 I think my camera is foggy so I'm just gonna rub you all a little. I thought that was a filter. Yeah, right. I need that filter. I'm like I didn't get much sleep last night. Turn on the filter. So I guess we can roll right into a public forum now that we have a whole bunch of folks here. That's great. Good evening. Nice to see you all. Is there anybody who has anything they'd like to share for public forum? You can go ahead and unmute yourself. You're already up as a panelist. You have to send me a note. Okay, let's see. If you sit too close to the screen, just know that you get really distorted. So sit back and enjoy it. Anyway, I wanted to let everyone know that the word's out at six o'clock on New Year's Eve. Everyone's supposed to go outside and ring bells. This is trying to go international, whether it does or not. Just everyone come out six o'clock on New Year's Eve to ring bells. And I'm gonna try to do a substitute. Substitute Caroline, I'll let you know when that's set up. Thank you. Mary, Mary, Mary to everyone. Thank you for everything you've done. Thanks, Caroline. Danny, do you want to go ahead? Hi. Okay. Am I unmuted now? You are. I wonder if other folks are feeling what I'm feeling. I'm feeling very uneasy about the future. I think that we're, as a society, we're going down a long dark tunnel. I don't know. Do you guys feel there's something very ominous that's looming? Anyway, let me continue. I'm very uncomfortable about the way things are moving in terms of the coverage that's taking place with COVID right now. I feel like there's a mass hysteria that's going on. People are very frightened. There is raging cases. There's a whole sense of, it's like a fear porn that's taking place right now. And it's based upon PCR tests that basically have been proven to be inaccurate. Even Fauci has said that anything above 35, cycling at 35 is not reliable. I have video of this I could share with anybody. I'm sure you could get a lot on the internet. And we are typically, the tests are at 37, 39, up to 45. That's what typically these PCR tests. So they're basically totally inaccurate. So everything that is about the raging cases that's going on is basically inaccurate, loaded with false positives. So I'm very uncomfortable about this because we're moving towards mandatory or vaccination that could become mandatory. And I think as a society, we have to be very careful about what's going down right now. I don't think it's being discussed in the regular press. We can't even leave comments on seven days or Vermont digger right now. Everything seems to be very difficult to get information on. So that's why I'm here right now. Because the death rates are actually, we have no more excess deaths than we have in prior years with all the considered deaths. And society is suffering right now. Many, many businesses are going under. And it's a really dark time for us. And I think we need to really focus. This is the main thing that we need to do because society right now is going into a big depression. And we're being pushed into taking this vaccine, which is an experimental vaccine, an mRNA vaccine that's never come out before. The only time they've ever tried this, back in, I think it was 2009 or 2012 with the flu SARS flu back then, the animals study proved to be disastrous and they did not come out with it. All the animals died in these experiments. And there were no animal tests. It was rushed. So we have an experimental vaccine. Basically, people are going to be guinea pigs for this vaccine. And I think we need to really look at this very hard and reject it. I'm glad that you're here for this conversation tonight, Danny, since we have David Grass here and we have a big chunk of time devoted tonight to COVID. And I know that David has a large portion of his allotted time set for Q&A. So I'm sure we'll be able to have a good in-depth discussion with the community about that. That's awesome. When is that coming up? That is right after the city council debate. It's from 7.30 to 8. Okay. Or not debate. Oh, sorry. I'm just reading off of the agenda. They're updating us on the city council debates. So is there anyone else who would like to add something to the public forum? Thanks, Danny. Okay, thank you. If there isn't, oh, Ben, are you raising your hand? If people could use the raise hand function or if you're a steering committee member, just go for it. I can't see everybody's while we're sharing the agenda, I can't see everybody's picture. Go for it, Ben. Well, I just wanted to say I'm glad we're all able to get together once more before the end of the year. I wanted to wish everyone a happy last night of Hanukkah. I also wanted to say that there's a rumor going around the south end. There's a secret south end elf society that has been designating people around the community as honorary elves. And I just think that's awesome. I've seen people talking about it on front porch forum. And if anyone here happens to know who the south end elf society is, or if you are a part of said society, thank you very much. I think that's very cool. And it's a nice community engagement effort here towards the end of the year in a very festive way. So just wanted to note that. Thanks. Yeah, that's fun. All right. If anyone else would like to add a public comment, if you can just use the raise hand function, which is available on the bottom of your Zoom screen. And to figure out how to do it, but I'm already unmuted. Go for it, Jeff. So last month, we had Juniper creative talk about the mural that was at Champlain. And they mentioned that there was a different mural going on the ceiling, I think, at Main Street Landing. And we had, we had, I don't know if this was like a temporary post that disappears or whatever, but they had posted a video of that progress. So we put that on our Facebook page. And sorry, if you don't use Facebook, but that's where they posted it anyway. So you would have to be a user to see that particular share. But we shared it on our site a few weeks ago. I know a couple people that were on at the time expressed interest in that project. Yeah, I've been following their progress on Instagram, and it's really beautiful. They're doing some great work. I have a word. Go for it, Andy. I just, I wanted to, I see Jones, Jones with us. And, but I wanted to say to everybody that as often as I have disagreements with city officials and city counselors, and Lord knows that happens, I really would like to add my voice to people who've been in criticizing the level of harassment that's been going on during the city council meeting and at people's houses, at city officials' houses. I really feel like that debate should, the debates around issues should take place in a civil manner and that should be happening in the forums that we create like the NPA or like city council public forum or the various commissions that that offer public forum. And I don't feel like, I feel like some of the tactics that have been used lately have crossed the line that I'm not comfortable with and I don't condone. Yeah, thanks for sharing. And Ben, thank you for your post on Front Forge Forum starting that conversation. All right, anyone else? We have three minutes of public forum left. If anybody else would like to chime in about something. And if not, we can hand things over to Joan and Chip. And Joe, I don't know if, is anyone else having a problem with the gallery view with the share screen thing happening? It doesn't work with shared screen. Yeah, so Joe, I don't know if maybe we want to take a break from having the agenda up well so that these folks can kind of share up in the speaker view. Great. Thank you. So I'll just say that, you know, Chip and I have also been talking about the level, you know, both the harassment and the silver lining really is the level of support we've been getting from the community. And specifically, Ben, thank you so much for really being the first to speak up publicly and support us, you know, whether or not you support our opinions or views. We really appreciate all the people that we've heard from both publicly on Front Forge Forum and privately. It means a lot to us. I would echo that. I just came into the public forum