 I'm going to start with Ward 6, poll workers needed, Amy Bovee, assistant city clerk. Hi everyone, thanks for having me here tonight. My name is Amy Bovee, I'm the assistant city clerk for the city of Furlington. One of my jobs with the city is to prepare for elections. And as I'm sure you all know, we have one coming up on March 3rd, which will be our presidential primary as well as our annual city election. So I came here tonight just seeking folks to help work at the polls on election day. The city relies on volunteers from the community to run each of our eight polling places. We do offer payment for your work, it's 10.96 an hour. And there's a variety of shifts available set up the night before and from early morning into the evening hours on election day itself. Number of tasks, checking voters in, helping calculate results, set up, break down, all of the things that need to get done to make an election happen. So I do have a sign up sheet that I'll be passing around. Folks are interested and I'm also available to answer any questions that anyone might have. I'm an inspector of elections. And Michelle is also one. As of March 3rd, I'll be the last elected, the only elected inspector of elections. We need three of them and we need a ward clerk. So we really need some people to step up and you can actually run as a write-in and get elected. Because it happens regularly in this office. So if you are at all interested, you can contact me through the shell. We'll contact you too. Thank you. How it would work is if you were a little right. If you don't want to do that, please, someone, contact Amy, someone will contact you about helping in the process. We really need it. We've always had a good group in this board and the elections don't happen. And without help, we'll be there until two or three of us are there. I don't want to do that. And I will add, not to put you on the spot, but we have had a volunteer for Ward Clerk. Annie has agreed to help with that. But yes, help us, help her and we'll make this election successful. How many people do generally have work today? Twenty all together. It kind of depends how long folks want to stay, but it's a good estimate. Thank you, Amy. Before we leave this topic, I'd love to see a show of hands of anyone who's ever worked at the polls. Awesome. This is great. So Jeff Wick posted on Front Porch forum asking for people to work at the polls and he said there's a special place in heaven for the people who do this. So look around. These are the people you'd be in heaven with. It's a great crew. I would love to be in heaven with all these people. So thank you, poll workers. And I actually want to just do a special shout out to Jerry Manik. Jerry Manik does, I think, the crappiest part of working at the polls and he's done it for years and years and years. He shows up the night before. He sets up all the booths. He's there at 6.30 on election day, making sure everything is ready for the first people who arrive at the polls. So Jerry, thank you for your many years of service. I'll do it again. Okay, great. Okay, so our next presentation is going to be Burlington Telecom. We have Mike Lucy and Enis Sohovic, and I probably butchered that name. And they're going to talk about service in the parts of our ward that don't currently have service. So they welcome your questions and they'll explain a little bit about the current situation. Yeah, so I messed up. So Enis and Andy are not from BT. They're from Burlington Electric and thank you for being here. Good evening. Thank you for inviting us to your NPA meeting here at Ward 6. I'm Mike Lucy. I'm the general manager with Burlington Telecom. I've been there nine months. With me tonight is Will Deshane. Will is our manager of construction. He's been actually with Burlington Telecom. This is his 15th year. So he has deep knowledge, experience with what's going on with the builds, what we're trying to do. Give you a little bit of background for me. I came most recently from Velco. I'm an engineer by academic training, working primarily in the telecommunications space when it comes to developing, monetizing various systems. At Velco we built basically a 1500 mile system throughout the state of Vermont over a nine year period of which I led that charge. So that kind of gives you a little bit of background on that. On your table tonight that we brought, just to give you some examples, we've taken a look recently since Sher's has purchased BT on the last, actually spent 10 months for them. Some of the areas in and around what we call the hill section, we refer to as the hill section. So I've got a couple examples of diagrams that we've been able to secure from the city DPW as well as working with Burlington Electric as to what projects they may have going on in these areas or in these streets. So historically BT has worked with BED with cooperating on different builds, difficult builds, but the key is do they have a capital need at the same time that we're available to work with them. So I don't know, we don't really, it doesn't sound like Burlington Electric at this point has any major excavation work going on. We also know that the DPW who we've been in concert with that they don't have any major projects going on either in the next two years. The reason that that's important is you'll take a look at this first diagram which is de Forest Heights. The second one is Overlake and then de Forest Road. I just pulled three that were sent to us. The key point to us being successful at trying to make this work and make it feasible is really understanding what it's going to take to construct up there on these various roads. So you can see this top one, it actually has electric, it has gas, it has high pressure water main, it has a combined sewer and wastewater line. There's also Comcast and Consolidated up in those areas. So basically what that means is that when you try to dig and install a new conduit for instance, you've got a significant amount of utilities that you have to work around. And if they're in rock, it makes it very slow and very expensive. So we want to make sure that we're measured about how we go about looking at our feasibility studies. So we have done a conceptual design for the area. We have done a schedule of costs. So we actually have some idea if things went well, what that might cost up there. What would help us be more successful at working with you is really understanding what is the interest of the residents in these areas. Who would commit to taking service, for instance? That would be an example. Yeah, I don't need a hands right now, but I like that. Don't like that. So our neighbors on Chittenden Drive here have some have worked around and they have lines going through their backyards to get service. And unfortunately Chittenden Drive is on a private road. It was built in the 67. And Tony Conner was trying to sell the city for like a dollar ever since. And they don't want to expand their budget. You know, one of the Department of Public Works first people said that under oath. So I don't know how, so I tried to get a lot of guests to come up the road. But if you guys could work in concert, so we could get these services at the same time. Absolutely. But I also... Can I? That's frustrating. Sorry, Vermont guys are supposed to come this evening as well. But they had to cancel due to the storm. They couldn't safely get their guys here and back to where they needed to be. So anyway, the attempt was made to have them come here. But they had to... But Burlington Telecom is working, we're willing to collaborate with any party that has any kind of excavation work that's going on in these areas. It may be piecemeal because there may be certain areas that Vermont gas needs to build because they have it in other parts. We're willing to work with them in a piecemeal fashion as well. As BED has new work that goes on in the future, we're willing to work with them as well. If that's what we need to try to drive the capital costs down to make this commercially reasonable at all. So that's the challenges, the density and the cost of the build. Do we have out-of-date sewer systems and underground power lines that haven't been serviced in years? Are the roads falling apart? So there's definitely a need there for the utilities to get together and address the situation in concert with the city. But I don't think there's much I can do. I certainly can't fund the work. And we have Matt with Darren Springer. My counterpart over at BED. Obviously with Merrill, the mayor. We've had a lot of lengthy discussions with him as well as his team and the DPW. We're all aware that Shur's Communications, Burlington Telecom, our owner. We're willing to work and try to get up there. We genuinely want to get up there. We've actually spent quite a bit of time trying to look at what the costs would be and what the risks are and what we don't know. So we can't really get a good feasibility study until we know primarily two pieces of information. How many? Which streets? I guess that's two right there. And the third is we would like to do some exploratory work along those roads which means just basically cutting a hole in the road. Plenty of holes already. Well maybe we can see. What we're trying to understand is what is the sub-base up there. If they have a sub-base that goes down 18 inches that we can directionally bore through, we can do that cost in a matter of a weekend. Is there any overhead service on Chittenden Drive? Just at the very bottom of the hill from my driving area. Because we're on Kingsland and we have overhead Burlington Telecom service that works very well. So I don't think you have to absolutely blast the ledge to get at least your service in. The overhead just stops right here at the light post. Seems like that's an easier solution than blasting the ledge. So we actually have serviced two homes in the Crescent area off of that side road. So we are looking to be as creative as we can be to try to get the services in there. For most of the people, we could look at knowing a case where we actually installed poles. But my guess is... Yeah, I already tried that. I made a complaint with Burlington Telecom 15 years ago. They showed up and were ready to do poles. They had to get the permission of the people who lived up the street. They would not get permission because it blocked the lake here. So the road curves that people up the hill have up. But these are great discussions that you can have with your neighbors to actually start to vet some of this. So you only have to go down 18 inches? For ours, yes. Water and sewer goes deeper. But I also know that quite a bit of the water up there based on discussions with the DPW is actually pretty shallow as well because of the rock. They also did a combined water sewer line which is really in the environmental world and not a great solution because of the overages of spillage when storm waters come into it. So they probably did that purposely because of the cost to get two separate lines in there that they needed space. So that's probably why they did that. So if you know that there's a sewer line there, you know there isn't any ledge where the sewer line runs, where the gas line runs. Why can't you just follow what you know is over from the ground? So we do have as-built maps that we've obtained. The challenge with that is if the sewer main or a water line has a break and they need to get in there to service that water line, their hole is going to be at least three or four feet wide because they're going to have to set what's called a trench box so that they can be safe in a hole per ocean. In order to do that, we wouldn't be able to have our conduit there because that's obviously going to constrict their ability to do that work. So would we look at that? But the chances are that being a practical solution is probably not great. And it also depends on after they put that sewer line in, what did they actually put back in as fill? Is that something that we can drill through or easily dig? If it is, that gives us more data of which now we can assess what the cost might be. Yes? I understand on summit to reach, utilities are underground along the sidewalk. And I think when they put them in, they put in extra type for utilities in the future. And