 It is 6 p.m. Monday, April 15th. I'm gonna call it to order the liquor control board meeting. We will start with the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Thomas Rennick. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you very much. All right, welcome, Jenny. We have six businesses coming in for restaurants and liquor licenses, some renewals and some new, many of which are conditional pending either inspection or state license. Yes. Okay. Anything else you want to address? No, I just would like to introduce Tool. You wanna come up and he can talk about his new restaurant. Welcome, Tool. If you wanna state your name and tell us about your new, you can keep it brief. Whatever you wanna share, just an opportunity to share with the public. Yeah, thank you for all the pleasure and everything the city is doing. And I know city, Viniski, I believe, is the most diverse city, I believe. And then, and city is doing a lot of work, working for all this diverse community and for all the whole community and my first experience like coming to US, also I stayed in Viniski and I love the city, the small city and I work at the Viniski School District. I also work with red coffee for some time and then I have a lot of like attachment to this city and I know most of our community members. So one of my friends came and then he told me like, since you know a lot of the people and you'll be a great help, like let us do a partner business. And then I said okay and then the previous owner is having some issues because his mom was sick. So we did the contract, we signed the contract and we are running, we started running but in the same name, Fusion Cafe. So hoping to change it to Vermont Korean cocktails. So we'll be having restaurant plus bar. The idea of restaurant I know like with a different fusion food like and also guests from our own country and from different other countries. And the idea, I know like when we think of bar we don't have a lot of advantages. We have a lot of disadvantages of having bar like all the liquor when you think about liquor. And health wise if you think it, it's totally opposite. But as a community when I think is a place for people to enjoy, come and enjoy. Also for people, those who feel like home is not a good place because they have white children and everybody will see at home. So it is a private place for people to come and enjoy. Culturally like our folks like they don't want to drink in front of their children. So that will be a place for them to come and drink. And the other thing since many of our folks are language barrier, if they go to other restaurant and then there won't be any interpreter to interpret for them. And then it will be very easy like for them to come because we speak, I speak like different languages. So it will be good for the local people, immigrants, refugees like and the people around, around Mineski. So yeah, I always like speak forward like what is a good thing about liquor, what is bad about liquor. And it's not necessary to talk more about that you all know about it. Moderation. Yeah. Yeah, but one issue like I'm having since we are running now with the old, still the previous owner is with us, like he's helping us. But his liquor license is expiring at the end of this month. So, and then I don't know how long, because he's not going to renew it because he has to pay money for that. So I'm hoping like if things go right and then if he spit out a little bit, maybe I need help from the city so that I get license before the first of next month, that would be my priority actually. Actually, since you're a new establishment, this is when you're starting. So yeah, just go through the applications and then you'll be all set. All right. Well, very exciting. Thank you for coming in. Yeah, and also I'm thinking of having a grand opening. Maybe when we get all the, actually I got the food license, so it's not a big deal. So I'm still waiting for the liquor one. So I thought of inviting people from the city. I have Christian Lord in my mind. Maybe that dates if yes, I'm wondering. I'll invite you for that. Thank you. All right, any questions from Council? Fortunal or about any of these other permit lists? Well, if there are no concerns, do I have a motion to approve items A through F on our liquor control board agenda? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. That is the end of our liquor control board agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. It is 6-0-6. I will call to order the cannabis control board meeting. We have one item on for discussion or approval, a tier two manufacturing license for said wind suites. Yeah, so in the absence of the city, director of city planning, I will cover this agenda. So just going to read from the cover sheets. In 2021, the city of Manuski opted in to allow retail cannabis operations in the city. All this opt-in vote was specific to retail cannabis. Other cannabis operations, including processors, manufacturers and laboratories, would be permitted consistent with local regulations and did not require an opt-in vote. In February of 2022, the city of Manuski established a local cannabis control commission to issue local licenses to any cannabis operation wishing to do business within the city. The city received an application for the renewal of a tier two manufacturing license on April 3rd, 2024. The applicant previously requested and received a tier two manufacturing license from the city's cannabis control commission on April 17th, 2023. No changes to the specific operation are proposed with this renewal. Additionally, the city received a notification from the state cannabis control commission of their intent to issue a tier two manufacturing license to said wind suites LLC pending local approval. We have not had any complaints about the location. We've checked with both code and with police. Since this is an application for a manufacturing license, there is limited information that is considered public. This is done to protect the location and security of the operation. The applicant was invited, and I don't believe there's an attendance. So they could have offered details if they wanted to, but the city isn't limited in what can be included with the public-facing component application, which is why it was very spare in the packet. Any questions? Any questions from council? I feel like the last time we saw them, they hit the thought that they may want to pursue like some form of retail in the future. I'm just, clearly they haven't, but I don't know if they spoke about that at all. I'm not aware that they did. All right. Any questions from members of the public? If you're attending on Zoom, you can use the chat or raise hand feature. I will validate also, I have not heard any complaints from community members about this one. Okay. Hearing no concerns, do I have a motion to approve the tier two manufacturing license for Sedwin Suites? So moved. Motion by Thomas, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. That is the end of our cannabis control board agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Okay, it is 6.09. We'll call to order the Winnuski City Council meeting. First up is agenda review. Any concerns about our order this evening? I was curious about the treasurer's report. There was a reason why it was further down. There are just a lot of guests through the bulk of the agenda. Okay. We will move on to public comment. So, oh, sorry. Actually, John, are we, I didn't take a look to see if there was anyone from VTrans, not from like... They're here. Oh, there. Yeah. Okay, so public comments. If you're here for an item on tonight's agenda, I would ask that you wait until we reach that agenda item. If you can, we invite public comment for every agenda item. But if you have a comment to make about something on tonight's agenda, there's time for that now. Please use the chat or raise hand feature. And I see we do have a hand raised. Paul will bring you over. Welcome, Terry. Hi, thanks for taking my comment. It's actually a question, not a comment. Just here to check in. I'm wondering if John Rauscher is on the call tonight and wondering about a couple of things about the striping. First of all, I was just wondering about our contract from last year. I know that we're owed, and I say owed in air quotes, some painting from last year. Did we actually pay the contractor for that work that didn't get done last year? Chris, you're wondering, do you need to use for that? Oh, go ahead, John. Sure. So yeah, good news actually. So the one we paid the contractor for the work they completed last year only, which was about, I forget, around 20% of the line striping contract work that we procured two years ago. The good news is they actually started today for all the work that they need to complete as part of the existing contract. Some of that work's gonna have to be redone because it's already faded, but that is, they will be paying for that amount. So the plan, I'll touch on this probably a little more in my infrastructure update. So they're starting on Main Street this week. They should be doing all the Main Street striping crosswalks and stop bars mainly because we're gonna be starting construction on Main Street. Weaver Street will also occur, I believe, this week. And then they'll be moving on to the downtown to do all the rest of the downtown work. That will be night work. And then once they're complete with that, they still have some of the connector collector streets they have to finish. So Spring Street, Meltz Bay, La Fountain Street, and we also have them doing some parking lot striping for us. So they've committed to be here for the next three weeks before they get tied up with some of the state contracts. And they've committed to finishing all the contract work that they still need to do. Thank you. So am I correct to understand, John, then, that all the stuff that you've just mentioned is all the things that they've committed to complete? Correct, yep, yep. And obviously that's weather permitting. So what if they don't finish it by the time they have to leave? Well, within their schedule, I mean, they have factored in weather. So I guess we'll play it by ear. If it's really rainy and they get washed out, then we'll have to see where they're at. But I mean, they do have a good three weeks built into the schedule for all of the work they need to complete. So they think they can get it all done. I guess we'll see how the weather goes over the next three weeks. Christine, can I jump in? Sure, Elaine. Hi, Terry, it's Elaine. So I will say that the reason why we were able to get them here is because John and Joe Shaw, the deputy political secretary and I had a meeting with them about a month ago to clarify what's needed in order for them to be here to complete work within the contract period. And that's what they told us is if we booked them in early spring, just like John said, that's when they can commit to work because it's before the state slams them with their priorities. So during that meeting, I'll say that they were, they did express some consternation that we were very unhappy with them. So I'm optimistic that they are doing their best to meet our contract needs this time and within the timeframe they gave us. Well, that sounds amazing. Thank you. I appreciate the update. Thank you. Is anyone else here for public comment? Please use the raise hand feature. Okay. We'll move on to our consent agenda. We have our city council and liquor control board minutes from April one, payroll warrant from March, counts payable April, subsequent to payout March, event permit applications for Champlain Valley Swim League championship, waking windows, Winooski Wednesdays, the Winooski farmers market, approval of Winooski armory redevelopment project request for congressionally directed spending, the Arbor Day Proclamation