 We can hear you now. Okay, great. Thank you. I don't know if you see me, but I don't see myself. Oh, we don't see you either. We don't see you, but we can hear you. Okay, that's good. That's all you need. Great, so happy November, everyone. Thank you for coming to the meeting. We will get started with some announcements and introductions. So we can just quickly go around the zoom room and physical room and say what your name is and what board you're a part of. And I think we should do it popcorn style. So introduce yourself and then hand it off to someone else. So my name's Hannah King. I am in board eight and I am a steering committee member and I am going to pass it off to Jonathan. My name's Jonathan Chappell Sokol and I'm in board one. I'm also a steering committee member and I'll pass it to Dave Collin. I am Dave Collin, board one resident living on the hash place and part of the old East End big group coalition. And I'll hand it off to Jonathan Farrell. Good evening. I'm Jonathan Farrell. I'm with the committee on temporary shelter. We'll be talking to you briefly this evening. I'll hand it off to Bob Duncan. Hi, my name's Bob Duncan. Sorry, my video's not showing up and I don't know why that is, but I'm an architect from Dr. B. Sanctea Architecture and we're working on the expansion of the Class of Ending Shelter. I'll pass it on to Karen Long. I'm with Karen Long and I live on Henry Street. And I don't know who else is there. I think I saw Angie, but I don't see her name up there. I'm here. I'm Angie. I'll pass it to Angie. I'm Angie Chappell Sokol and I live on North Prospect Street. And I hand it over to Keith Pillsbury. I'm Keith Pillsbury. I live on University Terrace and I'm the steering committee representing Ward 8. I'm on Nash Place, which is in Ward 1 and I will pass it off to Richard. I'm Richard Hilliard. I am your assignee to the AdHoc Committee on Redistricting, representing Ward 1. Hey everyone, Jack Hanson and I'm the East District City Councilor. Hey, good evening. My name's Jane Strongard and I'm the Ward 8 City Councilor. Great, thank you. And then once we have one last person stepped away, but when they come back, we'll intro them. And then other folks are, I see Lewis and Jason. Lewis, you can now talk. If you'd like to say hello. Yeah, can you maybe, I'd just like to say hello. And my name's Lewis Siegel and I'm in Ward 8 on Pearl Street. And I just want to say that Jonathan Thall, since he came on his video, is the only video that we see. So all of the other people that introduced themselves following Jonathan Thall, we didn't see. And my screen has Jonathan Thall. Hi Jonathan, I don't think that's the way it should be. That's interesting, because my screen has Dave's calling. Yeah, I don't understand. Anyway, that's what I'm seeing. For folks on Zoom, you might want to make sure you're in a gallery view, because that's how you get to see everybody. If you're only on speaker view, you might only see one person. Yeah, for some reason it seems to think that Jonathan is constantly speaking, which is why it's focusing on him. What I could try and do Jonathan is, or if you want to leave and come back, I might fix it. But otherwise, switching to gallery view might be the best bet. In galleries, if you see right in the top right hand corner of your screen, there's a little gray box that says view with other little white boxes. And if you click on that, it will give you speaker, gallery, and then other options. And if you just click gallery, then you should be all right. And if that doesn't make sense, just raise your hand, and I can walk you through it again. But great, thank you all for being here. Really exciting meeting. We're now gonna go into Speak Out. And so I know we have a couple of folks who have reached out to us already. And so Bob and Jonathan, if you want to kick us off with Speak Out, that would be great. Okay, so do you have, I believe I was told you had the drawings from our earlier presentation to show to folks. If you don't, you would take me a few minutes to bring that to the screen, to the screen share, all right? I can check in the minutes from last month. Are Jonathan's gonna try to see if he has them really quickly? Okay, well, while he's looking at it, I could just give a brief description of it. I don't want to take any more of your time that is necessary, but I think maybe everybody's so prepared that there was a little snaf who were the public warning of the previous MPAA meeting we came to in September. And so there's some glitch by the way that the meeting's properly warned and therefore may not meet the criteria for making a public presentation before the zoning application. Though the way it was resolved with zoning staff and our MPAA folks was that we would make ourselves available to answer questions if people had any questions. On the blocks, we would probably not make much of a presentation because you folks have already seen it, all right? So if you need more than that, I'll be happy to go for the whole thing. Or if you have questions for people that didn't see the presentation have questions, so Mike, can I answer those and we can break things up on the screen? Okay, did by raising your hand. Karen, I see your hand is raised, so go for your go. So I was at the last meeting and I didn't hear the presentation so I'm not, I'm confused about that statement. So I don't, I don't know, don't know anything about it. Okay, so at the last MPAA meeting, well excuse me, it may not be the last time the MPAA meeting, it was the MPAA meeting in September, I think it was September 8th or September 9th that we presented this and we showed all the drawings and it turns out that the number of letters that needed to be mailed out was not done and so we're on a warning for tonight's meeting to specifically answer questions for people who may have questions about the problem. So if we, like I said, I'm conscious of your time and don't want to pick up any more than is necessary so if you need us to do a presentation and give us those drawings, so if you bring them up, how do I do it? It'll take me a few minutes to increase our server and bring them up, so if that makes sense, you may just give me a couple of minutes to do that. Part of the September meeting, not the last meeting. It was the September meeting. I do have the images if people want to look at them and then I just need to be able to share the screen but this is speak out, so. We do have the photos but I think if anyone has any specific questions or wants to see them and if you just want to let us know, then we can make sure they get to you but we do have to be conscious of the time of the meeting I would say so there's no other questions. I don't know if folks are comfortable with that. Oh, okay. So do you folks see the photographs that are on the screen? Okay, so just very briefly, this is the actual application that's been made to the city for this project, it's a 16 unit addition to the existing Hot Family Shelter 278 Main Street. So the top series of photos are photos of the building itself at 278 Main. The next series of photos that you see here that's labeled site context shows a building in the top left corner to the east. Actually all of them in the top row are the building to the east. And then in the bottom row, that's the photograph of the consolidated communications building that's to the west. And also in the lower right-hand corners looking to the north and that's 289 College Street of course access from college. The next sheet are some photos nearby Edmunds School and also in the lower left and more auditorium consolidated communications. The building from a pedestrian view that's just east of the property at 278 Main and then a building further up the street at 300 Main. The next drawing is the site plan. So this orientation has north to the left Main Street is along the right-hand side. The existing building, if you can see my cursor is in this location and we're proposing an addition to it that's on the north side in this location that has 16 units total. There's a small amount of parking that's being provided a total of nine spaces broken up into two smaller lots access from the same driveway although it will be rebuilt same driveway that serves the property now. What we're proposing to do is have a pedestrian access from the sidewalk at Main Street along the property line here that leads to a concrete plaza, if you will that forms the entrance to the addition itself and this distinction of materials between asphalt and concrete is intended to demonstrate that that's a pedestrian area and any cars traveling in here would be conscious of that and traveling more slowly. The other drawings that are here I'll kind of go through them sort of quickly. This is a landscape plan that calls out all the plants and trees and so on that will be proposing to be planted here and on the site plan there are two other structures that there's a trash enclosure here that keeps the dumpsters approximately where it is now on the site. Covered bike storage here for permanent bike storage and this lower left hand corner is where the electrical transformer will be. A question came up at zoning about whether that transformer makes noise and the answer is only if you're standing right next to it not that anyone would hear it from any adjacent building or nearby building. The rest of these plans actually show the floor plans of the basement and upper floors of the building but I'll scroll quickly through to get to the elevations and the one thing I'll point out on this roof plan is that you'll see labeled equipment here all that is rooftop mounted equipment and when you see the renderings we've taken care to locate it in such a way that you don't see it from any of your points on the ground. These are some unit plans of the apartments themselves and then here you'll see the elevations of the building. So as you look at the property this is perhaps a little bit confusing but you're actually looking in the lower left is what you would see from Main Street and the center here is actually a section taken through the addition that was built in 1991. So what you see here is brick at the main entry in this portico that you enter the addition from. There's a third floor terrace that folks who live here will be able to enjoy and the residential parts of the building are delineated in fiber cement lap siding. This is the elevator tower that's delineated in vertical siding and then the circulation that sort of bifurcates the building is delineated in this more purple colored fiber cement panel siding. On the west elevation that you see here this on the right hand side is the west elevation of the current family shelter Main Street being on your right here and the forced array addition at this location. The