, especially when the score is informed by adverse community environments like racism, poverty, poor housing quality and affordability, lack of opportunity and overall community disruption. You'll see on the tree here that both aces and adverse community environments are shown. When taking up a root cause analysis of crime and harm, it is in our best interest to consider a person's experiences and environments leading up to the arrest and not simply the choices that they made which led to the arrest. That adverse community environments represent the roots of the tree, demonstrates how community environments inform family structure, relationships, life chances and life choices. So because we can't all see the screen, I'll just name some of the few adverse childhood experience traumas that are on that tree which would include substance abuse, domestic violence, homelessness, mental illness, incarceration, physical and emotional neglect, divorce, maternal depression, emotional and sexual abuse and for adverse community environments, we have poor housing quality and affordability, discrimination and poverty, just to name a few. The 2022 research study from the Academic Pediatric Association that I reviewed confirmed that the research on aces and criminal justice contact in adulthood was indeed lacking. The study introduced itself as the first of its kind. Using recent national data on adolescent to adult health, the study assesses the relationship between aces and formal criminal justice system processing during young and middle adulthood and found that accumulating aces, especially scores of four or more, again, the scale is from one to 10, was significantly associated with various forms of criminal justice contact during young and middle adulthood, including having been arrested, experiencing a greater number of arrests, having been incarcerated in adulthood, having been incarcerated multiple times and having spent longer periods of time incarcerated. The association between aces and formal criminal justice contact extends beyond juvenile years, which there have been studies on and into young and middle adulthood. My experience working with people who have experienced harm and abuse, interpersonal and systemic for the last 10 years, in addition to my personal experience growing up in a household where substance use and abuse was present, has led me to believe that very rarely are people bad actors. And I would be hard-pressed to imagine that further studies on the pair of aces, so that's adverse childhood experiences and adverse community environments with criminal justice system contact in adulthood would not conclude similar results as this one. And considering that the criminal justice system is disproportionately composed of adults who have experienced childhood adversity, pushing these individuals and punishing them is not an effective approach to improve lives that have been so characterized by harm. Five minutes left. Okay, we expected to skip some slides. So this is as Lauren is saying, you have like risk factors and vulnerabilities. So this is just like a heat map from the Vermont Department of Health that shows these darker areas, which is Burlington has a higher risk when you just consider socioeconomic and poverty. And these kinds of maps would indicate and inform what kind of programming is needed in certain areas. This is a really important slide to our presentation because this is a slide that takes a few data points from the first ever survey on victims' experiences with crime in the United States. I was similarly surprised that it was the first survey of its kind. And so this is from the National Alliance for Safety and Justice. And perhaps this may come as a surprise to some, but a significant percentage of victims of both violent and nonviolent crime prefer increased investments in treatment options for those who have caused harm over prisons and jail. And again, this is a really important slide to our presentation because we work with victims of crime and harm. And as we strive to be victim informed and victim centered, we're not gonna make any strives forward unless we're listening to victims themselves. And yeah, maybe we can just skip to the next one in the sake of time because we're gonna talk shop about a little bit more about what we do at the Burlington Community Justice Center and where we come in here. So as I said earlier, so we're victim services specialists. So we kind of lead up to this and understand root causes of harm. As Lauren said, people who have harmed have also been harmed. And so we realize that those can flip flop day to day. So we open our doors to anybody who's been affected by crime and harm. And the whole premise of parallel justice, it was founded back in 2006 by a woman named Susan Herman and it was founded on the premise that all victims deserve justice regardless of whether the crime is reported to the police and that basically victims can forge their own path towards justice and we help them do that. And so we help them do that with a victim centered approach that supports them with emotional support, safety planning, systems advocacy, resource coordination and some limited financial assistance. And we recognize that victim may never see the inside of a courtroom and that this may be the only justice that they are able to achieve. And then helping them just to feel supported by the community is like a major factor in our program. And then Lauren knows about the conflict assistance program. Yeah, I am excited to talk about this program because it's also a relatively new one for the Community Justice Center. We actually, this is a pilot program. We haven't even been a year. Actually, we just reached our first completed year of this program. And so this is another criminal legal system alternative for folks who either might reach the criminal legal system eventually or for folks who don't wanna interact with that system at all. And this is a program that supports Burlington residents navigate conflict. And so our case coordinator works with community members. A lot of the work that she does is around neighborhood disputes, conflict coaching, a lot of one-on-one support as well as restorative dialogues between both people that are involved in that conflict. And these are all services that happen at the community level that can help de-escalate existing conflicts and also prevent interpersonal conflicts from forming. All of our services are sliding scale or they're free and we never turn anyone away for a lack of funds. Okay. So we're just gonna skip ahead a little bit. The chief did a great job of talking about cahoots and the CSL. It will be time for questions. It will be time for questions. Yes, I