and the Community Services Scholarship Fund fundraising campaign. Any questions about consent agenda or do I have a motion to approve? So moved. Second. Motion by Charlie, second by Brynn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. We will move on to council reports. Charlie, would you like to start? Sure. The next Winooski Housing Commission meeting is set for next Tuesday, April 23rd at 6 p.m. The commission will continue with remaining topics from last month's joint meeting with the Planning Commission, including discussions around inclusionary zoning and replacement regulations. Thank you. Thank you. That's fast. I don't know if he meets later this week. However, last week, I attended the airport commission on behalf of council Oakleaf, which was in fun little shake up. They talked about a few things, I think, council and the public would be interested in. They are currently, as many folks may know, they are working on their parking garage and that project is moving along right on time, which is great. I guess there have been some concerns. It would be delayed, but that is no longer the case. They are applying for some, a sound mitigation grant through DOD. So that is a newer type of grant for sound mitigation that the airport is not currently accessing. So hopefully they will be able to get that and they will be able to speed up the rate in which they are able to help some homes in the impacted areas. Also, they applied for a grant to do some work on some of their runways and they did get that grant. So that work should begin soon and their next meeting will be May 8th. And then I attended the Safe Healthy Connected People Meeting, which was nice to be back in the room with all of those folks and they were mostly discussing scholarship policy. Some of the things that they were talking about is availability to non-residents, should back payments be permissible. They also talked about voting to allow the INB commissioner to become a voting member, which they did approve. And then what I was looking for when Charlie finished was downtown Winnowsky's next Blingo day, but I don't see it here quickly. So just go to downtownwinnowsky.org. I believe that's the second Tuesday of every month. Thank you. Thank you. Big thanks to city staff, especially our public safety teams for time and preparation and working through the Eclipse event. Everything went well, luckily. Following up on what Charlie mentioned, the Planning Commission met this month to wrap up changes to our unified land-use regulations to align with the new state requirements of Act 47 with the goal of getting their public hearing process complete and advancing to council so that we can be in compliance before the end of year. They'll next begin review of potential updates related to replacement and inclusionary zoning and having the follow-up discussion with the Housing Commission to advance that work. Our Finance Commission began review of our Economic Development Strategic Plan. This is a process they've completed for us in the past and when they meet again next month, second Tuesday, 6 p.m., they'll be joined by the Executive Director of Downtown Winnowsky as many of the plan recommendations have overlap with that organization. Lastly, the City Manager and I were able to meet with leadership from the local mosque here in Winnowsky. It was a productive meeting where we received contact information to incorporate into communications and language access and also made a commitment to have a twice-annual touch point to sort of bring structure to interacting with that group. That is it for me. Great. The Municipal Infrastructure Commission is not meeting this month. We don't have any actionable items so we will not be meeting on the 18th at this point in time. There are items on the agenda, work plan updates as well as traffic calming, funding requests that came out of the March 21st meeting that council will be discussing tonight. And thanks to Deputy Mayor Runner for standing in for me at the Airport Commission. Appreciate that greatly. And I will be continuing in that role until we appoint somebody else. So just following up on the April 1st conversation. So that is May 8th. We'll be the next Airport Commission meeting on that. Okay, thank you all. City updates, Elaine. Yes. Construction on the Main Street Revitalization Project is planned to start on Tuesday, April 23rd of this year. This construction season will focus on upgrading water, sewer, and stormwater systems. Activities will take place Monday through Friday between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. There may be night and weekend work when needed. Single lane closures will be required throughout the project where Main Street will be reduced to northbound traffic only. Southbound traffic will be sent to Weaver Street. This detour will stay in place 24 hours a day, seven days a week. To keep access open for emergency vehicles, on-street parking will not be allowed along Main Street within the active work zone during work hours. On-street parking will not be allowed along one side of Weaver Street. Travellers should be alert, use caution, slow down, and please pay close attention to signage and flyers. The project team will send weekly construction updates starting Friday, April 19th. These updates will include construction activities, active work zone limits, traffic impacts, traffic pattern changes, and parking restrictions for the upcoming week. To sign up for these updates and for full project details, please visit wanooskevt.gov slash Main Street, one word. And as a reminder, all businesses are open during construction. It's gonna be a tough year for them, so please patronize them if you are able. Downtown tree trimming and restricted parking will be on April 16th. Department of Public Works has contracted to provide tree trimming on Main Street from the US Post Office down to Grazer's Restaurant and in front of the Wanooski Block, meaning from Scout to McKee's, tomorrow on Tuesday, April 16th. Work begins at 8 a.m. and parking will be prohibited in the project areas. For full details, please visit the news update section on our website, wanooskevt.gov. And lastly, please join your neighbors for a green up day in Wanooski on Saturday, May 4th. Pitch in and enjoy this annual statewide tradition by cleaning up public spaces in the community. You can grab your green up bags on May 4th from 8.30 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Wanooski Senior Center at 123 Barlow Street. Staff and volunteers will be available to help you. Once you've got your bag, feel free to green up a location of Wanooski. Bags are also available for early pick up at Wanooski City Hall and the Wanooski Memorial Library. For full event details, please visit wanooskevt.gov slash green up day, May the 4th be with you. Thank you, Lane. All right, onto our regular items. So first up is on for discussion or approval, the Chittenden Solid Waste District fiscal year 24-25 budget presentation. I see we have Sarah and Jen from CSWD on Zoom. If you could bring them over, please, Paul. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you very much. Hopefully, Jen Holiday can also be learned as a panelist. She's going to try to share her screen. I've been having some significant computer difficulties. So in case I freeze and go away, Jen can step right in and take over for me in my frozen absence. So it's actually a tempting to do that, which would be great. So I will kick it off to say thank you again for your time this evening. My name is Sarah Reeves. I'm the executive director for the Chittenden Solid Waste District and CSWD is a regional entity that is Chittenden County and we are charged with managing the waste generated within Chittenden County. And I'm going to be kidding. Thanks, Jen. I always like to start off again with a little bit of who we are. In case there are folks out there who are watching that are not familiar with us. And I like to talk specifically about where we generate our revenue. And so as an example, our last audit fiscal year, fiscal 23, you can see that these are the three main buckets of our revenue. User fees or tip fees. Those are the fees that our customers pay directly to us to manage their waste. So like a drop-off center or material leak. We have material and product sale. That is before the, which are the recreate that we sell. So like the recycling that is sorted at the Murph or compost products, local color paint, and then a solid waste management fee, which is the fee that is charged at the Coventry Landfill to haulers when they bring Chittenden County waste there. Where we do not receive any revenue is directly from our members of these in town. So we do not receive any revenue income tax, sales tax, property taxes, or any per capita fees. Next slide, please. Also from feedback from past presentations, people like to know how we're doing. And I'm going to move us over to column number three. So that's where I wanted us to take a look at. And really that's where CSWD focuses. We are looking at those roughly 60,000 tons of material that were disposed in the landfill that really could have been diverted somewhere else either to recycling, to composting, or through CMD construction demolition debris recovery. So that's the chunk that we're looking at, trying to recover and make sure it does not go into disposal in the landfill. Next slide. So for our fiscal 25 budget, which is what I'm here presenting to you tonight, we're looking at income at just shy of $60 million. And again, you can see those three buckets of income as main buckets. The one that kind of fluctuates quite a bit is that sale of materials. And that is because that is mostly made up of revenue from the sale of recycling to the materials recovery cycle facility. And we simply do not have any control over what we are paid for for those materials. So that revenue can go up and down as a percentage of income every year and it does. Next please. And similarly to kind of give it a sense of where our expenses land at just over 16 million should probably not be any surprise to anyone on the council that payroll expenses make up a very large percentage of our expenses, 38%. The other very large item is materials management. And what we mean by that is the fees that we pay to haulers or to other entities to manage the material that we bring to them. So for transportation to the transportation or for transportation to the markets and to Cassella for operating the materials recycling facility on a daily basis or countouts. Next please. So I'm looking at our bottom line this year. It is different than in any other budget that I brought to you in that we are showing a small deficit. So we'll talk a little bit later on in presentation about how we're going to be looking to make that deficit up. Next please. And a couple of quick comparisons this year to last year, you'll see that the revenue is going up just slightly. We're looking at some modest increase in our overall revenue. Where we are looking at the big expenses, I mean, you see those are going up double digits is in that equipment and fleet increase. Just about half of that increase is directly related to the materials recycling facility, the existing one, the old one. I'll talk about that in a moment as well. Next please. So when I was talking about that shortfall and needing to draw down from our reserves, this is where I don't think that actually we will need to do. But we have to budget that way so now just in case everything completely follows along to how we've written it out. But we, every year we conservatively under budget certain areas and conservatively over budget certain areas. And we generally under budget on the recycling facility to commodity revenue. Again, because we don't control the market prices. We also are under budgeting slightly on the