I know that Telecom has a service at the bottom of Cliff and Willard that new house that was built there. They have service. And that's like two houses from mine. Yes, so we do have a what's called a conduit agreement with BED for them to let us know do they have spare conduits available on these roads. That was an actual discussion that we actually had last week to try to take a look at that. But before we spend money, because it costs us money to do that, we want to make sure that we have interest on those roads for us to be able to spend that capital dollars to go ahead and look at them. So they actually charge by the job, which I don't think would be exorbitant, but we just don't want to spend money if it doesn't make sense. Well, I've been calling in, my wife's been calling in, and we keep repeating the same. I know. I'm exorbitant. Yeah, speak to that. Sure. So I'm Andy, Director of Engineering at BED. So as Mike mentioned, we do have an agreement in place already with Burlington Telecom to allow them to share our conduit system where it's feasible to do so. So we do have the list of locations that you're interested in possibly, or BT is interested in serving. So we're going to look through those and see, you know, start the investigation process and see if it's feasible to share our conduits. Yes. It would be helpful in a neighborhood like I live on Overlake. I don't think Comcast is a particularly popular operation on Overlake Park. If we committed, like we got a group of neighbors that committed in writing a full switch if you build this, would that help you or not? That's absolutely part of the feasibility stuff. How many residents would commit on which roads? So we have an understanding. We can then go in and take a look at what is it going to really cost to build there. We would have to do some exploratory work, subsurface exploratory work so we understand what the cost might be. Because if it's rock and we have to hydraulically hammer that rock to get our pipe in, that's a totally different cost than if we can do directional drilling. So if we can do directional drilling, it's a much more economical way to do it for multiple reasons. Hi, thank you. I just want to provide people with the parameters of what they'd be getting into. I assume that people who aren't served here by Burlington Telecom are served by the other telecom utility Comcast. I recently moved downtown, so I feel like my numbers are pretty fresh. Comcast wanted to offer me good internet service. Upload, download, YouTube video. I mean, what are we doing on the internet? Watching stuff, killing our brains with TV. But Burlington Telecom was willing for only $120, 20% more to offer double the formidable, robust infrastructure that we are privileged enough to receive here in Burlington as a gigabit city with fiber optic infrastructure. Now, a lot of you are probably at home with your YouTubes and your Netflixes and maybe you have a kid at home who's, you know, eating up some of your bandwidth. But I want you to know that as a media professional, I used to work with Charlie at Channel 17, I can tell you that 4K video is going to become the new Derigur standard. And as 4K starts to eat up your bandwidth, you're going to start feeling the pitch from Comcast. And Comcast, as we know, has not much interest in holding down rates, so it might be good for you all as a community to get ahead of increasing utility bills and having to double your service, get the platinum service, let's say, just in order to, you know, watch friends. Here we go. I have to say that this is in the order of tens of thousands of dollars for a resident. I mean, I've been on this for so many times with a lot of gas, and they, you know, they said they could come to my house and they made a quote of $12,000 in 2002, and then it was $30,000 the next time I asked them. And people have, because people have up the road, it's like sort of jury rig access to gas that they don't need it, so all the costs on that, so it's great, it would be awesome, but I certainly don't have tens of thousands of dollars after the tens of thousands of dollars that I've spent in tax already to pay for YouTube. Yes, to go out alone. But that's why this data is very important, understanding how many people, what they think they would like to take, we can then assess on a road-by-road basis, you know, what seems to make sense, and what the economics look around them. We have to be commercially reasonable when we go to our lenders, right, they look at our capital projects, they ask about what is our return on our investment. Fortunately, which shares communications, we actually have a little more room than some of our competitors, because it is privately held, they are a little more aggressive, they do work in small to medium-sized cities in four other states across the United States as well. So this is a common thing for them, we have to have those numbers so that when we go to our lenders, it helps us with our money. So I live on Edgewood Lane. We're five houses, so I was wondering and I appreciate the explanation about how there's an economy between the electric and the telecom service. Is there any similar economy with the gas? I understand the gas folks are not going to be here tonight? I wouldn't make it a guess, but yeah, we would work with the Montgas surely. So if they require, let's just say a four-foot space around their pipes so they can get in there and work on their gasoline because they have to be down at least three feet, we could easily go one foot wider and be on the outside of that and make that work. So that somehow we could see a cost-benefit sharing between those types of projects. If we were to do a head count on Edgewood Lane as to what percentage of folks would want to convert, there would also be a cost for actually connecting from the gas lane correct to the houses, that would be our cost. Yeah, I'm not sure how Vermont gas structures that. Burlington is included in the service unless we run into something like we have to bring in federal grants in there, for instance, but if we don't have to do that, it's included when we sign up for service for us up to 150 feet. So, you know, that's one of the conditions that we would want to look at, right? So we did an analysis, a quick, better than napkin analysis. And it's about a mile and a half of just what we call trunk, just to get to the roads, get to the homes. There's another 1.25 mile just to do all the drops if 100% of the residents took it. So you're looking at almost four miles of underground build. So it's not, you know, it's quite significant when you start rolling all of that up. And those numbers are fairly accurate. You're talking about all the streets in the ward that don't have service right now? Correct. Okay. And this doesn't picture them? No, I just brought a few examples because, yeah. But we do have all of the examples. It's every road in the ward that doesn't have that. So, as pointed out, Summer Ridge doesn't have to have gas, so that wouldn't have this yellow line, this yellow dash line, but it does have the other lines on that one, for instance. So if we were to do any, as to how many folks would be willing to sign up for gas and BT? Yes. So who would we submit? You can submit it to me. Okay. And that would be communicated to all three as you work together? Well, sure. Yeah. We could take that point lead. I just want to make sure it doesn't become, yes. I mean, we could take the point on that. Sure. Yeah. We're happy to work with Vermont Gas. We know the folks over there, obviously Burlington as well. So that's something we can take the lead on. I just want to make sure it doesn't become like a, you know, full-time, full-time job. So if you can do much more data, to us the easier it makes my job, I'm happy to reach out to them and try to help me use. Yes? Yes. It's a little surprising to me that we don't have a better sense of who would be interested. And I'm sort of furious about this. For a very reasonable price, I'd be willing to knock on all those doors. My wife just did the firing for the neighborhood. I was working. She was only gone a couple of hours. Can't be that many people. So interesting enough, we actually just enlisted three college students that have seen years in the marketing program. They actually went and did a door-to-door survey of areas that we could have served for over two years, just to try to get real data from those residents who seem to be not taking our service. Because we don't really know why without asking them, right? You could do a survey, monkey. That doesn't really work. So we sent out these college kids to actually do it. So we're trying to get that data. So you would think everybody would want it. But we have some areas that, you know, we were 20% of the Tickery. That's a very, very low-out ticker. So it's a very important number. It's a tight margin. These numbers are very important. I don't want to get ahead of anybody else here. But I'm also wondering, you know, we're talking about fiber to distribute the signal. Yes. Is there not, at this point, another technology which could be used? I mean, I keep hearing about 5G coming in. I realize that's a completely different technology. I realize this is obvious. I'm not an engineer. But for a small neighborhood like this, a small area, is there no other way to broadcast that? There is. There's various wireless technologies out there that can do that. I used to actually work for Sprint PCS for 15 years doing wireless build-out in New England. So I have some familiarity with it. There is a new license that's coming out, CDRS. They claim that that's going to give you great speeds. You have to purchase that license. Burlington has a license. And then you have to have enough, basically, capacity to get the speed that you want. The challenge with wireless, and even with 5G, is you're not going to get the same speed levels that you will with 5 or 2 footprints. So we have to get more information around 5G. I still have friends in the industry that design and work with that. And it's still pretty early. I mean, there's a lot of claims. I heard AT&T or saw it on Superbowl at their nationwide 5G. Well, let's go down to the store and ask them for a 5G phone. And you're going to see that it's not capable. So we are willing to look at that. We actually have our engineer, VP of Engineering, is on a task right now to look at wireless as a possible solution for certain areas. But that's going to require antennas. So you need a height of land. Depending on what frequency, I don't want to get too techy on you, but trees can stop it, houses can stop it. So you have to look at that. So it definitely would be cheaper than what we're proposing bringing fiber. And that's something that we're wanted to look at as well. Yes. Yes. Yes. Just like to ask the guys from BED to speak to the city's net zero energy plan. You know, I love the idea of bundling gas, electric, and telecom access at the same time. But I feel like it's not a sound investment to be building out more fossil fuel infrastructure. If the city really is trying to get homes through incentives to switch over to coal climate heat pumps. So can you guys just speak to where BED is at with the net zero plan and how you would weigh in on the idea of bringing Vermont gas in as a partner? I'm probably not the right person to weigh in on that. If you want to take your name down and if you're the right person to talk to about that, get in the microphone. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm saying I'm not really prepared to talk about that tonight. I'm not really in that area. But I can certainly take your name down and get in with the right person. I mean, I would like to see the city have a holistic approach. I think the net zero energy plan is a great realistic conversation about what it's going to take for us to get to a sustainability climate footprint that matters. You are correct in that the net zero plan does promote the use of coal climate heat pumps and obviously wants to get us away from fossil fuels. And I know there's been some talk with Vermont gas about renewable natural gas. I'm not sure where that stands, but... Well, you know, as a community, I'd like to see us put our money into the technologies of the future and not the technologies of the future. I can speak to that a little bit because I've been down that road. So I have to buy propane, which the price varies a lot and it's super expensive. So I look right over here on Chittin' and Tribe. So early on, I switched my fireplace as to wood pellet stoves, which is a lot of carrying stuff around in messy. We just installed three heat pumps and there are a lot of rebates and everything, but I had to take out a lot for $13,000 to do that. Our boiler that I installed 15 years ago, they have great rebates, went and we just had to put in a $7,000 boiler. At that point, we looked at a hot water pump that would be with the heat pump technology, but it's not far enough along. It was also super costly. So honestly, I feel like I've spent a lot of money trying to... We had Vermont gas. I'm still stuck with propane for hot water. I can't get away from it because it's too costly to go with a heat pump hot water. And that technology is just not far enough along yet. I know there's been some improvements recently. They're working on a few new things with... And I talked to Chris Burns. He's like, everybody's boiler in the south end is in their garage, which is not great for putting a heat pump. So you need to create a space in your house for it, basically. Which is like redesign and work. But I just don't... I hear what you're saying and I agree with you and I'm like an electric car, but it's still so much cost on the consumer to be that energy until the city can figure out how to support people. I don't think it's realistic. Of course, it's going to cost us a lot to get gas in. I know, I know. I can't even go. I can't even think about that at the point. I spent so much money trying to be energy efficient and to save the cost of heat that I've outspent. I'm going to just pay for the propane to begin with a little bit cheaper. In respect to Burlington Telecom, I've just been curious about what percentage of residents in Burlington do not have access to Burlington Telecom right now? Do you have an idea? Of those, there's 121 that don't because of the high cost. There's an additional 343 roughly that have chosen not to take it. It's a private... They could if they wanted. They could if they wanted. But the bill there is different. So it's really, we have to get an agreement on the private land. It's just much like chitin' and drivin' and drivin'. So that's basically it. Other than that, we serve or can serve everything but 700 residents. It's basically... But of those that you can serve, what percent choose not to? Well, we are... Those that we can serve will be 53%. We're 43% have taken our service. So the big part of the picture is how many people will subscribe and the other party is working with the other utilities to get the cables in. So since we've been trying to do this for 20 years, how does it work that the utilities inform you that they're going to do a project so that you can examine whether you can get cables in? Is there a mechanism for that happening? Because I don't... I'm skeptical that that's going to happen. I don't know if historically there was a good mechanism with everything that was surrounding, everything that was going on. We definitely do that. What is it? I mean, but somebody at Burlington Gas... Yes, we... Burlington Electric will call you. We'll look at their annual bill plans. What are they doing? Where are they doing? What are they actually doing? They're going to be doing some water... like DPW is going to be doing some water reliant in some of the streets in the house, what we call the health section. But that doesn't really help us because they only have to open up a small section to access those pipes. It's not like they have to open up a whole room. So we are in communications with the city. The city absolutely know that we're committed to trying to do something. So those lines of communication are open for sure. That's on an annual basis? Yes. Everybody sets their budgets. We have to have heads up so we can get it into our budget system as well. Yes, Karen? So Mike, thank you. Thanks very much for being here for agreeing to come and to all of you for being here. I hope that people will look upon... Well, first I wanted to backtrack and also thank Barbara for reaching out to me about two months ago and asking for a meeting like this. We talked about having it as a neighborhood meeting and agreed to have this as part of an NPA. And for those people that are on the affected streets, a group of us did go and deliver something to your door. And thank you. Thank you very much for being here. I hope that people will look upon this as even though there have been a number of people that have been wanting this service for a very long time, that we try to look at this as a first step in moving forward now. And if there are people that are here who live... For those people who are here who live on the streets that are affected, that they will start that conversation with their neighbors. I didn't mean to take the mic, but that they will start that conversation with their neighbors, because that's really the first step in getting moving. I did meet with Mike and Will about a week ago. I can attest to the fact that they have put a tremendous amount of time and effort into figuring out how to make this work. They have modeled this, and I firmly believe that they do want to make this happen. But the first step is going to be those neighbors organizing and committing to taking the service. So there's no better advertising than neighbor to neighbor, and I hope that we can get that started so that all of you who I know want the service can get it. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. Just as a matter of efficiency too, I'm happy to be the starting person, but if we could funnel the streets as you get your information through one person so that I don't miss it in my emails not knowing all of the residents here, that would be very helpful. So I know who to reach out to, who not to reach out to, whether it's VED, whether it's Vermont Gas. I'm just going to hop in for a second. Because Vermont Gas is not here tonight, we have extra time for you folks, so don't hesitate to ask your questions. We can keep them going until 7.25, so feel free to take advantage of having this kind of direct conversation. I guess I was wondering what's involved in putting Burlington Telecom in, say, Chittenden Drive into the forest, which already has underground electric, and so I imagine there's conduits that you could run the five projects along to those, you know, up the streets and to those houses. Is that a major opportunity? Because Comcast is there now. So that's part of the investigation that we kind of referred to earlier. We actually have to send a crew out to start looking in the conduit system to see if there's any spare conduits. And if we don't have any spares, then it's a little bit more time to share our conduit space with PT. And how much space do, I mean, is there a type that needs to be a certain distance to the new fiber optic? Ideally, we would have an empty conduit that we could allow them to use, and then we wouldn't have to worry about spacing. But even if there wasn't, I guess I'm trying to get a sense of the work involved and the cost. I imagine it would be a lot less expensive than trying to do it in conjunction with Burmont Gas, which means a lot of deeper area. Right. I haven't seen those costs to use a VED conduit, so I would reserve an opinion that's cheaper or not. I don't know yet. We have, but each build is kind of unique. So there was one that we did where they actually pulled a whole new conductor along with the fiber. So that's a different kind of a, that's a different type of a build. So you have to understand what it is and then we can get the cost to be easy to get. We're just leaving it there. Is there, I know each instance is going to be a little bit different, but... A better way to answer that, if we're able to do directional drilling, not open up the streets, minimize that, and we can actually drill, we're probably in the $300,000 range to do what we've been talking about. So then you'd have to do the math. So now it depends on how many residents take the service, what level of service do they take, what is our revenue model. We can then bounce that off of what our capital costs are and see what we can get an actual model. Do you know how many residents are on this four and a half mile stretch you described? 85. Based on my numbers. $300,000 divided by 85 at best? Yes. At a very high level. And that would be without... debt service, anything crazy? Correct. Yes. Do you have to be 18 inches deep? We have to be 18 inches deep and we have to be 18 inches away from them. Why do you have to be 18 inches and let it just kind of... Once again, it gets to... If they were there first, they would have to be 18 inches away from us as well. So... But the debt, you have to be... Yes, because we put ours in conduit. They may have done direct burial. I don't know. The problem with direct burial is that you're going to be replacing that before... long. That's the challenge with that. But it's a lot less expensive than $300,000. I don't think I would agree with that because you're using a different method called plowing. And if you can plow, it will be cheaper than directional drilling, but it's not going to be $100,000. But Comcast have done it already. Yeah, they also have... Yeah, I don't know their models or when they did it or how they did it. I don't know. You also have to remember that if you're in those green spaces with the trees, we actually have to stay 5 feet outside the drip zone of mature trees per the city's arborist rules. So that really limits, like if you go down Oak Lake, for instance, you really can't get in that green space. So now you're under the sidewalks, which is very, very expensive in the sidewalks. Probably... actually may even be more expensive than actually being in the roadway. So if we can get in to the road next to the curb and that's drillable, that is really the ideal solution for us to save the most cost if we can't work with somebody else and find synergies in the construction. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. And team... Okay. Everyone's sick tonight. Thank you for coming and because we have extra time because of Vermont guest not being here, we are going to move to our next agenda item now. So because we're ahead on time, we'd like to take a second to tell everybody to please eat. The food is from the Burlington School District. So everything that you folks eat is everything we don't have to take home. So please take the time to eat. And I've been asked to ask you folks that when you're done with the silver, put it in the end tub so we can wash it tonight before we leave. So next on the agenda is an update from the Burlington School District from Burlington School Board member Jeff Wick. Good evening, everyone. Jeff Wick, I'm Vice Chair of the Burlington School Board. I'm also on the negotiations committee. And tonight, you've asked me to specifically address four issues. Maybe we'll get the quickest and easiest ones out of the way first. And I'm just we've got quite a turnout tonight. I actually thought with the snow, nobody would be here. But so look at this, we've got a great crowd. And look at the food. And jeez, I think I missed our musicians, right? Anna and Andy, did I miss it? Yes. Sorry. Excellent. I'll take the questions a little bit out of order that you ask. The first one was tell us what you can tell us about the Edmunds Elementary School principal vacancy in filling that. And so as you know, Shelly Mathias, the current principal who's been there for quite some time, is retiring and therefore obviously creates a vacancy. So I spoke with the superintendent this afternoon and I said, what can I tell my constituents? And he said, Jeff, just let them know we'll have an update, a quick update next week. But right now we can't talk about it. So that's why I started with this one. It was very short and easy. We all expect to have more information about filling that vacancy next week. All right, that's Edmunds Elementary School. Let's see. We've got a few interesting things going on. Let me take the next one that