 So I'm going to call me to order. And so the first thing is to review and approve the agenda. And I don't think we have any. Changes to the agenda as they are as it as it is. Does anyone have any information. Different than that. Okay. Don't miss Madam Mayor. I just suggest that we. Flip. That we do the meeting with the legislators before the alternate transportation issue. That is. Number eight. Oh, I see. So flip seven and eight. Yep. That makes sense. I like that. Yes, Jack. I had a question about the. It was pointed out to me earlier this evening. That when we last took this up. The motion I made was to. Delay. Consideration. For four weeks. And then we had. We changed the meeting dates for. November. So we're only three weeks. We're only three weeks. We're only three weeks out from that now. And I gather that there was. Some discussion of it at the house. The homelessness task force meeting, but. Today, I think. Maybe yesterday, but I gather that it wasn't. And concluded. So it makes me wonder. If we shouldn't. Take this off. And put it to our next meeting. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I apologize for the public input that we're looking for. We'll have had the full. Time. That, that we were looking for. I apologize for not mentioning it earlier. But as I said, I was just, it was just pointed out to me today that this was a potential issue. Yeah. Your point is. Well taken. My only hesitation in taking it off is that I know page is planning to join us. I think it's going to be a good idea. I think it's going to be a good idea to hear from her, even if. We don't do anything further than that. Is that, is that okay with you there, Jack? Yeah, it's fine with me. Thank you. All right. Okay. Anything. Well, and if, if page doesn't. Show up. Then maybe we can. We can table it for another day. Okay. Any other thoughts or comments on the agenda? Okay. Objection. We will consider the approved. So onto business and appearances. This is an opportunity for a number of the, to address the council on any topic that is otherwise not on our agenda. And so that. If you have something you'd like to share with us. Please state your name and where you live and try to keep your comments to two minutes or less or so. And are there folks who would like to speak? I see. Elizabeth, you would like to, to speak. I'm afraid my internet is a little. So. If it gets to be too bad, then maybe we can have Donna lead things. Can I make anybody hear me? Yes. Yes. Before you go. Yeah. Go ahead. Before you go. Is there anyone else who would like to address the council? Yeah. Steve Whitaker. Okay. With the complete streets committee. I would mind taking a moment. Okay. Yes. And Alex. I haven't seen the agenda, but I wanted to add some considerations regarding the new alternate parking. Okay. Great. So anyone, anyone else I have before so far. I should mention my, my, my, my column is around an agenda item around the. Active transportation fund. So if it can wait till then I can wait or I can speak. Oh yes. Let's do that. Because if it's pertinent to that item, let's do it together with that. Discussion. Is that okay? Understood. Okay. Super. All right. So, all right. Elizabeth, go ahead. Yeah. Okay. And you can hear me. Now, yes. Oh my God. It's a miracle. I'm having issues with my sound on zoom. Anyway, I'm excited to let you know that this week. There is an onboard survey being done. On the GMT routes, Montpelier hospital Hill and the Montpelier circulator. And I just wanted to let you know that that's going on. If you know of any current runs, I am going to forward information to all the members of the council. I don't think we've done that yet with a tiny URL link for the survey monkey. Survey. And also a phone number. Where people can call in for the survey. So it's exciting. People have actually been calling to do the survey. We've learned a lot and we'll report on that. And another meeting. So just to let you know. Oh, and wait a moment. The reason we're doing it is because on demand, microtransit and Donna and Conor will report to this later, but I'm just going to do it in case anybody doesn't know about this on demand. What was formerly known as on demand, microtransit is now my ride by GMT and it will be starting January 4th. And we're very lucky to have. Andy Perschlick on our, the, what is now known as the my ride community advisory group. So there is a lovely group of people who are working very hard to affect this transition. So we're very lucky and not kill you. And just on that topic. Just so everyone knows council and everyone else. GMT will be on our next meeting agenda December 2nd to update us on that. That service. And it was interesting. That's fabulous. Okay. Steven, go ahead. I want to. Just point out that your public restrooms, the library is now closed again. I suspect that the executive order is going to necessitate. Rappel rows are being closed. City hall is closed. That your public bathrooms. Collectively, you're either cruel or oblivious or both. But it. The fact that people cannot find a place to use a bathroom is a real problem. And you need to address it. You need to address it at every meeting until you. Solve it. Secondly, I would like to point out that. You need to address it at every meeting until you. Solve it. Secondly, I raised this at the homelessness task force meeting this morning. That. The charge that was given to that committee 15, 16 months ago, they have failed to do any of what they were charged to do. Their own sole accomplishment is a couple of. Port of Johns. With no head washing facilities. So you really. You know, it was. I was refrained from saying this last time that. To delegate them to address and solve the. Dilemma of what role the pocket part should have. Or what should multiple of them, et cetera. Is somewhat farcical. When it was appointed, we recommended. That it not be service providers. But service providers be interviewed by the task force so that. To deliver the. Service providers. Invested interests. And those invested in status quo. Would not be controlling the meetings. Now you have good Samaritan another way. Center for independent living, the police department. Maintaining status quo and not fulfilling their mission. Right. My recommendation is dissolve it and base it. Based the music as the city. year and a half later, and it's a travesty of bad governance. Additionally, well, that's enough for now. Thank you, Steven. And just to follow up on that, we had made a list of publicly available restrooms. That was pre the most recent closures due to COVID. I wonder if we could update that list with that. I'm seeing Karen shaking her head there. Is that something that seems doable? Yes, I'll do that. Okay. Thank you so much. It's still a useless effort. You've got an emergency problem going on with a COVID pandemic and people cannot wash their hands anywhere. There's no bathroom because there's no bathroom. Anyway, I'll stop there. Okay. Thank you, Steven. All right. Alex, oh, yes, go ahead, Bill. You had two other people waiting for general business. Yeah. So, Dayton is going to hold off on his comment. So, Alex, I think you are up. Okay. Hello. So, Mike, I'm not 100% familiar with the overall format. Mike, the general concern I have is the new alternate parking that requires people to move their vehicle every day side to side. The concern is multifaceted. Some water under the bridge is how it was communicated. I only learned it when it was already enacted. I know, in retrospect, I found a single post on the front porch forum. I left social media some years ago. It was just too much. I was trying to retain my sanity. And the price is not being able to learn about things like this. I would have joined the earlier discussions. But again, at this point, that's water under the bridge. But hopefully, something could be done better going forward. But realistically, speaking of going forward, the concerns, specific concern I have are multifaceted. One is the overall amount of carbon output that moving, especially since the rule says that vehicles must be moved in the evening after five o'clock. So, it's in winter we're talking about colder time. Everything will take longer. So, I actually made a little experiment. I took half an hour. I drove all around town using my electrically charged car. And counted cars parked on the streets. I made some estimates, like how long it takes to move the car, compared like average car efficiency. So long story short, at the most optimistic estimate, it would generate 11,000 pounds of carbon compared to the same, compared to city vehicles even waiting. Like I remember, I know the argument is that the city vehicles that are doing plowing have to wait for the cars to get towed at night. And I even took into consideration some excessive number of towings that would be done. So long story short, from a carbon point of view, I'm happy to share my calculations. Also, it would cost every single person who has to move their car one day of their life through the week, over a winter, to move their cars. So, I realize I understand exactly the problem that we are trying to solve. And I'm not saying that we should not solve it. But I am not sure if this is the best way of solving. So, from a little bit of Googling I did, I see that it was inspired by Madison Wisconsin. And it looks like they are already rolling this program back. So, that's a brief feedback I have. Happy to elaborate a little more and share the spreadsheet. Alex, I appreciate your calculations, that you took the time to make some calculations about this and looking at it from a carbon perspective. I would love to see them. And I'd love to chat with you about those calculations. So, if you get the chance to send them along, I would be very interested. So, fodder for the discussion. Sound all right? I'm going to, I am, chat is disabled. I was going to paste the link to the Google spreadsheet into the chat, but it's off. Go ahead and just email it to me. We'll follow up. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you. Was there anyone else? And Cameron, are you seeing any hands of anyone? Not right now. Okay. Could I, something I meant to add just a quick thing. As a possible solution going forward, I wonder if, okay, follow the problem that I'm assuming mainly we're talking about the nightly budgets for due to overtime. So, maybe it could be that people move cars side to side only when necessary. So, we kind of follow the model of the sea of how it used to be. So, we announce a parking ban at this point people begin moving cars side to side. So, this way it could be done during the day and we avoid overtime at night. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. All right. So, moving on. So, we, just to be clear, so this, this next item, an appointment to the Montpelier or as a, to have a Montpelier member to the Capstone Board is really more of a recommendation from this group. And I see that there are some folks here who are, who have applied for that and would love to give folks an opportunity to introduce themselves and discuss their, their interest in helping to serve Capstone in this way. And yes, we'll go, we'll go from there. So, I, I see that Abby White and Gabriel Lajunis are both here. Am I missing anyone else who, Jack? Yeah. Mayor, before we hear from the candidates, I see that Sue Minter, the Executive Director of Capstone is here and I would like to give her an opportunity to say something if she wants to. I think that's a great idea. Sue, would you like to say anything about this? Thanks. I don't want to take a lot of your time, but I really appreciate your taking time to focus on kind of our mission is to really, we have a board that is what we call a tripartite board. So one third of our members to our board are the clients we serve. The participants is the word we use. One third comes from the private sector and one third comes from the public sector. And we also, as you may know, serve Orange County, Lamoille County and Washington County. We have four different members of the public sector. And right now, we have a member representing the city of Barry. We have a member of the state legislature from Orange, Representative Jay Hooper. We have a member from Lamoille County who is appointed by Representative David Jacoboni. And I was hoping and reached out to the mayor to see if we could engage the city in sort of being represented and being a part of our work and our mission through this. So, you know, what we have done is worked in tandem and reached out to some folks. I'm happy to see whoever applies. And I do want to say that our board has met with Abby because she expressed an interest already before even there was an opening on our board. So, we have met with her on a couple of occasions and she has visited our board. But we obviously will welcome other applicants. But we'll look to you for a recommended applicant to serve on our board to represent you and your interests. And also to be a liaison to you so that you learn more about what we are trying to do on behalf of the vulnerable citizens and residents of Montpelier. Thanks so much. Thank you. All right. Well, so we can go in either order here. So, why don't we want to start with Gabriel? Would you introduce yourself and tell us about your interest in serving on the capstone board? Yeah, great. Thanks for having me here at my and appreciate. I mean, Abby sounds like she's very interested. I'm sure she's a great candidate. I just love the work that's being done by capstone. And, Sue, grateful for your leadership there. I've come to know capstone really through service at the Church of Jesus Christ Alliterate Saints. We did a grant last year for several of the community action agencies for clothing drive. And, and the Sue's team received a lot of that is able to distribute that over the last year. I'm really grateful for that just so much of the work they do. You know, over the last few years up until 2018, I was in the board at the veterans place. And so that homelessness problem that we have, you know, working through that just again, great partnerships that we've seen there. It's a great pause. And when I saw the post looking for somebody to represent Montpelier, I thought I'd love to join that effort and and help. I'm a financial advisor. I work with Edward Jones, had a practice here until just recently moved down to Barry. Have a legal background. And anyway, I'd love to help if there's any. Thanks so much. Great. Thank you. Abby, go ahead. Hi, everybody. My name is Abby White. Good to be with you here. I know many of you. I'm, I'm a Montpelier resident. Obviously, I have two children in the Montpelier school systems, one that's in the middle school, one that's in the elementary school. And for my day job, when I'm not being a mother, I work for the Vermont Land Trust and I'm the Vice President for Strategic Communications there. So I became familiar with capstone in previous work when I was working on weatherization and really trying to advance both access and resources for weatherization throughout the state and had a great opportunity to work with Sue and her team, Paul Zabriski, over there and just became deeply familiar with the work that they're doing on so many different fronts to combat poverty in our region. So became aware, interested, and just really an admirer of the organization and of Sue and her leadership. You know, later, I would say over the last year, I thought a lot more about capstone as we saw what was happening in our community and the ravages of the pandemic and the economic fallout that we continue to see and the gross disparity that that's not just revealed but deepened. And I truly believe that poverty is just one of the, if not the most important issue that we need to address. It's at the root of so many other causes in society, whether that's climate-related, whether it's, you know, education, healthcare. And I see capstone as an organization that's really leading on that in our region. And like many of you, this year has been just one for the record books and one I think that's forced all of us to just think more deeply about what am I doing? And what can I be doing more? How can I deepen my commitment? And so I reached out to Sue and expressed my desire to get more involved just because I see the need and I see the opportunity for more of us to get involved and be active participants in this democracy because if we don't, then who will? So that summarizes my interest and thank you again for the opportunity and just look forward to next steps. Great. Thank you. Any counselors have questions? Donna, go ahead. I just like to comment that Abby was one who put some really clear relatable words in your narrative, in your application. I mean, the seven people applied all have amazing resumes, have made contributions to our community. But I really felt that your statement of why you wanted to serve on this committee really laid out the understanding of its purpose. I was very impressed. And so I hope one, I congratulate you on that wording wherever it takes you. But also to Sue, we have seven people here. So I hope you take advantage of somehow finding a place for these people to help you because they're all very, very qualified. Thank you. I wanted to just chime in to say there is room for help in many ways. So I am thrilled to hear that there are seven applicants and Gabriel, your investment in us through this warm clothing drive has been incredible. Your financial background, I know that if there are seven people that want to be a part of Capstone, there's room for you. There probably is only room for one member of the formal board, but we have many committees and many activities. And I would love the chance to engage all of you. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions from the council? Okay. So, Jack, go ahead. Pursuant to one VSA section 313A3, I move that we go into executive session for the purpose of considering an appointment of a public official. Excellent. We got a couple of seconds. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay. So the councillors will be leaving this call, but the call will stay open. I'd like to make the motion that we ask the Capstone to consider appointing Amy White to their board of directors and Gabriel Lanzies as an alternate. Second. And you meant Abby. Abby. Yes. Okay. All right. Sorry. Was there a second? Jack. Okay. Give her a second. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. And opposed. All right. Well, we want to thank both of you for your interest in your time and certainly keep us posted as to what's going on with the Capstone and how we can be involved. The work of Capstone is just so important, especially now. We're so grateful for everything Capstone does. So please pass along our gratitude to everyone there. All right. Thank you. And we also want to encourage all of the other applicants to consider getting involved. And as Sue said, there are lots of ways that people can be involved with Capstone. So thank you again. Thank you all so much. And we'll be sure to reach out to every applicant. Thank you. Super. Thank you. Okay. So just to revisit the Gertin Pocket Park item, is there anyone here for the Gertin Pocket Park? Steve, if you take it up, I'm going to speak to it. Would you be opposed to us tabling it? Not at all. Okay. Great. Thank you. So I think we'll we'll just push that off to another meeting. All right. So meeting with our delegation. So we are so grateful that you are here. Thank you for taking the time to meet with us as we chat with you about what our priorities would be for this session. And we do want to make this a discussion and see what your impressions are for this coming session. So we have had a committee of the council come up with priorities. And I'm going to turn things over to any member of that committee to kick us off here. I don't mind kicking it off. I think maybe Bill would be best to go through the whole agenda there since there's a lot of stamp recommendations to flesh out. But I would just say very grateful for the delegation to come to a meeting like this. And I think it's more important than ever during the pandemic that that close tie between municipal government and the state government. And I think the genesis of this was, you know, we just realized we don't know what we don't know is happening under the dome there. And it's really great to be able to rely on all of you to let us know of any opportunities we should come up for. Just an example, when we heard one of the colleagues in the Senate there might be looking at cutting pilot funds, you know, Bill sent an email to all three of our senators who I think every one of them got back within like an hour to Bill just to set the record straight that this wasn't happening. And something like that is so important, I think. So as we go into the next biennium, you know, I'm sure COVID is going to continue dominating and, you know, looking at the gap in our budget and the difficult decisions we're going to have to be making in the next few weeks. Any opportunities to draw down state funds to sort of fill those gaps and meet the services at a time when people need them most are going to be so appreciated. So a lot of this legislative agenda is duplicative of last year, I think there are some new things in it though. But yeah, just wanted to on behalf of the committee, thank you so much for spending the time coming in here tonight. Just follow up with that, just more of a process. As you recall, we met with you all this in the spring, I guess, or near the end of the session and decided that that timing wasn't great. And we had we had our laundry list. And what we had agreed at that time with you was we would work up some ideas, run them past the council and then have a conversation with you folks about but are the council's ideas, what were top on your list, what was, you know, if there were things on there that just were never going to happen to let us know now and also if there were things we should have on and then after meeting with you, finalize our actual formal agenda so that it's really done collaboratively with you. So the council appointed a committee of Lauren, Connor and Dan with my me as the staff help. And our group drafted the initial list. The city council as a whole looked at it, made a couple of changes. And then the staff list at the end wasn't really run through the city council. Those are just things the staff was tracking those that chose to offer staff suggestions. Just because some of them are more technical in nature. So I don't have I wasn't played to read through the whole list unless people want me to I assume you all have it. And if there's anything specific people want to ask about or comment on, I think we're interested in hearing and having a dialogue. I would I would mention one or two. That's okay. I mean, yes, go ahead, Senator Cleanup. Yeah, I think your list is good. I don't have any problems with it. Obviously, all most of it involves money. And that's the problem in general. There are some of us who are willing to find ways to raise revenue. And I'm willing one of those people, I think we need to raise revenue to meet our needs. But I think any of these things are going to be difficult given the financial situation. We just have to be aware that we're not sure, of course, whether or not there's going to be federal money. And we have to assume there's going to be some federal money. Because I mean, as bad as things are in Washington, you have to presume that they're going to come up with something. I mean, I guess there's part of me that wouldn't be surprised they did not. But it's just I can't accept the fact that they would actually do nothing. So I hope for the best. I wanted to mention two things, though, that are sort of on your list, just to keep in mind, we did have in terms of the, I forget how it's phrased on your list, but giving local municipalities more power, more decision making, I forget how we refer to it. But we did have a bill last year. And it was S106, which basically was a convoluted way of trying to allow certain communities to take more control over their local decision making. It passed the Senate and it's got stuck in the House Government Operations Committee. I'm not sure, but I presume we're going to take something like that up again. I mean, it's almost become something in the Senate Government Operations Committee. It's almost become something of like a, I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but it's kind of like a joke. You know, we joke about the fact that, you know, we're making decisions for towns all the time. We're never like allowing towns have been put into their own decision making. So I think we will revisit that. The other thing I just want to put on the table, because you've heard from the folks from Montpelier is the non-citizen voting charter change and whether or not the city is interested in trying to move forward with that again. As you remember, it passed the House. It got stuck in the Senate. There would be some, there are some changes going to happen in the Senate, which might make it easier to move that through the Senate. I can't guarantee it, but I just want to make sure that if we, we've, Mary and Andy and I have talked about it a little bit. Usually those things have to, they don't have to start in the House, but they traditionally start in the House. But we want to make sure that if we're going to do that, that you folks want to see it happen. We don't want to try to make it happen again. So I just put that on the table as well. So we will be doing more around trying to give municipalities some power. Not going to guarantee it's going to happen, but we're going to try and then we'll take up the voter thing again, if folks want us to. And then the other thing is just we'll, we'll scratch under every cushion to try to find money that we can send back to local communities. I mean, as you know, you can imagine, we all go through downtown Montpelier. We just see it's, it's, it's really, it's really quiet. Let's put it that way. I mean, it's really sad. And they've just told the state employees that they should be ready to work at home. To March at least is what they said. And I can't imagine what it must be like for someone who owns a restaurant in Montpelier at this point or a cafe or any kind of business really, but it's just really frightening to me that these folks are going to have to like try to survive and cancel more months without any more support. So do everything we can to get them support. As much as that we could, must make them survive and hopefully come out to the other end of this thing. Still in business. Okay. Thank you. Senator Cummings. Okay. Yeah, I think we're all going to be focused on physical and economic survival. And I think once a vaccine becomes available, we're going to have to be doing some coordinating with the cities and towns to get as much of that vaccine out there as quickly as we can. We've been again trying to use every cent of federal money to target those businesses. The good news is any business downtown and that's a lot of them that use NACIS code 72, which was new to me. I keep thinking of NCIS, but it is a tax code. It is on your tax form. And it basically, we were trying to target the hospitality industry, but that covers bars, restaurants, anyone that pays basically rooms and meals tax. And with the remaining 75 million that joint fiscal approved on Saturday, those businesses will be getting 100% of their unmet need. Unmet need is not the best form. They're basically taking last year's revenue, subtracting this year's revenue and any grants you've gotten and what remains is your need. It doesn't help a lot of restaurants and things that were only in business for two months last year, because they didn't have much revenue. So we're working through that. The rest of the businesses retail, we think we'll be getting right now, they've gotten a third of their unmet need. We believe we're going to be able to do 50%. So there is some financial hope out there. Again, we really need more federal funds. We're going through every cent. There will be some more money, we think, going unspent and joint fiscal is meeting again Friday. And we'll probably meet one or two more times before this is done. But we know that we're going to need some more money right now for advanced testing and perhaps some surge hospitals, depending on how the virus tracks. And I think that's it. We are all looking for money. In June, I was looking at $150 million shortfall in the Ed Fund and about $200 million in the general fund. The Ed Fund last time I looked is down to only about $60 million and there's a $30 million reserve that has to be filled in there. But we also know that we deficit spent in the Ed Fund this year not to do a tax increase other than the 4% that the town's voted. So we're going to, we've got some ways to deal with that inter loan borrowing and a few other things, but that will, we're hoping everybody go out and buy something because the sales tax, apparently a lot of folks spent their federal benefit buying things, large items online, and thanks to the Wayfair decision that brought the deficit in the Ed Fund down from $150 to a mere $60 million. So we're going to be working through that. We know the schools are going to have extra costs. We know the cities have extra costs. Everybody write somebody else's congressman because our congress, our delegation is all good. But we really do need some more federal money in here. It's anything that's left on December 30th will now by law go into the unemployment fund to replenish that because we don't want to have to increase unemployment taxes which would probably fall on those who have been hit the most that had to lay off the most people. So we're trying and I think working together and I am, I voted to increase income taxes twice before to protect the safety net. We're going to be looking at if there are ways to work with the tax code to find out how we can find the revenue which we're probably going to need before we get out of this. So that's where we are. And can I say it was really nice to be here to see the capstone discussion because that's how I started. So Abby White might want to be careful. I started out as the City Council representative to what then was the Central Vermont Community Action Council and that service played a big part in getting me appointed to the City Council. So it was good full circle. That's very cool. Well, so thank you. Anyone else want to, any of the other delegation want to share? I didn't know if you wanted, I had a couple questions at least on one thing. You know, as far as my relationship to the City, I'm really interested in my ride by GMT. We're now calling in and participating on that. And I really want to see that be successful. So we'll be watching that both just because I'm interested in and also in my position if I'm still on Transportation Committee. But one of the things listed on here was support legislation allowing removal of red line deed restrictions, which I'm assuming Montpelier doesn't have any. But assuming you're just kind of supporting municipalities in general, if we had, for those municipalities that have those, they should just be able to take them out and take them off and not have to go through a legislative charter approval. That's what you're advocating there. So actually we were, we were approached by a resident who had looked into this and there are deeds not only Montpelier but all around the state that have that still have red line language in them. The courts of rule that they're invalid. So they're not enforceable. But this particular individual and others wanted them taken out of their deed they didn't want. And we're kind of told that you just can't do that. You know, that there's a whole chain of deed title and it was the initial deed. And it's not allowed to be, you know, basically thou shall never mess with, you know, the deed. And certainly this person wanted the city to sort of have asked for the authority to take or to grant authority to change deed language. And we're like, I don't think we can do this. This is something probably that has to come from the legislature and probably has to be done statewide. So, so yes, there is red line language in deeds. It's not enforceable thankfully. But it still exists. And someone, you know, I don't play, I would want a deed that says you can't sell it to X, Y, or Z persons. Right. Oh, yeah, I get it now. I thought it was maybe the restrictions from the municipalities about the deeds. But yeah, maybe Anthony, if he's still in government office, we can figure out a way to address that. And from the real state days probably has some thoughts on that maybe. But one other thing I can talk to Bill offline maybe about is the district heating system. I am interested in that and want to see it be successful and expanded. And I know there was some concerns about the contract with the state. So, if we want to open that up, maybe sleeping dogs are best to lay life, but if not, I'm willing to take that on. I'd be happy to talk to you about that. We did actually have a successful year this year where we brought in more money than we spent. That was good. Trying to whittle down some of our losses. I think the toughest part with expansion right now honestly is the price of the well. It's just a tough, you know, to ask someone to consider, you know, redoing their whole building or even just their connection plus, you know, taking on it's a big financial ask right now. Which is of course the exact opposite of the direction we expected to be when this system was being put in. We were seeing nothing but straight up. So it's hanging in there, but I do think some of our costs with the state could be revisited. That would be great. And particularly some of the capacity issues that interpretations of capacity that the state has raised, which I see, you know, Mary here, we sweat a lot of blood over this and, you know, it was not at all the way. We, the interpretation now is not what we agreed to. So, I think you have a good team here if you want to bring it up again, you know, between the House and the Senate, we should be able to to do something if we need to. Okay, that's great to know. Well, maybe we should set up something separately on that. And one other thing, it's not on your list, but last time we did talk, I think I was supposed to reach out to Donna at some point, but I never did. It was about the dispatching. And so, I don't know if Donna still is the point person on that, but I will do that if there's still an interest in talking about dispatch. Okay. Yes, thank you for bringing that up. Dan Richardson is the appointed member from the Council, and I'm actually an at-large elected member of the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority Board. But I think both of us would really appreciate having a conversation with you. Okay, great. I'll do that. Mayor, John Odom has his hand raised. Okay. John, go ahead. Oh, just a note to make sure that to include me in conversations about any kind of retroactive continuity of deeds. Just, you know, my impulse is I think that's a very dangerous slippery slope, and it is the kind of thing I get invited to the legislature to talk about. So, I just want to would make sure we were all on the same side. Oh, but as long as I've got the floor, I just want to mention to Senator Polina, I'm sure that the city will, you know, will feel the same way. But in terms of non-citizen voting, my office has been very assertive in pushing it. And I say irregardless, oh my God. Anyways, and we'll continue to do so. It's pretty near and dear to my heart. Mary, go ahead and then Connor. Yeah. I won't repeat what other folks have said about our concerns about revenue and expenses, other than to say, I worry about it every day. So, yes, that's on my list too. In terms of kind of the particular portfolio, I carry, I'm very interested in the justice related issues. And so the issues you all raised regarding community services, the police social worker, the effects of legislation on policing, et cetera, got it and paying attention to it. I'm particularly interested in figuring out how we can help push support into the communities that are obviously kind of our first point of where we ought to be offering services and helping prevent folks from going deeper into the system. And so got that in my brain and hope you'll keep me and your conversations and let me know what you're seeing in terms of actions that you would like us to be paying attention to. It would be helpful to know some about your revenue, the municipal cities struggles with revenue in terms of our making arguments within our respective bodies about why we need to be supporting you. I find that we're particularly in tuned with issues, tax issues around the education fund, but tend to be somewhat less sympathetic to the burden of property tax as it relates to municipal issues. So just keep us in the conversation on that. One of the things that's been on my list is just how y'all feel about the train or the railroad. I look at the pile of trash that's kind of next to Ann's house and am very disappointed that we have seen the change that we've seen in the railroad. So we had talked about having a conversation and never did, but it's on my list. Bill, go ahead. Yeah, I just want several comments about the topics that Mary raised and hopefully I'll hit them all. So going back, you know, reverse-ordered the railroad, we had met with the railroad, with V-Trans, Senator Perchlich was actually pretty helpful with that. And I think when we were talking before, we were talking about, you know, the engineering study and trying to figure this out. And the next thing we do, the tractor being put in. Right. And really, nobody knew that was coming. And I'm not really sure how that all happened. And so, you know, any, I suppose, review that you all can do to learn more about that would be great. But the fact is, you know, they're done. It would be nice to see them clean up along the tracks. And in fact, if you really wanted to go for a big ass to get that rail car that's been there for 30 or 40 years out. But yeah, but definitely that's been one thing. With regard to, so I'm going to jump around to the sort of needy population, I think what we're seeing, and here I'm speaking a little bit statewide, not just popular, but, you know, there's been budget cuts backs, budget cut backs, you know, federal state for years. And as the human services costs have diminished, they've fallen more and more and more and more onto city government to the point where, you know, you heard Steve Whitaker talk earlier about, you know, being disappointed at what our homeless task force did it. And, you know, he's not totally wrong. I mean, not about the individuals necessarily, but, you know, we don't have to know how we don't have the expertise to have the organizational infrastructure to deal with these things yet it's sort of falling on us to figure these things out, because the state doesn't seem to have the financial we're with all the capacity to deal with it. So I think we're just asking for, you know, and I know that the money is a bad situation, so I get that, but somehow we're having growing needs and the sort of partnership of who does what it seems to be eroding. And it's a real concern for I think any city or town that has a community center, you know, the rural community is as much of an issue, but places that have, you know, the downtowns are definitely feeling it. Toward that end, there's one very specific thing on our list, which also you heard mentioned, and that is a public bathroom. And it seems pretty, you know, small, but it's actually is an urgent need. And we have spent a lot of time talking about it. COVID has certainly, you know, the state has closed its public bathrooms, the city, everyone has. But visitors who come to the city are coming to use our businesses, they're coming to visit state, they're coming to use all sorts of things. And it certainly would be a nice thing if perhaps we could partnership, you know, and I think on the scale of money, this is not a giant multi-million dollar endeavor to find some commonplace or two in downtown Montpelier where we could actually construct real bathrooms for all people to use. And that it seems to be a concrete bad pun thing that we could do that could show results that would not be a big, and need a real need and not be a big ticket item. Lastly, you talked about municipal revenues. And again, I think it's a little bit of a different story depending on the community you're in. So I'll speak just from Montpelier because it isn't just the property tax. You know, obviously, we are collecting our property taxes. We're, we've seen a little bit of delinquency. It really hasn't been too bad compared to formal. It's a little bit slower. But we are concerned that, you know, the longer this goes on about people's ability to keep paying those, you know, as people are out of work, as their businesses suffer, as whatever happens. And certainly, you know, the municipal tax rate here in Montpelier is high. So that's, that's just a pressure as it always is. But for us, you know, Senator Polina mentioned, you know, the sort of quietness of downtown Montpelier that has translated for us to just massive loss in parking revenue. We also rely on rooms, meals and alcohol tax. And that has dropped drastically. We rely on fees for senior center services, rec programs, all those kind of programs of people gathering and doing all these things. Those have gone off the table. So, so we have a very substantial revenue loss that isn't really just property tax. It's all the other things that make up. And so to cover those losses, we have to raise our property tax by something like 20 cents just to be whole. And, you know, I see two former mayors on here, you know how, how viable that is in a city budget conversation. That's just not, that's not on the table. And nor should it be, I think right now. So, so that's what we're up against. And then we are really concerned about pilot. Thank you all for making sure that we were held whole this past year. And thank you for the support on that. And we'd like to believe that's going to happen again next year. But we all know that pilot is funded by local options taxes throughout the state, which means sales tax, rooms, meals and alcohol taxes, et cetera, in those communities that have local options taxes. So if they are all experiencing the same kind of economic activity downturn that we're seeing, it stands to reason that the fund, the pilot fund will not have the same kind of resources that it's had in years past. And so we, in terms of next, the budget we're preparing now are anticipating a shortfall in our pilot revenues based on that supposition. We haven't seen hard numbers. So there are a list of revenues. Now, as I said, that particular pie isn't the same for everybody. I think if you're a small rural town, dependent solely, really essentially only on property tax, maybe you're doing okay, you know, you're hanging in there. For those communities that have a bigger diversity of revenue stream, particularly based on activity, yeah, I think we're all really hurting. So, you know, we're looking at, I mean, actually our team is meeting tomorrow to talk about a $1.7 million budget gap, which for us is about 15% or something, 13% that we've got to present to the city council in a couple of weeks. So it's real. And it's going to have a big impact on services and projects and all those other things, just as it is at the state. I get it. I mean, I'm not, and one of the things I personally was hoping that we could hear was exactly what you know about the states. I've gone on way too long, but I hope I answered the questions. Bill, would you just send, can you pop what the revenue losses by fund are just, I don't know, on the spreadsheet or just a little way for me to see what they are? It'll help me with my conversations. Do you memorize all that? No, no. You're slipping. No, we'll send it. We have it all prepared, obviously, our own budget work and, you know, for the council, so yeah, we'll get it. In terms of where the state is, you're right to be thinking about what the funds are in pilot. So that's something to watch. I'm actually somewhat relieved that it is not as awful as we thought it was going to be for FY 22. Yeah. And sadly, in some ways, the longer some of this goes on, it creates different revenue options. So, for example, as long as we're in a state of emergency, we get an increase in what the percentage of Medicaid funds are that the state receives that amounts to, well, it's been a while since I've thought about it, but I think it's on the order of $6 to $8 million per quarter. And, you know, so it turns into some real, there's just some weirdness like that. And obviously, as Anne mentioned, we're hoping for federal relief. I personally have been very disappointed that we have not focused that more on the services that both state and government, state and local government provide. And instead, it has gone out the door to people who are desperately in need. But, you know, you guys are our first line of service and defense. And we need to be thinking about you. We'll do the next, we are monthly getting revenue updates. And so that's all on the joint fiscal site if you want to kind of follow it there. But we'll see the next formal forecast in January when we'll build the budget from there. And hopefully, we'll know something from the feds. But I've said that every month that hopefully, we'll know something from the feds and it hasn't happened yet. It's really disappointing. So I have some further comments about the railroad, but I interrupted Connor earlier. So, Connor, do you want to still have the, you saw the comment? Oh, sure. I just had a quick process question. And on the legislative subcommittee, we suspected, but we didn't know for sure on a charter change, the non-U.S. citizen voting in particular. We suspect we would need to put that to another vote again. But we didn't know for sure and probably should have asked John Odom. I could be wrong, but I don't think you need to vote on it again. I think you just need to say that you want us to work on it again. Well, I think, yeah, it needs to be resubmitted. Everything needs to be resubmitted. But that's something you just need to say, will you please do it? And we'll put in a bill request. And there's emails out there asking that right now. If it had been several years since the city vote, it might be wise just in terms of making the argument to the legislature that it was still pertinent, but I think it's fresh enough that we're okay. I feel comfortable resubmitting. That's great to hear. Thanks so much. So sort of to that point about the non-citizen voting and some of the other items that we have discussed tonight, how focused on COVID related bills, do you think the legislature is going to be this year in terms of like, is anything else going to pass or will it be all COVID all the time? Good question. We actually passed things last year. We were limited, at least in the Senate, at first to doing COVID. But this year, we're getting better at COVID. I mean, I think we know what needs to be done. I can say this is the first time I haven't been proud to represent Washington County when we are the highest COVID hotspot in the state. And we need to get that under control because until that's under control, all the money that may be available is going to be being held in case we need to open surge or do more massive testing. But I think I know both bodies are still trying to figure out how we might be able to meet in person. I'm sure you found out there are limits to Zoom meetings to the level of discussion. And there's definitely a level to not meeting at the water cooler in the hall to finding out what's going on on the other side of the building. So, you know, it's probably at this point, as soon as we get a vaccine and get it out there, we'd all like to be back in person and back doing other things, other bills. There's going to be some cleanup. But I think this year, we figured out how to do Zoom. And so, it will be easier to do other things within that limitation. So, I think things will get done probably not as much as other years, but probably more than last year. Yeah, I would agree. I think it's going to be, it's not going to be just COVID. There'll be other opportunities to pass legislation. Okay, that's encouraging. And just to get back to Mary's question about the railroad, I have asked repeatedly for the debris that's next to my house to be removed and not received replies. I know Bill has also inquired about that. And I continue to feel like they're not communicating sufficiently in terms of warning for spraying pesticides. And I am curious as to where things landed. I know we had had some conversation previously about having some exclusion zones or some areas that would be exempted from pesticide spraying. And I'm not sure that I know where that landed. Is it pesticides or herbicides? Well, so I think in this situation, an herbicide, like the pesticide is the umbrella term. So it seems like pesticide would just be for animals, but it's not. Okay. Yeah, and I think Mary put in a bill. Yeah. And so I'm willing to do that on the Senate side this time around. And have you guys been talking to the railroad or to VTRANS, AOT, about the debris and other stuff? Well, so to be fair, I think the people I was emailing were in VTRANS. Okay. Well, we haven't had much contact with either of them in the last year, year and a half. You know, we've all had other stuff going on. And then we had this railroad issue that we kind of flipped over. Right. Rail let you and Mary speak. But so most of our communication with VTRANS and the rail has been about that specific project. So these other issues, I think, from at least from my perspective, have not had a lot of attention recently. Well, they're still live balls. I agree that I would just point it in a way, the whole thing worked out even from before that we had the last meeting, whatever that was over a year ago. So I'll reach out and we can have make sure we have a meeting where we can list our grievances. That would be great. Andrew, would you make sure that, and Bill, would you make sure that I'm included on that? I'd had very specific conversations with the secretary of VTRANS about this and was assured that what happened would not happen. I mean, the same experience that you related, Bill. And I have some thoughts about how the level of control that we can exercise given that the state of the property and does not have to enter into a lease with the railroad unless it chooses to. And I think the lease is probably coming up just to be really to be militant about it. For whatever it's worth, they had piled quite a bit of organic debris, trees that they'd cut down, and so on, on city property. And they did eventually remove that. So we know they can do it. Yep. Okay. Any other thoughts, comments, questions? Lauren, go ahead. I just mostly wanted to thank you. This has been really helpful. And I think just continuing ongoing communication. I mean, obviously, in these unprecedented times, trying to understand as you all are dealing with budget deficits, and we're trying to figure out what we can cut for this year, if we have better information about where gaps either the state might be able to fill or if, you know, if we do get federal funds, what things might be able to might be better to kind of put on hold because they're the kinds of projects we could put stimulus dollars towards, you know, better to pause some infrastructure, because that's easier to get dollars to or something that kind of advice would be would be great to just understand what you're hearing and seeing about, you know, what, I know it's kind of crystal ball right now. So it's hard to say, but just appreciate, you know, the staying in touch as much as possible so we can all do our best, you know, knowing we're have these the budget shortfalls and also, you know, greater needs from our community that we want to be addressing as well as we can, of course. So that's it. Thanks. Dan, go ahead. I want to echo the gratitude that the other City Councilors have expressed for the four of you coming tonight and taking the time to talk with us through some of these issues and, you know, I'll echo Bill's take on on this, which, you know, is that we're having to deal with more demand for social services that we haven't traditionally provided in the time where we're facing these budget shortfalls, which is probably just a microversion of what you're dealing with on the state level. But it obviously is causing us this type of distress and need for additional resources. So to the extent that money comes from the federal government and pass can be passed through to municipalities, free projects, we certainly we will spend it well and wisely in providing some of these essential services. Moving forward, you know, if there's any way that any of you would prefer to have us keep in touch as things I know things can move quickly, we're certainly all ears for that. Connor, Lauren and myself are the legislative committee, and really we're we're formulators, but we can certainly extend to any type of communicators and people to go in between when when things start to happen, if we can help in any way. So I wanted to offer that as well. Okay. You know, I just want to mention not to open up a whole conversation, but one thing we didn't mention this evening was the other pull on our financial resources are the schools in the city and around the state who are like local communities are taking on a lot of a bigger burden than ever before at a time when the resources are not there to meet the demands that are being placed on them. So it's just another thing we all need to keep in mind is schools are looking for more support as well, educators and staff at the schools. And so we it's just that's another pull on the financial resources that we have to keep in mind as we move forward. You know, I think this is is helpful to sit, you know, in a formal meeting, but it would I think be more helpful if at some point maybe the legislative committee or the, you know, committee would build if we could have more informal meetings just to keep us updated because I didn't know what the issue with the railroad was. And so I don't know if I don't know what it is. I don't know how to, you know, if I can fix it. But but in the old days, when I was mayor, as much as I hate early morning meetings, I was dragged up to the, the State House at 730 every Tuesday morning. And we sat there and this was when we were birthing pilot. We were there every Tuesday and we button hold our legislative delegation and talk to them about the reality of the state not paying anything to be here. And it, you know, but to find a way to talk to us, there's six of us, those of us in the Senate have a much bigger territory, but it's helpful to know what's going on. I think the cities have always, they're at the bottom line when the state doesn't come up with the resources to deal with mental health issues, homeless issues. The bottom line is they're on the city streets and the city has to deal with them or, you know, let them freeze and sit there. And fortunately, we don't do that. So I think staying in touch is really important that we, we continue to know what's going on. And if you come to the State House at 730, I won't meet with you. Noon. Noon is good. It's good to know. Thank you. Well, Mayor, it's turned into a, Senator Cummings, it's turned into, you know, a $919,000 coffee that so you did your job. We tried. Well done. Yeah, I'll echo what Senator Cummings said that it, in what Dan was saying, that we could have communications more regular, whether they be email or quick phone calls on a more regular basis, even though these with the whole council are good too. But I know we'll be in a lot of Zoom meetings. Your meetings are probably long as it is. So we can't always do that. So I think more regular communications would be good. Sounds good. Yeah. Okay. Great. Any further comments or questions? Who, anyone? Yes, I wanted to quickly mention something. I ride my bike regularly on our beautiful new bicycle pass. And I noticed, like it's just going back to the rural conversation, that the place, the multiple spots where this new perfect pavement has been damaged to the point where you actually can feel it when you ride on top of it. I realized that it's not, it makes no sense to repave it, but it's definitely something that has been affected by the new tracks being laid in and all this heavy machinery riding on the top of the bicycle pass. All right. Go ahead. Get out of that. Yeah. Yep. Okay. All right. Well, thank you again for taking the time and we will be in touch. Thank you. Thank you all with this new session. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. We have to leave, but not on this. Lee. Quickly for the question on this topic. Legislators don't necessarily need to stay on, but do you feel the need to come back and revisit your list or is it good after that conversation? Just trying to decide whether to put it on another agenda. No. Is it a question for the council? Yeah. I just, our plan was after this conversation to put the legislative agenda back on and finalize it, but my impression at least was that we don't need to do that based on this conversation. I agree. I don't think anything's changed. Okay. Thank you. I'll read enough information. Yep. Thanks. Did we want to put non-citizen voting on it just so that they have the clear message? You can put that. I don't think we need to have it on an agenda again. I will do that. Yeah. We just have something about the charter changes that we can be specific. Yeah. Okay. Mayor, can you take a comment on the legislative agenda? Sure. I believe now is an opportune time to have the legislature being that for the next year legislative process is probably going to happen remotely. It's an opportune time to address the parking issue to do some planning around what satellite parking by legislators and lobbyists might create a positive impact on downtown parking congestion. The economics of the hotel and the garage are very iffy. We still do need to address parking. That would be an opportune time because it's not such a burning issue while people are working remotely. I think that that's one that getting the legislature engaged in discussing whether or not satellite parking at the junction or out at the route to rotary places like that and using potentially light rail or passenger rail to get into the village is worthy of discussion. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Stephen. Maybe that could be a part of our follow-up conversations. Okay. Any other further comments on this? Okay. All right. So, on to our COVID-19 update. So, I assume for this we are turning things over to Cameron. Oh, Donna, yes. Go ahead, Donna. You reversed number eight. Oh, that's right. Transportation. That's right. We need to do that. So, my apologies. So, revisiting the Alternative Transportation Fund allocation, well, from the Parking Fund. So, for this I'm going to turn things over to Bill. Hopefully this is reasonably quickly. A few years ago, as we were entering into our Alternative Transportation Plans, Montpelier, we had the good name for it. I'm slipping my mind. But anyway, we had the Alternative Transportation Plan with the bike paths and all things through the city and the then city council wanted to make sure that there was a dedicated funding stream to help do some of these projects, which was a fine idea. And at that point, we had just, I think, raised parking rates and the anticipation was we were going to have a fairly significant surplus in the parking fund. And so the council set, and as I recall, this was done fairly quickly. It was an idea that was thought of at a meeting and approved at the same meeting. There wasn't a lot of financial vetting to it. And the council approved a 5% allocation from the Parking Fund to go to Alternative Transportation, with the logic being that, you know, cars coming into the downtown, creating the congestion, you know, their fees are paying for parking lot to help create alternate solutions. And it was fine. And at the time, that was around $42,000. And then I think the next year was determined that rather than make it a percent, it would just become a hard number. It would become $42,000. And that's where we've kept it over the years, and it has funded a lot of great things. But one of the pieces that got, I think, missing in that conversation was what happens when the Parking Fund is no longer generating sufficient revenues, even to cover its core costs. And so what we saw this past year, you know, the fiscal year we're in and last summer, when we had to shut parking down completely, is, you know, huge, as we mentioned, huge revenue losses. And next thing you know, we were getting, again, nobody did anything wrong here, but requests for use of this money. And we're like, there's no money here. It's like we've furloughed our employees. We're not, you know, there's no $42,000. We're in like negative $600,000. And so we felt it was important, I think, because we were kind of made it just a staff, like, you know, determination that there was no money, that the council weigh in on this. And so our recommendation, obviously, our recommendation is that, that if you want to continue this policy of using parking funds for this purpose, it should be conditioned that there is sufficient revenue in the parking fund above expenses. And it should probably be a percentage of that, I don't want to call profit, but that surplus that fund balance that can be used toward these purposes, rather than, you know, once you set a number, this doesn't, I mean, you always have, you, we always have the option of putting in our capital plan, maybe not this year, putting in our capital plan, an allocation for alternate transportation, and it just would be funded by the general fund. So it's not like we're necessarily saying that would not be alternate transportation funds. But if it's going to be tied to parking, and particularly right now, you know, our professional suggestions, there's no way to sustain it. There's no way to fund it right now. So that's our, our suggestion is that we go back to what I believe was the original intent of the council, which was, we have extra money, let's use it, not to pay it out of this fund, regardless of whether the fund is performed. So that logic makes sense to me. I mean, I remember that being passed, and we did not consider that prospect that the parking plan would not have generated a surplus. Any other thoughts, questions, comments, concerns? Donna, go ahead. I too was there when actually Jessica, Egerly Walsh, Walsh, Walsh, never said her last name that much, made the motion, and it was all done pretty quickly. And with good intention, she was afraid that it might, five percent might be less than 42, and she wanted to stabilize it, which I remember from the discussion. And I like the idea of 5%, it's reasonable for both groups, if it goes up, if it goes down. I would like the cap, though, to be increased up to 45,000. That would be another flash beacon for a crosswalk. And it would be an even number, and it's been at 42 for a long time, and hopefully it'll get back up there. So that's, I think it's a great idea, and that's what I would endorse, the 5% at a cap with 45,000. Seems fair to me. Jack, go ahead. If that's a motion, I second it. Was that, was that a motion, Donna? Sure, sure, absolutely. Okay. All right, so you have a motion and a second for the discussion on this. If it's possible to make public comment. Oh, yes. Yes. Please go, go right ahead. Great. So, turn camera on so you guys know I'm not a faceless drone. My name's Dayton Kreitz, and I am a recent chair of the Complete Streets Committee, and I'm joined here by Konstantinos with the intake committee. Basically, I'm certainly just here to say, I think it sounds very prudent to say when we don't have enough money in the parking fund, 5% of zero is zero, and that's, that makes perfect sense to me. I would like to either push back or explore the idea of the cap. Certainly times are tough now, but we're going to get through COVID. And if I think if anyone has seen the increase in people being outside and putting masks on and supporting onion river outdoors, I think the desire for outdoor recreation, including our transportation, walking, biking places is only going to increase in coming years. So I'd like to suggest 5% tied to that revenue, but why have a cap? And would suggest removing a cap. Would anyone else like to comment? I see Konstantinos and Elizabeth, you turned your cameras on. Konstantinos, go ahead. Yeah, I'd also like to advocate for not having a cap on it as well. I mean, we might be going into austerity now, but hopefully that won't last forever and hopefully we don't want to be hamstrung in the future when the good times do return. So MTIC is committed to reviewing the city's transportation infrastructure and making these recommendations to the council on how we can make it safer and easier for all users to get around. And the ATF is what gives us that capability to implement those solutions. So MTIC has discussed different ways we could provide that input. And city manager did mention the CIP is one way, but the CIP is for mostly big items. It doesn't put in those smaller discretionary items that we have. So for example, we have a budget item for the complete streets committee where they do their education and programming. So it's like they give out lights to pedestrians and cyclists in the winter time or do various educational programming. The fund has also funded different planning efforts. So the Dairy Main Street Scoping Study, the downtown master plan, there was money that was contributed from the ATF for those planning functions. And like Donna mentioned, the rapid flashing beacons are another thing that are paid for out of this discretionary fund. And these things might not actually be material enough to be in the CIP. So we might be losing out on some of that without this fund. So I think by not capping the ATF, you do provide the committee that's actually charged with advising you on transportation infrastructure, an opportunity to actually implement those changes. And just to let you know, also there are some controls over the ATF. There is an application process. We do have a rubric where we do review any applications for those funds that come in from the public. So it's not just, you know, the funds can go anywhere willy nilly. We do have a process to put them in places that are actually going to have some sort of impact. And we do review them and have votes and discussion on it at the committee. So with that, I'd just like to make sure that you guys know that this fund is not, it's very useful for us. And we do carry forward the funds every year as well. So you did mention that there is surplus as occasionally and some of that is on purpose because we do see bigger ticket projects coming forward. And we want to carry forward some of those funds that we save to pay for something bigger. So for example, traffic calming is something that we've been talking a lot about. And some of those projects might be rather large if we're talking about resurfacing a street with speed bumps or whatever treatment is going to help that specific, whatever problem it is. So having those funds that we can carry forward and in lean years, for example, a year like this year where 5% is zero, that's perfectly fine. But if 5% ends up being 50,000, you know, we will find good uses for it. And the public is always encouraged to put in applications for anything that they feel would assist them. So I think that's probably fine because it's the percentage of what the fund has cleared. So I think that logic makes sense. And I just want to say to both gentlemen that the funds have been used really well. I think you have both of managed the processes really well and it does a lot of great things. So I don't think there's any question from us about how they're being used. There's no money there to use. And to Konstantinos' point about the capital fund, I think he's correct that no individual project might rise to the level of a capital thing. But we do have a couple of categories normally. And again, I'm saying normally because I think this year all bets are off. But normally in our capital plan, we have, for example, we carry 10,000 each year for just downtown projects that really are live uses. And they can be very one or $2,000 projects. We just carry that money. The same thing with parks and cemetery. We just carry a set number. So there's no reason other than limitations on the dollars that at some point in the future, the city council couldn't put in an annual $42,000 or $25,000 appropriation for alternate transportation without it being limited to specific projects. It would just be these are capital type projects that go to this fund. So it's not completely prohibitive. I'm not saying advising we do it and certainly I can almost guarantee it won't be in our budget proposal this year. But it's not out of the question. As you think about other places to go, that is that's one option. Go ahead, Donna. And then Elizabeth, did you want to speak? If not, that's okay. You can let Elizabeth go first. She hasn't talked yet. I'll go after you, Elizabeth. Go ahead. Oh, but we can't hear you now. Even though you're unmuted. So, yeah, sorry. She's probably going to go call you. So, okay, I'll talk why she's calling. I'll say. Okay. All right. I think that I see about the cap is that there are other projects that involve things dealing with pedestrians, cyclists, non vehicle related that are in our CIP that are very separate from the funds that this committee gets. I feel this committee is really blessed to have any funds to deal with. This is like a discretionary pot that I don't know if any other committee has a pot to deal with. And so, but yet I do feel like it needs to be contained. And that within the CIP, yes, there are projects that the MTIC can support and bring to the CIP group and DPW that will go directly in there totally separate from the ATF funds. So, I think there's a different issue here from the big, big projects and the things that are more included in the ATF funds. So, that's why I feel more comfortable with a cap. Okay. Thank you. So, Lauren, go ahead. I was just curious and Bill might have the answer. What, so excluding this crazy year, like what's what's a normal variation of, you know, is 5% so that particular year that this was established 42,000 was the 5% if I'm hearing you right. I'm just curious what the fluctuation or how stable that normally is and what 5% usually is. So, one of the interesting things about parking revenue, unlike other revenue, is I tip it, you know, you don't raise rates, you know, parking, I mean, it's changing a little bit now that we're going to park mobile and some of these other things. But, you know, when you think about parking, we sort of think about incoined increments. So, you don't really raise your rates a 2% one year because of cost of living and 3% another year. It's every number, you know, you raise them a quarter like every 10 years. You know, it goes from $1.25 to $1.15 an hour, $1.15 an hour. And it sort of depends on what's going on right now. So, the parking fund tends to get like a big jump in revenue. And for a couple of years, it makes it has a fairly large surplus, at least in theory, because the costs are just going up. And then over time, the revenue kind of stays, it's all in the same category, revenue kind of stays about the same, assuming the demand is the same, but the costs, you know, are rising. So, if we're really excellent money managers, right, we take all that surplus to just hold it, because what's going to happen is eventually the costs are going to go past it. And you need that money to kind of cover it until you do the next big rate increase. So, what happened was we've just done a rate increase and we're projecting, you know, a fairly large, the big gap and the council was like, whoa, let's take, and don't blame them. They were trying to figure out a way to do something good. This isn't a fault. But it was like, let's take that money and use it. Well, number one, we definitely, actually, the reality is we didn't get as much of a gap as we thought. And secondly, now, you know, last couple of years, we've been sort of breaking even or barely breaking even. And now, of course, now the bottom's falling out. And one of the things that we're looking to do as we rebuild is maybe take a look at things that were in the parking fund. Should they be, you know, you know, don't waste a good crisis, right? Here's a chance to maybe reallocate our funding and look at how we're using our dollars wisely. So, as we rebuild the parking fund, ideally, we could build something like this into it as a regular cost. But, you know, so I thought it was a convoluted way of saying it's hard to predict what a surplus might be in a given year because the revenues are really, you know, flat, really. Once you raise a rate, you're kind of at that revenue number for the next bunch of years until you change rates again. I'm going to go Jacks and Lauren. Hearing Bill's description of how this works, I think it makes sense to me to retain the cap as a way of giving us the opportunity to not necessarily say no to anything over the cap, but at least to trigger a conversation if we get to the point where we have the surplus beyond that level. And so it makes me think that keeping that discretion within the City Council is a good way to go. Lauren, go ahead. Yeah, I guess I'm just thinking, I mean, the same conversation is happening at the state level with the Transportation Fund and, you know, how are we really prioritizing investments and alternative ways of getting around and, you know, are some of those ultimately reducing, you know, the number of times you need to repeat the roads and that kind of thing. So, I mean, to me, I would love to, obviously, you know, unfortunately not right at this moment, but like longer term think about, you know, could we make that? Maybe that's how Bill was describing it, more of a stable, predictable fund that could be, you know, part of our infrastructure instead of this, what sounds kind of unpredictable. And we're seeing this year, not reliable year to year, but really try to get to a point where we're making a kind of consistent investment in this piece of our transportation. Yeah, that makes sense to me in terms of maybe not this year, but moving into the future, just having part of our budget be like, well, it's, and have it not necessarily tied to parking. If this is something we value, then we should put money towards it. Donna, go ahead. Well, maybe I'm not understanding people's interpretation of what Bill said, but this fund has gotten its $42,000 every year until this year. Correct. So the fund has fluctuated. The city has had less money because we made a flat rate. The alternative funds have been steady since the first time it was changed from 5%. So just the fund itself is nothing you can control, Lauren, because cars will do what cars do with weather and everything else. But the fund itself for this committee, the alternate funds have been steady since it was instituted. Right, because we set it at a set amount, to be clear, cars won't do anything. The people driving the cars will do what they're going to do. But the, you know, I, you know, so just if I were setting this up from scratch, I mean, I believe it actually ought to be in our capital plan. I think if it's a value and a priority, it ought to be in our base budget, I recall what happened was we already had, we were working on building up the capital plan and we had a sort of plan for repaving streets and all those things, which, you know, we're still couldn't be doing a better job at. So we were maxed out of money and the council tried to find additional money to put to this. And it's like, well, let's use the parking. Nothing wrong with that, it's policy decision. This may, I'm saying maybe this is the opportunity as we're recalibrating coming out of this and putting our money back into different places. It might be the time to say this is just important to us and we're going to put a sum of money in our capital plan every year for this. And that's just what it's going to be. And, you know, does that mean that's 45 or 50,000 that isn't a paved street? That's, you know, it's a priority decision for the elected officials to make. Instead of risking it on what the parking rate is and what the weather is and what the cars drivers do and those kinds of things. Well, maybe if we move forward with at least moving it to interpretation of the surplus as opposed to the total amount of the fund tonight cap or no cap, maybe this is something you can revisit as a part of our budget discussion. There was another hand. Well, so actually, first of all, Elizabeth, I don't know if we can hear you now, but I want to give you that opportunity. And then Alex, no, no, I'm not meant to speak. It's okay. No, no, we can hear you. Miracle of miracles. I am having Wes is going to be working on this computer next week to fix the sound at last. Hallelujah. So, you know, I'm really glad the direction this conversation is going in, you know, in the as empty was working on the transportation plan. One of the important points was to really support my pillars on, you know, transportation work with for biking, walking, etc. And so I just want to applaud the council for the direction you're taking this conversation. Of course, I'm on empty. I think that the work we do is very important. So I'm advocating for no cap. But at this point, that may not be relevant. So thank you. Thank you. Yeah, Alex, go ahead. Yes, I'm just curious if another variable has been factored into the parking conversation from a point of view of many organizations who are going to allow employees to perpetually stay at home. So some people who currently before COVID have worked out of the downtown office may not be coming back. So as much as you want to the demand may return to where it was. So just for capacity planning sake, it's just another variable to look into. And probably state might be one of the bigger organizations downtown. So if there is any way to predict what it's going to be like, at least for the state employees, it will be like a big chunk of potentially predictable numbers. That's something we're given a lot of thought to. Of course, we have no way of knowing what that's going to look like. But you're absolutely, I'm sure there's going to be some subset of organizations that choose to continue working remotely. That's a good question. Okay. So there is a, yes, Constable, go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to comment on the piece of putting the money back into the CIP at some point, and kind of putting the having ATF part of the CIP is that I think, like I mentioned, having some discretion and control over it from the committees would still be important. This way we don't lose out on some of the programming that we've been doing in the past or projects come up. For example, covered bike parking was something that we were talking about. That's like a five or six thousand dollar expense, right off the bat. And if someone puts an application for that and knows of a good location and could be part of the downtown master plan, for example, as part of the street, streetscapes, we'd like to still have that freedom to do projects like that on a rolling basis as they come in where the CIP, my understanding is that it meets once a year and you go through all your projects and you prioritize them. And we would lose out on some of that control and we could lose out on some, some projects that we could do over the summer or rapid flashing beacons when we identify other places that might be problematic. It's just, I think it's important to keep that discretionary piece. So I just respond to that and say it could be structured that way. You know, again, using the Montpelier Alive, the downtown 10,000, we don't scrub what's going into that. Sometimes they say that it's basically here's an allocation that Montpelier Alive can use for downtown projects as they come up and deal with that. And if there's a change that like, a couple of years ago, I said, a couple, I'm dating myself several years ago, we had a big project and we knew, we talked to them and said, hey, we're going to need that 10,000 for the next couple of years to go to this project, but it was for downtown. And they said, yeah, that's a great project. I think it was new sidewalks or something like that. So they were, they were okay, but it was done collaboratively. We did just take it from them. So if we were going to build a new bike path, let's say we needed matching money, might go to your group and say, hey, can we take two years of this 20, you know, 50 grand to match the bike path? Great. Yeah, that meets our needs. But it's not, you know, it could be set up where you would, you know, it's an allocation or where you would make, you would have sort of control over it like you do now. Thank you. Donna, go ahead. I guess along those lines, Bill, Corey has been very good to come to the MTIC for matching funds. And the group has been very good being there for matching funds because the projects were related. So it definitely works very well. Yeah, of course. You know, it's been a great program. Cool. That's encouraging. Okay, so any further comments on this, on the motion that's been seconded, it's just to recap. As I understand it, it's to have the 5% come from the surplus of the parking fund with a cap. And Donna, the cap was 45,000. Is that right? Okay. Yes. All right. Any further discussion on that particular piece of this? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. And opposed. Okay. So the motion passes. Thank you. And thanks to all of you. Came out to chat with us about this. I appreciate you taking the time and getting the input from your committee. It's really valuable. So. All right. Madam Mayor. Yes. Where are you going to the next topic? I think we may have skipped over the consent agenda. Oh, we did skip the consent agenda. Oh, I'm all about skipping things tonight. Let's do that. And then we'll take a break. Is that okay? Okay. I'll move that we accept the consent agenda. I'll second. I like that people are still using the two things that make me very happy. So all right. We got a motion and a second. Any further discussion? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. And opposed. Okay. Thank you. It is now 830. What do you think? Five minutes? Ten minutes? This one was slightly longer than some other ones we've gotten recently. There's obviously been a lot of movement and the uptick of cases in Washington County and Orange County. I do want to say that the governor has been very clear in why he's putting out the guidance that he is really focusing on want versus need of things to stay open. He did extend his state of emergency through December 15th. The new guidelines. At this point, I am sure most everyone is aware of them, but starting November 13th, he has banned multi household gatherings, whether inside or out, public spaces or private. They really discuss why. Any one percent of cases associated with an outbreak in Vermont right now are because of a private event or social gatherings. Starting on the 13th, at 10 p.m., they've also closed all bars and other social clubs. Restaurants can stay open, but they have to be closed to in-person service after 10 and have to switch to go services. There is now also a more stringent requirement for folks to keep logs of people who come in. And Vermonters who sign those logs are stating they're going to comply with contract tracers. Returning college students are now required to quarantine for 14 days, even in state. They're requiring telework for those who can and discouraging in-person meetings. They're also pausing recreational sports leagues, which I'll explain a bit later how that impacts our department. And they also stated they're going to be releasing more guidance on gatherings this Friday, so I will send an update to y'all at that time. The hospital has some updates as well. Health services has ordered hospitals to go back to tighter restrictions, which includes no visitors with very limited exceptions. Again, our travel map has been suspended and all travel into Vermont requires a 14-day quarantine or a seven-day quarantine and a negative test. The state has also said that they'll be using state resources and local officials to help them conduct safety and compliance checks at folks where people gather. So our modeling update is, I think, the biggest change from last time y'all met as there has been a pretty steep increase of cases. In the last 23 days, we've added 1,000 cases in the state. Vermont currently has the second highest reproduction rate of the virus in the country right now. Currently, we have 593 active cases this week, which is 400 more than we had four days ago. The state attributes this to the Halloween surge from folks gathering and socializing over Halloween. So that's really, really worrying. The state did reach out to us and met with us this week to discuss emergent needs in Washington County and Orange County and will be helping sort of craft better communications for us to share with residents. To comply with those requirements, the city is closing City Hall. I will also say that Dr. Levine told us specifically that he would like to see all public buildings closed currently just to emphasize how serious this is. This is not a spurious decision that we made. We really were asked to close by health officials. We were also canceling sort of by proxy all the in-person council meetings that we had set up before. However, we know that people have urgent business inside City Hall and so folks can call the departments that they have questions for and we can still accommodate appointments on a case-by-case basis as needed. Most things can be accomplished on the phone or online at this point, but we know that that is a detriment to some. Also, to comply with new state requirements, the senior center is suspending in-person classes for right now. It's continuing its online classes and its foot clinics and the recreation department is suspending rec center rentals for any sports leagues. They are continuing child care for right now. There is a new and interesting thing is the state is expanding its testing capacity. They added new testing locations in Burlington, Middlebury, Waterbury, Rutland and Brattleborough and they also are increasing their testing at the Berry Auditorium from nine to three. They've had quite a few at this point, but the ones that are upcoming are tomorrow, Friday, Monday the 23rd and Tuesday the 24th and you can call 211 for an appointment to get tested. I also included in the memo our community meal information and another way is still looking for donations for folks. Do you guys have any questions? Go ahead, Jack. Thanks, Cameron. I just thought of this from an article in the Washington Post this morning. Do you know if there's any progress on development of a COVID-19 contact tracing app for cell phones in Vermont? A number of they are in existence for a number of states, but Vermont is not on the list at this point. I feel like they would have told us that because they were talking about their contact tracing. They are upping their contract tracing number. They're going to be including some of the National Guard members from Vermont into their contract tracing ranks, but I will ask them if that's something that they're going to be considering as an app. Thanks. Lauren, go ahead and then Dan. I was just in response to that. I had heard Dr. Levine at a recent press conference on this topic saying that they were watching what other states were doing and basically until they saw a proven example or model, they didn't want to spend their limited resources on developing that. I think it was a little bit of wait-and-see and if other states had something that we could mimic, but he hadn't yet seen it as something that had proven so useful that they were spending their time on. I had a question about, you know, we're seeing this uptick in Washington County cases. Have they broke that down into communities where in the communities they're seeing the uptick within Washington County? They said adults primarily and adults who are socializing with others. There has been some back and forth with the state and not just us, all the localities about what level of information we can get to make sure that we target our communications to the right folks. And that's not, I think just because we're such small communities, they're not going to identify specifics other than right now it's primarily adults, adults who are socializing. What about geographically? Are they finding, you know, oh, they've broken it down by region mostly. I don't think I have any more specifics than that really. They do have a heat map on their website, but it just says general numbers. Uh-huh. Thanks. Further questions? Just to further that a little bit, I had at one point seen a breakdown of the Washington County numbers by city or by town and. Yeah, it definitely exists. It just isn't, it's like one of those longer term maps where it says like how many cases you had and do have, but it doesn't tell you anything more than that, right? Right. I'm going to tell you what community that is. It almost seems like a historical map where they, and that may be sort of a secondary tier. And the message may be it's Washington County, so it's us, whether it's an outbreak in the Northeast section of Washington County or not, we should all be acting as if it's in our communities. Oh, I'm sorry. I was just going to say they also are trying very hard to not be very specific in what they like publicly discussed because they're really trying to discourage to, for lack of a better word, witch hunting who has the virus. I think that's impacting smaller communities much harder than it is ours, but still something that could be possible. Yeah, fair enough. All right. Mayor, will you entertain a one minute comment, 30 second comment on this issue? Indeed, Stephen. Go right ahead. Okay. The impact on those requiring bathrooms is inordinate and it's no excuse for not having secured the inside doors to both the upstairs and downstairs hallway and allowing city hall bathrooms to stay open, send a cleaner in once a day. It's really unconscionable to ignore that opportunity to provide restrooms. You could even have used the police buzz people in, but it's not something to just kick down the road. Secondly, we should all not just turn a blind eye to the constitutional issue of banning assembly. Freedom of assembly is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. I understand we're in a pandemic, but we don't roll over like sheep without questioning freedom of assembly. To tell people they can't have dinner with their neighbors is absurd. So I just need to speak up on that topic. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you. That's a good point. I hadn't thought about that. Any other comments? Okay. All right. So we have an infrastructure update from Donna. Hi. Good evening. I'm here tonight for the annual infrastructure update. Joining me is Zach Blodgett and also Kurt Modica. And I apologize that we did not have Kurt's our deputy director's name on the front of the PowerPoint. Complete oversight on our part. So before we start talking about what we accomplished this year, I just wanted to sort of reflect and acknowledge on the changes that our department encountered. COVID changed everything for us. And so typically we would be sitting here, the three of us, and we would be talking about how well we managed all the projects that were on our plate. But COVID not only affected our ability to undertake projects, it affected how we did the work of our department when we did the work, whether we did the work, and we had to deal with ever-changing rules, short staff situations, and more. So we're feeling a little bit awkward and a little bit guilty that we can't come to this meeting tonight and do what we normally do, which is proudly present, that we succeeded at everything that was on our plate. But I I do, as the director, want to say that that was out of our hands and that our staff rallied, did the work we could. And there were times when we just couldn't not even engage with contractors. So we didn't have the option of completing work. And so I am going to, for the most part, turn this over to Zach and Kurt. And you'll see that we've created this PowerPoint. Everything that's in red is our items that were identified as needing to be done this year. They haven't been done. The black is what we were able to engage in and deal with. And so I'll turn it over to Zach right now. And all three of us will just join in as appropriate throughout the whole rest of the conversation. Zach? Thank you Donna. So we'll first go over the strategic plan goals that were outlined this year. So the first one was Clarendon have phase two road reconstruction that is now. Zach, I'm sorry for the interruption, but are you are you share screening your presentation because I'm not seeing it. I'm not. I don't have that capability. So camera wants to run through the PowerPoint. She can or we can just kind of talk along. I just want to just check what you were doing PowerPoint. Zach, I've given you the authority to shares now should work now. Can you do that? Yeah, one second while we get that up. Cameron, can you give Kurt the authority to do that? He actually has it. I'm on my phone and he's on the laptop. Okay, you should all have the ability to do that. Yeah. There we go. We get this line. Do you go to slideshow? Up top. So of the first strategic plan goal, it was Clarendon have phase two road reconstruction. We are wrapping that up this week. They're just finishing up their final top soiling. We have got a lot of actually really good feedback from the residents. Very pleased and happy with the contractor and the project and just just a lot of compliments on that project. The other the second strategic goal that we had was Taylor Street, the storm modern road reconstruction that is mostly complete. The lights are still, they still need to go up, but for the most part the road is paved, the sidewalks are in, the dry wells are in, the storm water treatment is in. So we're now really just waiting on the lighting component. Chestnut Hill was another goal that we had that was completed this actually this past week. On Monday, they finished the paving up there. And then in addition to Chestnut, we had paving of streets, crack ceiling and markings, which were also all completed. In red, you'll see the Grand Street sidewalk repairs. The project was not completed. It was deferred. We have received a grant for that project and it will be completed, we plan to complete it in FY 22. Route Road Bridge, we had in the strategic plan, we had said that we needed to come up with a funding strategy for Route Road. We have allocated money to keep this, to get this bridge funded, but it will be largely dependent on receiving the grant fund during this next grant term. And then lastly is the Moab property, which the construction manager lost. We've been unable to complete last year due to the required environmental studies and then the construction manager lost their site contractor and they have been unable to fund a replacement to date. So in summary of the FY 21 projects that were the majority of these were outlined in the CIP program. We for streets, we completed Clarendon Ave, Jordan Street, Redstone, Taylor Street. Memorial Drive leveling was an addition that we included this year. Bailey Ave, Bridge Deck was also added. And then as I just spoke, we finished up crack ceiling and pavement markings. The sidewalks along Taylor Street were completed. The storm drain on Taylor Street was completed. As I said before, we've completed the Chestnut Hill Road stormwater project. Scrivener Street was planned, but still we haven't had enough time to get staff up there to complete that. We will likely be up there first thing in the spring. If the weather holds out, we still might find ourselves some time to get up there, but I'm not holding my breath on that one because we're getting a little bit late in the season. And then for MRGP projects, we completed McKinley, Chestnut, Wheelock, and Main Street. For water projects, we completed Redstone East in conjunction with the Clarendon Ave project. And then a project that was newly added to the list was the Murray and North College Extension. In addition, for CSOs, we did install our six monitors and three rain gauges, which are now operational. We'll talk a little bit about the projects that we didn't get done. So for street paving, Dewey Street, Donal were planned around the Clarendon Ave projects in that same neighborhood. And that was a budgetary cut, so we weren't able to complete the paving on those two streets. And that's similar for Westwood Drive, another deficit mitigation plan item. And also, Cumming Street, we're just getting an array with that one. That is currently being converted to gravel with our own staff. So the pavement condition was so bad that we've decided to temporarily turn that street into gravel. Next summer, we plan to do in-house utility work on that street and then follow that up with paving. For bridges, as Zach noted, we didn't get the grant for Grout Road Bridge, so we're going to continue to apply for that grant for storm drains and culverts. Main Street and Town Hall have a large culvert in that area that is beginning to fail. The bottom of the culvert has developed some holes and there's some sinkholes developing in the lawn of the property that the culvert runs under. We just don't have the funding for that right now. We're going to apply for a grant for that project as well. Felt Street was going to be a contracted storm drain project. That was a budgetary cut to the COVID impacts. Zach noted Scribner Street, that's still planned to be done in-house, potentially in the spring. And then for utility work, in front of the State House, there's a large, it's really a constructed drop in the sewer main. It's an area we're not able to clean, so it ends up backing up the system a little bit because of incontinuity in the grade of the pipe. So that's a really big combined sewer overflow project that we want to do. We're hoping to do that next year. Water, Cornell Drive was planned to be done in-house in the spring. We weren't able to do the work because of the furloughs to staff and restrictions on construction activities. And then there's a couple other small CSO projects that we're planning to do in-house that we weren't able to get to because of the late start. That's Bailey and Sunnyside, and one on to one out. All right, so here's a summary of the completed projects. And we'll see on the right that there is an approximate goal such target that we try to meet on an annual basis. So typically, our goal is two miles of roads paved. This year, we were able to get a half a mile of resurfaced roads, plus we were able to do some leveling projects. So we were right around a mile worth of paving work this year. For sidewalks, we look for to get around 444 square yards of concrete and 1,350 square yards of asphalt. And we were only able to get roughly, well, of the reconstructed sidewalk, we've got 267 square yards, and of new sidewalk added, we were able to do 104 square yards. For new sidewalks, our goal is to eliminate gaps which are identified in the mob pillar motion plan, or gaps identified by the MDIC committee. In addition, for crack sealing, we got right around three and a half miles of road done, which was actually really, that's a pretty good number for amount of crack sealing that was completed. The goal and the target depends, it varies with the severity of the road. For storm drains, we looked to get around 1,200 feet completed a year, and this year we completed 600 feet of it. For stormwater MRGP, we're actually doing pretty well in that category. We completed four projects. And the goal such target we're on track, that one is a little bit harder to explain because there's a whole bunch of tiered goals over the next 20 years. The first five years, we have to eliminate all of the high severity problems, which we only have a few remaining. So we have a couple more years to do that. And then for CSOs, like I said before, we ended up installing the six monitors. Our goal on target is to fully eliminate CSOs. And then for water projects, our steady-state goal is 1,500 linear feet a year. We were able to complete 1,500 feet, but that was some of those projects were new lines, like Murray and North College. That was an extension. It does bring in revenue, so it is good, but it doesn't really fulfill the steady-state target of replacing 1,500 feet of existing mains per year. I should also note though that in this table, we forgot to include the work that was done at the rail crossing along Berry Street. So there's an additional 500 feet there, which should be counted towards the existing infrastructure. And with the sewer, again, we forgot to, we omitted the Berry Street rail crossing. So we completed about 1,000 feet of sewer line along Berry Street. And our annual target is around 1,400 feet. All right. So next, I'm going to talk about the upcoming challenges that we're facing this year and in the next year. So the first one is maintaining appropriate funding for infrastructure categories. As you all know, because of COVID, we're having to make cuts on several more projects. So that impacts the amount of work that we can do, which translates to not meeting our steady-state targets. We deferred approximately 500,000 in equipment and projects in FY20. We also have reduced staffing levels with six positions that remain vacant in the department. It also should be noted that typically we hire a construction inspector for summer projects, which we did not have this year. In addition, the reduced staffing is limiting our capability or our ability to complete in-house construction projects. We are trying to diminish overtime as best as we can. We've had a change in leadership positions, not just within our department, but through a whole bunch of positions within the city, which is taking this required time to achieve a new normal and for us to restructure how we operate. As it was stated a little bit earlier in today's meeting, the parking fund is no longer supporting the alternative transportation fund, but now we've passed a resolution tonight, so it still will support it. And then the last one on this page is the increase in public demands resulting in more people from working at home and noticing more issues. All right, so continue with some additional challenges we'll be facing. The water sewer master plans, they've hit five years this year and really need to be updated. A lot of things have changed with the big projects that we have currently ongoing at the wastewater plant. We have to maintain compliance with our long-term control plan, which is our plan to essentially eliminate combined sewer overflows. There's some regulatory requirements associated with that. Meeting net zero targets for fleet and equipment, obviously with the reduced budget for equipment purchases, it's going to be difficult to upgrade our fleet to meet those goals. Also related to delayed equipment purchases is the more potential equipment breakdowns. Because we're not replacing equipment on our prescribed schedule, we're likely going to have to spend more money on repairs. Funding for survey in order to develop shovel ready projects. We talked a little bit with the legislators about potential stimulus money. We have a couple small projects that we could get ready pretty quickly, but the one that comes to mind is East State Street as our next really big reconstruction projects. That's a fairly big undertaking just to do the survey work and design. Right now we don't have the funding available for that. The changes in the CIP fund related to paving funding also will affect the water sewer master plans. That's because when we try to do projects like in like East State Street, we try to couple the infrastructure, the utility work with the CIP money for paving. Just having that reduced CIP levels is going to make it more difficult to meet the master plan goals. Then the last one is COVID related operational changes. We're really having restrictions on how many people we have in the work zone and the safety equipment, wearing masks, things like that. Just a lot of planning going on. One thing I'm looking at is how we separate our staff at the treatment plants. Just a higher risk area for losing our staff in that particular area, potentially all at the same time and not having anyone available to run the plant. Just a lot of planning ahead and getting as we're entering this next wave, we're really trying to stay ahead of potential issues associated with that. Then supporting new parklets to try to support the businesses downtown, new interrupts needs and assisting the school with street closures so that they can comply with their safety guidelines. And that is pretty much it for our presentation. Let me open up the questions. All right. Well, thank you. Okay. Yeah, go ahead, Jack. Hi, this is just a quick one. There aren't that many people that live on Grout Road, but how critical is the bridge issue? Are people in any danger of being stuck on the wrong side of the bridge? Sure, I can. So it's not, the bridge is an immediate, is not an immediate risk of failure. The issue is getting heavy trucks over the bridge. So there's one property that needs a new well-drilled and the bridge currently can't support the load of that drill rig. So that's some of the urgency around it. There are also, you know, some restrictions on, you know, how large a fire truck or emergency vehicle could access it. But the actual pedestrian cars or pedestrian cars, but the personal vehicles are fine to go over the bridge. Thanks for the foreseeable next few years. Thank you. That'll be done. Other questions? Go ahead, Donna. Yeah, and then Lauren. I just can hear all your discouragement of what you haven't completed, but I wanted to tell you, I see what you have completed and what you've coped with, and I salute your work. And I know that you'll do the best you can under these very, very trying circumstances. And I thank all of you. Thank you, Donna. Lauren, go ahead. And then Dan. Yeah, I mean, I also wanted to, you know, Donna starting out with apologies, like we're in unprecedented times and we all recognize that and appreciate all that you have gotten done. So I thank you. And, you know, it's been a hard time for everyone. And, you know, the list that you showed us of everything that you've gotten done is impressive to me. So thanks for everyone's hard work. Also wanted to say congrats on the standard offer agreement that we approved earlier, right? Yay. That was a good step forward. So I just wanted to acknowledge that. That's great to see. And my only question was for the staffing issue, is it just been hard to hire people or what's, or are we, have we stalled out on hiring because of our budget issues? Or could you just describe what, what? So part of it is budget, has been budget issues. Each of the departments has been asked in a couple of different timelines to offer up the ability to move forward with a balanced budget. And so that's part of it. Zach, Kurt, do you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I mean, some of it was the fact that kind of it was just kind of bad luck on our part. We had a lot of vacancies when COVID hit and it just caused a lot of stress on, you know, we had a hiring freeze very early on and we had vacant positions open when that happened. And, you know, some of that is somewhat related to the inability to find good quality candidates. We do need to look at our union contract and we were up for a to revisit that and to update that. But we're having a little bit of a hard time bringing new employees in. So when we are making offers to people, they're sometimes backing out at the last minute because they decided that they want to stay with their current job or they have got a better offer. So we actually lost three individuals that were all but ready to come here and that already signed a commitment letter and then backed out at the last minute and then this happened. So that's just some of the difficulties we've had. We lost an engineer because he wanted to go have other life experiences, no fault to him, but it just kind of been some of it's just was bad timing. And then the other part of it is just having a hard time being able to fill some of these positions. Well, I just want to add my two cents here that I am so grateful for the work that you all do and want to recognize that you've done a lot with a little and we're I think that shows through this as well. I know there folks have things I want to say. Did I see it? I know I saw a hand from Dan and then Connor. Yeah, go ahead. And then Jay. So when you talk about the goals for each year, the approximate goal and target for each of these categories like resurfacing or leveling two miles of road, is that a function of both staff and budget such that if you were fully staffed, would you have been able to have done more paving this year? Or was it because the budget numbers were held back? So in terms of paving, that was is directly related to the budget being held back. That is something that we contract out that service. So when we eliminate roads like Westwood, that was, you know, almost three quarters of a mile. So we ended up having to take things out to meet the shortfalls in the budget, which is why we weren't able to hit those targets. Right. And so if a budget shortfall is coming in the upcoming year, it just means again, further delays in that. And the only way to sort of get either caught up or back on track would be to expand the budget to allow for that missing pieces. And let me ask that question then about catching up with some of these goals and plans, some of these larger goals and plans. You know, is this something where these are just lost years and we're going to have to reevaluate these plans in the near future? Or do you see a path forward for catching up with some of these larger goals? So I guess street paving is probably the hardest one to talk about because it relies really so much on hitting your minimum targets. I mean, generally we have 40 miles of road that we pave and we have a 20-year life cycle. So it's pretty easy to understand that you need to do two miles a year to be able to get your 40 miles. So when you start, when you aren't unable to do as much, we can only get really so creative with how you stretch the money. You know, coming straight this year we're going to convert to gravel in an effort to kind of improve the road. So I think that we will be able to catch up a little bit but without really increasing the funding. I don't know how we can have a, I don't know if we'll ever be able to truly catch up, at least in the like short term. It may be a little bit of a progression to dig us back out of it. Sure. But even looking beyond the paving question, as far as, for example, the master plan for the water and sewer that you mentioned, you know, is this something where you're going to be looking to reevaluate some of that in the next in the next two years? Or do you see a path forward to catching up with some of these? Yeah, so for the water and sewer master plans, we had plans to essentially reevaluate those on a five-year cycle. It's just a lot of changes with the plants and everything, like I mentioned earlier. We don't know where those funds are exactly yet as far as financial impacts. There's some early indication that there's some delinquent, you know, water sewer bills. But we don't have a good handle at this point on what the financial impacts are. You know, in the short term, I don't think, you know, the loss of the CIP for paving funds associated with large reconstruction projects. I think we could catch up from that and just do solely utility projects if the funding's there. But I think at this point, it's a little too early for us to say exactly what that impact's going to be. But I think there's still a chance we could, you know, stay on track with the city-state. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Connor. Yeah, no, I think I just wanted to echo the thanks of everybody else. It's actually pretty exceptional when you see this report. We've deferred half a million dollars. You're down six staff. We've asked you to like reduce overtime. Sometimes I think like if we just push pause this whole last year, you know, we're doing okay. So to see the progress that's been made, I think is pretty remarkable. And just hope you're honest with us going forward about what you can and you can't do, I think. But, you know, this is great. And the other thing like it's not insignificant this parking change that we've gone through the last few days. And to see the emails of, you know, constituents who feel like they've been heard on what might be a minor change, but it is a very major thing for them. Really appreciate that, guys. I think you've all had a really good way about you as you interact with people in the city there. But let us know the limitations and we'll probably have to reconcile the overtime and sort of a staff shortage as we get into the budget there. But thanks so much. Yeah, I just want to add, too. I mean, they have done a great job. And, you know, when you add up everything, water, sewer, all of it, DPW really is about 50% of all the money we spent. I mean, half of everything the city does comes from them. And so of course, what that means is when you have big financial problems, they get the biggest hits. In part because some of their projects are the biggest dollars. And, you know, we actually have our budget Congress tomorrow, but I suspect it would be more of the same at least for one more year. You know, someone asked, is this just two lost years? In some regards, that's kind of the way it is. At least in terms of major projects, I think what we staff and after we get through this year needs to think about is as we come out of this, is there a way to, you know, bundle a bunch of projects, maybe do a five year bond or something to play some catch up for the lost years and still try to stay within our annual funding. You know, front loads of projects, but we've got time to think about that. But, you know, none of us saw this coming. And it's, you know, some of even some of the water and sewer things they do is with their own people. And if they're short people and people can't work in close proximity and, you know, so hats off. DPW has just been fabulous and very responsive to people and tough time right now for them. Yeah, I agree. So, so grateful. I just have a couple of follow up questions for you. I see that Taylor Street is in the completed category. I know it's upon occasion over the summer, you know, they would do work and then sort of fill it back in. But so Taylor Street is done now. Yeah, with the exception of the lighting, the lighting posts still need to go up. So okay, the the bases are in the ready where I think we're just waiting on the electrical contractor to get in here. And there were some there was a really long lead time in the actual fixture that they had a problem securing. And again, it goes back to COVID related issues. They couldn't the supplier couldn't they couldn't get the light that they needed that we had that was specced. So there was some some lengthy issues. But I I'd have to ask Cory about when they're going to be here. But I think it's fairly shortly. That's good to know. And it's also good to know, just a little bit of the backstory about the MOA property. I mean, that's something that folks have been, you know, upon occasion asking me about and, and, you know, wasn't sure what status was or why there were some delays there. But it's good to know. And, you know, hopefully they're able to find the folks they need to get that done. Um, you know, just coming to sort of what Dan was saying, and Bill, we're saying earlier, I mean, I, you know, just thinking about the gap that this generates on into the future. And it's so I mean, as with everything, it's just so hard to know how it's going to play out. I mean, I like this idea of having a bond to bundle a bunch of work together so that we can potentially catch up. But I, I could also see us, you know, I mean, at one point, you know, while I was still on council, we were, we were quite far behind on fully funding our, our infrastructure needs. And those were, I mean, they were not good times for everyone, but, you know, relatively speaking, they were better times. And so I, I could just also picture us making a commitment in the future to, to catching up and, you know, acknowledging that, like, if, if we're going to stay on top of this so that our roads don't fall into such disrepair that, that they're even more expensive to get, get back up to, to speed that that's an investment worth making. It's anyway, that's going to be a conversation for a future council, I think, you know, especially as we come to understand like what are, I mean, yeah, what what's normal for our income and expenditures moving forward is nothing, nothing is normal yet. But regardless, so grateful for all of the work that you are doing. And, you know, this continues to be hard conversations about, about the budget stuff. And that, you know, we are so grateful for all the work that you've done. So thank you. Cool. Any other further comments? Oh, yes, Jay. Oh, I'm so sorry. Yes, Jay. It's, it's all right. And I won't be redone it because I too am thankful for all the work. But I just think it's important also to acknowledge that, that the report you guys, you all have just presented are, are some of the more macro goals and, and projects that you're looking at as a city. But I just think it's really important to acknowledge all the kind of the micro and the small issues that you deal with on a daily basis, whether it's, you know, an emergency water main break, it's 10 inches of snow in the first week of November. It's issues that come up for individual households that, you know, you're still dealing with on a daily basis and doing your best to, to communicate with, with, you know, with, with folks who live in the city and, and stay on top of it to, to resolve issues as quickly as possible. I just, I just think that that's important to acknowledge too, that those things never stop, regardless of where the budget's at and, and how many feet you've paved or cracks you filled or, etc. So I just wanted to thank you all again for, for staying on top of that and, and your diligence with, with those things. Thanks again. Yeah, agree. Mayor, what a good when you get a minute. I'd like to comment on this topic. I think now would be a good time. Go ahead, Stephen. So again, with, with respected admiration for the effort and the teamwork that goes into this, I think this is a budget category, which has been short, shorted in prior years for many years running, even possibly decades. And I think we're foolish to not fund, find the money somewhere to get the survey and have shovel ready projects when federal stimulus money starts to flow. We should be doing that survey now on numerous projects. But to say that we're maintaining steady state, that's a slow slide backward. I mean, you've been hearing from me for years over these crosswalks, the paving that was done improperly last time, the puddling in the crosswalks, which freezes. And we haven't fixed that year after year after year. And it's, it's unconscionable. So when we have slope sidewalks from frosty on school street, where people are falling down, just trying to walk down the sidewalk because the library melt runs across the sidewalk and freezes. And, and it's, you can't walk on a slope sidewalk. And it's just, there's, there's too much that's getting neglected, you know, and it's not that people are staying home and noticing this. I've been noticing this and listing it for way too long. And my point is that we need, this COVID has come and created a perfect storm to lower our bar of expectations. And that's not what we should be doing. We should be raising our bar of expectations and hiring the people to get the job done and get caught up on decade or two of, of neglected maintenance. So it, you need to put more funding in, but it's, it's a, we spent a quarter of a million dollars on signs that do nothing that point to closed businesses when we could have actually, you know, fixed some sidewalk or, or, you know, replace the two lampposts would have live electric wires hanging out on the school street bridge or the Rosalucha bridge and right in front of the fire station. I mean, we're, the snow plow hits and prize up the steel on the Rosalucha bridge. All those corners are bent up and curled. And I've walked around and show those, you know, to staff and we don't have time to walk around with a, a sledgehammer and pound that back down. We don't have time to fix the most glaring, you know, anyway, you've got the point. Donna's definitely got my, got the point. This now would be the time we know federal stimulus money is coming. That would be the time to get ready for it. Instead of worrying about a five-year bond, let's get some projects teed up and find the right staffing and get the survey work done now. I'll leave it at that. Thank you, Stephen. Anyone else? Konstantinos is raising a stand. Great. Konstantinos, go