 any folks hear me all right well we need to this conference will now be recorded okay welcome and i would like to call to order the um city council of south burlington their meeting of tuesday january 16th 2024 and we'll begin with the pledge of allegiance instructions on exiting the building in case of emergency and the technology option thank you for those who are joining us in the room if there's emergency you can go out either side of the rear of the exit the building for those who are joining us online thank you for joining us if you would like to speak on any item on the agenda feel free to turn your camera on or you can indicate your interest in speaking in the chat and i'll have the chair call on you otherwise we're not monitoring the chat for content thank you next um item is the agenda review and there is an addition i mean a deletion are there any additions or changes and the deletion is item 22 we will not be having an executive session you should all have received um email from com so that will be off the agenda time so yeah so we might get home earlier okay um comments and questions from the public not really oh okay um so i would i'll move that we approve the agenda with that change second all in favor i i uh comments and questions from the public not related to the agenda anyone in the audience no how about at home don't see any so we'll move on to council's announcements and reports on committee assignments and then the city managers report andrew do you want to start not this week only thank you oh yeah meet no i don't have anything to report you don't have anything to report about okay all right all right well i went to two wonderful events at the high school this weekend on friday afternoon i was a judge for the speech and debate teams um there was i don't know where all the teams came from but it was um i think it was regional northeastern i think it was at the north it was just local vermont maybe i had heartburn i don't know yeah consider that but if they the teams that i was judging it was really hard to they were excellent um so that was and they were talking about social media and whether or not to repeal the section 320 that protects social media companies and platforms from liability and being sued so it was very very interesting to hear these young people really repaired uh prepared and uh also the middle school put on uh alice in wonderland which was a wonderful production um an amazing just an amazing feat you see all kinds of energy and and it's all positive coming from the kids who either are acting on stage or are in the crew and then all the parents um and this year a parent who happens to be a staff member at the middle school she stepped up to be the director and she did a fabulous job and it it is it's quite amazing to see these young people um they're so so psyched about it and it feels like such a i think they're just elated at the end and who is else my daughter so you went both nights actually i was with my son the first night but um anyway but yeah she did great she did great so did everybody it was really fabulous cool larry thank you i did uh join the um the debate competition at the high school on friday uh was on the speech jury uh broke broken up into numbers of different ways for public speaking and since i don't really do much public speaking i was very impressed with those young folks and i was at the speech contest as well um and i did the speech and impromptu um oh wow okay um but there were three different ones they had to research a topic um and something else i can't remember poetry no i had no poetry reading but it was very impressive because a couple of them they literally picked um the topic out of a hat and had um two minutes to get ready just to speak about it or one minute or the other um debate more debate not debate but um serious topic um they were given the topic and had 30 minutes to do the research and then had to speak for six to eight minutes to defend or support their thesis so some of them were very very good very funny and um it was it was really an interesting experience i did that in high school and middle school too so it was fun to see somebody else do it and then i also attended the um the common area for dogs committee i always want to call it the dog committee but our dog park committee and they um are anxious to get some things rolling that we have um already agreed to fund so i think they're going to um and um adam matt was there or math he's the um advisor and i think he's going to be speaking with us or um jessey about sort of what they want to have happen in the near term so they're anxious to get some of those things going so they're very enthusiastic and they soon will have their final report on the um survey that they received on on um dogs not on the leash leashes and how many i don't know it's like 800 different respondents so it's quite impressive so um that's what i was busy with just oh i'm sorry tim yeah you are busy no we can't hear you no we no oh yeah you can hear me yes we can now yeah yes sorry um so last week i attended the uh economic development meeting where uh they talked about a desire to create a survey for childcare providers in the city and uh also they had a guest speaker but i had to drop temporarily from that meeting to attend a burlington planning commission meeting where i heard uh that they are doing a large revamping of their neighborhood zoning regulations and may be uh rescinding some of the density requirements on small lots um uh i also then heard went back to the uh the committee meeting and uh they were talking about working on a comprehensive economic development strategy plan something that's aspirational um i also attended the pension advisory committee meeting uh today and you will hear from uh both representative from sei and from eric uh the actuarial uh i also went to pick hard circle and had a great tour of in the snow of pick hard circle and um you know we're gonna wash we're gonna wipe that street right off of the map and then finally i just came here from the public arts committee meeting and um they'll be presenting later for a very nice piece of artwork that you hopefully have seen in your packet thank you all right jesse okay thanks um so a couple of updates from the team many of whom are here tonight for the budget hearing um just a reminder to the community and to the council that petitions to run for school board and city council are due by five p.m on january 29th holly the city clerk will stay open of course until that time um we wanted to share that the staffing for our second ambulance is hired and on board and in the recruitment academy um we were able to tire two we were able to hire two who are already licensed paramedics which is a great advantage to the community um so it says great things about our ability to hire on that note uh we our new online application system um let's meet our new online application system through neo gov is um up and running on the website so this is a technology solution that will not only help us promote our jobs out more widely but also provide huge efficiencies for staff to manage applicants and the onboarding process so thanks to daisy and her team for that work encourage you to share it with your friends especially those who may have cdls or want to be public safety officers um and uh apply to join our team this week staff in planning and zoning and the library and communications are working on interviewing consultants who will help us with our equity and planning effort this was a municipal planning grant we received last year um so just as a reminder to the council this is um helping us think about how we engage the community so all folks all of our neighbors feel like they know how to participate in conversations and our um and we lower our barriers to participating so we can hear as many voices as we can um and then also guide us on what we do with uh that feedback how we make decisions based on that feedback so this is going to require a pretty significant culture change on behalf of staff in the committees in the council so paul and his team will be here in february to talk with you all about that effort um and then finally i'm not going to go over all of it but there's a ton of new programming being offered in the library and through recreation and parts really encourage you to check out their websites and facebook pages and summer camp registrations will be online on february 1st so mark your calendars for summer camps great thank you thanks okay uh next item six is the consent agenda we have three items disbursements um minutes from december 15th and january 2nd and approval of the proposed set of ccrpcs unified planning work program application says recommended by the planning commission i'll move that we approve the consent agenda is there a second second second is there any discussion i just wanted to make a comment that um there are a considerable number of projects that ccrpcs is is working with us um that reflect a considerable considerably large amount of resources that they're committed committing to the work of our city and as i was going through the budget um it looks like it's a very good return on our investment because i think our contribution is 42 000 is that right so it depends which one paul or martha you can jump in here it depends are there two you mean the current applications yeah yeah right yes that's my point so for 42 000 in dues we had the opportunity to apply for um i didn't add it up but i think it's several hundred thousand dollars worth of work and they're usually quite generous with our community so i think it's a little bit different than gmt we give a lot more money and probably don't get the same level of service in terms of our commitment so it's nice to see there's no discussion or comment i i'm ready if you're ready for the vote all in favor of the consent agenda as presented i okay that's unanimous that pass thank you item so we're gonna we're gonna move yeah let's see um so looking at who's in the room you could skip down to 16 you want to be up first the employee handbook okay i can do it for you daisy that's okay maybe not good evening everyone uh i'm daisy brayton and i'm the hr director for the city and i am so very happy to be in front of you today to uh propose our revised employee handbook um and which is our policies and procedures it's been a very uh uh diligent collaboration with lots of different people to get to this point so it's very i'm very excited to bring that to you i did want to mention um i'll be giving a brief presentation on an overview of the policies and procedures and some of the height and highlights some of the changes that have been made or the new additions that have been made um per our city charter the city council must vote to approve these rules and regulations and i will be happy to answer any questions that you have um and uh will at the end request that you approve the uh the policies and procedures so so just one quick clarification so um we're not necessarily asking you to approve them tonight we're giving that it's a huge document so we're giving them to you to consider um and you can approve them at a few future meeting if you'd like okay thank you very much or we could do them tonight or you could we don't it's we don't need a public hearing you don't need a public hearing but i haven't warned it for approval i've just warned it for well then we can't and provide direction to staff so we'll okay very good moving on um the reason that we uh wanted to revise those policies and procedures is because they were quite old originally drafted in 1993 last revised in 2009 um they were extremely outdated they were not best practice some laws have changed since then and they resulted in some inconsistent practices and treatment of of employees so ultimately our goals um for for revising them were to make sure that we were utilizing best practices and that we were creating new policies to address the gaps that we had that we didn't currently have policy on um we definitely wanted to make sure that we were legally compliant with uh with with with state law federal law um and we also wanted to make sure that we were building and including in our work culture um looking at things through a filter of equity and inclusiveness so that was an overarching um theme and goal um with the revision of these policies um and then also lastly we definitely wanted to create a document and policies and procedures that would allow us to be consistent with the treatment of our employees um and and moving forward that we uh have a document to go back to to make sure that we were uh in alignment how we got here uh I have been here for a year I came in January and the very one of the very first things that was asked of me was was was to start these policies and procedures revisions and I'm happy to say we started that in March of last year um and since then we have come a very long way um and I'm very proud of what we've put together um we've worked with both internal and external obviously we worked with Colin um our internal attorney but we also uh worked with chris brines who is an employment attorney in in Vermont and she was an excellent resource to help us with developing these um in addition to myself the executive team we went through a very diligent um and uh several meetings to have policy discussions and what did we want to do and how did we want it to look and and um they put in a lot of time and effort and thank them I thank them very much for everything that they helped um with getting these put together um ultimately we then went to the department heads and we wanted to make sure that we included them and got it and got their perspective on how will these policies and procedures relate to their department um and we got some excellent feedback from the departments um and the department heads on on some revisions that we could have made and we implemented several of those revisions that they suggested um we went back to the city or excuse me the employment attorney that we were working with and and lo and behold that is now the document that we have in front of you tonight so been a long time coming great work put into doing this and and that's how we got to where we are today I did just want to highlight a couple specific areas although it's it went from a 29 page document to a 70 page document so there's a lot of new things in there but um just to highlight some of the points um that I wanted to make um one of the new sections as I mentioned in the very beginning is that we wanted to um and we created a commitment to diversity inclusion and belonging um and and all of the policies and procedures are viewed through those lenses of inclusivity and belonging some of the revisions that were were that are very important we tightened up the employment classifications and made sure that those definitions included what we currently have they were they were very outdated um we also created a compensation and pay schedule specifically for non-union staff members so at this point in time all all of our contracts or our employees who are covered by a contract have a um a pay schedule but our non-union employees did not so we created that pay schedule new sections included um a remote work yeah remote work wasn't a thing back in 1993 but yeah we all know since COVID that has become a a very important policy that we needed to create um we also created uh to to specifically align our policies with the fair labor standard standards act we created um this policy that specifically regarding exempt employees or employees that are um salary paid our drug free and alcohol free workplace one of the significant revisions that we made to this policy was was reasonable suspicion so this would allow the city to if an employee comes to work and they appear to be under the influence of alcohol drugs um we have the ability to send them home um and then to take action on on that reasonable suspicion that was not currently in our um policy and we established um and we spent quite a bit of time on the code of conduct and we used the policy that the council put together as kind of a benchmark of where to start um and yes very important that we have guidelines and expectations on on code of conduct for our employees additional revisions interestingly enough we established um an annual performance evaluation policy so we have we now will have guidelines and expectations on when departments will do their annual evaluations and again making sure that they're consistent and uniform um that that will be quite a feat and that will be um a nice thing to see uh new section that we created again um as jesse mentioned uh we have a new applicant tracking system um the applicant tracking system will also include an onboarding module that we haven't yet implemented but as jesse mentioned we did our our new online applicant system is is now live as of um january fifth so we're very proud of that the holiday section uh we made some revisions to allow for floating holidays this is addressing so for example if i am i am an employee who does not celebrate christmas um and i would prefer to take off hanukkah or another day um this would allow the flexibility for my department head to make those um authorizations that i could work in a day other than um for four separate holidays they could float them to use for other days um i do also want to make i didn't um point this out in the powerpoint but currently juneteenth is not in our um our holiday schedule if that is something that the the council would like to vote on to add that would be a financial impact of approximately 40 000 dollars can i just ask on the floating holidays um so if the um facility is closed um are people able to come in and work it would definitely be the decision of the department head so it needs to be and a good example of that for example would be the library the library is usually um if if they are closed due to a holiday there's not a lot of someone can do when there's no patrons or so yes it would be up to the department to make sure that it's gonna um impact it in a positive way impact the department in a positive way and they have there there are always times that you can have um someone do work from home or do work that in an office or excuse me uh separate from customer service so yeah it would definitely be up to the department head uh we did address some uh changes in the vacation policy um with both vacation and sick leave which i'm going to talk about next we tried to align them um more consistently with the city hall and public works um contract so the vacation policies would now have a maximum accrual of 400 hours um the sick leave policies while i don't include that here would have a maximum accrual of 600 hours um we needed to implement some changes to be compliant with the Vermont sick leave law that that's for part-time employees if they work so many weeks and so many hours they are they are uneligible for a very small amount of sick leave but we needed to make sure that those revisions included that um we also set some standards for a practice that while not in writing um had been in practice where individuals that retired could use their sick leave balance to pay for continued health care coverage um contracts have recently removed that um policy and so we are doing the same for um for non-union members um one of the most significant things we did and is now a best or I mean it's definitely a best practice is that we need to make sure that all of our employees number one um sign a document saying that they've received the handbook that they've reviewed the handbook they plan to practice the handbook um again signing a receipt to indicate they've done that in addition to the harassment policy it's very important that all of our employees are are familiar with the harassment policy have read it understand it know what it means to be compliant with it and again sign off that they have um done that so that's my highlight with all with some of the very fun things that we have done and and very important work that we did on creating this so I would definitely be open to any questions but it's very impressive I mean I ran two small small organizations um both of which needed to um update or create a um an employee handbook and it's no