lower level is being done in large format porcelain tiles, not to mimic but to just express a similar kind of base that the existing building has with its stone base. On the upper left here is the north elevation that you would see, excuse me, from the parking lot. So once again, the apartment complex is the apartment parts of the building delineated fiber cement siding. You see the entrance portico here, this clotted brick so that relates back to the original building and then you see the circulation path here which is the corridor in the building that's delineated in the dark purple tiles and then the base here kind of reverses itself as it steps back at the fourth floor to reduce the scale a little bit for the addition as it fronts to the west side. The next views are perspective views. So this is a bird's eye view that none of us will ever see but you can see very clearly there the rooftop equipment that would be on the roof but is visible only in a view like this when you come down to a pedestrian view looking at the driveway with the entrance to the addition here, none of the rooftop equipment is visible. And then this is a bit of a close up view as you're coming down the driveway of the brick clad entry portico and you see this plaza here that interrupts the paving, the asphalt paving and behind it is the 289 College Street and to the right is 288 Main Street and this is a corner of the building of the family shelter. Sorry, Bob, we're gonna have to wrap it up just so that way we can stay. Okay, that's fine, I'll quickly scroll through these so people can see them and that's the end of the presentation. Great, thank you. And- I can leave us on the screen and people have questions. Yeah, so if folks have questions do you have contact information by chance, Bob? Sure, yeah. So contact information is my, like maybe it's easiest to read and just send it an email or if you folks have an email you can pass it on to anybody who has any questions because Jonathan's been communicating with me so you have all that. So I'm happy to ask you questions that way or answer questions that way. Yeah, so if folks have questions feel free to reach out to anyone on the steering committee and we'll make sure you can get in contact. Thank you both for coming in. I don't see, I know Dan was supposed to come in, yeah? Yeah, he was going in. But I don't see him on. So we're gonna go past that and then Jonathan do you wanna, you had something, right? I do, I'll be quick. Yeah, we have a minute, that's fine. And this is from Jared Wood and it is just a suggestion. He is a comment on the ARPA survey how to spend $50 million. And he's not big on computers so this is the way he likes to make his voice heard. His recommendation is to spend $50 million toward the high school. He says we have a clear need and we don't need to overthink this and it would help the taxpayers going forward if we just spent it on something we know about. As opposed to what? Well, there's a survey as to what are the needs of the city and what we should spend extra ARPA money on. Oh, oh, okay. Great, thank you. And then does anyone else have anything they'd like to make an announcement about? I'd like to, just a comment or an announcement. Just speak out, so. Whatever. So, I also spoke to Jared and he was exercised about the column that the mayor wrote in the latest Burlington Community North Avenue News and reading it, I also found something that I thought was a bit not quite right. I don't understand why the mayor and the city council should be and this is a direct quote, allocating $850,000 of ARPA dollars to fund recruitment and retention incentives for Burlington police officers. That's in November the 5th. It seems to me that that is money that we shouldn't be incurring and it certainly shouldn't come out of the 15 million that I thought was supposed to be for the public good rather than compensating for missteps by the mayor and the city council 18 months ago. Perhaps it should come out of their budgets. Let's have some accountability and that would be my comment. Thank you. We're now gonna head into city council reports. So whoever wants to kick us off, Jane, Jack, Zariah, feel free. So we just have new people who came in and do this themselves? Yeah, so, sorry. Before we do that, we have some more folks who just joined us in the room. So we just wanna give quick hello. If you wanna say your name and what ward you're from, if you're comfortable with that. Okay, and then Ann, if you wanna say hello to everyone. I'm Ann, we're in your ward eight. Thank you. Oh, and then, yeah, Kathy, sorry. Kathy, all well. Board one. Great, thank you all. Now we'll go into city council reports. So whoever wants to kick us off. Thank you, Matt. So it's nice to be here again. I wasn't here at the last NPA meeting, so nice to be in this space. So the fun topic of reappraisal. So the council just recently passed a resolution that creates an ad hoc committee to hold hearings on reappraisal process in general and work with city attorney's office to explore and recommend changes back to the council. So the CDNR, the community development and neighborhood revitalization committee is going to, I believe this is happening in January. Sorry, I have a puppy and he's kind of rowdy right now. They are going to study the whole municipal tax system here and kind of propose ways we can improve the system with a focus on equity and a reduction on kind of the pressure on low income individuals and households in the city. So I think that that is obviously a really good thing. I'm happy that that passed. I did have a few people reach out to me after that, that resolution passed wanting to kind of understand what exactly that's going to do to help them, especially with how this reappraisal process took place. And if there's any way that somehow we can kind of reduce the damage that's already kind of in play. So obviously this topic is not over and this doesn't fix what is, but moving forward, this is good, but I do think we should keep talking about it. So moving on from the fun topic of reappraisal, we approved the $1.3 million of ARPA funding, speaking of ARPA, to help with the unpaid electric bills in the city for people who have really struggled with paying those, so due to COVID and everything. Obviously, so that's a good thing. I think we should be always promoting things like that, especially now. And then trying to think of anything else that's pretty pertinent. We did suspend the police chief search for six months at least. There's kind of a lot of details that go into that. I can move forward to press release that was put forth by the mayor. I also, I'm gonna be putting out some comments regarding that process very shortly. So I'll be sure to send that to you all too. And then just kind of some general remarks. The COVID cases and the numbers are going up and they're projected to go up for the next four weeks. That was just released today. So just be careful. Everyone's doing the best they can. They're really exhausted with all of this at this point. And, but I just wanna reiterate that as we kind of head into Thanksgiving and traveling and wanting to see people and being able to see people. So yeah, just be careful. And if you need any help finding resources on the COVID front for any reason, please email text me. And then also one last thing. A lot of the food shelves in the area are struggling. Like it's been pretty rough obviously for most organizations and facilities, but especially food shelves. So if you have anything to spare or have any capacity to donate even a little bit, especially to feeding children, they're trying to feed a lot of families before Thanksgiving and for Thanksgiving, that would be huge. So yeah, I just kind of wanna put that on your radar. I'm actually gonna step out of this meeting shortly after. I wanna kind of hear some more stuff and any back and forth and stay for questions, but I'm actually really sick right now and need to sleep as soon as I can. So I would love to stay, but I do need to get my rest. So apologies for my early departure this evening. Thanks. Jack, Zariah, if you don't need- Yeah, I can jump in next. And Jane reminded me that we've actually had three meetings since we all last met. I thought we had only had two, but we have had three. So kind of a lot has happened. Three meetings ago, the council voted to increase the police officer cap to 79 excluding the airport. So it was an increase of 11, I believe, from what it's been for the last year plus. We also passed an ordinance, we updated an ordinance around sex work in the city. And basically decriminalized at the local level sex work at that meeting. And we got a really awesome update from the racial equity inclusion belonging department at that meeting too, that I thought was really illuminating into a lot of what they've been focusing on in their work. And they, so I would recommend watching it if you haven't already, but they laid out what is basically a racial equity strategic roadmap for the city and talk through the key areas where as a city we can really confront systemic racism and reduce inequities, racial inequities in the city. So I thought that was really powerful and they kind of laid out their vision for that and their plan for that and their roadmap that they'll lead on, but that we all will obviously play a role in. I think, yeah, and then we've been grappling a lot with the issue of the encampment that's here is laying in the south. And there's been an encampment there for many years that people have lived in, there's been as many as maybe 30 to 50 people that live there, it's a bit transient, although there are folks who've been living there for many years as well. The mayor chose to disband the encampment or break up the encampment and that's somewhat underway right now, both legally and on the site itself. So we've been grappling that with that in council and trying to really, I mean, we've disagreed on whether or not the camps should be broken up, but we are all I think working hard on finding stable housing for residents of Sears Lane and former residents. I brought forward a resolution at the last, at the second to last meeting, two meetings ago around transportation demand management. I've talked to you all a lot about policy regarding new construction with transportation demand management and sustainable transportation requirements, but this is actually a study into what a city-wide system would look like for existing employers and institutions to really lean in on not just building parking lots and providing free parking, but instead, using those resources to support various methods of transportation and really make it so that people are actually able to get around using other methods. So that's gonna be a long process, but that