when Andy was speaking and thank you, Andy, for your sentiments. It does mean a lot. I would echo Joan, you know, we, I think we try and model. We all may not agree, but we're trying to keep the discourse at a civil level because the reality is if it gets beyond that, it's from my perspective not a productive conversation. So thank you, Andy. And I would also echo many have reached out to me as well to check in and just see how we were doing. And it really does mean something. So thank you to everyone, including those on this call. Chip, do you want me to start or did you want to start? We could go either way. Yours probably could eat up the full 15 minutes. So why don't, you know, I'm more than happy. Joan and I talked before this to sort of to fill in everyone on this call on there were four, the big agenda item on Monday, which was a continuation of a meeting from a week prior to that were the four charter change proposals. And Joan and I sort of bifurcated them. We'll each take up two. And then if we have additional time, we can talk about there's never a dull moment. So we have some interesting things coming even on Monday's agenda. But looking backwards, the two agenda items I was going to present on one is noncontroversial or I won't say less controversial than the others. And that related to potentially adding two seats to the airport commission. One of the seats would be designated for the city of Winooski and additional seat would be added to the city for a representative from the city of Burlington. This chart, it will, it did pass unanimously. So it will be on ballot on town meeting day. This request came from the city of Winooski in large part out of issues relating to the F-35 and noise mitigation. This seat was being added, but a prerequisite was that the city of Burlington, South Burlington and Winooski have been negotiating a memorandum of understanding relating to sort of collaborative efforts on noise mitigation and studies. So that MOU is about to be in final form. And the expectation is that will be signed before this goes on the ballot. So if this does pass, the city of Winooski will be able to designate a representative to that, the airport commission, and the city will pick up an additional seat. The other issue that I was going to take up to our report back on tonight was a little more controversial in part because of, I would say, a false narrative that made its way into the press and that relates to a proposal on thermal energy, a charter change proposal relating to thermal energy systems. This comes out of the city's attempts to try and get to net zero 2030. And it's a convoluted way to explain how we got here. In essence, the council, after a presentation from Burlington Electric Department, I'm going to say even a year ago, asked BED to go back and come up with proposals on how to move new buildings or require new buildings to hook up to non-fossil fuel systems. And the proposal they came back with for new buildings was to require them, but recognizing that not every building can do that because of technological issues and quite honestly, some may choose not to, so they were proposing a fee. As it turned out, after a few more hearings, the city attorney's office took the position that we did not have the authority from the state legislature in order to impose that fee. So they went back to the drawing board a little bit more and what came out was the proposal that at least was preliminarily proposed. And WCAX, based on that language, ran a story that basically said the city of Burlington is considering a proposal that will require everyone to convert from fossil fuel to a non-fossil fuel heating system, which cause great consternation among our constituents reaching out. So before Monday, there was an attempt to tweak the language to make clear that what we were seeking authority to do was to regulate thermal systems, but also with a caveat that before any fee is to be imposed, it would have to go back before the voters and get voter approval. So with that modification, even those who were a little reluctant to sign on ultimately did, and that proposal, I believe with the exception of one counselor passed 11 to 1. So that too will be on the ballot on town meeting day. I supported it as did Councillor Shannon and I appreciate there are it's somewhat technical. If there are further questions, concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to either myself or Councillor Shannon to answer them. And with that, Joan, I will turn it over to you. Thank you, Chip. So the two other charter changes that I was going to cover include the community control of police discipline and just cause evictions as they are titled. So the community control of police came out of the racial justice resolution that did a number of things, including there were two rev resolutions on the reparations, I think, but that first started in the racial justice resolution. That was also the resolution that defunded the police by 30%. And among the other actions, there was a recommendation to empower the police commission with disciplinary authority. Currently, only the police chief has disciplinary authority. And I think it's broadly agreed that that is that can be problematic, that there should be more public input in that process. In fact, in practice, the police commission has been consulted on discipline. And it's now officially part of the policy to engage them on discipline, but it's not required by the charter. The other piece of it is that even when the police commission is included in discipline, they don't really get both sides. They don't have investigatory powers. So that is also deemed to be problematic. So there are different possible solutions for addressing this. And there are three There are three broad types of civilian oversight models. One is they're called review, investigatory, and monitor. What was proposed was this investigatory model, which is a model that's typically used in very large cities. So for example, New York and Chicago have thousands of police officers. And so they have an investigation office, you know, a full department. And so that was what was suggested for Burlington. And it came up after the it was in the Charter Change Committee, which I chair, and the city attorney had drafted what was requested by the racial justice resolution, which was to empower the commission. But counselor Freeman brought forward a complete rewrite of the of this part of the charter addressing discipline and and really reinventing police discipline, including creating a the dis so there would be both a city department created or an office with a director and the ability to hire investigators and outside counsel, as well as a seven person board. I feel like I'm about to start a sneezing fit. And if that happens, I'm going to have to just I have really bad allergies. But we'll plow through for now. So the board is selected. So it's a seven member board, but the selection process for this board is extremely complex. It was amended to be a little bit less complex than it originally was. But it's still, you know, there are requirements for eight members, and it's only a seven member board. So you can check one person can check multiple boxes here. But the board in whole, there is it's a very one sided selection. There it's it excludes anybody who has any affiliate, you know, familial affiliation with police officers. And for example, it includes, let me see if I can find this quickly, the requirements for the board. It includes people who have lived experience with a variety of things, including homelessness, incarceration, domestic violence, mental illness. And I had suggested that instead of being so limited to domestic violence that we include victims of crime. And that was that was next because it was deemed that that victims of crime wouldn't be as biased against the police as domestic victims of domestic violence, because police officers commit domestic violence at a higher rate than the general public. And so they thought that should specifically be included. But I think that victims of crime actually have very much an interest in policing issues as much as these other groups do. But that is just