I think is going to be relatively brief about the delivery, but when we have questions it may be the popular one. I don't know. This has to do with the renovations at the high school. Give us the update. What is the update, Jeff? We have heard. Well, we all passed authorization for the school district to spend up to 70 million to renovate the high school. What happened a few months ago is after I think they called it the first round of schematic design and other physical examination of the property it was determined that the project was looking like it was going to cost a lot more than 70 to complete. In fact, I think the number was 91 million. We were all rather shocked. And they assured us that that was just the first round. They're going to then do the second round of schematic design and sharpen their pencils and figure out what needs to change to bring it back down to what we asked and what you'd authorized. And one of the most substantial changes that it appears will we may well actually sorry let's see what did I want to note about that. What was one of the most remarkable why was it so much more expensive? Well in part it turns out that the soils around the I'll call it the south side of A building the south side of the what is it Joel the gym right turns out you probably know this already but if you don't I guess sand and other much softer than anticipated so that it turns out that we'd have to stick these pilings down much further than anticipated and that a lot of the cost with the project would go underground so you know who wants the cost to go underground we want it to go where it means something so I think they're redesigning what was going to be this wraparound of the gym and the auditorium and redesigning that so one of the most substantial changes in the pending sort of redesign the elimination of the wraparound design due to unfavorable soil conditions discovered during testing work so the next step what is the next step we're all eager to know the next step because we would like obviously to get a great renovation on budget the next step is the black river design who are the architects with whom we've been working on this project they're going to present to this committee that you probably know exists which is a partnership between the city of burlington and the school district called the building and construction oversight committee bcoc black river is going to present to the bcoc their recommendations after several months of attempting to redesign their recommendations to bring the project cost down to budget at which point that committee will evaluate how these proposed changes will affect the project's priority goals and just remind everybody what our priorities were improved accessibility meaning for those who are disabled it's very spread out so improved accessibility improved security energy efficiency and what's come to be known as 21st century learning environment so we're all waiting to see what that looks like and when is that meeting well there's a public meeting of that committee the bcoc february 20th if you're curious the public is welcome to attend february 20th to discuss and focus on the cost saving options that have been identified or that will be identified the meeting will be held at edmunds middle school in the library which is also known as the makerspace at 5 30 p.m so if anyone would like to attend 5 30 edmunds middle school I'm planning to attend I'm very eager to know okay so that's two of the four items one was the budget that's for me the biggie the school budget but the fourth well what was that for or am I just imagining there was a fourth we've got edmunds ah superintendent last search I do have a whole packet on that in fact so what I'll do is because this is a big one and you are rightly very curious about it and there were 27 people signed in so I might not have enough I've got 25 copies here of what we call our superintendent search one pager so that if you listen to me for two minutes on it don't worry if you remember it all or not it'll be right here so maybe I'll pass some different directions I need my notes okay superintendent search what's going on you everybody knows the superintendent finishes his term here June 30th so as of July 1 the new fiscal year we plan to have a new superintendent in place okay here are the bullet points we have what have we done so far well we have internally as a board we've appointed the superintendent search committee that is chaired by two of our commissioners one whose name is Kendra Sowers and the other Martin Gula Claire Wool's also on the committee sort of a standing member we've hired we put out sort of an RFP and we ended up hiring one of those national superintendent search firms there aren't that many actually nationally one we've hired is called McPherson and Jacobson they've placed over 750 superintendents across the US since 1991 there's a particular consultant from the firm who's working been assigned to us his name is John Grotto he was at our January 14th board meeting to do some work on this with us what else if you would like to go to our website at the school district we've got as much information as we possibly can give you on this process we've held three what we call community stakeholder forums one at Hunt one at Champaign Elementary and one at IAA Integrated Arts Academy are one of our elementary schools in the old north end and we've posted all that feedback on the district website we have additional stakeholder meetings coming up and we've had some already with employees of the school district students employees would include teachers as well okay now what else are we doing we have recently set up what's called a screening committee as broadly as we could we attempted to let the public know we're taking applications for the screening committee and a number of folks did return applications there were 30 applications and at the end of the day 11 were chosen to be on that committee the makeup of the committee consists of two school principals one teacher two employees from the district central office one other school district employee and five members from the community at large and so they're the screening committee they are going to essentially review the applications as they come in and then ultimately it is the school board's job to select the next superintendent so they'll essentially be referring those applications to us the closing date for applications was actually today and I heard we have received a number of applications the screening committee initially meets on the 11th of February to review the applications oh I'm sorry that's their initial meeting on the 11th on the 18th of February they then meet again to review the apps to view various candidate videos and then to advance acceptable candidates to the school board on March 4th right after election right after February break the board the school board will interview those candidates at a time and location to be determined and then on March 5th there will be a public or community forum with the finalists again we'll announce the time and location so the public will have a chance just as the school board did the day before to listen to the candidates and I hope ask candid questions and then we expect to make an announcement of our selection and I hope acceptance by mid-March so if all goes according to this plan mid-March we should know who our next superintendent will be it does sound a little soon to me yes sir can you tell us about the compensation for the consultants if I knew that answer right now I would tell you I can find out and I can certainly get back to you and if there are other things I cannot answer tonight my e-mail address is jwikjwik at bsdvt.org oh no that's the school district yeah might as well take the questions as we see them the gentleman I used to cover Burlington development review boards where a lot of new buildings creative ones creatively using land especially close to the waterfront have recently been certified including by I believe it's one of the alternate members of the development review board who works for Black River Design now they sent the redstone cliff hanging apartments back to square one multiple times and Eric Hoekster did an amazing job at doing nips and tucks and they located these sandy geographies as something into which they'd have to drive exceptionally deep pylons now I don't have the greatest memory I smoke a lot of pots sometimes but even I know that those pylons were detected by the development review board were insisted upon in order to have the building you know like not fall off the cliff and now it seems like every single time a big project whether it's a private project or whether it's a public project goes before the DRB they seem to just walk between the raindrops and then when you send a budget to the to the voters it's curiously off the mark in terms of what the actual budget ends up being so I guess am I being paranoid in thinking that certain projects kind of skate through the process especially before they go before the voters with these important life changing property tax increases for some people who are absolutely pushed to the is it fair to think that I have a tinfoil hat on that basically Hoekstra got nailed but BSD walked between the raindrops what's going on well I don't think we've put our someone correct me if I'm wrong but the timing of permitting is I don't think we've applied for permits for a building yet so we haven't been before the DRB well anyway even though he's a member of the DRB he was unable to detect and guess that this would be a much heavier lift and a much deeper dive into the earth than we had expected I mean is that am I completely off the mark here you know let me know so I think I totally get where you're going what you're saying because the question has risen in my mind which is how are we sold something at a 70 million dollar price tag and after whatever the expensive schematic process was it came in higher that that's a very good question that I don't know the answer to you can bet that I'm no happier than you are about that and it is my hope that some of these costs well I'll find out more details especially at February 20th but yeah believe me if you rerun the tape from the school board meeting where we approve this thing there were three scenarios put up and here's what you can get for scenario A B and C and one of them was just very expensive so we went for the middle one it was 68.5 but then I personally raised a question about air conditioning I said hey you know this is crazy we really need air conditioning and so sort of on the fly there they suggested alright well if you the board want air conditioning why don't you just all we can do right now is just add a little so in any event as a result of that we passed the 70 we approve the 70 million or recommended to the voter 70 million that was 68.5 plus the air conditioning and so now it's yeah well I'm told though in their defense that it's not unusual for the first round of schematics to come in perhaps higher well I get it thank you I know you're in my corner and I'm not even in your ward so thank you okay um Dan yeah I just wanted to follow up on one thing about the question about consultant compensation because I learned this working on the superintendent search a little bit but there's several national consultants and they serve almost as like little mini e-bays or linked ends so all the prospects go to these firms and these firms deal with all the school districts if you don't hire one of these firms you're not going to get the lead flow so they they're not monopolies but they're really important they do more than just come in and talk to you they have the lead flow of mechanics so you kind of have to work with somebody thanks for that clarification Dan I appreciate it I mean if the question was raised do you use one of these firms or do you go without it I would certainly suggest that probably providence would dictate we would use one but the question still on the table is how much does that cost so email me I'll get back to you okay okay we talked about superintendent search I really want to reserve some time for the most important thing because that's the thing we'll all be voting on which is the school budget