did pass, so we'll be working on that. And the mayor is gonna talk about the ballot items. That's been a big focus of our work is these two ballot items coming up. And I'll leave, like I said, it's been three meetings so there's a lot of other stuff. Maybe I'll let Zariah go and go to questions and we may end up touching on some of the other stuff as well. Thanks. Yeah, I don't have a concrete plan. I think some of the things, I just stopped listening to Jack at the end. So I'm not sure that if you touched on, but one of the things, Council has started talking about which Jack and I have been working on for the last year and a half is short-term rentals and where that's, did you talk about that, Jack? Yeah, and where that stands. I didn't, I didn't. And where that stands, I think generally is we're definitely gonna allow people to rent short-term within their own home, whether it's an apartment or a standalone house or anything along those lines. And probably going to allow it if the owner lives within the building and then some things that are up for debate are things like, can you, can tenants rent within the building? And having, and I think one of the options that we pursued very late in the game that's new is that if there's an affordable unit which we can define affordable, then you can have, for every extra affordable unit that you have in a building, can you have one short-term rental? So that is a debate that is happening in council. I'm happy to go into more details on that. And I can also write a front porch forum post about it. Yeah, the police cap, I think that's fine. I think most folks probably know how that went and just to elaborate a little bit, the cap was 97 back at the beginning of the summer without the airport. Went down to 66 during the summer and is now back up to 74. So 97, 66, 74, kind of the, sorry, my apologies, 79 are the numbers without the airport. Jane and I, so there were 150 recommendations from CNA. Jane and I both sit on the Public Safety Committee. That's gonna work with the police commission and then a little bit with the fire board. Sorry, there's just a little bit of background noise. To start to implement some of the recommendations, I think folks know there was a joint committee, which was the whole police commission and the whole Public Safety Committee, which managing 10 people can be a hard way to get things done. So I think we're gonna consolidate a little bit and start to work with representatives of the police commission instead to start to try to get the recommendations implemented. And I think that's the two big things that I have. So I'll turn it over for questions. Great, thank you. Does anyone have any questions? You can raise your hand with the little icon or just unmute yourself. Karen, I see you have your hand raised. Yes, thank you. A question I read, I believe it was in the free press about this idea of suspending the police search because we need to offer more money. And it said that in order to be competitive with police departments of similar scale, we needed to raise the, right now we're at 119 to 132,000 and they want to increase it from 130 to 160,000. But the cities that they were using was Boulder, which has 106,000 people. Burlington has 42,500 and they also use Madison, Wisconsin, which has 255,000 people. So, and then there were two cities mentioned that they said their comparable salaries were 128,000 to 134,000. So why would Burlington, Vermont with 42,000 need to be competitive with cities that have 106,000 people or 255,000 people? So that's a question, please. I'll tackle this question a little bit, Tango, because she's also on the search committee. I know that there's different feelings in the caucus around this, but I think, I think Jen may be more kind about, which is what I say than I am, is I was very frustrated with the mayor for like how he portrayed how this happened or he was just like the progressives won't raise the wage. But I think essentially what happened is he tried to call an emergency meeting to raise the salary and we said, hey, this analysis seems a little thin. Maybe this is an emergency meeting. Can we talk about this with a little bit more information? And so I think that we are like, I think that this is a conversation that needs to be had is how competitive we are with other cities because I think we didn't get the candidates that we wanted in the first round from, and Jane can speak more to that. But yeah, I think that we're hoping to see a little bit more about what that range should be and why. Yeah, thanks, Soraya. So yeah, it's been a process that kind of went throughout the summer and into the fall. And we didn't get enough applications to make the final like we should theoretically, as Burlington, we should be able to be sifting through really good applications and just be like, oh my gosh, these are all such good candidates. How do we even kind of whittle this down, right? Ideally, that's what we deserve and that's what we should really be pulling for. That was not the case with the applications that we got. So the reason why it's suspended is honestly, that in itself is, whether that's a necessity or what have you, I personally don't think it needs to be a suspension. I feel like we just need to keep the application process open, but we are just kind of putting a pin in it and reevaluating the process for which we kind of, I guess, took part in to get us to this point and how to like redo that and fine tune it. But I do think that we'd use Boulder and we use Madison a lot for a lot of different things, which is interesting that you brought that up because that's really good points and that's kind of what my reasoning was when I first said, oh, I kind of want to hold off on raising the salary, but it was very open to it kind of as the weeks went by, as I saw, there weren't as many applications, maybe that would be a good thing to do. But I personally think it's more time than money. I feel like the window of time for which applications can come in needs to be longer rather than go back and forth with the difference of 15,000 or something in the salary. So yeah, you bring up good points. Those are larger cities. I think we use them as examples because they kind of have, those are cities, especially Madison kind of looking at more of a, in general, kind of holistic and restorative process for how they function in society. I feel like they are something that we try to emulate in some ways. So definitely kind of looking at that, but to look at that for an actual number, for a salary, I don't think is a fair comparison. So I think you bring up a really good point, Karen, with that. Yeah, I completely agree with you, Karen. I don't think that analysis was compelling at all for raising the cap. If we're gonna spend an extra, if the intention of raising the salary of the police chief is to get a good candidate, I'd rather spend the extra 30,000 on getting like an expert recruiter and hiring up on the recruitment side to specifically target cities that have done transformative public safety and try to recruit and really head hunt a candidate who has strong experience leading transformative change. I think that's what we should be focusing on. So I think it's a distraction from what we should really be doing here. And I'm really frustrated at the process so far. And it's definitely something that I wanna work on going forward is not to just sort of accept this narrative of the administration and just accept that we're gonna continue to indefinitely delay. I think we need to move forward much more strongly on getting someone at the helm of our police department who is on board with transformational change to public safety. We have a couple of hands in the room. So we'll go Keith and Tom. Yeah, Keith and Tom. Yeah. I guess this is addressed to all of our city counselors. I heard Zariah's talk about Airbnb's having that can exist if the owner is on the property. Many of us live next to rental properties that owners live out of state. And they are very hard to contact and they have property managers that are out of the city also. What are you, what is the process now? What is going on about working with the University of Vermont to provide more housing for its coming, its undergraduate students? They seem to be admitting more students to the university and we the neighbors are having to pick up the extra stress of having those students in our neighborhood. I don't know, Jack wants to take this, but we are renegotiating, I think, part of how many students you've been in houses. And I think therefore we're, I'm not sure how much we're allowed to talk about it, but I think we're pushing in that renegotiation for it to be higher than it has been historically. Yeah, we're activists. I mean, actively is a weird word. We had an executive session recently in council about UVM building more housing, which is I think the first, since I've been on council, the first serious discussion that we've had executive republic as a full council on it. So I can't really speak to it because it is executive, but we are discussing it actively, which again, I think is the first time in a little while that that's been the case. So you know where I stand on it Keith, I hope. I mean, I completely agree that UVM needs to build more housing and needs that housing to be priced, you know, more in line with the market. I don't want them to use housing as a mechanism to bring in income. And that we did an enforcement mechanism for any housing that they do promise or percentage of students housed that they promise that there's some keys behind that. Right, because we don't want them to just, and you've talked about this Keith as much as anyone, like it's one thing for them to build more housing, but if they're gonna just build more housing and then just grow by that same amount, it's not gonna have that impact. So there has to be teeth to the percentage likes or I said. I just wanted to question regarding the police chief's search, is it possible that there aren't applicants because it's not seen as a desirable position and that one of the ways to make it more desirable is to increase the salary. And isn't the mayor already requesting that professional recruitment organization be recruited to help with that effort? Jack, I'll go. I'll go, sorry. Yeah, I do think that I'm not saying that I don't think it makes sense to increase the salary. I'm saying that I don't think we did much of an analysis of what it should be. I think that the analysis that we did get was weak. I didn't think that it justified having an emergency meeting on it. And then to the speaking for increasing the salaries, I think generally the city has been increasing salaries for all of the directors. So I think even just looking at parity within the city, like