small task it absolutely right and then I will say I mean yes I've I've done HR for quite some time this this one's pretty impressive we put we did a lot of good work it looks very putting this together well organized Tim do you have any yes yes um Daisy thanks for the presentation this looks like uh a badly needed update on something that's been around for a while so that's just really great work um you said that the employees um have to uh they have to sign a document saying that they've read the harassment policy correct right is that the is that well so the question is do they have to take a test or an exam about what they read at all and pass with like four out of five or eight out of ten questions or we do not we do not have a built-in test um for or excuse me a test as part of this policy it is definitely so for current employees what this will mean is that I we literally will have to hand deliver um these uh the policies and procedures we're going to have trainings for uh current employees we're going to specifically review what the harassment policy includes um one of those things is we definitely we we have to explicitly identify if you have and you believe you're a um or have a something that you need to report we are required by law to specifically identify an individual and their contact information that individual is me um and we have to make sure that everyone understands if they have a need to report or uh have a a complaint that they can reach out to me um but yes so the new employees every new employee and new employee orientation will receive a copy and also sign those receipts that they've received the harassment policy and the policies themselves and does the harassment policy talk about retaliation at all yes absolutely okay I figured it did I just wanted to ask that question and not tolerated yep of course great question that's good all right thank you can I yes Daisy can you you've done a lot of thinking already about training around the release of this handbook can you give a few sentences on that sure um training is going to be very important because we have a lot of a lot of new policies and we have changes to existing policies so not only will it be getting this document in front of people but we are creating videos that individuals can go um and go to our employee portal and watch videos about specific not just the policies and procedures in general but each or some specific policies and procedures we're going to be doing some um in-person training the first starting with the department heads um and then and how they will um an interesting thing is one of the things that the department heads the feedback we got from them is not only with these policies and procedures but how do those compare to the contracts so we have three different contracts with police fire city hall and public works and then we will have these policies and procedures so there are differences in them um so if I am Paul for example I have individuals who are in the the city hall union I have some individuals that are not in a union so to make sure that those department heads are comfortable with with all of the above so yes um doing some online training in-person training um there will be videos that they can go through um there will be checklists on if I have questions about family medical leave in the process um so we really are trying to very heavily focus on on getting folks the information and learning how to how to implement and and follow the policies what's your timeline uh we'd like if if and when we get the uh approval which I was hoping will happen before just um excuse me February um again I I have a oh no I'm sorry that's NIO GOV I have at the end of January we have a training for NIO GOV for our department heads um and then in uh the end of February March is when I plan to do the in-person um the online training videos many of them come from some of our current vendors they're already available but they just might need a little bit of tweaking and some of them we're gonna have to create from scratch great yes um is there a section uh Daisy that deals with um you know violence in the workplace active shooter situations is there a video training for that as well yes we have a workplace safety section um in the handbook and definitely a new employee orientation we have a section on workplace violence or excuse me workplace safety but we did have some some questions about active shooter it's not currently in there um our safety committee used to address that but I think that is something we should definitely make sure we add okay but we do have a workplace safety section um that but work uh active shooter is not there okay Andrew so Daisy of course echo the comments of uh my fellow uh counselors complete thorough really good document I did read most of it so job well done um two things is there anything here that you want to highlight to us and I'm not suggesting there is that it's potentially controversial or required a difficult judgment call on your part that we should be thinking about I don't believe there's anything um in a policy that is so risky that um it would put or that it would be a risk for the city we did have a lot of conversation about what currently is happening in in contracts with other employees what is current practice and and and we are putting a stop to some current practices that have not been consistent so for example the um retirement when an individual uses their sick leave bank to so I have 400 hours of sick leave I'll I can convert those 400 hours times my hourly salary and come up with a dollar figure I have a hundred thousand dollars that I can spend towards insurance premiums um that's that's a little controversial and some of the folks that we have recently in the past couple years have allowed to do that effective July 1 24 we are no longer going to allow that to happen um so that's the kind of thing that I might say might might be a little challenging especially um we also have a couple situations where we are going to have to make um some individual agreements with some specific people so for example um our sick leave maximum we have people our sick leave maximum this new policy is 600 hours we have some people that have 3000 hours of sick leave we can't just tell these individuals that you're going to 600 hours or yeah so we are going to have to address those individually there's a very small number of those but um we'll have to develop a strategy for those that actually neatly leads into my second question which was are are we changing policies around vacation sick leave other leaves it sounds like we are we are and we are summarize or highlight some of those we did and we wanted to make them consist or trying to make them consistent with what the city hall contracts are um we we were very different even in the accrual rates so for example sick leave we were pretty consistent and everybody earned the same amount of sick leave however vacation rates we were very different and so yes we are trying to align those where our accruals for uh non-union staff members would be the same or similar to a union staff member um so we just tried to make those um consistent and um similar so putting a maximum of 400 hours on vacation is new um putting a maximum of 600 hours on sick leave is new um we also uh it's another someone can't accrue vacation for 10 years and then take the years absolutely yes and we have some individuals and clearly they've been here 32 years they have a lot of vacation in sick leave so is the ranked and filed have they seen this or is it just the department heads just the department heads okay so you haven't gotten that kind of feedback yet so just to bear in mind that this as daisy said this is one of four policy documents that we adhere to the three collective bargaining agreements and now this one the collective bargaining agreements for those employees are the details of these kinds of questions segregation time um for those employees so those employees have bargained that that right this is really talking about that policy for the folks who fall outside of the bargaining units which primarily our management staff um with a few exempt employee exception yes we have very few non-union staff members um most of our staff members are covered by a um a contract or a union contract vast majority well just for vacation and sick and but the other things like right harassment or all of those things um our city policy or city policy one of the things that um some of the contracts are silent and is is um disciplinary action so that would be one area within this document that would cover um more than just non-union employees life is short take your vacation that's the moral the story we want you to take your vacation and five days at a time we don't want this half a day here and half a day there that was good for your mental health and your productivity i think yes that was actually one of the policy discussions we had a lot of was these aren't meant to be savings accounts these are meant to take care of the health and wellness of our employees and how do we help incentivize that so folks our city attorney for example is in the room actually learn how to take your vacation 400 hours this is generous he took too much he was driving around Scotland very generous it's a lot of just 240 yeah so so that's the other i would just add if you don't mind daisy that to the controversial part of this is that um there were a number of things the city did for these employees who are not covered on a thunder cba that was unique to employees without a written policy um and gave gave management a lot of flexibility of how to handle folks and have a wanting more consistency across employees was really important to us so that so putting more parameters on folks does limit some ability to be nimble um but it also helps us try and better align to what our residents are paying for so the benefits our employees receive which is very generous um we want to make sure that we are making good fiscal decisions about those benefits even and still be a priority workplace and a place that we can recruit the best talent to our team so we tried to walk that balance yeah there was a very intricate balance for sure are there other questions or comments so that that was going to be my some of my questions around the the coordination of contracts and personal policies just one quick question though how many folks would actually be non-union in this industry you know larry if i had to and this is a guess we have about 186 total employees and i would say maybe between department heads that's about 15 we have another maybe 10 so maybe 25 30 great thank you thank you very much so we're not going to vote on it but we will head or so with your approval we can put on the consent agenda for your next regular meeting which is great great thank you so much i appreciate that okay thank you thanks daisy all right so we now can go back to item seven for our warned meeting on the proposed f y 25 budget and capital improvement plan so you should open the public hearing and then i'll do a quick presentation okay so i would entertain a motion to open a public hearing second all in favor hi hi so just for the benefit of those participating in this public hearing i want to give a little context of where the council currently is i have the privileges city manager to present this budget but it's really a result of your work your council's work martha machara our finance directors work and of course the leadership team members many of whom are in the room today in case you have questions so the proposed budget as it currently stands that you have been discussing since early december and the leadership team has been working on since september it's all in a almost 65 million dollar budget broken a broken across these lines so general fund that's the fund that prays for primary primarily government operations and is what is raised by property taxes is 35 million then we have our utilities and our special funds so what is included in this proposed budget i'm going to give a very high level summary here but i'm happy to break it down in math if you would like is the continuation of our current level of services several strategic investments in public safety including the reinstatement of our use services sergeant completes the second year of our ambulance implementation and adds a highway position takes our first big financial steps to implementing your climate action plan includes small increases to sidewalk maintenance downtown vibrancy and green mountain transit and includes targeted support for both school safety improvements requested by the school district as well as an increase in the housing trust fund you've seen these assumptions before but i think they're really critical to outline what we have based the budget on includes increases in the grand list and local options tax to right size to the receipts we are currently receiving as well as our contractual cola and step increases the new child care contribution payroll tax that the legislature has put into place and our health insurance and property and equipment insurance increases so the total of all of that results in a 5.82 percent increase or almost three penny increase to the tax rate we have updated this spreadsheet from what you have previously seen with the mid-year condo and house assessment values so the the annual difference our average condo owner will experience over the course of f y 25 if this budget is adopted is an $84 85 increase and for a homeowner it is single family homeowner is a $125 annual increase you also talked during your budget discussions about using one-time funds to do some of those strategic investments those capital and planning efforts that we are interested we all are collectively interested in so that includes the use of $742,000 of ARPA money specifically for those transformational climate action plan capital projects to complete a parks master plan and to allocate the grant match for the heinsberg road past project it also includes the use of $360,000 of fund balance or our reserves to fund a portion of a new signalized intersection at market street and heinsberg road and to increase sidewalk maintenance so tonight if you are interested and then of course also part of this budget is our utilities budget so this is the summary of how the utility rates will be increasing aligned to the utility budgets that tom de petro presented really these are these increases are driven by personnel and benefit costs as well as capital investments in our water and wastewater systems tonight is your public hearing you need to approve tonight the amount to be brought to the taxpayers on meeting day as well as all the associated actions january 22nd is our steering committee meeting with the school board where we will share our budget presentations and what the voters can expect we are doing a presentation at the request of the south brollington business association on the morning of january 31st budget books and ill reports will be available february 1st tom and i will be doing the town meeting day or the town meeting tv broadcast of this budget and bond votes on february 1st that will also be recorded and available and then of course there's the pre-town meeting day in a meeting on march 1st 4th and town meeting day on march 5th all of this information is also available on our website so that is the summary happy to take any questions but your next steps would be to hold the public hearing and then approve the next five agenda items okay if you so choose well i would encourage anyone in the public now is the time to make suggestions um and ask your questions typically that happens the night before town meeting but it's kind of late because we have the budget and it's on the um warned on the ballot so now really is the time for complaints or suggestions or questions that then can be addressed so are there is there anyone in the auditorium who would like to say anything linda i think i've got this going hi linda bailey large road budgets are big deals from the home budgets to the budget for a city with the inflation that we've been having over the last while everybody's pocket is getting pinched some of the things we definitely they are what our city is for the roads the sewer the water a library all of these things are the good stuff that cities should provide when budgets get tight you need to look at what it wants and what our needs i know that a big chunk that we will not see in the budget this year is for the climate action plan i believe you're covering about 400 thousand of that out of our money this year plus another close to 200 000 into the general budget for another staff person to work with it great we're covered for this year on that i'm assuming that you guys looked at what the cost would be of the climate action plan going forward before you enacted it would that be correct we have some estimates for sure in the next five years i think it goes out maybe a little bit longer through 2030 primarily yeah estimates yeah and they show you what you put into it and what the climate benefit is that comes out of it so that you know that it's worth the cost going in is what i'm hoping you're doing i would suggest that in light of future transparency you make sure that people know that the climate action plans this year the bulk of the costs are coming out of arpa but in the years going forward there is going to be i believe 600 000 plus is what i've seen in figures so that people know that that's coming down the road so that you can look at it and make sure it actually is going to work for us at the level of the budgets that we've got coming i think um our concern we share that and i think the budget reflects um how we thought it best to handle that and that is hiring someone who can assist the city with looking looking at um external funding for specific things in the climate action plan yeah um so we're not kind of embracing the climate action plan and assuming that the entire cost is just going to be picked up in the general fund yeah and i think that transparency will be there i mean i won't be here but other people will make it very transparent um when we apply for have um items that we need to to fund um we don't hide where money comes from so if there's a grant or if it indeed has to be um general fund that's made very clear yeah so that is our hope and it it's possible that some of our hopes and dreams for the um a particular a particular year for the climate action plan um cannot be realized because of the cost but that's that's true of literally every part of the budget exactly and that was part of what i was going to urge you to do is make sure that the plan is flexible enough so that if we get to a year and it turns out the cost of item a is three times what we thought it was we cannot do climate a right that action right then that there's enough flexibility so we don't have to stick to some sort of really rigid schedule i know my husband and myself in upgrading our home it's taken us over a decade and we had to not do one thing in order to do an upgrade like putting in new windows in the house i'm driving a 10 year old car because i'm not didn't use the money for a new car i use the money to upgrade a house and our energy so that's something the city can look at as well but things are not necessarily needed to get a future benefit thanks thank you does anyone else want to make a comment okay are there other questions or comments in the audience oh please come down hi we're good um you can sit or you can stand either one i don't know how to do this i've never done this before well there should be a bright green light and there's a little it's on okay great so just speak into the mic please um and give us your name and where you live seen larkin right circle uh my question is and this is just more on timing for my education um kind of along the lines of what has been said just you know with the increase in cost to everybody in the community uh to fund the budget the the budget's going up so the taxpayer has to pay a little bit more each year does at what point during this process if we wanted to say hey besides arguing like the merits of each individual thing we want to put into the budget if we wanted to keep the budget flat so there was