facility inbound tons for recycling and for organics. We are actively seeking additional tons into both facilities, but we want to be conservative on our estimates of what's coming in. We also over budget on our wages and benefits. And we have four or five new positions that were proposed in this budget. Whenever we budget in new position, we always budget for a full family plan, for example, in the budget, in the benefits. And we also budget fully, not over budget, but we never realize the expenditure fully in the community cleanup fund. And I know Winooski is actually really good at using your community cleanup fund dollars. So we want to continue to fully utilize that. You get a brand new bucket of money on July 1th. And Brendan Rickshaw has been great at finding projects and seeking that out in the community for use of those funds. That's it. So one big news, large news this year is that for the first time since fiscal 13, you are increasing the solid waste management fee. It has been $27 a ton since fiscal 13. We are raising that fee to $30 per ton. And this is, again, the fee that is charged to the holders when they bring material to generate in Chittenden County full disposal either at the transfer station in Wilson or directly up to the landfill and Coventry. When we looked at the potential impact per household, across all the households in Chittenden County, the impact is less than 30 cents per month. And we generated that by multiplying the capital of household persons and by the path of the capital. Drop-off center customers, both residential and small business, can reduce their potential impact and exposure to the solid waste management fee increase simply by reducing their waste. It really is a pay to throw. So the less amount of trash that you generate, the less your exposure to that increase will be. That's it. That our materials, similarly, we're also looking at a small increase. We're currently charging $85 a ton. We're looking to increase that fee to $90 per ton. And again, that fee is also charged to holders when they bring material directly to that facility in Williston. This does bring us roughly into the market range for what other mercs, as we call them, charge in the region. And we're talking in the region as Northeast and Northern New York and Northern New England. This is specifically related to the expenses at the current old 30 plus year old building. And again, that $250,000 increase in the equipment cost is directly related to keeping this facility running. The building, the equipment are all at their end of life with a couple of small exceptions. So we are anticipating increasing need to just basically maintain this facility and running for the next two years. So after the next couple of years, once we get the new mark up and running, this facility will be decommissioned and then those expect to go away. Next place. And again, extra cycle facilities and good news, no tip fee increase there. So we're maintaining the tipping fee at $70 per ton. We're again budgeting tons a little bit reduced. We're still seeing an impact from the facility in Williston, but we are actively seeking additional tons on that for our facility. We did increase our pricing for compost products, the finished products and for compost itself. Sales remained strong. So we feel that we are still within good market range. We are slightly below the market average. So we think there may be room to grow, but we're not seeing an impact on that increase yet. We are also implementing, our board will be voting on this policy this month in April on a new contamination policy for our organic recycling facility. And it's based on the one that we had in place at our Merck. And this is to address ongoing issues, contamination and unwanted materials coming into our inbound food scraps. And this is something that we've been doing a lot of outreach to haulers. We've been involved in this process for about a year with us. And we hired folks to help us to monitor and implement, but this is something where we want, we feel we need to take additional action and just having a policy in place will give us another tool in the toolbox. Next, thanks, John. Again, more good news, no increase in bad fees at our drop-off centers. So we feel that we're confident that the pricing is where it needs to be for this year. We are going to be expanding our services in Burlington, hopefully by the end of this current fiscal year. And they're looking also to expand our footprint in Milton. Next point. Just a very brief look at capital projects. The main projects we have, obviously coming up are the Numeric Construction. That project will be, the construction part will be awarded hopefully in May by our board with construction to hopefully begin groundbreaking in late summer, early fall. And then we hope again to be up and running until early fall of calendar 25. Fingers crossed on that. We have another good mild winter. We should be well on our way. We're also undergoing some stormwater infrastructure review. Just again, we felt it was prudent to be out ahead of any potential additional heavy impacts due to rain events as we continue to become more and more frequent. And as far as the fund equity, our reserve funds, we have a number of reserve funds. All are adequately funded with the exception of one, which is our landfill post-closure. And that is the reserve fund that we have in place for the landfills that we are charged with monitoring and maintaining in Williston. And we are in about year 28 or 29 of our 30 year closure plan. So it's not unexpected that we would have less revenue, less money in that reserve fund at this point. However, we do not know what any impact may be for us to have to now a new project to treat leachate coming out of that landfill for PFAS. This has been a concern of ours for a while as this was starting to become apparent, but we would need to be doing something and with the EPA rule just coming out. We're still not sure what the impact will be to our landfill, but we do know that we don't have enough money in that right now to be able to fund a major payment project. So a good portion of the increase for the solvers' management fee will be used to supplement this particular reserve fund. We had no other way to add income or add revenue into that reserve. So that increase of the $3 to the solvers' management fee will be used, will go into a good portion of it, will go into this reserve fund. And as I do each year, we ask our member cities and towns to consider voting to authorize our budget for adoption. It is one of their responsibilities of our member towns and each city and town has one vote. As an unit is now waited, you have your own vote and we hope that you will vote in favor. And I would be happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you very much, Sarah. I will just say, I think this is the sixth CSWD budget presentation that I've reviewed. And I appreciate, as usual, I see some like expense savings and kind of a rotation of where you increase fees to, and I'm glad that you've calculated household impact on the hauler fee updates. That was useful to see. Did anyone around council have questions? I'm a Newsy representative for the CSWD Board of Commissioners. I just continue to be proud to serve in that role and work with such talented folks and skilled folks at CSWD. I know that there is quite a bit of effort endless amount of hours that go into the budget development with the finance committee. So there is quite a bit of layering that goes into the thought process as well as built in continuous improvement efforts that have been started with Sarah's vision and guidance, as well as team leads, Gent Holiday, being at the helm as well. As you mentioned, we at Monuski use the community cleanup funds diligently. We would always continue to advocate for an expansion of that fund for Monuski as much as we're able to. There's ample amount of projects here from best practices, from updating our community public use containers. And when we can, we do the matching grant, but there's always other opportunities that we would definitely take advantage of if the funds were made available. So outside of that, yeah, just continue to be very happy with all of the work and effort that goes into making sure that the budget is balanced as much as possible and the transparency when it's not. And the commitment to refraining from a per capita assessment on the city as well. Thank you. I would open it up if there are any members of the public who wish to ask a question or make a comment. Elaine, did you have something? Sure. Go first, if anyone doesn't have a question from the public, you can raise your hand, let us know. So this doesn't have to do with this budget adoption, but Sarah, I was hoping you could let us know when you anticipate starting a need to treat, leachate for PFAS, and if you anticipate needing a small assessment at that time. That is a great question. Both actually are two great questions. So the EPA rule came out regarding drinking water. So we know that that's obviously where they're starting and I think that's a great place to start. We are involved with a group that is working with the US council of mayors at the federal level to really communicate the impact of treatment, not just of drinking water, but of wastewater and then of leachate all the way down the line to not only the EPA, but also to Congress to make sure that they are keenly aware that this is going to be a significant burden to municipalities across the country. So those conversations continue to happen. So I think the EPA, they have heard the concerns. They felt that this was where they could start with drinking water. There will likely be challenges. So those will have to play out. I think leachate is far enough down the road to give at least us the SWD some time to build up that reserve fund. I'm aiming to have about $750,000 at a minimum in that fund just in case. I hope that that will be sufficient. And so right now our leachate is brought to the Essex wastewater treatment facility. So we have been in close communication with Essex about what they might need from us, what they're looking at as their needs and their expectations, and they're not sure yet either. So right now, unfortunately, it's a little bit of a wait and see. I'm hoping that we'll have at least two years to figure it out, but that is purely a guess on my part. There is some really great research happening in Vermont actually, as well as I'm sure that's some great research happening here that we have relayed that we'll be happy to help pilot any potential solutions and to see if we can be part of that solution and not just react to something that is brought down to us. So we know that those studies are going to need to continue for the next probably 18 months at least. So that's what I'm hoping, and I'm gonna put down the universe, that we have at least two years before we have to come up with a plan. Then we need to drop the plan, and then I'm hoping there'll be another bit of a time before implementation. So this is why I'm hoping we will have until fiscal 26 or 27, before we need to dry down on any of those built-up funds. So in that time, through a combination of, again, the interest revenue from Solway's management fee, we have done well in our investment of our term reserves this year as well, but we put some of that investment income into this fund. I think we'll be able to make it to that point and then whatever the implementation is will be what it is. So by that point, when we know how far down we'll need to treat for ESNICS, we'll determine how much money we need to be putting in on an annual basis to be able to support that treatment. And generally our per capita assessments in the past have been for long-term indebtedness and it has now been for general operations. So I think we would continue to try to source that revenue from general operations rather than assessing up a capital fee. We really, our board is very much not in favor of that. We don't want to do that. And we haven't had to since the 1990s. So that really is our last ditch we'll go to. We don't want to go. I appreciate your very thorough answer and your planning ahead. I saw that article about the UVM research and I was like, oh, great, we'll get to know. And then I saw, I was like, oh, two years from now, I was like, oh, okay. Three years. Appreciate that. Also, I have to say, got some fun acronyms in your field. Orphan, orphan, orphan. Mr. Ryan's just smart, just people. All right. I see no public comment questions, hearing no concerns from counselors. Would someone like to make a motion to adopt the Chittenden Solid Waste District Fiscal Year 24-25 budget? So moved. Second. Motion by Brinn, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you again. Thanks very much. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Okay, and next up is item B. Also on for discussion or approval, the Burlington-Wunewski Bridge for my agency of transportation, standard finance and maintenance agreement for federal aid projects. See, we have Carolyn and Bob on Zoom, if we can bring them over, please, Paul. And John, would you like to open this up? Yes, thank you. So this is on for review and approval. This finance and maintenance agreement, this is the same agreement you all saw last meeting at the April 1st discussion. So after that meeting, we met with our city attorney to review additional language that could be included to add some protections, specifically in the right-of-way section. After some further review, ultimately, he's looking at adding an additional sentence in the attachment E section, where we're talking about right-of-way work. So we were comfortable enough to bring it back to you all to say, we're looking at a request to have the city manager execute the contract conditionally with some additional negotiation with V-Trans to include language in attachment E. So the actual, let me read the recommended action. Authorized city manager proceed with executing the agreement subject to the condition that the language outlined in attachment E, that's that right-of-way section, undergoes further negotiation and revision deem necessary by the city attorney. And as mentioned, his last recommendation was one sentence that we're kind of negotiating back and forth with V-Trans between their right-of-way folks and their contract folks, and ultimately it's just giving us a little bit more protection regarding the condemnation, potential condemnation proceedings. And just to be clear, when we talk condemnation, we're only talking about temporary construction easements. We are not looking to take a property. It would only be for temporary rights to do construction work within the property and then basically put it back the way it was if we do have to go there. Bob and Carolyn, do you have any, and I should, sorry, one more thing. The reason we also wanted to bring it back is schedule. So next meeting is in May. This is a critical path item in order to enter negotiations for some of those temporary access points. So our goal is to finalize the language this week, get all the parties together this week, do that work so that V-Trans right-of-way folks can start negotiating with property owners and we can continue development. So I guess with that, Bob or Carolyn, if you have anything to add? No, nothing for me. Thanks, Sean. Thanks, Sean. I will just summarize, in our last meeting, we had a discussion about this. We gave direction to staff and the city attorney about some additional protections that we would like to see. But overall, we're supportive of the agreement. And so I think the ask tonight is, can we approve this conditional to those ongoing negotiations, knowing that we've already given clear direction and we would be looking for just some improvement in language that would be comfortable moving forward with that. Do folks have any questions? Are there any questions from members of the public? Okay. Given that, I would ask if there is a motion to approve. Sorry. If there is a motion to authorize the city manager to proceed with executing the agreement, subject to the condition that the language outline and attachment E undergoes further negotiations and revisions as deemed necessary by the city attorney. So moved. Second. Motion by Charlie, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. The motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you for continuing to work on that and for coming back tonight. You're welcome and thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you. So this advance and get into those right away negotiations. Yes, we are. Thank you. All right. We can move on to item C then. This is also on for discussion or approval. A general fund balance request for traffic calming evaluation. Madam, John is also here. So this is a request to use general fund reserves for a traffic calming evaluation. We placed up to $10,000 in this request. The background is during the FY 25 budget process, the city manager budget proposal did include some funding to do two traffic calming valuations. There was some discussion during the meeting of potentially using one time funds to support that project because the intent is that we would bring on a consultant to do sort of a one time evaluation. We would take that template internally and do those evaluations once we had sort of a template set up. So we brought this to the Municipal Infrastructure Commission at the last meeting. They unanimously approved to make a recommendation in the council to use reserve funds to perform traffic calming valuation. So in your packet, you'll see it's kind of worded. You can, you have sort of an option of doing, if you so choose to move funds, you could do one traffic calming valuation to set that template. We did have two in the original budget, mainly because we have eight requests in currently. So we're just trying to catch up with a few and that's 10 grand is roughly how much we typically spend for the match requirements for the scoping studies that we do with the CCRPC. So for your review, you can look at potentially doing reserve requests tonight. John, what is the, if we approve this, the consultant executed two of these studies over this fiscal year, what is the capacity to actually implement any changes coming out of those studies? Yeah, that's the tricky part because we don't have funding set aside for that component of it yet. So although if we do say, for example, if we do a traffic calming study and it points to doing like speed homes, that is something we can do internally and it's not, we can do that on operational funds. If it is something more substantial, like curb bump outs and things like that, there are temporary options, but we currently don't have funding set aside for like those type of features. So we could do something small and operational, but if it's anything beyond that, we would have to look at FY26 funding potentially. Try to get that in the budget. Okay, that's helpful. Do other folks have questions? I'm looking at a sheet from August 2023 with about 10 different streets on it that may be eligible for traffic calming based on the plan and what's in the plan. Has there been any additional streets that have been added to this list since that? No. Yeah, and two of those we called out is any of those collector streets we're gonna do a scoping study primarily for those, so I think, I forget which collector streets are on there, but that's, you'll see if those are, yep. I think 10's on here. But yeah, we've not received requests for any added ones since that list. Okay, great. Yeah, the other piece I'll mention too is obviously with Main Street, traffic conditions are gonna change quite a bit, so we would have to select the street that probably won't see impacts from the detouring traffic, so it wouldn't be any streets like in the vicinity of Main Street because, you know, over the next two seasons, it's gonna look, traffic's gonna look a lot different on the streets. And just a follow-up question. Pretty standard with the way a number hard city processes go are scoping assessment, funding allocation, project implementation, right? Right. So this would still follow along that first step of scoping slush assessment, getting an evaluation in place. Yep, so this would be if we took, you know, an example like local street, we would do the evaluation. If it meets the thresholds for traffic calming, then we would do sort of like a small-scale scoping study, but it would be more internal, I would say. So it would still follow sort of that pattern. Okay, so if I'm hearing you right, assessment, scoping, then funding and planning. Correct. Okay. Thank you. I don't have any other questions. Are there any questions or comments from members of the public on this one? Oh, do we know? All right. Paul, we bring Terry over. Hi, thanks again for taking my question or my comment. I just wanted to say that I would love to see this traffic calming funding for these studies and also for any kind of traffic calming we could do at this point. I'd be in support of that. Thank you. Thank you, Terry. I am comfortable with this reserve request as long as we set the expectation that this is an evaluation and it doesn't, we still have to make different decisions to commit further funding if it's not stuff that can be done in-house. And I received similar feedback from councilor heard ahead of the meeting. I did see a hand raised, but it just went down. Oh, was there additional public comment or question? Oh, sure. I see Jason Weinstein. I was muted. Apologize. I also am in support of the assessment for it. I live on West Street and I've been just chatting with neighbors for a long time about speed bumps. And it's, we're on the truck route where the truck drivers surprisingly drive very courteously down our street, but a lot of the locals in the neighborhood use it as a drag strip. Not actually racing, but I think speed bumps would definitely put a stop to that and just to hear that they could potentially be done in-house, it would be really great. So that's all I have. Thanks. Thank you so much. And then I see Laura as well. Hi, thanks so much for taking my comment. So I know that the rotary is probably not included in the calming, traffic calming because it's probably a completely separate entity there, but I would just love to put it out there that having those blinking lights installed the rotary crosswalks and on Mallets Bay Ave and hopefully near the school is something that I would love to see pursued. I think that as we have construction slated for the next several years, traffic is going to be detoured and rerouted all through our city and having some evaluations in place to help calm that would be very much appreciated as we sort of move forward into the new era here. So I would highly recommend doing an evaluation. Two seems wonderful, but one I think would be good too. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, and I, just getting back to what you were saying about clarity of expectations and I think that's also helpful to say versus the assessment then would be scoping so that just in terms of order operations there's just better understanding of like it's still not going to happen within this next year that the resolution's desire will be implemented but it's a step in the right direction. Does someone want to make a motion to approve this reserve fund request? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Charlie. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you. Could I, before folks leave. Do you, did you have the west street on the request before John? It's on the current list. Yeah, can I just clarify the amount? 