an example. I think that it's it's concerning. And one of the concerns is that if this actually becomes the board making the decisions, are these decisions going to hold up in court if they are, if the body seems to be biased. So that issue was raised to me by attorneys and I'll just read a letter from Jerry O'Neill who lives here in the south end and is an attorney and was a longtime chair of our police commission. And he says the department is falling apart now because of the interference by the city council in the department's operations and proposals such as this one. We had a great police department, albeit one with flaws. As most departments have quality officers now are leaving as fast as they can. And we will not get quality individuals to join the department. No one wants to be a part of an organization that has been decimated for political reasons arising out of knee jerk reactions to terrible tragedies. He goes on, but I think that there is a real concern about what has already happened to our police department and then how this is going to further affect our police department. If we want to have, I mean, I think, I think we have a vision, a common vision for the police department that we want to have that appropriately responds to crises and public safety issues. And this I don't think is getting us in that direction. The police commission, which is a BIPOC commission, was excluded from the process. The charter change committee referred this to the city council and to the joint committee simultaneously. So the joint committee, which does include the public safety committee of the council and the police commission, had one night to look at this and give comments. The police commission bent over backwards to give comments on this. And they did. And I will say some modifications, you know, some tweaks were made, but it doesn't get at the crux of the problem with this charter change in my opinion. So, and the crux of the charter change is this board that's created and a new city department that we don't actually know what the cost of creating that department is, but I will tell you in our budget adoption process, we deliberated over 40 line items that were, you know, probably the least was $75. And most of them were probably under $2,000. Many of them in the hundreds of dollars. So we don't have 150 to $250,000 or possibly more to staff a department. It also, we never looked at how many complaints this department would be addressing. Estimates are that they would be addressing between maybe four and, you know, if they really broadly investigated up to 28 complaints a year, but many of these complaints are not, they're not use of force complaints. A lot of the complaints are things like I called and because of a noise complaint and you came and you didn't do anything about it. Or, you know, I got a ticket. I was only five minutes late to my meter. You know, not every complaint is an actionable complaint, but of the actionable ones, there might be 28. So that's concerning. Going on to the just cause evictions, I think that so I see Patty Wayman is on here and I believe that she wrote the report that this kind of came out of. We wanted to strengthen tenant protections in the city of Burlington and there was a CEDA report to address that. And one of the problems is when tenants, when tenants lease is, when a lease is not renewed, that can be problematic for a tenant. Sometimes that happens for reasons. It can happen because they're not paying the rent on time or it can happen because they're acting inappropriately or disrupting other tenants in the building or harassing people or dealing drugs. It happens for a lot of reasons, but sometimes it is not the fault of the tenant. It's a situation like the owner wants to move in. And the report suggested that we consider having, you know, making payments, you know, maybe giving them a month's rent if they have to leave through no fault of their own, give them a month's rent to help them move on. But that morphed into this just cause evictions and just cause evictions I think is going to have much more effect. It says that you can't evict without just cause, but then it ropes in not renewing a lease. The expiration of a lease is not a just cause. So it ropes in any situation where a lease is not renewed. It's not limited to evictions. And when Councillor Mason tried to remove the part about the expiration of a lease is not considered just cause, the reply was, well, we can't do that because that would gut the whole thing. And I think that that was an honest response because it's much more about the renewals of the leases than it is about actual evictions. The other component of that is what I call rent control and Brian Pine defends that it is not rent control, but a landlord would not be allowed to increase their rent in an unreasonable amount, but unreasonable is not defined. And when I asked, how would you determine what's an unreasonable rent increase, the answer was the courts would decide on an individual basis. So it may be that in one case, $50 is a reasonable increase. And in another case, $50 is not a reasonable increase. And you won't know until you litigate it, which is really concerning. And I've talked to several lawyers and Chip may want to chime in on this, but from all of the lawyers that I have talked to, it's turning this landlord-tenant relationship into a highly litigious relationship. And I also found this concerning, but I don't know if Chip wants to add to that because he kind of- I actually just want to let you guys know that we're two minutes past. And we do have David Grass here from the health department to give us a COVID update. And I want to make sure that we really leave time for that. I really appreciate you guys. And we had some really big issues to talk about in this update. So obviously, we're not going to be able to get in absolutely everything. But I really appreciate you guys being here tonight to communicate with us about this. Thank you. Thank you. I don't have anything that would add, Jillian, other than just to note, as John said, these will- I expect there will be a public debate over all four of these charter changes over the next three months. And certainly, if you have any specific questions, don't hesitate to reach out to either of us. And we are working on an all board Zoom event to cover the charter changes before the election. So hopefully we'll have information to distribute about that soon. And we can have a great community conversation about it before we all vote. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you guys so much. And so now we have William Grass from the Department of Health or David Grass. I'm sorry. There's two people with the same last name here. And I got confused. I'm very sorry. It's David Grass from the Health Department. And you can take it away. Thank you so much for being here. Hi. Thank you for having me. You don't have to apologize. William Grass is my dad. Oh, okay. He happens to be a Ward 5 resident. Oh, how nice. Yes. Yeah. So there are two Dr. Grass's on the call tonight. So I'm going to share my screen. And how does that look? Can you see the presentation? Yeah, it looks great on this end. All right. Excellent. So I'll start by thanking Andy Simon, who is a longtime friend of my father's since before I was born. My name is David Grass. I work for the Vermont Department of Health. And Andy asked whether I could come talk for a few minutes about the Health Department's COVID-19 response. Normally I work at 108 Cherry Street in downtown Burlington. It's a lovely place to work at the State Headquarters for the Health Department. And I miss being there. I've gone there very infrequently over the last nine months. So I'd like to move through some material pretty quickly to give you an overview of sort of what I do and leave some time for questions at the end. So I'm going to try to present for about 15 minutes and then take about 15 minutes of questions. So to start off with my background is not an infectious disease. I'm an environmental health scientist. My PhD is in Earth and Environmental Science. I studied the health impacts of climate change. And I've worked at the Health Department