think so. Well, we might need to do questions at the end of the evening as well. And just mindfully have some other folks coming up to present. Sure, sure. And if we don't get to any questions today also, you know, folks can email us and also give us a call and we're happy to talk more. So here we just have different. So we talked about, you know, like community-based approaches to public safety. And sometimes it feels like it's something we're always working towards but actually we have some already in place here. So things like Old North End Mutual Aid, they just received a grant at Pathways for a peer workforce development program. Turning Point is a peer-supported recovery center. Howard Center has a street outreach which builds relationships with folks. We have faith-based organizations such as a new place which has a low barrier facility for people facing homelessness. The family room also has parenting and childcare programs that do early intervention. Something I really have liked is that the Office of Neighborhood Safety, they have meetings such as this where they have various stakeholders that work towards building safety plans for the neighborhood. And that could be things like block parties and gardening projects and things like that can really bring the community together. And that's based out of New York City. So the secret to a healthy community, it might lie in our relationships to one another. Genuine partnerships between community members, policymakers and community-based organizations, particularly those led by formerly justice system involved people, advances community trust, public safety and health and racial equity. Thank you all so much. And I do wanna just give a quick shout out to some of the folks who were a big part of how we all got here and some of the information on these slides. And so that involves the Parallel Justice Commission, Karen Vastine of UVM Health Network, City Councilor Ali Dieng, Aline Mukiza of the Howard Center, State Attorney Sarah George, Tammy Bouda of the Howard Center Street Outreach Team, Dr. Kathy Fox of UVM, Deb Hinchie of UVM, D. Barvik, the Vermont Violence Prevention Task Force, Talitha Consults, Malo Grant, a police commissioner and to our community members and to you all. So thank you so much. Thank you very much. All right, thank you very much to Warren and Bridget from the Burlington Community Justice Center Parallel Justice Program. It was a great presentation. Thanks. We wait for questions afterwards. If folks do have questions we have, we're set to wrap probably close to 18 or so if you're available to stay. If not, maybe we can share your information afterwards for questions over email or phone. We'll hang out. All right, thank you very much. Next up, we're happy to welcome the Burlington Electric Departments, talking about building electrical policies. So Darren Springer and Jen Green. I'm gonna take this table right here. Actually, we'll work if the network's small for you. Yeah. Let's you might explore you. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Okay, actually it's better for me if you're over here. Oh, sure. No problem. Charge and charge. No, I'd like to go right through. Thanks, Dan. We appreciate it. So thank you, everyone. We really appreciate being here. My name is Jennifer Green and I'm the Director of Sustainability and Workforce Development at Burlington Electric. And I'm so pleased to be here with General Manager, Darren Springer. Our plan tonight over our next 20 minutes is to tell you a little bit about some of the commercial electrification policies, building policies that we're considering and that the city council has requested and then get some feedback from you all. Before that though, I do want to just set the table so we all understand sort of some of the basic assumptions that are coming into the building electrification policies that we'd like to potentially recommend. And that's some BED's history and the fact that we're the first utility for city in the country to source 100% of our electricity from renewables, as you may all be aware. So that of course is biomass, wind, solar and hydro. And this sort of big achievement was accomplished in 2014, at which point we decided we're gonna take it to the next level, which is to transition away from fossil fuels in the ground transportation and built environment by 2030, essentially becoming a next zero energy city by 2030. So to help us in that effort, we're fortunate that we have funding that we distribute by way of incentives and rebates for heat pumps and really anything that you want to use electricity for from lawn mowers, a lawn mower aficionado, electric vehicles of course, e-bikes, et cetera. So we have sort of that bucket of support. We also have technical support that we offer through our energy efficiency team. Together, these things are helping us on our path. But we know that we can't do it with just what we think of as sort of carrots that we need to be thinking about policy as well. And hence the city council coming to us and asking for some building recommendations or policy recommendations, particularly around electrification of a large commercial spaces and our city buildings. So I'm really happy now to turn it over to Darren to give you the background on what brought us to this point and then where we are and what we'll be doing city council on Monday. Thanks, Jen. Great to be with everybody. I'm Darren Springer, general manager with Burlington Electric. This is the last NPA meeting on our NPA road show on this topic and we're glad to be with you. We are scheduled to present on this topic Monday evening at city council for any frequent city council meeting watchers. You'll see us there. And we really, this kind of dates back to the town meeting day 2021 vote. If folks recall, we had a vote on whether the city should seek a charter change related to regulating greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. And we got about 65% of the community said yes. There was also an advisory ballot question that spoke to trying to provide some of the benefits from this approach in an equitable manner to the community, no worries. And so after those votes, we had consideration in the legislature this past session of the charter change, it was approved, the governor signed it, that happened around April and then in May the city council resolution that Jen referenced was adopted that asked us and the department of permitting and inspections to look into policy recommendations for building emission reduction. And we're focused primarily on new construction on large existing buildings, which we're defining is about 50,000 square feet or larger, really only about 80 buildings in the