for the upcoming fiscal year and I have a handout oh Joel so sorry I have a handout on that too I've kept one for myself already I've got 25 here it's double-sided sorry it's not in color but I'm sure you don't mind the original is in color I just didn't have color printer alright here's the short of it the short of it is our current school year the one we're in right now the estimated budget is just shy of $9 million so $88.7 if we add no new programs no new teachers no new personnel just sort of a steady state or baseline budget it turns out the estimate is that our budget would what I'll call naturally increase by almost 4% to $92 million and that natural increase well it turns out that health insurance premiums as you all know I'm sure they go up by double digit amounts but in this case we're told 13% your premium is going up and so that's pretty substantial when you have well I think we have about 1200 employees in the Burlington school district also there is somewhat of a natural increase in wages and if not wages per se there's a step system that teachers are on that progressively raises their salaries based on experience and education master's degree that sort of thing that's a component of it special education costs we're told are increasing as well as anticipated borrowing costs relating to the first phase of the VHS project if you did your work which I'm sure you did a year ago we all knew it would not be cheap when we started to borrow from the high school and it was frankly my hope that the community would would approve the bond because we need the new high school but that that that new spending would not crowd out in other words it wouldn't be at the expense of gutting the personnel to actually teach our kids so that's my hope for the future but that's a few years away because this year the increase due to the first amount we're going to have to draw down in about a year or within a year the increase isn't that large if memory serves it was about it added about 750,000 to our budget so that's the first phase of the VHS project in addition we are obviously now paying down the debt that the voters approved a number of years ago for what we call our 10 year capital plan so that also adds to the budget I'm not sure what that amount is so those are the things that inherently increase the budget without adding any bodies or programming and then what we the board did is we together with our administration found about a million dollars of cuts and then we did we did find, we did desire and propose new investments of about 360,000 so it netted if you reduced by 1.1 million and you add back 360 you know the difference is really 660 or so but the net net of that is that our total budget in the next school year that begins July 1 is increasing 3.18% so just to use around numbers 3% however sadly due to what I'll call the miracle of state education funding that is expected to have an education property tax increase for those who do not get a discount on their property taxes based on income those who are over that threshold who just pay the full load of the tax bill that's expected to have an increase of 7% 7.36 to be exact but that's precision without being correct because that's based on current estimates there are few items that could change, namely one how the state ends up funding I think there's a political decision that could be made that's been made in prior years that could either make it better or worse but as of current understanding 3% increase in the overall budget translates to a 7% expected property tax increase if you get a property tax discount on your income your increase will be less in fact there's some kind of generic if you're an income based payer the school district estimates I think this is based on some legitimate numbers that other school districts use it's you're expected to have on average a 3% property tax increase so as you all may know it's so complicated because each of our property tax bills might be discounted by a certain amount based on our income so one metric doesn't cover everybody but for those who who do not get a discount on their tax bills presently we expect a 7% increase that is the story if you'd like any more detail I probably have it and if I don't I'll get it to you so what was the expected increase last year? yes I think last year the expected increase turned out to be about what we estimated and when I got my property tax bill in July first thing I did when I opened is got my little calculator and said what was my increase on the education portion and I think it was 4.7% and that's about I think we estimated around that I had thought we'd estimated higher but then a commissioner recently said to me no Jeff it was actually a little lower than 4.7 was around that ballpark 4-ish if memory serves but in any event the fact is if you didn't get a discount on your tax bill your education portion went up 4 correct me if I'm wrong but my memory says 4.7% now just for comparison not to beat anybody up I watched the south probably shouldn't say this but we're not alone in our increases the city of south Burlington is expecting an increase in their education property taxes next comment Michelle and I looked out in Arizona Tucson Arizona for a number of years where they have very low taxes and they had 42 kids in their AT courses kids were sitting on window cells and on the floor so it's kind of like you either have good schools you have low taxes God bless you Alan given my background I know that one of the differences often between what's going to happen with our tax bill and what's actually going on in the underlying budget has to do with the number of students or the equalized pupil numbers but it's pretty close to whether or not student population is going up and down is some of this reflection of the 7.3 versus the 3.2 related to change in student numbers yes and I have the details I'd be delighted so the key variables I think it's important for a number of reasons because it's always sometimes the community is talking about do we have capacity and don't and what is happening with the buildings and the student numbers and if we are if student numbers are coming down that's being related to that that's kind of the follow on as well it turns out as you probably know everybody knows Alan he's a former chair of the school board but that our student count overall in Burlington has kind of gone a little up, a little down a little up, a little down, a little up it really hasn't gone far even at the high school roughly around a thousand students I think now around 950, 960 don't quote me on the exact numbers but I know I'm very close and I did an analysis before I ran for the board because people were claiming various things and I went back to the annual reports for 10 years to see what our student count was and it hasn't changed and it's not changing and I mean I'm not saying it's not changing in the future I'm just saying it's not changing substantially one year over the other but Alan your question is a good one in fact there is a slight increase a slight decrease in our equalized pupil count by 1%, 1.25% and equalized pupils doesn't translate into kids in seats it's equalized in that certain students get counted as more than one student and other students the little we ones get counted as less than one so it's a sort of a number that doesn't represent actual number of students but 1% roughly is what we're down and that does have a slightly adverse effect when it translates to the property tax adjustment but if this year we're down maybe next year we'll be up you just never know never very much the delta any other questions wow Dan? how much of that is health care because I feel like often these things get pinned down in the school system and what the school system really is is a conduit to the medical system and it's really not there's only so much a school system can do where the cash flows through to health care which Bob has described health care as the tapeworm of America just sucking up all the nutrients on every other industry I think it's pretty accurate and it often gets pinned on schools so maybe how much of that 3.5 is health care you know obviously what I do know is that we've been told by our CFO that the premium goes up about 13% as expected too but what I think he also told me was the big four health care was one of them the big four increases were over a half a million and maybe under a million so I can find out Dan how much but it was substantial I I'm stunned that earth in front of the high school the building that high school was built on the rocks so there's no rock there's no rock well I hope you'll come to the meeting and we can ask those questions and really learn more yeah and it's really hard and then the other thing I wanted to mention is that when we redid I think a million dollars in the air condition in the middle of April and so I'm a little surprised that we would have to spend a lot more down on that I don't know if that's what I heard but I was a little surprised okay Andy have you mentioned equalized spending my understanding is there's a bill in the legislature and there is some effort to modify the formulas to calculate student weighting do you know anything about that I know that the city council does and I see Karen but I also saw Joan Shannon I don't know who did it I wasn't there but somebody introduced a resolution in the city council just last week oh there Joan did and to urge the legislature to take up that matter in this session you know who knows if they'll actually do that but it would be beneficial I'm told substantially beneficial to Burlington I mean I actually I'm not super well educated on this but as I understand it I would love it if you could just give us a little more background or maybe Karen or Joan or others yeah Burlington has a lot of revenue relatively speaking to other towns it comes from payment and move of taxes properties that are owned that are not taxed in the city so we have one challenge which is we're not allowed to tax those landowners who are non-profits the hospital and the university with education taxes so they don't pay into education funding so that's one kind of disadvantage we have the second is that we have a population that includes a lot of new American students who do need English learning support and not only those students but lots of students in our community have trauma in their past and really do need social service support and so we also have those challenges that are part of that funding formula for how expensive students are what equalized the pupil count is so am I right in that we have a couple of kind of structural disadvantages as a community in terms of how much state funding comes into our education I think you've stated it very well because if you know the high needs students right now I think are weighted 1.2 versus 1 but I believe there's a, I've seen it a very substantial report out there you can find that went to the legislature that suggested that weighting those students by 1.2 would be enough it does not reflect the cost of the system it should be higher and I don't remember but anyone can shout out what that higher was oh I see Brian Pine here too but I thought it was somewhere like 1.4 or I'm not sure if they made a specific rate but it would be enough that it would be meaningful very meaningful to our state funding formula and therefore our budget and our tax rates absolutely this is a substantial increase you know in my budget it would be a substantial this is a substantial increase a 7% increase to your property taxes I admit is a substantial if you do not get a discount an income sensitivity adjustment we don't qualify for that this is a tax year when we haven't started to build a new high school I'm just nervous that obviously we want good schools to have good schools but if this is a year where we actually haven't even broken ground on a new high school what are the next couple of years are we looking at 7% for the next three or four years or is this an anomaly or well my sense is that what we're looking at the increase attributable to the high school bonding which I don't think we've drawn down any or much yeah but just for the next fiscal year well it actually starts in July what I was told by our