10,000. Right? Yeah. Sorry about that. Okay, stick around for item D, the strategic vision goal, update on municipal infrastructure from John on for discussion. Great, thanks. So this is our third update for the year. So we have six identified tasks that we're tracking. They're all progressing fairly well. I will say, you know, the biggest item that we're working on right now is obviously main street. So city manager covered kind of the, a really good high level overview in some of that's in the news blasts that we're putting out last year was April 12th. Just to give you a bit more detail on where we're at with this project. So April 4th, we had our pre-construction meeting and that is kind of our kickoff, internal big kickoff meeting with the contractor and all the stakeholders. And that's effectively where we give the contractor the notice of proceed to start moving and start coordinating some of the details of the work. So that was a big day for us to get that finally scheduled and completed. The contractor right now is, their current schedule is targeting two construction seasons to complete the project. Very aggressive. So we'll see, you know, that could change depending on whether, you know, once they get excavating, they have 900 days. So they do have that year three buffer to complete work. But right now that's what they're targeting as city managers stated, they're starting at the south end of the project and working kind of their way north with some of the deeper utility excavation work to start. So April 23rd is the start date. So that's, when you'll start seeing a lot more activity on the corridor, you'll start seeing some of the traffic control pieces go into place. You'll see signs starting to go up tomorrow. Those will be bagged until the April 23rd start date. One of the main pieces we're coordinating currently is traffic control, which is gonna be a major disruption for a lot of folks. So we have received the traffic control submittal from the contractor. They have a design consultant that prepared that for them, transportation engineer. We have not approved it yet. We're in agreement with the general scheme where Main Street will be northbound only one lane and then weaver will primarily be the southbound detour. There will remain two ways, but it's gonna take that additional southbound traffic load. So you'll see some prep work on weaver right now. So some no parking signs are being added on weaver street. We're doing some outreach, whether traffic control folks putting flyers in windows. We've met with the church. We've met with St. Francis School to talk about what those impacts will look like. And we've also today, we've met with the Winooski School District to talk about bus routes and those type of impacts. And tomorrow we're having a follow-up meeting with the contractor and their traffic control expert. So that's kind of our primary focus right now is getting those pieces kind of wrapped up so that we can improve the traffic control and contractor can start on the 23rd. Other items going on with Main Street. So we are also meeting with a small poly group tomorrow night. Thanks to Paul for scheduling that. We're trying to reach out to some other new American groups to just provide construction updates and just make sure they know what impacts are coming. So there's still a lot more outreach that we will be doing. We're lucky to have WSP as our outreach consultant that VTrans has provided to really help us with that. And obviously Paul who's coordinating a lot of that work. So that's kind of what we're focused on currently with Main Street. But yeah, there'll be a lot more information coming especially with the weekly construction updates for that project. So. The interjection. Yep. Just to say that Paul's actually, I'd say training VTrans for them in terms of best practice to reach out to language communities. So he's doing coordination but also making sure they're incorporating the best practices that we've learned, he's learned. The team has learned over the last few years. Can I also add following our meeting with Moscow leaders that we have a contact there also that we can get information out to Somali community, Somali speakers. And thank you Paul for leading. So that's ultimately where we're spending most of our time. So that's primarily the update. I will say that just to wrap up, we are planning to bring the LaFountain Diane Street scoping study back to you all next meeting. So the consultant's preparing some of the documents for that. So expect to see that one wrapped up. Is that going to be like other meetings where it's a preview of feedback and then a... Yes, yep. Yeah, there's no schedule time crunch to wrap that one up so we can do the two meetings. Okay. Yep. Do counselors have any questions? Main Street related question? Yes, of course. For engagement with stakeholders, are you going to be doing individual outreach to the small businesses on Main Street? We have been... Or will WSP be doing it? We've been primarily working through downtown Manuski. I think our plan is as we are moving up the corridor, we have a resident project engineer who's going to be like face to face with all of those business owners as you kind of move along. So we will be doing face to face coordination with those folks as we like get to their door, basically. Okay. Yep. And then we have done flyers. Like WSP has done, they've done flyers at all the businesses and doors. I think they have reached like gone in and chatted with some of the folks. So there has been some outreach there. Okay, great. And Paul, a question for you. As do you have any plans? Are you working with downtown Manuski and Melissa to do all like Manuski is still open for business? While we're being worked on? Yeah, absolutely. Great question, Deputy Mayor. The signage is in fabrication right now. So we are going to be rolling that out through the different phases of the project. It's a pretty simple signage package, A-frames and big old four by four. We have a big banner scheduled for down there, the Rotary for people to see that down there. There are some conversations happening right now with Melissa who is on this evening. Hi, Melissa. So doing a grassroots social media campaign too with a lot of the downtown, a lot of the main street businesses with downtown Manuski support. So we're also available to help bounce any of those social media posts and support there where we can for sure. That sounds amazing. Thank you. You're welcome. I was curious with the Northbound, Southbound traffic management, how is the East-Westbound traffic being managed? So the Spring Street will probably be the primary Eastbound Westbound route. We're actually going to have to install temporary traffic signals at Weaver and Spring Street because we're afraid there's not going to be enough of a gap to create that Eastbound Westbound. So that's where we're pushing folks. There will be signage along the corridor for the local streets that could be cut through as local traffic only, like Stephen Street and some of those streets so that folks are not trying to take those to shortcut like Spring Street. So it's a block by block construction plan, right? I think that's what I recall from the public meeting. Starting at the southern end. So Northbound would be everything that's in that construction zone, but not including what's past it. So if there isn't work between Fountain and Bellevue, then it's two-way. So I think the plan would be to make it Northbound's only the whole way. It's really only Spring Street below is where they might turn it on and off a little bit. So that Spring Street is the cut through. So that is the plan. And I do want to call up. So I don't know if you all know Ryan Lambert. He's here, a city engineer. He's doing an amazing job, like with all of the day-to-day work on this. And so feel free to jump in if I'm missing anything. But I do want to give Kudos to Ryan because he's been here since before me and he's been managing this project amazingly. And I, forgive me for trying to walk through like an example of this. It's one of those like, if I could see it kind of things. So if somebody is coming southbound and they're being diverted, but they, you know, they would be turning on the fountain and then, so that's North and Spring Street. So would they have to basically do a full rotation to get around to- Yeah, so like an example would be the school we were chatting with them today. Like if they have school teachers or admin folks coming northbound, they're gonna have to go Tygen Street, Weaver Street and East and Spring Street and all, like do that whole loop around just to get back to Norman Street entrance. Which is, it's gonna be disruptive. But I sort of understood that that was gonna be the case, unfortunately. So is any component of the traffic management include like time estimates? So we have done some, well, not us. VHB has done some modeling on the, what the queue estimates would be. And that was one of the reasons they wanna see some temporary traffic signals at East Spring Street. It's really challenging because we can only take the baseload traffic today and like split it up. But there will be a reduction because people are either gonna stay on 89 or they're gonna go Susie Wilson Road or we think people will avoid it. The other thing we're working with and Ryan's been involved with us primarily is V-Trans has, it's called a big data software tracking so they use like Bluetooth technology so you can track kind of queuing and delays. So we're starting to get into that and hopefully that'll give us some like data on like what the queuing is and where delays are so that we can make modifications. Okay. I'll just add a speck to the track. Can you come up to the microphone, sorry, for the folks on Zoom and the recording? The contract specs the 10 minute delay per traffic control measure, 15 minute aggregate total is the maximum delay. That's difficult to monitor and track and feel but as John mentioned, there is a big data system that's set up by the state that we have as a resource to look at current travel times relative to historical. So if we do see that Delta hit 10 to 15 minutes that's sort of a time for us to intervene and say we need to address the traffic control plan because this isn't quite working according to the spec. Okay, good to know. Thank you. What can we do to help advise folks like best? Yeah, the biggest, I think the biggest key would be and Ryan jump in is we do have WSP, they are kind of the primary outreach. So like we're funneling everything through them, through the info at Winooski mainstreet.com, if I got that right. Info at Winooski mainstreet.com, yes. That email address or there's a hotline number that's 24 seven. If folks either email through that or call the hotline number, WSP will get it to the right person. So if it has to go directly to the contractor or us, that is the best way to get that information. And if I may just quickly jump in, the easiest way to share that with folks is to have people go to Winooski.gov slash mainstreet. All of the updates are there. The email signup is there and then that contact information is down there. I know that email address is a little wonky. That was a tech thing, but I promise you that email works, phone number works. Easiest thing is to just direct people to Winooski.gov slash mainstreet. Right, and for those folks that are comfortable getting information by email, it's helpful to channel a lot of the update, like they get the updates directly themselves. And then that can cut down the amount of people that really need that hand holding that we can service better. Great. Will this traffic flow continue through the winter as well? No, so all the detouring will be taken out for the winter time. Yeah, so the construction season, they're starting now early December