 Being 6-0-1 on Monday, May the 7th, 2018, we'll call the order city meetings this evening. First up tonight, we have a liquor control board meeting, which we have slated for 6 p.m. We've got one item on there, should be fairly quick, and then we'll transition over at 6-0-5 and start the city council meeting. And for folks who are here for the purposes of tonight's public hearing, which will be the main street revitalization vote, we're gonna start the public, our general public meeting for city council, we'll go through as many items we get through before 6-30, and then we'll transition into that public hearing where we'll go through some of the project details, open it up for a question and answer if there's that interest as well. So that's what tonight's slate looks like. So first up tonight, we'll open with the liquor control board. I'll ask that everyone please stand and join us for the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Nicole Mace. Congratulations to the flag of the United States of America, to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. So we've got one item on tonight's agenda for the liquor control board. We have Big Red Presents, which is a LLC of DBA or through Business as Misery Loves Company, Lake Champlain International Chowda. It's a spell-brown, it's Chowda Fest. And fundraiser May 26th, 2018. So this is an event that will take place on the 26th in the Rotary Park. It's gone through the event permitting process, but they are looking for their catering permit to support the Chowda Fest in Rotary Park. Great. No concerns? Does this event happen before? This is a new event. It's a new event. It didn't come to you because it doesn't require, did it come to me? I just know it doesn't have any street closures at its own or to other. So the concept, it's a water lake, lake cleanup organization. So they source the fish from the lake, and then they have a Chowda festival competition. So they are recruiting entrants. If you are a Chowda chef and want to participate, contact Misery Loves Company. It's worth managing to take the opportunity to do another visit. So I'm pretty sure our house is international Chowda fame of sorts. They've won several national or regional competitions with their Chowda, so excuse to go down. Eat delicious Chowda. Any questions, concerns from the Likert Control Board? Any questions or concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing none, I would entertain a motion for our application this evening on the Likert Control Board. So moved. Second. Motion by Christine, second by Hal. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries, is approved. That completes tonight's Likert Control Board slate of items. I didn't entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Motion by Eric, second by Nicole. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries, Likert Control Board meeting is hereby adjourned. We'll start the city council meeting in about a minute. Okay, so being 6.05 on Monday, May 7th, we'll call it order to the regular city council meeting. Asset everybody again, please join us for the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Paul Mace. Pleasure to introduce to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay. So up first tonight, we have a gender review. This is an opportunity for a council review agenda and make any adjustments. It might be warranted at this time. I think we stack things up pretty in a way that made sense with the public hearing in the middle. Any questions or concerns about the agenda? Good, so seeing and hearing none, we'll move forward with the agenda as presented and open up for public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the public to address counsel about items that are not on tonight's agenda. You can find the agenda in the back and we also would appreciate if everybody could remember to sign in in the back sheet too before leaving this evening if you haven't done so already. Thanks for doing that. We want to address counsel on an item that's not on tonight's agenda. Okay. So seeing and hearing none, we will move on to our consent agenda. Our consent agenda tonight consists of the approval of city council and looking for patrol minutes from April 16th, warrants from five, four and four, eight to 421. So it's going to payouts for March. We also have the International City Manager's Association Retirement Cooperation Agreement, Corporation Agreement, good grief, adding extra O's and R's. And also approval of the V-Trans Annual Certification for Compliance for Town Roads, Bridge Standards and Network Inventory and also the V-Trans Annual Financial Plan for Highways. Any questions or concerns in regards to the consent agenda? Any questions or concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing none, I retain a motion for approval of the consent agenda as presented. Motion by Nicole, seconded by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. And those opposed, motion carries. City updates. Great, thank you. So a couple of updates tonight. First on some program updates, wanted to let you know that Ray and I met with representatives from the pool, the fundraising pool committee last week, they have met and started their work about developing a fundraising plan, setting some fundraising targets, and we're looking for more information from us, which was really helpful and useful. They're meeting again on Wednesday evening here, have people are interested. So at your next meeting on the 21st, we will be bringing to you the follow-up information that you requested when it was last on your agenda, which was some cost analysis on those necessary items from the pool and the add-on items. That information has also been shared with the fundraising committee. A timeline to get to an August bond vote and some more information about other community services programming. So that will be coming to you on the 21st. We're really gonna try, because the pool committee is meeting this week, we're going to get their feedback after their meeting and send you that memo, either the end of this week or the very beginning of next week. So you'll have it a week out from the 21st meeting. We've been talking about the master plan process as we're in the, have a staffing vacancy with our planning and zoning manager. We are finalizing an agreement with CCRPC for them to come and help facilitate that project through the adoption of a new master plan, hopefully in the winter or early spring next year. They've agreed to it. We have authorization from the state to use the municipal planning grant we secured last year to fund that work. So it's no new money, but it's facilitation help that will ensure that that project continues on even during the staffing vacancy. I also want to let you know that we have about five months ago, we stood up a safety committee with representatives from all of our unions and management to have the people doing the work really inform us about areas where they felt we can make safety improvements, training opportunities, equipment, et cetera. It's been functioning really well. Kudos to John Schout, who's the chair of the committee and Julie, who staffs that. So since that's been stood up, we've held work-strong training for all of our staff, which is training that's run through Vermont League of Cities and Towns, back-entry prevention for the public works team and the fire department. Again, prevention to try and ensure that they're healthy and safe and that we're not experiencing claims. Ergo evaluations for employees who are more sedentary in their work, flag their training, and now we're starting to focus on mental health training for our first responders. So it's a really great effort and ideas that are, again, coming from our team, which I think are really exciting. One more project update. Last meeting I talked to you about the 268 East Allen project getting their low-income housing tax credits. So that project is moving along fairly quickly. They hope to start construction late summer. It will require the closure of one lane of East Allen Street during construction because with the form-based code, they're building right up to the sidewalk there. So John Rauscher and their traffic engineers are working on a plan to accommodate that during construction. Since it's right uphill from the hood intersection, it's kind of a complicated lane closure, but I want you to know it's coming and we'll provide that traffic plan once it's finalized with the engineers. Events this weekend was really fun. So two updates, a green update was a huge success. We filled up an entire dumpster with our friends and neighbors cleaning up the city races. It's the most he's experienced since he's been here, which was awesome. And thank you to everyone who came out and participated in that. Waking windows from the city's perspective also was a huge success. Wanted to thank the organizers for putting together such a well-run event and of course our public safety crews who were on duty most of the weekend supporting that event. Just while we're on events, May 19th, we have three other fun events in the city. It's not this Saturday, but the following. We have the Wiffle Classic at Cassavent, which will be all day. We have the Public Heroes Day on Manuski Falls Way with our public safety teams. Howard, mental health is gonna come out and have us set up and some of the other public safety providers in the region. So that's usually a fun day for families. And then there will be the plant swap that morning at Richards Park as well. And then finally, since our last meeting, CCRPC hosted the Housing Commission convening, what they called it, on April 30th at the OCC, had representatives from, I think, all but two Chinden County communities talking about what they're doing to promote affordable housing development. Really interesting conversations and coming out of that, CCRPC agreed to host a series of more targeted conversations about specific tools that have been used across the region. So affordable housing, trust funds, task forces, inclusionary zoning, other policy initiatives. So we will continue to keep you all in the Housing Commission informed as those are scheduled. That's all I have. Thank you. Great, thank you very much. I'll turn it over now to council reports. Can Rich, what was your last time? I think it's me. So I attended the Community Service Commission meeting on April 25th as the council liaison. Conversation about the pool was a big conversation. The concern of the commission is that we don't scale it back to the extent that it really doesn't satisfy the needs of the community. But here in Cal, the Fundraising Committee is getting up and running. That was an important part of the plan of how do we fund the project with some support from Fundraising. There was conversation about the OCC and they'll know by mid-May whether or not they're gonna have a childcare provider in there. It's been a real tough go to find a suitable vendor. It's pretty competitive. And if it doesn't pan out, there's gonna be possible conversation about how do we relocate the library. The library presented Amanda Perry. It was a very strong report out about how well they're doing, the numbers are increasing, a lot more young kids and young people are using the library and their space is kind of bursting at the scene. So it was an interesting dovetail to the conversation about how do we fully utilize OCC. There's also a conversation about doing a needs assessment to have a better understanding what the community wants in terms of services. So there may be some conversation with United Way, which is pretty skilled in doing needs assessments in communities. So that pretty much captured that meeting. I attended the CCRPC housing convening meeting. Number of cities and towns from Chittenden County were present and the focus was on affordable housing. It was a great experience to really hear from all these different towns and cities of what they're doing. And it was a real opportunity to be able to connect with some of the towns and cities that are doing some pretty interesting things to support and grow affordable housing. The will of the group was we'd love to reconvene and maybe we'll do a deep dive about certain topics. One of the ones that rose up to the top was housing trusts that are now becoming more and more prevalent and how they're really effective in seeding projects for low income affordable housing. So we'll stay tuned for gathering again to learn from our other towns and cities out there doing some good work around affordable housing. Thank you. Sure. So let's see, it was on April 23rd, myself, Jesse and Seth sat down and met with David Scher from the Attorney General's Office to discuss the Winooski Fair and Partial Policing policy. And we did convey what we had all expressed coming out of here from council that we would like to see the areas of the policy that they believe are not in compliance with Act 54 outlined in a memo. So I believe our understanding from them is that we'll have that shortly. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see for the written memo from them on kind of what areas of the policy they're taking issues with and we'll have some time to digest that and deliberate on it here and go from there. There's a public safety commission meeting tomorrow night here at 6.30. The public safety commission is going to be joined by Lauren Sampson who is on our planning commission to discuss municipal master plan. So that'll be a great opportunity if folks from the public wanna come out and kind of be a part of the work that the public safety commission is going to be providing input on in the master planning process. Definitely encourage folks to join us. And then Jesse mentioned Public Safety Heroes Day which in addition to there being a bouncy house which I feel like is a gigantic draw, they'll also be our brand new shiny sap fin fire engine. So if nobody has had a chance to see it yet, give us down on Woodings Key Falls Way Saturday. It's beautiful. Definitely go check it out. And I think that about wraps it up for my updates. Thank you. Just to reinforce what Jesse said could not be more proud of all the work that staff did this weekend to accommodate a massive festival takes over the entire city. I mean, I think our report indicates we really had no incidents of any sort of significance which you get that many people with opportunities, interactive traffic and each other that's a feat. So well planned out, well executed. I know every time I talk to the festival organizers while running around with their heads cut off just a really positive reflection of what it was like to work with our staff and the job that you all did. So great kudos. Thank you. Thanks for supporting those events and allowing them to happen in our community and doing such a good job with them. So it says a lot about the philosophy that you all work with here. Thank you. One event left off Saturday I also want to acknowledge our tree committee. I'm not calling them tree board. It just feels wrong. But and working with John to have a wonderful black gum planted in Allen Park next to the dog park. Great job. Everybody who was involved in that and supporting an organization. We also did a resolution. Ray, thanks for all your work around that as well in honor of Arbor Day. And a great group did a lot of awesome work. Planning commission met and the housing commission met since we last met. So it's been busy. Housing commission, I think we're gonna see some priorities, priority statements from them very soon. They've kind of mapped out very similar to what the planning commission did when they were starting their work. Hey, this is reframing. You've got the high level back here from housing of what their goals are. They've been putting some really thoughtful work together around what their additional goals look like with a little greater specificity about what specific outcomes they'll be striving towards while also continuing all those conversations about what it is they're targeting and how those numbers are gonna be reached. Planning commission really rebooting. Thanks to Jessie for all her support there in terms of new membership, but just an incredibly high capacity, high power group, a lot of discussion about agreement of timelines. And you're also seeing now liaisons from the planning commission go out to other commissions as those, as each of the other commission areas feeds into the master plan. There's gonna be a planning commission member really assigned to follow that work and keep interactive updates coming back to the planning commission about what's happening. So it's not kind of a cram at the end. And obviously staffs have been doing a great job supporting the work for the next planning manager as well. And also just an update met with Burlington, South Burlington, San Maron, how long as we do every couple months. And Burlington has indicated that we will have first off, we have a draft MOU between the three communities in regards to a number of things around the airport that we're gonna discuss further. And that's, we're kind of taking a first stab, looking at it now to see if there's anything confining about it from a legal perspective, but expect to have that out to all of you in the next couple of meetings for consideration. And it will be late summer before we hear sort of a final stance on governance and what that's gonna look like for potentially moving that conversation forward in a productive manner. So yeah. That's it. It's a fun two weeks. You forgot to mention that you represented the city very well, the community talent show. It was the opening MC. You've been busy. So I actually don't have much to report. I was unable to attend the housing commission meeting because I had April vacation plans, but it is the meeting is on my calendar for the next eight months. So I look forward to picking up with that conversation. Next month. All right. So I along with the mayor and city manager presented the mainstream revitalization projects to a community dinner that was really well attended. I think you said the numbers are there. 