CFO is that we did ask we haven't really started yet do we really need to bond for this do we need to actually go get the money borrow it and the answer was yes we actually because of the timing of when the city raises the money probably at the back end of that fiscal year that we're budgeting for a chunk of money that will be used for the first phase but if your question is well we so the answer is yes that's a chunk but this is a 70 million dollar price yes it will get worse I can't say it will get worse it's not going to go 7777 I don't know what it will go but at some point there's going to be a step where in terms of the bonding we'll have drawn down all the bonding money that I won't be able to say to you oh in next year's budget we're going to be paying more because at that point we'll be the full brunt of the bond payments will kind of cap out and that'll be steady so Jeff we have time for one more minute of question or comment no problem I have a question about special ed you said it said special ed costs were on the rise and you mentioned teachers with masters and what have you not in the scope of all that and with the contracting and everything are you folks considering including paraeducators in that contract process to give them credit for for their education to increase their contracts to have be eligible for retirement benefits well you asked a couple of things and the last thing I guess I'll admit my ignorance that I don't know enough about paraeducator and retirement benefits but I can say that we just begun paraeducator bargaining as well because their contracts have always been kept under a certain amount of hours within the district to not allow them to earn retirement benefits I only know this because I was a para for 16 years so some years it was 22 minutes some years it was 45 minutes under well I'm not yet familiar with any intentional attempt no in the budget I just didn't know because you said that special ed was on the rise I just didn't know if there was any talks about anything like that it's a very good and honest question let's treat people well and is there more of a move towards that direction I hope so I don't support that but obviously consistent with prudent financial management tax increases the music is going to start thanks thank you Jack thank you everyone for your questions and I'm sure Jeff you're available for answers if people want to contact you directly great so one of our goals with this evening's meeting was to make sure that you had a chance to hear in depth about the ballot items that you'll be facing on election day so we've covered the first one which is the school tax and there are three more ballot items and the way we're going to break this down in terms of discussion is we're going to have Michael Monti from Champlain Housing Trust and Brian Pine he's award three city councilor they're going to talk about the housing trust fund assessment so they'll tell you what that's about and then Murrow Weinberger our mayor is here and he's going to talk about the public safety tax and the charter change and for more input if necessary we have fire chief I forget your first name Steve Locke is here so we'll kick off with the housing trust fund assessment discussion and then we will go from there and Brian will head on up here so if you could just introduce yourselves tell us your background and then let us know everything you know about the trust that would be great thank you Brian should go first right Michael so I'm Brian Pine and I serve award three on the city council my knowledge about the trust fund is based on the fact that for years I was the trust fund manager at CEDO and prior to that was part of the group of activists that led to the creation and the ballot question that went to the voters in 1989 you were there so we have that piece of background right up there so what I thought I'd do is briefly try and explain what this question facing the voters is and what it accomplishes and then Michael I thought could talk specifically about what types of uses, how it gets used in the community because it's a critical source so I thought I would just explain that in 1989 the voters of Burlington not overwhelmingly but by enough of a margin to call it a victory approved a penny literally it was the picture it was the penny and it was a penny for housing was the campaign and this was after a few years of federal retrenchment under an administration that went from Reagan to Bush where they did not continue to put federal funding at the level that had historically been put into affordable housing both public housing which was actually discontinued under Ronald Reagan entirely so there has been no new public housing built since then so everything changed and we needed to find some resources in addition to shrinking federal resources there were some other new funding sources coming about at the state level through the Vermont housing and conservation trust fund which was a pioneering way but it never was quite enough but it also never really provided this early what we called kind of risk capital that the city could put forward to a affordable housing developer to allow them to buy a piece of property to hire the engineers and the architects before even knowing for sure that they could develop 10, 20, 30 housing units there 30 homes so the taxpayers approved the penny the problem with the way the ordinance was created it wasn't a charter change the city council ordinance and in doing so didn't lock in that yield from the amount that we were charging ourselves the taxpayers the yield on that amount shrunk essentially in relation to the tax base it had to stay revenue neutral so without going into the detail in the minutiae of it over time the trust fund has not grown a whole lot since it was created in 89 there were I'll give the mayor full credit for this because under his administration the trust fund has seen increases but not due to the tax assessment that was placed in effect in 1989 that has decreased in value and in yield to the trust fund so we've seen it go down hasn't kept up with the penny it's about worth half a penny right now and the mayor's budget has for at least four or five years has increased it to the value of a whole penny so we've been essentially making up for that difference through general fund revenue I think that's probably fair to say what we'd like to do in this proposal what's proposed now is to lock it in at the penny today and have it keep up with growth in the grand list so that the yield will increase as property value increases with that so I think we're estimating it will generate roughly 400,000 I think in year one could be a little bit more because there's some other added sources that may be paying into the trust fund which we can't go into tonight but that's a significant shot in the arm for local affordable housing which lets me hand the mic to Michael thank you so I work I'm Michael Monty I'm chief operating financial officer at Champlain Housing Trust and we work regionally and what I would say is that the housing trust fund example has inspired other communities to establish housing trust funds so right now Willisons on the verge of doing one City of South Burlington has done one is actually trying to increase its funds and other communities like Wynuski I think are beginning to look at it so it's a good thing truth is we don't have enough local funds going into affordable housing we have state funds that does that and the city has some limitations it can use its CDBG funds but the state of Vermont actually has large amounts of CDBG funds and so when we develop affordable housing around Burlington we can go to the state and get a half million dollars while the city doesn't have that money other than the housing trust fund it really makes the difference and we're not the only users COTS is a user Cathedral Square is a user quite a few others have been users Distance House I think used it in the last couple of years Homeshare so a few other programs I think they might have gotten some funds to do the ADUs work is that true other than housing trust fund that was VHS so lots of good work has happened lots of good development has happened as a result of this work in the last two years the housing trust fund distributed about a million dollars plus or minus and that leveraged about 42 million 41 million dollars in other sources and rarely really coming in early often enough a good example is Bright Street Co-op one of the last few lighted areas in the old north end a couple of buildings were for sale the developer was prepared to sell it to us an owner was prepared to sell it to us a trust was prepared to sell it to us we didn't have enough money to sort of operated at a loss while we redeveloped the property trust fund came in gave us $50,000 enabled us for over a couple of years to really get all the money we could do get to redevelop the site and create 40 apartments with the Bright Street Co-op and that's a really great example of early money in, early risk and great opportunity and great results but also big projects so if you went out on North Avenue and you saw the 76 apartments which we just leased up on a Cambrian Rise we call it Laurentide fully leased a range of incomes in that house in that building ranging from people with practically no money to people making 70 or 80,000 a year but the trust fund was a good example of money coming in over two or three year period giving us I think about $300,000 or $400,000 they did the same the trust fund did the same for the Juniper House which is owned by Cathedral Square so two major affordable housing initiatives in Burlington were reliant really fully on the housing trust fund as one of the important sources of funds that it got other than the other kinds of money that we go and get on a regular basis so I think you should support it we just know how to use the money vote yes on number I'm not sure which, do we have an example of that probably not so I don't think we have that number the mayor might know which number it is public safety tax is two housing trust fund three the charter changes I can speak to in a moment or four the TS I saw a hand you said it wasn't made as a charter change at the time it was passed as an ordinance is this a question asking whether it should become a charter change or is it going to remain an ordinance no it would be in our charter which requires that we go to the state legislature to get approval so this wouldn't be the last word on that we're proving that the city goes to the state that's correct it would have to go through the legislature to become in effect and it would be for the following fiscal year so it's not likely that it would be active and is it a two part that asks in the meantime also allow us to bring this back up to Appendia's ordinance no it doesn't do ask doesn't ask both questions so but we accomplished that because like I said the mayor's budget has achieved that but it's really a we want to lock it in we want to lock in that commitment I didn't mention that since the trust fund was created approved in inactive went into effect in 1990 over 1800 housing units either have been created or preserved with that little it's a fairly small contribution when you think of it so for every dollar we've leveraged 40 other dollars so the leverage factor is significant there and yet it's that but for money too because it's usually that critical money that needs to be placed into a project before anybody else believes in it or has confidence that it's going to go forward Brian what is the per square foot cost of the affordable units in Cambrian Rise please total development cost or construction no if I go there and I'm a renter who is underopportuned what would I pay per square foot for a unit? I don't think we calculated it that way but I would say that I could do it in my head if it was just maybe early on in the day maybe you could give me the total cost and the area of the apartments we have some apartments that are available 30% of your income and then we have some people coming in with vouchers who automatically get that and then it ranges and there's like five different income source so it goes from 30% to 50% to 60% 80% and even a little higher so why the range of incomes