city that meet that threshold. And then city buildings as well. So what we're not doing is we're not proposing anything related to residential housing, whether single family or multifamily or rental or condo, we're not proposing anything related to small businesses. This is really for new construction, city buildings and the largest existing commercial buildings in the city. And we issued an interim report, it's up on our website on July 18th. We've had a number of stakeholder meetings, we've done webinars with different folks in the energy efficiency and the design communities taking a lot of feedback. And we have a final report that we'll present on Monday evening. And basically what we're proposing is a couple of things. First would be for new construction, we're proposing that assuming it would be approved by the council and assuming that voters would subsequently approve it town meeting day 2023 because we'd have to have another vote on this to be able to enact it. That all new construction starting in 2024 would be renewable in terms of the heating and the thermal systems in the building. So heating, water heating, cooking, appliances, all of those types of uses would be renewable. We currently have a requirement that was passed last year that says that the heating system has to be renewable. So this would expand that to cover more uses within the building. And we also would be able to say that if you're not able to use a renewable heating system or renewable fuel that there could be a carbon impact fee as an alternative compliance that would apply at the time of permit for new construction. In addition for the large existing buildings and the city buildings, it would be a similar requirement move towards a renewable heating system or renewable water heating system. If you're pulling a permit for an existing building, large existing building or city building or in the case of the large existing buildings you could also pay the alternative compliance fee. We have a couple of ideas within the report for how to utilize proceeds from the fee. One of them would be to help the city with its own efforts to electrify its fleet and its vehicles and its lawn equipment, which can save money for all taxpayers and help with the city in terms of leading by example. A second effort would be to create a new city fund to support clean heating installations for low income residents and low income renters which would be consistent with the advisory question seven from town meeting day 2021. And then the third option for existing buildings would be if somebody is paying in that they would have an option to get some of the revenue back if they propose a plan to reduce emissions at their building or at their facility or within their own fleet. So give folks an option if they have to pay the fee to be able to use a portion of it to help with the city's goals and with its own emissions reductions. So that's kind of a very hopefully quick enough summary of what we're looking at. It's a relatively long memo for us about eight pages. It's got some analysis in there and we'll go into more detail I think at the city council meeting but really we're hoping to hear is if folks have feedback for us, have ideas, have questions we're happy to have those as well as just sometimes when Jenna I visit the MPAs people have questions more generally about Burlington Electric, about our work about different technologies. So we're happy to talk about anything that's of interest and I'll pause there. Thanks for having us. Hi, yeah, my name is Megan. Oh, yes. Hi, yeah, I'm Megan Epler Wood and I read the previous projections that were done by the outside firm from Cambridge and they emphasized rental housing as being one of the most important ways of reducing our towards net zero. And I noticed that's no, and I talked to someone about that and it seemed very unfeasible to work with that part of the problem in a rapid manner. So I'm wondering how you came up with these new assumptions that you wouldn't have to work with rental housing. We definitely believe rental housing has has policy associated with it but this set of recommendations isn't focused on rental housing. What we do have is was passed in 2021 is rental weatherization standards that are affecting rental housing, existing rental housing. We basically start with the largest energy use buildings and they're going through compliance now and we look at having a phase in over a period of the next few years as we get through each cohort. There's a challenge with weatherization. There's not enough workforce. There's a backlog in terms of, if you're trying to participate in one of the programs, the utility programs or the state programs. So that policy tries to really set up a kind of staged process with the rental buildings to get the biggest energy users first and then kind of move through and get to a point where all buildings have some basic weatherization and we're not losing fuel and warmth out the window or out the unsealed property. Just a clarification. So if you're phasing, which I think is feasible and makes sense, but doesn't that lower your chance of reaching a real net zero result by your target date? There's no question. Net zero 2030 is very, very ambitious goal. It's basically the most ambitious climate goal anywhere in the country. I think Ann Arbor, Michigan has now adopted a similar goal. So we're not alone, but we were first. And what I think of as net zero 2030 is really, it's a guiding kind of North Star is that if you have that ambitious of a goal, it does require that you concentrate your minds on all the different tools in the toolbox, as Jen was mentioning, the incentives, the policies. So there is a timeframe for rental weatherization that is consistent. It's actually the phase in ends before 2030, but there's definitely a challenge in getting to the goal that we have in the timeframe that we have. Even if you got halfway there, we'd be doing a lot more than a lot of communities around the country. And I think we're striving to really do as much as possible to kind of not only reduce emissions in Burlington, but hopefully be able to model policies that can be used in other communities as well. So I love your presentation. I love what you do. Fantastic job. But one opportunity that I like to, that I see is I live next to Champlain College. They have parking lots, parking lots all over the place. They're water issues with parking lots. They're heat issues with parking lots. Why doesn't Burlington Electric develop a plan to put solar panels on parking lots and deal with the water, deal with the electricity? It seems like that would be a real opportunity. Yeah. We love solar panels on parking lots. We're