350 people, I think, right? Yeah. So there were a lot of people there. There was a lot of questions asked. A lot of really good information can surface out of that. And we'll see you more tonight. Thank you for that. And thanks for your Jesse's time too on Saturday to make ourselves available with handmade art signs to as part of the waking windows. We were the city's arm for giving people information off the main street project, actually had some really great interactions and people to stop by in addition to doing our first Facebook live, I think, with the city. So it's great. May, I had one thing I forgot on my list. Please. It's now a happy thing. In December, on the December 4th meeting, we had a public hearing on a dog bite case and put parameters around care and treatment of a specific dog. There was another dog bite today this afternoon and there's a woman in the hospitals. We are negotiating with all parties about how best to move forward per the ordinance if there's been no formal complaint made yet. But if there is, we'll need to have a hearing within seven days. So there is a possibility that we will need to do that between now and your next meeting. So I just want to flag that for you. I think there's a good likelihood that it can be resolved between the parties but just want to flag it for you. I'm fortunate to hear. Thank you for that, Zephyl. Okay, we'll now turn over to tonight's regular agenda and we'll start off with the appointment of Erin Barnaby for the Community Services Commission. I'm here mostly for moral support. So Erin, if I was gonna be here, unfortunately I was out today unexpectedly but I'm here instead. So Erin applied a little bit ago now and has been patient with us as we've kind of worked through process but a person who I know personally and who brings a lot of commitment to volunteerism moving from Burlington to Manuski, we are very glad to get her. And thankfully her track record of community participation has continued as she's crossed the river. So I'll let you sort of speak to your interests and joining the commission. And I think they may have some questions about background but for more I set a really solid addition to the group and some really awesome perspective to bring to the table. Sure, hi everybody. Yeah, so my partner and I moved here in October and we were really excited to join the community and we've been volunteering at the library and we're just so amazed at all of the work that the librarians and do for the community and how much the community just uses those resources and how valuable they are. And so that was sort of what initiated my interest in the community services commission. And since then I am starting to get involved with the community gardens and places like that as well. And I'm very excited about the main street project and the public art initiative that goes along with that. So yeah, that's a little bit of my interest but please, any questions that you guys have? So it's kind of nothing to do with the fact that you also live now in a library. I know, right? Yes, so we bought the old town library. Yeah. Yeah, we got any of that. And actually we've had people show up and looking for to borrow a book. So I see from your application you serve a number of organizations that volunteer. What motivates you to volunteer? That's a good question. I have, well, a couple of things. I think it's always just been part of my DNA. I grew up in a small town in Vermont and it was just what you did. You had to be part of the library. You just supported your community. I think for me specifically I do things professionally I do things professionally and I can't always do all of my interests in my professional career and kids and working with kids and working with kids in the community is a really important part of something that I can't do professionally anymore. And so that's a big part of it. Things that I've done in the past, mentoring, working in makerspaces, stuff like that comes from my interests in both working with kids, being an artist, doing stuff like that. Having known you from the other side of the river, I'm very excited to have both of you here and have you contribute in the community and it means a lot that you're jumping in so quickly and helping out. And it's exciting to have the energy added to the mix and your knowledge and experience too. So really excited to be part of it and appreciate you putting your time out there and your energy effort into it. Thank you. Other questions for Erin? Any questions about the selection process for commission members from the public? Notice how we indicate that you can't kill people, but great. Thank you very much for volunteering and now the important part not to be forgotten. I would entertain a motion for approval of the selection for Erin Barnaby to the Community Services Commission. It's a motion. Second. Motion by Christine, second by Eric. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Congratulations. Let's go ahead and also do the quarterly treasurer's report. Dr. Tysers. Thank you. We'll wrap into the treasurer's reserve fund report. And then best update. Mr. Marin, members of the council, this is always an interesting time of the year, any fiscal year, when we get an opportunity to report the outcome of the three quarters of the fiscal year, nine months into the fiscal year, we can report the financial outcomes. And it also gives us an opportunity to be able to project the last quarter to give the legislative body and yourselves, the council, an opportunity to see what lies ahead. And as you can see, and I'll try to make my report as brief as possible, because I know you have a public hearing, go through these very quickly because I sent you a memo. Everything seems to be in order financially for the city. All the various operating funds and the various budgets are looking pretty good. The general fund, as you can see from my report, looks good for the first nine months of the fiscal year. And with the outcome of fiscal year, even though it looks like we had $147,000 deficit, there was an item, there are items in there that you had pre-approved, spending of some of the FY17 surplus to the tune of about $230,000, you pre-approved that. And that's included in the operating cost that you see within the general fund budget. So when you fold those back in, it looks like we'll end up the year with a proposed $83,000 surplus. Now, it's not as great as it has been over the last couple of years, but it is good. It's a positive feature in our finance. It means the city has run their general fund budget very efficiently and very cautiously. And the managers have done a good job of making sure that they check and track all their expenditures. Our revenues look good. So as far as the general fund budget is concerned, it looks like we'll end up the year with that kind of a surplus. We'll give you a better perspective on that once the audit is done this summer. But I'm very pleased to announce that we will have that kind of a proposed surplus of some $80,000. Any quick questions on that? I'm gonna run through these quickly because I know you've got two other things to do, okay? The rest of the funds, the basically the three enterprise funds, which is the water fund, the wastewater fund, and the parking garage fund, which consists of a combination of two funds, all look fairly well. The water fund is in a very healthy mood. It looks like we'll do pretty well at the end of the fiscal year. And even though we're having a $28,000 deficit, we had projected a $50,000 deficit when the budget was proposed. And we use that money, we will get that money from the water fund reserves. In this case, we'll only use $28,000 of that, of our proposal rather than the 50. And that still leaves us, you know, something to put back into that reserve fund. And that water fund is a healthy fund. And we can very touch on that very quickly when we talk about the capital reserves. The wastewater fund, which is the sewer sanitation funds, basically a look pretty good, even though again, there is a perspective of having a very large deficit, but that was built into the budget. We understood that when the budget was presented and you approved it way back when, and we had proposed that we would probably end up using about 424,000 out of reserves in order to keep that fund floating. And in this particular case, it looks like we'll use probably close to 460. But again, the wastewater fund, the reserves in the wastewater fund is substantial. And so that's okay. We'll use some of the reserve, but we had planned on doing that anyway. So it's not gonna cause us a great deal of grief. There are some expenditures in there that were necessary and they were built into the budget. You approve, they were done, and it looks like that budget's gonna come out okay, as far as its progress is concerned. The parking garage fund is basically a combination of two funds. It's the on-street parking and the parking garage. And we keep them separate simply because of the fact that there are covenants that govern the use of the parking garage funds where we don't have those covenants when we talk about the on-street parking. Those are all the meters that are spread around outside the parking garage. It looks like the on-street parking fund will look at better than a $100,000 projected surplus at the end of the year. People are using the parking, they're paying their parking, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's going extremely well. We do that particularly through one of the local banks with credit cards that people are used to it now so they go to the kiosk and away we go. The parking garage is pretty much governed by, pretty much governed by some covenants because of the fact that it's under bond. And in that particular fund, it looks like we'll break even at the end of the year. Why? It's because we can't use that surplus money for nothing but the parking garage. And any excess money that comes out of that, if we had a surplus, it would have to go into the tiff and that's governed by policy. So we don't have any real major control over that. But that fund looks like whatever was budgeted will be spent, the revenues will be collected, and that fund will end up with a zero balance again and that minimal $200,000 reserve will keep in place for other things that we can use for its operation. The other funds that I report to you are basically what we call special revenue funds. They're community justice program, the rental registry program, the tiff, the O'Brien Community Center and the Economic and Development Programs. The Community Justice Center is basically a break-even because their special revenue funds, we use no taxpayer money for those particular funds. They're all self-supporting. And so whatever they are budgeted for, whatever grants are applied for is what they use. The Community Justice Program will end up with, again, a balanced budget, not for the same revenues versus expenditures, but in this particular case, this last year, the city paid back $28,000 of a previous grant that came out of their expenditures and simply did not cause any deficit. I'll actually allow the program to break even. So that was an excellent feature. The tiff, on the other hand, as I said in my memo, is an interesting one, okay? Because the tiff relies on both the property taxes that come out of the tiff district and any other kinds of fees or charges, such as... Pilots. Yeah, pilots and things of that nature, okay? Unfortunately, as I said in my memo to you, in the, as far as the tiff is concerned this year, we had a couple of pitfalls. Number one is we received less revenues from property taxes than we had expected, something to the tune of 211,000. And we also had a pitfall as far as our ground leases are concerned, they didn't get paid, and that was about 340,000. So if you put the two together, you got better than a half a million dollars that we did not receive, although we will expend what we had said to in the budget that you folks approved. That's gonna lead us to a rather large deficit. We had anticipating a deficit of 110,000 when we started the year in a budget process, we'll end up with a $560,000 projected deficit with these two caveats that I've just mentioned being fulfilled. The fortunate thing for us there is the fact is that the tiff does also have its own reserve operating fund as well as its capital fund, and that $560,000 can come out of the tiff operating reserve. The only thing that we need to be cautious of for that particular fund is that as you can see from my report, we started the year with 783,000 in that reserve fund for the tiff. If we expend $560,000 out of it, it now narrows that down pretty much. So we have to be a little cautious about what's gonna happen from this going on. The rental registry is basically a self-supporting fund. We had anticipated a very, almost a break even at budget time. Looks like we'll end up with about $15,000 or $16,000 deficit at the end of this fiscal year with projections. That's pretty good. That's a pretty good balance budget. The O'Brien Community Center, of course, is something that I'm sure that's been on your mind for all the time because you need to wrestle with it and you've heard many, many stories about it, particularly from us in finance. At the beginning of the year, we had budgeted that we would probably end up with a projected $67,000 deficit. It looks like based on the fact that we really haven't got the rentals and the tenants that we wanted to, it looks like we may end up with something around the vicinity of $110,000. And I know that is on your agenda to talk about over the course of the next several months on what to do with that. We've heard stories about what's gonna happen there. We don't know, but I'm sure that the city manager and her administration will keep you abreast of what's going on with O'Brien and you can wrestle with that. One of the things that we just remember that the O'Brien Community Center will be folded into the general fund next year because the auditor say we can't keep that as an enterprise fund, it's not self-supporting. The community and economic development is probably the first time we've reported this to you that that fund has a $300,000 revenue item. And basically it looks like they will be underspent. They aren't gonna spend as much money as they had intended to. They're really just starting to get off the ground. They're doing a great job, but it's gonna take a little while. So we take a very sigh of relief and say, they're gonna end up with a sizable surplus at the end of the year, but I'm sure that we can sustain that as time goes on. All told, as I always like to conclude when I do the, oh, I'm sorry, let me back up again. There are some other community services, special revenue funds, the gardens, this, that, whatever, all self-supporting funds, they all look like they're really coming along well. They're all within balance. They're all taking care of themselves. There's no actual city money, taxpayers' monies that help support those. So they're all self-supporting and they're going very, very well and they're very well managed. So there's a lot of those little funds that, just take up a lot of paper if I report them to you. They just tell you those special revenue funds for the community services programs for the community are beneficial to the community and they're all in balance. They're all looking really, really good. What I can say is that, from a standpoint of the enterprise funds, the general funds, all the special revenue funds that I've mentioned, things of that nature, we've got a good handle on them. Things are being managed very well. They're very efficiently run. They're very well managed and people are very cognizant of that. The fact is that the monies they spend to keep these supporting programs going for the city aren't going to the benefit of the city. So your city manager and her administration or managers are just doing an excellent job and I give kudos to them. Is there any question on that? This is kind of a general overview of all the various funds that I've talked to you about. Any questions, concerns for Jim? If there's anything that you'd like to see differently in our reporting in the future, please let me know and we can do that. But I try to give you a flavor of all, where do you stand financially? Because having been in finance as long as I have, I know it's very, very critical that you understand where the dollars are coming from and where they go and where they should be at a certain point in time. And that's why we use benchmarks and we use that 25, 50, 75% benchmark to say at this time of the year, you should be sort of at this with your expenditures. If they're up and down, we take a very critical look at it and that's what's nice about this time of the year when we can make our three month projections, it gives us an opportunity to balance out and do some reallocation within that last three month period that is very, very helpful. So when you get a chance to look, say, this is what we project you will probably look like at the end of the fiscal year. Even though they're unaudited, it looks pretty well. I would ask, since I wasn't here for the previous budgeting process, in the water fund and wastewater fund, the deficit there is for, I'm guessing, one-time capital expenditures. Does anyone recall? Ah, Jesse, yeah. Yes. Yes, so that's how, in recent history, we've funded the capital through the water and wastewater funds is with the use of reserves because we have very healthy reserves and much of that work is one-time upgrades, smaller projects that we don't necessarily want to bond for as we do with the headworks project but that we can incrementally modernize our system. So we've used that reserve for that one-time capital expenditure. We've literally used it like a capital fund and that's one of the reasons why it's been so high but we've had periods where we haven't done as much planning on the execution of the fund so it got built up far beyond what's probably what we want to target it generally without big projects in the pipeline. Okay. The only thing you have to be cautious of with the reserve and we like to call them reserve funds and they include monies for capital projects like Jesse said, things that you don't want to go out and bond for, sometimes don't even want to go out and take out a bank note for it because it would be more expensive than what you, and you have the funds to do that. The only thing is, and we keep a very close watch on them because of the practice, that it's kind of like a savings account. If you use it all up, it's gone. You've got nothing left. Then you have to do something drastic and that's not a good way of managing. The last thing is- So Jim, we're gonna have to keep this to two to three minutes in addition to the report just to be mindful of everybody's time who's shown up for the public caring. Okay, the last is basically the first report we've ever given you in the current reserve fund report. What I've tried to do with along with a very large sheet is to show you all the various reserve funds that we have for all the various different operational activity. And it could be, like I said, they could be reserve funds for both capital needs and operational needs. What I've tried to do in the first three years is to say, hey, if we've got money sitting there, let's put it to use. Let's make money on the money we've got. It's just sitting there. Let's get the most we can get out of it. So over the course of the last three years we've been working towards, what can we conceivably invest and be very cautious about our investment? And rather than leave it in a checking account that earns 0.4 or 0.5% that we can put it into another investment instrument and we've done that. We've managed to get to that point now talking to the various department managers and city manager and what have you. We've now reached that point. We've said, okay, we're gonna take our first baby step and we did. We figured that there was enough money sitting in reserves of the water fund and the wastewater fund and some of the on-street parking money that we could invest about $875,000. We took out a one-year CD. We got a CD rate at 2.09%. Basically, it's a maturing CD. So we will end up with a yield of about 2.13. That's a lot better than 0.4. And so we'll make some money there. There's other monies that are still sitting there idle but we're looking at how can we invest them over three, six, nine, 12 month periods and to be very cautious because it is taxpayer money and we wanna make sure that we don't blow it. It's not like investing in the stock market. It's not our money, it's somebody else's money so we're very cautious. That's great. We appreciate your work to get that jump started. If I could just jump in really quickly and support what Jim said. This is a really significant change from how we have managed our reserve funds in the past and one of the reasons we want to bring this to you was just to make sure you understood that we were investing that $850,000 for a year in a CD but also as we go forward with our capital planning efforts and long-term thinking about fund balance, the fund balance that we still have remaining for FY17 as well as whatever we develop from this year. We're gonna be flagging that for you so you see where those dollars sit. We also want to be very careful to articulate that when we're talking about the use of one-time money for fund balance for for example, the cloud migration we talked about recently, that's in addition to the 30 days cash on hand we have and in addition to the other capital funds we've set aside. So it's not just that $250,000 pot that we or $300,000 pot that we currently have sitting there. So more to come on that but we wanted to flag it for you for future conversations. That's $20,000 to $30,000 over that period of time in terms of earnings. So that's a another extra strip of sidewalk that gets done or absolutely. Well, any money that we can gain by investing at a higher rate, it brings to the city, it will mean something else we can do better. Great, we appreciate that. Thank you very much. Other questions for Jim or Jesse on that item? Thank you very much for the detailed memos. It's very helpful because it preps coming in. Thank you for your support. Unfortunately, we have to jog through the items. Oh, I understand. Thank you. Any questions or concerns from the public in regards to those two items? Okay. So seeing and hearing none. Thank you, Dr. Teyshurst. Okay. We're gonna now open up our 630 p.m. public hearing for the Main Street Realization Bonvote that's scheduled for not far away tomorrow between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. We are going to invite John Rascher up. Can you do anybody else? Can press play on the thing and open the front. And our plan for this evening, if you attended the public session previously, we're gonna do a condensed version of that two and a half hour marathon session. And just go through our slides, the same slides that we covered that evening and open it up to see if anybody has any questions or concerns. We've got both the engineering team here as well as the city staff who have worked really hard on this project for the entire time. So very similar to the last, I'm also not gonna stand up and move around as much as last time because number one, we want this group to feel like they can ask all the questions or make all the statements they wanna make. But in addition to that, really wanna encourage you as a member of the public too. We're gonna do this a little differently than our typical public hearing where we take breaks. So are there any questions if you could just pop your hands up? If there's something you've got a question about while it's on the screen and let's talk about it before we move on. So maybe Jesse, I'll just open up by saying if you wanna introduce the project team just for acknowledgment because there's a lot of people who've done a lot of work on this. I would love to do that. So John Ruscher is here as is Ryan Lambert, our project manager and public works. They really carried the water on this project from the city side. Dave Saladino here is here from VHB and his team Dan and Erica as well. So they are the experts on the engineering side of things, the preliminary engineering we've done over the last six months. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you all for all of your work. We appreciate it. So jumping right into the general information. First of all, we'll just do a little boom. Yeah, there you go. First slide changes. Ah, I should have a little bell. So first up, the vote looks just like a regular town meeting day vote, right? So it's between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. you can go to the senior center at Barlow Street similar to the other public votes. Now you can actually register or update your registration at the polls for a new feature. Thank you to the secretary of state office for making that happen in Vermont. But you can go vote in very similar system of shorter ballot than you're used to seeing on a typical town meeting day. So what are you actually voting on? What you are going to have on is a yes or no question. Do you authorize the city to bond $23 million for the mainstream revitalization? And that's really as simple as it is. There's not a number of other items on there or a number of other authorizing factors. It's that one question that will be there. So if you were to vote yes, what we've kind of consistently tried to message is it's actually what we would call a yellow light to move forward. I like that analogy. I think councilor Colson maybe came up with, which is we're at the point now where we've assembled the basics of a funding package. We're aware of the state and federal subsidies and resources that are available to us to get to all the final numbers on those. Those entities take things to a point and then they stop and they say, we need to see that there's public support in your community for this. And that's what this vote's about. It's about getting that authorization to be able to go for the full funding mechanism organization. So we can't take it any further without that. If a yes vote were to come forward, it also does up with 100% certainty certain team mean that the project will move forward. We will go back work with those state and federal funders come up with the best package possible. And then we're going to talk about numbers of what we think the impact looks like, for example, for the tax rate, what we would need to do for water or wastewater fees and what impact we think of 1% sales tax, those other revenue sources we're talking about using to help pay for the project. We'd have to gauge based on what we've learned from those other funding entities, what the impact of those numbers look like. And then council would have the final say based on this vote, if the vote were for yes to pull the final trigger on the project. So that's an important factor. Now the other question that's come up is like, okay, does that mean then that after that vote, the public has no say? The answer to that question is also no. The final decisions are going to be made in public meetings just like this in these chambers. So, and the communication is not going to stop just because we get past the vote, right? We're going to keep communicating with the public about this is where we're at, this is how things sugared out and this is what the numbers are looking like. So it does not mean that there won't be another opportunity for input. It does mean that this is the one opportunity to vote on it. Something a little tricky about that is we are also building up funding packages that are dependent on subsequent things. So for example, we're going to talk about in a minute or two the general fund, potential impact to the general tax rate, right? We don't just implement that automatically. You actually have to vote and approve next year's budget and when you do that, you'll be voting to authorize us to adjust the tax rate as we're going to propose to do by approving or not approving the project. If people were to vote yes, we move forward and we come back with a tax rate that's unacceptable, public can vote that down. That wouldn't do us very much good because we would be scrambling to then, okay, what do we slash cut and do to cover this debt that we've now committed ourselves to? So we hope the public won't do that but that's an option that people have. And in addition to that too, if we do a 1% sales tax which we're talking about hitting beverages, meals and rooms, the public would also have to vote to authorize that as well. So that's kind of the voting logistics in terms of what happens. If the vote were a no, it's not going to stop us from having to spend money, time and energy on Main Street. We'll just look at it differently. We'll talk about why we decided to do the project in this manner in the next few minutes but a no vote would basically send us back to the drawing board of saying, okay, this is what the communities consistently said that they wanted, how do we achieve that without this kind of scale of work? So any questions about kind of the voting mechanics? Yes, sir. The way I read their saying is that what does the project cost? Beautiful, yes. It seems to me that you are going to go, we authorize you to go and get the money from either the state or the federal government. But the idea of it is if you don't get the money from the state and the federal government, we end up paying for that. So that means you're going to have a 20% increase of your property tax. You're also going to have maybe a 15 to a 16% on your water bill. I don't think this, so you won't just can't afford that kind of stuff. You take a $5,000 bill that I pay on property tax now that's another $1,000. So I would say that we have to come back and vote if we don't get the money from the state and the federal government. When it stays right there, you say it's only up to you guys. I don't go along with that. I can't vote yes on that. Yeah, and I appreciate that. I mean, that's a reality of the way the mechanics of this do work is it does put the, puts the final say back in the hands of the council. I think what we've tried to say is right now with our funding methodologies, the way we're stacking them up from those proposals is we've looked at between a four to 6% increase in taxes. From a historical perspective, I think you can get a philosophical feel of exactly how this body's felt about increasing taxes by looking at the fact that we haven't gone over 2% in several years. I think it's a pretty cognizant government, but you are correct that you are theoretically turning that over to the council if there's a yes vote. That's true. I think you would be hard pressed. I'm not gonna speak for everybody who's sitting up here, but if the whole project hit the tax base, you're talking about about 16% cent increase. That's never been something that anybody's had any kind of appetite for that's sitting up here from my conversations. Correct me if you're wrong, if I'm wrong about that. But a big part of the reason why this project came forward and the timeline that it did is because of the funding opportunities we had to help subsidize it and keep it cheap to make that simple. If those were suddenly not there, if they were suddenly not available to us, I would think that that would be a very large strategic conversation and discussion. And especially if we've said to the voters during this process, we think four to six, yes, it could be more, it could be less. We want to be clear about that because if it comes back at seven and council decides to move forward, that's a possibility. Well, I think it would be much clearer to the people who are voting yes or no that if you say, okay, we're authorized to go get the money from the state and the federal government and they say yes or no, whatever the case may be, then I think it should come back to us and say, okay, what's the final decision? $23 million is going to come out of our pocket. And if that's the case, do you want to vote for that $23 million? And that means you're increasing your property tax based on $5,000 is $1,000. Well, people want fixed income. I don't think they're going to be able to afford that. And I do appreciate that. There are several technical logistic reasons we couldn't come back for a secondary vote, including restrictions on the funding mechanisms. Once those federal funds are obligated, for example, or the state commitments are done, the train sort of starts leaving, not sort of starts leaving, the train starts leaving and there's bills racked up. So to have to come back for a secondary public vote just logistically isn't possible. So I appreciate it. And I know for some people that that puts it as a non-star, I get it. So what's the yes vote on the ballot? Does the state the same thing that you stated on your program for the last time we had to meet? That means you're not coming back for a vote. That's correct. That's correct, yes. That is right. And we want to be really clear about that. But then there's the availability for input than is that public meetings. It's not at the voting booth. Yeah. And voting, for the people who sit up here, or not. Just to respond to that from a personal perspective, I think if we're putting the best faith analysis of what we expect the tax impact to be between four and 6% out to the voters and that it comes in as a yes vote and the funding package that actually comes before me, just speaking personally, was really different than that four to 6%. I wouldn't view moving forward with that project as alignment with the intent of the voters when they showed up on the polls and gave that yes vote. So I think from my perspective, if the package that were to come back is incredibly different than what we're actually putting out and allowing the community to vote on, I wouldn't feel comfortable moving forward. Any other questions from funding mechanics? More coming. So going back to this idea of what the goals of the project were and why we prioritized it, the first thing is this isn't a new conversation. We've tried to say that really consistently. This is something that Manuski's been a topic for well over a decade is a need for reinvestment in Main Street and Main Street being a key place that we think from a vibrancy and development perspective is gonna be a focus. So during most recently, the last seven years specifically, we did the gateways planning project. Then we did the form-based code evolution and development of that planning work. And then we also did the master transportation planning process. Each of those planning processes created a very similar vision for what Main Street should look like. When people talked about walkability, people talked about making it more pedestrian friendly, people talked about making it multimodal for bike and bus as well more friendly for those types of things. And then just quite frankly, we just have infrastructure there that's between 130 and 140 years old. So we also, from a technical perspective, are saying, hey, the growth that's happening on Main Street in the gateway process and form-based code updates, we said we want this to be a denser area of development. We wanna keep our neighborhoods or neighborhoods the downtowns of downtown. And then we wanna spread the success of the downtown into these gateway corridors, being East Allen Street, Malis Bay Avenue and Main Street. The infrastructure that's there does not support that growth. It does not support that work that's currently starting there that you're seeing take root. Form-based code was successful, right? You can start to see some of the investment taking place on Main Street. It did what we asked it to do. And this is a way of then coming back and supporting that from an infrastructure standpoint. So modernization of Main Street, again, back to those key principles that people again voiced over and over again through all those planning processes. So this is not something that project that's pulled out of the hat. This has been a long-running conversation. A big piece of that has been to the development of we have a lot of conversations in here about how we balance the tax growth, right? How we balance our grand list growth and it can't, every time there needs to, stuff's not gonna cost less next year than it does this year. It's not the way it works. It's gonna cost you two to 3% more to buy a milk tobacco sample right now, but a box of cereal than it's going to this year. It just is. Everything we buy in the city is gonna cost us two to 3% more next year to pay for than it did. We've gotta get that money from somewhere. We either do that by turning back to tax payers each and every year with residential homes and saying we have to increase your taxes as percentage, or we try to grow and get a little bit more balanced in our tax space. And the best example, probably in the state, is Winooski's, the opportunity we took and the risk we took with the downtown redevelopment where we turned $23 million with the property and $110 million with the property off of smart growth, investment infrastructure, and that's worked. It's worked really well and worked as intended. And it's actually a large part of, again, why we can do this project is that growth. So that's a lot of the thinking behind what pushed this project forward right now. Maybe I'll look back to you guys now if you wanna talk a little bit through sort of where the project is, what it is, and what it looks like. Sure, so John Mouser on the Public Works Director. So the project is 4,000 linear feet from the railroad bridge just north of kind of where the circulator is. And then it goes, it extends all the way to the Colchester Rind. So we're looking at, you know, this route maintains 15,000 vehicle trips per day, so it's a main corridor into the city. And the proposed work we're looking at is streetscape utility infrastructure, undergrounding utilities, and some traffic signal upgrades. So here's kind of a quick profile and plan view of what the proposed streetscape would look like. So you can kind of see there's, this came from some alternates meetings that we've had. This was the preferred alternative. What it shows is a climbing bike lane along the eastern side. We've got some reduced roadway widths. So what we're doing is creating a road diet and we're bumping out sidewalks to create more sidewalk and pedestrian amenities. And we're also looking at enhanced street trees and streetscape to help accommodate that form-based code that's been improved previously. And then I'll hand it off to Dave who's done some concept design in other municipalities like this. So these are some precedent images showing kind of indicative of the direction that these improvements would lead with the upper right being St. Albans that shows landscaped bull bouts, with the street lighting with the banners. The tree is not quite mature yet and kind of similar look and feel with the integrating the concrete sidewalk, brick pavers and curbs along Main Street. Similarly here, here's some, again, precedent images from elsewhere. The upper right shows that's a fully protected two-way bike lane or cycle track. In this case, on Main Street, we'll have one direction that's protected. Off to the right, stormwater and green infrastructure was a really important component to integrate into the plans. So you can make out here some of the stormwater infiltration rather than putting it all into catch basins, trying to get some of that back into the ground. And then some of the amenities, the trash cans and that's much more detailed and lots of opportunity to weigh in on the look and feel of those, but it's the type of thing we'll be looking into further. So this is the preliminary engineering cost estimate that came out of the process VHB did. So there's a lot of numbers on here, but this is where we come up with the $23 million. Just in summary, it's about $8 million in municipal utilities. So water, wastewater and stormwater, those are the really old aging infrastructure that's currently under the street. About $7.5 million for those streetscape improvements, paving those traffic calming measures that will get those 15,000 cars a day that come through our city to slow down and create more of a place. And then about $6.5 million to underground the overhead utilities that will improve the aesthetic of the street and enable that full build out of Main Street over time. You can also see on this side, it's pretty hard to read from the audience, but broken down by phase of the project as well. And this presentation is on our website if you wanna go and take a detailed look at it. So shifting back to why we do, why we prioritize projects and why we work with them. We took a process a few years ago and we asked the community again, this is, the communities are in a constant stage of planning, right? It's sort of when there's a problem in the legislature or communities, what do we do? We create commissions or we create study groups or we commission reports to be developed or we initiate planning processes, right? That's what we do. That's like the government answer for everything. When there's a problem or an opportunity, either one. What's really cool is when we get to take those planning processes and actually turn them into an action, right? And that's a lot about what this project is about, is trying to seize upon an opportunity where we did a process a few years ago to come up with this strategic vision statement back here and we created a word cloud based off of responses. We asked people, tell us your top three reasons why you either live here or why you're going to stay here. What's gonna make you stay in Mooski when we prioritize community? And those are the things that came up, right? Things like community, downtown city, diversity, restaurants, market, affordable, street, river, taxes, people put taxes on there. I said in the public me, I think it's either because they want more of them, right? I'm just, yeah. So in seriousness though, I think the affordability piece downtown city, all those things came back to us and we came up with the following slide as the strategic vision statement. And when we weigh investments and we prioritize budgets now, we use this as our guide to say, are we hitting one of these benchmarks with whatever we're spending the money on, right? And it's a different way of thinking about budgeting. It's not just taking whatever comes forward or flies forward from the front. It's hopefully keeping us on a strategic path towards achieving a vision that people want to see. And when we looked at this project and started to weigh it, the question was to check all these boxes and we felt like it did, right? And economic vitality, does it create new opportunity for business development? It absolutely does. Number two, municipal infrastructure. It's one of our biggest