no increase in cost and we just had to make decisions of what would go in and outside of the budget where does that happen in this process to where you know if we wanted to do the climate act but actually the climate act compared to something else as a community we choose something else or the climate doesn't really matter but just to keep the budget level like do we do that before the town meeting or is it at that point it's like we just vote down the budget or not it's like i'm all or nothing thing like we're working we kind of really play with that if that's too late and i'm just showing up well before the party i mean or after the party's out yeah when you say level in in like so actual dollars or yeah inflation adjusted dollars or you're saying the actual dollars like so when you go and say the average cost is somebody who owns a home or a condo this is what they should feel you know during the year you know the $85 or the $125 if we wanted to keep that zero so the community can get the services that it wants and it can choose whatever those services are but keep it flat where do we do that as a community so we can say if we don't want to go up but we're going to make choices uh-huh well when we develop the budget we certainly as a council identify some assumptions or parameters that we give to the city manager who then works with her departments to see what a budget looks like for each of those departments and then you know you add them together and you um see what you have uh i i think it would be really difficult for any budget to be um a no dollar increase other than the growth in the grand list perhaps with the kind of um healthcare inflation um and just general inflation that uh this country is experiencing but we can negate that by not doing other activities as well well that's police and fire yes i mean yes you can always do that you can cut staff i was on the council when we did that one year for cutting staff or anything just yeah well but that's what it came down to and so the following year we had to raise it and absorb it in an amount because um we didn't have the staff to carry out the services that the public um found were minimum and that's always hard i i understand yeah where do we see that those those choices or is it just the advent of what the budget is being presented to us well i think it's in our conversations and your presentation so it starts in december really okay well earlier than that you putting budgets together but well and you set your budget goals in september so and i believe um son i missed a call from you this evening when i was preparing for this meeting i'd be happy to sit down with you and kind of walk through where those lever points are during the process um because it is a very long process that the council goes through so september is really when they set if they were going to set a zero tax rate increased budget that's when they would do it because it would require as the council chair is saying it would require us to reduce some services in order to achieve that but there are certainly opportunities to present that kind of information to the council and have them weigh those opportunities so i'd be happy to sit down with you and talk about that if you go to the finance page on the website all of our budget materials are there and you can see the links to the agendas and the meeting minutes where those where those values were weighed during this session i'm sorry i missed your call that's okay we can we can touch base afterwards yeah i think what would be helpful too and i don't see it in this presentation tonight but in past presentations it does show how much is spent on each of the different departments correct and i think that would be very helpful for the public to see i think that the focus on the climate action plan that both you and linda have brought forward it's pennies compared to the whole budget and i just really want that to be clear and i also want to make clear that any investment that we make today will pay itself off many times over in the future cleanup is much more expensive than prevention and ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure just keep that in mind and i think it's really really important for you all to think you know five ten years down the road when those new and have no new residents will be faced with we don't know what right but the fact that we have good storm water infrastructure in place we've invested in that and that has saved us what berry is now having to work through right they don't know if they can pass their budget and so they're putting it off until may waiting to see what the fema funds will will be able to provide so we have to keep the mind that this is our future and and so every bit of investment that we make in order to ensure that our residents do not have to face you know really critical not only infrastructure challenges but personal hardship challenges because the city doesn't take care of everything yeah no i i think that in mind is also part of the investment in south brolington and it's not about a specific program or anything that i'm i'm talking to it's more just the the decisions process and how it how it goes through just because i work with a lot of people and they do enjoy our community and stuff it's just really really hard for them to get by uh-huh and so just understanding how the how and when that those decisions are made so when we can voice our opinions as those are done so it doesn't disrupt the whole system at the very end you know i think next year we can think about ways to engage the public sooner i mean maybe you have public hearings a couple times sort of a uh you know an initial public hearing with what's the community interested in what do they want more of or less of and then see some budget rollouts and and have that because typically it's it's the day before and traditionally the town meeting in vermont worked well because town meeting day you could make changes to the budget from the floor from the discussion the public came in and talked about stuff and things were cut and added and then they voted but we use the australian ballot so that's not possible you have to kind of get into the planning process and make your thoughts heard for your understanding sooner than i mean even tonight we could certainly make changes tonight that's that's true but it is getting to kind of the 11th hour here and maybe we need to really think about um how to engage um people sooner so it doesn't feel so like well why bother because the budget's done although we we did change it we gave parameters jessie came back and the increase was 8.2 and the council said that that's too high so we cut out some things move some things around and got it down to five point eight five five point eight so it can happen and i and i'll take jessie up on on me yeah right andrew yeah i mean it just to give you some assurance to the integrity of the process the integrity of the process i i also came in a bit skeptical right and and was you know wanted to ensure that our dollars are well spent and it's it's really hard helen alluded to the health insurance i think the health premiums alone health insurance went up like 700 000 plus right and like you know and and we you know we also put up a second ambulance which is also really expensive and like even with all that i'm actually really proud of the city because i also asked jessie to go back and show us how the budget's increased over the last five years compared to inflation and i look at this a little differently than you like in my mind if it's flat and real dollars i.e we're not exceeding inflation we're doing a really good job and in fact if you look at our budget increase over five years compounded annually and compared to inflation compound the annually we're almost spot on so like we're just going along with inflation and like you can't really do better than that because the city's costs are going up at least by inflation as well so and with regard to income there there is income sensitivity in vermont as well right so i really do encourage you to to speak with jessie and and to really get to the heart of your concerns i'm not sure if it's the process or if it's the actual dollar figure or if it's you know what we're investing in awesome thank you but i appreciate your interest we should have more people who are standing there asking us questions that would be helpful is there anyone else see we won't bite off your head anyone at home no okay there's bob oh oh bob britt hi uh bob britt vice chair of the bicycle and pedestrian committee uh i feel a little sheepish at this point with where you are in the process talking but when the committee met last week we discussed the fact that our request to add another ten thousand dollars to the striping of the road the road striping budget which hadn't been increased for the last two years we thought it was worth coming back and saying is there a place where we can get the ten thousand because of the importance of striping to road safety it's nice to have great roads but if they're not striped properly the crosswalks and the fog lines like happen on patching road allen road other roads this year and crosswalks like the one out at uvm at the jug handle um it's it it's it's just sad that we since it's the most cost effective um way of gaining safety uh it's it's just a shame not to try to find that money and the committee was not looking to increase the budget but we're hoping that there were was a way to get it from another source uh we had looked again at the 1.15 million that is being spent on paving and wondering paving's nice but it's great to have the lines so that bicyclists and pedestrians know where they should be where they should cross and cars know where they should be so we thought that 10 000 out of that budget might not be a big deal um also i and and i don't know personally the answer you know is there more is there an allocation like was done for rec path maintenance um that can come from uh the surplus which you're going to be doing the resolution later tonight so okay uh what say you i guess is the question well thank you yeah that my understanding is that the um is it 1.5 for paving 1.15 was really what the bid is for um dorset street so but i don't know if ten thousand dollars out of that would make it um not happen or if there is any flexibility we had asked i mean i asked on that question his answer was that that's that's the budget do you want to have staff responses sure yes please so martha and tom you got tom's online and martha's here in the room jump in if you would like um so two points to bob's request um one is the paving money this year is all for that last phase of dorset street it includes the striping as part of the paving budget paving budgets always include the striping for the line for the roads that are being repaved so some of some striping is accomplished through that line staff did have this conversation about looking at the striping operations budget line which is outside the capital budget as you noticed it is level funded from last year at 40 000 we only spent 34 000 this last year as a result both of priority projects and also availability um as you all know we're trying to figure out how to increase that availability of contractors to do that work so we felt like this was an appropriate um physically responsible recommendation to bring and tom can jump in more you absolutely have the ability to use fund balance to fund an additional ten thousand dollars of striping um next next year if you would like um doing it that way also enables us to if we don't spend it for whatever reason it stays in fund balance so that might be a path forward martha or tom anything you want to add to that i'll just turn my camera on to say jesse i think uh the same things you were about to say confirm that the paving is for dorset street phase four um and certainly if we had more budget we could get more line striping done but my big concern is the contractors again that are available to do it um my staff and i have had a meeting scheduled three different times to figure out ways where we can make that contract more attractive to perhaps folks not just in vermont but more regionally um and so we we still have to get together and do that um so that'd be the only thing i would have to add to what jesse said tom have you um thought to contact the airport to see if they have they have a line striper it isn't i mean it's used a lot um but not every moment of every day in the striping season i i don't i i did follow up again because i didn't really hear back but i will i'll reach out about that again well and i have a um commission meeting tomorrow wednesday so i will i will bring it up as well but i think if you call we might be able to find a striper that we still need the money because i don't i don't think they'd loan it to us but i don't know so what's the thinking is anyone interested in upping a ten thousand out of the fund balance so if they can't find a striper to stripe it it stays in the fund balance sounds reasonable yeah i mean bob part of your um email to us mentioned that um at some point we were told you were told that the city really need to spend 80 a year in in order to get the striping to where it needed to be just can you expand on that a little bit i mean because if that's the case then yeah i mean i would be in they're moving toward the number that that we need yeah and tom probably has a better feel for this um than i but uh that was what we were told back in 2019 with uh justin rabid that he thought that and this is not every line in the city just the ones that annually need to be done because some lines on quieter roads don't need to be done for three to five years but um but his estimate at the time was uh he thought 80 000 would make sure that all of the lines that were fading need and crosswalks would get done so i mean i'm just going off of that benchmark dp a probe does that sound like it has some legs or is that was that just uh or is that ring a bell i mean i you know i that's someone else's estimate not yours that's right now i have no reason to doubt it helen i would just i'm not like to understand um what's within there because i know we do a fair bit of our own crossbar crosswalk or start stop bar and crosswalk striping we have the machine to do that it's really the long lines right the double yellow log lines etc where we have to hire that out um so i guess my question would be before i could respond to that would be i'd want to go look see what we're capable of doing in a typical year with the equipment and staff etc and i knew that calculation on our own with some updated costs but i i'm sure it's in the ballpark well maybe for future budgets that would be good to know have a um an estimate or some understanding of what the scope of work that's required i mean we certainly have that with paving we never do at all that's for sure we could spend 300 000 um and pave not get it all done but get more done so so what is the um council's pleasure to increase this by 10 000 coming out of the the fund balance tim that sounds good to me listen to her in a public hearing we can't make and don't can't do an action can we have to get the public okay all right so we'll take that up when we come out of public hearing it's thank you very much there might be a um a place for that thank you appreciate it are there any other um thoughts or comments all right um i would entertain a motion then to close the public hearing so moved second i have i just one thing to say if that's all yes absolutely just hi mike cohen um i live in laurel hill uh this is my first time to one of these meetings and to be honest i had no idea all this happened in the background so i just wanted to say thank you for everyone that it's just incredible that you guys are all working on this tirelessly to kind of come together to make our community better so i just wanted to say thank you and um i'm going to try to join these more often great awesome good you could also run for city council yeah i've got i've got three little kids right now right i know i know yeah it's screaming upstairs but maybe off our brain yeah thanks just bring your kids to the meeting yeah hurry yeah we'll get a lot done well a little dick here in the background okay beds with it um because we're all righty well thank you okay so are you ready for that vote now to come out of public hearing end it okay all in favor signify by saying hi hi so we are back into um the meeting and we can um i guess make moved at number eight consider the proposed budget um capital improvement and enterprise fund budgets um i'd entertain a motion i guess to increase the so yeah yeah so how we've done it this year is separate out all the different actions so it's about approving the resolution for the general fund enterprise fund and capital improvement plan budget and you have the town meeting day warning then the resolutions for arpa and fund balance and then the okay so we'll wait till we get to the fund balance and i would recommend let's table the fund balance one until the next meeting we'll put it on the consent agenda but it will let us update the numbers in that resolution oh okay yep all right so um item eight then is um we need a motion to consider the the proposed budget so i'll move that we move the proposed fiscal year 25 general fund the capital improvement plan and enterprise fund budgets uh uh to be sent to the steering committee in the boat and the voters on town meeting day 2024 second so any further discussion all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye so that is unanimous great it's always nice unanimous budget thank you for that thank you to the leadership team and Martha for building it i would also say this is usually the biggest thing a city council does in a year that one vote but i in a but this month i think you may actually have a bigger vote with adoption of the city plan so well done on your second largest vote this month okay all right so um item nine then is approve the 2024 town meeting day warning and set the public hearing for march fourth 2024 at 6 30 p.m so i entertain a motion to do that so moved second okay is there any discussion we got the language in the packet what the warning looks like okay is it a little premature to eliminate the position of cold way or of what i'm teasing the resolution eliminates three positions the the cold way or the lumber um it's part of the climate action plan the cold and lumber okay so we have a motion was it made and seconded okay are you ready for that vote okay all in favor of approving the town meeting day warning and setting the public hearing signify by saying aye aye aye so that's approved great it says the offices of fence viewer wayer of coal and inspector of lumber shall be abolished yes well we don't do any of those anymore but remember good fences make good neighbors yes this is true it's not that we don't have fences we just um tell everyone they have to be white in a certain height um item 10 approve the resolution 2020 number 2024-05 on the allocation of the American Recovery Plan Act the ARPA funds to support the FY 25 budget marcia do you want to come down and go over that or just the i guess we probably should right or is everyone familiar with it enough you don't want to go over it again we've gone over this quite a few times we still haven't spent all of it yeah that resolution is just to approve the amount of ARPA fund revenues that are in the budget and the project listed in there are the climate actions projects that are being funded 417 plus the two project park master plans and the shared use path allocations hell can i just mention just for the public what this entails because there's just so much discussion of what are pretty small amounts of climate action right we're installing charging stations we're replacing windows we're we're weatherizing um and i would hope and expect honestly that a lot of those things pay dividends in the future and maybe emiss almost pay for themselves so and it'll be interesting to know that but these are relatively small dollars you know doing sensible things linda bailing again yes i agree with you these are good things to do but what i was concerned about is that these funds are being quote-unquote hidden