for it. We have a state program that is called the net metering program where if somebody wanted to put up a structure and be able to use their parking lot, they can participate in that program where they can use some of the energy on site. They can send some of it back to the grid and we pay them for the energy that they're sending back. So that's one avenue to do that. And then we also look at power purchase agreements. So there's a great example, I think of what you're talking about over at the Echo Museum. I was down there for the opening of that. That's Encore Renewables, a local Burlington renewable company. And they've got, I think it's 150 kilowatts of solar, parking canopy cover, a lot of co-benefits associated with that. And we're supporting that project and are participating in that. So I agree with you, we're on board. And we definitely like to find opportunities for solar in the city because we don't have big open fields like there are in rural Vermont where you might be able to place a larger project. So we're really looking at exactly this. It's rooftop, it's parking structures. The one challenge that I've heard from some of the renewable developers is that the parking structure tends to be more expensive. So it may not always pencil for folks who are looking at the project, but I think it has a lot of benefits and we're very supportive of it. We have a microphone. Let me just share your name as well. Yeah, Greg Epler Wood again. Thanks, Greg. BED City. And you're looking at this through electrical lens, but there has been efforts to build out district energy. And for those people who don't know district energy, that's using waste heat at the plant at our power plant and distributing it through the city over major lines and trunk lines and then two other smaller buildings. And I think there's at least one, maybe two anchor tenants who've said that they would be willing to involve this. Would you be supporting district energy or do you view that as too difficult or adversarial to reach that 2030 go? No, so McNeil is the wood chip plant is our plant. We run the plant and we've been working on district energy. Since I became general manager in 2018, we've been working intensively on district energy. No, we're 100% supportive of district energy. We've gone through three phases of feasibility work over the last several years with our partners Evergreen Energy that we have from St. Paul, Minnesota and they run a similar system with a wood chip plant in Minnesota and they developed these around the country. So we're working with them with Vermont Gas, with UVM, with UVM Medical Center, with the Intervail Center and the city. And it's been a, it's a long process overall, right? Cause the plant was built in the early 80s and was permitted for this purpose in part with district energy. So this most recent iteration is four years old but the effort is 40 years old. That said, we have a presentation also on Monday evening to give the council a substantive update on district energy myself and Neil Lunderville who's the CEO of Vermont Gas and Michael Ahern who's a vice president at Evergreen Energy. So I'd invite you to tune in. We've got some exciting announcements coming on district energy. We continue to move the project forward. The challenge is at the moment is financial. It would be a debt finance project and interest rates are higher. So that's one challenge. Electric market prices are a lot higher. So that also creates some challenges for us at McNeil. And then the construction pricing has gone up over the course of the last several years. On the other hand, we were able with Senator Leahy's help to secure some federal funding, a little over 5 million that could go towards supporting the project. So we're working hard on the financials of that and hopeful that we'll be able to move forward. Any other questions? Any folks online? I'm good. All right. Okay, Alan. Alan Mattson, I just got wondering, as I was listening to this, how does the McNeil plant actually figure in because it's not a net zero electric producing plant, is it? So this gets into a great question, which is the carbon accounting of biomass, right? And there are a lot of different opinions on it. What we do at McNeil, I would argue, is different than what some people think of with biomass if you were cutting and not restoring the woods. What we have is four foresters who work with us. We harvest within roughly a 60 to 70 mile radius of the plant and we're typically able to work with lands that are managed lands. So they're working lands, they're harvesting and they're regrowing and sequestering carbon. We've had some independent analysis that suggests that in the areas of New York and Vermont where we harvest that's actually adding carbon, net carbon, over the last several decades. So EPA and the state and others who would look at it would really say that you look at it based on that land use component. Cause when you're burning wood, there's carbon emitted. If you're regrowing the trees, you're sequestering carbon and there's the potential to have that balance out, particularly for an older plant like McNeil that's been running for a long enough period of time where you've had regrowth at some of the original sites that you've harvested. So we actually looked at this as well with BEIC, which is the organization that runs Efficiency Vermont. And we asked them earlier this year to say, look at not just McNeil from a wood energy standpoint, but look at all of the upstream emissions that are associated with procuring wood chips, whether that's running a train or a truck to the plant, diesel load or whatever it might be and count all of that and then compare McNeil to natural gas plants on the electric grid that are running typically at the same time that McNeil is running and don't even count any of their upstream emissions, the methane leaks from the pipelines, the different extraction related emissions. So kind of give us the worst case for McNeil and the best case for the gas plant. And they came back and said McNeil is still 85% better on emissions than the natural gas that's the dominant fuel in New England. So we're fairly proud of the work that's going on at McNeil. It's a very complicated area of carbon accounting. So I appreciate you asking about it. We think that there's a good case for the McNeil plant, but biomass is different in all different regions of the country. All right, thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Don't I just be in one? Yeah. All right, next up we have Friends of the Frame. Zach, thanks so much for joining us. You guys sit here as well, since this is a good spot. It might be difficult to set up though. Are you still interested