stretches of infrastructure, along the stretches of infrastructure and oldest stretches of infrastructure we have. Housing, does it offer an opportunity for both affordable and market rate housing to be developed? It does. It lowers the barrier and through the market, better supports and development taking place there and lowers the cost of that development. And then safe, healthy, connected people. Does it create an opportunity for people to build community around spaces to walk more? There's no child that gets to school without touching Main Street, for example. Does it serve that purpose? It absolutely does. So we felt strongly like it checked all those boxes as we went into the process. And I'm actually gonna skip through this one because we just talked about that, but I just want to suffice to say that the Tax Department Financing District is maturing in 2024. That is on pace to be paid back in 2024. We are talking about forward committing a percentage of those funds to help pay for this project, okay? And what that means is with the Tax Department Financing District, all the infrastructure that was built downtown to support the redevelopment down there, that debt has been paid off of the difference between what the original taxable value was, it was actually about 23 and a half million and the 110 million that it's worth now. So that difference, that money is actually going to pay our debt. When that debt's expired, it actually rolls back into our general fund, which is a great thing. It's a great egg for the city. It was a wonderful move, right? And created financial sustainability for the community. We're talking about forward committing portion of those funds. What we've talked about as 2024 approaches is what is not a good strategy is to suddenly shoot from the hip when that money is available. It's also disingenuous, we've consistently felt, to just hand it back to the tax rate and just do across the board declination of the tax rate. Doesn't mean that that can't be done in some manner, but to not reinvest some of that money that has been built from that and back into infrastructure to us has consistently not sounded like a good policy. And we've wanted to be ahead of this conversation and talk about making sure we have a plan as 2024 arrives, not be scurrying at the end. Yes, yes. Yeah. You're thinking about the cost of the fund versus what exists at present time. This 130 years of hatching and replacing bits and pieces and so on, basically a century of deferred maintenance that hasn't been adequately addressed. Have you, have you tried to cost out, right? So you have this $23 million package that you think will pay for what we have to do. What's the other side of the coin? What are the costs that are likely to accrue to the community if this isn't passed and we continue the same kind of fix this burst name, dig up this little stretch of corroding pipe, close down the water delivery system because you get bad, I don't know, lead time for water or anything else, lead levels or something in it. I mean you have to, did you do an alternative cost because if this fails, you don't have to go back and think about how you put the things together in small pieces that are possibly fundable for this little bit plus that in a larger, larger plant. But it's absolutely clear to me that if this isn't taken care of in the next five to 10 years, it's gonna cost a lot more than $23 million to deal with it in the year 2028. Did you do anything, did you look at that? So the fixed things we can measure is what's the inflation of cost of goods and cost of construction over the course of years. The answer is around two to 3%, three to 4%. From an infrastructure failure standpoint, it's a much more complex question because infrastructure doesn't tell us when it's gonna fail, it just does. So I don't know if you guys had any thinking along those lines with confidence to talk numbers, but I'll just also say from an opportunity cost standpoint, we already have one housing development that meets the definition of providing affordable housing in the community that was scaled back because there was a significant additional cost that built into the project budget because there was infrastructure surprises as they started to, this is the mixed commercial use and housing development that's located where O'Brien's Pub used to be. That project actually had to scale back because of additional costs associated with hooking up to our infrastructure. Chris, wanna comment any further on the... So we haven't done that financial analysis. I think all the points the mayor just made are accurate and demonstrate that increased expense over time. The other thing that we have talked about as a project team when we talked about potentially scaling the project or phasing the project is that an advantage of doing it all at once is that you're excavating once, you're paving once, you're disturbing the ground once. If we start responding on a piecemeal emergency basis, those costs are going to be born again and again and again along Main Street. I'm not sure if there's an industry standard of the percentage that adds to a project, but it certainly would be in aggregate, would be more than the present day value of $23 million to do it comprehensively. And then finally, the mayor has mentioned this earlier, but one of the significant purposes of coming now is we believe that there is the significant subsidy to the project from the state and federal government that may or may not be available in the future. So I think it's hard to think about that, the uncertainty of that subsidy coming back to the city if we were needing to do this on an incremental basis. Yeah, can I share a quick little funding anecdote? It's not right along the lines of what you're saying, but I did hear something really interesting the other day that I thought was pretty motivational from a funding standpoint. When South Burlington, it was either in 1995 or 1996, re-did about a one-mile stretch, so similar in scope in a lot of ways, and it's not an Apple's-Apple's comparison, but a one-mile stretch of Dorset Street. It was in 1995, and they did the same work of undergrounding the lines, a lot of similar street redesign. And that project cost between $15 and $16 million, somewhere right in that range. So for 13 years later for a really similar project in size to potentially be doable for $23 million, I just thought that was pretty motivational and interesting to me. Yes, Jeff? Would you just like to point out that this is not necessarily a choice of spend $23 million or do absolutely nothing. I heard you say that fixing the water and sewer utilities of approximately $8 million of the $23 million is that $6.5 million putting the utilities underground. Boy, utilities underground look great. It's a nice way to go. It's with a $6.5 million price tag, putting, redoing the utilities above ground would be a lot cheaper. I think the problem a lot of citizens have, including the gentleman who had to leave, is that this is four to 6% tax hike. Price tag at $23 million seems very high. Especially when we're looking at higher taxes coming at us for some school projects that are becoming long as well. Because our property taxes are not just what the city does, it's what the school does. The city is contemplating, or excuse me, that the school district is planning on a replacement of their eating system and other infrastructure costs. So more tax rises are likely coming your way. So at this point, my own preference would be to look at this project with a little more bare bones and a little less fancy. Because into the neighborhoods, if people want fixed incomes, this tax rise is gonna have a real impact. We're delaying this project until the TIF money comes more available. Yeah, and if we're talking, so people know numbers, if we're talking about 6%, that's roughly about 150 bucks per year on the average home in Lewski. So certainly spread over for a fixed income family, we understand any amount has an impact and is a burden, right? And causes the folks to make adjustments to their budgets. I'll just say that one of the reasons why we have, just if you could go to the past few budget cycle, tax increases, yeah. One of the reasons why, again, if you come to the two hour marathon sessions on budget sessions at the school each year, one thing we talk a lot about when we put our budgets together is, we know there are some large infrastructure needs coming. We have chronically underfunded infrastructure in the city of Lewski for decades. This is not a problem that we're unaware of and have become increasingly constrained on. And one of the reasons why we've tried to keep these increases low, it would be awesome for us to be able to provide more soft services and more programming. We would love to do that. We think it's effective. It makes a place a great place to live. But I think we've been very cognizant in 2%, 0.99%, 0.73%, 1.21% and 2% tax increases over the last five fiscal years of the city really doing our part to keep our tax rate increases as low as possible. And those each year reflect numbers that are below the cost of living adjustment for that fiscal year. Meaning that we got blood from stones. I don't know how else to say it. You know, we worked hard to keep that as low as possible understanding that this would come forward. So I do appreciate it. It doesn't mean that each of those tax impacts didn't have impacts on households. We do appreciate that. But I do wanna point out that one of the reasons why we've tried to keep those operational costs low and capped is to try to help with infrastructure needs if we could get projects together. Yes, sir? Just kind of as a counter-project. Has there been any like data or any kind of extrapolation as to what type of money may actually come from the revitalization of this? Like to think about it from the other side of things, like I'm not proving it at all, but I understand it. But with revitalizing that, isn't there going to be a new business and new influx of money there? Is there any numbers on that, or any projections on that? Yeah, so the answer we know is yes, but the problem is tying specific numbers to it with assurances because one thing the city is not doing in this case like we did with the TIF is controlling what the development looks like. We pretty much helped decide what that tax base was gonna look like in those developments. We were part of those conversations. So we very intricately built that to say if this does what it's supposed to do, it'll pay for itself. What's very different about Main Street is we're not buying any property. We're only using the existing city property that's there. And then it's up to the people who own the private pieces of property to make decisions about what happens with those pieces of property. When we went to form-based code three years ago, the idea was to increase opportunities for density at Main Street that would allow folks to find opportunities to use some of those properties differently, quite frankly, and allow for digital density. Part of the idea there is it increases grandness, value, and growth. So we've identified properties. Heather's our economic development officer. They've done a lot of work on identifying what potential looks like and what properties we think are going to go up and down Main Street, but that is very private focused. So we have not built our models super contingent upon additional tax rate coming in. One would say that that's a conservative way of doing it, not hedging on those future incomes. And it probably is, but just from a functional standpoint, it's a hard thing to do. And so just briefly in regards to the grounding of the lines, and I could be wrong here, so if I am, please correct me, but I believe in talking about scaling back the project in that area, I do believe that putting the lines underground just isn't a function of appearance. Also, the above ground lines do have an impact for what some developers might be able to do with certain properties. So it's actually inhibiting growth in some ways. Is that correct? Yeah. Well, I know I was hoping, one of the reasons they could, the only way they could put it so close to the street was to put those utilities on the ground. Those utilities are on the ground now, because being in front of a building with two close to utilities, people could reach out for safety reasons. Is there a reason why the buildings have to be so close to the street? Because now you've got no buffer. Are they gonna be buffers from the buildings to the street with a lick of green belt or anything? Or is just gonna be, everything's gonna be tight to the street, like the downtown area? It will, there's a green belt built into this to the proposed project. The idea has always been that main streets really, really, really wide, and it is. And there's a lot of real estate there, quite frankly, that we think could be better used. Well, I know some single-family, single-family houses up there, and they're ready to just get out because they don't think they're welcoming more. Well, that's unfortunate, and I know there's a room of flying around that were purchasing five or six homes in Taylor's Island that just couldn't be closer to the truth. When zoning was redone, the opportunities created there for people to do things with their property, there's absolutely no requirement for people to do things with their property. They're welcome to live there, and they're welcome to live there. They've got real truth, and not for us after them. Well, unfortunately, that's happening across the city from a housing perspective. I mean, there's a recent story of the folks going and hanging stuff on doors to say, if you're thinking about selling your house, please let me know. That goes back, too, to some of that work we're doing with the Housing Commission is to talk about what we can do to retain affordability in the community. And we've invested a lot in working that conversation forward and setting up that commission to focus on that issue. So we are working on that. That's not one that there's really easy silver bullets. Oh, lots of them. The right side going up are really deep. Yeah. Or some of them are really deep, which people would love to get hold of, you know, developers would love to get hold of those, because the lots are so deep. Right. You've got a lot of, you've got 100 feet, 200 feet behind some of those houses there, and people want them. And that's the conversation with this, is that we're not reopening and making that decision again. We're trying to build off of a decision we made when we updated zoning. When we went with form-based code, we made that decision to move things closer to the street and try to use the city property there differently and to try to create an atmosphere that was that more urban feel, quite frankly, and more public vibrancy feel. And that decision got made three years ago, so we're really working now to support that the best we can moving forward. So, and part of that is varied utilities was always in that kind of long-term vision. And then the other just kind of general point that we've tried to make several times is it's more expensive, more disruptive from a technical standpoint. And yes, the price tag to do just the water portion of it might be six and a half million dollars, but you still have to cover it back up. When you dig the hole, you gotta fill it back in. And the question is, are we gonna, if we did one piece meal part of it, would we just put what's there back on top of it? And that would have an expense tube that would look different and would be higher than just replacing the 6.5 million dollar pipes. Yes. I had sort of a side question related to this. Is there an interval or a plan in the future to reassess house site values to base the taxation rate on? So that's a state mandated formula that's used called the common level of appraisal. Common level appraisal is a percentage where they take what properties are selling for versus what they're valued at. If you have a home, for example, that we assess at $80,000 that sells for $100,000. And that was our average, our common level of appraisal would be 80%, so that 80,000 to the 80% of 100. When it hits certain benchmarks, you're required to do certain things. Our common level of appraisal last check. About 92%. Yeah, 92. So as much as it feels like things, people are seeing increases, actually from a pricing perspective, that's not really mathematically accurate. There's advantages and disadvantages to doing reappraisals. Taxes change, funding formulas, you'll hear it probably talked about more on the education side, because it has even more to do with the way education funding works, too. So we have a decision point where the state makes us do it. There's justifiable times beforehand, too, where we could do it. It's an expensive process, it's not cheap. You have to go back through and reassess everybody's home. So it's one that most town cities and municipalities wait until the numbers get pretty close to doing. Any other items on that? Good question. Going back, Jesse, maybe to, we talked about past planning goals and why progress to the project. Could we go to timing of potential funding sources? Thank you. So this goes back to sort of what we have talked about in terms of why now for the funding sources. You know, again, the increase in potential costs to the project, it's not gonna get cheaper, time-sensitive from state federal programs. If you wanna see similar outcomes from funding programs we're looking at working with, St. Albans and Barrie are great examples. Two towns that did pretty wholesale reconstruction of main strips. I can't say enough about what's happened in St. Albans as a direct result of it and Barrie too. I mean, from a positive reflection standpoint, it's been great to use it as an opportunity to example. And then if you could go to the next slide, Jesse. In terms of how we're looking at paying for it, if folks haven't seen these numbers yet, what we're talking about right now, in general terms, is that 4% to 6% general fund increase, right? So that's the general fund tax impact that we're discussing. We wanna be really clear that we're trying not to hamstrung the conversation to just saying if it's over that by half a cent or half a penny on the rate that we've affixed that, but we wanna say that that's right now what our model has got us at. Point made here was a good one that there's not probably a really strong appetite if we put something forward and said this is what it is and it comes back as something completely different. From a personal reflection standpoint, I would have a real issue with that too. Again, the tax reform and finance district allows us to reinvest in the community from an infrastructure standpoint. And then we're talking about local option stats, which is something that the public actually voted in favor of three years ago. 1% on rooms, meals, and beverages. So we're starting that conversation with business owners and getting feedback on that. That's something that they've heard before. Once we got the vote to authorize, voters to authorize us to implement that last time, we actually set it aside because we were in the process of setting up paid parking. And we said from a implementation standpoint, let's let parking settle down before we come back with a 1% tax too. I think parking is paid parking is something everybody's figured out and have realized it's not, not maybe the negative thing that some people thought it would be. And businesses have continued to thrive and have continued to grow. And then we're also talking about water and wastewater fees. Oh, yes. I would encourage you to move ahead with the 1% sales tax. I think it's kind of you to wait and hold off on the downtown businesses, but it's time for them to help out a bit. I don't know anybody among my circle of friends who say, oh, golly, let's eat musky tonight because it's 1% cheaper than eating in Berlin. Yeah. And that's a great point is we are in a donut hole. We are really the only connected community to us that has a similar economic scale that does not have 1% tax. So one thing we have had very directed feedback on from the business owners is they really appreciate it if you can tie it to something and show them what the value is and something that they can also point to their customers for and to. So we've appreciated that. And another thinking has been, maybe there will be an opportunity in the future to tie it to specific projects or a specific activity. Like you said, doesn't mean that if this doesn't go through we couldn't come back and look at other ways to do that. Right now, those funds are expected to be about $150,000 of revenue that we would apply towards the debt service here. And then I'll just throw in there two that the wastewater and water fees right now about 2% increase we're looking at which would still keep us well below our regional average. And we have not touched water and wastewater fees since. 