coming in and you wind up paying 30% of your income or shifting up to I think the median is something like $1,000 or two bedroom including utilities which is a pretty decent price from a market perspective and again if you are lower income there's usually a couple of units that are cheaper than that as well as then we work with you on getting a subsidy to help with your income so and then I think about 50 we made an effort over the years now but also for this property we brought forth 15 people who are homeless into this property immediately and they were just right off right out of the woods right out of a shelter into an orange right so pretty good stories going on at that building How's that going with the folks because you know there's with homeless folks there's constant debate about you got to get them into treatment or you got to get them into housing I've always kind of thought you have to do housing first is that bearing out? So we think housing is sort of a continuum right down here let's say you're homeless and you're in the woods you're going to need you're going to need both a supply a unit you're going to need subsidy because you don't have any money and you're going to need services and if you don't you can't do without supply but often enough if you're very homeless and you're homeless chronically you're going to need services and you're going to need money to help you pay your rent no doubt and then it moves up just like anything else some people who are homeless are economically homeless they're going to be able to sort of come in with maybe a little bit of services maybe a little bit of subsidy but they're going to be able to live on their own so it really ranges right up through that whole process we have hired last year we hired a social worker this year we hired an additional social worker to sort of help us as we are we now have 350 apartments of people who are formerly homeless about 17 or 18% of our apartments are now people who are homeless and so we're finding that we want to make sure that people stay and the only way people are going to stay I think Housing First is good we like to say Housing First and then services really quickly because you really people really need that support especially if they've been not living sort of a regular life in a helmet with a regular apartment knowing how to do it when we do chronically homeless they sleep outside their door because they're not used to being inside there's a whole range of stories that we have but we've been sort of increasing the amount of folks we have who can provide social work to make sure that after we house them we retain they retain our housing and we don't a victim because they don't know how to behave or because they can't figure out how to pay the rent or for whatever reason so we're really really leaning into that quite a good question, great question I just want to say we have five minutes left because I'm a physician and I do addiction treatment in central Vermont and I see patients for pathways Vermont which is a mental health agency that is based on the Housing First model and I can't speak for Burlington but I can tell you that we need both treatment and housing and you need housing that is in a safe environment and away particularly with addiction, away from other people, in pathways they're great for buying housing but it's, you know, they can't afford much and so even if they are trying to get through their addiction they are surrounded by other people who are using and so if they have housing that isn't safe, it's not going to work and the people who have the most success are the people who manage to find housing either outside of town or in an environment where they are surrounded by people who are not going to endanger them anything that, you know, any money that can be put towards creating safe and sober housing so we're about to build 32 beds and 12 units, it's actually an existing building working with Vermont foundations foundations for recovery but it does this now and we're doing that now at the fork it's going to be in Essex and it's going to bring some folks from Burlington out there it's going to be kind of like what you're saying not quite in the middle of everything a little bit far away but still close enough to services and a bus line and everything else and an intentional community of folks who are trying to deal with recovery so we do a lot of special purpose housing and I think the trust fund has supported those kinds of things Dishness House is one of those I love the sound of what you're doing what was that 17% figure I didn't quite understand that 17% homeless I think it might be 18% 18% of war 18% of all of our apartments have folks who are formerly homeless have we covered it sufficiently I think you've done a great job thank you thanks very much Michael and Brian for making the trek in this weather and informing us so here we have the mayor and fire chief to talk about the remaining valid items thank you see somebody out on a slick night and happy to be with you I'll be back here Chief Locke is here if there are technical questions about the public safety tax which is really the main thing I want to talk about but let me try to boil it down actually before I go to the public safety tax let me just make sure it's clear I'm a big supporter of what Michael and Brian were just talking about we see the housing trust fund as a key tool for the city in addition to the examples Michael gave one of the things that we've been able to use the housing trust fund for in recent years people may remember when the Farrington's mobile home park was being sold out on North Avenue a few years ago the residents of that mobile home park mobilized to try to take control of their future purchased the park from the Farrington's and the city was able to move quite quickly with some funds from this trust fund it was a very small part of the overall transaction but as Michael mentioned it was a critical early flexible piece of money that played a significant role in the residents being able to take that action so there now it's really quite an optimistic positive Farrington story of recent years the residents do own it they have reinvested in the community it's in much better shape than it's been in years new energy efficient homes have been brought in it is a pretty good bet that there will be permanently affordable not by regulation but by the nature of the housing these will be very affordable by Farrington standards homes for many years to come came out of the two housing summits that we led down at city hall in 2019 and I am hoping the voters will give a strong support on town meeting day we also are coming forward for a the first increase in the public safety tax since 2005 I believe public safety tax is one of the actually a number of these we sometimes refer to them as splinter taxes you don't see them this way in your tax bill but your municipal tax bill is made up of seven or eight different taxes and one of them is the public safety tax we are what this boils down to fundamentally and it's a little bit more complicated than this as things always are in city government but if you are happy with the level of emergency services ambulance services that the city provides we are at a point where we need to make a new investment to continue that level of service and that's what this increase will allow us to do we have two ambulances currently they are busier every year it has been a consistent trend for a couple decades now that basically every year the number of emergency services calls to the ambulances go up it's a combination of demographic changes changes in the way people use this service some population growth we have gotten the point now with the two ambulances we have where they are both basically as busy as the one ambulance was back about 20 years ago when we went from one to two so we have been you may have seen new stories on this in past years we've been the head of the firefighters association Kyle is here this is something we've been talking with the firefighters for years talking with the chief about we feel we have delayed this basically as long as we can and continue to reliably provide the level of ambulance services that we do today which generally I think Brawlingtonians are happy with which is why we are coming forward with this we think we need to take action if we are going to continue that level of service that's why we are doing it the downside of this is that there is real cost to this of course and it's not really the cost of the ambulance itself it is the cost of having the staff in the ambulance three shifts of two firefighters in each shift plus we have found that if you don't hire additional people for people going out on leave they go out on they have vacation days if you just hire the six we would be spending an enormous amount of overtime to keep those shifts full so this will essentially result in an addition of nine firefighters if this goes forward so that's the kind of bad news on the cost to put this decision in context I'm asking people to take a little bit wider view of this we are very conscious that Brawlingtonians pay high property taxes it's been a real priority for this is the ninth budget I've been responsible for I can't quite believe that but looking out over the course of all nine budgets this is the largest increase that I have brought to you and because we have been very conscious of costs throughout this period and conscious of rising property taxes if you look out over that nine year stretch and I know it may not feel this way but if you look at the cities operating taxes over that nine year period they have risen considerably slower than the rate of inflation we are well below if you just took the if we had just ramped it up each year the taxes the property taxes we use to provide services to the city if you just ramp that up by inflation each year we'd be at a much higher rate than we are currently if this passes and it is a three and a half percent increase if you vote yes on this look at your municipal property tax bill you can count on the municipal piece of it going up by three and a half percent as a result of a yes vote on this even with that three and a half percent increase in this year over that nine year period of time we are below the rate of inflation which I think is an accomplishment when you also consider that it would not just be this expansion of services there have been many other service expansions that have been made during that time and yet we have been able to keep the impact on property tax payers under control I think I will leave it there and open up for questions because I would be interested to hear this is my first time I have been to an MBA and talked about this since we have gone forward with this is the first and interested to hear what people's questions are without doing any endorsement or recommendation as a member of the wards two and three MBA steering committee one thing that was outlined for us was that trouble doesn't know the difference between wards and these new services will be able to serve the northern stretch of the old north end and include that in their service so it is not like a lopped off just for the new north end thing I just wanted to mention that the way this third ambulance will be housed in the new north end which is where that point is coming from the two that we have currently one is at central station and one is at station two which is on the southern part of north avenue this one will be on the northern part of north avenue but I think the way to think of this is by giving the city more capacity you ensure the service will be faster more consistent throughout the city even though this will have an impact on city life I've been living next door since 2002 my taxes were considerably lower I think it was 2004 maybe we went through a reassessment and my taxes doubled and I will pay close to $11,000 gorgeous raised branch it's not a great house but we paid a lot we just heard about a 7.36% increase in school taxes we haven't broken ground on the new high school so I'm assuming there's more cost coming down the way and now of course everything sounds great but it's just so expensive and we're looking at now if we vote yes on everything 11% taxes