if I look at that, then it makes sense to me to increase the salary. So I think the only thing I've ever said on the issue is like, let's look at more numbers and have a conversation about it. I do think that Burlington is going to be a uniquely difficult place for a new police chief. Like I don't think that there is any way to say it other than that. And I think making it, and I think that that could be heard a lot of candidates. And I think it might hopefully also encourage one or two of the right candidates. So I think that it's a conversation about salary and it's also a conversation about, yeah, who we're recruiting. Yeah, I mean, as Karen pointed out, like the analysis itself, not only was the analysis then, but I think the analysis itself showed that we're actually in a fine place. The only city that was in the analysis that had similar population of Burlington had like, it was like 128 was the salary and we're going up to 131. So yeah, I'm open to like seeing more cities in a stronger comparison analysis, but right now I don't see any compelling argument to raise it. In terms of the second piece, I, yeah, I mean, I think most people who've been in policing for a long time who have a lot of experience in policing and have served in leadership roles in policing are embedded to some extent in the current system of policing and have been successful in that system and gain their experience in that system. And so it is a tricky, you know, it's tricky and there's less folks. If we are, if Burlington remains committed to this type of transformation to public safety, it's gonna be a smaller pool inherently because there's not people who are committed to traditional policing probably aren't gonna wanna be in the role if that's where the city's going. But that's why I was saying earlier is if we specifically target and search out people that do have experience with transformative change to public safety and with alternative models like the ones that we're talking about. So that's where I think the focus should be. The last question will be from Tom. Yeah, hi, I guess my question is just a sort of a logistics one that's given that we have an acting police chief, how long can we go before we actually do damage? To our police force in our city. Can we go for six months? Can we go for a year? Is this something we should really have filled by January? What do you think? Yeah, that's a really great question. I personally think that, yeah, we haven't had a permanent police chief in a while. And I think that that isn't great. I think six months is a long time that is half a year. Like that's a long time to just kind of put a pin in a process without any real hard reasoning. So ideally it doesn't last six months. And ideally we kind of figure something out. Honestly, this is like a literal active item of like where do we go from here? Because you're absolutely right. Like where do you draw the line? I personally have never been in this position before where there's a committee that's kind of created and this is really intense, but important process. And then all of a sudden it stops for no true reason. It's just kind of like an artificial deadline that was put in place. So hopefully we can work around that and figure something out. Just administration and the council and just figure something out because you're right. This is not a permanent fix. And the city deserves answers as to the direction and where we're gonna go from here because why have a police committee search for a police chief if we're just kind of going to, like it's almost as if it didn't exist. So it's like, well, all of that work couldn't have been for nothing and it wasn't. I mean, we did learn a lot in that process. So we do need to pick the parts that are useful and move forward with that and figure out a process around kind of that and how to fix that. So hopefully it's not six months long because I agree that is, that's a long time. Like I'm not gonna sugarcoat it and I'm not happy with it. Yeah, I mean, to be clear that, sorry, is right. Did you wanna go? Go ahead. Just that wasn't, council hasn't weighed in on that and I don't agree with that at all in terms of delaying it. I think we should be working, continue working hard to find this person and recruit along the lines that I said. So it's a weird, there's a weird power struggle issue because the mayor does a point, the mayor has the sole ability to do a point department head. So I don't know how this is gonna play out in terms of the division of power, but I certainly think that we need to keep going and I don't agree that we should wait. Kiss the last thing, sorry Hannah. I know that we always have back again and I sometimes have three different opinions. I think that the question, well, what I see was rhetorical, like what the actual endpoint was before we start doing damage. And I think the other, it's from an organizational development kind of standpoint and like what it means to have like ambiguity when you're in an organization about like what leadership is, which I think is probably the kind of worst term that we have looking at it like from the standpoint of the folks in the police department. I'm hoping that some of that is meant just because we put off the search so long already just with COVID because all of the many transitions in the police department happened at the start of COVID. And so I, from the conversations that I've had with people in the police department is I feel like people in the department trust the acting chief. And I think that there's and I think that there's some consistency in that and how long you've been there. So I'm not sure that internally there's that much harm being done because there is some stability in that but clearly I think the faster we can wrap up the process the less uncertainty there is for the police department the better it'll be for the police department itself. I don't know if that was more of what you were asking but that was what I heard. Okay. Thank you counselors. Now we are going to head into school board. Kathy, if you have any updates. Okay, well I guess most of you know that we made the decision to stay on Institute Road and the south side of Institute Road we've chosen for the next site to be checked out. Checked out, certainly they have to do a lot of boring et cetera to make sure that the soils are all okay but it will be in front of the old school down on North Avenue where the bus turnaround is and part of the parking lot will also be used and it'll be both the tech center and the high school. And we're just starting to start designing et cetera for that site so how much this is going to cost we don't know yet. We have already started getting things ready because besides asking the taxpayers for money we are also going out to look further afield and to also really ask donors to give money to this because we don't think that it's possible to go for the whole two buildings. I mean it's one building but it's the equivalent of the tech center and the high school that we're going to be putting on a ballot and so it's not going to be cheap and I think everybody knows that so we are looking in all sorts of places to get these funds together. We also just signed a three year contract with the superintendent for another three years which we were all happy that he wanted to stay we wanted him to stay so that's good. And the only other thing really going on which isn't small but it is the weighted study that has been going on in the legislature which really has a lot for us as Burlington and Winooski and other cities that have high poverty and high ESL students and so at the moment there is a legislative committee that is or task force actually that has been looking into this and we Burlington Winooski and towns across the state have organized into a coalition that are going at this as one group because we realize for 20 years we've been underfunded in this district and we pushed to get the legislature to study this, the weighting which was done by UVM Rutgers and American Institute of Educational Research. The legislature paid over $100,000 I think it was to have this thing done and now they're tearing it apart and they're wanting to pull ESL students out of it pay for those with categorical aid which I personally find extremely racist given the makeup of our ESL population and they're also trying to do something by pulling poverty out of that weight, it's out of the weights as well. We in the coalition are pushing very heavily for them to use the study as it is and don't muck with it but we'll have to see what the legislature does. The moment I'm not too happy with where they're going because it doesn't sound equitable and it doesn't look equitable but. We have time for one quick question so Jonathan. Thank you, happy, what can we do to help? Well, we are going to and I keep saying this, we are actually going to organize that people here in Burlington start talking to legislatures, both ours in Chittenden County but also those that are on this committee that have proposing this that we find outrageous, we need to talk to them too because they need to understand that this is not okay and we have been dealing with it not only Burlington but Winooski and all these other towns and cities, Rutland, I could list them off, there's a bunch of them. For 20 years we've been underweighted and we've all and it's taking its toll, we're seeing that and yet nobody has the civil courage to go out and say to their taxpayers in these overweighted districts that they're going to have to pay more taxes for the same education that they're giving their kids right now. So I mean we have Act 60 which brings the money in equally and then when we delve it out to the school districts it becomes unequal again. So we're, you know, we love to say that Act 60 and it is probably one of the most, you know, equitable school funding laws in the country, at least it was when it was enacted but we don't look any different than any other state because it certainly is inequitable how the money is given out and the difference in what some of these schools look like in some of these very small rural areas, I mean it's sad, it's really sad to see how they cannot fix up their buildings, they don't have the money, they keep cutting stuff. I mean really when you look at it we're as bad as many of those states that we would never want to put Vermont in, you know, compared to so. Great, thank you. I want to be mindful of the time because we're already behind schedule so I think we're going to go to the mayor's presentation now if you are ready. I thought I hit the new button. Good evening everyone, you're able to hear me all right? Yes, yes, yes. All right, excellent. Very nice to see everyone. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk for a few minutes about the two ballot items that are before you in a special election that has begun and which will remain open until December 7th. If you have been an active Burlington voter in recent years you should have received a ballot already. If you haven't, you should get in touch with City Hall and there's a number of ways you can go on our website and find out how to request about it. You can call City Hall. There's a number of reasons why you might not have received the ballot and we can get that straightened out quickly. If you haven't registered yet, you can of course register right up to and including election day. There are two items. One is about item number one is a general obligation bond for city infrastructure and ballot item number two is a Burlington Electric Department revenue bond that we are calling the net zero energy revenue bond because this is a key step forward, represents really a key communal decision if we want to meet the very ambitious local climate goals that we've laid out for ourselves. This bond is perhaps the single most important decision we face over the next decade to try to meet those goals. So I'm gonna, I've got a PowerPoint for each of these and I'm gonna start with the general obligation bond if I can get it pulled up correctly. Here we go. And Hannah, we have about 20 minutes. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. I'll try to get through these quickly so that we can have time for questions. Here we go. Bear with me just one more moment. All right. All right. Everyone seeing that? Okay. Here are the, if you're gonna kind of take home three things about this to know from my perspective about this $40 million capital infrastructure plan bond before you, here's where I would focus. This proposal has been is a fiscally responsible, long plan continuation of the last five years of major overdue investment in our public infrastructure. Hopefully you have noticed that since 2016 when almost 80% of voters voted for the sustainable infrastructure plan we have done a great deal of investment in our roads and our bike path and our sidewalks and our fire engines and to some degree in our city buildings and this is a continuation of that effort. The bond is largely focused on that key infrastructure. There are, in addition to what I just listed there are important bike and pedestrian improvements that are part of this. One difference between this bond and last time is there's a significant dollars, about $4 million that will be invested in public safety communications equipment. But a great deal of the money is going again into what I think everyone thinks of as roads, sidewalks, parks, core infrastructure. There is a cost to this. There's no way around that. I do, as people are making their decisions about the cost and I know this comes after what has for many people been a painful reassessment and I know there's rightly concerns about property tax burden in general. The cost of this bond may be less than you think. We can have this very substantial continued investment in this core public infrastructure for an additional cost when fully drawn down several years from now of about $13 a month for the median homeowner. Further, this important to know about that cost is this is the last major general obligation bond that the city, and I'm making a distinction here between the city and the school district. And I know there's some questions about that and we'll speak to that later in this presentation. This is the last major bond of the city plans for the foreseeable future. And after this bond, we get to a point where we are retiring a significant amount of debt on an annual basis and we'll be in a kind of stabilized level where we can continue to invest our infrastructure at a higher level than we've done historically which is important because we weren't investing enough but there will not be mounting growing costs to property taxpayers. So those are the big fixer points. Let me quickly go through some additional details. So this, I won't go into every line here. This is just a reminder that this effort goes all the way back to 2014 when we committed to drafting a capital plan for the first time. And we went through a great deal of process back in those years. We've gone through quite a bit of process this time as well. It's been quieter perhaps process. I know some people have said to me they felt like this sort of came up out of nowhere. Virtually every commission in the city has reviewed this plan in recent months and endorsed it. And the city council gave us a strong support as well that by almost unanimous 10 to one support including I believe all the counselors who are participating in this call supported this effort. Just really quickly again, I won't go into every one of these highlights but I think it's important to reflect back a little bit on what did we do with the first $27 million bond? Well, we really changed the trajectory of our sidewalks. We basically tripled the amount of annual sidewalk investment that we had been doing which was critical because we were only replacing about 1% of the sidewalks a year before that replacing three or 4% if you can sustain it for a long period of time is a sustainable level of annual investment. We put substantial efforts into our streets as well doubling the amount going into our streets. The bike path is hopefully you've all experienced and enjoyed has been virtually completely rebuilt. The final mile is being rebuilt now down in Oakledge Park. If you haven't been down there recently you should go check it out. It's pretty exciting. Why are we back for another? And why is it important that this happened now? Why are we doing this special election? There's a number of reasons for that. The major one to me is a bullet point four there. We are essentially a year behind schedule in this effort already the pandemic like impacted this effort like everything else. The initial plan had been to seek voter support for a second bond in 2020. And as a result, we've already been through one year of considerably lowered investment that we had been doing. By voting now in November and November and December we have the opportunity to get back and have very productive 2022 construction season. Whereas if this is pushed back to town meeting day because of bonding requirements, bidding requirements and whatnot, it will impact and we'll have a second pretty less active investment season in a row. Further, we are in a period of some uncertainty and I know that cuts both ways. I know the economic uncertainty we're in in some ways, ways on some voters' minds. A positive element of the current environment that we don't have a guarantee will continue is that we continue to have historically low interest rates right now. And by approving this now we can lock in those rates for at least a major percentage of this $40 million bond in the near future. The other, I won't go through every bullet point but you can see there's some other elements that drove our collective decision as to why to come forward now as well. We talked a little bit at the top about what this money is going into. And instead of focusing on this slide I'll go, let's go straight to the numbers here. Here's how, here's our projected breakdown. I think it is important to note this is a projection. This is an estimate. The actual investments happen on an annual basis through the appropriation process with the city council. But we are always very mindful of course of how we talk about these efforts with the voters and this is the basic roadmap, the plan for how this $40 million would be invested. We're going to continue to have this enhanced level of street and sidewalk funding. We do have the city IT needs that we have traditionally paid for out of bonds and there's a piece of that here as well. Bike infrastructure and intersection improvements. And sometimes it's not obvious to be what do we mean by intersection improvements. So a good example that I think people have seen the real value of is down by Shy Guy Gelato that complicated five way intersection. We had a kind of a quick build, a test a few summers ago. And then I think last summer, maybe it was two summers ago now we came through and rebuilt all the curbs and really made that a much safer clear, more clear to navigate intersection for cars and pedestrians alike. That is an example of an intersection improvement that improves pedestrian safety in a material way. One in your ward that is a plan for the near future and that this bond would go to is the intersection between Pearl Street and Prospect Street. That kind of complicated somewhat dangerous intersection will be improved if we're able to continue, if we have the funding to continue this work. Local match for grants. This is a big thing on Monday. The city council approved, for example, a one-and-a-half million dollar design contract for us to move forward at full speed with the Rail Yard Enterprise Project. This project that would connect Battery Street to Pine Street. These are a great deal for the city. We get essential public infrastructure and the state and federal government pays for 90% of this work, but there is a local match that we need to pay. We need a local match there. We need a local match on the Shelburne Rotary that we're building currently. The Champlain Parkway is actually gonna get built and we need a local match there. So these dollars leverage tens of millions of other dollars to invest in our community. There are bridge projects, believe it or not, the city of Burlington has more bridges than you would think. There are a couple bridges on the bike path that we're responsible for that need significant investment. The one that connects to Rock Point is the city's responsibility, the bridge over the entrance to North Beach needs to be replaced. Civic buildings, I know some of you are down there at the library. We have significant investment needs at the library. We have 25 major buildings and about 40 lesser structures that the city's responsible for. Many of them have been under-invested in for a long period of time. And if we're having this kind of bonding allows us to proactively do that work as opposed to as too been often been the case in the management of city assets in the past, just deal with things when they break which ends up being more expensive. There's more parks investments, there's more investments in fire trucks. The public safety infrastructure is that communication system I mentioned before. And then finally, there is $10 million reserve for Memorial Auditorium here. This first and foremost, what this funding would allow is us to ensure that Memorial Auditorium maintains structural integrity and does not fall down. I don't wanna be the mayor that after decades of neglect sees the building actually