in the South Waste District being the alternate? I do. OK, we should talk. Because I think my term should be done soon. Sure. It'd be very interesting. OK. All right. The folks on my will maybe take two minutes and get set up and then we'll get rolling. So I will send it to you. OK. Give me one. There's a question. I haven't turned it on yet. I don't think so. I don't think there's a second chance. Yeah, it's older school. If you join to Zoom, it might be faster. Either one, really. If you just do. I actually joined. You're going to join them. I think I've got it online. I don't know. OK. All right. No, wait. If you go to Burlington Beach. I actually don't know. I've got 15 minutes. But if you're on the ad, you can just go right there. You can just scroll down. I think that's interesting. I'm sure we're still broadcasting. But yeah, I think it's. So you sip our water here. I think it sounds good. And we're generally on track agenda-wise, too. So thank you. Super interesting. You know, it's wild. That's 85% better for carbon emissions compared to the best case scenario for gas. I don't know. Look at that analysis now. Much more to the point. I don't know what you're talking about. It's actually what we're. Mike, Michael. Michael, I think it's OK. I don't know what you're talking about. You're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. All right. All right. Here we go. Thanks so much, Zach. Four is yours. All right. Well, thanks for inviting me to come and speak to you all tonight. My name is Zach Campbell, and I'm from an organization called Friends of the Frame. The Moran frame has been in the news recently with the ribbon cutting that happened a couple of weeks ago. I'd like to just kind of share a little bit about what we've what I've been doing, working with the city and kind of what things are going on now and what things are coming in the future. So again, I'm from an organization called Friends of the Frame. It's an independent organization outside of the city of Burlington that was organized to really kind of facilitate the sustained use of the frame as this ever-evolving public space that brings in high quality, inclusive public programming, and helps support ongoing stewardship of the space, as well as procures funding for various things at the frame in partnership with the various city agencies, such as BPRW or BCI. And if you haven't seen any photos of it, phase one is now complete. I don't know if people have been down to the waterfront lately. It's starting to get a bit cold and windy, but here are some photos from a few weeks ago. It's looking really nice down there. And depending on kind of the weather, the time of day, you can see that the experience and the way that it looks kind of changes throughout the day in a really, really nice way. Also, on my end of things with Friends of the Frame, we've had a few kind of things that we're trying to push ahead here, leading up to the end of the year. One of the things that we did was we launched a website for the frame. It's theframebtv.org. That's going to kind of be the main place to go to find out about upcoming events or installations or just general goings on at the frame. There's also places where people can read about the history of the Moran plant and how it got to be the Moran frame. There's places to donate and this website will kind of grow and evolve over time. And there's some plans to bring some really interesting engagement tools so that people can kind of provide feedback or share ideas almost in real time and kind of build upon the legacy of the Moran frame as this place that's always kind of inspired these big crazy ideas and people get excited about them. And we definitely are interested in kind of keeping that energy going and figuring out how to empower it in new ways. Another thing we worked on that you would see if you go down to the space is we have these, right now there are two of these hanging bench swings that kind of pick up on the language of the three-stepped form of the space. And we worked with Generator to design and fabricate those swings. The goal is to get more of them and hopefully find people who might be interested in sponsoring additional swings. But I'm actually going to talk about swings again in a second because one of the other things that is going on right now also involves some more swings. The ribbon cutting ceremony was a few weeks ago as I mentioned, and then actually coming up on New Year's Eve as part of highlight, there's going to be a projection installation at the frame where we actually purchased a stretchable screen that fits within one of the openings in the steel. You got a show on there? Yeah, that's a mock-up of it, but it will look like that and there will be views from far away in Waterfront Park as well. It's going to be a very cool, immersive thing with sound and projection, so looking forward to that. The other really big thing that's going on right now that I'll spend some time talking about is Friends of the Frames pursuing a unique grant opportunity with the state of Vermont that also includes a crowdfunding campaign and the grant is structured as... It starts with a crowdfunding campaign and then the deal is if your campaign is able to hit its target, the project gets a two-to-one matching grant from the state of Vermont through the Better Places program. And so really the reason that we're going after this is because phase one of the ran frame vision was really heavily focused on stabilizing the site and the structure which were contaminated and there were some structural issues that needed to be addressed, although the building superstructure was in pretty good shape overall, but there were hazardous materials, asbestos, lead paint, all kinds of nasty stuff that are very expensive to deal with and you don't really see anything new at the end of the day. I mean, the steel was painted this awesome red color that's really kind of cool to check out, but in terms of the things that you can bring down to a space, especially a public space that really kind of make it inviting and comfortable and easy to use, there weren't really room in the budget for as many of those things. And so us as Friends of the Frame, we really want to start bringing people to the space to enjoy performances or events or any number of pop-up markets or art installations. And in order to do that, we need to kind of add this very modest but crucial set of things that are going to enable this to happen starting next year. But as I said, there wasn't money for it in the first phase, so we're looking for some help to kind of do the crowdfunding portion of raising these dollars and then hopefully get a two-to-one matching grant from