for the last eight years on issues such as PFOA contamination in drinking water, radon in people's homes helping them to get tested and get their homes fixed, blue-green algae in recreational waters. We have a CDC grant to try to address the health impacts of climate change in Vermont. There was a groundbreaking law that got passed two years ago that required all schools and childcare to test their drinking water for lead. And I helped lead the implementation of that law. But for the last nine months, I've been working pretty much full time as part of the Health Department's response to the COVID-19 outbreak. And the position that I was asked to fill was Deputy Director for the Epidemiology Branch. In some of the notes prompting the presentation tonight, it suggested that we say what our connection to Ward 5 was. So I wanted to recognize that my dad is a resident of Payward Street. I lived on Lyman Ave for a couple of years, rented a very nice house in 2012-2013 after we moved from New York City back to Vermont. My kids spend a lot of time this fall skating at the bowl and half pipe at Burton and Talent Skate Park and the barriers. And my oldest son spent a lot of time climbing at Petra Cliffs. And when he wasn't there, he was at Perhaps Magic, which was also in Ward 5. And my house subsists on Myers Bagels. So Ward 5 is really the center of our universe. So the Health Department is based at 108 Cherry Street in downtown Burlington. There are 12 district offices across the state. We are a centralized health department. It's not like they're county health departments like there are in other states. All of those district offices are part of that one state health department. And when there's a crisis or an emergency, the health department implements an incident command system. And that it's a FEMA structure that's designed for emergency response. The idea is that it is scalable. It allows for integration of people from multiple jurisdictions. All sort of organized around one objective for that response. I like to envision it sort of as a transformer. Whereas maybe normally the health department is a car. During a time of crisis, it transforms into this robot that has this one overriding objective of trying to prevent COVID-19 transmission. So in a traditional ICS structure, you've got your incident commander, your public information officer, safety officer, and then you've got these four sections, one of which is finance, making sure that everybody's getting paid and bills are getting paid. Logistics, which is in charge of materials and resources, making sure people have what they need to do the job they're going to do. The planning section, which is defining what those objectives are and strategies and tactics to meet those objectives. And the operations section, which is sort of where the action happens. So operations section would be the firefighters who are getting dropped in by the wildfire. Or in our case, the people who are going and setting up testing events, helping nursing homes when they have outbreaks, and doing everything on the backside to make sure that healthcare facilities can operate as safely as possible and that we are identifying where there are situations and outbreaks and preventing transmission of the disease. So the way that structure looks in its implementation is a lot more complex than the first diagram that I showed you. So at the health department, we call the incident command system that we implement the health operations center. So we're in health operations center mode. And pretty much everybody at the health department at this point has been deployed in one role or another to aid in that response. And we work very closely with the state emergency operations center, which basically takes care of everything outside of the health department. So in terms of like delivering meals, ensuring that there's transportation for people who need to get tested, making sure that there are quarantine and isolation housing options for people who can't stay in the homes, state emergency operations center handles all of those things that the health department is focused on. So within the health operation center, we've got our finance section and our planning section and our logistics section. But the section that I'm in is the operations section, which is here, and specifically the epi branch, which is here. And all of these things expand. And this is the epi branch in all its glory. So I realized none of this is legible either. But I just wanted to give you a sense of sort of the scale and the immensity of the response. I've been involved in HSE activations in the past. Nothing of this scale, nothing of this duration. To give a little bit more detail on what that epidemiology branch consists of, we sort of have three groups within the epi branch. Operations is probably what people are most familiar with that contains contact tracing, including calls to our cases, calls to contacts, care coordinators who are like social workers, or who come from a social work worker background, who make sure that services are in place to ensure that people can safely quarantine and isolate, then outbreak prevention and response both within healthcare facilities and non health care facilities like schools or workplaces. I like to think of outbreak prevention response as sort of contact tracing at the institutional level. And the work that contact tracing does is an absolute grind and requires an immense amount of empathy and compassion. The work that outbreak response and prevention does, they do site visits, requires, in my opinion, courage and physical bravery and has been really hard on the people who have filled that role for the last nine months. We have a fantastic data management and analysis team. A lot of the data infrastructure of public health relies on fax machines. And because of a chronic sort of lack of investment in modernizing health informatics, and a silver lining of this response is that there have been abundant resources that have allowed us to improve the way data gets reported, lab reports come to the health department and modernize bringing that information to the health department in a digital format. They also do a fantastic job of reporting out that information in a way that I think is accessible and I'll talk about that a bit later. The group which I oversee directly is the community mitigation group that includes primary prevention who provide guidance documents for different environments such as addiction recovery groups who are looking for guidance on how they can meet safely for communities of faith. They've done work for schools, basically any environment that you can imagine primary prevention has done some document development for them, including drivers at teachers. Public inquiries team supports our main call center which receives anywhere between 800 to 1200 calls every day. Public inquiries team feels more technical questions. Symptom monitoring team deploys, well I'll talk about symptom monitoring a little later so I won't go into it now. Travel monitoring monitors those folks who are returning to Vermont from outside of Vermont ensuring that they are quarantining, fielding questions about domestic and international travel and yeah that's that's efficient so I'm going to move on. So I'm proud of the work that the health department has done over these last nine months and some of the policies, protocols, decisions that we've put in place have had impacts on you know outside of our borders. Vermont put in place a test out of quarantine policy back in May. CDC just made that a similar policy sort of official and recommended for other states if they wanted to adopt it just within the last couple of weeks. The health department did some really excellent field work with Department of Corrections watching surveillance footage of Department of Corrections staff and his interactions with prisoners who are incarcerated individuals who turned out to be positive for COVID-19 and they established that while he was not around them for any one block of 15 minutes he did become a case and his cumulative duration of exposure was 17 minutes and so on the basis of that we started adopting cumulative