become lost. And that is hanging in the balance now if we're not able to make significant investment in it. That will be only be to $3 million. There will not be more investment in the building until we really have a more full plan. We have not as many, as you know, we don't have a full plan for what we're gonna do with the building in the medium and long term. That will be something that we will be working on and finalizing in the city council would sign off on further investment in. I'm gonna try to, I can come back and talk more about this if there's questions about it. The point of this complicated graph is that the $40 million that we're asking voter support to support would help leverage about over $100 million of other investments in infrastructure through these various programs. So we are not just coming to property taxpayers for all of the help here. We have worked hard and are working hard and will continue to work hard to line up a variety of other sources as well. I won't get into the details of this slide, but I show it to further reinforce the point that a lot of planning and thought has gone into the amount of debt that the city is taking on and that the school district and city together can take on. We've had since 2018, the first ever debt management policy for the city of Burlington. And we are borrowing at levels that ensure that we are in line with what Moody says is appropriate levels of borrowing for us to maintain our AA rating that we've collectively worked so hard for over the last decade and made such progress on. A further point here that is actually kind of captured in this graph, although it takes a lot of words to explain, but is that more than half of the bonding capacity is being reserved for the school district to pursue their infrastructure needs and that there is substantial additional capacity that remains beyond the $70 million for the new high school that the voters have already authorized that will remain, that is being planned for and that will remain regardless of whether this bond passes or not. I'm a big, I got two girls going through the system, one daughter in high school right now. I fully share Kathy and the school board's sense of priority that the new high school is incredibly important for this community and that we need to get it done. And I'm looking forward to supporting that effort in every way I can. This just lays out the costs again in a multi-year projection. That is the presentation for the general obligation bond. Let me just really quickly shift to the revenue bond and then I'll take questions. I thought somehow I've lost the sort of summary slide that was here. So you know what, let me just in the interest of time just say, here's maybe all that you need to know about the revenue bond. If you like all of the administration and the entire city council believes that it is really important for Burlington to do its share for addressing the climate emergency and do everything we can to meet the very ambitious goals we have of becoming a net zero energy city by 2030. This bond is a key step. This is going to allow us to address both sides of that equation. It allows us to invest in the infrastructure that's necessary to make the city work when our cars and our heating systems have been electrified. It allows for millions of dollars investment in that infrastructure. It also will allow us to continue the green stimulus incentives that have made it possible for hundreds of Burlingtonians to shift from gas burning heating systems and vehicles to electric vehicles and cold climate heat pumps in recent years. It allows us to continue those green stimulus incentives for at least the next three years. Another key thing to consider as you're weighing this is this is the unusual bond that will have no impact on your property taxes. It's a revenue bond. It also will have essentially no impact on your electric rates for at least five years. And then very modest like maybe 1% a year impact on electric rates for years five and beyond with conservative projections. So this is really one of those rare times where you can kind of vote your values, vote to make progress on the climate emergency and do it confident that it's not gonna break the bank. It's not gonna have a major impact on your household budget. Why don't I stop there and take any questions that there are about either of these initiatives. Okay, so folks, you can raise your hand on Zoom and for anyone in the room, you can raise your hand as well. We're very short on time, so be mindful of that, please. So any questions? I know Tom, you're at your hand raise and then we'll go to Karen and then everyone else I can put in speaking order after. Hi, Mayor, I got a quick question about the borrower, that the city's ability to borrow money and keep our rating. It looked like the target was one and three quarter percent and we exceed that in a few years. That includes a small amount of money to replace the high school. I mean, in my back, the envelope calculation is that a new high school will cost about $300 million and you have maybe 70 million in the spreadsheet. Are we gonna get in trouble? Great, thanks, Tom. So that is a good close read of some of that spreadsheet and you are right, the target for the municipal borrowing is between 1.75 and a maximum of 2% of the full value of our grand list and the way our debt management policy was written, it says if we're gonna exceed that 1.75, lower end of the target, we need to have a plan to get back, we shouldn't go over two and we should have a plan to get back under it. And what those projections show is that we're estimating a two to three year period of time where we're in that 1.75 to two range and then it goes back below 1.75. The city council made a special finding of that plan when this was approved. And so those actions are consistent with the way the debt management policy is written and that Moody's had reviewed and I will say Moody's just came out with a kind of update as they do on an annual basis of their U of Burlington and they reaffirmed our AA rating and they specifically noted the way that there was an expectation that we would be taking on more debt and that was expected and they were comfortable with it. That said, I mean, to the second part of your question, a $300 million high school all paid for by bonding would be a problem with staying within those limits. Certainly I would say from my conversations with superintendent, and then again, I think that is a number well above where he is hoping this comes in at. I would not agree with your characterization that that spreadsheet has just a little bit of money for the new high school. It includes the $70 million that was already approved plus tens of millions of dollars additional beyond that. It's really up to the school district, I think, to lead the conversation about where they expect this cost to come in and certainly the whole point of creating this policy is so that we are mindful about it as we are making our borrowing decisions. And so I do think this will be part of the discussion about how much borrowing is appropriate for the new high school and basically to boil it all down. You can be confident that more than half of the total capacity is being reserved for the school district under this policy and that there is substantial additional capacity for a new high school beyond the $70 million that has already been approved. To get into more detailed numbers than that, I think it's really the district has to lead that discussion. Okay, we'll go to Karen, then Airheart, and then I think that will be all of our questions for tonight. Thank you. Hi. So my understanding, I think, is that 70 million that we approved was for renovating the high school, not building a new high school. So I feel like there's gonna be, I'm sure more bonds that will be required. And that's what I wanted to ask Kathy before because I love to ride my bike and the bike path is great and all that, but we need a high school. Like I don't care about any of those other things anymore right now, like we should be focusing on how we're gonna get this high school up as quickly as possible. And as far as taxes, you're saying a median price, it's gonna be $13. Well, the reappraisal has really increased my taxes like 40% because I don't know, Mr. Vickery thinks my house is worth really a lot of money and you really are driving. I'm a senior now and you are driving families out, maybe not you personally, but this whole reappraisal, I know young families that cannot pay their taxes. And Mr. Vickery went to each NPA and really downplayed that, oh, don't worry, we're not gonna be affected. Well, I am personally affected and I know many, many other people who are personally affected. So I don't think you get that, how we have to be more careful with what we're doing. And I'm against the, do you wanna increase the police thing? You are comparing it to Madison, which has 255,000 people, we have 42,000 people. So that, and that's a whole different thing, but I really, I think that we need to just rethink this because, and also even doing a special election, I know that costs a lot of money there. And we could have waited till March, March is only a few more weeks, months away. So I just think that, I don't know, I feel like you're just trying to price people out of Burlington, Vermont. So Karen, I, so there are elements of what you said that I fully agree with. I think Burlingtonians pay way too much in property taxes. There's no doubt about that. The municipal investments are not the driver of the dramatic run up in property taxes over recent decades. If you, what is driving the tax burden is a broken statewide education financing system. In just a little bit more than the time I've been mayor, we have gone from a situation where 40% of the property tax, over 40% of the property tax on an annual basis went to the city to a place where only about 30% goes to the city. The city has been very restrained in its budgets. Certainly throughout the decade that I've been responsible for it. We have kept the cost of the general property taxes for the operations of government underneath, well below the rate of inflation. The other major driver of why home valuations went up so much is that we just simply don't build enough housing. We have a huge supply issue in terms of housing in Burlington and you and I have been on the opposite sides of many past debates about the importance of housing. It is far more than anything about municipal spending. It is opposition to the creation of new housing that is driving this huge run up of valuations and the scarcity of housing. So I've been stood for fighting against that in every way I know how. I don't think there's, with the possible access from a new high school, I don't think there's