potentially. They would shut down and then, but they would be probably back at it in early April again. So it's pretty short duration, but. Anyone else? Were there any questions, comments from members of the public? Well, thank you very much. And thanks in advance for the ongoing effort that we'll have to be made here. This has been going on since, before I even started here, so exciting to see us finally hit the construction. Groundbreaking time. Yeah. Thank you. We're not quite up to decades yet. No, well, I don't know. I don't know how long the fun gun discussion will take for you. We will be doing a groundbreaking at some point. We just got out of the planet. So we'll all be invited, of course. All right. So let's welcome our treasurer, Jonathan Venny up for the quarterly treasurer's report. Sorry, Jonathan, I didn't anticipate that one was gonna take that one. Hopefully you feel very informed. I do, I do. So good evening, everyone. I'm here to present some key takeaways from the third quarter of FY24 financial report. Based on Q3 financial activity, the city's general fund is forecasting an annual surplus of about 0.1 million with a net fund balance of 2.2 million, which is about a 6% increase year over year. This is a 1% increase to projections from Q2 from last time I was here. From, for reference, the previous fiscal year's ending net fund balance was 2.05 million. General fund revenues are forecast to total 9.5 million, which is about a 0.2 million above budget. The city's main driver revenue collection property tax is estimated to bring in 6.6 million for the city this fiscal year, which is an increase of about 3% revenue year over year. Like FY23, we predict that external factors in the market will be a major contributor to our increase in net assets. Rising interest rates accounted for over 90,000 of additional revenue last year, and we're projecting interest earnings this fiscal year surpassed last year. General fund expenses are forecasted at 9.3 million, which is about 0.1 million above budget. Like FY23, there are some cost savings due to staff vacancies across multiple departments. Vacancies reduce forecasted salary fringe and other employer-related expenses. However, forecasted cost savings from vacancies are decreasing. We see each quarter since filling, since filling administrative vacancies throughout the year. Our police department has had additional vacancies since Q1 or quarter one. However, savings from police department vacancies are being offset by more costly overtime hours. As you may already know, the city's actively working to fill these positions. In general, the city of Winooski continues to forecast small surpluses or break-evens across some fund balances this fiscal year. We see some small dips in Q3 to the wastewater and parking fund due mainly to adjustments in forecasted revenue, but very small dips. Overall, there are no major changes from Q2 to Q3 forecasts. As the year progresses, we expect to see surpluses continue to lower closer to break-even, levels as unanticipated expenses occur. However, at this point, we are pretty close to the end of the fiscal year. As a reminder, specific details to support current forecasts can be found within the respective financial report on the city of Winooski website. Please bear in mind that this is a Q3 report and that projections are a best guess guided by the financial activities we've realized so far and therefore are subject to change as we progress through the year. Are there any questions? Thank you for the summary. I will just say it's exciting not to see anything surprising in here. It's pretty, yeah, pretty from Q2 to Q3, pretty consistent. Yes. Yes. In this case, other. Do folks have questions? Are there any questions from members of the public? I'll also say normally I would personally like the sound of the surplus, but in the instance of public funding, hitting the break even is actually the target, so. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We wanna do another one before break? Yep. Item F, on for discussion approval, a downtown designation renewal application. Something I haven't seen in my tenure. Just reading from my cover sheet again. So the state of Vermont's downtown designation program recognizes and encourages local efforts to revitalize Vermont's traditional downtowns. Having this designation gives the municipality and properties within the designated downtown access to resources such as technical assistance and state funding for historic and code improvement tax credits in the form of historic and code improvement tax credits. Downtown Transpiration Fund, priority consideration for state grants, traffic calming and signage options and relief from some Act 250 requirements. The state downtown designation is effective for eight years. After eight years, the municipality must submit a request for renewal, demonstrating that it continues to meet all of the requirements of the designation. Winooski received its first downtown designation in 2003. So there have been a couple of renewals since then. Of course, most of the Corbin from downtown Winooski contributed greatly to this renewal documentation, as well as a few folks from the staff. Do you have any questions about it? And Melissa is online in case you have any question for her. Well, it was actually kind of interesting to read through the application. There's like cool information here about what the designation does for us and what we are doing in downtown Winooski is doing in the community and staff. Is Melissa, oh, she's already moved over. I was looking in the attendees. Melissa, did you want to add anything? No, I think the city manager said everything that I would have said, but if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer. Excellent. Any questions, folks? Brunner. Some point of time in my short tenure, I'm like, man. We had been talking about expansion of the downtown designation. I'm presuming this is renewal and not a renewal and expansion, so I'm curious if where that conversation stands and if there's still interest in moving that forward at some point in time? Yeah, so a slight amendment there. It's actually a neighborhood designation that has been on the docket to potentially expand. Okay. So the downtown designation, that's static. But those two processes are linked. The neighborhood designation is also up for renewal at the same time, but it doesn't require council approval, so it's not part of this packet. So the status of the neighborhood designation expansion conversation is that I brought it up with Melissa's predecessor and looking through it, I think we would benefit from downtown Manuski helping us with the outreach, because there will be some required for that. So I might have mentioned that Melissa one time and letting her to get her feet under her before we talked about that. But there is a process for expanding that that we can do in and off here as well. It is included in the renewal as an option, but I don't think we're ready for that for this year. When is the neighborhood renewal again? It's due at the same time as this. So it'll be due, the draft is due May 6th, along with this one. So it's kind of simultaneous. It's not staggered, correct, yeah, okay. But you're saying you could, an expansion could be done in between the eight year, correct, you know, cycle, okay. Any public comment questions? Okay, do you have a motion to approve the downtown designation renewal application? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Should we move on to item G? Our housing goal update with, oh, Jasmine. Jasmine. In person, welcome. All right. Good evening, everyone. Alrighty. So, I think that this is our third housing update as well. If it's John's third, then it's probably my third. So out of the five, yes, five tracked policy priorities for this year, four of them are proceeding as planned. The only one that remains in the yellow is the plans review process, which as I mentioned in the last update is on hold for now. But everything else is going ahead as planned. All pretty brief and self-explanatory. And then counselor runner kind of did the airport update. Yes, the grant sounds hopeful. So I really hope that they're able to apply and receive that funding. Because the planner from South Burlington, Paul Conner, he brought up the math of, if there's 2,600 homes, dwelling units in the area and they're doing 50 a year. You know, that's a long time. And then updates on the ULUDR. A lot of this has been discussed by Planning and Housing Commission, our meeting currently and again in May to continue exploring inclusionary zoning and replacement regulations. Just Cause is not looking like it will be approved during this legislative session. But renter protections continued to be a focus for the Housing Commission. Short term rental, obviously that was approved and the system will start on July 1st. I'm currently working on the applications and FAQ sheet for owners. I've started a bit of like an informal registry just based off of people that have reached out mostly in response to the Winooski News article. But that represents about 22 short term rentals within the city, mostly non-owner occupied. And a few of them are owned by landlords that also do long term housing. So it's interesting data to start collecting. I'm glad that we're starting that process. And then other housing related operational updates. Myself, along with the Housing Commission have continued to work on the Housing Trust Fund programming and the reach within the community. Final draft is the next agenda item. But we continue to explore the possibility of expanding the down payment assistance and interest rate buy down programs to other lending institutions. To do that, we needed to update our MOU first because the MOU had language that made it exclusive between the city and Opportunities Credit Union. So we updated that this month. Opportunities was totally fine with it. So now that we have that done, Housing Commission is gonna begin thinking about our marketing plan and reaching out to realtors associations and other lending institutions and seeing if we can get a little bit more traction. The RFP for the Equitable Housing Needs Assessment, which is the project funded through the Municipal Planning Grant that we were awarded, will be posted early next month with the hope that a consultant agency will be chosen by June. And the project end date for that is December, 2025. So it's quite a long, two year long grant. The reappraisal is on track to be completed on time. So by July of this year, there are five assessing teams working with one team assessing the multi-unit buildings. One team for single level condominiums. One team on the northern end, one team that recently crossed over Main Street and then one team assessing the SAC in Spinner Place. And then two, informed development of incentives for priority housing. Staff met with six local developers to understand costs associated with development, current market conditions, and to discuss the impact of future policy decisions by the city. These conversations have also been helpful in ensuring the city has a voice in the development of future housing projects. Jasmine, a question on that last one. Have you engaged non-profit housing developers as well as full-profit? Yeah, so well, I met with a lot of non-profit housing developers when I first started. That was all part of me developing my work plan, last so on the private developers. So I do interact with them and public. So Winnieski Housing, obviously, I interact with them very frequently, less so with the private developers. So this was more of a specific effort to reach out to that population, to understand that perspective, since I don't think it's usually voiced in the housing group that we have, like housing commission, housing round table. But the cost document that I ended up generating from those meetings is definitely something that I would like to kind of pass around to some of the non-profit developers as well. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I'm Julie folks. I have questions. Sounds great. Huh? It's different. Oh, sorry. Any public comments or questions on the housing update Jasmine just shared? I actually do have a question. Yeah. So you said there are 22 on the stairs on the unofficial list. Yeah. Estimated closer to 90. Yeah, yeah. This is just people who have purely emailed me with questions about like, essentially people saying like, can I get my license? How do I get my license? Being like on top of their rentals and, which is great. I'm happy to see that there's already people who are going out of their way to make sure that they're in compliance. Yeah, there's really only been one person that voiced like negative, but everyone else has been really positive and, yeah, creative about it. We're in passive mode. When we get to be a certain pro-active mode, we're hoping that they will all service. Okay. Thank you for that update. We can move to item H then, the housing trust fund guidelines update. Yes. I would like to think someday that this won't be here multiple times each year, but then I presented at the Wilson Housing Committee a couple of weeks ago, and my takeaway was that it's an ever-changing program. So at the end of the day, you might be seeing it a lot, but. So since 2021, city staff have received a few inquiries about the program, not an enormous amount. In recent months, I have been examining each program to ensure it is accessible, effective, administratively feasible and relevant, partly informed by those inquiries, partly by the perspective that came from my start date. Based on their review, I have recommended the following changes. So generally, just language to prevent the use of properties for short-term rental activities through the life of the loan. This was actually brought up by Councillor Oakleaf a few months ago now probably. So just being a little bit more explicit about the definitions, we didn't necessarily have the short and long-term rental definitions used throughout our ordinances, so just making sure that that's explicit. We did decide to keep that to the life of the loan. And then inclusion of the interest rate buy-down language. So that was approved on December 11th, so just making sure that that was throughout the entire policy guidelines. More general language to allow for applicants to use banks other than Opportunities Credit Union. Again, with the hope that we will expand into other lending institutions. A slight change to the core evaluation criteria to score based on income level targeting of the affordable units. So if you're targeting lower AMI, you're rewarded with more points. Again, we haven't had any successful applications for core, so I wouldn't say it's an incredibly competitive loan, but if it ever gets to that point, just making sure that the evaluation criteria was clear and that it was sensible. Area meeting income. And then changes to sections of HIP determine necessary after staff audited every eligible activity and realized that many were not feasible to verify internally. I met with Chief Audie and we went through every item. Many of which seemingly were, those are great things to have covered, but we didn't have the internal city processes to actually verify it, so we can't really be giving out grants and loans to things that we have no idea if it's actually, they're using it for the said item. So I went through every single one and removed the ones that the city didn't have processes for. And then as recommended by Efficiency Vermont and Vermont Gas, the removal of language that would explicitly have the city fund energy efficient projects as there was no viable process for the city to verify such work and due to the robust program offerings and accessible financing options from these organizations, these proposed changes do allow for the program to be used for additional funding to cover projects that may exceed what Efficiency Vermont or Vermont Gas can fund, namely like storm windows is a good example of that was really one of the only projects they said. Regularly people would go over the amount of financing that was available internally and most of their programming often, there's I'm sure Councilor Oakley knows, but they have zero interest for loans for lower income people and then low interest rate loans for amounts a bit higher than our hip program was. So it was at the recommendation of our partner agencies that we make some changes and then just some general updates to the loan and grant application process to reflect actual workflow. You know, some of them were backwards of like opportunities gets to the city when reality approaches come to the city. So just some kind of general cleanup. Yeah, it's the hope that after this round we'll do kind of a big marketing push and see if we get any traction and then if not reassess and if so fantastic. Thanks, Jasmine. Appreciate the effort to make sure it's like a viable program and also the need to incorporate the short term rental stuff. Are there questions from Council on any of these changes? Thank you. I think it's a great cleanup. I think very thorough in assessing feasibility. So that's always appreciated. I think our taxpayers also appreciate the ability of like what can we verify as well. Just one change minor would be to spell out Vermont instead of using the abbreviation BT for Washington, Sacramento. Okay, yeah. BGS does use the acronym. Yeah. That's the only change I have at this point, but it's looking great and hopefully it does help increase interest in access. Any questions or comments from members of the public? Sometimes a new story can help prompt new interest. Nice. All right. Do I have a motion to approve these updates to the housing trust fund as presented and with one edit from Councilor Klee? So moved. Motion by Charlie second by Thomas. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, Jasmine. Thank you. Okay, I am gonna call five minutes recess. It's 740. So at 745 we will reconvene on item I. Sorry. I will reconvene our city council meeting. We are on item I for discussion or approval. New position description part-time recreation assistance and Ray Coffey will introduce. Yeah, so as kind of stated in the cover sheet per the personnel policy here in the city, city council approves the title of the purpose and the funding source for new positions. So this is a new position for us. But as I stated here in materials listened to you prior to the meeting, this is not new money. It's repurposing funds that had been previously used to cover an AmeriCorps position. So we've been struggling really since the beginning of the year to fill that AmeriCorps role through DREAM despite Robin. Robin meets weekly with DREAM. There's active recruitment happening throughout their channels. AmeriCorps is tough right now to find people to do. So this is a way for us to sort of supplement the maroon and Robin's time to allow us to keep programs going through spring and summer, which is really our busiest time of the year. So have any answer any questions that you have? Again, we're looking at roughly five to 10 hours a week based on the salary range that came out when we scored this position description with Jesse and Angela. Is the intent to just get a new part-time person? So this would be a new hire to us so a new part-time person. And then we're gonna continue to recruit for AmeriCorps on the advantage we have in the agreement we have a DREAM is that those positions are free to us, the AmeriCorps position. So we are able to fill those that's further supplemental staff that would allow us to then either think about, again, pulling Robin out to do some more program planning and development, some grant ratings, some more park work. So it just gives us a little bit more depth on the programmatic delivery side if we are able to fill those AmeriCorps roles. The other thing is because Ray is trying to very hard to stay within the budget, it's five to 10 hours a week for a limited number of weeks. So there's no, we're not predetermining what happens after this year's discussions. Okay, other folks have questions? I did that. Any questions from members of the public? Oh, I should actually be looking at Zoom just in case. Okay, hearing no concerns, would someone like to make a motion to approve this new position description? Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, Ray. Awesome, thank you. We are on to item J on for discussion approval, the IT contract award and an additional reserve request. Yeah, so the city bid out for managed information technology services in January. That was due on March 15th. Our current contract ends June 18th, 2024. Bids were received from a total of seven vendors of these four quotes exceeded our available budget. The city's IT team consisting of the city manager, finance director, communications director, and HR director reviewed the remaining bids and interviewed the vendors. It is our recommendation to award the contract as simple route LLC. The level of support outlined in their proposal, the ability for all staff to contact a support desk, which relieves internal staff time dedicated to these type of issues and the price differential reasons why we're recommending this. There are one time costs, which we are not, of course, wouldn't be in the budget because of one time, which is the reason why we have a reserve request, accompanying this request to approve the contract. And I will give a shout out to Angela for doing most of the heavy lifting on this whole endeavor. And it's been on her list for some time, so hopefully she feels some relief that we've finally taken some progress on this. I do have a question about the one time funding. I understand it's a one time cost, and so wanting to pull that from reserves, but if there's operational savings, would it not be strategic to use that gap to buy down some of the one time costs? The one time costs will be incurred this fiscal year. We will not have operational savings until next fiscal year. Okay. And the operational savings are over the course of a three year period. Thank you. A more technical question. I see a good chunk of this is for server installation and bringing servers back into city property. And I'm curious the strategy around that. I am not an expert, but I have seen my own employer and other organizations moving away from physical servers and into cloud storage. Yes. We were also surprised about that. So when we asked it's because our current data is stored by our current vendors servers, which is not the same thing. And they, so if we say for example, if we cut our ties tomorrow, we would have a lot of trouble getting that data out of them, which is not where you want to be. The simple route to discuss with us that cloud migration would also be advisable to a cloud service where we would own that data. And it wouldn't be such a problem switching vendors, say like Amazon or any of those big vendors. But that would cost even more. So this is in between stuff which we could continue with, but it's a way to just transition us there rather than hit us with all the costs on the front end. Any other, did I miss anything there? No, but we would also continue to back up our data in cloud storage as well. We just would not be 100% hosting in the cloud. Okay, I follow. Thank you. Do other folks have questions? I appreciate that you're using a Vermont vendor. I also feel like that will result in better customer service if something were to arise. So good for multiple reasons. And I've been looking at this for a while, so glad to see it in front of us. The state negotiates a variety of contracts that are accessible to municipalities. Was that ever explored as something that might be feasible for this need? Right, that's a good question. Actually, I didn't look at that ahead of this. I looked at it when I was on my previous disability, but I didn't think to look at it for this one. And just curious about the ability for other municipalities to partner and potentially get like in the event that BGS doesn't have anything that would be a viable option for us thinking about other municipalities that have a similar need that pairing up with a contract could result in lower costs for multiple parties. A lot of the costs are per user base for licensing and such. There could be some of economies of scale, but some things are very fixed in nature and would continue to grow the more users we add and the more servers that are added to the contract. That's a good point for other services, though. Just curious, our needs are not super unique in this regard, so thinking about economies of scale and opportunities to leverage other negotiated contracts that might exist. So again, it might not be something that's feasible in this instance, but just thought I'd ask. Yeah, that's a fair point. Any other questions? Any public comment, public questions? Oh, I also wanted to appreciate the note in here about support and staff getting direct support and not funneling through one staff. I've worked in both models and see where this will also add some capacity while having operational cost savings. Hearing no concern, do I have a motion to approve this contract with simple route LLC and the associated reserve request? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Brynn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Thank you, Paul, Angela and Jesse, especially thank you because I take all of most of those requests. There were so many facility tours. So many. So many, many, many. Okay, we are on to item K for approval, the 2024 local emergency management plan. So reading from this cover sheet also, a local emergency management plans, also called LAMPs or LEMPs, are municipal documents templated by the State Department of Emergency Management. LEMPs are designed to be easy to use by anyone in the municipality in case of an emergency by putting all of the information and protocols one would need to manage an emergency in one well-organized document. Having the same organization with the same types of content across municipalities also makes it easier for the state to coordinate aid across jurisdictions during emergencies. LEMPs are only as useful as they are kept up to date and as municipal leaders are familiar with their content. So the state requires LEMPs to be adopted annually. To incentivize this, having an adopted and approved LEMP is a requirement to be eligible for logistical and financial assistance during state and federally declared disaster declarations. Winooski's leadership team, which is the department heads and the city manager, updated and reviewed Winooski's LEMP in the last month. There were only minor updates made from last year's version. Once adopted, this plan goes to the Chittin County Regional Planning Commission and then to the State of Vermont Emergency Management Division, which approves such plans. Council should also be aware of the content in case you need to be pulled in to help staff a larger scale emergency. So I'll review some key points here. Paul, sorry I didn't queue you up if you could share your screen with that document. I'd appreciate it. So as noted on page five, the city manager is the emergency management director. Our fire chief is the emergency management coordinator. That's John Audie. The EMD or EMC would be the ones to open the local emergency operation center. The center isn't a standalone location. It's a way of signaling that we need to be thinking and acting like emergency managers. There's also a physical location associated with it when the situation is complex enough. Our primary location is council chambers. The secondary is public works. On page six, section 2.3, you'll note the organizational chart at the top. Give Paul a second to catch up. Thanks Paul. This shows the types of functions that are needed to manage any emergency. In a small event, all of these functions might be done by one person. In a slightly bigger event, it might be the staff that people, it might be the staff people that usually have these responsibilities. In a large regional event, we might need to pull people off their usual job or even call on other city officials like members of council or commissions to help. So for example, the admin function might need a few more people, processing people work and something really big. Logistic support might need a few people to get supplies to areas around the city. Situational awareness might require a few people to have eyes on different parts of the city. For example, during the July flood in 2023, the emergency management coordinator visited sensitive locations along the river every hour during his workday. After hours, a police officer on duty did this and the public works director and I visited one or two times a day in addition. Communication support might need a few people to handle requests or offers of support from other municipalities or requests from the press, from residents or staff and fellows. After this, we have a checklist of equipment that we have and descriptions of them. Again, you can imagine how this would be helpful for anyone to step in and be able to manage an emergency. Paul, you can just scroll very slowly. Section 3.3 shows the staff allowed to make purchases and their spending limits during an emergency and the standing municipal contracts we have. Again, if you're coming in fresh, you could go to this one page and know who to call first. Sections 4 and 5 are about communications with media and communication with an awareness of where our vulnerable populations are. Section 6 reviews emergency shelters. The one true overnight one we use is in Burlington. Section 7 has contact information for municipal officials. The appendices contain a lot of other information useful in an emergency, including a description of emergency levels, our communications procedure in key maps. John, I know you're here. Is there anything you would like to add or highlight for council or in the public? Thanks, Paul. Nope, you've covered it very well. Thank you. Thanks for joining. Any questions? Thanks for the walk thoroughly. I just wonder if you have staff or role transitions. Is this updated ad hoc throughout the year? Generally not. It's, I think of the one year renewal is like a compromise between remembering to do it all the time and just having one time that everyone's seeing it. But I'm not sure if that's actually why it's one year. That's fair. Just curious. Also, because council needs to adopt it for your awareness, they'll want to bring it back to you for every staff change. I've heard of that. I have a question about map four. It's exceptionally hard to read with the sewer service area, grade, color grade. So that it, to the point where it almost obscures some of the notable locations, as well as some of the font, like the wastewater treatment plan is kind of obscured by the writing. I don't know if these maps ever are updated to make them a little bit easier to read. There's just things that are hidden, the church on St. Peter. It's just, you almost need a magnifying glass to find things on here. So just know what you're pointing that out. Yeah, if I may, those are like quick reference. In the event that we had a larger scale event, we would have the actual prints that Public Works has. This is really a quick reference document. These are the maps are provided to us by regional planning. Good to ask them to change it for next year though, like how they do the color coding, so that is clear. Even just making it a little bit more transparent, but yeah, obviously the folks that live and work within the town are pretty familiar with the facilities, but for folks that would be coming from outside our jurisdiction. But it sounds like there are more useful maps that would be referenced, which is good to know. Anyone have some questions? I wonder if the Wendusky News should be added to the local media contacts. Oh, are they not in there? And also in 5.2, the vulnerable populations. I don't see the St. Francis School, so I don't know if that should be added as well. I'll just address the Wendusky News piece really quickly. Sure. So I think the Wendusky News, the best of my knowledge, doesn't do emergent news updates much like the other organizations do. They're mostly focused on pretty much like blog style posts. I mean, we of course can add them in there for reference, but the focus on that list was for more emerging and established news organizations. So Lily, ahead of next year's that we could ask them if they would do that. I think they've changed their publishing protocol, I guess the word from recently, so could ask them if that's something they would consider. Sure. Thank you. Thanks for the insight, Paul. Can you add the St. Francis School to that? Yeah, I think we should do that. We can do that before we submit this program. Any questions or comments from members of the public? Okay, do I have a motion to approve the 2024 local emergency management plan with an update to add the St. Francis Xavier School to the vulnerable populations list? So much. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Brynn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. And finally, we're on to item L, the city council engagement update. Deputy Mayor. Thank you. As you all know, but for the public, council has wanted to make sure that we are engaging with the public outside of these chambers and with different groups of folks. So I provided a update on July 17th, 2023. So here is the next update, which will include activities from July 2023 to March 2024. So for youth outreach over the summer, city manager and the mayor met with a class from the middle school and attended the school year welcome event at the Winnowsky School District. The mayor and myself also joined the Winnowsky High School Culture and Community class in January. Senior outreach over the winter, each member of council joined a coffee chat hour at the Winnowsky Senior Center. Multi-lingual outreach. The city manager and the mayor met with community members at the mosque and the mayor and council heard, attended the holy celebration of Winnowsky School District. And budget outreach slash council and the community events, all members of council, the city manager and members of the staff leadership team engaged in a series of community events at the library, two farmers market Sundays and three local businesses. Additionally, the annual community dinner and budget presentation at the O'Brien Community Center and the town meeting day presentation at the Winnowsky School District. And we continue to do more events. And just as a reminder from the last meeting of this role transition to council, I've heard last meeting. Do we miss anything? Any questions from members of the public? Okay. Appreciate having that in the public record for visibility. Not on for a vote though. So this brings us to the night of the, could I make a comment? Yes. I just want to appreciate again that this council prioritizes being out in the community is definitely best practice not to wait for folks to come to you. So I appreciate you taking that time to think that work and congratulations on a successful first term what they call it. Yeah. Deputy Mayor on leading this, coordinating this effort for council. Thank you for that. Thank you. All right. We are at the end of this evening's agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Motion by Charlie, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries meeting adjourned. Thank you everyone. So we have a call to adjourn. Oh.