the state to really kind of get us the rest of the way there. As I mentioned, we're looking at a mix of things, but really it's three key areas that we're interested in. So one would be free public amenities, art and activation is the other one, and then crucial support for events and performances. And really, this is the mix that we think, it adds some of these kind of compelling elements that people get a little bit more excited about perhaps than others, but also has really kind of utilitarian things that come up in every discussion about somebody might wanna have an event at the frame. Like, do you have storage on site? That's lockable and secure. And so figuring out how do you kind of balance the needs with the things that are more exciting? But I think we have a pretty good mix here and really what this is going to do is enable a kind of robust set of activations, events and installations in 2023 that are actually gonna serve as kind of a ground test for some ideas about longer-term use of this space and what can it be and what should it be and what works well and what's missing. And we're really gonna kind of pair this with soliciting feedback from the public and that's gonna drive future decision-making. And so here's kind of where we are with our crowdfunding, the crowdfunding portion of our campaign. We have two weeks left and we've got $11,000 to go. We've been kind of, we launched a couple of weeks ago. It's a fairly short campaign, but we do get a two-to-one grant if the goal is reached and we have lots of gifts and raffle items for people that make contributions. So that's all I have for you today but I'm happy to kind of answer some questions and yeah. Yeah, well, I know crowdfunding is very difficult. Greg Epler was at the end. Thanks, Greg. Tasted it in your first two times. To do a crowdfunding, you really need some incentives and where those three areas and those little bullet points under those three areas, that's the crowdfunding, what you're pitching to- That's the scope, correct. Oh, okay, all right. The incentive, you mean as like kind of thank you incentives for donations? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we do have a mix of those. It's kind of a blend of the frame swag and a few kind of things that were donated from local. So how do we find it if we go online to- Yeah, so I'm happy to share the website address but it's theframebtv.org. There's a donate button right on the homepage. If you click that, the crowdfunding link is right at the top. So if I may, I have two things. One is a fundraising idea. The state of Vermont doesn't have a film and video office anymore, but if you get the frame on the list of producers from motion picture producers, it would, I think make a pretty good location. They're looking for unique location spots and you get money if it's used for that. I think James Bond in the casino right now, okay. And then the second is that I, this is pie in the sky, but when the big homeowner was, they were gonna put buildings up and I plotted out and I even made some contacts about putting a ski lift from the frame up to the top of one of those buildings up there. And it works. I mean, I was looking at it, it's a nice shot and cause people wanna get high. That building is there. So people wanna get at the top and look out. I mean, that's the one advantage of that building, right? So CBD or whatever. Thank you. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Had a month more boring, but that was pretty fun. I don't understand the relationship of your organization to the city. And did you explain that? And how is your organization empowered at this time to manage what's going on at the building? Sure, I very quickly kind of talked about it, but I'll go a little bit more in depth now. So friends of the frame, it's independent from the city, it's not, I don't work for the city. Right now I'm in a pilot agreement with the city. Essentially, if you kind of think about similar organizations, the High Line in New York is kind of an example where it's operated and managed by friends of the High Line in partnership with the New York City Parks Department. The city of New York owns that space and the structure, but they work with friends of the High Line because they're able to bring a lot of energy and other resources to that space. And they have an agreement that outlines roles and responsibilities. That's kind of what I'm working toward with the city longterm. This pilot phase is really next year's kind of, there's a lot of testing going on, both on the agreement side of things between friends of the frame and the city of Burlington and also on actually what's happening on the site. So in terms of where we are now, that's a written agreement and we're kind of figuring out those exact mix of roles and responsibilities going forward, but it's gone quite well so far and I'm excited to... So it's a mix. I mean, started kind of working more with CEDO, especially as the building was under construction, it was in more CEDO support, but it's in Waterfront Park and it's gonna be operated in large part by the Parks Department. So, and then BCA obviously is a, yeah. Yes, two more questions. Very quick. So if one of us or more have what we consider a fabulous or insane or both idea, do we get in touch with you or with the city? You can get in touch with me. Got it. All right. Good things to bed. Ringling brothers no longer. Good things happening. Is that okay? Yes, yes. So in addition to being a mixed and services specialist for just like that, I also do the noise ticket programs, the way to work sort of noise program and a lot of the tickets are received by UVM college age students who are looking from fan venues and they are looking at places, but they are students trying to make money in a lot of places, take their groceries. So the frame might be a great place for UVM students and working with the community to offer them spaces and reduce noise for anybody else. Yeah. Reduce noise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, folks, we have, thank you so much Zach. Thank you. Thank you. Our last agenda item of the evening, do we have Robert with public works here tonight? Discussing online. Yeah, Jeff Patrick. Yep. Okay. All right. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah. Turn it over to you for parking services. Yeah. Let me share my screen here. Right. You guys are seeing this. Oops. Yes, you're up. All right. Very good. Well, thank you very much for having me. I'm here tonight to, I will go click about eight slides. I appreciate where we're running a little late. So I'll go quickly, but please interrupt me if you have a question. So my name is Jeff. I'm the prison director for parking and traffic. I'm actually in charge of parking services, parking facilities and traffic. So parking services are the folks that write tickets and sell permits for the garages. Parking facilities is the group that actually takes care of the build the facilities, the actual garage facilities and our lots. And traffic are the folks that take care of the signals, the signs and the lines and the crossing guards. And these are three completely independent groups and they are all self-funded. So we don't actually operate on any tax dollars. So that's an important thing for people to understand is that all of our traffic, like our traffic signals, the lights that you would expect would be a reasonable thing the tax dollars would pay for. Those are actually paid for by, in whole by the revenues from parking meters. So a quarter at a time. So anyway, but I want to talk about tonight real quickly is parking services cause we have some amazing things happening in this group. Over the past two years, we've had a major shift in how we address parking and we now have a new motto that we go by and it's safety and equity. So we've started looking at everything we do from a safety and equity lens, which means that if you're getting a parking ticket, it's probably because there's an ordinance that says that you're violating some sort of safety issue or an equity issue. So that would be if you're parked in front of a fire hydrant, that's a safety issue. If you're parked in the handicap spot and you're not, you don't have the proper credentials, that's an equity issue. So we're trying to reframe how we approach ticket writing. And we used to write citations for violations. Now we write tickets for safety and equity. Important reframing, right? Our goal is to minimize tickets and minimize towing. And anybody who gets towed tomorrow is gonna not believe me, but we are sincerely making lots of changes that are strategically aimed at minimizing tickets and minimizing towing because we see that as an equity issue. When someone's car is removed from their, we're taking someone's asset and they are using that to get to their job or do whatever they're doing in their life and we don't want to interrupt that. So in order to get to all this safety and equity and minimize everything, we have made some major changes. We moved the staff from BPD, what formerly was parking enforcement and we moved that staff into DPW. And we also concurrently, we took the gates off of the garages. I don't know if it was parked downtown recently, but we took the gates off. And when we took the gates off, that radically changed how we managed the garages, which meant that the staff that was at the garage was no longer needed for to be in the garage all the time. So we moved staff into parking services. And then we aggressively retrained staff on different job duties, customer services specifically. And what this has done is it's resulted in an increased ability to provide coverage. And I'll talk about that on the next slide. What I mean by coverage is we have staff, we have more staff in the field over more parts of the day so that we can respond more quickly to the needs of the community. So some of the things we've done, what we're trying to do is build a one-stop shop for parking. So if you have a question about parking, you go to DPW or you know, Burlington, vt.gov slash parking and there's website there that will have everything you need on it. We are one-stop shop. You go down to 645 Pine Street, go to the window, you can get any parking question you have answered. We're not quite there yet, but we're heading that way very quickly. One of the equity issues we did last year was we reformed the scoff. Scoff is when you get your car towed because you don't pay your tickets. So the threshold for scoff used to be $75. Which meant if you got one ticket, the next ticket you got, you were getting car towed, which is pretty much a one and done, which is just not fair. So we raised the threshold to $275 and concurrent with that changing in the threshold, we launched the Fines for Food program. And I think that's our counselor, Paul, on this call. She was instrumental in guiding us towards this program, which for the month of December, it just started on Friday. If you pay off your overdue parking tickets, this is only for overdue tickets. If you pay off your overdue parking ticket, we give half of the money we raise to Feeding Chittenden. Last year we gave them a check for $40,000. Yeah, it's huge. And we're looking to at least increase that by 50% this year. We're hoping. We just sent out 7,000, no, 8,000 direct mail letters to everyone who owes money. So hopefully they pay. So anyway, so I'm gonna keep cranking because I'm sure I know we're running on time. So free holiday parking Fridays and Saturdays through the end of the year. There's two hours free anywhere you park. If you use Park Mobile, you get two hours free. That's in the city parking lots, city parking garages in the meters, and even in parks owned lots. So we actually have a relationship with parks because they own a number of parking facilities. And we're expanding our services to support parks. Cause ironically, they're very good at parks, but they admit themselves not so good at parking. So we're helping them there. We're working, we've worked very closely with BHS with their challenge of moving all their students into the Macy's, you know, we have a parking garage right there. So we worked with them to get them discounted parking. We've worked with them to create a rooftop garden on top of the garage, which has lots of legal challenges around it that we've got through that. We're working with car share, actually putting electric chargers in the marketplace garage to support the car share electric vehicles. We have created fully digital resident only permits. I know Ward six has quite a bit of resident parking in it. And you probably used to have those green, silvery, gigantic growth stickers. Those anymore, those are gone. If you still have one in your car, you should have gotten a new ticket or a new permit for this year and been told that it's digital. If you don't know that, please stop by 645 Pine Street or call them 540-2380 and talk to someone about making sure that your credentials are correct because you do not need that ugly green sticker anymore. We created a contractor parking for resident only. This was a big problem for contractors. They were so mad they'd come, they'd work on somebody's house and they get a ticket. So we created a program for them so that they could actually buy a permit for a month, a month, a quarter or a year. And then they can park anywhere they want in resident only when they're working