2012. 2012. 2012. A lot of communities you'll see them do it every year. We haven't touched ours in about six years and we're below average. Any other comments there? I think that's a missing. I think a question that's come up at other meetings about how we're investing in our capital. We talked about a little before the fund balance in none of the modeling that staff have put together thus far we touching debt service or capital dollars used for other capital projects in the city. So our intent is to, if this is approved by the voters to be able to continue that capital investment in the neighborhoods as well. So I just want to make clear that we're not displacing that, those resources to the neighborhoods. Yeah, and that's a slide we didn't go through that if you look at this online, you'll see is back to the question about do you know how much you might get back from development of the redevelopment of parcels with the tax value that would be is while we don't assign values to it we do understand that from a return on investment standpoint both because of the subsidy available but also because we expect the investment to create additional tax base, that this has a really strong return on investment for the taxpayers for the dollars that they spend. It's different just being blunt different than redoing Weaver Street, it's different than redoing Hickok Street, it's different the economic impact is different the funding streams are different those are residential streets. What this does do back to Doug's question about what the cost of not doing it is is it means that we don't spend capital fund dollars on Main Street, right? Will we have to? We most assuredly will. There would be something that will come up where we'll have to use our general capital fund over time to do some improvements there but it should theoretically free up the opportunity to use those monies we might otherwise be spending to main street they will be pigeonholed with these funds and offer us more flexibility to do those other streets with our general capital funding support. Yes? Well, the reason I asked that question is because I want to offer a different perspective than a younger perspective. Yeah. Just because I know that my colleagues and the reason why I moved to Winooski from out of state to this area as a young professional is because of the downtown. And that's why I moved here and that's where I am right now and I understand that things will change but I see this more so as an investment in the community to then gain those benefits years down the road as the community grows versus the hit to currently. You know, I know that it's going to hopefully increase the value of properties it's going to increase, you know. If people are going to move here, I know like young professionals want to move here and you can see how houses are on the market or apartments on the market for one day and two days and they sell above asking. That's just from a real estate perspective but also people want to come here. More things in Winooski spoke to two or three people today that basically were like, oh, this sounds like a great idea. Any reason for me not to go downtown is a great reason for me to just stay and spend my money here. I was like, I would love to have this more things to do here so I didn't have to go down to Burlington. I mean, that's just an end of testimony but that's keeping more of that spending money in this area as well. I think a lot of it has to do with, unfortunately, you know, I can speak because I'm part of this trouble. You should like, I'm facing facade of what's going on. You know, a lot of people are going to see underground on the lines and things like that. They're going to like that. They're going to see those pictures and they're going to like those things. And I don't know, I just say, I get where the, I definitely understand where the concern is coming from and I don't know where they're going at all but for me to put this money in and know that at some point, as a new owner in this area, at some point I will get dividends. And then to what he was saying before about, you know, not having another vote and you guys, you know, doing that sort of thing, you know, it's our expectation as voters and as constituents of this community that like having the guys of this council that you're not going to turn and be like, 30%, there you go, not my problem. Like that's your job to not do that. And so I understand who's coming from but to offer a different perspective to have faith in that you guys are trying to increase the community and also the proof of what the downtown has done to revitalize this community. You know, I, like I said, I came from our state so I never knew what this place was before, you know, we had been in a criminalization. I never knew what this place was before but I have colleagues who went to college here and when I mentioned I was moving to Minsky or whatever and they were like, why would you, why would you do that? That was, that's their opinion. I don't know, I'm not saying anything bad about this but it was just a different, it was a different perspective. I just operate a different perspective, that's all. I'm not saying anything which I would try to run. True. Thank you. That's what's coming up. Yes, sir. Yeah, my perspective is probably a little bit different than this. Yeah, that's right, yeah, which is good. Yeah, I've lived in the same house on New Street for the last 70 years. I have seen a lot of problems with Minsky and I've seen a lot of problems with Main Street. I know why you're saying what used to be done now and why you're questioning it, why now? For the last 70 years Main Street's been a corner. Totally. There's traffic by my house just coming down here today. It took me 10 minutes to get on my driveway because by spring and Main Street there's two lines of traffic. There's a place where it's supposed to split. It splits all the way up by four days which is probably a good 2,300 feet beyond. With two lines of traffic, can you try to get out if you can do it? All right, the last time anything was done on Main Street when the area was refurbished, okay? They put in new trees. I found out how much each tree cost. If you go on Main Street, you'll see the trees. You know, they cost $700 each. To me that's mismanagement. That's just not supposed to be in any way, shape, or form. We talk about downstream. Hey, downtown Wanooski is beautiful right now. How about discussing the 30 years we had nothing there? We're gonna do this fabulous Renaissance project. What did they do? They ripped up half the city into 30 years. It was an empty hole. Then they turned around and we re-do this. We had Mr. D. Kent come in and he built this beautiful design thing. Now we got around about in the middle of the city and it's the largest place for accidents in the state. That's the last thing I heard. That doesn't sound like that's progress to me. You wanna do all these fantastic things fine but if it goes to you and we don't get the state funding, we don't get the federal funding, it goes into your life and we're going to go ahead and do this. I'm on a fixed income. You're gonna throw me out of my house. How am I supposed to look at that? I used to know everybody on the city council. I don't know any of you with the exception of one person that I personally went to see and he come and see me. So, in your perspective as such, yeah, this needs to be done. It should have been done years ago. From Newsy and Main Street have been ignored. So why the big funds to do all this? Immediately, everything, let's do it. Oh yeah, we can do all this and bundle it together. I know the gentleman was just like a little while ago. I can't possibly go from this the way it stands. Not without a guarantee that we're gonna get the federal funds. It falls back on you and we have no other vote. No way. Yeah, unfortunately just the mechanics of that are we can't secure those until they see that we have the legal authorization to do the work. So, I understand your perspective and I think we're trying very hard to do a project that is gonna hopefully make up for years of lack of investment. That's part of the vision of what we're trying to accomplish with this and it's an ask. We understand that and our job here is to try to make the information as readily available as possible and give you all a clear understanding exactly how the decision-making mechanics work on it. And it's correct that there has to be faith that the council at some point is gonna perform its fiduciary and community-oriented duties responsibly. And one of the reasons why we put the tax increases up there is to try to show that we've tried very hard in the past to be very fiscally responsible. It hasn't been a free-wielding tax and spend type of environment despite the fact that we've grown. So, I appreciate all your concerns. I know there's a significant asking for the community. Yes? My perspective is a little bit different, I think, from me too. I come as a recent migrant to this place seven years ago as a retiree and a model-fixed income. But my concern is fundamentally about a kind of social responsibility, I mean to generational responsibility to the place that I have adopted as my own and I'm living in. And I see that that hasn't been done effectively in the past here. The kind of thing that this gentleman was talking about probably is as much, not so much because there isn't an intergenerational commitment to the place, but a limited set of resources to invest in the place. It's a kind of problem of socioeconomic status, perhaps, it's a problem of disposable income that the community has all had to invest in this particular place, but it hasn't been invested. And somehow we have to find a way to break through the barrier of intergenerational investment in schools and in the city infrastructure that supports both business and citizens' activity. And so that's why I see this as something that's just really fundamentally important to the future going forward. But I'm absolutely also certain that if the funding package doesn't work out, I think we can rely on our city council as not to impose a 20% tax increase on the community. We have to find, be very creative and find other ways of putting limits and pieces together to make it work. Take a longer perspective, look at what is absolutely essential to the way this general is talking about. But we have to make those kinds of investments because if we don't, we won't be able to place it in the future. Yeah, if we get 130 to 140 years out of the new infrastructure, that would be quite a forward commitment to future generations. But that does remind the thinking and the same arguments that went into why do the downtown was to try to create a sustainable tax base here. The year after year doesn't require the same lift on behalf of residents and households for that type of investment that we are behind on. Other questions, comments? What's next timeline? So from a funding perspective, the federal funding applications and their funding packages will come together if we're authorized. Almost immediately we'll go right to work on that with final numbers, hopefully coming forward in late summer. So this is not gonna be a conversation that's gonna drag over time. We would have additional public hearings in regards to those additional opportunities for people to weigh in. Then in 2019, actually there should be another item on here is you would see the general fund and the 1% very likely on that ballot in March. 1% could come earlier on one of the fall votes because this is a midterm year where we'll have a legislative vote in August and in November, but you can expect those items to come back in terms from a ballot perspective. And then we're looking at two construction seasons. And this goes back to this idea of trying to do things all at once versus a phased approach is we think we can do it in sections and do it in a way that allows us to bifurcate traffic in an organized way. So there's already been some thinking done on that. We haven't gotten to the execution plan yet on a project and we don't have a yellow or green light to move forward on those types of details aren't all worked out, but they've been theorized and put together from a conceptual standpoint in terms of how they deal with those types of concerns from construction management standpoint. Any other benchmarks as I'm missing in the process from your perspectives, okay? And then we'd be talking about construction late summer of next year, possibly, right? Or excuse me, construction season next year. You guys want to ask one? 2020, we would be. 2020, 2020, so I don't know, 2020 now. We have about a year of between a go vote and a shovel on the ground. We have about a year of design and permitting left. Thank you. Now we're back to that vote screen. So this is it. You know, this is what we do is try to take an opportunity of community vision and turn it into something that's tangible, actionable that can be executed and done and now share the facts with people and let you make a decision and how we move forward. It's a democracy work. So we're not a referendum state in Vermont which is a beautiful thing in my opinion in a lot of cases, but this is a really direct opportunity to make a decision on what will become our largest infrastructure investment since the downtown redevelopment and one of the largest projects that the state sees. So it's a huge opportunity and one that again, we're very respectful of everybody's concerns that have tried our best to try to mitigate those. But we do put this project forward very confidently that it achieves that vision and has that return on investment for voters in terms of what the outcomes of the community will look like. So we'll open it up now and see if there's any comments, questions, concerns from council and from the public perspective too. Did this two and a half hours the last go round. So that was a very condensed version. If you want to watch the full town meeting to encourage you to do so, we went even further into some of the philosophy behind why we did it and what got up to this got us up to this point but in the scale of a meeting like this. Yes. I just want to say, I mean both to Dave, we just left and then your points as well. I really do understand that there being some uncomfortability around taking a vote on something that is not a concrete exact dollar figure that is a little weird and it's different than a lot of other bond votes. And so I understand under uncomfortability about it resting with the council after rather than back to the voters. Luckily with the timeframe, there is another opportunity to vote in this town meeting day election. Some of us will be up for reelection. So, you know, that is the chance to, if it's the direction that we moved in is not following the will of the voters. I think that's always an opportunity to weigh in. But I think like I said, it's a really firm commitment that I personally have of when the folks who show up at the polls tomorrow, the results of the vote I feel like represent a direct intention of the direction that the voters want us to move in. And I think that it's our responsibility as stewards of the public. Well, me personally at least to follow that intent. I'm curious, please, could that ballot have been written so that it would state something not to exceed 4% tax increase? My answer to that is probably not from a legal perspective. But I don't know the answer to that question although we floated it to our council. I did not ask that direct question. I think there's actually two parts to that. Well, a couple of things. So one says kind of in the municipal weeds but all bond votes are authorization votes not obligation votes. So with any bond vote we take, it is ultimately up to the council whether to move a project forward. Two, I don't know. I did not ask our legal question, our legal council that specific question. What I can tell you is that may not have passed muster with the state and federal funders. So one of the reasons to move this forward now is to really understand from them what they are, at what level they are willing to subsidize the project. And if there was uncertainty in that wording, they may not have seen that as a true commitment from the community that this is an important project to move forward. And therefore either not subsidized it or subsidized it at a lower rate. And you cannot put a percentage in a municipal vote that I'm aware of is my understanding in Vermont. You have to actually use a dollar amount. We shall raise dot, dot, dot, dot by taxes. And it's not a range type of function. So that's been my past experience with that. So I think we saw that as problematic on a couple of levels. And frankly we've really struggled with what to put in these presentations. Because we've done the modeling on there and then what comes back, we wanted to be really thoughtful and careful about that messaging and leaving room for council to make some adjustments to the final. Let's say the difference between tapping future TIF revenue at a certain click is a difference in the percentage and takes you from four to 5%. Do you make that strategic decision to use less of the TIF revenue now and instead have a general fund increase of 5%? Those are a type of balance in conversations we could have too in terms of those, how those numbers might fit together in the end. Yes? You said 15,000 cars a day currently. Is there any projection of whether it's going to the redevelopment is going to be able to accommodate more traffic or will it remain about the same? Yeah, I think we turned to you last time for that. I'd love to hear it. Sorry, I wasn't at the last one. So we did increase traffic, we used the standard and state growth for the next 20 years and then we also did summarize where there was additional growth on top of that planned and the intersections are expected to operate pretty much at the same level. They have the capacity and the traffic's also going to be moving differently. It's going to be slowing down a lot more the way the form-based code goes, the number of driveways along the roadway might change. So it's going to be functioning differently also but the intersections do have the capacity for quite a bit of growth. So the bump-outs tend to narrow the feel and scope of driver's experience and thus slow them down and that's actually a very intentional thing in this case. The roadways will be getting more narrow that also tends to slow people down. And in addition to that, a lot of thought and conversation during the form-based code discussions centered around the number of curb cuts. Main Street has several properties that have multiple curb cuts and that's not a good practice and not a good idea. It creates too many opportunities for people to be coming in and out in different angles and there's actually items in there that support people sharing curb cuts as much as possible to create common space opportunities in the back. So that's something we think is going to really start to unfold in less than some of that turnout traffic that we're seeing. I guess I would just add also, it's often a crystal ball exercise to say what traffic's going to do in the next 10, 20 years. This moment in time is even more difficult with autonomous vehicles and Uber and Lyft and all of those dynamics that are really hard to gauge. If you look back in time, traffic hasn't increased too much over the last 10 years on Main Street. If you were to trend that out, we're well, we've assumed much higher than that. It's hard to know once you get Uber and Lyft and cars that drive themselves in 10 years, does that mean more cars, less cars? I can tell you it's going to be 10 years is what people are going to be doing to milk them in part or at the rate of nine and make a country where this can go to work. I think the volume of the meters is just in here and we can't really produce the throughput. We care about what Winooski looks like in the future, but there's a lot of remodels who just care about how fast they can get through to Winooski to get to their jobs. And that's, from a discussion standpoint during gateways and zoning, changing that perception that this is just a drive through place on your way to someplace else is a major part of the aesthetic features and the idea behind this is absolutely the same thing on Allen Street. And that's something that takes time to change and takes time to change people's perception that, again, they can just fly through. I mean, you see it all the time, people regularly exceeding 10 miles per hour the speed limit and still honking at people to go faster because they're trying to get through from someplace to somewhere else. And that's where, as a community, we have to also make a stand and say, you know what, our pedestrian safety and our experience living here is more important than that person getting to Burlington two minutes more quickly. You know, during the crosswalk conversation, all my engineer friends can shut their ears because they didn't necessarily agree with the removal of the crosswalks. My quote was, I don't really care how long it takes somebody in cold gesture to get to Burlington to work when it comes to the livability and vibrancy of our community. Do I understand we're part of a broader regional transportation network? I do, and we have to plan that sandbox and we'd benefit from it. But at the same token, we need to prioritize the experience of what it's like living here for the people that we represent. So. There's been so many of the traffic circles actually been an improvement over the traffic light that was down there before the traffic circle existed. And the crosswalks that are there in place now are the sensible crosswalks. And that's been an improvement. But the volume of cars has just gone up and up and up and you can't change the fact that we are the corridor to get into the section of Burlington that's across from us. Yeah, that's absolutely true. It's the reality we deal with. Yes. And I have a question, but I should first I'll just say too that maybe we can encourage people to move from Milton to here to get greater urban density on Main Street and have some bigger buildings just like everybody moved down to the robbery to a lot of the condos that are down there. But my question is, when will we find out the results of this, would you expect that evening to tomorrow evening? We'll know at 7 o'clock because Carol's so amazing. We have to hand count those ballots. Yeah, we have to hand count those ballots. The image expectations. 