they're not being seen in the tax raises we're using ARPA money which is a limited fund will end up being going away in a while and it's not just these things in the climate action plan but anything else that is a want rather than a need when pockets get tight you have to tighten the budget somewhere and i just wanted to make sure that this is known and is being looked at thanks i think we we tried to make that really transparent by identifying the kinds of things like the windows that are a one-time um allocation of funds that we believe will have a return on that investment and use the ARPA funds for that because we wouldn't need them in the ongoing budget and then the things that we believed were more operational and needed to continue into the future we put into under general fund dollars and then as is always true with every budget every year even if some the position has been in place for 25 years the council can eliminate a position if there isn't the money or the need for it so even with adding people it's still i think is a a transparent way to say this is what the staffing needs are for this community with these goals and if the community wants to change the goals and the council is agreeable to that then you can eliminate positions or operating funds that are um included in the general fund but that's just true of every budget some communities cut police you know fortunately this one didn't all right so can i add to that too when the cip uh capital projects if you look in there we divided out so when you're looking at the project there's the actual cost of the project up top and the cost to be climate sensitive and we call it out as climate climate item or climate cost so when you're looking at those projects you are able to identify which project are actually climate and which uh projects are the regular project that the city would have for it would have to undertake as a regular process of running the city okay so did i get a motion to approve this no the the allocation of the ARPA money not yet so i will move that we approve resolution number 2024-05 on the allocation of american recovery plan act funds to support the fiscal year 25 budget second okay any further discussion all in favor signify by saying aye aye aye and that is unanimous all right we are going to table then item 11 because that's the um allocation of the fund balance we'll bring that back to you on the fifth with the additional 10 000 for the striping so we'll move on to item 12 approving resolution 2020-04-07 which is setting the water wastewater and storm water rates and allocation fees for FY 25 those are also yeah come on down more they're also um laid out in a um a chart that you went over right yeah do you want to see that again um that yeah why don't we put it up so the public knows what we're voting on i mean we're voting on the language but this is this is the resolution puts the these utility um increases um in language that the public votes on so i don't know if there's any further recommendation i think i might note that burlington south burlington continues to be one of the least expensive communities in the area for storm water sewer and water rates it is now right i don't know what it will be i don't know if any um communities are cutting their rates marcia yes so the rates are projected to support the budget FY 25 budget as you've looked at before what is new in the resolutions that's out of that is the allocation fees that the council has looked at before in the past i believe late last year and we are proposing to as you approve these resolutions the allocation fees begin with your approval tonight so that is thank you for calling that out that is a that is a significant difference for this resolution obviously the utility rates go into effect the first of the fiscal year um the allocation rates would go into effect now to capture the growth that we would experience in the next six months can you describe the allocation fee again i'm just so is that that's for new development that's yes so a new development comes online developed with a one-time fee based upon anticipated demand is that that works can hey travis can you show the cameras because tom's back on too please thank you tom you want to answer that again um so the two different allocations we have are the water and the wastewater allocation so that's to help pay for future growth so if somebody needs to connect to our water system or our wastewater system it's basically the cost of those gallons uh in this case i'll use drinking water so uh the gallons of water that it would what are we thinking would cost to kind of build those in the future so that when it comes time to build the next water tower we have the last one paid for or some funding in place for the future one it's estimated and the reason i asked because like have we been getting it right if we'd be getting it right i would have expected our utility rates to kind of like go up say in line with inflation not nine percent and so maybe those allocations too low like how do we estimate that tom yeah so um there was a good discussion about that in the rate study that went to council back was that november a little while back in any case um to cut to end Andrew uh it was determined that our rates are currently too low um and that the water rate should be closer to ten dollars and the sewer rate closer to twenty dollars per gallon um and so the plan here is to get those more in line with the actual cost and neighboring you know nearby communities over the next two years so that's why you see any increases here and we're doing it sooner than later as jesse said to help capture capture the growth that's happening right now okay um pay for those improvements going forward but yeah they're a little low at the moment for sure thank you thanks for that reminder tom that was helpful tim what what happened to the discussion that we wanted to have about uh the types of connections like to multi-unit buildings versus individual residences is that not included in in this new rate or is that a future discussion item for how we develop rates per buildings or remember that discussion we had where if you had a four-inch pipe going into a building and we didn't think it was it was fairly distributed the cost in terms of the building yeah tim um we could have that discussion at any point council would like to have it again um it kind of got honestly overshadows the right word but we moved into the budget discussions um and the spreadsheeting that i did to prepare information for that discussion uh it was quite a bit um and i didn't want to be in a position where we had to not only talk about the complex budget but also a complex way of determining utility rates i i didn't feel like the right time so i've not come back to you with that yet but certainly when council's ready i'd be i'd be more than happy to have that discussion if you all would i really do want to have that discussion when the time is right thank you okay so are you ready for adoption of this resolution or approval of this resolution i guess it's the community that adopts it so i'll move that we approve resolution number 2024-07 setting the water waste water and storm water rates and application fees for fiscal year 25 second all in favor hi hi hi okay it's unanimous okay moving on we have two minutes but we can start by the time we get to opening the public hearing on a Picard circle it'll be eight o'clock so i would entertain a motion to warn a or open a public um hearing on the discontinuation of Picard circle so moved all in favor hi hi hi and so top tell us about Picard we all went to see it under the snow today it's not eight o'clock yet well i guess i'll i'll talk about our site investigation today till we get to eight o'clock so uh one of the people public works director i realize i haven't introduced myself yet tonight for those may not know me uh yes so today in line with the state statute for discontinues of a road we had a forum of council members come out to Picard circle uh which is off of airport parkway kind of near Kirby road Kirby road extension um and so we took a look at the area i would just us no members of the public showed up we did advertise it and we did notify a butters the only a butter being the airport um and so the background here uh is that in 2009 well so i guess for going even further back uh Picard circle is a residential street but all of the homes were purchased and removed by the airport so it was just sort of a road with nobody living on it any longer also in 2019 we decided to remove the road and put in a really great and a large storm water infiltration project for that area um so the project was a success it's in place currently i was contacted last year by folks at v-trans who do the mapping they create the state highway maps uh everywhere in the state and they asked me what was going on with the card circle and they pointed out in statute that we had to go through this process to discontinue a road um so that's what we're doing today we're just cleaning up that paperwork so that v-trans will be able to remove that road from the maps um so the road will be discontinued the city will retain the right of way kind of retain the property and ownership because that's where the storm water treatment facility is um and so i think our next step here would be to take any public comment or have a discussion with any member public and then um pass a motion regarding the discontinuance all right is is there any comment from the public i mean the road is gone it's just grass but to make it official is there anyone on line okay well right okay so um it appears as if there are no public who wish to speak so we can close the public hearing so moved second all in favor hi hi public hearing is closed and then we can move on to item 14 and take action to discontinue pacard circle is there specific language i may not have provided specific language in the motion but the motion would be just to discontinue pacard circle as a public road but retain ownership of the property so moved second any discussion i do have just yes just a simple piece of but yeah so i just want to um review the the can you hear me the the current status of that property all those all the former residential lots are owned by the burlington international airport right that's and they cannot build any residential buildings on that land for at least what was it 20 25 years is there a number on the number of years 20 well it's after a change in airport operations so it would be 20 years after that but i we still own the road so that just has that that even though you can't see the road the land where the road once stood is ours so is there an easement for that road a legal document for it yes okay but there's storm water underneath it right now so you can't really you wouldn't want to put asphalt on top of it right um you probably could but it's you know it's just green space right now yeah um the this particular system you probably could and it's pretty deep as well so um yeah well where is it receiving its input where is the input water coming into the system just from the the the soil above no it's from airport parkway and a little bit of surrounding roadways kind of rooftops adjacent um you know i didn't go back and look up all the old storm water project information but i know it's on our storm water utility website kind of drainage areas okay so there are conveniences from other sources to bring the water to that those particular infiltration devices underground okay it's not like just okay i was just trying to think ahead about contingencies in the future for something strange that might happen you know after we're not around so okay but this is fine i have no problem with this larry thank you i would just wanted to point out how much the mature trees that are on the property and there's um i'm not sure that the this this corner of airport parkway and is is actually part of the airport's plan for its public park um i could be wrong about that but i think it's a little off away from where they were planning on proposing and i think it's it's just really nice a nice area now for um for public use if there was any other kind of public use other than building but the the trees on it as as much as uh is as evident in most of the most of the area in which the airport took control the mature trees are are quite nice to maintain and i think the airport at this point intends to maintain them i think so so all right so where are we with this um um okay so is there any other discussion all those in favor of um discontinuing card circle has a um street signified by saying aye aye passes great um and now we have let's see item 15 is receiving and potentially approving a recommendation from the public art committee for a piece from mormon is that how how he pronounces it low at jc park the public art committee is going to present this or or alana representative who's presenting oh penny penny okay hi here i just didn't choose to stay there and wait because it's snowy out so that's fine and i can't see who's online so welcome thank you thank you um i think that some of our committee members are as well here but i i can't see who they're because they're either so i believe john is here and maybe one other member um yes i guess i am presenting it i wasn't sure but uh i guess first i'll ask and double check have you all had a chance to look at the artwork and the little vimeo um piece that that was provided by the uh by it's clay mormon and fee below that's the name of the team so um that's one thing i wanted to be sure okay great because otherwise alana said she could video actually but i saw a bunch of pictures yeah yeah oh okay well there's a uh video i thought that was accessible for you all but it basically shows how the light would go through that sculptural piece so we didn't see that oh alana is that something you can try to show them or is that too complicated i'll continue talking in alana can decide if she can get it for you um so that we don't waste time um so just a little bit of background so when we were first formed as a committee you know we were we our projects were more restricted to where the tiff district were but once we started to ask for money to be held or to be used in your capital improvement plan so that we could start to put public art in other places in the city and so this really um is uh i think i can say this is the first piece um that we are a are being able to put forward to to recommend to you um to be commissioned and it is outside of the city center area it is proposed for jc park um i'm hoping you all know where jc park was i had honestly not visited it myself but um it's on patch and road and it's just beyond where the post office is and it used to have i think a building for the jcs on it if i'm not mistaken i think that's how it got its name and uh we started this process back in 2022 um with a request for proposals received a number of proposals but the one we brought forward was this one from um clay and phoebe it is about seven feet tall if i'm not mistaken and it uh i i can tell you that we we have seen some of their work in real life john and i went down on new year's eve to the waterfront where they had a um installation of smaller pieces a couple of four lighted smaller pieces one of which was um in character and feeling uh similar to the one that they've proposed for us and it seemed to be it was well made and looked very sturdy and all that so we we were happy to go and uh see their something of their work in person because up until now of course it's been drawings and videos so and the other piece to tell you is that it's taken us um there is your would have had in your packet we had a public um period period for public comment um and most of the comments were positive they're never all positive um but mostly people seem to be um enthused and interested in the our idea to put a sculpture on that um location so with that and having saved some of our cip money so we're basically need to use about three years of cip funds they've been accruing them uh and to be able to um afford the project so let's see what else can i tell you those are the main things yeah i think that's it i mean i think i mean ask questions but i i we wanted you to know we we um we did vote on it last in december to put this forward to you i took a while to find a location i will tell you that that part was a bit of a challenge for our committee once we committed to the idea of the sculpture and what it would look like we looked at two different locations and for various reasons they did not go through and then we actually were really thrilled when we discovered oh what about jc park that the area is right in front near near to the road so it will be enjoyed by you know pedestrian traffic car traffic hopefully they don't look too long um uh but it will be uh visible from the road and that is a spot there where um it should get it will get good light i can't account for the cloudiness of ramon though that we can't do anything about so i'm trying to find the picture of jc park i was just curious it wasn't clear to me exactly where it would be um so it um a lot of you you might need to help me here because um so jc can you do that i can um if um i don't i don't there we go great it's in the front area of the park there's a part there you drive into the park and there's parking beyond a little uh white house little building i'm not sure what it is and but it's in front of that and so it's uh there you go so there's a there's a good uh see the red arrow oops so it's not near the swings and uh no the swings are lower in that image if you look uh to the bottom of that image you'll see that is the swings in that area okay at one of the things we right one of the things we have also um this has come up in comments that it will have an anti graffiti coating i know some people asked about that so just wanted you to know that that is part of what's um in the budget and they're and we will there will be some structural engineering we'll be working with um the city departments about you know the structural things obviously as well uh what else and alana does that mean you could show them the video there you go sunrise just right so um and we do think it'll it'll be a nice addition to that area and it put something there that you know that is um a part of town that probably doesn't have as much um of that type of thing going on so we thought it would be a good location yes it looks like people can walk between the different pieces is that right no no no no no they are they're close enough to each other Megan that they are one unit okay even a small child because it looks like they're if it's two feet deep it looks like there's at least a foot um i don't i mean i i i guess i can't answer that for sure could the child climb well let's put it this way we're not we wouldn't be surprised if children tried to climb on it right let's put it there so i mean but i don't uh yeah i don't think there'll be anything that will um you know sort of like the gooses they could well they're designed to be climbed on but the gooses can be climbed on um this is not really designed for that um i don't really know if a child could fit between this basis it could walk all the way through no but i mean you can squeeze it and i guess sorry i can't i never can figure which way i'm supposed to move in my video and the artists um were opposed to any electric lighting it was funny you should say that i was just get well i read all the comments and some people my favorite of that and other people were saying that's the last thing i want to cross the street is all those right yes so uh it's funny you should say that because the piece that we saw in New Year's Eve they specifically were lighted um and they were kind of cool yeah so um i think it's one of those things that we would explore for the future but it wasn't for the initial proposal so i don't think it's impossible but i also think electricity uh you know access to electricity in that location might be challenging so maybe it could be done sometimes i don't i'm not sure alana do you have any more information than i would on that possibility yeah we did we did look at that and currently there isn't electric at that location in the park um so it would