much else that's more important. I guess, and climate change, I don't think there's much else that's more important than addressing our housing supply shortage. And this is a conversation that's gonna continue in the months ahead. The city is gonna be doubling down on its efforts to address the housing supply crisis and to functionally end homelessness. And there are many reasons that I hope the public will support that effort. One of them should be concerns about property taxes going up. If we had the right amount of new investment in housing happening on an annual basis, that would have bring a lot of relief to the run up of housing prices. And it would also divide these costs, municipal costs over a bigger tax base. So I stand by my record of turning the city's finances around of creating a double A rated city for going from the edge of junk bond status. We've been very responsible and careful about your dollars and our efforts to do that. I think infrastructure is important. And when every time we've talked to voters, they've said infrastructure is important too. So that's why we're bringing this forward again. I hope you'll support it again if you wanna continue the turnaround that we've succeeded with over the last five years with the city's infrastructure. Hi, and we're really short on time here hard. So just keeping in mind. Thanks, Mayor. Thanks for the presentation. Hope you're doing well tonight. So my question, and I fully support the need for the city to invest in its infrastructure, you're absolutely right. It's always been a struggle to find the money for these kinds of things. And we have large needs, including the high school. But I'm just wondering, given the fact that Congress just passed this big infrastructure package and hopefully there's more to come through Build Back Better, and I know it's recent, but have your staff been able to do any kind of analysis to what extent some of the money in the bipartisan bill that just passed can be used for some of the things on the list? Hey, Arad, I'd love it if we got a memo from your team telling us exactly how to understand this huge bill. We are digging into it. You know, it certainly represents substantial opportunity for the city and the city council was really clear and the resolution here, if we end up doing better, we have assumed in that big complicated spreadsheet I had up there, we have assumed some federal infrastructure investment in this $150 million plus total plan for the coming years. If we do better than that, those assumptions, the council is really clear that, you know, they may, that it will take further council action. We're gonna, there are guardrails on the resolution that we're not gonna spend the local money if we don't need to accomplish these goals. Great. I will say, I think it's gonna a little bit, maybe I'm curious to take on this, Arad, from your perspective, working for the senator. I actually think having strong local flexible dollars may actually allow us to do substantially better in the competition that's gonna go on out there for these federal dollars. I mean, already we have deadlines coming up in the next few weeks for applying for some of these competitive funds and having local matching funds, having shovel ready projects, I think is gonna put us in position to do really well competing for these dollars in the coming years. You know, I think there's wisdom in that. I think it's still early, you know, we're, and I'm not the expert on the bipartisan bill, I've been focusing on Build Back Better and the housing investments that are gonna hopefully go into that when it hopefully finally passes. So, you know, I think it's still early to know exactly how it will filter out to municipalities. You know, we've seen, we've got numbers for, you know, what we expect the state to receive, but it hasn't been broken down to the granular level of how much Burlington might expect. So, looking forward to working with your team on that. And it's an exciting part. These are hard times, but that's an exciting part about what's going on right now to have a real partner in the federal government for unlike anything I've experienced over the last decade. It's really exciting. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Great, thank you so much. Mayor, I think we're gonna wrap up, but thank you for coming in. Thank you everyone, nice to see everybody. Great, now we're going to go into our redistricting discussion. So, I don't know who wants to kick us off. And then Keith, I have your presentation when you're ready. I'll start by saying that Ann and I are listeners and gathering public input. And Keith has gone to a lot of work, excuse me, to put a presentation together and I would leave the floor to Keith be my recommendation, okay, with that? Yeah. Well, I've got a couple of other things, but I'd like to go through some timelines and record that there's another public meeting next Wednesday, but... And there's also another public meeting December 6th. So, two more public meetings and we're hoping a survey, although that seems to be delayed. We'll see a survey in the community news of December the 3rd. Oh, okay, yep. So yes, the two public meetings, which are gonna be hybrid meetings, again, are November 17th, which is a Wednesday and December 6th, which is a Monday. I think those were the main messages that we wanted to get out. The only other one that I would add is the city attorney spoke to the public meeting last Monday, that's Monday, whatever it was first, I think. And said that it's the time train as it stands at the moment makes it most likely that we won't see an election with the new boundaries, whatever they are, until time meeting day in 2024. And if anyone wants me to go through that, give me a call or email me. I'm sorry, I just wanted to clarify that. So the actual vote on whatever redistricting plan we come up with, I believe we're voting on that November, 2022, okay. So it's not gonna be this town meeting day. That's right, it would be 2024 when we'd actually see them in effect. Well, it'll be implemented, okay. Yeah, do you have my chart to take? I'm currently the ward clerk for ward eight. I started out when ward eight started existence in March of 19, or March, 2015. I came from ward one where I was asked to be a volunteer when they needed me. They didn't always need me because they had a real oil machine there or they had people who did it every year. They spent the whole day there, so they really didn't need help. When we started off in ward eight, it was really different. First of all, we didn't have a pool of people who were available for election day to be able to spend the whole day doing the work that the people that I'm used to doing in ward one. They saw it as exhausting. They saw it as something, or they were working. They didn't have the day off. So we didn't have the availability of people to do this. So we had to really go to a big push to get people to come in for a couple of hours to do this. And we had to convince the city that the state would allow us to have anybody from the city of Burlington to be a volunteer, to be an assistant election worker in ward eight. You don't have to be a ward eight resident. That was our first thing to overcome. Our second thing was to get a space that allowed us to be able to operate as I was used to in ward one. Because we often have people who show up, well now we have people who show up and they need space to register, same day registration. But that's not the only thing that our people have to do. Our constituents have to do. Most of them will get a card. I don't know if you're familiar with those. I wasn't in ward one because we didn't do that. Oftentimes they get a card that says they need to tell the voter registration, they need some information. So we'd have our constituents coming to the checklist and we'd always send them back. So we've really, we've had to have more volunteers to kind of go through that with them. They first enter the polling place to make sure that they're on the checklist, that they're at the right place. Oftentimes they're not, oftentimes they need to go to another place. Oftentimes they're not registered, so we have to take care of that. Oftentimes they're challenged, that is they need to give further information. Just to give you an example, we all, those of us who are regular voters have received a mail-in ballot and so did all the constituents in ward eight. But 1,850 of those mail-in ballots came back with address C unknown. And ward one had 1,500 right behind it. So I think some of the larger wards are the, some of the wards were some of our larger student populations are dealing with the fact that either the student has left the ward or left the area, whatever. So those are some of the things that I come to. It's just really hard to explain how different we are and how it feels that we are having to have, up to 20 volunteers to take care of making sure that our students are met in a friendly manner, that we get the help they need to get the information we get information we need for them so they can get checked off on the list and then get their ballot and then show them how to put it into the voting machine. So what you have here is the kind of comparison between ward eight, the registered voters, and they're not all that much different from the average of wards one through seven. We're probably a little bit lower, but not that much lower. And this is the real, since the number of our voters who did not, or whose ballot came back, indicates that a lot of the names on our checklist are people who are no longer living in our ward. I don't know if they're living in another place in the city or if they're out of the state, but that's one of the situations that we have in ward one. Because as Gene Bertman said about his ward, ward three, we're a transitional ward. People come and go. And because a majority of our students, 42, 150 live on campus in ward eight. You can see that we do have a large number of students that are not engaged in the voting in our ward. And some of the things I heard at the last input meeting I thought were not true about students. And I'm not gonna go into why I think they're not engaged or other things, but I can just tell you anecdotes of my campaigning door to door. So I sort of tried to compare the number of votes that we had in each one of the elections from March 3rd, 2015, to just the past one, March 2nd, 2021. Now, I wasn't originally gonna put in the primary ones in August, but I decided you should see like the primary in August 9th, 2016, ward eight had 285. The August 14th, did I say 2016? The August 14th, 2018, we had 188. I suspect that's the basis, the base or the core of our voters. That's kind of the number of voters who are regular, there may be