ahead. Yeah, I'd just like to thank Donna and Zach and Kurt for their presentation with really informative and the rest of DPW staff for all the work that they've been doing this year, especially given all these circumstances, the budget cuts, the furloughs, everything else. I think DPW is really the heroes of the city, keeping everything moving and getting up and getting the roads clean at 4 a.m. this morning from the snow and all the other jobs that you're going to be doing this winter season and, you know, the water main breaks are happening. And I think it's great all the work that DPW does. But I'd just like to echo what the mayor and Zach had alluded to and what Stephen had just said about this deferred maintenance being an issue that, you know, if we do go through this austerity measures going forward and DPW does get cut, it might actually be more expensive to cut now and then fix later. So I would hope that during the budget deliberations going forward that I'd hope that you try and fully fund DPW as much as possible given the circumstances and to me. And again, I'm speaking as myself now as a member of Entaker, you know, I think any dollar that goes to DPW is a dollar well spent towards the welfare of our community. And I hope that, you know, you take that to heart when you're putting your budget together. Thank you. Thank you. Any other thoughts on this? Okay. All right, so we are going to move on. I had earlier in the meeting said that we would table the Gertin Park discussion. But I, so, and Paige was not able to join us, obviously. Connor, do you have any further word on that? I think I was texting with her right now. She would be grateful, I think, for another couple of weeks to maybe discuss this and come back with some more concrete stuff. Okay. All right. Okay. Well, let's put it early on the agenda for next time. How does that sound? Okay. Unless there's... No, you just have a lot next meeting. We're supposed to be presenting the budget. GMT is coming to talk about microtransit We were going to hear from Capital Fire Mutual Aid about their dispatch of communications infrastructure. And then I think those are the three big things. And Mike was going to do an update on the housing initiatives goal. We could probably push that to the ninth and do Gertin Park on the 12th or do Curtin Park on the ninth. The ninth is all budget. We don't have anything else. Okay. So maybe the mayor and I can talk about scheduling. Okay. Which meeting would be best for me? We'll figure that out. I do think just, is a reality check though. And I'm saying this without having talked to our VPW folks or parks folks or anything. We could be reaching a point in time where moving the park, moving that structure it won't be happening until spring. So, you know, that's just one of the consequences of, if we were to move it, if we, the desire was to move it, we chose to do so. We, depending on the weather and conditions and where it's going, that could be an issue. You know, I've wondered whether or not that was already the case. Depending on what we do with it, I don't know that it is, but it could be soon. I say that without having talked to our folks that actually know what they're talking about. So really disregard what I just said. Yeah. Donna, go ahead. I'm glad you brought that up because that was one of my questions. All we need is a real snow melt freeze and you can't move it. So I'm glad you're thinking about that. But I also feel like we have an issue now that we're not really dealing with. And trying to word this well, I think of having two sons, they're now in their 50s, so they live through it. But you have two very clear different demands for that shared use path. And some of the people using it feel very much harassed and intimidated by people who are using that particular shelter. And I want to balance both needs. So how do we do that? I mean, how is the police or social worker, we now have in place someone to help us negotiate behavior so that people can both have their rights totally protected. But we both need to be respectful while we protect one another's rights. So I'm really looking for some action now to move in that direction, whether or not that particular structure stays in place. So I'd like to have, whether it's a conversation now or asking the police and DPW and all to talk among themselves, how to keep it clean and how to keep behave here friendly on everybody's side. Does that make sense at all? So I'll just weigh in. I mean, we can, we will certainly be happy to have that conversation. You know, I think asking city staff from any department to keep behave, to keep a certain behavior or certain location at a certain standard at all times is unrealistic. I don't think, I don't think, you know, we can't be there all the time. And, you know, so I think one of the things in the look at where at an alternative location, if that's what you wanted to do, we try to consider how do we put this in a place that still meets the needs of the people that want to congregate there. And it is all, but it is also still accessible to the public since it was put, you know, meant to be a public amenity. And I mean, all, all members of the public and potentially have it relate to the bike path a little bit necessarily. And, you know, I, again, I think from our perspective, my perspective, I'll just talk to speak solely for myself. You know, this particular location on that corner with fences on either side and then the bridge just creates a cornered in situation. Now, not everyone has to agree with that. That's fine. But I do think, you know, having it somewhere central in the community where people who are using it can still easily get to it is important. But I think Donnie, you're right. It's creating a conflict between two public facilities that were intended for different uses that are in conflict with one another. Well, but it's back to the same conflict you were having with people on the sidewalks on State Street when they were in front of stores, but not in front of storeways, like how to share that space. And I feel like we've got so tied up into moving the structure that we're missing the more significant conversation that I was hoping the social worker, the peer support counselor, was going to help us and our neighbors learn how to talk to one another and share this space. And I'm not expecting the police or anyone else to be there every time, but somehow to have us have some really active group conversations so that we can work on this whatever happens to this shelter. It's still an issue of shared public space. So I'm feeling a little torn at this point. I know we said we would push this off to another day, though, you know, I guess it is 940. I'm not sure that we would be able to wrap this up by 10 exactly. But how do others feel about having a discussion about this presently? Dan, go ahead. I feel comfortable having a discussion now. I reviewed the options, and I think there's a couple of different conversations within this, and part of it is keeping those threads somewhat separate. And I think Donna's point is a fair one, but I think that her point is a larger point, and I think the worst of all worlds is a situation where you have a shared use that creates an antagonistic situation, which from the feedback that I've gotten in the past few weeks from people feels like it's moving in that direction. One of the things I was really impressed about in looking at different options about where to put this that preserved the essential uses, and I think that I felt last time we discussed this, it was really about how do we preserve the essential use of the bike path and this use and this need that has sort of suesponte kind of arisen around this shelter where it is. And one of the options would be to move the shelter to where in front of city hall where the sort of plexiglass bus shelter is. And one of the things that I really liked, I talked with Bill about this, is because it would be so close to a building, it would put in, it would enable a charging station potentially to be connected to the shelter so that if anyone, because I know that's one of those issues where people need a place to charge cell phones if they can't have access inside of a building. And so if this shelter had that, in some ways that feels like it resolves a number of these issues. One is it stops making the use that's emerged for the shelter and the use for the bike path stop being antagonistic to each other. Secondly, it preserves that use of the shelter but in a similar downtown centralized location and forth it augments that use. It allows for something that doesn't exist right now. And so that to me finding a solution like that, I mean that's just sort of a gift when you can make something like that work like that because then I think you can also then address what Don is talking about and some of those larger questions because you've backed the two uses off and then it becomes much easier to talk about you know what these uses look like, how people relate to each other and some of these problems you know such as we've seen in the past and such as we've seen at this site. When they're forced into sort of each other's faces, I think you encourage that antagonistic behavior. I mean you get emails from panicked constituents who say I'm really uncomfortable walking by this or an email, hey there's naked people down the shelter that you know are causing some people to you know say why aren't we solving this problem and not the bigger problem but the small acute problem. And so I think by backing this off and so to me we could we could hold this conversation off because to go back to the mayor's pending question which is you know I think we could put this off, we could put this off for two weeks, three weeks, we could talk to Paige, you know we could sort of mull this over a little bit but this is this seems like a fairly clear solution that keeping it where it is right now is not a workable solution because I think it does a disservice to both uses and encourages antagonism that we've seen over the summer and finding and you know because we have these other options and I can understand a few weeks ago when we didn't have an option where there wasn't where there was a an asserted use but not necessarily an option on the table but I feel like now we have that and we have that option and so I'm happy to go ahead and have the conversation and I'm happy to vote for it right now. Jack go ahead. One of the concerns I have is that I suspect that there are people who were watching the meeting earlier who heard the mayor say yeah let's table let's push it off to another meeting and I actually while the meeting's been going on talked to a couple of people who are interested and they said so is it not happening tonight and I said yes looks like it's not happening tonight and I think we're depriving ourselves of the public input that we were hoping to get. Whether the location in front of city hall is a good option or not I think that's certainly something that is a good part of the conversation although I don't think it's realistic to say that people who are uncomfortable walking past this structure with people congregating on it on the shared use path are going to be any more comfortable walking past it when they're when that site of congregation is right in front of city hall so I don't think it's an easy discussion. So I am certainly kicking myself for just like straight up canceling it earlier. I apologize probably should not have just jumped to that but I think you're right that we probably do need to make this decision with you know if there are people that want to end we need to hear from them and I also have faith that you know there might be there might be some warm days left or warm enough days left that it possibly could still be moved even if we take it up later but Lauren go ahead. I guess I was just wondering if I don't think I do but are there were there questions or like with a memo we got is there any additional information gathering that it would be good to let city staff know or anything if we're going to push it off two weeks so that we don't have the discussion and then realize oh wait I had this question and we didn't answer it in the meantime. Conor go ahead. Yeah I didn't see uh I thought maybe Confluence Park might be an option too if it was set back far enough and there was talk of having a structure such as this I think at some point with the river conservancy um so that was the only question I had I'll tell you like the constituents I've heard from um this week have said leave it there you know we want to keep it on the bike path it's uh you know the whatever problems you have are going to move with the structure uh so just deal with that and there's like uh thinner spots on the bike path that would create you know just as much problem with the social distancing and stuff in talking the page and it was you know it was a brief conversation but it was definitely meaningful to her um given the work that Jed has done on sort of water quality in town to maybe have that on a place on the water where the grandkids could come by and uh sort of pay tribute to the granddad there so if there were options like that I don't mean to get too sentimental but that would definitely resonate with me so just for context also I um I'm a little wary of putting it I've thought about putting on the uh you know the option of putting it at the Confluence Park space as well but uh it seems as though that may actually not resolve the issue um uh too much because there is still that proximity and there's there's still a corner there um and uh yeah I'm gonna let Jay go go ahead and then um Steven go ahead well I'll just jump in on a couple thoughts here one is the um the I think that as far as the Confluence Park as I understand it you know there's there's been a fair amount of design work already done and a structure like this there is you know thought of kind of an open space or a performance space but a structure like this doesn't necessarily fit in to to what the you know where the design is at at this point and um and yeah I would be concerned that it would not alleviate um the issues that are that are happening right now um beyond that another thought um would be to um well I yeah I guess I don't want to necessarily introduce another another potential location because I think we've got to sort of decide if if we're we're we're at a place where we can talk about moving it or I guess my my primary concern is as Dan said that there there is a real conflict happening of use conflict happening where it's at now so are we in a place where we could say we we can move it um to resolve that conflict because where it is now isn't working um or we you know because it doesn't seem like we're in a place now where we can figure out exactly where it needs to be um in the long term so those are just just a couple thoughts um uh yes Cameron I just also wanted to acknowledge that um while I do think that um the Homelessness Task Force did talk about this um you all asked them to and they did have a pretty long conversation about this um and so I just wanted to sort of check in on if you're going to be talking later how you would like to receive that information um they did not have a cohesive statement and they were also um they wanted me to share their thoughts and also they really were torn um voting wise over whether or not to um ask you for more time to consider your ask so I just wanted to let you know that I could also write it in a memo if that helps hmm that's interesting that's that's good to know um uh Stephen you wanted to say something go ahead yeah I think the um the inconvenience or the uh anxiety that other bike path users feel is is miniscule in compared to the feeling of the people who use utilize that space as their only place where they can have a little shelter from the rain or from the wind who don't have shelter otherwise that's located within uh proximity to where they can go and crap on the riverbank or pee in the bushes that will not exist in at city hall uh there I mean it's clear that public drinking you know open container violations happen there but that will not be uh it's easily uh you know city hall that there's a privacy dimension of the human needs that are not being met that are coming home to roost here uh the the public facilities the privacy the respect the dignity the etc and and it will not be solved by just taking it away from him uh taking it away from them morgan had uh comments in the homelessness task force this morning it it's like it's not in my backyard was one of the the nimby acronym you know and he characterized it as no not on planet earth we don't want these people near us you know and I think he he's voicing something that you need to hear that this is a this problem will not be solved by taking away the only safe structure they have to use right now uh true they wouldn't have to pee in the pocket park if there was a bathroom if they could go and use the transit center bathrooms but no we just gave away that that option so I the task force ran out of time several key members will ever Lee and can Russell needed to leave today the discussion could have easily gone on another hour even so but ironically a vote to ask for more time failed uh because of politics so I just think you're you're you're not going to be able to solve this problem you can take something away uh you can move it somewhere else you can move it somewhere better or worse for the population it serves but you know that Casey and others have slept there you won't be able to sleep next to the Walgreens driveway you know uh anyway it's it's a very complex issue and if we do handle it right we will make huge progress on not long neglected issues of responsibility and dignity and human rights that exist in our community thank you thank you page yes welcome hi started to jump in late I was told earlier that you were going to table this until next week so I was well yeah then I got a note from John Odom yeah we we were and then we you know we were like well should we should we table it and then and then of course that just became discussion but um uh go ahead page well I've talked with both you I talked with Connor this afternoon I appreciate you're getting in touch with me um um and I honestly think that this is a way bigger problem than just the the uh Gertin Park um that moving the shelter is not going to solve the problem and it does as Stephen said it takes away right now everything is closed to those people city hall is closed the churches are closed the transit center is closed everything is closed that they could normally go to and that's a place with shelter um I granted it's not convenient for the rest of us but I think taking it away does a disservice to the community the other thing is it that structure and the flowers and whatever when they're kept up um beautifies a particularly ugly spot on the bike path so I think you really need to think for I don't know where you're at right now if you're going to move it to city hall I'm going to protest violently I think that's really unproductive totally unproductive move maybe I misunderstood I just got here so um anyway I um I talked with my son tonight actually for a while and I I had as I mentioned again I had a couple of suggestions and I wouldn't do it now I would do it after COVID is done and maybe people have places to go or after we have a discussion about what else we can possibly provide for people who don't want to live in houses um but one of the places was the future confluence park I think that might produce the same problem because it's not very far away and it's also difficult to access to clean and empty the trash and I don't know that there's water available there the other possibility is um a long old country club road there's a little parking lot there's a fishing spot that's a long stretch of bike path without any shelter from the sun or the rain or whatever it's a really nice area it's far enough so that some of the local people might not go all the way you know some of the homeless might not go all the way out there you could set up um a little solar pump with water from the river to water flowers and beautify it and make it a really nice spot out there and personally because it's for Jed or that was