exposure definition for close contacts and eventually the CDC also adopted a similar definition. I'm going to move quickly through the next ones because short on time we have a program where we give a pulse oximeter to all cases who want one in order for them to monitor their saturation oxygen blood oxygen in order to have better information for their healthcare provider and determine when they might need to seek emergency care. We've done groundbreaking work doing infection control assessment and response assessments within long-term care facilities and homeless shelters. This is sort of like the work that the health department's food and lodging inspectors would do for a restaurant making sure that all the best practices are in place so these were assessments that were done remotely in order to ensure the long-term care facilities and homeless shelters could operate safely and importantly just within the last month the state has been able to stand up 16 locations where daily testing is available to really meet this overwhelming demand for testing around the state. So I've listed a couple data products. I talked about how much I admire the work of our data team. People are probably familiar with the data dashboard. It's interactive. If you click on Chittenden County you can look at the time series for Chittenden County specifically so I encourage you to play around with that. Fewer people dig down to look at the weekly data summary which not only sort of updates ongoing statistics about COVID-19 throughout the state and provides a real depth of knowledge about the status of COVID-19 within the state. Each week they also or most weeks they provide a weekly spotlight which drills down into one topic and explores it and and really tells a story in a way that I don't think is getting told elsewhere so I encourage you to look at those weekly spotlights. And then finally they have started publishing data briefs the first of which is COVID-19 among Vermonters who are Black, Indigenous and people of color which does I think a very sort of honest job at assessing the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color in Vermont so I encourage you to look at that as well. In terms of contact tracing I feel like this is something that people you know in talking with with my family it's been beneficial to have resources to refer them to so there's a contact tracing flow chart which sort of gives you the big picture of how contact tracing works and then in terms of the timing of the different milestones for when people can be released from isolation or released from quarantine we have these visual timelines for both cases and contacts and if you haven't seen those I'd encourage you to look at those as well. We also have an excellent communications group and I think they do a really good job with our website and making things relatively easy to find and new resources that they've put online recently include guidance for communities of faith information for COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines in Vermont and a way to sign up for a newsletter so if you don't want to seek out the new information it can get sent to you on a weekly basis and that's it and I will do my best to answer questions. I don't know Gillian or Kirsten if you want to all unfold. Yeah I actually just wanted to say before we dive into questions to make sure that we have time for as many people as as a need to ask questions and have substantive answers if people can keep their questions to two minutes or under and I'll let you know when you have 30 seconds left if you are approaching the two minute mark just to make sure that we have time for everyone. I know Danny specifically had said he had a question. Oh great thanks very much Gillian. So my question has to do with the cycles of the test the PCR test David. You didn't mention anything about that and as you know I'm sure there's a big controversy about PCR tests that are being cycled at rates that are bringing back a tremendous amount of false positives. In fact Dr. Mike Yeaden who is a was the chief scientist at Pfizer a pro-vaccine person has come out very strongly about the PCR tests being incredibly inaccurate actually up to 90 percent inaccurate this this was written in even in the New York Times and I'm wondering that that because of the cases which is driving everything about this this virus the case rate is is being inflated so it's unbelievable rates and I wondered you know how how you could please tell me what what the cycle rate is. Danny I really can't speak to that I'm not a lab scientist I don't work with the cycle thresholds there are folks at the health department who who know about that but I'm not one of them so I'm afraid I can't be very helpful to you're in the epidemiology area are you not I mean you're the deputy epidemiologist for Vermont how could you not know this this is very key information Danny as I said I'm an environmental health scientist and everyone at the health department from you know the the business administrators to everyone else has taken a role in in our response so I think there are people at the health department who can speak to that I'm just not one of them. Well I have to say I'm tremendously disappointed in the deputy epidemiologist in the health department of Vermont I cannot answer that question it's a very direct question it's a very simple question it's been in the news and we need to know that number because this that's what this is all based upon David sorry I have to keep pressing you about this this is key right what is going on right now. So if you consult the weekly data summaries that I referred to you'll see statistics about how common it is for people who live in the same household to go from being a contact to being a case I can't speak to you know whether PCR discovers lots of false negatives what I do know is this is a highly transmissible disease I do know that when it gets into long-term care facilities you know you have dozens and dozens of people who are getting sick including the patients and the staff and they are dying so I think anything that sort of undermines the seriousness of what the health department is responding to sort of misses the point. Yeah we're going to move on to the next question Danny I appreciate it and David I appreciate when somebody can say that they don't know the answer to something I think that is a good quality in a leader so thank you um anyone else with questions for David. Well I was just going to jump in my name is Lucia Campriolo I'm part of the steering committee in word five it's so nice to hear from you David and I just wanted to say thank you for your work and your team's work because it's been just I mean it's incredible to kind of have access to the level of information that you're sharing but I've also just been so grateful to the state's response to COVID and you know certainly in cooperation with our local communities and the immediate response that the city of Burlington has provided etc but you know having family members living in different parts of the country and different parts of the world I just feel so incredibly fortunate to be here and it gives me great confidence to know that neighbors like you are working incredibly hard at keeping us all safe and so I just wanted to extend my gratitude and then for those of you who are here with us tonight please know that as I've been taking minutes I have been linking you know fast and furious as Andy has sharing some really incredible resources from the Department of Health website and so I will will be sure to post those minutes very quickly but in the meantime please feel free to check out the website there are some incredible resources online with tons of data and information and phone numbers and people you can call if you have questions so there are you know a lot of people working really hard to keep us all safe and a lot of really great information to answer any additional questions out there tonight so thank you so much and great to meet you next to me too if no one else has a question I have a question about contact tracing go ahead John um so I during one of the governor's press conferences he relayed a message