property taxes plus it's not additive oh it's not additive it's good to know I think that's a helpful clarification so this one we're talking about the public safety tax that would be 3.5% on the municipal piece of your taxes which is about 30% of your total tax bill the school side the projection is this which is a frustrating thing with the school side you never really quite know even until later in the process so many years it's ended up lower than the projections but it's projected so it's the blended rate I'm not sure what it was doing exactly yes and when the assessment happens what is that happening when will that increase I assume there's going to be an increase associated with that so let's talk about that so first of all it will not hit on this coming years tax bill so is the reassessment your first bill under the reassess taxes will be for FY22 which means you'll get the first bill in July of 21 and um you are absolutely right to have questions and uncertainty about what that will mean for your taxes what surprises some people is the cumulative impact of a reassessment is that the city collects no more money it's actually a revenue neutral tax assessment that doesn't mean that people's bills don't change what ends up happening is if certain types of properties of certain neighborhoods if the residential sector has appreciated faster than the commercial sector then the total costs of the taxes get reallocated and can see a certain sector shift upwards shift down also properties that you know haven't been currently the assessment is based on a very old sale or transaction that's where the city's assessment is based on and then something has happened in the interim those can see a big jump but some people actually see their taxes go down I wanted to make this about me last time I bought my house for $200,000 and it was reassessed for $400,000 two years later and then you had a deal and then the economy crashed two years after that it's an expensive place to live it's lovely but I'm assuming that we have lost the center of Burlington so we have the tax burden that's going to be higher let's talk about that too no that is not correct they are paying taxes they are paying a you're talking about the city place so they have been since the mall was built one of the two largest property taxpayers in the city when they took the property down they are paying about 25% less than they were paying before their property tax payment though interestingly all goes into the tax increment financing district it basically does not their property taxes don't fund city operations until the TIF district expires I know it gets very wonky but the point is there's been zero impact on the general fund from the modest decrease in taxes that they are paying during this period point number two is the city they missed all their deadlines and they have not performed under the agreement we have with them and they are coming back for an amendment to that agreement so they can get going again now with this revised project and I intend to hold them to the point that we had agreed to let them go forward they made a promise of continuous construction they have not met the agreement of continuous construction they have paid the city about a half a million dollars in costs by failing to perform to do what they committed to do they have been paying all of our legal fees all of our development consultant fees through the last two years that we have the money we have had to pay because of their failure I am looking to them to make us whole for the impact on the TIF district as well that the delays have caused we actually sat down and started negotiating that and we don't they had the right reaction to me raising this there is also this notion out there that the loss of those shops must mean that we have had a huge hit on our other taxes sales taxes, gross receipts that too is not the case I am looking forward to the fourth quarter of gross receipts taxes to come out because what it looked like to the first three quarters is the greatest the highest amount of gross receipts taxes that we have ever received I believe was in 2019 although that for sure when the fourth quarter is out the city has is very healthy and very strong despite the fact that we are going through this transition and so that is not your property taxes are too high you are absolutely right about that it is shocking to talk to friends in other parts of the country and compare property taxes there is some big structural reasons for that are challenging I have the part of that that I have the most control over is the municipal side which again is about 30% of the the bill you get and we I really think have been quite disciplined about that and I think that is what you want me to do I don't think you want me to come forward and never if we don't ever ask for property tax increases we will not be able to maintain the level of services we have it just doesn't work that way this is another point that a lot of people wouldn't intuitively know is other levels of government, state government, federal government the main revenues are taxes that rise consistently with inflation if you think about it your sales taxes go up because the cost of goods rises over time that is the whole concept of inflation income okay, great I will wrap this up income taxes incomes generally rise over time and the state and federal governments their revenues go up with those increases property taxes we only see an increase in the property tax revenues when we come to you with an item like this and you approve it or when there is real growth real investment in the city having a parking lot building on it there isn't as much as that as people think either let me just make sure if I lose this floor here I want to very briefly touch on the other item which is should not be controversial should help us solve a problem people may remember a few times in recent elections when something very confusing has happened maybe you have been caught up with it you may have requested your ballot in the mail and you got a ballot and you fill it out and you set it back in and then you got another ballot from the city what is going on there what has happened there is we have had up until now different deadlines for the state and federal elections versus the local elections and that has created this kind of perverse situation where by law we've had to send out the state and federal ballots earlier than the local ballot has been ready then we've been allowed to print the local ballot by statute we're trying to fix that for the fall elections we're harmonizing those deadlines it does mean people have to get in their petitions a couple weeks earlier but it addresses that issue once every four years like a year like this when we have a presidential election we may still have a conflict in the town meeting day elections but this will make things much better and eliminate some of those problems thank you very much mayor for coming here tonight and clarifying those ballot items for us our two city counselors are here Karen Paul has generously donated her time on this agenda to the mayor to make sure that he could talk about these items but we brought Joan all the way from the south end of the south district so she's going to get a few minutes to tell us about what's happening on council issues I think I'm actually the west end of the south district but so there was a few things to talk about staying on the tax theme I've been trying to kind of figure out I just want people to be aware that we are going through reassessment I contacted our assessor to kind of try and get an idea of how this part of town is going to be affected by reassessment the reassessment is we're supposed to have a new assessment by April 1st 2021 so just a little more than a year away and then we will have a bill reflecting that reassessment in July 2021 so the average differential between our property values and market value we're supposed to be at market value so that's what's called the CLA for the education tax purposes is about 72% I think the last time they reported was 75% but we continue our real estate prices continue to go up so we continue to increase that differential so he says it's about 72% and I had him do a calculation for not just ward 6 but basically south of main street and he said that the average difference most of the properties that have sold have been between 50% and 80% of market value so if you're at 80% of market value you would actually in theory see a tax decrease if you're 50% you're going to see a tax increase and in addition to that we do have according to the SF sir 7.12 cents that is not revenue neutral so there are a few taxes that are not revenue neutral including the housing trust fund tax that we're voting on an average house in this part of town is the market value is about $460,000 so it's not roughly 72% of that so once in tax would be $46 on a $460,000 assessment most of our assessments right now would be less than that but you can also look up your assessment is on your tax bill on the city website as well I also wanted to talk about Burlington telecom because we are now at the point where we get to decide if we're going to have a carried interest in Burlington telecom and I did put that out on from porch forum and invited you to give me feedback and I've gotten some not a whole lot but I think that there are three elements that you know that should be considered in making the decision the first is that the reinvestment that we're talking about is $2.4 million which gets us a 7.5% interest in the company and it gets us one seat on the board and the board is seven people right? so the question I'm asking myself is this the best use for $2.4 million of city money is this as an investment is this is there a reasonable expectation that we're going to really increase the value of that investment over time? There's some people think we'll get our $17 million back by reinvesting this $2.4 million I am more skeptical than that I don't think we're getting $17 million back and I'm pretty sure how good an investment is but perhaps there are people in this room that are better judges of that than I am so give me your feedback and then in terms of the influence we would have one seat on the board I don't have a lot of clarity on how that seat is appointed yet and I don't think we haven't really had those discussions but this is a private company so those board discussions are private and the other members of that board would be the local manager and a lot of people from the parent company who are currently on the board are you cutting me off already? No, I can tell you Oh, okay It's 8.30 So no questions tonight? So if you would like to ask Joan questions I bet that she would stand back there in the room and answer any questions that you have I'm sorry Joan to cut you off What did you pitch the ward 6 clerk? Yes, Amy Bovee and you would not believe the response everyone in this room raised their hand yes look at this amazing everyone here is working at the polls on March 3rd it's amazing so yeah before we end this evening I just want to acknowledge Karen Paul for a couple things one that she worked very hard to get our representatives from BT here as well as Vermont Gas that didn't quite pan out how we had hoped but thank you Karen for all your efforts and also for leafletting your streets and streets in this neighborhood in this ward to make sure that folks affected by the BT non-service status were aware of this meeting also Karen is up for re-election so she has waged a campaign against actually no one but if you'd like to know more about what she's got on her mind in terms of the council and the city there's a blue newsletter at the back of the room that you could pick up so I want to thank everyone for being here tonight Andy Anna the music was amazing thank you all for participating and you know we have all this food that was made by the Burlington food project which works with youth and local food producers to create healthy meals for students and for people in the community who use their catering services which we did this evening so if you want to take some food home grab a plate, pile it up take this food home so we don't have to deal with it alright thank you all