long-term residents of the ward, whatever. I put that in there just to show that the numbers fluctuate. We never know how many we're going to get from vote, from election to election. We also are the ward that registers the most number of voters. And in 2018, we registered over 500 new voters. And it's not unusual for us to register between two and 300 new voters each time we have an election. So that involves a lot more volunteers, a lot more helping the students understand what they're doing and making sure they don't put their home address out of state, but they're Burlington residents, so that they become a Burlington voter. I'm not really going to give my interpretation of what I see here, but I think it shows that we don't have the engagement of the student population that people were desiring. And I can just give you my experience from going door to door. Many of the students say, I vote at home. In 2016, and in 2020, when I thought, even on my street, I would go around and ask, let the students know where they could vote and blah, blah, blah. And nobody said they were going to vote in Burlington. They wanted to vote in their home state. They thought their vote would have more weight there than in Vermont. And we have on our street, we have 11 registered voters who are owners of homes or long-term renters. The other 50 to 60 residents on our street are students. And if three or four vote, that would be unusual. That is just my street. And I think the numbers here show you that other pockets in the community that makes up Ward 1, you see the same kind of thing. So does anybody have any questions about this chart before I go on? I have some other comments. Well, first of all, this is all public knowledge, or public information on the city clerks. But I wasn't sure that they were always accurate. So I went to the tabulator that we work as, we work out at our ward at seven o'clock, we have to run the tabulator strips and we have to make sure that the number of voters that we've checked off equals a number of ballots in this machine. Now, working with people that come in for a couple of hours that then leave and somebody else take over, and at the beginning meant that we had some slip-ups. We were off a couple of votes and we couldn't find out. And who knows, when you're working with volunteers you don't know, especially as they're coming in new, they haven't really been trained or done it before. Like in Ward 1, the ladies sitting at the checklist, they do it for the 12 hours, they've done it for years. And so I found it was more accurate, although we did have to find all of the write-ins and make sure that a write-in number was the same as the number came to the same number people checked off. We oftentimes, in our checklist, have more pages of new voters that day than we have pages with a voter checked off. Okay, that's a situation in this ward, okay? I think I saw, does Lewis have their hand raised? I can't see anything else on my side. What's that? Lewis has their hand raised if you wanna promote them. Okay, I'll just go through some of my notes. I've drawed it down some thoughts. At our last, at our last vote, we had 229 new voters we registered that day. That was a town meeting day. It was the election for mayor, so there was some excitement. And we had a total of 837 votes cast in Ward 8. It was the lowest number of votes cast of all the wards. Almost 21%. Actually Ward 1, which also has a high number of students in it, they're not all that much higher than we are. And they actually bring down the average from the wards like Ward 4 and Ward 5, which have high percentages of their people voting. Probably less renters, less people that are moving in and out of those areas. I also explained that we usually have the largest, well, we've only done it twice. We've had the largest number of mail-back ballots. That the postman says the address he is unknown. As school commissioner, I used to go and I was invited to the Student Government Association at UVM monthly and we would talk. And I could tell that they enjoyed asking questions about the school district and getting information. But when it came to getting signatures for people because I needed to get on the ballot, there were only two out of the 50 that were actually registered in Burlington. And when I went last night to beg, for volunteers for the Ward 8, I need volunteers for Ward 8's election on December 7th. I put out many, many things. I've gotten four names. I got a good number. Now we'll see if they'll actually be able to do it. And one of the comments, basically the comments that they told me were, they wanted to be more engaged, but they really, they didn't have that energy. The activists were. It's very clear that there is a group of people who activists who wanna get registered, wanna vote and get involved. But a lot of other students are not that committed to voting in Burlington. They have more loyalty to wherever they come from. And that was clear to me last night. So that was some of the survey information I have picked up so far. Okay, our ward, when we, the worst time for our election officials is when we vote in legislative districts. And our ward has three legislative districts, as well as ward one. But our legislative districts are so convoluted that somebody on one side of the street is in one legislative district. And the other side of the street is in another legislative district. And it's very hard to explain to students which legislative district they're in. So we have to use all kinds of tricks. Use the map, kind of use this. And oftentimes the information we've been given by the city or the university isn't as accurate as it needs to be. So we've had to deal with that. And I think one of the advantages that we've had is that I know the district so well that I can tell a student where they are. Even if somebody who's trying to help them, it gives them the wrong information. And then we have to have a discussion about which is the district they're in. Oftentimes they think during, even when they're told they're in a district, their name isn't on the checklist. It's because they moved and they registered in another district. So we have to have them, we have another list, another pile of change of address. That's another. We are at 838. Just, it's 838 right now. So how much time do I have more? I don't know. I guess I could talk forever on this, but basically what I'm saying is that for a city council ward, this ward takes a lot of work. And we're not getting a lot of the engagement. I think people thought they were getting with students being in it. And I feel like you're so, is that all you want me to say? I thought I came prepared to say a lot more, but that's okay. Let me ask you a question. So why did the fact that Ward 8 has such a difficult time finding people to vote and finding people to work at the fold? So what is the city of Burlington doing to help you conduct your fold? So is the city, is the city clerk's office giving you extra assistance? They will send us people, I don't know how to say this, they'll let everybody know we need them, but they don't necessarily send us the most helpful people. So that's why I've developed my own group of people, sort of camaraderie. They know the situation. They give me, I mean, like I sent in five names yesterday, like we were supposed to, and Lori knows that I'm gonna be having to send in some of the last, sometimes the day after the election, because I can get students to come in the last minute. I just wanted to say, I don't get the point. What are we trying to do? Are we trying to make students that live in Ward 8 more engaged in local politics and become voters? Or what is the objective here? That's a good question. My job is to make sure that we run an election that is secure, and everyone gets an opportunity to vote who is qualified to vote, and that's what the Ward clerk does. Lewis, can I try and answer that as well, if I may? So the city attorney's presentation will show guidelines for 2010, redistricting. I won't go through them all. You know everything that's wrong. And one of the first recommendations that the ad hoc committee will be giving to the city council is to adhere to the guidelines for 2010. And the result of that will be or should be that the sort of dysfunctional or dysfunction that Keith is describing is, I won't say it's eradicated, but it's spread out among a number of different wards. I don't know how that's going to work out because we're not drawing boundaries, we're just taking public comments. But it- So does that, to grant us, should I just say, does that translate into a redistricting that would provide viable or consistent urban population of permanent residents, more of a race, as opposed to the diluted situation where you have a lot of non-voting student transitory populations in the wardings? I can only say that we hope so. And that would be the strongest possible recommendation. Any final questions, comments in the last couple of minutes? I have a question. So as a steering committee for wards one and eight, are they interested in ever making a, like basically promoting some sort of resolution to the city council as to whether or not wards one and eight MPA are interested in maintaining ward eight or if ward eight should be removed and the city should go back to a different number of wards, based on what Keith is saying, Mr. Pilder. Well, I think what our role is to get feedback and that feedback is going to be tabulated and presented to the city council. I don't know that we're gonna actually make specific recommendations for to present to the city council ourselves and reflecting our own personal opinions. I would agree with Anne, but I would also say that if something is clearly dysfunctional, that there's, I don't see any reason not to mention it to your city councilor because they're gonna have to make some decisions. And we would like them to know, I think, that the sort of situation that Keith describes is prevalent and I think Sandy Wynne said in the meeting last Monday, the public meeting that we held in Contoy's, she said it was intellectually challenged and I think that that's correct. But we only have a minute or so left before we have to clear out, so Jonathan, if you want to do the raffle, I'm pulling. One, two, they hope you will read what I wrote. Kathy, Kathy has won one. And then Angie, Angie and Angie are our winners. How exciting. Well, thank you all so much for coming tonight. I know that Keith's put together this presentation so if anyone wants to read it or see it, reach out and we'll make sure that you get a copy as well as all the other presentations and it was great seeing you all and then we will see you next month. Thanks everyone. Bye bye. Local board. Oh, okay. It's a one-year subscription.