from a contact tracer where they were saying you know if you don't want me to call you don't have you know unmask contact less than six feet away for more than five minutes um but beyond that I'm actually not sure what the um what the criteria are for close contact and I also wondered um what sort of tracing goes on with things like indoor dining um I know uh there was recently a report about um restaurants in South Korea where there were people who got sick from being indoors but they were a significant distance away from each other but you know there were multiple households indoors dining without masks um so I'd love if you could add some clarification to what that contact tracing um process looks like sure um so as I said the the definition for a close contact is anyone who has been within a proximity of six feet for a cumulative amount of time of 15 minutes or more during a 24 hour period um whether or not people are masked does not enter into the um determination of whether someone is considered to be a close contact or not and that that definition is not um a bright line that will always get it right in terms of who is going to become a case and and who is not um in order to to be able to um define um you know who has a a reasonable expectation of their exposure resulting in transmission of the virus um a definition had had to be determined and in in terms of how it it bears out it definitely captures people who are not going to end up turning into cases themselves and um it doesn't always capture everyone who does become a case sometime after doing our case interviews we find that there are people who are not named as close contacts uh who may be shared the same workplace who become cases um and it's not perfect and I think uh this the situation that you're talking about in terms of the restaurant in South Korea sort of gives an example of um a situation that um where that definition of close contact would not have captured everyone so if there was um a person who was producing a lot of virus uh if they were symptomatic uh if they were really vocal if they were speaking in a a really strong voice that's why you know singing or being in a loud bar where you have to really speak up you're you're producing more of those aerosols so in in that type of situation you can have aerosolized virus that depending on the the ventilation in in a restaurant you know can carry virus more than six feet there's certainly been documented evidence in hospital environments where they find virus um you know more than six feet away from patients so um that is the working definition of uh how you define a close contact but but it isn't perfect admittedly. Great thank you so much um and now here we are at eight of one so I think we're doing pretty well in our agenda here and um next up we have and while you're doing that can I just say David thank you so much for spending time with us tonight I think you know your dedication and precision in your presentation has been so helpful to this group and when we think about like how we want to structure these conversations we we really try to structure things that are both accessible and informative to the community and you just really modeled that for all of us so thanks for for sharing your time with us on a volunteer basis while you've also been supporting our community in this totally dedicated way over the past nine months so thanks yeah thank you so much my pleasure um so next up we have uh director green from the department of racial equity inclusion and belonging and uh Pablo Boze is that am I pronouncing your last name right uh a member of the reparations tax uh task force and ward five resident and uh we're delighted to have you guys here for this conversation thank you thank you we also have skyward natch who is also a part of the racial equity inclusion and belonging department which I great have come along with me because he is helping with the reparations task force as well as many other items in the department wonderful thank you all for being here so much all right um so I'm kind of you know just I'm just here to to talk about the reparations task force as far as I understand Pablo and I we're going to be answering questions surrounding the task force but I'll tell you a little bit about a little bit about what I do for the city and what my goal is for the city so I am the director of racial equity inclusion and belonging my department focuses on eradication of systemic racism in all of our policies practices and institutions we are starting off to doing like an organizational culture analysis creating a anti-racism curriculum for the employees and for city council members as well as creating a strategic plan for the next three years that is informed by the Bopi community so that's just a little bit like kind of a bird's eye view of what we're what we're doing in the department as far as the reparations task force is concerned that was a council a city council resolution that was passed I believe in October or maybe September and we convened our first reparations task force in November and we had another one last month in December and we're going to have our next one our next one in January oh and equity and an equity indicators report we're also focusing on thank you skyler so that's a little bit about me and a little bit about what I'm doing at the city and I'm open and willing to answer questions about that work so is Skyler so is Pablo and open about the reparations task force I'll just add so I'm serving on the the task force with director green and three other representatives I think there's three other members of the task force and we've so far been talking a little bit about the structure of the actual studies that will be undertaken in order to to investigate and make recommendations to city council as part of the city council resolution that was passed there any any questions about the reparations task force I see Andy what's the what's the timeline for the reparations task force do you have a do you have a framework a time framework to complete the report for city council and then for is there another mandate for action by the city so the timeline for the study itself will probably probably begin sometime in January we are in the RFP process right now looking for academics historians economists people who study constitutional law people who study reconstruction and slavery era and and researchers qualitative and qualitative researchers that's just to name a few to to perform a study and they have a year from the date that they are awarded the project to complete the study and at that point well we will get the report as a task force we will look at the report together analyze it together and make our recommendations based on that report to the city council and there's also sort of checkpoints along the way that I believe director green will be providing updates to city council in terms of what's going on as as she already mentioned you know there's at least two sort of major components to this work one of looking historically at the the record of the city of burlington in terms of its connections to chattel slavery in in multiple forms so looking at you know just connections to the slave trade beyond you know enslaved bodies but but looking more broadly and then secondly also investigating the question of reparations themselves so both for historical harm but also looking at the legacies and and ongoing institutional forms of of harm that have kind of emanated from that so that involves as she already mentioned potentially multiple skill sets of looking at at different kinds of aspects of this work that's been that we've kind of taken on and again we're not the ones taking on the the study but we're overseeing kind of the the guiding of the study in different ways Pablo if I may do you feel like so far are you hearing I know that that you're putting together the the experts that would go into this research but do you feel like the archives in vermont are are good and how how broad you know would this be something where people would be going to to national archives would there be like a broader scale research involved with it I mean I'll let director green answer