be an additional expense uh and was not included in the budget so penny you have a far keener eye for art in aesthetics than i do and i know that in fact there were a bunch of folks who said they didn't think this would like fit in with the natural area and what was your perspective or the perspective on the other folks on the public art committee to that perspective i think overall our committee sort of weighed in on that there were um more folks who were in favor of it i don't think i do it wasn't that those weren't um you know there any current comments are warranted um and i think we felt that the bright colors and the modern look of it was part of what made it distinctive and attractive to be in the space so i don't know if that answers your question well but um you know to have it in kind of muted tones and other kind of natural tones we were like well then that wouldn't be the piece so in terms of not fitting within the natural environment that's a little bit of a tougher one i mean it is uh it is an art uh piece so it is sometimes that's a little more subjective but um on the whole the committee felt it would be um a positive more positive than negative i guess is the way to state that and john if you are here and wanted to comment you're welcome to i'm i i can't see so does it have a name is is the piece titled and will there be a little plaque or something that lets the public know it is not currently titled it's now just called espi sculpture so it is not yet titled um and in and i i would hope that we yes indeed would have a plaque there to say what it is and why it is um i don't know if that's included in the budget but i certainly think that's something we need to do and andre t i and we've talked about maybe outreaching to some of the neighbors who were less excited um and see if you know see if we can help them feel better about the fact that we'd really like to put this there i would like to have it titled even if the artists call it untitled we can absolutely take care of that just sort of right well i wanted the art piece then just right some color well i will tell you something amusing in one of the previous budgets it was called otis and we thought is that its name so we could check back and see if they intended to call it otis or whether that was a mistake but yes um i i think that's a great idea other comments by the council members just i just want to be sure that children can't get stuck in it that's the one that's but otherwise and i think we can look at that with the placement good well and you probably want to say don't climb on it uh you know i mean right i think we want to design it so that if people climb on it it can support them oh yes if it's going to be in a part it what it should be able to be climbed on that comment makes me pause okay if we're going to have something that can't be touched it shouldn't be in a children's park yeah so i just want to make sure that it's safe for little people yeah yes so the project will be reviewed by a structural engineer and then the installation will be done with um department of public works and recreation to make sure that it's appropriate appropriately placed um and is not a hazard well it looks like a butterfly to me but i think it looks like sort of like the mountain ranges but there you go purple mountains majesty yeah and i i do appreciate you reaching out to the neighbors i think it's i mean i don't know sometimes things just grow on you know yep people wanted to tear down the eiffel tower yeah what would Paris be without the eiffel tower okay so this we need to vote on this approve the money is that right do we need to um vote for this approve yes there should be a recommendation at the end i think okay so it would be to approve the commissioning of the piece for jc park okay so i move we approve the commissioning of the uh mo the more man low piece for installation in jc park in coordination with public works and recreation and parks departments second is there any further discussion i just want to say this is a fabulous piece of art and it's great to have this asset for south Berlin in that park that park had a dog park for a little while that disappeared so it's good to put something there that is going to be pleasant to look at and i think people will enjoy it as time goes on if they don't it didn't like the idea initially i think what Megan said is true they will grow on them and it has wonderful colors so i look forward to seeing it john collackey has joined us did you want to make any comment we're we have a motion on the table has it been seconded yes yes but we haven't voted on it so if you wanted to make a comment please feel free oh well thank you very much and i'm sorry i was at a williston select board meeting something else that's why i jumped on so i'm sorry i'm late this has been a thrilling process for me look meeting these artists getting to know their work seeing the site that we have presenting to you and i think penny may have mentioned that we went down new year's eve to look at some of the other examples of their work and it's just studying public work that is going to bring magnificent color to that part of our our town so i i i hope the motion goes forward um and i it's been a pleasure to work with this committee on this with these artists great well i appreciate your um both of your work on the committee all right thank you ready for the vote all those in favor signify by saying i hi hi it's unanimous great thank you very much we look forward to when and thank you for your time hopefully this summer this summer yeah by this summer that'd be great yeah great thank you after mudsy them after mudsy's exactly i think you might look even cool with snow oh yes i agree with you it'll be beautiful in the winters yeah as long as there was some sunshine to go with it well we occasionally have sunshine okay so yeah well yeah okay worst solar year ever last year by two percent share of the solar farm generated very little electricity the past month yeah our my big work is about that uh eclipse next year it's like 70 chance it'll be cloudy over for month it's going to be less solar produced when that eclipse happens that's really bad okay moving on to 17 um receive the city pension asset update and the net performance report i'm wondering do we want to take just a five minute break and they can get set up and we'll be back five minutes thank you i will call back to order the south brongton city council meeting of what is it january 16th and we are at item 17 to receive the city pension asset update and net performance report we have daniel capel sci client service so welcome thank you okay now your voice thank you for the technical support as well it's great to see everyone again obviously um things have improved drastically from when i was in providing this report last year so um some good news to share so i will run through an executive summary i'll just touch on uh i know being mindful of time quick market economic where we're seeing things and then jump into the overall portfolio review and then that will be it so as always please feel free to stop me if any questions you may have as i'm running through the presentation so taking a look overall uh looking at the the one year return it's 13.22 percent and um that is uh obviously a substantial increase relative to last year if you look on the left hand side with the bar charts the light blue lines represent 2022 and the dark blue lines represent 2023 as you can see everything in 2022 is down across all major asset classes with the exception of commodities and in 2023 all major asset classes are up with the exception of commodities so it's been a complete uh switch and and um and what did what wasn't working to what is working so as of uh 12 31 2023 the market value stood at 43.9 million dollars and taking a look over the the longer term our core our objective of course is to sustain the defend the funding and improve the funding of the pension plan um in order to provide pension payments for for the members and you can see that in the the longer term 8.47 percent on the five year and 6.03 percent in on the since inception and that is all net of few returns reflecting back on equities we saw that global equities delivered solid returns in the us was really a standout a lot of this was driven by a craze over artificial intelligence we saw that mega cap technology names really led the way last year and there's also been expect expectations for interest rate cuts in 2024 and that has been a key driver for equity market performance from a fixed income standpoint we saw that central banks across the globe took their foot off the gas pedal from interest rate increases there has been a pause with the fed and other major central banks such as the european central bank and the bank of england as a result what was carnage in bond markets and fixed income market markets which you traditionally do not see that that reversed and we saw a positive lift in bonds this year and finally the alternatives exposure that the fund is invested in a core property fund it's been a difficult and challenging environment and that does continue for core real estate and that is a product of the rising rates and heightened economic uncertainty but again the portfolio is well diversified across geographies asset classes and in order to reduce volatility and diversify risk away moving forward from to our point of view and what we see on a go for basis so in 2023 we entered the year with a call peak pessimism there was one of the most forecast recessions if everyone was in the recession camp and typically what happens is these pendulum swings too far in one direction and it's not as bad as what it may seem and there really was a surprise and above average pace of growth and there was really superior economic performance relative to other advanced economies but in light of that now we've kind of reached peak optimism heading into the end of the year we had this huge reversal so from our standpoint we could see that there should be subdued growth in 2024 and perhaps a stagnant or mildly recessionary environment but again the economy is not the stock market so that does not necessarily mean that we'll see you know what we did see in 2022 from an interest rate and inflation standpoint it's our view that inflation will remain persistent that's driven by the cost of services low unemployment and wages and as a response we believe that the degree of interest rate cuts currently being priced in which is 150 basis points or what would amount to six cuts of 25 basis points is likely is likely not going to be achievable but by the Fed but nonetheless that is what the the bond market is pricing in and overall from a market standpoint a lot the major driver of equity market returns last year was the magnificent seven so I think your mega cap technology companies we did see a broadening out so other companies in in the US market participating in the fourth quarter we do we do expect that these major stocks are vulnerable based on where their valuations are and as a result as I mentioned diversifying across stocks sectors and geographies and the portfolios positioned as such in order to address concentrations that we're we're seeing right now in some of the mega cap technology and finally taking a look back on what impacted portfolio performance looking at the US equity market just wanted to bring attention to on the dispersion between value and growth you can see that value was up 11.4 percent for the year and growth is up 42.7 a lot of that was driven by the mega cap technology names what does that matter well there are active US equity funds that are in the fund that would underperform their benchmark as a result of of of this outcome but nonetheless as we mentioned we think that that rally has gotten ahead of itself with this huge dispersion between the two and finally from an international equity market standpoint we did see a wide dispersion between to end the year between developed markets and emerging markets as you can see indicated by the dark blue line and the light blue line on that on that chart and of course there is diversification and the fund is exposed to both international and emerging market equities is that disparity um typical uh it the between the emerging and yeah it's it it really is you could have those so for example a lot of the reason for the emerging market struggling is China China did not have the post covid economic resurgence that was anticipated so it could have you know it could very well go in the other direction where emerging markets would outperform developed markets so but it certainly I would say is is China weighing down the two of them um it it really is you know but they're segmented economies of developed if you think you know Japan you're uh Pacific X Japan where you would think of emerging markets China being the major one Mexico being another one Brazil think of those types of countries so they would be reliant on each other just based on a global economy but you could see dispersions if there is isolated problems in a major in a major country like China which is what's driving this dispersion between the two why it's such a major company the country why is it considered an emerging market doesn't it practically drive the market it is yeah there are certain and I don't know the terminology off hand of what there are certain what determines what isn't emerging what is developed and then there are also frontier markets and they graduate from frontier to emerging to developed um yeah and there's a there's you know an academic description of what constitutes being a developed versus emerging versus frontier economy and then finally taking a look at at fixed income and it really was although it did feel like there was pain and interest rates last year if you look at the on the left hand side it was extremely volatile throughout the year you can see that the the light gray line which was December 31st 2022 um and then it by 9 30 the the darker line that's where um the rates stood across you know across maturities it moved up and that's why we saw a challenging environment leading into October and then as of the end of this year everything kind of came back down so it was almost a a trip around the sun for interest rates and and the uh the policy rate which is what is set by the Federal Reserve and what everyone focused on you can see shorter term rates did come up um and did stay there uh but nonetheless you know longer term rates think of rates that would you know influence mortgages really did a round trip um on on the year so uh just interesting it took a pause myself to say well it really shot up and came back to where where we started in 2022 and then finally and I know this is going to be front and center especially after after last night as we head into election season um you know we often get the question is is there going to be uncertainty uh amidst a presidential election and this is taking a look at um in presidential election years since 1948 and you can see the outcomes um as a result of of elections and there's only one instance where there was a negative uh as or there was only one instance where negative returns were produced in the s&p 500 so for the most part um while it can cause noise and perhaps volatility along the way um it's still a bit positive outcomes across election cycles but also should point to not only the u.s. is going through election cycle there's a number of other major global players that are going through election cycles namely timeline already had their election um the uk uh south africa russia india indonesia to to name a few that are also having elections so um again these these events are constantly happening but specifically um here in the u.s. uh no not necessarily a negative uh impact on on equity market return the civil war impact equity evaluation I think if that was there I don't think that is modeled into this thankfully that hasn't happened in this the samples 1948 but yes I would imagine that um that would likely skew uh this this paragraph that you were seeing here and I hope that is not an outcome I said earlier in the day at this meeting that I was going to call the the russia election right now I think it's I think I can call it I think you can be very confident in calling that election and then finally just one one slide that I wanted to share on a on a bigger picture and I think this is important to you know pension plan dynamics as well as just societal dynamics as a whole and we we spoke last year when I was in about demographic demographics and job vacancies and not having people to fill jobs and this is taking a look at the old age dependency uh ratio so across economies and both emerging and developed markets globally and this is the number of individuals aged uh 65 plus per 100 workers um aged 20 to 64 so as you can see really across the board moving forward there's going to be a larger uh number of individuals um poor working persons which obviously impacts anything from tax base pension contributions and really those that are working versus those that are um have reached the retirement age and may retire so we believe that although uh that that demographics will limit deceleration and compensation gains as as and create inflationary pressures moving forward so just in really look on the right hand side you can see and for example Japan Korea almost one to one um for for those numbers projected by by 2050 and in China they're trying to pay women to have children and it's not going well so finally the good news bad news um good news US economy is relatively healthy um especially versus other major uh advanced countries fiscal policies are quite expansionary still to this point and um risk assets traditionally do well when the Fed begins to cut interest rates which is what is projected to happen this year um the bad news as I mentioned animal spirits or exuberance investor optimism is running high um what do you mean by animal spirits decide whether that was the bull or the yes the it's your actual feeling prophecy of animal spirits okay um and it's they're running high it would not be surprising to see that you know we could see a pause here and all that it would take is you know weaker than expected growth or um the central bank not easing as much as expectations and we also see that central banks just may not be able to cut interest rates as much as as much as they would like which could be a problem again for fixed income inequities and um to geopolitical and you know we see instances of this um oil markets could pretend could end up in a more difficult place should we see continued uh stresses in the middle east of which we have seen picking up particularly of late and of course oil would contribute is a major contributor to inflation so um that those are the good news and bad news on a go forward basis so finally uh taking a look at the overall portfolio on a one year the gain for the portfolio was five point four million dollars which more than out offset the net cash outflows of one point four million dollars which would be going towards benefit payments leaving the ending portfolio value as I mentioned of forty three point nine million dollars and as as overall uh looking at the individual investments um there is nothing that that stands out as major under under performance um to of note as I did mention looking at the us equity factor allocation fund not as much exposure to those magnificent seven technology stocks so we do see some other performance there but that is to be expected and does balance the large cap index fund um which does have that exposure so we you know again we're we're our approach is to manage risk and maintain that that funded status throughout time and um it's using that that balanced approach and then on the the next page just taking a look um at fixed income it was really a positive contributor for the year after what I mentioned in 22 was one of those uh uh very challenge very difficult years for for fixed income so overall fixed income um the the US aggregate bond index up uh five and a half percent with the um you know that's that was a stark change and if you look historically the 10-year annualized return is 2.41 percent so starting to see a lift and benefiting from being a