after the fact I realized that but it is now a memorial I would love to see it on the river I think that's important I think that's what he was about but I also believe that he would not be happy about just taking that little shelter away from the people who are using it so um one other thank you um so one other piece of information that feels relevant is that um for my communications with another way they were planning on building um a similar structure on their site so whatever function um that structure serving could potentially be replicated over there which is not that far right but it's also right on the bike path so that's why the problem is not going to be eliminated unless you move it away a little bit right well and so that's uh I guess I'm um I'm saying that that frees up the location of the right right and that's great I'm really happy to hear that um because I think something needs to be provided for people and everything else is close to them right now because of COVID yeah so that would be awesome hmm well so it is 10 o'clock I actually don't think it would because we said we would table it I don't think it would really necessarily be appropriate for us to vote on it tonight unfortunately um but excuse me which is actually like what I was like hoping to avoid but um Morgan you wanted to add something go ahead Morgan yes um thank you mayor I appreciate it uh first off I just want to thank Stephen for his comments and uh and uh quoting me effortlessly and uh from today and I also want to thank Paige for um getting on and chiming in I appreciate your comments uh thank you um yeah I'm quite concerned about you know this this had been table and now the discretion has been backdoored which you know it's up to the council's discretion I know that's why I've been watching you on YouTube I know how these things can happen so I've alerted all kinds of people uh about this you know I had let them know earlier they're good tables and I've sensed alerted them that oh guess what they're discussing it now and you know it deserves me you know that uh it's being raised even though you might not vote on it it's being raised and discussed in quite length after a lot of people you know probably uh turned you up and gone and done other things and not paying attention and you know it's like if you're gonna have a discussion forget about you're gonna have a discussion on it you know have it when you know people are gonna pay attention like they were earlier because they thought it was on the agenda you know and uh this is not all right you know and I was upset about this whole thing anyway before and and now you know I'll probably be up half tonight you know this is it's not okay and um you know have an honest discussion don't want people listening you know and trying to move this structure you're kicking the people living homeless that are using it down the road and you know this is not nimby not in my backyard it's nope not on planet earth and you know it's it's not all right you know people living homeless they're just as important as anybody else and you know their needs are great you know and we should be discussing what the root root situation is you know what the root problem what the root need is and that's we need housing you know let's do something real meaningful you know quit kicking us down the road you know quit trying to get rid of these people because that's what you're doing you know and hey you have the right to discuss it but let's do it in the open you know yeah thank you yeah thank you Morgan I appreciate that and I um I think it is I agree and I think it's important that so that we hear from everybody and so we're gonna wait at least until the next meeting to make any final decisions but you know that yeah that's I yeah I appreciate that um in any case all right um one hopes that like we're like getting closer to making a decision but um but we'll see all right any further final comments on this as we're we're not going to vote tonight okay all right thank you um and uh so on to uh uh council reports uh Donna are you good to go check in you have other business listed before council reports do you want to ask anybody I yeah I mean is there any other business usually I mean there's usually other business listed and they're usually isn't any but uh yeah it also lists the mayor's report first this week which there you go go for it and well that means I actually don't have anything to add so I would pass go ahead Donna you always make me want to be brief um the central Vermont public safety authority had two new appointments by the city of berry that will be joining that board its next meeting is December 10th and we're meeting to review the submittals to the RFP keep you posted the other thing that I would like to talk at length at some point maybe when we have a less late meeting is central regional planning commission has become the designated service provider for the Winootsky basin and all the funding from the state their clean water funding instead of going to the state directly and do a grant you'll go to this service provider so they will allocate the funding they'll oversee the projects and so it's a big change in the how things flow or dealing with clean water and so there's a lot I'd like to share about that at some point and third I'd like to check with Jack to see if he got all the council members to give blood on the 13th I did that's all want me to answer it now the answer is no there's there are at least two members of the council who were uh for medical reasons are not able to uh to do it I tried it with my office too and I got I got some response but not everybody but you know I've been giving blood for well almost 50 years I'm going to keep doing it and I think the rest of us who do will continue to do it when we can I'm glad you nudged us all thanks Connor no I think I'm going to just a very happy Thanksgiving to everybody next week and you saw a meme today which I thought was kind of smart it's a zoom in Thanksgiving with your family is preferable to an ICU Christmas there so just hope everybody is really smart you know good news on the vaccine right so let's all just hang in there thanks so much thanks um Jake yeah I'll uh echo Connor's uh thought around making sure we're safe making smart choices um uh around Thanksgiving um make sure everybody uh if you're down near Shaw's the new downtown Montalier sign went in today if you've seen it um it's uh pretty striking um and uh just I think it kind of I could say this at every meeting but it goes without saying um uh thank you to uh our school district the administrators teachers and staff for everything they're doing the fact that are we're able to even with everything that's happening our kids are still in school and and having real positive experiences I just think that that's um uh been a herculean effort so I just wanted to acknowledge that once again thanks thank you um Dan picking up on Jay's comment I don't know if everyone's having good experiences my 11 year old has some grievances but those have may have more to do with long division than anything else um first I I want to uh take a moment in the report to pay tribute to um one of the uh volunteers that keep Montalier going who passed away last week Mary Nielsen um who some of you may or may not know who was chair of the Greenmount Cemetery Commission for a number of years and active member in the Montalier community passed away um when I was on a when I was a cemetery commissioner she was chair uh and it was just an absolute pleasure to work with her each and every meeting um a really wonderful friendly caring giving person she and Corky uh were great to spend time and and talk with and you know it's people like Mary who make Montalier a wonderful place to live and who you know show that service is is not a drudge or a burden or something that we have to um just do is our duty it's it's a joy and a pleasure and uh she brought that to her work here and so you know I think we're a smaller city as a result of her passing and uh I just wanted to recognize her um the other thing is that I would encourage everyone who has any funds available to make sure that you spend them downtown at our businesses to make sure that they do go into the black between now and the end of the year um more that you can spend locally the more the stays locally one thing I I have done work on on uh some economic impacts of local studies uh I mean of local spending and when you spend money in the community it's not like spending a dollar it's like spending up to six dollars because that dollar bounces around the local community um and has impacts well beyond that single purchase of whoopee cushion at Woodbury Mountain Toys um it spends uh and allows other people to uh and keep their standard of living keep their business keep their independence and keep living in this wonderful community so I think those are the two notes that I'll add so thanks thank you uh Jack I guess I'll have to keep an eye open for the whoopee cushions I didn't realize they had in there um there's as much time as I've spent there um I I'll pass yeah um just wanted to let you all know the um police review committee met last night so we're getting up and running and organized um so great to get that group together and we're mostly focused uh in the short term on the membership so hopefully we'll be getting back to you all soon with that um and I just wanted to raise I know there were some emails going around about the homeless shelter and issues so I don't know if that needs to be on the next city agenda or what what we're doing sounds like some um you know problematic issues going on with the shelter and and capacity so just wanted to put that on our on our list to look into um wanted to confess I was one of the people that did not give blood but it's a moment to say thank you to many of the city staff who when I passed out when I gave blood in October and Bill kindly gave me a ride home because I didn't react well to to my recent one so thank you to the city staff who took good care of me in that your secret was safe with me but but I appreciate everybody who who did give blood and um good old Mary mellow was there she was like I volunteer now standing at the desk instead I was like that makes better sense for me um but stay safe everyone follow the the the rules that our state's putting out they're there for a reason and happy Thanksgiving great thank you John I'm here I'm here sorry I always press the wrong button um I would just mention a couple things um one of them is very short and one of them I'll keep very short just that I am still away um been away for a bit and it sort of turned into a an actual quarantine and I need to wait for test results because I may have had exposure so blah blah blah but then I should be back if I'm lucky I'll be back Friday but I'll probably be back Monday and Crystal has been out this week too she fell ill which means the two person operation is now a zero person operation so I know there are some frustrated people out there that neither of us are available but it was just not foreseeable unfortunately um another thing I just want to sort of put in people's minds um already looking ahead to the town meeting day election there if the expectation is now out there that all are especially during COVID that all our elections are going to be vote by mail um the money that facilitated this from the secretary of state is apparently not available for municipal elections there has to be something you know statewide or federal on it so I had so far failed and I'm about to give up on trying to find grants elsewhere because I got a recent grant to buy all the plexiglass and stuff we used in the last election so there may be more grants out there to allow us to do it again just on our own just you know got a sort of a budget out there see if we can do the all mail thing ourselves but that's looking unlikely so um anyways any ideas on that there's probably no ideas to be had but um people should probably start preparing across the state in all municipalities for stepping back a bit and having an election more like the august primary rather than the general election which unfortunately is going to be a lot more labor intensive since we're talking about that I do want to just point out that it might be worth us considering uh adding some funds to the budget specifically for this we may not have funding to do you know mail-in voting for this coming town meeting day but we can plan for future town meeting days so I just want to put that on people's radars for for less than $10,000 that may be worth it Connor yeah John I have a question that came up uh this past week um if folks want to petition something on for the ballot for town meeting day is there any alternative to getting physical signatures that's like maybe they passed in the legislature just like candidates were given you know the opportunity you know um it's this I hate to to to put this in a such a holding pattern but we haven't gotten guidance from the secretary of state yet on this we're all a little a little confused as to where that's going to go into whether that you know before the signature requirements were suspended which of course made it easy for that huge list of presidential candidates right um so we don't know what it's going to be then I've been asked I mean I was asked about this as far back as nearly two months so I tried to put out to people who've asked me you know there may be ways around it if you're just running for office you know you can always get people you need 25 signatures 25 people to download a form all by itself right and put in the mail petitions are more complicated um I the only good answer I came up with and I'm guessing the secretary of state will cut some slack on this but given that what they haven't yet given that we don't know is it may be possible to hold a couple like social distance petition fairs you know maybe we get a big space like the auditorium and set up tables everybody's got the petition for anything and you can come up at a distance with masks on and go and sign what you want um um I started grasping at straws but that's all I got right now it's interesting uh jack go ahead I uh I have an answer to that uh I uh have also been caught like Connor I've been contacted by a constituent asking about petitioning and so I contacted the um secretary of state's office the elections division this is what I was calling you about today john um yes they tell me with regard to petitions for uh public office um this past fall they passed a bill before they recessed removing the signature requirement for petitions for local office and that was section 182 of s 354 and they did not remove this petition requirement for petitioned articles including social service appropriations the league of cities and towns has guidance on model policies that towns can can adopt and so I will forward this email I got to you all and we can maybe talk about it because apparently we do have the ability to uh to not require a petition to have one of those uh requests be on the ballot and I note from my own history that they're in the early days of the housing trust fund there were some years where the council agreed at our request to put the uh appropriation request on the ballot without forcing us to go through the petition process after we got through a couple of seasons of showing that there was sufficient support to do that so I'll send that out and maybe we can have another discussion about it well please send me a copy too because when I ask him about this very thing I was met with silence and at least one other clerk I talked about it was too so you know sometimes we have our time communicating as well as we should with the secretary state I'll get that out probably tonight or tomorrow great all right uh bill sure so uh while we're on that topic you know to talk about petitions I would note that there's there are two different thresholds the city council can always put an item on the ballot and has done so at request of groups in the past housing trust fund I think one of the more common practices prior years was if somebody had been had petitioned to be on the ballot had received approval of the voters then the council might say okay you don't need to petition again you know as long as it's for the same amount one question I think to consider for the council I don't need to answer it now but just as we have this conversation going forward is if we're going to say okay you know it's a bad year to petition are we just going to take every request to put it on um because if we're not then people still have to make the you know whereas if we receive a petition and it's legal we have to put you know have the discretion to say we're not going to put it before the voters so you know if I'm on the agency and I want money am I going to take my chances that the council might say sorry we're not putting it on so I just we on the other hand if the council says we'll put on for all askers we make we may get groups that we've never heard from before that want money and suddenly going to get on the ballot so I think it's an important distinction um so I hope there is some solution I'll add that I heard the secretary of state on uh WDV the other morning or noon or whatever morning I guess talking and he was talking about potential all mail ballots for Tommy so I don't know whether they're trying to come up with funding for this or not but uh he was talking about the success of the mail in ballots now and you know they were looking to see if they could replicate it so it's frustrating that they they communicate with you guys better than me because they would communicate that that wouldn't be available and that I should go on and look for my grants so this was the secretary was talking on WDV the listeners he wasn't communicating with me he was talking to anybody who was listening well he talks to anybody who's listening more than he talks to me doesn't mean it's going to happen um and you know just will be manufacturing those yes votes in the back room to put them on um more to the point we've got a couple of minor things here um the CIP committee uh we're hoping to have them meet like and I'm trying to who it is there's three of you and I forgot to double check it before but you know who you are right the three members of the capital improvements planning committee we are hoping we could meet on December 2nd and December 9 before those two council meetings 515 530 but we'll send out a reminder tomorrow checking if that makes work if not we'd like you know we'd like to have a couple meetings in the next couple weeks to look at what's left of the capital plan um with regard to budget we are having what we call our budget congress starting tomorrow so we'll see how that goes our goal is to get you a draft budget for or post budget for December 2nd so we're about a week early this year so we'll give us more time to wring our hands and finally um with you know as as we the city clerk has mentioned a few times chasing people down to sign things and also um now with the police station being closed our finance department has looked into electronic signatures and we think that is going to be possible so more to come on that but probably be buying at least three licenses one for the clerk john you don't know this because you weren't here but for liquor licenses and things assuming those can be signed electronically one for serena to use for warrant stuff and one for kelly for a sort of emergency warrant so there'd be three people that would have access could send out with the list of names and all you have to do is click your electronic signature so that would take care of those things so and it's secure there's a whole so we're and the licenses aren't very expensive they're like 20 a month per license so 120 dollars a year so 360 dollars a year total for three licenses so um anyway more to come details to be determined but kelly wanted me to let you know that otherwise happy thanks giving also to everyone and and i hope none of you are traveling yeah agreed uh anyway all right well thank you everybody and uh have an excellent evening have a good thanksgiving and uh we'll see you later on uh so uh without objection we'll call this meeting adjourned great see you all later see you later over y'all