for myself I would say that we don't know that yet I mean I think that that's part of the the scoping that we laid out I I mean I have to say having served on lots of committees I've really enjoyed being in this one so far because part of what we've been doing is is really like working through some of those challenging questions of like what is it that we're asking researchers to do and what is it that we're asking them to look at and and how are the you know what are the parameters of that work so I I don't know at this point I really think it's once we award this these you know the RFPs that then we'll start to get a sense of it I mean I'm not sure director green if you have more of a sense of that than I do I would say you're right on track Pablo about how this is going to go we really don't know for sure there are some some archives and I think over the summer while I know over the summer we did this event called the stopping stones where had been uncovered that there had been two slaves here in Burlington on living on Main Street after Vermont said that they had abolished slavery so there is some evidence that there were slaves here in Burlington proper we don't know how many and we're hoping that this study uncovers that see a counselor Shannon has a question um yeah thanks Jillian uh thank you so much for um dedicating your time to this important work and it's something that I think that it's really even what you've discovered so far that we did have slaves in Burlington which I don't think anybody knew until you know very recently I think the work is really important and I believe in reparations I believe in trying to right our past wrongs or in some way um you know at least make an effort I talked about this on a radio show which called caused some alarm among the collars and it sounds like the first step is just identifying kind of what was our Burlington's historic role but but then the next step would be how do you make reparations for that and I wonder if any thought or discussion or maybe Taisha just your background knowledge on what are ways to make reparations because it's so hard to even identify who who's eligible for those reparations right well I don't think that it's hard to to determine who's eligible it will be people who descended from enslaved people so that how DNA tests I've had one I my my ancestors arrived in this country in 1700 on the shores of North Carolina so my family was involved in the slave trade trade for 165 years in this country and so I don't think that that's going to be a hard part to figure out I think that we will have the resources to be able to to do that but your deeper question is how does that kind of like fan out to other races you know like African blacks they're being treated as if they descended from slavery how do we deal with that how do we deal with you know just Latinos and how do we deal with the Asian population how do we do all these people who are experiencing racism but this study is 100 focused on chattel slavery and a descendants of chattel slavery and I think we should stay focused on that so it doesn't get too broad and then it will become I think unmanageable at that point but what do you do you have any thoughts on the form that reparations take I mean I think that the vision that everybody had on the radio show was it's a tax on white people that goes to black people and I thought that was kind of a limiting view of of what it possibly looks like but I don't really know right and I and I have had this question several times counsel Shannon and my answer is going to remain the same we don't know I mean how what what is the price for kidnapping people from their country and bringing them here and brutalizing them and raping them and lynching them and killing them and forcing them to work to be born into slavery and to die into slavery how do you put a price on that I don't think that we should do that I think that we should let the study speak for itself and then we decide where to take it from there I think to project it or to try to imagine it is is it's not fruitful at this point I would I'd like to follow up a little bit on that as well as that I think that's one of the things that we're hoping for in this study which looks both back and forwards and I think part of that is also you know I am not an expert in this area I certainly have seen some of the other proposals in in a few places there's not a a lot in the U.S. there there are a few examples of other jurisdictions that have made proposals around what reparations might look like there are certainly some economists some very prominent economists who have had some proposals around what reparations might look like and I've also seen these in other other countries as well so I think that that's something as director green has said is something that we want to see like what what is it that we might consider and I would agree with her that it's difficult to really speculate on some of those without having actually seen what is kind of out there we've had some conversations about what we're asking people to look at but I don't think at this point where we're really at the point of of knowing what that is right I want to give Skylar a chance to wait in if you would like to as well I think you're exactly right Taysha you know trying to answer and envision what reparations would look like is really the point of this study and we're going to be best served letting that process play out because this is something that we haven't done before and for us to then try to figure out you know in the court of public opinion what reparations would look like can only serve as a disservice to that process and I think that we owe it to ourselves to the history of this institution and to the city to let that process play out and let the academic or the academics do that work and then judge it on its merits and see what makes sense for the city and the community in a way to move forward but I just I would hope that rather than trying to figure out what it will be at the end of this study a year from now people would just be excited that and proud that as a city and one of the only cities in the country we're putting time and resources into doing this thank you and I am proud of us for that so thank you to all those who are doing that hard work I see Mike Fisher has his hand up go ahead Mike thank you Jillian so I'm really interested in in this work and one of the things I'm curious about is is there you know we talked about how we're one of the only cities looking at this is is is there been any cities that have seen this process through to the end I thought I read that there was Asheville North Carolina or something like that are there any kind of models that we or cities that we can look at to learn from less lessons from Asheville North Carolina determines if slavery happened there as a foregone conclusion so they didn't do a study they just said you know what we know slavery happened here what can we do to fix it they didn't study the effects of slavery they didn't study what it meant for Asheville if they had slavery there they didn't study how Asheville benefited as a city from slavery they just said okay we're just going to admit that it was here now what do we do about it we're doing it a little bit differently we want to study it so that we actually understand what actually happened here we're not going to just say we know that there are two slaves here you know and make it a foregone conclusion and then go from there I think it's really important to go a little bit deeper well actually a lot deeper and so are there so thank you for that are there other cities that have done this kind of investigative work no we are the first and the state of California so it's just us in the state of California right now who are actually performing a study okay thank you no problem does anyone else have questions thank you guys so much this is I think it's really exciting that we're doing this work Andy I actually have another another sort of direction question so I really appreciate this work and I put up a couple on the chat put up a couple of background resources just for people with sort of a general framing of the reparations case but one of the questions that brought up especially by Nicole Hannah Jones in the New York Times magazine article that I think it's really really good what is owed was the level the responsibility she says the responsibility is a national responsibility that the federal government because this is a national historical issue that the federal government should be taking responsibility for funding the reparations when you know when once it is is decided as an as a nation that we are are responsible for this so I guess I'm wondering about the levels of responsibilities sort of locally and nationally once the I once the study is done and and then there's sort of action that's proposed from that thanks right I was hoping that our study as well as the study that's being done in California would complement HR 40 so HR 40 has been in the house since 1989 is being brought to the floor every single year and it has not been taken up every single year so what HR 40 is asking for is what we're planning to do here in Burlington study it and so then we can go this can be a model that we can send to the Congress and say hey we've done the study here you go so as far as the levels of responsibility and Nicol Hannah Jones is correct it is a national responsibility but until we get there which we haven't been able to yet I think it's important for us to study it as well I think we can you know we can look at the reaction of some people in Bur in just Burlington now that we've kind of brought this topic up and obviously there are a lot of us that are really excited and see the value in this but obviously there are a lot of us who are really uncomfortable with the topic don't quite understand it it can be a little bit scary and this is a city of 40 000 or so people and we talk about that at a national level you just see what an incredible lift this is going to be in the case that's going to have to be made to convince people that this is the way to go and so I think that over hopefully over the next you know if we take this macro level view to history about you know from slavery to this point now where we even have four cities that are focusing on this issue to then five 10 15 years in the future where you know you have 10 cities 10 states 15 states and this slowly but surely gets into the mainstream I think that's the path that you're going to see this taking that responsibility is a national responsibility and it would in a perfect world we would have taken care of this by now and you know be moving forward collectively but as we all know that that's not the way that we like to do things here I'd also add that you know again the emphasis is on the involvement of Burlington within the system of child slavery so it doesn't end with looking just at I mean it's obviously very important to look at enslaved bodies but you know the ways in which industry or I mean you really want to look at the ways in which these interconnected systems you know what are those linkages and I think that that's the kind of historical research archival research that that does raise it to more of a national level or national scale I mean I think you're absolutely right Andy if you look at what little history we have in this nation of dealing with any form of remedy for past harm if you look at the the reparations paid to you know Japanese Americans who had been interned that was overwhelmingly done within the state of California rather than say Hawaii but it was still taken on as eventually finally as a national as a national issue but it's for all the reasons that that the other panelists have already identified it's a heavy lift because it becomes personalized in ways that that are well I didn't necessarily participate in this so why you know how does it implicate me and I think part of this the intent of this study is to is to really look at the foundations of of what this particular community is built upon so that's a good point Pablo great point uh Carolyn did you have a question Carolyn you are currently muted there you are okay I've been reading these books by the Chittenden let's see here we go Chittenden Historical Society there are three of them about the neighborhoods in Burlington and yesterday I read about the people that lived in the building that is the ski rack now on that southwest corner the head slaves here yeah so there's a document right in that I can find the page later and I can read it to you if you want but I think it's in either volume let's see see either in volume one or volume three towards the back of the book you want to find the where the ski rack is yeah yeah and that's where we had the stopping stone ceremony Carolyn to mark that and say we know that that's enslaved people lived right here in this location yeah she brought him up from Mississippi I think it was yeah yeah and it was Ethan Allen's daughter so that's another thing that we have to contend with here the way that we kind of exalt Ethan Ethan Allen he allowed slavery to be in his home and we need to think about that and and we also have to think about did he just allow his daughter to have those slaves in his home or were there others others that he possibly owned or other prominent men and women in in Burlington did they own them too this study will uncover that anyone else with questions this has been such a great meeting overall but a really great conversation I'm so glad to have the three of you here and I'm really excited to see what work comes through Pablo can I just make a comment that has nothing to do with this topic but the last one as somebody who works extensively on COVID-19 impacts on multiple communities especially refugees it is not true that 90% of PCR tests have false positives it's about 0.5% false positivity rate there's a higher false negativity rate but I just I appreciated David's presentation from the health department and I really didn't want that that particular misconception to flourish out there it is not true that there is a 90% false positivity rate sorry I just I had to say that thanks thanks Pablo all right well I think can I just ask a quick question just a general question if people want to the meetings of the reparations task force are public meetings people want to participate as a spectator or in any other way could somebody say when the next meeting is and and what the best way to do that is I believe is January 6th Skyler is am I thinking correctly on that and and the meeting will be you know warned and and go through all that process Skyler is it the 6th of January 6th okay and you know we will it's it's kind of like any other committee meeting I would think we will have a public forum at the beginning for for people who want to speak and then after that it will kind of be kind of like a spectator sport a little bit like you you'll listen to us you know debate the issues and talk about the applications that we're getting because that's what we'll probably be doing on January 6th is talking about the applications that have come in from the different academics who want to be involved in this and start that selection process so I think I believe that's what's on the agenda for the six great that was a great addition Andy thanks for asking that all right so I just want to mention before everybody signs off that our next meeting is on the 21st and our engagement team has put together a great sort of I guess we all did the agenda together but the engagement team has come up with a great sort of theming of the meetings throughout the year and we're hoping to have a discussion focused on the unhoused members of our community in January and we're still firming up the guests for that but I think it's going to be a great conversation and I hope a lot of you can be there for that but thank you for having me this is my first NPA meeting like ever like I I know I live Ward 7 I think somewhere maybe Ward 8 I don't really know I read I don't I haven't gone to any so thank you for for having me in your meeting I appreciate it all right well thank you thank you everyone for coming out or staying in but you know on the computer taking the time all right I'm gonna go ahead and the meeting all right nice job Julian everyone that was great