on someone's house. We created a whoops program. So if you get a ticket because you parked in resident only or you get a ticket because you parked but you overstayed a meter, you can actually once a year, you can say, you know what? Can you whoops this for me? And we will write that ticket off and write it down. Yeah, you have it done. You have resident parking in front. Yeah, we don't. So we've removed the transaction fee for online payments. Used to be if you've got a ticket and you wanted to pay online, we charged I think it was an extra 275. Well, that's just pain on top of pain. So we took that away. So you go online, you just pay your ticket. So we already talked about the increase in staffing and we are really focused on customer service. We have parking service agents. We don't have parking enforcement officers anymore. We're trying to reframe this whole concept of how we approach people and hopefully how people approach us because we are people and we're trying to do our job and make the community safe and enforce the rules that we've decided as a community that we wanna live by, which is, you know, in our case, ordinance. So any preview, we're headed towards 24365 service. So our vision is as soon as we can get people hired, you won't have to call the police two o'clock in the morning. You can call us and we'll take care of you. We're ongoing upgrades to our digital permitting system and web sales. We just launched a whole new platform last week. So there's more improvements coming there. We're actually actively talking with some members of the Public Works Commission about changing ordinances to minimize towing. There are some fairly rigid and strict penalties in ordinance. And my challenge is I don't have the authority to do anything, but what's in ordinance. So we have to change the ordinance. We're working, hopefully start up in January, February timeframe of visioning project for the marketplace garage. That garage is 50 years old. It's actively falling apart. We're actually putting half a million dollars into it right now over the winter to patch it up for the next three to five years to allow us to contemplate the next version of what happens at the marketplace garage site. And then we just rebranded the garage that's behind the Hilton Hotel Vermont. We branded that as the downtown garage because nobody knows what it's called. It was called the Lakeview and College Street garage complex, which nobody can remember. So we would bring downtown garage. That's it. So anyway, so I blasted through there. Like I said, I'm happy to answer questions, cycle back through any slides. Any questions? Mark Howe. And I have a question concerning the transition from parking enforcement with the police department and two parking services with DPW. And you may already have answered this in the 24-7 thing that you said, but that went by pretty quick. Somebody's parking across my driveway. Yes. And it's a Saturday night. Yes. I don't think I can get anybody at DPW. Not right now. Right now, you need to call the police. Calling dispatch is the best thing to do right now. I can't seem to find my stop sharing button. Oh, there it is. Right now, because we don't have our staffing up, we only have about 10 people, we need 14. So as we get to 14, we're going 24-7, 365. So the best thing to do for the foreseeable futures, call the police and dispatch will either deal with themselves or they will call us because we coordinate with them so they know if we're available. And we're available. So we have five people working during the day and five people working at night. So working until, I think they're going until 11 o'clock at night. So we have pretty solid coverage all day. A year ago, we had three people, get five physicians, four filled, one left, get three people. So for all day, from eight in the morning to 11 o'clock at night, now we've got five people in the day and five people in the night. Thank you. Yeah. Another question, Seth. Yeah, I was just wondering how you manage the garages and for safety and also how do you keep it from being a place for homeless too? Yeah, we work really hard on this. We've made a number of upgrades in the garages we've put in, we've replaced a bunch of cameras. They were broken cameras, we've replaced them. We put in camera monitors now. So when you go in the garage, if you look at the booth, you'll see there's a TV screen and you can see it looks like a security room, right? There's cameras are flicking around so you can actually see what's going on throughout the garage. We've reorganized how our maintenance team works. So now we have one person in charge of all three facilities that we have and it's their baby to keep it clean and keep it organized. And so we're painting towers, we're replacing light bulbs, we're making things brighter. We just did a whole bunch of landscaping at the downtown garage. There's a ton of work going in to make these facilities safer and cleaner. And we meet with the hotels because the hotels are a big customer of ours. We meet with them quarterly around safety issues and at our last meeting, they pretty much agreed anecdotally that things are much better than they were in the spring. So I think we're making impact, but it's hard work. Quick question, presumably really dumb one. In the absence of gates, how do you charge people for parking? So you pay with Park Mobile, which is the app or you can pay at the kiosk. And part of the change with what used to be the folks that work in the garage when they came over to Parking Services, we actually needed that staff now because they actually patrol the garage, just like they patrol the streets. So the garage actually works exactly the way it works on the street. If you park your car on the street, you sort of guess how long you're going to be there and then you put money in the meter. You go in the garage, you park, you kind of guess how long you're going to be there and then you pay at the kiosk or you pay with Park Mobile. And then we go around. If you don't pay, you get a ticket, $15. Got it. Thank you. Yep. Any other questions for Jeff? All right, if not, Jeff, thanks so much for hanging in there. I know we're in a little bit late tonight. Really appreciate it. Thank you for the presentation. Yeah, thanks so much. All right, and that concludes our MPA meeting for today. I know some folks had questions for the Parallel Justice Program. Thank you for staying later. I'm being available for that. Oh, no, totally fine. Well, thank you so much, everybody. Have a good night. I'll show you where you are. That's a different system. I haven't used it. I haven't used it. We have any questions. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you.