7 30s. 7 30s. And you can actually come to the senior center as polls close and you can hear the count. Yeah. Sorry about that. I forgot they sent me a hand count and not machine printed. I think a lot of us have social media to hand out the results. The positive thing is there's no write-ins on this one. So we don't have to hand those. Made. Yes, sir. So is it safe to say this is a build-it-enable-come scenario? I would actually say it's they're coming and we're experiencing that right now. And that's not really a mystery to us. And we're also involved. We have, I keep using 100. It's well over 100 now. We have 100 plus net new units zoned for approval in the city. So that the results of form-based code are occurring. That's coming to fruition as intended. We're seeing that investment up there. Do we think it will lower the barrier and increase some of those opportunities? We do. So does that make sense? You can see the two primary new developments on Main Street as examples of that. And Allen Street's another example coming out that we're addressing that area, but of the results of form-based code. If one of the reasons I asked is you mentioned that one of the projects had difficulties hooking up to utilities. So they had to scale back their project. We have made more sense for the city to pick up a tab on that as opposed to paying this. That becomes a tricky thing because those costs can escalate fairly quickly. And if it's not predictable to us, we would essentially have to create a super fund to address those types of things. Because each project, part of the issue is it's pretty patchwork up there in terms of any fixes that have been done. Maybe we're done one way, one decade, and then any fixes or additions that were done. In another decade, we're done differently. So every time we open up the earth, it's a learning experience. And we find out what's underneath there. So it's number one, it's not predictable. And number two, from a funding financing perspective, that would just mechanically be a little bit challenging because we'd just have to set up a fund. And then how to apply that differently or how to apply that similar in a similar vein to each development would be a little challenging. You know, the one thing that we have talked about is in the future using, for example, we have a loan fund for housing. We've talked, one of the housing commission goals is to talk about use of those funds. We have a quarter million dollars that's sitting there that people could take out different types of loans to do home improvements on. We've had conversations about whether you start to use some of those funds towards lowering barriers for affordable housing development in the future. So those are the types of conversations we're gonna have about maybe investing some funds to get targeted outcomes, but to just pick up a tab from a specific development is that can be complicated more than technically. Does that make sense? I think we'll do it more about if the project happens and it started in terms of affordable housing and just monitoring that and what are the next steps and sort of just tracking that and making sure that that's working. Yeah, sure. So we do, what we did two years ago was engage your group to do a housing needs assessment. It was run by more Collins, who's the assistant director at Vermont Housing Finance Agency and she used her grad students as the labor on it. So they put together a housing needs assessment that gave us a number of recommendations for steps to take in regards to maintaining or growing affordability options in the city. One of the keys was setting up a housing commission. We've stood up the housing commission. They've started doing their work. One of the second primary outcomes was to start using a gentrification assessment tool and putting together data on a regular basis to really measure, hey, new stuff's coming in. What's it mean to the mix? What's it mean to the percentages and what's coming in? So Heather Carrington is somebody that if you wanna do a deep dive on how that's working, we get gentrification reports what three times a year, I think we haven't really set up a time. They've come twice so far. July will be the next one. July will be the next one, okay. So we have those available on the site and the housing commission is working through a number of different policies, policy considerations. You know, they're looking at things from inclusionary zoning to if you displace it, you replace it policy where affordable housing is taken away. It's got to, you've got to have at least an equal amount. So all those types of policies are being considered for recommendation that will go to the planning commission, planning commission will digest and then pass back to city council. And if I recall correctly, in the discussion we had before voting to move forward the special election for this fund, councilor Mason raised some concerns that I agree with wholeheartedly that we don't necessarily right now have the guardrails we need on when the development that will result in this project starts to actualize to protect our affordable housing stock or at least to protect against what could amount to be pre rapid gentrification as a result of those changes. And so I think as a part of our vote to move this forward, we did also ask that some of the goals that the housing commission as a commission have established to look at, we get a concrete timeline of when and how they're going to be examining that work moving forward. So I think that's something the council is expecting because we did wanna see something a little bit more concrete of, yes, we know this work needs to be done. Let's see the plan on how between us, the planning commission and the housing commission we're actually gonna examine these and make sure to get those guardrails in place in an appropriate manner. And if I can just pile on a little, I think the other thing that council's done is be very intentional about supporting active affordable housing projects coming into the city. So we have 268 East Allen Street, which is up beyond Hoods Crossing is a true mixed use housing development that will include, I think it's about 35, 40% affordable housing units with market housing and house homelessness prevention units, which is a project the council supported with a letter of support that got the tax credits this cycle to have that project realized this year. So there's policy, there's data tracking the data and then there's actually supporting the live projects on the ground. And I'll just say that from the early sketches of the housing commission work, one thing that they've already put in those principles is to be very data-driven. And so there's been a lot of bad policy decisions made off of people's perceptions and misperceptions in a lack of understanding of the actual information in the past. And so there's a ton of data and information available on the housing commission site. If you've got some more, I want to take a deep dive on that. So. But just to be clear, the floor-based code does not have requirements for development of affordable housing. So there's an incentive program that if a developer wants to add an additional floor, they can do so if they offer affordable housing units or energy efficiency. So far, the units that have been developed have not received the incentive based on the development of affordable housing units. So from my perspective, it's important that we get ahead of this curve sooner rather than later because the development that's happening, the incentive program does not seem to be doing what we had intended, which was to incentivize more development of affordable housing along the gateways so that we don't have pockets of affordable housing in other parts of the city, but not along the corridors. Council, public questions, comments, concerns? I just have a comment. I'm a new city councilor and I take real seriously our mission statement. And that calls me to be physically responsible to the citizens. So if we have a guest vote tomorrow, I see that as a yellow light. I think it's gonna cue us to go into some serious deliberation about approving the project. So I think you can rest assured that we are gonna be looking out for the best interests of all of our citizens. Anybody else? Any other questions from the public? Yes, no, we're right in. We look forward to seeing everybody at the polls tomorrow between seven and seven. Again, that's at one, two, three Barlow Street, which is the senior center that shares the park and a lot also with St. Stephen's church there. So thank you all for your time and coming tonight. I appreciate it. Okay, we will turn back towards the city's, the rest of the agenda. Can we have a team that right? Absolutely. Thank you. So we'll resume at eight o'clock. Zoom the city council meeting and pick up from our agenda. So we'll go back in tonight's agenda to item D, which is the approval of the Ward Bridge Rail Repair Project, which I gotta tell you, I am, this is when I wish people could have heard that we're here for this project. Cause I mean, I think this is another one of those that I, from a public perspective, there was a lot of interest in. Thank you. So this is for the contract for the low bidder for the rail reprop rail project, rail replacement project per resolution, any contract over a hundred grand that you guys have not seen has to go in front of you. So we have sent this over to legal counsel to that. And they did not have any comments, but the total construction bid award was $328,590. Just important to note that the city cost, which we're partnering with Burlington, there's a 50-50 split, the city cost, the estimated cash out would be around $30,500 for us for the project. It's great. This is a badly needed one, pointed out to Burlington that we're at the point where there are some spaces where there's enough room for somebody or something to go through. So, and we've patchworked a couple of accidents that happened before you guys came that were pretty scary events. So excited to see this work move forward. Questions, concerns from counsel in regards to the agreement? Questions or, oh, sorry, go ahead. I have one question here. So it says a 10% match split 50-50. Wouldn't the 10% be 38,88? Yep, so the anything over the grant amount, there's gonna be a split between Burlington and Winooski. So the construction cost is $328,590, but there's also design, engineering cost and construction inspection costs that they're also tacked onto that. So we do anticipate that over the grant amount, it's gonna be around $21,000. So, 50% of that's around $10,000. That's tacked on to that 10% or something. To the 16 or 18 or whatever? Yep. Okay, that makes sense. And this is just for the rail, not the whole bridge fix. Correct, yeah, that would be nice. I don't have several other zeros behind it. Yeah, it's a big grant. To that point, there is a group that has been put together that is looking at the future of the bridge. Correct, yeah, so the next public works commission, there will be a presentation on replacement, which will also be presented to you all, I think next month. Did you have the time to share meetings? Right, yep. So RPC is leading that term with the design consultant. And we just put somebody more active on that commission meeting. They had very quietly, so quietly they didn't tell me a point of me to serve on that committee about a year ago without informing me. So we now have an engineer who's going to be attending that, which is a much more qualified person. Because that's what I would have said anyway. We have much more qualified people than me to have those conversations. Look forward to bringing back an update from the Commission on that. Other questions, concerns from Council? And for folks that didn't see it, Jonathan last meeting did a great overall update on summer projects that people don't expect to see around town. I think he's going to be invited to be on a television show later this month to be aware of this one or more. Any other questions, concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing that, I'm going to entertain a motion for approval of the Award Bridge Rail Repair Project contracts. Second. Motion by Eric, second by Hal. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. Item E, second with Jonathan, the Water and Sewer Passage Reports. Yes, so during the, I think the March 19th meeting, there was a request to get an updated capacity report for sewer and wastewater. So I can't take full credit because Angela, our accounting staff, put a lot of this work together. Did a great job. So what I'm showing here is that basically on our water distribution side, we have roughly 26% of our allocation remaining for capacity and that using some typical flows so that's roughly 942 houses just based on flow. So we've got pretty adequate capacity at this point. On the sanitary sewer side, very similar, we have roughly 32% of our treatment plant process capacity left, but that's just for flow. So just a caveat that if a brewery comes to town that changes things because it's a high strength waste, but just looking at it with residential flows, that's a pretty high 1600 houses potentially. And just to underline data that's before you, that includes the projects that are currently under permitting in the city. So they're in allocation, not in the remaining capacity. I think the important thing here is just as we look, we look at projects that could spur additional investment as we continue to do that, that we don't want to, I hate to point, there's a neighbor in community I won't point out, that had to just totally hit the brakes and do a moratorium on development because they lacked water wastewater capacity, which in fairness to everybody involved is the responsibility of this body, working with you guys to make sure we're looking for our head that we're not setting ourselves up to outpace our capacity and our capabilities on that front and in the past, we've done a really good job as a city of staying ahead of that and that's past generations of leadership. Sometimes we say underfunded capital improvement projects in fairness, they did a really, really great job in this front and in 2012 or 13, we contributed a significant amount of funds to additional water capacity when a new tank was put up on Water Tower Hill. So this is good news. So I have a question about, given the fact that the development is not in single family homes, it's in apartments. And what's the translation? Is it an apartment? Is it the same as a single family home or is it? So I mean, typically apartments, you're gonna have a, so a typical single family is like 210 gallons per day, a lot of these apartments, they're using high efficiency fixtures and rates. So it's a significantly lower amount, but we can look at what kind of apartment, maybe frame this a little different, look at what, for a typical gateway building, gateway structure building, how many developments does that equate to? Yeah, that would be great just to sort of help frame it in where we're actually likely to see strain on the capacity. Right, yeah. Thank you. So again, not directly addressing that question, but one thing to point out on these lists of current allocations is the remaining allocation for the full build out of the TIF district. So when we think about building out Lot D or hotel project or other allocation that's gonna come out of the TIF, that's already being held in the allocation number. So it's a very good point. We can absolutely translate that, but just that's already accounted for in the TIF, in the current allocation assigned to the TIF. Yeah, there is a hotel allocation in there already. Yeah, no, I'm mostly thinking of the gateway's yellow ones, yeah. Yeah, I mean, is to look at, for example, the potential project next to CCV, you know, that would take up five percent of capacity of remaining capacity left over. It's 10,000, some odd gallons, and you've got basically 200,000. So it is, I guess it's something that will go very quickly. I mean, it's great to see that we have that percentage capacity, but that's why we're tasking your very capable minds to look ahead at those future infrastructure projects. We can meet that capacity going forward. Is evaluating that part of like project permitting? Yes. The same thing with the amount that somebody pays to hook up to the system. And so like Jonathan said, like the difference between a residential unit and the, and there is actually state requirements for gallon per days for different types of businesses in the capacity they have to hook up to. So you can't have a restaurant, for example, which happened a few times in Zmonoski where they got residential allotments to commercial buildings, which is, and they actually had some residential piping couple cases before everybody hears time, so I'm here. Um. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's, well, no, I was here too, yeah. But the, yeah, but so the state stepped in in a couple cases and said, you have to up that and correct that and change the fees significantly. And Angela were here. She would tell me to tell you that the, that permitting process, they go through where we assess the allocation and they make their payment that that fund, that those funds go into an account for system improvement expansion. So it's not that those per those funds are going into an account for the general fund. Any questions, concerns? Thank you very much for putting this together. Questions or concerns from the public? Okay. So seeing and hearing none. Thank you very much. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Okay. Skipping down past the public hearing notification to item F, discussion update on children and family programs budget. Evening up with a double ray coffee. Well, Kirsten's going to join me too, so. Yeah, and I waffle back and forth about which order to put these in. So I suspect these next two items will sort of flow together a little bit, but we'll, we'll get through it. So on the agenda piece, wanted to give a quick update on the thrive budget and staffing situation. That was a request that had been put out during the budget process actually as some of the changes were recommended at that point. So wanted to just bring that back here and kind of field questions and let folks know where we're at. So in terms of the current year budget as of quarter three end of quarter we're performing kind of right on track. We're anticipating at this point ending the year right around break even based on the quarter three report that we have in our system here. We always see our program here is a little funny and that it doesn't quite track with the fiscal year. So we typically see kind of bigger financial hits at the beginning and end of the year because summer is a more expensive program for us to run. So we may see that shift a little bit but I think we're tracking in a pretty comfortable space right now to be again right around that projected break even point, which is good. Certainly enrollment wise, you know some numbers here that I think certainly with summer you see a trend that is concerning and that we've talked about a bit. Kirsten and I looking at some ways to address. I do think we're starting to see a rebound a little bit in early enrollment numbers which is positive for this coming summer season but there've been a lot of changes in the summer program since I started and that's led to I think lower enrollments but I think on the flip side of that higher quality programming. So it's a trade-off that I think we've known was gonna have some impacts on program enrollment. We used to run Thrive Summer as a free basically throw your kid out the door at Landry Park and again would have in the order of 100 kids there but I'm not sure that that was over-serving those kids the best that we could. So you know encouraged to see the rebound this year and after school I think we talked a lot through the process of having interim folks in different positions that we intentionally kept that number pretty suppressed last year and it was good positive to see that rebound. We've seen more total families serve but I think in terms of daily enrollment that number is still tracking a little bit lower than usual. For a host of reasons. And I think we've had a more volatile population this year for reasons that are kind of out of our control families dealing with relocating job changes that have led to changes in their subsidy levels. Some families with financial issues who've had to discontinue a couple instances of behavioral issues that just kiddos weren't appropriate for the program we're offering. So that's one that I think in a given year you can't predict that adequately. But you know again I think total number of families served as kind of back on track with where we've traditionally been, which is good. And I was encouraged to see both vacation camps perform well this year for us. I think that was a good sign as well that families are really viewing us as a childcare resource, which is good. The other piece too is staffing wise we have been down since a staff since February. That's a tough time of year to hire into a school year position. And so we didn't have a lot of luck in casting a net. And so we have kind of decided at this point to hold Pat until the end of the year and I'm curious he's been in ratio a bunch. So that's limited some of the enrollment recruitment that we can do because of those hours being put into direct service. So. And. Explain what in ratio means. Yes, does everybody know what in ratio, oh sorry. So we run a regulated, actually I finished up. You tell me. This is yours. So we're a state licensed childcare which means that we're regulated by state childcare regulations which is set by the child development division. So within those regulations, we have requirements for a number of staff that we can have ratio of children to staff, group sizes. So it's sort of a constant numbers game on top of all the other health and safety regulations that we have to follow. I only have three steps. I only have three steps. Yes, we're an accredited program which is accomplishments above and beyond licensing compliance. So we're currently a three star program which is the threshold for high quality designation. Can you guys just give the 90 seconds just for those people at home because we jump right into Thrive. Yeah. Is it like it means something to people and some people might not know. Yeah, what is Thrive? Yeah. Yep, so Thrive again is our licensed state licensed childcare program that we run after school and during the summer months. So that's been running since well before my time here when I started with the city about six years ago that program was running out of the O'Brien Center. So just as a comparative the first year I was here I believe our after school enrollment was 12 because we had the challenge of getting kids from point A to point B with no consistent transportation and we were doing a lot of vision questing across the community with six kindergartners in tow. So moving up to the school was a huge deal for us and we saw our numbers just about triple in that first year. So that has been a great thing. And then summer as well we base out of the school and that's actually largely been due to our efforts to dovetail services with the summer school program that the school runs. So for many years we ran essentially a competing summer camp program with the free school program and sort of finally decided that we were competing for the same kiddos. So we now run, if you look at our program brochure we run a lot of half day weeks. Reason being that the school is running half day programming in the morning and then we pick up the ball in the afternoon and take kids to 5.30. So that's one of the big pieces with the 21C program and with the school that we've been trying to coordinate better and better year over year. So yeah, thank you. Is that? That's great. Any questions? It's pretty close to 90 seconds too actually. That was awesome. So yeah, any questions on current year stuff before kind of jumping ahead to looking into our crystal ball a little bit? So I guess the 26 from summer 2017 as we transition, do we think that that's going to be a number that's... I think the short answer is no. I think we will rebound some. I don't think we're gonna get back up to 80 to 90 kids. I think we're seeing some different enrollment patterns in that program. I think there's a lot to that but I think we will rebound closer to that 45 or 50 number and our ratios are gonna allow us, we're gonna run... It'll be two classrooms and our max group says is 26 per day. It'll probably be closer to 20 per day, just for health and safety reasons but... So that 40 to 50 range is I think where we're expecting. As I just said, we are gonna actually run this summer two classrooms instead of three. I think that gets us closer to having a maximized ratio of staff to students. I think it's a manageable number. And again, I think it's looking at our daily enrollment versus our total enrollment. It allows us to serve. I think the number of families we've been seeing and keeping our daily numbers comfortably within ratio. That's one of the tricky parts of this is that weekly enrollment and daily enrollment are two different beasts. So you've got to make sure on a given day that you don't have all those kids show up and then you're out of compliance and out of ratio. And of course that's the day that the compliance visit happens and then you get slapped. But also you take some risks and over enroll at times because you know not every kid shows up on every day. So that's sort of the, I think the art of it is figuring out exactly what that looks like and making sure that you've got numbers that cover your bottom line but also keep you within compliance and within health and safety standards. So yeah, it's not unfortunately not a street line calculation. I wish it were, but all right, cool. Onto the future and we can certainly bounce back up questions emerge. So looking ahead, you know, again, just sort of to reflect back to the budgeting process. At that time, the leadership proposal had proposed to bring additional portions of curiosity's position back into the program budget and out of the general fund. So in years past that had been a third in the general fund or two thirds in the general fund, a third in the program budget. With this fiscal year 19 budget that was approved, it moved to a 50-50 split. So it shifted some of the burden of the position financially to the program budget that hadn't been there in years past. So that led to a deficit budget for the coming year which we kind of all knew was gonna be an outcome of that in the short term. So that's that $19,000 number that was there. That was a number that was there during the budget process and that we sort of discussed at that point. On a positive note with the extension of the Promise Communities Grant, we have been able to carry some of that grant funding into the next year. So that's about a little less than 8,000 bucks. So that will help bring that negative number less negative. So we're projecting at this point with that known grant money, about an $11,000 deficit, which is actually a palatable one for us. It cuts about 10% of our program reserves to cover that cost. We're carrying about $100,000 at this point in Thrive Revenues, sorry, reserves. So not a pattern that I think we wanna carry on year over year over year, but I think to kind of kick the tires in year one, that's a palatable dip into the reserves to do that. So I guess questions on that front, certainly I mentioned here some other approaches that we're anticipating taking as we look ahead, but grant funding is as good as your grant approvals and getting that funding awarded. So we will certainly be looking for that opportunity, but that's not hard money that we can guarantee. We are, I think, gonna look a little more closely at our 21C partnership, in particular looking ahead in next summer and what that could do for us in terms of maybe leveraging some grant funding there. That hasn't been part of our, how we've leveraged that funding traditionally, but I think there's some flexibility to look at that. So, and then as I mentioned too, I think summer being a good example of trying to get ratios and staffing sizes down to a point where we're really maximizing that enrollment number versus the number of staff we have on board. And again, that's, we tend to err a little bit lower than maximizing ratio, because I think from a program quality perspective, if you've got two people and 26 kids in both classrooms, it's pretty nuts on a given day. So I think trying to keep that number of students a little bit lower gives a better experience for the kids that we're serving. So. And with Kirstie's upcoming very exciting event that we're all very much of you towards, congratulations. Yes. Is that person selected for late July or so? Nope. So we're in the process of getting interviews set up as we speak. So we've had a few candidates come through, a couple which look pretty good. So we're gonna keep trolling the waters, but right now we're starting interviews. I think next week is the plan. Yeah. So, yeah. And I think, you know, again, that's an additional cost here that I mentioned about 8,500 bucks that we, that's the price of doing business, right? I mean, we have a person who we value who's gonna be out on leave and we feel like to stay in regulatory compliance, we need to backfill those hours in that role. So that's certainly money that we are, they're happy to spend. I do want to mention, and I didn't, I should have perhaps made this more clear in the memo, but one of the things that I did do as I was looking at that $8,500 number is carry that in our part-time salary budget that had been presented back in January. So as I looked over the last couple of years at our staffing levels for part-time staff in particular, we have typically come in below what our budgeted number was. So there was some wiggle room there that I felt pretty comfortable saying we could absorb that $8,500 in the budgeting number that was already there without increasing that $11,000 deficit if that makes sense. And again, I think summers are a great example where we're gonna have one less classroom of staff. So we're adjusting things and I think we'll see dividends financially from doing so. So that's kind of the update from the world of Thrive. And I don't know if there are specific questions or other things folks would like some more details on. Happy to answer what we can. So you had mentioned before that the low enrollment could be in part resulting from short staffing. Are you expecting to see that again then? So that is meeting with the summer reducing summer staffing. So that great question. So that was more to do with the fact that Kirstie's position has been acting in ratio. So when we say short staffing, it means that our director is in ratio working with kids. For the summer, we're gonna staff classrooms, ideally in such a way that the director is not required to be in ratio the entire time. What's been challenging is when Kirstie's in the trenches playing Scrabble and doing the work with kids, those are hours that she's not able to be following up with families, connecting with school guidance counselors. So by having the part-time person not in ratio all the time this summer, we'll be able to have that flexibility again to start doing some of that work. And then also by having those folks, Kirstie and that person overlapping for hopefully a couple weeks, a lot of the prep work for the fall will be done under Kirstie's watch. Well, that new temp person is really sort of managing the ship for summer. So we've got some additional depth with that part-time person coming on late January, July that'll give us a couple weeks of time to do some of that leg work. That's really often where we have our best luck with bringing new families is through connections with the school and kind of getting into those partnership relationships with other service providers. That's a good question. Was this three years ago? Kirstie's position was two, there was a summer thrive and a school thrive for lack of better words. And the decision was made to combine those into the one full-time position because it gave some additional strategic capacity, management capacity and consistency of programming development, quality development. And that's from all the feedback from the public really paid off with Kirstie's hard work and the attaining of the additional star when it comes to the ratings of the program too. I think that would have been really challenging under the previous setup with two different directors, basically for half and half of the year. So. It was great to see that getting built back in to get that capacity for you to do all the things you do that aren't just opening salsa containers for kids and getting, you know, a burn plank scrabble. Congratulations. It's very exciting. Additional questions for Ray and Kirstie and the thrive portion. Any questions from the public in regards to the thrive programming update? You know, one of the items we did is shift some of the thrive responsibility to general fund this year. In the past, it's been a self-sustaining fund and in doing so asked that we get some kind of regular check-ins on how it's going and how that's balancing. So we have a understanding if that's something that's likely to continue into the future or if additional capacity might be needed there, the general fund. So I appreciate you guys keeping that thread and narrative open. Yeah. And we'll look forward to another update. Yeah, anything we can talk about one in the future, that would be a good spot. But yeah, we're just happy to come back and chat about that. Great. Transition into part two. All right. I don't know if you need to do your official transition to the next agenda. I don't know. Oh, any other questions? That's correct. Would you use to run these meetings? Any questions observed from council? Any additional questions from Christian Ray? Okay. So seeing and hearing that, we'll move on to tonight's last agenda item. All right. So again, that program that Kirstie's been really intimately involved in, we've got a memo here for you all just kind of giving a status update which we had talked about coming back to do. Namely in regards to the conversations around trying to get really childhood at the Oblast Center, which as you know, we've kept you I think pretty well in the loop as to progress there or as a lack of progress unfortunately it's been a hard slog. I think there's been a lot of professionals and really dedicated folks around the table trying to make this happen. As mentioned in here, we did get information back from kind of the last operator the childcare operator that we've been working with as a possibility. And at that point felt pretty strongly that we needed as a promise community effort at least to take a step back from trying to land childcare at the O'Brien Center at this point. One thing I do want to reiterate and I think it's mentioned in here is that the group is by no means stepping away from that effort in entirety. I think it's just that we're feeling like at this time through this grant funding trying to get childcare capacity in the center-based approach expanded at the O'Brien Center is just not working for us. And I think given the pressures of the building budget and the need to see some things change there we've kind of I think exhausted our ability to sit and wait for it to happen. It's disappointing. I think as you can see here there's a lot of challenges within the broader system that I think we are falling victim to. My hope was that we'd be able to sort of spearhead some changes there. And unfortunately I think we're finding that the challenges are pretty pervasive and we're needing to take a step back from that at the moment. So is it also fair to say it's not just the need to move forward with the building that's driving a change but the grant period is ending. So if we want to try and make the best use of the grant dollars we have, we have a window to- December. Right, a window to ask for a reallocation rather than sitting and waiting and having the dollars simply run out. Yeah, and so on that front I'm gonna let Kirstie share this update. We had a phone conversation today. We, Kirstie and the two steering committee chairs had a conversation with the state today about that. So I don't know if you wanna give just a quick update on the sort of the executive summary of that conversation with the state. So at the time that we wrote our roadmap which was, so the way this whole grant process worked taking like a real step back was that communities applied based on need. So you basically said like, hey, we're a community with a lot of children and families and we wanna do some cool stuff. And the state said, cool, here's some money. And then from there you were given originally a year we ended up with two years to create the plan of what that was going to be just sort of backwards for a grant process. So at the time that we submitted our roadmap which was the document that was the culmination of two years of work on what we wanted to do for families. We had essentially two plans at OCC. One of them was early childhood. So that was the center we've been trying to pursue. The other one was more of what we were referring to as a hub model, which would be essentially a bunch of services all hosted in one space. So some things that we identified early on are that families are looking for places to meet with social workers and case workers to do visitations. Families are looking for ways to get in contact with WIC and WIC is trying to host clinics with us. So some things like that. And there are other communities in the country that have had success doing these sort of family hubs where all of these services are co-located and then you have one place in your community that you can go. So that was one item that we had in our roadmap and so as childcare has made its own wants and desires known, we are repocusing our efforts on trying to do something under that umbrella at OCC. So the conversation that we had with the state this morning was essentially if we come to you with a proposal for something less childcare related and more hub model related, is this something that you would even be willing to consider and the answer was definitely yes. We have essentially three things that we need to put out there very clearly which was like rationale timeline and something else related to planning. So all things that we would put forward anyway. So I think we have a pretty clear path forward to at least present an idea to them and it sounded like it would have a pretty good chance. And that deadline to the state is the 2028th, I think? 