saver and we see that as as positive move forward for um a pension plan and um it would uh it would be great to see rates elevated from from that standpoint of being compensated in fixed income investments that is all for me um happy to address any other questions I appreciate you having me in here today and to share the results and happy that they were positive results this this time around are there any questions yeah I just I'd love to see maybe not for this presentation but next time um that you're before us a breakout of the fees yep so you know both the fees at your level and like embedded fee is at any fund level just so we can see like you know gross fees net yeah yes of course yeah we can show you can see it here with the on the one year number that would be a full cycle and I can show you the actual breakdown and what the pricing looks like for the fund but you can see the the returns that I stated at the beginning of the presentation were all yeah net of fees so you can see their 72 72 basis points would be the the fee so the return to the net return 72 basis points so on this I'm sorry page uh sorry I'm on page 15 correct on page 15 the fees are which if you look at the total portfolio return relative to the net return I can I can give an outright breakdown though displaying of how the how the fees are allocated what hey uh Andrew I see total pro turn in the net so that the difference right does that does that include kind of like um embedded fees at the fund level great yeah that's no that's a great question so the way that that the fee structure does work is there's two components there's um the in subadvisor fees so showing you this this comprehensive list here the way that it works or the investment program of the pension fund is currently using there's sei and our you know we work on the overall asset mix and designing an asset mix that meets the the liabilities of the fund and we do that um by hiring subadvisors in these various asset classes so fees go to them and uh as well so there's there's two fees be great to see kind of like the the total fees that are paid versus total gross return yeah we can we I can certainly give you that breakdown of you know the typically would be that what the fee is that goes to sei from for managing the program which is outsourced to us and then there's the underlying manager fees as well and then there's also we are also the custodian for the funds as well which we also look at look after so there's a number of different components too thank you hey andrew if you didn't know sei supplies a turnkey solution for the the whole pension system so from managing the assets uh all the way to cutting checks to uh the people who have retired if you didn't know oh I did so so this fee is not just for investment management this is the whole operational structure correct what do we say outsource it's the the whole fund if if you were to think of if the the city had its own pension investment office set up right from hiring managers to middle office capabilities uh and then you and I am the link between sei you send out statements letters you see the whole we we do everything correct this is just the this is the byproduct of all of that and on top of that you know we I'm in here core I'm in her quarterly to work with the pension advisory committee um you know we we are looking at the asset makes we do we have an in-house actuary come in once a year to perform an asset allocations an asset liability study to ensure that the assets align with what you with uh Eric will be speaking to next and it's really in addition to that education and other components as as we see fit but it's really when we say outsource the whole investment operation has been um delegated to us and we're a co-fiduciary um at that as well in the way that we invest the the assets is Daisy still in the room just go ahead I'm sorry I just I I can't remember when you first started working with us 2016 is the inception date yes and we did implement I believe two years ago we did implement a increase as well um good question yes so Dan I I recall this is a closed fund there aren't any new members joining that's yeah that's that would be I'm sure the actuary will cover that in the next part but yes it's closed to new adherence but there are still benefits being accrued right but in terms of that uh aspect of it being that is there a is there a is there an investing design that you include because of that yeah that's that's a great question so what we did earlier this year actually is we had um when our actuary was in so the asset side the liability side we folk our actuary focus is on the asset side he was in and we actually did a a um an education session on the life cycle of a pension fund and what does it look like as you get closer to fully funded status and you know ultimately the fund will terminate at some point down the road much further down the road and it's how do you de-risk the plan um moving forward as these milestones are reached and and we share some insight into that as of right now you still need investment returns in order to sustain the funded status um and that is for for the foreseeable future would still be required but as again as we hit certain milestones we would definitely and you know as the the plan evolves and reaches you know as as entrance um there's as entrance are no longer receiving benefit payments um then then you would de-risk the plan and and eventually it would it would wind up but it is something that we're in dialogue with and I'm sure we will you know be that that education piece will be a constant theme as we move forward um with with the SMX Tim do you have anything you want to add at this point um no just that um we live in a complex world right now you know I mean it's always complex every quarter that Dan shows up I go but what about what about Gaza what about Russia what about Ukraine what about pandemic what about you know they're just like they come in waves and you know you just kind of hope for that sort of like placid happy production happy consumption happy trade you know happy energy you know matching across the globe uh but there's just too much cross current going on and so that's what causes these imbalances and ends up adjusting these performances in these these assets and you know it's it's just um it's just human behavior I guess you know but like you said you know the economy is not the market and vice versa so we were lucky last year and I hope that we continue to be lucky but you know there are times when when things are not that don't go well the only bright spot is it is an election here and it looks like the average return on that was at least six percent except for we won't have the possibility of an incumbent republican losing I guess right that's that's true that removes the only the only negative period in this depends how you um well that's true because if you didn't if you really won the last election yeah it's you know anyway exactly so yeah that here's the challenge isn't it we got two both winners okay thank you very much thank you very much for having me and look forward to seeing you all again next year with hopefully more good news as well no thanks Dan okay Eric shape you're gonna do the city pension actuarial update this is the stuff that keeps you going I am Eric shape with the new park group and the actuary on the plans pension plan and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk a little bit more on the liability side of the plan just give you an update on how that goes over time I'm gonna try and go through it quickly so that we don't have to go through all of the boring points but I'm just gonna start giving you an overview that each year we do an actuarial evaluation we update it for census updates each year and when we go through this we're gonna have two different liability measures we're gonna look at one's called the unit credit one's entry age normal I won't go into them too much but just know there's two two different liabilities overview one looks at just the current value and one incorporates future compensation increases and future service to try and fund to what your ultimate lease is going to be paying in the future so it's more forward-looking funding policy for the plan to get to a point of being sustainable over time and just graphically when we look at it the entry age normal will be higher in the short term but they will they will end up in the same place just quickly some other terms we're gonna we're gonna talk about the liability which is past service earned in the plan so there's active employees in the plan they've worked for the city for a period of time say 20 years their liability is everything attributed to the past that's happened previously and we'll talk about the normal cost which is benefits being earned in the current year so we're just when we go through the funding of the plan there'll be a portion paying towards the past and a portion paying towards the future and then just in general there's a funding policy for the pension plan and what it is is we'll take that liability compare it to the assets get your unfunded liability the first part will be an amortization payment paying down the unfunded liability there'll be a part for the payment of the current year benefits being earned on the normal cost and then there'll be a little interest to the payment date and not included in what your contribution will be but employees also paying to the plan each year and it's worth noting it got brought up earlier that as of July 1 2019 no new participants will go into the plan so over time the active population will decrease because no one knew was going in and when that happened the city started modified the funding policy to decrease the period on the amortization of the unfunded so each year the period's getting a little shorter reflecting that there's there's no new employees going in over time the plan will be more mature so it made sense to accelerate funding to get to a point of 100 funded so as of July 1 2023 we were at a 16-year period on the amortization and the total contribution for the city to the plan was 1,183,000 compared to the prior year it was 1,175,000 so relatively stable from year to year as the period accelerated there's not much variation year to year on the contribution because it takes a lot of smoothing aspects into account there's a smooth asset value that goes into it and we'll review that in a little bit just graphically that 1 1,183,000 about 465,000 is the new benefits being earned 626,000 is payment towards the unfunded liability just to pay that down and then there's a little bit for interest in there so if we're looking at the funded status on the smooth market value of assets and the current benefits earned that unit credit liability the plan is just over 100 funded if you look at it with that smooth value with the more conservative entry age liability it's about 87.6% funded same two values but comparing it to the unsmoothed assets just for reference you have 97 98% on the unit credit and 85.23 on the entry age normal and that 85.23 is the number you will see if you were to compare to another city or state's financial reporting so that's the more standardized number over time the two rates have been relatively stable over the last several years made a little bit of a dip last year and we're starting to recover from that but comparing to other plans you are 85.23 funded on the same day the average public plan was about 77 funded average for Vermont or average for country national level. Veeamers was 74 the teachers state teachers 57 Burlington was 80 that's a little bit older of a number and St. Albans about 55 so just comparatively overall your plan is well funded compared to pretty much everyone else and you do have a good funding policy that I think that accelerating of the amortization period will keep you keep you funded and work towards a point where when everyone's retired plan will be 100 funded and you don't have to worry about it as much. There are a lot of assumptions that go into the liabilities each year I'm not going to go through each one but just know that we do review them every year to compare that you know make sure see if there's any changes needed or any recommendations to changes being need to be made and no assumptions have been changed in the past year or are recommended to be changed in the next year and they're all consistent from the prior years so I'm not going to go through listing what each one is but just they're all in the report if you wanted them and I mentioned the smooth value of assets it's a little hard to see up there but the the middle line there is the smooth value over time and you can see it does what it it says it is it's smooth and the market value will go above and below from year to year but it pretty much always come back towards the smooth value just rough asset information I know you've seen the actual number is more in depth but generally over the last several years the three in the 10 year your actual returns have been at or above the assumed return in the plan of 7.25 percent and then in the plan as of July 1 23 there were 59 active participants left and those are people working for the city earning benefits there were 54 deferred participants those are people that earn benefits but don't work there don't work here anymore they have a benefit to get in the future they're just not getting paid it yet and then there were 97 retirees getting monthly payments from the plan and you can kind of see the trend over time as the active group is shrinking and the retired group is growing and that that will just continue over time that is all I have on the plan unless there's questions questions I just so the recommended funding was a million one or something and that that's the amount that I believe is going into them and that's part of the budget already okay any other questions okay thank you this is another question but just can you go back to your last slide for a minute with the employees yeah so as Eric said with his support and Dan's support we do a very active system one of the things that kind of freaks me out about this slide is you see the you know the decrease from the active employees of 68 to 59 and 9 drop in in one year of our employees retiring even if they're not collecting that's a huge amount of lived experience that is walking out the door every year for us so when we think about our workforce and think about you know churn is good but also experience especially in our public safety teams that's a lot of turnover in one year to be expected but a little scary from an office perspective and that's where it mostly is isn't it fire and police fire police and some public works but mostly fire police yeah sorry not actuarial data thank you this reflects back on Dan's slide about lots of gray gray hair or well that's what it was about yeah but it's a bit okay thank you very much thank you for having me thanks okay so now we have we've been waiting for for a while the first reading of a residential rental ordinance and instead of public care in February 20th at 7 p.m. so Steve you're not going to take us all through this but you had a good summary yes I mean so um so this is I just look back this is the sixth time this this this item has been before you and so last last week just to make sure we captured everything I did rewatch the last meeting to make sure that we addressed everything although there were there while we talked about a lot of things at the last meeting there was no real changes requested from you so this now is in official Colin was able to put it in official ordinance format and it does set in motion really the the request that you then schedule the public hearing this be considered the first reading and set the public hearing for February 20th 7 p.m. and then we have to have the second public hearing no no you can you can go of the fur to call him I think you're gonna adopt yeah that'd be great so make it and I can vote on this potentially so you could adopt it that evening if there's no change or actually I think we could even make changes that evening then you're done if we made changes that evening we'd have to re-warn it and have another hearing okay so is there more information anyone with people questions where are we in terms of funding the the build out and you know the sure so that would come back to you as another conversation so what this does is set fees that we believe would allow us to using some borrowing a fund balance would allow us to do the addition of the fire station all all of that is going to take time so without using opera with so it would the proposal was to use 500 000 of one-time monies to whether that's ARPA or fund balance in addition to a loan against the fund balance that would be a decision you would have to make it sometime in the future we'd bring that back to you once we had solid construction costs and a solid plan what this allows us to do by moving in this fashion is to set this in motion for an April 1 2024 where we would start collecting fees while we're still getting stood up so we would be operating the first year because we the first year and I'm going to call it hot desking a way in which we we would not have the space built out let me describe does it make sense given that it's possible we would change the fee schedule off the back of a conversation like that to put the fees in a resolution that is more nimble that could be changed more nimbly than in the ordinance itself I particularly love that I've never been a big fan of having fees and ordinances in general just for that reason um but I guess I would dig for to you and to call calling you any comment on that call um no it's certainly something we could we could change and I think a lot of our ordinances do have fee structures that are set by resolution print you know referred not only fee structures but our speed limits our stop signs water wastewater sewer rates all are set by resolution so they could be more adaptable that time goes on well I would be supportive of that yeah I guess the question just could would that change us would that if we change that now does that change us from having the ability to have the public hearing on the 20th of February I don't believe so we've this is a first reading of the ordinance we can make changes between now and the second reading we can't make changes once once it has been warned and published and ready to go for the the actual public hearing so if we made the changes now we could warn that version and make that version available for the public hearing for your consideration of that does everyone amenable yeah just explain why why we could do that so we can change them more easily right that makes sense so if we need to raise a little more money or we've raised too much and we could lower the without changing ordinance you've changed right you just changed the resolution and so then you don't have to have public hearings on resolutions you just do it as a financial decision as a council action I mean for me my boy is much cleaner not having fees within the ordinance so I would welcome that and the second thing is um chief can you make available maybe at the next reading the um inspection cycle resolution we would also treat that as I guess I would treat that as an internal policy on how we're going to do inspections not necessarily council action okay um I mean I was personally interested in it because it kind of drives staffing a little bit and you know cadence and so I hear you but maybe no action but I mean I was interested in just want to see yeah certainly have no problem sharing it for informational purposes I would prefer it not be included in the ordinance or as a resolution just in case there are things that we want for information and maybe maybe feed out what the process or the schedule might be and just so I can clarify when putting this together so we're talking about section four of the of the proposed ordinance which is registration fees registration fees would still be due on April 1st just the amounts would be set up by resolution yes set forth in resolution would we want to if you'll notice if you're looking at the ordinance in front of you right now there's a subsection five which says five dollars of the per unit registration fee for long-term and short-term rental units will be deposited in a fund held by the city to financially assist property owners would that still be in the ordinance or would you like that in addition in terms included in the resolution is your mic on I would personally pull all the numbers out into a resolution but you would want language that says that we will collect a certain amount of money for this purpose set out in the resolution fees will be set by the resolution right yeah so all of sub four or section four will be a resolution that with the exception of the date with the exception of four a yeah that's okay and a certain amount of this to determine by you and resolution will be set aside to help assist residents yeah I think that's good policy to keep in the the ordinance and I would propose if we can can bringing a resolution to you that at least with at the at this rate of fees this same evening so that on February 20th so that we can move forward yes cross with the process but if we decide by June or July that construction costs are going to be more or less than we need to amend those we could do that I would yes I think that would make a lot of sense that was speeded along and get it in place sooner rather than later yeah okay yep yeah quick question yes uh Steve will the um first year include staffing up that is certainly our goal yeah so you you don't have dedicated staff now for this I don't do you have right yeah we would go into a building you'll need staff yes we will move quickly after the 20th I guess 30 days after that okay I have a question yes so Stephen um if if we pass the resolution and the the whole package on February 20th what is the next step where you would expect people to identify themselves and and or how would you proactively identify them are you do you have a list of addresses that you're going to send mail out to immediately when you are ready or yeah do we just sit there and wait for the phone to ring or unfortunately what if nobody calls yeah so a good question so first I would say that we have we do have many contacts for most of the larger complexes we already work with property managers so for in terms of existing I want to use the more typical apartment buildings we will have contacts already I suspect very soon our new communications person will be doing some outreach materials for us so as soon as we do have um a resolution an ordinance resolution is in place we will you'll see marketing from us from the city coming out and then I think at some point we'll have to figure out kind of that third leg of the stool is how do we identify those people that have that are operating that we're that we don't know that we're not aware of and don't have you know a contact for I think that those will over time continue to percolate up do we need our state reps to bring forward some recommendations and or legislation for the tax department to remit to those cities and towns that have enacted rental registries um the the address and owner name of anybody that remits um rooms tax to the state of Vermont not the amount just the fact that they remitted either through air bnb or verbal or whoever it is is that something that we need to pursue it has yes I'm for my it does it's good information to have um I'll defer to Jesse she may know the politics mora from vlct on that I think that would be an incredibly useful data point um you know over the path as you know Tim over the over years we've tried to get that data out um through a number of efforts including senator in and out of the tax department um they've been very hesitant to do that but perhaps a legislation that's specific to those communities that have rental registries are short term rental ordinances on the books that it's that name address only information that that might be a good request yeah there there and there is also a Burlington and Paul has told me about this Burlington uses a company that is able to somehow identify many of these operators of short term rentals and I'm I would hopefully we'd be able to perhaps even piggyback on the same company that they're using um to maximize value that would be an opportunity to find out those people who are identified that way but maybe aren't remitting as well right and I don't know if that's possible I mean I believe that some of these companies they're they're forced to collect it I don't know what those details are because you know I don't I don't do that so but you know it it's it's really a I can't imagine the job the IRS has especially when Congress wants to pull another 10 billion dollars away from their ability to make sure people are paying their fare taxes right and so this is sort of secondary to that right which is you know we want to want to know if people are operating a short term rental or not and so we need to be able to find out because this is how we're going to do business in the future yeah that would be I would think good and maybe you can bring it up with the LTC just is that something that other communities would like to encourage their legislators to push okay do we need a motion so we need a motion to set a public hearing for February 20th 2024 at 7 p.m. for both the rental ordinance and the resolution right and I would just ask I would just ask that you approve the resolution as written with the with the amendment of removing the fees and putting them in a resolution thank you okay so so I think the motion would be to approve the rental registry ordinance as written and as amended per your discussion tonight instead of second reading and public hearing for February 20th 2024 at 7 o'clock in accordance with requirements of the charter that's what I said so moved second okay mr. Doyle has his fix his camera on yeah pardon me oh mr. Doyle has his camera on did you want to say something Ryan yes Ryan Doyle so I I read all of the rental registry programs for Burlington, Winiski, St. Albans the proposal for Essex and I spent a few hours talking to their staff and it was really enlightening I also found it really interesting that we have the youngest housing stock but the highest fees and it looks like there are people doing this for less money with more difficult housing stock this looks like a really big bureaucratic thing to leverage all of a sudden you were talking about the budget a lot and trying to take it down from 8 percent to 5.8 percent but this fee for me as a ranger is an 8 percent increase on the taxes for this property the municipal taxes so that plus your 5.8 percent are putting me at 13.3 percent and then because you're going to double hit me with a fee as a short term renter that's another 8.1 percent so you're actually increasing my municipal taxes by 22 percent this year that'll be different for different renters because it's a flat fee and each property is valued at a different amount but I find that frustrating and typically there aren't renters represented on on city boards as well so I have a lot of points that I want to get to here and the first point is about that equity and flexibility renters already pay a lot of extra money on housing that they don't build equity in some people do choose to rent and they typically rent newer places when they're in that option but a lot of people rent because they can't afford to buy we have a lot of people in our community like that and this is a big sudden burst that might not necessarily provide them with any benefit at all and so it concerns me that there's this shift towards more expense on renters and low income people of course not everybody gets to get into low income affordable units they there aren't nearly enough and they aren't nearly commensurate for the amount of housing inflation that has occurred here so again I didn't really see like that there was a big need here like there is in let's say St. Alvin City where most houses in St. Alvin City were built before most houses were ever thought of in South Burlington but St. Alvin City has a $25 per year fee and they're able to manage that very well so that feels like a good value in return for bringing up old housing stock um what I think about what value does this provide to renters a lot of papers here there are a lot of requirements for short-term rental hosts that I'm not sure they're required for landlords so if we look at page 10 5g it says register and shall provide guests written documentation of the following information there's a you know phone name email etc city fire marshal contact written instructions for how to use a fire extinguisher emergency emergency shut off for heating systems and fuel burning appliances is is that a requirement for landlords to provide tenants with as well that is a real question directed toward staff I'm not quite certain of that but I think the the issue here is with short-term rentals with such a high turnover there's not where people ever get a familiarity with their units and I suspect that was the reasoning for the inclusion so a lot of renters on I would agree Ryan tend to be so I ran I was just responding to your question the this is Colin McNeill you're reading from the requirements of short-term rental units the section that is applicable only to short-term rental units not to longer term tenants and rental units yes that's my point so as a renter renters tend to be younger they tend to have less wealth and are likely to have less experience with appliances and so if there's an assumption that they'll just become familiar with emergency shut offs at some point I think that's a bit naive and I'm wondering why that's not required of landlords to help tenants be safer because that was a big thing highlighted at the top of this was this is about safety and we can add to that what about recycling garbage and compost information um I don't think landlords provide that and people move from different towns or different places and have very different rules and that seems like a very logical environmentally conscious thing that landlord should have to be providing maybe even appliance manuals um again I brought up another time that filters are really critical for the health of people if you have a really low-grade furnace filter that's you know legal to buy and install it doesn't mean it's filtering out a lot of particulate matter and that is a pretty small area where if the city required a higher standard of it then indoor air quality could go up for a lot of people who are lower income but again I don't see anything in here that's actually geared towards helping those folks so again this is more expensive than our peer municipalities with much older housing stock than we have and so I come back to this concept of regionalization Burlington is able to provide this at a lower cost and they seem to have a really robust policy and have more included in more benefits so it feels very much like a why am I paying more for less kind of a thing and I wonder why we wouldn't partner with more other municipalities right at the last meeting where you had a reading of this we had uh ccrpc here talking about the need to do more regionalized things in the future that is one way we can save money long term and not be pushing costs onto our less affluent residents and the other thing is this looks intentionally more challenging harsh and punitive than necessary I mean a two-day turnaround for communication and to provide a bunch of documents as is that precedent does that exist for regular hotels staff I don't manage any hotels I'm not sure yeah so that's weird um can the city go into like any business and demand information about um their clients or how often they have clients that's I don't know I think that's kind of weird to me um and again I didn't see that with places like Burlington um in their uh their stuff also the notarization that's just adding complexity for no reason nobody else has that right as you can register to vote online in Vermont right you can use your um your homestead declaration I think can be done online now and you're asking for a step above and beyond that is just cumbersome for no real proof generating I think the homestead was one of the options and notarized documents from the city and so I it would be fine if you get rid of the notarization and these uh extra complexities that don't really add value to anyone's safety or security then like that would make a lot of sense to me um so the other thing is oftentimes when a city starts to require things like a registration number Airbnb will prompt that automatically so if somebody goes on vacation once or twice a year and wants to put their house on Airbnb while they're gone um what what if they can't register with Airbnb without already having paid you to get a registration number if they're only going to do it for seven days and can the city guarantee for sure that people will be able to register on those websites without registering with the city even when they're totally compliant with the law does the city know that well I would like you to direct your questions to the council this is a hearing this isn't a grilling of the staff is that something I mean I don't know I've had properties on Airbnb Airbnb and VRBO and there isn't a problem registering that's my experience well your town doesn't require a registration number yet are you are you positive that once you require this that Airbnb won't start requiring that for people to register on their site I don't think we can control Airbnb so what you might be doing is prohibiting people even from doing less than 14 days so Ryan I think the point of this conversation is really for you to provide feedback to the council on changes they could make in the draft ordinance before it's worn for public hearing so you're asking great questions about implementation that we certainly could talk about as staff to a resident whenever you'd like I think that if you have feedback to the council on ordinance on changes in the ordinance language you'd like to see tonight I think that's really where your comments should focus um yeah that could be pretty long um I would definitely start with taking out Notarize and maybe I also would have started with seeing if we could partner with Burlington instead of making our own okay I really think that this is going to be an expensive new tax on renters and I find that very frustrating when I see other towns doing this for much less and providing more value to their renters unfortunately we're putting those fees into an ordinance which can be changed if needed we're putting them into a resolution a resolution yeah sorry and you'll probably increase the fees over time that's the typical thing that happens with fees that again I'm looking to see value provided to renters here if they're going to be spending so much more money a year again this is an automatic for me 8 increase of my municipal tax rate essentially and then because I'm on Airbnb or was six months ago I'm looking at another 8% so as you're talking about your budget I'm being hit with 22% where most people are being hit with 5.8 and so I do find that a little bit frustrating if the value is there for me okay I'll take it but I really want to see this be made into something that's going to benefit people and not make you uselessly cumbersome things you know when I look at the fees some of these fees are really high I think we get the gist of it I would just add you know we have tried to do quite a few regional efforts to make things better and it's easier said than done sure I understand that one's Burlington has chosen not to be a part of so to suggest that you know a better way to go about this might be to see if we can partner with a community that doesn't even want to do it on a number of other things um you know you can make that request but I think that would make this impossible to accomplish I was a city counselor in St. Albans City and the town of St. Albans was always doing us over water wastewater issues and yet they contracted us for policing services the result was we were able to provide a lot more policing services in both towns and save money those are really good partnerships and we totally should undercut like that so um okay I can type up the recipes and send them over to staff but I would be really remiss if there weren't some some changes along how harsh some of this language is before it gets passed let me just ask Ryan this has to do mostly almost entirely with short-term rental as I'm reading the ordinance and and again I'm I don't want to bring this up again but the vast majority of rentals are not short-term rentals um I think that the some of the conditions I'm looking particularly at the notarized existing short-term rental I think that happens once I don't think that's if I'm not mistaken and it may be two and I just have to I'm not I did not familiar myself with that particular provision for tonight it may be to notarize that you are operating an existing short-term rental on or before April 1 of 2024 so that you can continue for the next four years because if you don't do that then those people who are operating an existing short-term rental which is really means a non-owner occupied dwelling is that what that that could be what that's referring to I think it is yeah the way this document is written I actually need to submit two notarized documents okay well I need to write that in and identify that and send it to us and we can review it can I just ask one question to follow something Ryan said he said he's had yeah let's pay double fees I didn't see that 150 as a renter 150 as a short-term renter is that yeah so so Andrew um staff Ryan oh yeah the way the way he was written if you are a if you have a rental unit like a long-term rental unit you need to register that if you also have a short-term rental you need to register that so you're gonna have to pay if you have two different rental units want a long to different yeah but they're different but for the same for a renter you're not ever paying double fees I mean there might be a hypothetical in there where you could what there might be a hypothetical in there where you somehow could but I the intention is that you are registering a long-term rental unit you pay a fee if you're registering a short-term rental unit you pay right you also register that unit and pay a fee for that one right yeah so in my situation right well you have a you know if you explain it you have a roommate that you charge right so you imagine yourself as a short-term rental renter yeah so okay my landlord will pay a $150 fee they will pass that cost on to me as any landlord will do and to my rent increase this year right that's $10 and 77 cents a month okay so okay but that's eight percent per year and think about how much the council spent over your rent eight percent of what the equivalent municipal tax that I pay as a renter okay right thank you Ryan I know how much okay municipal taxes paid for this it's one way to look okay yeah thank you I mean that tax gets passed on to me to pay through rent and so you're very concerned about an eight point something percent increase applying to everyone this year and you brought it down to five point eight but now you're putting on what is for me an additional eight percent per year on my rent for somebody who is in a maybe a smaller place a less expensive place that's actually going to be a much higher percent increase worth of tax that they're paying and that's besides the fact that as a renter I'm also paying non homestead so I'm paying $550 more to the education fund than I would if I owned it okay well I thank you for your comment you're welcome I'll email them in tomorrow good enough are there other Michael Cohen did you hey it's me again so I I apologize I'm getting involved in this very late in the game I was unaware this was going on and I'm renovating my basement trying to find additional resources for the family honestly and the idea of turning the basement into a short-term rental whenever where we have the opportunity was kind of out there we're trying to be creative and how we bring in more income like I said I had three kids were paying any $200 property taxes I'm trying to understand the goal from the council to integrate these fees and some of the details that Ryan was saying in order to is the goal to limit short-term rentals in South Burlington as a whole or is is the goal to make it because I was trying to read it and it says that you guys want to ensure that the city is not unduly impacted by the operation of short-term rentals that are not owned or occupied and that's a very different situation what we're we're focusing on two things one is to try to make sure that the life safety portions of an apartment anywhere are up to code that people have are in a safe place when they rent that and the way most municipalities seem to do that is one you have requirements when it's a new build and you inspect that so that the wiring and all those things are up to snuff and then you to continue to make sure that it doesn't fall in disrepair you can have a program that will review that okay on a set period of time so that you know that the the apartments or the rentals or the housing is being maintained the other piece of this was trying to find a pathway to end the non-owner occupied air bnb short-term rentals which we're doing two things having um negative impacts on on some neighborhoods because it was changing the tenor of the neighborhood and people were using the house as a party as a loud noise too many dogs too many cars too many people for just a short term like a week or a long weekend or a big graduation party and so we were trying to find a way to start to limit that because and eventually get rid of them because there's this housing shortage nationwide but it's in vermont as well and so many of those homes are the perfect kind of home for a family to rent or own and so that's the the purpose in terms of what it sounds like you want to do if it's an owner occupied short-term rental you will be able to do that because presumably you'll be there it won't be loud parties and you know 10 more people than the place can accommodate and on and on and on so that is and michael michael and also this registry if you go to that process where you wanted to do something with your basement the inspector would be able to inform you that you have to have egress windows that are large enough for a person to be able to get out of your basement you know without having to struggle if you have interconnected hardwired smoke detectors throughout the entire house so that if any room is on fire all of them go off and they have battery backup as well and if there are any other code violations that would impact somebody's safety there right and i i love i don't want to belabor the point but um you know my son rented a a college house in south berlington for a year and the conditions there were quite despicable and there was nothing that he or i could do i wasn't on the lease and i didn't want to impact his ability to rent there but there was nothing he could do because there was nobody he could complain to in berlington it's entirely the opposite case right they try to inspect every three to four five years yeah and they you know they're the ones that he dictated that all those that older housing stock had to have hardwired interconnected smoke detectors you know and they save lives especially with a carbon monoxide detector as well so those are the types of things and then you start to get into lead paint if the building was before 1978 you know what what you know actions have been taken to try and mitigate you know any any possibly of lead poisoning or lead paint so these are all these things that you cannot get your hands around as a city unless you enact this registry and then you have inspections and you have enforcement and along with that comes a fee to make that the system self um you know funded and um and at the same time as helen said we're trying to have a positive effect on the shortage of long-term rental housing it's okay no it all makes sense i'm i'm all for making the house the homes safer you know when i was i did a um we're doing renovations we have the egress windows we went through the city for the zoning permit and everything and um you know we used to live in burlington and seeing the difference between burlington and south burlington's register or just zoning process was remarkable um and so i think it's a good thing i think it's positive i think one of the concerns i have is when i hear about you know are you guys using data to support your plans to move forward on this when it comes to you know the short-term rentals affecting the neighborhoods and that they're taking away from the housing stock because i'm not i'm not necessarily so concerned with my property right now i think what i'm concerned of if if for some reason my wife's a nurse if if she gets a travel assignment or something and the whole family wants to leave for a six-month like excursion and we pick the kids and it's this amazing adventure and we say you know we're just going to short-term rental the house out while we're traveling because we can we want to keep the house we want to have it for our the long term i i see these types of restrictions and i get concerns that they're being done possibly for the wrong reasons are you guys using data to support these claims that party houses are consuming our neighborhoods and there's not enough housing because of the short-term rentals i mean how many short-term rentals are there in south burlington and are there any other thing like is that really the cause that's my question michael we've had incredibly emotional testimony from folks distressed at the air b&b's near them and this is as i think the chief said this is the sixth time we're discussing this particular it's a public session and so if you listen to those sessions i think that will provide you the comfort that we've you know done the whole work on this okay i appreciate yeah and i again i'm sorry for like i said this is my first time and um and i do know you guys are working hard to try to make you're trying to improve the town and i do appreciate it um and so yeah i will review those and and um try to learn as much as i can about it okay thank you well our public hearing is on the 20th so if you do your research and have some other comments you're welcome to make them all right at 20th of uh uh got thank you michael if you send me your email this is steve i can send you the dates that those hearings all those other meetings were so you don't have to go back look at every agenda but just so you can i can outline this for you all right uh steve what is your full name it's just you if you go to the website i'm the deputy city manager to see the addresses there all right thank you steve is there anyone in the audience that wanted to say something i'm sorry you're way back there i can hardly see you're in the dark all right hi i'm ashley um and i have a similar thought to to my cohen um in that i guess it feels like can we have the person identify themselves entirely and where they live please oh all right uh ashley true acts i live on hadley road and i was wondering about what one idea i do uh agree with the sentiments around the notarized process and registration i feel like that should be it's it's simpler it's 2024 let's do it online let's get it done um so i think we should consider that uh i think that's you know around the the use of our property um we for our jobs have been assigned free location and gone away for periods of time you know six to nine months so far but maybe it could be longer but we won't we want to keep our house here we want to be able to come back to it we also want to be able to come back to it at holidays and other times so we can be back with our family and so using it as a short-term rental while we're away to certainly pay for costly daycare bills or nanny bills or whichever else that come up for for us um i i guess i this feels like i it's not going to let me do that the other thing that's coming up for us is taking care of our aging grandparents and so we might relocate for a few years while we need to help with them but then want to come back and and i guess it it doesn't feel like it leaves any opportunity for us to use our property that way and you know with housing market i don't want to sell because i don't know what's going to happen i want my property to come back to in the future so i'd like the this council and city to consider is there a way we could make that possible for people to be able to keep keep a home here that they can use for short-term rental intermittently right and come back because they're it's written as like if you go for so if we came back and lived for more than six months here then now it's now it can't be used as short-term ever again um if we were if we needed to relocate to take care of our grandparents or otherwise and come back so i want them to consider that um and then trying to think other points um otherwise i am supportive of of all the fire safety and you know checking that i work in environmental health and safety so i know i know how that works um i am wondering though what like what that cycle will be you i think i think andrew you had asked about it and do we have any details for what that's going to look like and and the you know being able to have the resources and budget and stuff to allow you know doing that do we have that together yet or not well we do have a five dollar fee that we um or five dollars from the fee that's set aside into a fund so that if there are um residents who need to update their home or their apartment they um they might have access to some financial support from the city to do some of the things that we're requiring so we have recognized that i mean it's on well that's that's for the individual right to get it up to code is what you're saying yes okay yes but what about the staff at the fire department or otherwise to to do the inspections and stuff do we have that plan yes we don't i don't have the schedule they're going to develop that but but the um ordinance does say if it's a new build may i understand your house isn't a new build probably but um if it's a new build then you don't need to have the inspection for at least three years and then it's a depending on if there are any violations you get a longer period i mean if you're a good um landowner and take care of the property and you don't have um you know violations then you don't have to be inspected nearly as much the issue is do you have some more things i think you're spot on just that the the the plan is that if we inspect your property and there's no violations you wouldn't receive another inspection for five years unless there was a complaint okay so similar to burlington's compliance mirrored offered burlington's okay the issue is if if like the owner's not there for an extended period then i think we get into this potential situation that that neighbors aren't happy right you know and so there's this balance there's a long term that we have to strike here you know um because you're not there right and you so we don't you don't really know what's happening mm-hmm well i mean we do have within so like like i said we've we've rented our house out when we've been relocated for work or otherwise and we we do have house rules that we ask our guests to abide by sure right and then and we have no parties no otherwise and and whenever we get inquiries where they describe hey we're coming for this party we say hey we don't do parties sorry decline hey um so you know the the renter as the host we can control that do you um do you rent for more than uh do you rent like a week at a time or do you try to rent for the whole entirety we we've done both we've uh we've when we go away for week-long vacations whichever we've had renters come in oh so you're right your house while you're gone while we're gone so and then and then we've had work assignments that had us away for six months living somewhere else we lived in toronto or otherwise during that period if you were to rent to folks i think it's more than 14 days or 30 days i forgot what the short term 30 30 right so you i mean if you're away for six to nine months as long as the renter is there for more than 30 days you're okay right this just says if you're not there and really not like have your finger on the pulse it's it's it's not great for the neighborhood to have for all this turnover right it feels like a hotel like i can so i'm sorry our rental has had our neighbors families rented because they want it to be a few doors down from their family but have their own bedroom and bathroom and kitchen right right so that's and yeah oh there's always those exceptions and i think there are we've heard of several others it's just really hard when you have an ordinance to carve out your particular situation because you're a nice person you have family here maybe that provides some oversight so that won't happen and then other people that have really you know make a lot of money we with their weekly rentals and that's what it's about and they live in some other state and it's just you know they hire cleaners and the next crowd comes in and there's not so is it and and they don't live there so they don't have to face neighbors who are saying you know the last group you had here this is what they did so i'm sorry is it is the problem that we have this isn't a dialogue with you and ashley so sorry i'll let you you can indicate you'd like to say something i think the only other question i wanted to confirm based off what i read was that if you have an accessory dwelling unit that you can rent that short term anytime with no limits because you're president because it's owner occupied when it's so when the main residence yeah yeah when the main residence is occupied by the owner yeah you could rent out a room you can rent out a basement you can rent out an accessory dwelling unit because you're there so the reality is you're not going to let it get wild because you live there and you have to live with your neighbors okay all right so you don't i mean you wouldn't want a neighbor but that way because of the size like just because it's a smaller one that it's less likely to get you know have a big crowd and that's but you're saying yeah because it's an accessory dwelling unit on the single family home right okay so if we so if we were reassigned for work and weren't living at our home you could look at long-term renting i would actually contact steve lock just like mike yeah and and just go through your situation he could walk it through with you what the options are yeah okay all right thank you very much okay mr cohen hi i'm i'm trying to come back to this idea about and again this is i know i'm late to the party um is the problem that there's bad guests because when i think about like what you've said so far i've had bad neighbors before where i've shared a driveway with them and they were horrible and it's so it's it comes to me like when i when i think about this is this is this a result of a specific scenario and is this the foundational problem that short-term rentals are bad or is it that there's individuals that are bad or there's bad hosts and are you preventing future potential either people from doing what i'm trying to do or what possibly ashley is trying to who are who are a little bit more protective of their property and and are trying to keep their property secure and safe and bring in good guests to allow them to keep their home in this market that's really hard and challenging and and expensive and are you preventing us from this opportunity if we were to travel or leave because of a couple bad apples and it's almost like saying you know there's people who drive drunk and therefore nobody can drive at all anymore and it's just like well that's not going to solve the problem you know what i mean and is is the real problem people driving or is it people driving drunk and in this scenario feels like it's not that people are renting their homes out on a on a certain schedule it's that people are are bad hosts and are not providing the the specific details that are required and can you find those people and and not remove this opportunity because it's and again it's not it's not just me i think about my mother-in-law who has talked about going down to florida for a period of time so let's say with her aunt and it's like she won't have the option to do that and short-term rental her apartment or her house or just other opportunities i just i feel like we're being very restrictive with the community because of a specific scenario and i understand it it's hurt people and i'm not trying to downplay that effect i'm just trying to say are we are we really trying to attack the problem are we just trying to say i don't want to deal with it so nobody can play with this anymore you know what i mean i'm just when i deal with my kids it's like fine no nobody can play with the toy i don't care who's fault it was or what happened let's just forget about it all together and it's just like it's not quite a really big it's not that it's it's more that people want to live in residential neighborhoods they don't want to live in commercial you know like hotels next door to them that's really the argument and whoever's you know the residents and whatever the experience is it's the fact of these changing people where you don't know your neighbor and you know i i hope that it's it's it's something that we can remember the time when there weren't air b&b's and people could go down to florida and people could go and do jobs in other places maybe it wasn't as lucrative but you could do something with your property and and so we understand the commercial interest for people but that commercial interest is not serving your neighbors necessarily and that's that's the the rub just maybe just another just to elaborate a little bit right so we have zoning and in residential zones you're not permitted to run a hotel right and or motel and and this feels um very much like something that's not permitted and so couple that with the with the bed actors to me it's pretty compelling that um you have you know someone living there says hey you know they shouldn't be doing this in any event running a hotel and now they're running it poorly you know help me here right if you rent your house out you don't pay rooms and meals tax unless you go through air b&b or verbal or whoever the third party is the minute you start paying rooms tax you are operating a hotel and that's not a zoning permissible activity in these residential neighborhoods we have a a a rental um vacancy rate that is less than one percent in shitton and county and the only way we can affect that is by retracting those houses that are owned by another entity in neighborhoods and being rented out for very short term amount of time and put them back into the housing stock for long-term rentals so we're doing two things here we're trying to correct that vacancy rate we're trying to also return neighborhoods back to being regular neighborhoods and we're also trying to ensure the safety of people that rent in rental units in south burlington yeah no i i i see that i i do question though when you say to wrap this up will you will you change the vacancy rate by doing this i mean we talked about this this thing in jc park for i don't really cut you off but i this isn't a debate format i we hear you you've said major points i think very clearly and very well but we're not going to debate this tonight that's fair okay i appreciate the time thank you thank you in a second on the table i believe yes that's good so are we ready for the vote now yes we do yes we do i do okay and ryan started it off yep all in favor signify by saying i i okay that's unanimous so we'll get to go through this again on the 20th looking forward to it yes all right um oh our last item this is convening as the south burlington liquor control commission to consider bliss b bueno isano guild tavern maple fields um at the airport maple fields um price chopper shelburne road variety all right so i move that we convene as the south burlington liquor control commission second all in favor hi hi i move that we approve these first class and second class licenses and tobacco licenses second and third class license all in favor i i a pass motion to come out of the so moved control second all in favor now we're out we're back in real life now um 21 other business is there any seeing none um i would entertain a motion for adjournment move so move all in favor hi hi we are hi adjourned thank you thank you drive safely everybody thanks jim it wasn't