29th. So the end of this month essentially. So our thought at this point would be to go to the state and say, here's a plan, yes or no and then to bring that plan back here to kind of present. I think what we didn't wanna do is bring something to you that hadn't been vetted through the funder yet and then have it fall back to the funder and have them say, no, this isn't gonna work for us. So there was definitely a lot of energy in the group around kind of moving towards this approach. I think the partners at the table, namely the school and the family center were both very excited about it. And again, we've had a lot of conversations over the last year or two years with other service providers who are trying to get into the community. And I think as we've heard this a little bit at the commission meeting with the library, that space actually is becoming in some ways a de facto space where social workers are meeting with clients, supervised visitations are happening and in that environment, that's not looking great. It's not the most dignified way for those service providers to provide their services. And it's not a great experience for other patrons. It's uncomfortable. So I think it could provide some opportunities to bring further partnerships into the city to better opportunities for little ones, which is the whole point of this promise communities journey that we have been on. So I think that's a little bit of the long and short of that. I think we're again, we've continued to do a lot of work with the philanthropic community, namely Permanent Fund and Vermont Birth of Five. They are still squarely at the table. And again, I think we're not giving up on childcare and Winooski. It's just given the timeline and the pressures of this project, it's just now is not the right time. But there's definitely a commitment around the table to keep the ball rolling and try to figure out another opportunity in the future. Which is exciting. So then obviously the spill out into the O'Brien Center budget is there's a short section here, but I think with some of these other conversations getting a little bit more fleshed out over the coming month, again, I expect we'll be back to you early June at the latest with some updates on what that will mean for the building, budget and process potentially. So I'm gonna pause there for a minute before we kind of go into the other work of the grant. So does that mean that you would present this new plan at the end of the month and then like the grants getting extended if they approve it? Grant would not get extended. So we've still got until December to spend the grant money. And then the intention then is you're still looking to use the O'Brien Center so it wouldn't. That's the thinking at the moment. Yeah. There was mention, I don't remember who said this or even when. Someone recently mentioned about the library like bursting at the seams and potentially needing to move. Do you think part of it is this like secondary use that you're seeing? Like if that moved over then maybe the library stays as it is and there's an additional area. So this, no. So right, so let me just tell you. So to raise credit, he is running, I don't know, A through F scenarios right now to try and find something that works at the OCC. So there are multiple different scenarios and one of the challenges with having this conversation publicly is there are only so many, there's only certain things we can share about that. I will tell you, there is an interest in thinking about how the library in this hub would interact. I think there's also a fear that this hub would and I would say a fear for me, not for these guys, is that this library would create a new service delivery system that we have not today discussed or staffed up or budgeted for or whatnot. So is there an opportunity to co-locate the hub with the library? And would there be, if we were to do that, is there a better use of the OCC space to accommodate both of those uses with staffing that could support both? So that's, I don't know, scenario D that you're working out right now. We also have some private tenants who are interested in the spaces as well that were in conversations. I would say like the whole hub situation, talking about waypointing to be involved, it makes sense to me to have it there based on, you already have the doctor's office there and the dental that people are going there for, so it seems aligned. Yeah, we tend to think so too. I mean, there's a lot of early childhood services in those different pockets that are happening in that building. So having the ability to kind of bring that all together and have some glue to hold that would be appealing. Well, not that this conversation's moved forward at this juncture, but in the visioning process regarding the potential relocation some day of city hall and what a functional municipal facility that better supported the community would look like having the space to conduct that type of work was pointed at as a major missing thing in the city from a capacity standpoint. So we had talked about some flexible offices that service providers could come in, but sign out and use. And it sounds like this might create something close to that type of opportunity, which is interesting from that perspective. Here's a question. Oh, I thought I saw a hand, I'm sorry. I'll pause though, any other questions from the public? Okay. So for the repurposing it, you think that's gonna be a quick turnaround in terms of their, okay. Has there been any conversation or coordination with neighboring communities? And do any of the other neighboring communities have this money? I know like Newport does. I know there's another rural community that has ran into the same set of ops schools that we're running into. Yeah, none of the communities in Chippin County were eligible for this grant. So we're the only ones in this area who have that and we were actually accepted into like special conditions because our need was so high. And in terms of coordination with other communities, it's a little sticky because it is such a community-centric grant. There isn't a great interest in serving families outside of Ponieski. So a lot of the partners that we're engaging with we're doing so with the idea that these are partners who serve Ponieski families and often Ponieski families have to go to Burlington to be served and so we're trying to figure out how to bring them here instead. That's sort of been the lens there. But in terms of more regional solutions, this grant is not really geared towards that. Okay. So I have a question about the childcare. I mean, we are moving on but then it sounds like there's still conversations happening. I'm wondering to what extent the strings that were attached with either the grant or the city's RFP around use of the space. I know that the RFP originally required provider to serve Ponieski families first and I don't remember what the percentage requirements were but there were some parameters that were focused on serving this population which is different from some of our neighboring communities and so I'm wondering to what extent that was a barrier that you heard from providers and if the strings attached to the grant and or where we were sort of pointing towards if those conditions are eliminated if we think conditions would be better for a different type of us. Yeah, no, that's a great question. The piece that, so after the RFP was unsuccessful one of the things that we did as a group was reach back out individually to a bunch of providers that who didn't apply basically to kind of ask that question of what was it that kept you from being in the mix for this. We had some requirements around subsidy levels for family surf. So the number of families receiving state subsidy which were well above kind of industry norms but in talking to all of, so we were requiring I believe 40% with the RFP for subsidy families and what we found in talking to providers is that 25% is kind of the sweet spot where programs are still eligible to participate in the state meal program but that number is not so low that it leaves them financially burdened. One of the issues is that the reimbursement rates for the state are well below what's required for operators to operate and that number hasn't changed since 2010. I think the state subsidy rate, it's been a while so it's not keeping up with the market costs. In talking to those providers though and saying so if we move that requirement down to 25% would your name be in the hat and I think the answer we may know the big issue we heard again and again and again was staffing. It was recruitment and retention of quality staff and I think as you saw from the provider kind of know in here I think everybody just feeling a lot of pressure even in their current operations just to sustain what they've got. And I don't think the requirement to serve Whenuski kids was a deal breaker. I mean I think there's ample need in the community to fill slots and I don't think that's ever been what's kept providers away. It's really been that staffing model and how to make that work. So I guess I'm just wondering what about it makes the permanent fund and birth defy think that not having it in this context would be possible feasible down the road. We're all really stubborn. But just, I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at but this second plan, this family hub is not a childcare. No, I understand but Ray sort of put on the table the prospects of we may not be able to achieve our goals through this grant opportunity but there may be other opportunities down the road. I mean, we've learned through this process is there's a need in this community for childcare and it's disappointing that we're not able to do that given the resources that are being put on the table to support that expansion. I was just trying to understand is it the strings that were attached to the grant that were a barrier or is it just a more systemic failure? I think more systemic. Yeah, and again, I think your point is well taken that there's a point at which banging your head against the wall is probably a fruitless exercise but I think again to your earlier point that the need is so pervasive and clear that I think the people around the table are pretty committed to trying to make something happen and there's a breaking point where that stops making sense but I think the interest we're seeing from the philanthropic community and the partners that have remained around the table for this entire duration indicate to me that there's a will. It's just now how do we find the way to make this work? It's just, it's gonna take some time and the right fit. And maybe some of this new development as commercial space comes online in corridors could be an interesting option. So I think we're wanting to just stay in the mix and be thinking about opportunities and not fully moving it off the radar. I do think there's some extent to which the timeline was operative since we only had until December. And I don't think saying to a provider right now you have another year would have changed it but I do think generally speaking if we have, if we can sit around and wait for opportunities a little bit more then I think that changes the picture as opposed to having this hard stop in December. Yeah, we haven't been having this conversation for a long time. This process has been. It's been grueling and frustrating and again I think not reflective of the amount of hard work that's gone into it which is also disappointing but here we are. Well thank you. Yeah, on a positive note and I put this at the end intentionally this grant has done some good work and I don't wanna lose sight of that. So I think this sort of final section here highlights some of the good things that have come to date from this. Some of them very much systems level providing some consistent coordinated training for professionals across different sectors down to individual investments like buying a kid a bed who's been sleeping with their sibling and having a hard time getting to school and being engaged there. So I think we've really tried to look at deploying this funding at different levels of an intervention. And I think objectively going back through this list and seeing to date what we've accomplished it does, it feels good. Like these are things that are gonna make a difference for families and kids. In some cases very immediately and very acutely in some cases years down the road but it feels encouraging that there's some good work happening. It's tough that the main focus of the grant hasn't come to fruition but again I don't wanna lose sight of the hard work and good work that's happened on the edges of that too. So I wanted to make sure to include some of those details here for folks to see. I appreciate that vertically integrated approach like a better word of trying to attack it from everywhere but I think you're right that just the coalescing around the table has been impressive in terms of ensuring there's a coordinated conversation going on between agencies, providers, cities, school on this topic of how we address this moving forward. It's been certainly from a huge visual win from what I can see. So that's great. So the Family Hub model really reminds me of the One Stop Center Department of Labor where it's an effective way, a successful way to get people services. So if you were to go forward and it's wildly successful, what happens after December? Great question. So I think the plan for the grant funding at this point is to really create if we were to go ahead with this approach really to create the space for that work to happen and continue to work through Curiosity's position and my position to sort of leverage the resources and partners that we have, we're not intending to use the grant funding to sort of staff up or kind of invest in those operating costs that are gonna come in year in and year out. I think it's really acknowledging that this is work that again is kind of happening in dark corners around the community and giving it some space to breathe the hope is that we can continue to partner to leverage those other agencies as other resources out there. And then I think look for creative opportunities in the future. I think suddenly you've got a space where you've got a little Petri dish for some cool work to be going on, some grant funded projects, some pilots, you know, I think it becomes a really interesting space to do some of that work. Which again, that space doesn't exist at the moment in the community for those families. So yeah, so we're not looking to invest in any kind of ongoing costs through this grant. That's not the hope. But what I'm not clear about is what's the rent situation in the O'Brien Center and how does that impact our, we've got to, so this is some financial report. Yeah, so yeah. So this is some of the modeling that we're doing now and looking at trying to bring a project forward that would have minimal to negligible impact on that budget. And that's what we're looking at right now, especially with existing partners who are in the building, a library space that is already paying its rent to ourselves. You know, we're looking at some ways that we may move those pieces around the board in a cost neutral way. Yeah, so that's the exercise right now. But I do think Hal's answer your question in a different way with a close question in mind that if we were wildly successful, one of the things we might be coming back to you with or one of the things we may be coming back to you within the next couple of weeks as we flesh out some of these models is to what extent does the city want to subsidize these opportunities for our community? And I think that that's a hard conversation groups of us have had over the last year or two. But I think it's a reality if we're going to continue the O'Brien Community Center with that social community wide value. I have to do it. I have to, and you know, the sales pitch that we've gone off the rails for was always that it would be at least as close to a financially sustainable enterprise as humanly possible. Meaning that the revenues for the building would generally offset there and that the taxpayers wouldn't be subsidizing at least the building. So that's something that was pitched the taxpayers that we have now been honest about and saying that nothing anybody was ever dishonest about it but there was definitely some ambitious penciling that was done in its inception about what the potential revenues on rents looked like. And as such, you know, we made the admission this year that it's just isn't working. Have to integrate it back into the general fund. So each decision that's made now going forward is not just are we gonna borrow more from the reserves it's a dollar for dollar impact to the tax rate conversation. So if we make a decision to forego $40,000, $50,000 of revenue for not that that's realistic revenue from any of the spaces right now but that's a direct tax impact now. Yep, yep. And that's again, I think part of we're really working to make sure that we're doing things cost neutral compared to what we are doing now in the building is definitely at the center of that thinking. That's why if you walk into Ray's office right now you're very likely to hear him on the phone with a realtor. That is true. Yeah. I mean, just to be clear, it can't be cost new. I mean, we need to generate revenue, I mean, right? So we've lost revenue. So compared to the full build-out. Yes, so compared to the budget that was presented back with April 2nd, I think it was that gets us, I think it's in 2020 fiscal year 2020 back into the black and starting to move the needle up. Okay. So when I say cost, it may not be immediately cost-neutral but on that trajectory that we presented. And I'll just throw out, we have, and just be really blown on about this because it does have to tie into this in some way, shape, form. If we want additional decision-making programming capacity and leeway in the future we need to have a larger conversation about that property and the property itself offers a lot of different opportunities and potential. And at some point you got to look at that and say, what else can we get for this to offset the cost of it? Cause it's not being, the land itself is not being utilized. And that was a discussion we had when we looked at moving city hall there was how do we do that? And that's kind of the conversation that started with renting out the greenhouse, right? So the New Farms for New Americans are there community-oriented projects like that that could also create revenue while also providing a benefit to the community. That might be something that we have to take another stab at, yes. And I would just say these are great conversations to have on June 2nd and I'm retreating. Yes. Yes. It is 9.04, you're sure? Are you worried about people turning into pumpkins? I gotcha. No, not for your drunken. Just don't forget the June 2nd date. What's June 2nd? What is that? I'm just good to greet, guys. Come on. I don't think I should start because I'm a slave either. Other questions or concerns from the council for Ray or Kirstie? We kind of cut you guys off, is there? Nope, we're good. We're here to be done. Other questions, comments from the public? Okay. So seeing and hearing none that completes tonight's formal agenda, I would entertain a motion for adjournment. Motion by Eric, second by Nicole. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries.