 So being six o'clock on Monday, May the 21st, 2019, we'll call it order the Winooski City Council meeting and ask that everybody please start by standing and joining us for the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Nicole Mace. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, so first up tonight is a gender review. This is an opportunity for Council to make any adjustments to tonight's agenda based off of needs, something moving around. I think we kind of try to stack things up so we could get through a few items and then get to items where there are people in attendance and then we'll get to the items where we think there'll be a lot of probably public participation as well. Any questions or concerns in regards to the agenda? So seeing and hearing none, we'll move forward with the agenda as presented. So next up tonight is public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the public to address Council on any items that are not currently scheduled to be covered on tonight's agenda. Tonight's agenda is in the back if you've got any questions about what we're going to talk about tonight in terms of formal items. This is also a reminder too that we appreciate you taking the time to be sure to sign in. And if you do that on your way out, that's okay. We just ask that you please try to remember to do so. It's great for us to have a record from a public attendance standpoint of who was at the meeting. So we'll open it up and see if there's anybody who has items for public comment that are not currently scheduled to be covered on tonight's agenda. Going once, going twice, hear one coup back there. Okay. So with that, we'll move on to tonight's consent agenda. We have four items on tonight's consent agenda. We have the approval of the city council looker control minutes from May 7th, 2018. We have the warrants ending in 518, 2018 in the payroll period also going to 5, 5, 2018. Subscribe to payout for April. We also have the grant acceptance for the Vermont Department of Education 21st Century Community Learning Center grant, which was covered in the last discussions around O'Brien Community Center slash the learning opportunities that we're trying to bring to the community. And also approval of the wastewater treatment plant generator boiler replacement, the electrical contract portion of that work, which is really formalized as the projects are approved. Any questions from council in regards to the consent agenda? Good. Any questions or concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing none, I entertain a motion for approval of the consent agenda as presented. Motion by Nicole, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. Consent agenda is approved as presented. Just a note tonight, if we do have any votes that are not unanimous to Eric, we'll pause and do a roll call vote as part of adherence to the council procedures and the recommendations from the Secretary of State. Okay. So next up is city update. Great. Thank you. I have quite a few updates tonight. First, I want to start by celebrating Janet, who's celebrating her 28th year with the city of New Ski today. Nowadays, they don't even let people start jobs at two years of age. That's amazing. Okay. So a couple of things. Just a reminder that June 2nd, we will be having our council retreat with our leadership team from 9 to 1 PM at the OCC. Staff have met and put together a set of recommendations and we will be sending that out to you in memo form by this Friday, so you'll have a week to review it before the June 2nd retreat. And of course, that's an open meeting and anyone is welcome to attend. We have Paul Sarn, our communications coordinator, has been reviewing our website RFP responses. We got a dozen responses to the RFP we put out and have come to a finalist and we will be bringing that recommendation to you at your next regular council meeting. We're really excited. We got great responses and I think it will be a big service improvement to modernize the city's website. If you were driving down West Alland today, you saw a DPW truck and a big flag. This week is Public Works Week nationally and in conjunction with the New England chapter for APWA, we are doing a fill a public works truck event to benefit the Wyniewski food shelf. So all week this week and on Saturday, there will be a public works truck part just out front of the City Hall here in front of the food shelf. Come drop off donations, everything goes to the Wyniewski food shelf and thank you to John Rusher for bringing that to us. We have a lot of events coming up in the next couple of weeks before our next council meeting. So Wednesday night at 6.30 at the senior center is the annual volunteer appreciation dinner. We look forward to seeing many people there. As we were talking about before, the Memorial Day Parade will be held on this Saturday the 26th, meet at 11 at the high school parking lot to line up and then the parade kicks off at noon down Main Street. The Fish Chowder Championship will be held at the Riverwalk on Saturday as well and the Wyniewski Farmers Market kicks off its annual season on Sunday, this coming Sunday from 10 to 2. The City is co-sponsoring the Wyniewski portion of Discover a Jazz Fest this year thanks to Craig Mitchell and his amazing work. So that will run from June 1st through June 10th. There will be a whole series of events happening both in Rotary Park and in restaurants throughout town. And our first Wyniewski Wednesday, which will be June 2nd, Wednesday after Memorial Day will be in partnership with the Discover a Jazz Fest. So hopefully it will be a beautiful night as it was last year and lots of people will come out to that. A couple of things on the administrative front. We are moving forward after approval of ICMARC. At the last council meeting, we are moving forward with that. That is an improved retirement benefit package for employees. We anticipate the completion of that transition to happen in September where it is quite a lengthy process to move everyone over. We talked last time also about trainings for staff. We have a couple more trainings coming up before the end of the fiscal year including mandatory respect in the workplace training and a supervisory training for leadership team and managers. I did want to talk about two controversial issues. Just briefly, rats. We have been seeing a lot of communication on front porch forum about rats. Please remember, the city cannot do work on private property. So to the extent that you are finding rats on your property, we recommend that you think about how to limit the nesting opportunities and food opportunities for them being consultation with pest control if that is necessary. Do think about options that are best for you. We would encourage you also to look at your homeowner's insurance policies. Often, homeowner's insurance policies will cover rodent removal. So think about that. What you really want to make sure of is that there aren't good places for rats to nest on your property and that your trash and compost is in sealed containers. We might hear from Sarah about some of that in her presentation as well. Finally, we are going to be talking about the Weaver Street cycle track pilot and the agenda as part of the Main Street agenda item. I know that we have started marking that out on Weaver Street and it looks aggressive and it's starting to get a lot of attention. I want to remind everyone that that is a pilot project. That was a result of a lot of conversation during the Main Street revitalization project. Heard strongly from the cycle community that they were interested in a cycle track, a two-way bike track. So we are piloting that for 10 days only on Weaver Street and the idea of putting something out there for the community to respond to. There will be lots of opportunities to provide feedback on if people like or don't like that through online surveys, opportunities directly with staff, as well as our partners CCRPC and local motion on that effort. We can talk more about that now or later on as part of the Main Street as well. There will be a community meeting tomorrow night at 6 o'clock at St. Francis School to talk more about what that pilot looks like and the purpose behind it and how feedback will be collected. And that, I think, is all I have. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, we'll move over to council reports now. Let's start. Christine, into the table. I don't have any new updates for this time. Neither do I. We've got a lot going on. I think we've got a pretty busy agenda tonight, so I'll save updates to interweave in these items. Eric, would you like to add anything? Yes. So I think also along the rules of the procedure and guidance from our Secretary of State, I'm just supposed to introduce myself for any folks listening in. So this is Eric Pavey. The only council report I would have is that the Public Safety Commission does have a special meeting that was called for tomorrow night. And that's coming out of, at the previous meeting, the commission met with Warren Sampson from the Planning Commission to discuss the master plan. So they're having a meeting tomorrow night to kind of go over their internal thoughts on the public safety aspects that will go into the master plan. So if any folks can attend and help them, you know, provide some community input into that process, that'd be fantastic. Thank you. I think just building off that I should maybe state that is that the Planning Commission has assigned a member now to really be the liaison to the different areas of commissions and other, even the school has assigned a liaison to be the person who helps bring the message of what's needed from the Planning Commission to those groups and help bring the information back that's going to go into the plan. So I think you'll see members of the Planning Commission being dispersed in some of those other meetings, and that's the thinking and reasoning behind that. So I'm trying to create that great communication connection as we move into the planning process. So, okay. So with that, I think we'll turn back towards our regular items and we'll open first with item A, which is discussion of the Chittin Solid Waste District Annual Budget. Welcome. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time. I'm Sarah Reeves. I am the general manager for the Chittin Solid Waste District. And first off, I'd like to thank our commissioner, Ted Regular, for his service. Ted is stepping off the board, as you know, this year. And I want to thank Ted for all the work that he has done and the contributions he's made to the district and his attendance. And we are thrilled to bring Oak Leaf, not only as an alternate, but hopefully stepping up soon to be full commissioner. So we are thrilled to have Bryn involved. The Chittin Solid Waste District is a municipality we created because of Act 78 to implement solid waste management mandates that were legislated by the state of Vermont. They function much like a school or a water district in that the Solid Waste District is a government entity that designs regional solutions to the solid waste challenges faced by our member towns. The district encompasses Chittin County and we are the largest solid waste district in the state. We currently serve a population of approximately 156,000 people and over 6,000 businesses. We are governed by a board of commissioners who are volunteers appointed by local select boards and city councils. Our mission is to reduce and manage the solid waste generated within the district in an environmentally sound, efficient, effective, and economical manner. We currently employ just over 50 employees in five main departments, administration, finance, facilities, unregulated hazardous waste, and outreach and communication. We also manage or operate five types of facilities, drop-off centers, the environmental depot, the rover, the materials recovery facility, and Green Mountain compost. And I'd like to present just a very high-level, 30,000-foot view of the budget, and then I would like to open it up for questions and comments and concerns. I did make note of two issues that we're just spoken about, so I will touch on those as well. In our general fund, we are budgeting revenues in the amount of $11,131,561. We are budgeting expenses in the amount of $10,597,613. And we are looking at a very heavy capital year this year. We're looking to spend approximately $1,755,000, and I'll talk about more of what the bulk of that is in the minute as well. We are not proposing any increases to the solid waste management fee. We need a $27 a ton. We are also not proposing any increases at this time to the trash fees at the drop-off centers, nor are we recommending any municipal assessments such as per capita fees. And also the fees at Green Mountain compost are not scheduled to increase. We raised the tipping fee last year to $52 a ton, and it will stay at that rate for this year as well. We did just recently, as in May 1, increase the tipping fee at the materials recovery facility. We raised the in-district, meaning the Chittenden County rate from $21 a ton to $25 a ton, and then we raised the out-of-district fee to $50 a ton. That is in direct relation to what is happening in China. And I'm happy to talk more about that as well. Everyone in the country and the world is being affected by what they're doing, so we are not unaffected here in Vermont. And we do anticipate the tipping fee to grow up again probably in the fall, or maybe even in the mid-summer. But our board will be talking about that over the next few weeks. And the reason that we need to raise the tipping fees are revenues at the MRF are relying upon both tipping fees, which are the fees that we charge the haulers when they come and bring the materials, the blue bin materials to the facility to be sorted, and on the sale of materials that are sorted out after we go through them all. And there's been a huge impact globally on mixed paper. So everyone who deals in mixed paper has seen revenues drop, not even just drop, plummet. We were receiving approximately $75 a ton maybe in revenue last August, and we are now paying $57 a ton to move mixed paper. So because mixed paper is approximately 35 to 37% of what we process at the MRF, that has meant that's been a huge, huge hit to revenues at the MRF. So again, I'm happy to talk more about that if you like. The administrative fee for our biosolids program also did increase this year, and that's a result of both how we decided to reallocate our expenses across all of the budgets, but also representing a capital investment, major capital investment in that program too. And finally, we are finally going to be charging for blue bins. Not many communities still use the little blue bins. Most have carts, and we've never charged for them. They've always been an expense. So we will now be charging $5 a bin. They cost us about $5.62 or 3 cents, so it's still a little bit subsidizing a bin, but we're now going to be trying to recover the cost of those blue bins. So I mentioned two issues that I will touch on, and I'm happy to talk more about if you like. One is the rad issue in composting and backyard composting. The General Assembly is still working on Equin 48. There were several bills that were going back and forth at the General Assembly this session, and what happened this time was that they maintained the food scrap landfill ban at 2020. That is still in place, so by July 1, 2020, anyone who generates food scraps will need to find a way to keep them out of the trash. Now, that can be backyard composting. It can be dropping food scraps off at a drop-off center. You can drop it off at the Green Mountain Compost, depending on your agreement with the cell waste treatment plant. Some communities do allow garbage disposal. Some do not, so that is something to consider as well perhaps. But it does not say in law that you must backyard compost. So I want to make sure that everyone knows that there are some options, but that did stay in place. What got pushed back also to July 1, 2020 was the requirement that haulers offer the service. They don't have to actually provide it, but they do at this point will have to offer it starting July 1, 2020. Kind of makes sense when people need to keep it out of the trash, that the haulers at that point would need to offer it. So that's where the law stands as of today. Could it change next year? Sure, so stay tuned. But for right now, that ban is still in place. So as far as any current issues that possibly could be related to backyard composting with rats, CSWD does provide workshops, community workshops, at no charge, and we would be happy, more than happy, to host a workshop here. We'll need to get a series of them. The city does have a community cleanup fund, and you would go through, bring for that for projects, and maybe it could be something along the lines of hands-on, best practices, how to compost in the backyard. We've done a lot of work with urban composting as well, as far as people who do live in urban areas. There are some adjustments that you might want to make to your bins, so we can talk about that as well. A whole host of technical assistance that we can provide, again, at no cost to our member communities at all. So I do want to make sure that you're aware that we have some of those resources for you. Certainly you can contact, just can reach out to me, you can talk to anybody at, even at Green Mountain Compost, and we have a whole education crew who works on these issues. And you also mentioned your master plan, your comprehensive plan. We also are happy to provide feedback or technical assistance on any of the components in the comprehensive plan that may deal with Salloway's recycling, composting, even if it's just a check. Does this meet the state requirements? Are you planning anything that we need to know about? Can you take a look at our wording on something like that? Whether it's with multifamily recycling, could be event recycling, whatever you may want to include in your master planning and comprehensive plan. If you want to have a take a look at it, we're happy to do so. I'd love to open up to questions, any questions you may have. First of all, welcome. Thank you. More globally than just tonight, but in general. Thank you. Where did you come from? A little bit about you if you don't mind. Sure, sure, sure. Sorry, I just launched right into my own little spiel in my own little world. No, that's okay. I'm in year two being here and being the general manager for CSWD and I grew up in Rhode Island. So my family moved up here for this job. So this is a great opportunity. I've worked in the solid waste industry for almost 15 years now. So just prior to coming here, I managed to recycling half of Rhode Island New Social Care Corporation, which is Rhode Island's owner of the landfill and the one Murph, the one landfill, the one HHW, and I ran the recycling half of that business. It was also a similar agency to CSWD. For that I worked for a town and I was a recycling coordinator for the town of Smithfield, Rhode Island, and before that I worked for the Sierra Club. So I've got some advocacy, some educational outreach. I've got municipal hands-on. If you wanted a bin, I brought the bin to your house. That was me. I was the bin lady. So I brought your bins and then moving up to statewide policies. So I was responsible again for the operations of the Murph. So physical plant operations as well as outreach education, PR, legislative, I was the lead legislative advocate for the corporation grant writing. I co-wrote the master plan. Anything that needed to be done when it came to recycling and diversion and resource recovery? I did. And then a job opened here, as you know, took over Tom Moreau and my husband got a job teaching at Casselton University. I got a job up here and we moved the family up and the dog. Some things we do is in great hands. We had an awesome relationship with Tom. I always appreciated seeing him. Sometimes even more than once a year, but anything that comes up. For a small town too, we tend to be, number one, pretty vocal. And we have a long history of, quite frankly, a lot of haulers originate here. Yes. From a just general perspective. So there's a lot of, I would say, sensitivity in the community too to that as well. And just a reminder for folks, all the communities get these presentations and also vote. Where are you in terms of your sort of larger schedule in terms of how it's going? Yeah. So this is a big week. I have six presentations this week. So three tonight. And then three more the rest of this week. So you're about in the middle. Okay. Yeah. So we, our board approved the budget to go out to you all on April 25th. So from there, it's 45 days that our member communities have to either approve the budget as presented or to take no action. And therefore that's a yes vote. Or to deny it and reject it. And if it's rejected, then the whole process starts all over. Yeah. So. Yeah. Thank you. And bring two thanks for all of your time and your volunteer for this new passion. I appreciate your energy there too. I think the only technical question that I had in reading it was in the past years, we've had a lot of conversations around the past couple of years. The rate stabilization. Yes. I'm finding it looks like that's being spent down with an expectation and FY 20 rate pairs could expect to maybe not see that helps subsidize rates and just wondering kind of generally what the, how, how the projection forward is going on that. Certainly. So we have several, not several, two main race stabilization funds. We have the drop off center, restabilization fund, and then we have the solver's management fee rate stabilization fund. So what you, where you saw the drawdown is on the, the docs, the drop off centers. And that was a planned drawdown. So if you recall several years ago, probably the last budget that Tom presented to you, we did what was called a double bump. So we raised the fees at the drop off centers a little bit more than we normally might in the hopes that we will be able to put money into the stabilization fund and maintain that rate for several years, which we did. So we knew that we would have in year one more than we needed, put that extra money into the stabilization, didn't draw down on that obviously there. Last year, it was expected that we would remain equal level, which we did with the expectation that we would draw down the balance this year for fiscal 19, which we will. So most likely in fiscal 20, there will be some free adjustment. And we don't know, and actually what we're doing right now, we're just planning a retreat. We're planning a drop off center retreat for board and staff coming up in the next few weeks. So part of that retreat will be to talk about free schedule, other items that we're taking now that are costing us more money that can maybe go elsewhere. Are there, you know, do we have enough drop off centers? Do we have too many drop off centers? Are they configured properly? Are there not? So we'll be having to be part of the conversation. This always management fee is kind of a good problem to have and a bad problem to have. We are not looking to increase that. We're in, I think year four, possibly going into five of not having to increase that fee because we're throwing away a lot of trash in the county. So that fee is directly related to the amount of trash that is disposed of Coventry at the landfill. So because there's been an excess of tons disposed, we've seen an excess in expectations of the revenue that's always management fees, so therefore we don't have to raise it. There's enough money in that reserve to stabilize that fee. Right, in the year's path, I feel like we've seen the graph with the trash steadily dropping. So is it, it's going the other way? Going the other way, yeah. So the recycling tons are staying relatively the same. The volumes keep going up. Which is interesting. And the tons are staying about the same because it takes more water bottles to make a queue now than it did 10 years ago. Almost one and a half times because the water bottles and other packaging is becoming thinner and lighter. So there's a lot more of it. So you have numbers, but the weight is the same. So even though the weight is staying the same, we're handling a lot more material. And on the trash, my board asked me this every month, why are the numbers going up? And it can be any number of things. We actually are, Steve, you do see some correlation between waste disposed and consumer confidence. And, you know, the economy is pretty good in Chittenden County from that perspective. People are feeling comfortable throwing things away and buying new or not fixing. So we know we need to do more work on waste reduction efforts, particularly when it comes to things like paper. We want to reduce the amount of junk mail that's going into our MRF so we can reduce our exposure there. We need to have maybe some fix-it cafes on a regular basis to get people back in the habit of fixing things. Reuse. So we need to dig into those numbers a bit more and see if it truly is just related to consumer confidence. I think there are other factors, but it's something that I turn my education team on. The questions? Yeah, I wanted to ask if you, regarding the Act 148, if CSWD is like already on par to take that on, or if you're expecting any changes as presumably a greater volume of people begin composting. Yeah, so great question. And so where Act 148 was basically, it was passed in 2012 and they anticipated eight years to fully implement all of the items within Act 148. And CSWD had already, we were overachievers for a long, long time, right? So we had already accomplished many of what was required by Act 148 with the last piece being organics. So at Green Mountain Compost, we are also in the midst of taking a look at the capacity there to make sure that we are structured properly to be able to receive all the tons that we anticipate being generated within Chittin County. Right now 90% of the tons coming into Green Mountain Compost originate in Chittin County. So we want to make sure that we have enough capacity for our members. So that's what we're doing now. We're looking at efficiencies and we're looking at the layer, we're looking at the product line, we're looking at everything to make sure that we have the ability to accept the food scraps that are generated here. And to make great quality compost out of that. So right now we're taking in about maybe 56 or 5,700 tons of food scraps a year. That is far outpacing where we thought we would be right now. So we are at capacity for our site currently. So this is why we're looking at, okay, what do we need to do? And we have ramped that up. So by taking all of this year, this upcoming year, and then in fiscal 2020, we'll most likely be implementing whatever the changes are to ensure we have enough capacity to meet that deadline for fiscal 2020. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions from Council? Any other questions, concerns from the public? And I'll say the same thing. I think we say every year it's always a bit intimidating, especially for your first round of council to get handed a multi-million dollar budget that's designed by other folks in these. But what I would always encourage, especially new councillors to do is feel free to make yourself familiar with our representatives who we entrust to be more engaged in that process than we would ever have the capacity to do just frankly from the seats that you're sitting in. So I'm glad to know we've been in great hands with your representation and appreciate all your work and know and trust that if there are big issues, we'll get flagged too. So thank you for all your time and help on that. So I have a related question but not for you actually for the city. That I don't believe, I was actually looking at our ordinance recently due to a resident complaint I heard about, but I don't think that we have compost guidance in there and that maybe that's something that we need to be updating in advance of this that perhaps you can advise us on. Absolutely, we're happy to. And I think the answer is understood and you're correct. Yes. So it's something we do recognize and have flagged as this needs to be addressed. So a great point. Thank you. So it's not just you guys that have worked to do ahead of that. So we've got you on this discussion. So we'll vote on that next go around. Make sure you get it in time and appreciate your time and coming today. Thank you very much. Appreciate your work. Appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. Next up is item B which is approval. The Wolfscar area event permit application. This is now a long running familiar event for the city. So that's a good thing. Yeah. This will be the fourth year. Actually. So awesome motive has submitted the application and the annual Wolfscar air out event on Saturday, August 4th, 2018. This is a gathering of high end show cars and it's proposed to be held on Manuski Falls way. It requires closure of the street between Cascade way and the circulator from 3pm until 10pm. Staff reviewed the application at the April 18th event review meeting and we established the conditions that are included in your memo. We recommend approval for the application. So you guys, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. You guys are the organizers and you guys great job. This is one of those events, the first year or two that we issued permits was a little rough because some stuff flew in at the last second and appreciated in the last two years. It seems like it's really smoothed out in terms of them knowing what they want to do from an execution standpoint. And in their forum they put that people would need to use public restrooms. And I don't think that we have any necessarily, like I think that's just businesses, essentially. What we've done in the past, and we just recently went through this with the farmers' market, we have people reach out to the downtown association about the bus stop restroom and also about the possibility of using Champlain mill restrooms, but they'll also have Porta John's there. Okay. Any other questions, concerns from council? Who wants the application? Any questions, concerns from the public? So, seeing and hearing none, I entertain a motion for approval of the Wolff-Sgar event permit application. So moved. Second. Motion by Nicole, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries event permits approved as presented. Thank you. And then we'll keep going on that theme. Item C is Winooski Memorial Day parade event permit application. Yeah, so this is a long standing event in Winooski. The VFW has submitted an application to hold the Memorial Day parade on Saturday, May 26. This event involves the closure of Main Street between Tygan and Maple Street for the duration of the parade. Formation will be at 11 AM at the high school and step off is at noon. The parade will end at the VFW where a ceremony and barbecue will follow. City Council is invited to participate in the parade and the ceremony and barbecue as well. We reviewed the application on February 21. We've been part of meetings at the VFW to do the planning and we recommend approval of the event. Great. And for those participating in that, or if you decide to come, number one, don't throw baseballs or anything named before, you're going to have to throw candy. Number two, we have candy locked down, so that's ready to go. Step off is at noon, so it's advised to get there 15 or 20 minutes beforehand for organizational purposes. And that's again in the school parking lot. I don't know if you have any questions from the Council or participation standpoint. Any questions or concerns from Council? Any questions or concerns from the public? Okay, so seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. For support of the Winooski Memorial Day Parade. Or excuse me, let me entertain a motion first, Eric. Can you mute yourself? I would entertain a motion for approval of the Memorial Day Parade event permit application. So moved. Second. Motion by Christine, second by Nicole. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you, Heather. And then we have item D approval of the appointment for a Chinning County Regional Planning Commission representative and alternate. So the next three items are actually related to CCRPC annual appointments. So this one, item D for our representative and alternate to the CCRPC Board, Michael O'Brien, former mayor Michael O'Brien and current chair of the Winooski Planning Commission has served as our representative and is interested in continuing to serve. And then Abby Blithing, who currently is on the Planning Commission, the Winooski Planning Commission is interested in serving as the alternate. We recommend appointment of those two. Can't say enough about both. Abby is a professional planner, just a proof of the Planning Commission designated her already to be the liaison there. So having her attend those meetings in the capacity of alternate only made sense. Traditionally, my positions set on one role or the other. But I'm involved enough with CCRPC in the planning process here. I think it's important that we develop some other people with that knowledge and have a different and frankly, technically proficient voice at the table. I think Abby really brings that and you know, Mike's seat at the Planning Commission level, I think it's important to maintain that view. He's done a lot of great work with CCRPC, including being their chair in the past. So can't say enough about both of them for stepping up. Questions or concerns regarding those appointments? Council, any questions or concerns from the public? Okay, so seeing and hearing none, I entertain approval for Michael O'Brien to serve as the city of Winooski's Regional Planning Commission representative and for Abby Blyling to serve as the alternate. That's a move. Motion by Christine, second by Nicole. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, I'll please say hi. Hi. And those opposed? Motion carries. All right. And item E, approval for appointment of the TAC Committee or the Transportation Advisory Committee. So the next two are slightly different, whereas the CCRPC Board is kind of policy-setting board of that organization. The next two are technical advisory committees that traditionally staff have held positions on, because it's a really coordination role between the regional planning, the regional transportation plan or water plan and how we're implementing that at the local level. So for the Transportation Advisory Committee, we are recommending the appointment of our Public Works Director, Jonathan Rauscher, as the representative, and Ryan Lambert, our project manager, as the alternate. In the absence of appointments in the recent months, they both haven't been attending the TAC and are up to speed on the activity of the TAC. Questions or concerns from Council? Any questions or concerns from the public? Seeing and hearing none, I retain a motion for approval of the said representatives for the Regional Planning Commission's Transportation Advisory Committee. Second. Motion by Christine Second, minor Cole, any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you for your service, Jonathan. Ryan, appreciate it. Great to have that technical or technical lens at the table for the City too. I think that's going to be a good day. All right, item F, we are appointment of the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission's Clean Water Advisory Committee with the CWAC. So again, this is a technical advisory committee that lays on between the regional plan for clean water wastewater treatment and what we do here at the Winooski Wastewater Treatment Plant and here to our permit requirements. So Tim Grover, our equipment operator at the treatment plant has served as our representative and John Cho, our utility manager, has served as our alternate. We both appreciate and enjoy finding the rules useful and we recommend that they are reappointed. Questions or concerns for Jesse regarding those two proposals? Any questions or concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing none, I entertain a motion for approval for appointment to the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission's Clean Water Advisory Committee from Tim Grover as primary and John Cho as alternate. Second. Motion by Nicole, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you to everybody for their willingness to step up and serve. Appreciate it. Okay, item G, discussion of Myers-Pool, preliminary engineering and cost projection review. So I would assume everyone was here for the CCRPC appointments, but maybe not. So while Ray gets set up here, I just wanted to give a little history and background on where we've been with the Winooski Pool Project just to kind of set the stage for the conversation tonight. So before me under Ray and Deeks leadership, the pool committee in 2016 and 17 went through a visioning process after the closure of the pool, put together with community feedback, and a recommendation for what they want to see re-built at the pool. I think many of you in the room were involved in that process. In November of 2017, we got approval to spend about $90,000 of fund balance to do the preliminary engineering to bring that vision of what the community want to see in a pool start into technical detail. So really understand from an engineering perspective what that was going to cost to the community. That was that preliminary engineering plan was originally presented to the Community Services Commission, the pool committee over this past winter, and then brought to the council in April and then again in March 1st and then again in April as a result of follow-up questions. So tonight Ray's here again to present some answers to questions council had at the last discussion and lay out next steps. I think just as a reaction to some commentary we've heard, I want to be clear that the council in their last several meetings has asked us to look at cost per item of the pool and that was really to understand the true cost of each of the elements and what could be leveraged from fundraising revenues and what could be leveraged from general fund revenues. I don't at no time yet has the council taken any votes to scale back the project from the community vision perspective. We're just trying to understand the full cost of the project and what are those revenue triggers or polls we could make to make this an affordable project for the community. So I will stop with the overview and let Ray talk through the answers to the questions asked by the council. Table setting, thank you. And awesome to see a big crowd here tonight. It's making me realize I maybe didn't need to get a babysitter actually. There's a lot of small citizens here, which is very cool to see. So yeah, as Jesse said, the memo that went out to council was in response to some fairly detailed questions that came out of that second follow-up meeting back at the beginning of April. So I think if this flow works for you kind of walk through that, those responses and then kind of let questions flow from there. So I think the first piece that kind of came up in the context there, just to refresh memories, at that meeting it presented, I believe it was five different potential models for what that pool financially could look like, one being as presented from the preliminary engineering just without touching it, and then with several tiers of fundraising or outside funding attached to that. At that meeting, people did ask at the council table for some more detailed looks at, you know, if you were to take, and I know this term was not a popular one, but for lack of a better one, sort of luxury items or items that in the perspective of the group could be fundraised more easily, out of the pool of money that's going to be impacted by the tax or impact the tax rate, what would that look like? So that was the exercise that I went through here, basically going through and looking at items that would not have a significant long-term capital cost, so things that wouldn't kind of over time end up costing us more money. And also then items that didn't have direct health or safety implications. So we talked a lot about the UV filter, for instance. Number one, I don't think that's going to be a particularly easy one to fundraise for, jokes aside, you know, I think the Ray Coffee UV filter is probably not something I'm looking to write a check for necessarily. But also then wanting to just make sure we stayed true to the sort of safety pieces that the engineers came up with there. So as we looked through that, there were a few tweaks that we made to the model, also based on some recommendations. So I'm going to just add those on and then we'll dive into kind of the impacts, bottom line impacts. So we did look at revenue. Christine had asked us to kind of take a harder look at that number. We had been, as we shared throughout the process, presenting a pretty conservative revenue number, I think it's fair to say. We were basically just taking the numbers that we'd raised in revenue from years past when the pool was operating and carried that average forward. That was about $5,000 a year of annual revenue. So I think it's fair to say we anticipate that a new pool would generate more revenue than that. But in the absence of hard data to know exactly what that would look like, we've just carried that low revenue number as a conservative approach. In response to the feedback we got, we went back and did adjust that up. So we added 50% on to the revenue that we expect to bring in again. I still think that's a pretty conservative number based on what we've seen at other pools, but that was based on taking what had been the rates for entry and kind of raising those up to mirror what we actually saw at the Rutland pool. So if you look at the chart in your memo, the proposed numbers are very, very similar to what Rutland's new pool is charging. And that represented about a 50% increase. So we did scale that number up. So any questions on that? Did that do the trick more or less? It's helpful, yeah, thank you. And then the other thing, just as a note, so one of the things that was discussed as potential item sort of luxury item was the slide. There's a lot of talk when we first presented about how that feature would actually add a need for additional staffing. So despite the fact that in some of these proposals, the slide is kind of taken out of the tax impact budget, because we expect that would be a pretty desirable fundraising item, I didn't scale back staffing accordingly. So I think to Jesse's earlier point, the conversation about pulling some of those things out of the budget wasn't to say, we're not going to have a slide, we're not going to have this or that. It was just to say, let's think about those as something we could raise funds for in a different way. So we kept the staffing or the operational costs static so that when we have a really successful fundraising effort, we're ready to staff that model. So with all those things said, just to kind of flash back to the original proposal that we worked with the engineers to come up with, that total project cost was $3.913 million. Soup to Nuts, that operating end capital that would have meant a roughly an 8 cent tax increase and an annual impact of about $184 to in year one. I've been using year one because that'll likely be the highest impact year as the debt service gets paid over time that that number comes down, with the exception of a few years in the model where there's capital investments, I think it's like years 7, 14 and 20, there's pretty big capital investments. So in comparing that number to the number that came back when we did some volume engineering with Wesson and Samson, that led to about a $3.582 million project, about a 7.6 cent impact and an annual tax impact of $171 in change. So quite a bit off the top in terms of the project cost, but in terms of annual tax impact ended up being about $13 a year. Then the next step was to take some of the recommended items off that list that we talked about at the last meeting and model out what that would look like. So we were able to get the total project construction costs down to $3.293 million, about a 7.1 cent tax increase and that would equate to an annual impact on an average home, which for us is about $225,000 in value. The annual impact on the tax rate would be $159.77. So scaling 0.7 million off the top of that project equates to roughly a $2.25 annual impact on the tax bill for that average home. So we're going to pause there. That's a lot of numbers and math and whatnot and see if there are questions or thoughts. I think it's important for folks who maybe haven't followed the entire thread of this conversation to recognize that during the process, we tried not to set up any barriers to the pool committee in terms of putting forth the proposal that they felt best served the community in terms of taking feedback. And also not just from a functional standpoint, but also from a potential revenue standpoint, which was something that was brought up several times during the presentation of the Western Sanction Engineer as well. So we did ask for the kind of what's the whole holistic vision. So we talk about value engineering, the sources of revenue discussed potentially for this project. We've been talking a lot about infrastructure projects and what types of subsidies exist, what types of grants exist. Pools just don't work the same way as traditional infrastructure. They just don't. There's not as much, there's not as much many financial tools available for them. So we've really been looking at the tax base and tax impact as the primary source. Lucky to have such a dedicated group of folks who stepped up and invested a lot of time, energy and effort in the pool committee that has now sort of shifted over to saying, okay, how could we potentially lessen some of the financial impact of this through fundraising? And that's the conversation that we've really been trying to figure out the nice balance of is, what's the baseline pool that still functions the way that we think it needs to for the community while also potentially itemizing some of these items that maybe aren't 100% necessary, right? Pool or the slide, for example, is the item we're discussing right now. And whether or not those could be attached to some fundraising efforts. That's a significant question. And then after we get past the conversation about what the pool costs, right, the cement, the thing, there's the operation of it. And this just looks very different than our last pool in terms of operations. Our previous pool ran us about $62,000 a year roughly with the staffing contracts, chemicals, et cetera to run. This is a little bit of a different animal and part of that has to do with design too. So I think we appreciate, I just want to say some of those contextual things. Most people have a whole way from a funding perspective as we start to talk about fundraising versus tax rate, operational costs versus fixed infrastructure costs on the pool itself. Yeah, and grant-wise, the research we've done, there's a lot of operating or programmatic grants out there for aquatics, which is great once you get the thing built. I think there's a lot of opportunity down the road for outside funding to come help us program a pool, but from what we've seen so far, the grants that we've found to be available are in the context of almost a $4 million project, not going to move the needle a huge distance. So yeah, I think that's correct. And with the modeling, I see the increase of 50% historical, et cetera. This doesn't get close to aligning with what was still the number from the main pool. That was used as sort of the Bastion example. It sounded like there were a number of factors that didn't make that a good parallel model anyway, but any other additional comments on how the fees were adjusted in terms of? No, and just for context for folks who weren't here, we were looking at a pool in Waterville, Maine, similarly sized community, but I think as a few folks here pointed out also some pretty notable differences in terms of demographics, sort of peripheral community too. I think Waterville itself is about twice as big as Winooski, but the surrounding area is very stark. There's not as much around it. So I think we've got a smaller city nested in a bigger region. So it's a little bit apples to oranges. Their annual operating revenue coming in the door was about $80,000. We're budgeting here for about 10. So again, I think as we've said throughout that is that is a very conservative number, but I would much rather be surprised in a positive direction than a negative one. I don't want to go in and inflate and say, I remember bringing $90,000 a year in revenue and have it be 20. I'd rather say we're going to have 10 or 15 and have it be 30. I just think as we look at this and try to be responsible stewards of impact, I just want, I want to make sure we're looking at sort of, I don't want to say worst case, but kind of highest case impact there. So yeah, it is tricky as we've as we've sort of joked throughout. When you ski is a very unique and special place. There are not a lot of places like it. And so it is a little hard to find a parallel example. And I'm assuming Angela has come up with a delinqually balanced reserve schedule too for the proposal to that includes capital expenditures, which is as folks again in the community remember one of the reasons we ended up where we were was a 1974 pool takes money to fix and keep up. So that's all modeled out. So we have we've been using that sort of year one marker is just sort of a way to capture a snapshot and have a comparative, but we've modeled all those different versions out over the full 20 year cycle of the pool. So again, as I mentioned, there are a few years throughout that where there are pretty significant capital investments that are that are tagged that relate to the specific facility that was designed. So we are we are planning for those out into the future. So again, you'll see the sort of the impact kind of do a little bit of, you know, not as it kind of moves along. I guess part of the point of that statement is we're asking you to do this the right way. Yes. The sustainable correct way, not the smack it together, get it in the ground, and then we'll figure out all the other stuff later. And there's a bunch of surprises built into the future. Correct. Yes. So I have a question about the difference between the recommended value engineering deductions and the deductions per council discussion and the subsequent impacts on the tax rates. So the recommended valued engineering deductions, those came from the engineers. That is correct. Yeah. But some of them are not replicated in the deductions per council. So I'm just wondering why that is, because it seems to me that the deductions per council discussion could be additive to the recommended value engineering deductions. So there's quite a few that apparently the engineers recommended and I'm assuming they did so within our parameters of, as you said, we're not interested in short changing the project in a way that's going to add costs down the road. So I'm just. Yep. I think the most notable examples of that are related to that sort of long-term cost impact. So there were a few in particular finishes that we, in modeling the sort of the council recommended model opted to keep in that the value engineer had pulled out. And those, again, were finished decisions, I believe, largely related to the roof and the facade that in talking to the engineer would have added useful life to the building over time. So in response to what I was hearing from you all last time, we kept kept those in. So these are, despite the fact that they were recommended by the engineer, eliminating them would have an impact on the useful life of the structures. Thank you. Yeah. We're at a kind of break point here, Eric. Any questions from the phone? I do. Yeah. So for the folks, this thing is, this is Eric Cubby. Ray, thanks so much for the memo. I think that it's incredibly helpful. I do have concerns in regards to the fees or the rates just because, you know, they seem low, but for a lot of members of our community, four dollars for a day for a kid is still a lot of money. And especially for somebody who has multiple children, you know, thinking a youth season passive $45 just isn't obtainable for a lot of our community members. And even with that, you know, if somebody has multiple children that family pass rate of $120 an hour, I just, you know, I personally know some families where that would not be doable. So I'm wondering if there's been any thought to financial hardship waiver or some sort of subsidy model for those families, you know, especially since a lot of families where that hardship would be the most difficult to achieve are the ones who are in most need of low cost opportunities for their kids to have summer recreation because they can't send their kids out of town for summer camp or anything. Cool. He's taking the answer off. Yeah. That was a great question, Eric. Thank you. So in looking at, and I think point well taken, I think as we look at a lot of the usership at the pool, certainly there's a desire to have a sensitivity to cost. We know certainly a lot of the users of the pool are kids, many from families with lots of children and four dollars. Well, it seems small and isolation adds up over time. So definitely point well taken. I think a couple of things there. One is that looking at the Rutland pool, which associated not only has a similar demographic to us here, and really being mindful about trying to mirror those rates was a consideration. Again, they've seen they've seen a lot of interest in their pool with those rates on board. So I think we'll kind of give them a year or two. Thankfully, they're ahead of us a little bit so they can get any pick for us. I think the other thing too is departmentally for us at Community Services. And Eric, I know this came up a bit during the budget process this season two. We're really trying to look at how do we balance the need to generate revenue in our programming to keep the wheels on and keep new programs coming and serve people with a sensitivity to the very unique demographics we have here. So I think the short answer is to your question. Yes, we've thought about it. The longer answer is we've not done a deep dive on it yet in relation specifically to this program. We've definitely taken a deeper dive on a lot of our other programs. And so I think we've got some models out there that we could we could explore. But again, I think we've we've tried to really approach this with a sensitivity and not. You know, I think what I didn't want to do is sort of in response to the Waterville pool, which had $80,000 revenue, just go in and turn the knob until we got to $80,000 and say we've had a success because then again, we're going to price out a lot of our users. So I don't know. I mean, I think it's a little tricky to know until the door opens on day one how that cost is going to play. And certainly we do a little bit more research on that before if we get to that point. But that's why it says proposed here. I think that's still open for interpretation, perhaps. And at some point, I feel like you provided us with a fee schedule of surrounding pools during somewhere in this two year. Yeah, we've we've looked we've looked pretty closely at Essex, Rutland. Again, this example in Waterville and there was one other pool. And I'm not going to remember where it was somewhere in the northeast that Mark was using quite a lot as we were modeling things out. So we've we've definitely done some comparatives with other facilities. Rutland, I think, from a demographic perspective, most closely mirrors us. So this and again, these these rates pretty much mimic what they've got going on in their new pool. Which I definitely understand and appreciate. But don't want to be beholden to a specific fee schedule based on other communities. I would much rather have one aligned with what we know the needs are in our community. And I'm not saying I'm unhappy with the rates or fees at where they are at. But I personally would like to see some sort of accessible process by which families who really can't make those fees work have some sort of either subsidy or waiver. Personally, that's kind of where I'm coming from. Yeah. And I'd say philosophically, that's where we are trying to be as well. I'm I don't want costs to be a barrier for participation for families or kids. So yeah, heard and understood. And I can just interject to I think what's before you here are models. Ultimately, the council would have to set that fee structure annually or on a continuing basis. So many more opportunities to have that conversation. I'm interested in exploring the non resident rates and what room there might be to grow there. How we compare to if we are the only other public pool other than Essex and Chittenden County, you know, is that other than the lake? You know, how do we compare with their rates? Because if we can be aligned there on the non resident side, maybe we can find more space to. And Rutland, again, is the one I have most committed to memory. We're very close with with them from a non resident rate there. I don't recall exactly with Essex. I think we're a little bit below where Essex was with their non resident rates. But I can I can take a peek at that. But like Jesse said, I think over time, we'll have opportunities to sort of flesh this out more. But I think it's a great suggestion. I would say from a meet perspective to that's interesting, because just to be clear, having a pool that does facilitate, which we've heard from the community is important from a number of people, having the capacity to do meets and the capacity of swimming, though, does add physical attributes to the pool that are the cost. Is that accurate and correct? Yes, I think. Well, yes. I mean, there was a lot of interest in the community to have a competition type pool that would allow for a swim team. And I think beyond that, just basic kind of making sure there's a rectangle that meets those specs in the ground. The only other real additional piece was a storage closet that was added on. So the building itself is not really necessarily a lot different because of the need to post meets or have swim stuff going on there, swimming team stuff going on. That's why we scrapped the idea to do the Lazy River from there. So taking this in a different turn, I had we received this huge report quite a while ago, and I had more time to look into this and was looking at the geotechnical report in there and the information about what's underneath of the pool. So there's a big piece in there about there being clay and silt sitting under there and not being able to say with certainty that creating like a new footprint and these new structures or stresses on the ground aren't going to have stabilization issues over time. I think there was a recommendation in there to do like deeper boring to check for what it is further down or groundwater. And I wondered, like, did that additional study happen? How confident is the engineering firm that we can change the footprint that's happening there to these two different structures? Adding additional, you know, say if we have a slide, like additional weight there that we're not going to see further problems when we have historically really struggled to maintain the existing pool. Yeah. So first and foremost, I am not an engineer of any variety, geotechnical in particular. So take this with a grain of salt in talking to Weston and Samson. One of the things that we did recommend, as you may recall, is the use of a Merthal liner, which is which is learning for me. But it is a stainless steel liner that's laminated with PVC and basically built off site, trucked in and sort of erector set in place here. It's a much lighter structure than a traditional concrete pool. So I think from a to in response to that concern, that was one step that we took and that would require less intensive concrete footings and whatnot underneath. I guess the other thing I'd say there is it's a little hard to know until you start digging in the ground what you're going to run into. And so we did a lot of work with the engineer to look at the geotech there. Based on the conversations I've had with them over the course of that three, four month process, they have a pretty good degree of confidence that we're going to be fine. I think if we started to go for like an eight or a 10 foot depth, then you start to get into some of those more concerning soil types. But I think if we stay at that six, I think it's six foot depth, that competition level depth from their estimations, we're in pretty good shape. I think one of the issues that we had with the structural integrity of the pool actually related more to the liner. So behind the liner of that pool was it was a cinder block structure. And there are a bunch of little cracks in the liner. The chemicalized water was getting out through that and actually eating away the concrete. So anyone who remembers going in the pool, you could in some places push the wall, you know, as much as two feet. And that was less to do with, in a lot of ways, less to do with the the geotechnical issues and more to do with the fact that concrete had just gotten chewed up by chemicals over 30 to 40 years of bad maintenance. So it's good to hear they have confidence in that. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely a point of pretty regular discussion through that process. Engineers are usually pretty careful not to say we can 100 percent guarantee. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I also wondered, so I understand there was like a good deal of community visioning that happened here about what folks want this space to look like. But those, you know, those vision things happen before we think about cost and the actual technical pieces of putting something together. And I continue to hear like outside of these meetings, I want the pool reopened. And I wonder like how we have gone from like potentially could we not have used the existing, you know, kind of stayed with the existing thing. Obviously, we need to replace the liner, the slab or whatever is underneath of it. Make an accessible entrance to that and avoid having to build an entirely like second pool and just get our existing pool back up and running. Um, so again, I'm not a engineer. Let me let me take a stab at it if I can. I mean, I think based on the assessment that we did with Weston and Samson back in April of 1615, when I came up to look at the pool, it was pretty clear at that point that what was there was in pretty rough shape. So I think the building itself certainly could have been, you know, put a new coat of varnish on it and gotten gotten used, I think. The pool structure itself was pretty degraded. We had a filtration and a chemical system that were no longer working. We had a filtration system that was actually a pretty significant health and safety risk. It was subterranean. That structure was caving in and itself. We were down to I think one and a half of the four filters actually working. So, so yes, we probably could have, but I think you would have been looking at a price tag that would have been pretty comparable to what we're talking about here, um, to go in, yank everything out and sort of put it all back together again, because there wasn't much in the actual pool that was super salvageable per the per the recommendations of the engineer. So. And the other discussion point after reviewing those that we had from sort of a strategic visioning standpoint was spinning money, trying to fix something that had just been essentially condemned by an engineer on site. Carried a significant amount of long-term risk in terms of reliance on reliance on stuff that was already failing, basically. So the sense was we, if we put 1.9 to 2.8 million dollars into that structure, um, we have no assurances. We do not have the same level of assurance that we're going to get a, uh, an outcome that's going to have the, the longevity of, of what this proposal should have, um, that was, you know, the conversation that I really remembered when it was kind of, you know, it was, it was condemned. Is there anything you can do to fix it? And the feedback from them was that's throwing good money after bad money, essentially. I mean, too. Are you talking about fixing it? Or are you talking about just replacing what is there? Yeah. One person, one pool versus to a pool. Um, I guess like from what I read in here too, yes, like you can't, it's not really solvable what exists, but having like a single pool that meets both of these needs of competition and, um, you know, having this more like family, family zero entry access point seems like it could be a significant savings over having two separate facilities and, you know, sounds like it meets the needs of what I have heard personally from. So I think the, in terms of, um, not fixing what was there, but replacing what was there versus costing out the community's vision. I think the direction we got in this was before my time, but the direction we got was do a community visioning process, understand what was needed and then do the preliminary engineering based on that vision. So to answer your question, no, we did not do that cost estimate of what it would have cost is to just replace what's not repair it, but put back a one pool solution. I think it was, I think you brought this to us before, like you call like a bare bones scenario, which I believe was replacing just the existing pool and not adding the other stuff. Um, and like looking back, there's numbers between the debt service and the operational fees. It's like 160 grand a year difference. And so one of the other things that I've heard about, you know, bringing the slide, bringing these additional facilities is that there is room for increased revenue, but the revenue is not going to offset that. And I just want to make sure that, like, we're aware of that. The, like the, like increased revenue can't be the reason that we're bringing in an expanded facility. Expanded costs and offset the increased revenue or the operating costs. Yeah, the operating costs are higher. Yeah. Well, let's, let's just let him wrap up and then we're going to turn around. And we'll leave you time. Don't worry. Yeah, there'll be plenty of time for public input and comment. We just want to give her an opportunity to kind of. So I mean, I'm, I'm at a decent pause point if you want to do public comment and then we can jump back into the next section. So you're good. Yeah, it's great. Thank you. Any other questions for Ray? We'll do that. So this isn't, so what we're going to do now is we're going to stop and we're going to have kind of this conversation about what you've just heard. And then we're going to, um, we're going to dive into kind of a second part of this conversation and, and we'll have public comment after that as well, sort of a, we're going to talk about broader, generally community service, community services programming. Um, and then we'll also have a public comment summary. So if, um, you'll have a couple of chances to, to weigh in and share thoughts, if you liked as well, we have a pretty big crowd here tonight. So, um, I, I try not to use the buzzer, beeper thing, um, as little as possible. If folks could just try to keep your comments to the two to three minute range. Um, that's greatly appreciated and gives everybody a chance to speak. So, um, if somebody starts going along, you might see me and just raise my hand and say, hold on a second, please. Try to let everybody have an opportunity. We appreciate that. Um, and the only other rule in a crowd like this, I like to remind folks is this is your opportunity to address council on the issue. We ask if you want to have a conversation amongst yourselves. There's a great parking lot out there. Um, so please speak to council, uh, not across the room at each other. We appreciate that keeps the conversation targeted too. So thank you. So we'll open it up now. If you just raise your hand, the only other thing I'll throw in is please state your name prior to speaking. Um, because we've got a large crowd, Mike, you're going to be okay if they speak from their seats. Yeah. Great. So we'll open it up for any public comment questions, concerns regarding what you've heard so far tonight. All sorry. I need my clients. I've been on the full committee for two plus years now. Um, I got a couple of things. I'll sit down and have the people talk and I'll get back to another point. To get to your point about just doing a competition pool, there's a large population of the city of the kids or citizens in the news. Be that don't know how to swim now. So you can't throw them in four feet of water because they'll never learn how to swim. They'll be too scared. The zero entry portion of the pool was to give, uh, families with small children or kids that don't want to swim or even adults that don't want to swim an opportunity to learn how to swim into enjoy the pool, um, instead of being in the area, four feet to six feet. I mean, four feet is pretty deep that if you don't want to swim, it's pretty scared. Um, it also gives the seniors an advantage to use the pool, which we didn't have before either. They're allowed to walk into the pool. Um, that was the reason why the community decided to have a zero entry pool because the kiddie pool that if we want to replace the existing structure, all the plumbing for the existing pool is, is, it's not good. The kiddie pool has a tree in a little bit if you've been over there and seen that, um, to revise, to re, to get the new, the original pool back up and running was a totally impossible feat. There's the parts that are 40 years old. They don't make them anymore. In fact, the last 20 years, the plumbing and, and Myers construction, Myers waste management have been making and fabricating parts to run the pool, but now that we're down to one filtration system, pool can't run anymore. So that, I know I'm a young fan here, so we're going to try to catch up the speed without being 2000 pages. Um, that's the reason why we want two pools. We need a competition pool for the swim team and for people that want to swim, take laps, do like our training on the zero entry pool is for them, the people that don't know how to swim, to give swim lessons out and for the seniors. Part two of my question is, I see the city's taking stuff out of the pool that the community has desired that they want in it. And I'm trying to figure out why we can't just go to the city for a goal to see if they want the tax hike instead of having city hall decide what the city wants. Um, I mean, we've been working on this for a long time. And I don't know if you've been reading in front of the forum, but it's starting to snowball right now. There's a lot of people talking about the pool and some positive, some negative, but people are starting to get fired up like, what's going on? What's going on? What's going on? Um, so I think before we start taking away from what we worked on, maybe we should let this community decide what they want to do. If they want the taxes to raise to the pool, then so be it. If they don't, then we go back to the on board and start taking things out. I mean, one way or the other, like the slide, the topic everyone's talking about, we're still going to have to plummet for if the fundraisers, if we fundraise the money to get the slide, we still have to build the infrastructure for it because we do it after some cost dull. So that's the main price tag on slide to I'm sure is the infrastructure for the slide. I think you're losing out if you take the community room out for a revenue generating that that one can be used year round. It can be certainly used after pool closes, but that's just my opinion. But I think you split the voters decide what they want in and out of the pool before you start slashing stuff. So I think just because really that was council so there was another important reason that I remember popping up and learning about as to a separation of the two pools, and I believe it was called a brown out, which was a whole new term for me and learning experience about what that means of why it's a good thing to have smaller kids to so the pool does have to be cleared if somebody has an accident. So you're correct that we asked that sort of the the committee put together what they thought was the pool that best reflected the needs of the community and that was that was absolutely the target goal. There's always been a stop here necessary and required for it from a financial perspective because the job of this body is to try to put forward something, not just to have voted upon for the sake of people voting on it, but that we think has got a good chance because it reflects the will of the community to pass. So we're trying very hard, I think to be as responsible as we can with people's tax dollars and there's never going to be total agreement about what a essential versus non essential item on something like this is, there's just not. So we've tried our best with that. The other piece that I'll just also put back is from the very beginning, there's been a long dialogue in this community about fundraising. The city cannot do fundraising. That's not an activity we can engage in. Our fundraising is coming to voters and saying, hey, this is what we're proposing in terms of tax rates in other communities. One of the ways there's been demonstrated will, efficacy and to create energy. And I'll say buying from the community is to fund it. You know, the O'Brien Community Center is a great example of that, right? This community, a lot of people reached into their wallets and gave $5, $25, some people more, right, to help make that a possibility. And some of that is for financial reasons. Some of that is also for buying and to turn back towards the community and folks who are most excited about this to say, what relief could you provide on some of these items that maybe some residents wouldn't agree are essential? And I guess I'm trying to paraphrase why we put those questions forward. So I'll pause to see if there's any other comments on that in terms of why we asked for some of those items to be pared down from the proposal standpoint and looked at separately. No, I would say that's right, is that we want to put forward something that people will vote yes on. And so I just want to make sure that we are considering multiple viewpoints here. I'm doing our due diligence. And I think the other thing is quite frankly, we looked at some of the items and recognized that they might not have the same pizzazz when it came to fundraising. We, like Ray mentioned in the beginning, the UV, the UV filtration system that cleans things, totally necessary, totally, you know, or a great item to have in a pool, probably not one that some foundation or some person would like to have their name on, right? So a slide is something, the so and so memorial slide is just something from from again, the experience, you probably have the better success rate of actually fundraising for. It's something that people connect to differently. That's that was the thinking in all those lines. Yes, ma'am. Has there been, I've been on the emails, but I'm wondering, like, has there been fundraising, like, established? Because if the community center was that private, you're saying that's an example of, like, the community coming together and raising funds to get a community center. So wondering if there's a way that maybe we could start like a community kickstarter or something like that to maybe get some funds going. It's easy to kind of just like donate it and maybe even, like, have people pre-buy their for their first year, you know, membership or something like that to kind of just show the community support because I think that would generate a lot of revenue. Yes, I'm going to break my own rule and just say first, I'm just going to say this setup comment that we have to bifurcate the city role versus the community role. The city can't go to private entities or turn to citizens and say we'd like you to donate towards this specific outcome. And there's there's a lot of reasons why we can't do that, that we kind of cover it in depth. There is a group of folks and I would just ask Cindy, you've been key to that. If you want to just maybe give a quick update in terms of where the fundraising efforts are, and I'm again breaking my rule of not having it be an exchange out there, but I think Cindy's probably best qualified to answer that question. I do have an update and I appreciate everybody. Mike and I and Carolyn have been on this committee since day one. We joined the committee in the thoughts that we were going to help the city come up with a design that the community wanted for their pool. We did that. We're very successful doing that. Three quarters of the way down. We then find out that that said committee was now going to kind of turn into a fundraising committee for the pool to help the offset the cost of the pool. At that point, we lost the majority of our membership of the committee. A lot of the members felt that they weren't qualified to be on a fundraising committee to raise that amount of money. To be honest, we've spent the last nine months trying to recruit new members for this committee. I've been given names repeatedly by Ray. I've sent out emails introducing ourselves. We've had meetings and a lot of people have shown interest, but then they don't show up at any meetings and they don't reply to any emails. So the last few months, we've been meeting twice a month trying to just brainstorm. We can't be a fundraising committee with three people. We've had a couple more people come to a meeting or two meetings and then again, nothing. So at this point, we're still gun hoe to do a fundraising committee. We just can't do it with three people. We do have the backing of Jeff Myers and the Myers Foundation. Jeff's father was one of the original people who built the original pool. We also have a by your professional he has also been willing to join the committee. He's come to a couple meetings and given us some great information. We've met with another guy who is going to help us devise a website, informational website that will have the back history on the pool, that have all the updates on the pool. And it also be a place for people to go and make donations. So if somebody wants to click a button and make a 10 dollar donation, there'll be a spot for that. The committee has been trying to keep going with their efforts. We did have a tentative date set up in June to host a big community barbecue to try to get some more interest in it to just update the community. We feel that the community as a whole hasn't been updated in over nine months, I would say on where the pool is. We didn't feel that was our responsibility. We felt that was the city's responsibility. And a lot of people have been asking me, you know, just what's going on with the pool. So we thought this day would be a chance to let the community know that. So as far as an update on the fundraising committee, we're plugging ahead, but we're kind of at a stalemate. We're at the same time. We have. We just have two new members joining last week, two weeks ago. So there's a lot of a lot of people interest in here. We're going to mention that. Yeah, we're actually going to change our June 9th barbecue to the Memorial Day parade. So we're going to have an informational desk or pamphlet source. We're going to be on hand to answer questions because last year, I have some rough numbers that over 400 people got served at the VFW for the barbecue at the end of the Memorial Day parade. So we're thinking that we have a great opportunity to get some input, maybe get some new members. Essentially, we're looking to get 10, 12 people so we can start from some subcommittees to go to different areas to start fundraising. But as you know, we all have full time jobs. So fundraising isn't our full time jobs. This is going to be a part time thing for us, unless we can generate enough money to hire professional fundraising firm to do this for us, which I don't see happening. But you never know. I think that's the only way that we'll be able to raise enough money to help the city is to get an outsider organization to do this. Because, I mean, we all have lives. We have kids. We have sparks. And it's a huge feat to pin on six people that have been on the committee for since day one. Thank you. Thank you for the update on that effort. And again, just from a contextual standpoint, so people are aware, you know, what we said in conversations with the pool committee or now the fundraising committees, we're not going to make the construction of a functional, a functional facility dependent on fundraising. That's not a good way to do things, right? So we said basically the city is going to craft a budget around creating a functional facility. We're not going to be dependent on fundraising. Do you think the question was whether or not to ask for fundraising on specific features or items that, again, there are there are differing opinions on what's essential versus not essential, right? Who you ask, but on items that in going through the list, we said, could the pool be created with or without this item? If the answer was yes, you know, we thought about it and said, okay, is this something we say to people, hey, this is an opportunity for us to make this, you know, less less of a fiscal ask. If there's a real desire for the specific feature, we're not, we're not arguing with you that you probably have lots of feedback that was important people. But our job, again, is to try to create a functional facility and do so in the most fiscally responsible manner we can. Is there an opportunity then to turn back and say if this is something we really want, it may have to be fundraised for. I think that's a really important factor. And, you know, we've we've sure tried to communicate as well as possible on Mrs. probably the 15th public meeting minimum that we've had where we've had a pretty extensive update and memorandums that are always posted, shared and given to the public. So just want to note that because I think staff have made a strong effort to try to make sure people know how it's available. It doesn't really matter how many different forms you post to, how many different communication forms you go through. It's not going to reach some people. That's the way it works. So is there anything on that? I have a question. Yes. Yes, I have a question. I'm Pat Edwards. And I guess started a ball rolling from Porch Forum because I feel a lot of people in the city didn't know what was going on with the ball. This is a third year it's been closed and we've hardly got any information to my way of thinking. I want to know what is the city's share of this pool. It is a municipal pool. It's not privately owned. So what is your responsibility to the pool? I mean, you can't expect fund raising committee to come up with three million dollars, right? Or one million, whatever. That's just not feasible. So what is the city's responsibility? I mean, do you want to put a bond issue out to the people? Do you know, do you want this pool where you'll be willing to pay more taxes for that? And if that is the case, I personally feel that this bond issue should have gone before the Main Street structure because we were, you know, in 2016 is when the pool closed and there wasn't a whole lot of stuff going on. If you said the first meeting was November of 2017, that's over a year before anything was done. Did you not say November 17? In November 2017 was when we got council approval to allocate $90,000 to do the plenary engineering based on the community's vision. The community had been developing that vision for years beforehand. Okay, but that's when you hired the engineers in November of 17? The engineers were here. Yeah, we brought the engineers on. So we've had the same engineering firm throughout the process. We brought them on when we made the initial decision to close the pool so that we could get that objective professional opinion. And then they stayed with us and with Mike and Cindy, Caroline and other members of that pool can be worked with us to develop that conceptual plan. Okay, so maybe Seth, you could answer what is the city responsibility towards the pool? So first of all, I think the first part of the statement is it's really important in issues like this. I can't encourage folks enough asking front porch form a question is going to get you probably more questions than answers. Really encourage you to open the city website. Ray and Jesse sitting right there can could give you a full detailed outline. A council member can help get that answer for you. So just really encourage folks to reach out to primary sources on information. If you want substantial updates that are accurate and have updates or process points. I think Jesse detailed kind of what the steps have been along the way. What we've arrived at in tonight's memorandum is is not saying, hey, we need $2.6 million from fundraising to combine with three. The city's looking at on this proposal, for example, between 3.293, so 3.3 almost million dollars and 3.9 million dollar price tag. Again, the question has been how what we asked ahead of this meeting was bring us back sort of scaled back options in terms of features. Are there any features that could potentially be removed? And those are the types of items we were turning back again towards potential fundraising efforts to say, hey, if we end up at a place where we've got to get this down as low as possible, this could be a possible fundraising opportunity. No point have we turned with a number and say, pool doesn't get built if you don't come up with 1.6 million dollars. The city's just move forward with this, okay, we're going to we're going to create a functional facility. That's our responsibility. We don't build half a fence and then wait for somebody else to figure out the other half. So I, you know, what we're considering and having a discussion about tonight is is the results of that kind of push back to say, you know, we got the full spec. We got the all the one with all the bells and whistles that was the most reflective of all the public feedback that was the design with the features that the pool committee felt most accurately depicted, you know, the work that they had done from a background perspective. We question some things. That's our job for the stewards of the taxpayers dollar, right? We question some things and said, well, what happens if this is removed? Does it affect functionality? What happens if this is removed? Because there are some items on there that cost some money that are not the thin in the ground, right? So we push that as far as we could. And that's what we were back here tonight discussing, looking at those numbers impact. Have you seen anything on that? Yes, I would say that we've had pretty pointed conversations about the timing of the main street vote versus the pool vote. There were deadlines under that. The Main Street Project that were non negotiable. And there was work on this project that I think, you know, people had different points of view about the timing. But the timing on the Main Street Project was fixed in terms of eligibility for certain funding opportunity. This has been a more iterative conversation in terms of once we got the preliminary engineering report, and it looked like an eight cent tax rate increase. I think that caused some of us to say, that's a big ask. We also know we have a lot of other capital projects on the horizon. Are there opportunities to refine what this looks like to be consistent with the community vision? Because, you know, my belief is people want a pool in this community. If the visioning process and the visioning process in no way contemplated tax rate impact really, it was a very creative idea. You know, what is it that we want? Right? We're now in the position of saying, and what is it that our community is willing to pay for? And six months ago, there was discussions that the fundraising committee felt like, or the pool committee felt like the fundraising millions of dollars was possible. So, you know, we've tried to give that process some time to flesh out and see, is that possible? Because if we're going to the community for a bond vote, which is I think where we're pointed, and now the question is, you know, what's the amount that we're going to bond for? And when? That's where we are. But it's not for lack of, you know, interest. It's really trying to do the diligence required to both respond to the community's interest in having a pool and having it meet certain needs or look a certain way. And to Christine's point earlier, putting together a proposal that we believe the community will support because I haven't heard a counselor up here say we don't think a pool is a good thing for this community. The question is how do we do it? So, you know, I think that our memo says we have an August bond vote option or a November bond vote option. Does that help understand the where we are and the process ahead? Somewhat. Other questions, comments, concerns from the public? Yes, ma'am. Our main, my name is, is the liner still staying in? Yeah, so we've carried that throughout what's called a Merthel liner, which is the stainless steel. Yep. Yep. So we've carried that for reasons that the upfront cost is about $200,000 more, but the savings over the 20-year life of the pool are well above that. So that combined with, as Christine was saying, some concerns about the soil stability, it's a much lighter product, we're going to carry that through. So yeah, that's the plan. That shell has a longer life span. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get, I think, one of those 20-year that shell. At least. At least. So it's a better deal for the city to roll that route. Less maintenance too, I believe, on it as well. Correct. Thank you. Good count. Other questions, comments, concerns? Yes, Ma'am. My name is Sarah Ma'am. We're just talking about August or November for the bottom vote. Now that you've got any information that you requested back from, from Ray, how can you take it out or what can be looked in, realistically, when do you think this has been a growth? So the reason why August and November are highlighted is because this is a, there will be legislative elections and well, there will be special elections too. So with those, there's two set votes. There are options and opportunities for this to, to go forward. Part of the discussion tonight is to see how close these things were. I mean, this is really information requests coming back to council. So we're not there yet in terms of being able to say, Hey, is everybody coalesced around one of these specific numbers? How do we all feel about this whole components, components being added to track or contingent upon something other than this, these funds? So I would say that's probably at least a meeting or two away in terms of discussions. If, if I then go smoothies ma'am. So our memo says if we're going to hold a bond vote on August 14th, we need wording for a bond resolution approved by council by mid June. So I think what's most, you know, useful tonight is to get input from the community so that at our next meeting, or maybe two, we're prepared to make a decision about what is the amount of money that we are going to ask the community to support in a bond vote. We can decide whether we want to put that off until November. We're not ready to make that decision or just make some decisions and move forward. But it seems to me, since we have a good group here tonight, it's important for folks to share their perspectives, but that we're not going to be making a decision tonight. It's not been warned as an action item. We're not making a decision. And another really important point for there be folks watching at home, you're going to go home and you're going to talk to other people in the community is tell them to send in emails, send emails and thoughts to Array, send emails or thoughts to all of our emails are available in the city website. Just give it to you. Or about what it is your perspective is on this. And Sarah, you weren't done. So this process has been driving out for a really long time. The residents perspective and we are incredibly frustrated to this point, especially if it seems the main street project came to a bond pretty quickly from a resident's perspective. So I would suggest seeing her rather leader. So I appreciate I want to point back to something that was stated though several times during the main street project and that we've been doing the gateway studies for eight plus years. We've been doing the gateway work envisioning process for eight plus years. We had to start from scratch in this process and go back out to the community and ask what they wanted. That was not. We did this from a municipal standpoint and almost a fairly standard timeline. And it's really frustrating, especially if I know you have if you're somebody who has that sweet spot of having somebody of age and your family that would really get a lot of use of the pool. I know it's frustrating in terms of timelines, but I do think that that's a delicate comparison because you need to recognize that the mainstream conversation was tied into a bunch of different strategic planning conversations that go way back. We just didn't have that luxury with the pool. We knew it was limping along. But there was never there was never the same energy put back, you know, seven or eight years ago to say, Hey, we should really think about what this should look like for the community in the future. It just didn't happen. I don't have any answer as to as to why that didn't go forward at the same time. But I appreciate the frustration. It doesn't mean we're we are trying to solve the problem. Yes, ma'am, in the back, just want to give us a call ma'am. I'm unfamiliar with the process of the bond vote, but maybe since we have like two different price tags, like the loan tier where it's just bare bones get things going, the 3.2 or whatever. And that's going to be 150, whatever increase a year. Could we vote on that versus the slide and all the luxury items for 180? Because I think when you put it to it's $30 a year and the slide and all those things seem like they could maybe help us get the entry fee up so that would make the pool more attractive. And when it's only $30 a year, I mean that so the community can kind of see like you can have this or you can have this, which one do you want to pay for? The short answer to that is no, you can't put two competing bonds for like that or a non referendum state. I think there could be some states that will allow something like that to happen, but we have to be very, very prescribed and put exact amounts, exact language in there in terms of what can be executed. It can't be a side by side like vote for one and we'll do, we'll do whichever one gets more votes that that's not actually permitted from a legal perspective. So that's why weighing in right now is really important because in the end it's you know the elected body that you put forward's job to try to synthesize all that feedback, look at the financials and make what they think is the best decision going forward. Well, I think I see property values going out and people may be being able to afford an extra $30 a year because you know also how to make property values go up. So I think that I can only speak for myself, but I see value in having everything, you know, that's my only first one. You, yes, ma'am. My name is Erica Barons and I'm you keep saying like what do you want to hear from us tonight? And I'm not sure like what like what do you need to hear? Do you want to hear from individuals saying yes, let's put it on for August yes, let's go with a higher number, let's go with a lower number like we're here and I want to support this but I'm not sure exactly what it is that you're beginning to hear from me. Yeah, so the issues never I think what Nicole stated is the issues never been about the pool, right? Is it a good idea or not? What we're looking at is three different tiers of potential funding. And one includes, you know, we had a discussion about how can we get this down to as low a potential impact as possible. Then there was another where we turned back to the engineers another model where we turn back to engineers and said, you do your preferred engineer that's fair cutbacks. What do you think balancing longevity and functionality would be the smartest things to do from your professional perspective? And then we have the full on model that's just the way it was proposed. So the difference is the full on model is 3.9 million. The recommendations for the engineers 3.5, 8, 2 million. And then the one that we kind of ask a bunch of questions of things of what if you cut this out of there that was 3.293 million dollars. So or in other words, eight cents on the tax rate, 7.6 cents on the tax rate or 7.1 cents on the tax rate. And those don't sound like big numbers to people but recognize, recognize that where our increases have been recently for the entire year has been around one cent. That's around what we've been asking for. And there's a lot of variation. You can go up to 2%. We had some years it's 0.7%. So what that is is it's that difference is a typical full year budget cycle increase in costs that we usually ask taxpayers for. So it is a big that penny is a big deal to us on that penny on the tax rate. And the new ski opinion raises around about $50,000 a year. And on more recent budgets we've tried to keep operational increases balancing with additional sources of revenue to about that net impact to taxpayers. That's a lot of them to our goal. So really we're considering what about these three different potential options. Part of tonight is it's great to get reaffirmation. This is an important project to people. The other pieces what about these features that have been discussed in terms of what they are the slides and the zero entries. Yes ma'am. So it would be helpful. I know I can't stay much longer. I mean is it helpful for a show of hands for you guys to see like how can we give you the feedback that you need in an efficient way. We're not each getting up and saying this is what I think. The lovely part about public process is this is the way it looks right as people get to stand up and say their piece. You know I think you're what you're welcome to do as I mentioned before send something in. You know and then the other piece of it is you know what you've got public outlets to. We just encourage people that from an informational perspective please come to primary sources when it comes to putting information out or we're asking questions to. You know the quote never asked to a question that's it's it's it's a bad idea. So what you need from us in here is you need emails with the specific indication of what one of those three we would support and you need us to talk to our community and have them send you emails with an indication of which one of those they would. Public feedback of any kind is is that would be really useful for the bond both so you would know where to put it. Yeah and it's the whole idea of engaging with people and opening this up to public discussion is it gives you a chance to weigh in right. It gives you a chance to speak to the body that eventually is going to pass or authorize language that's going to put this on something that then you get to vote on. So this is the public opportunity the chance to nudge that helps steer that conversation in a way that you think best reflects what it is that you're interested in. And it's you can't go through in our seats. You just can't and count emails. You can't go to meetings and count hands and have that be an effective methodology of taking feedback. It's just not because people show up for different reasons and activate for different reasons around the issue. So it's this body is then a job to try to again synthesize that with the financial information available in the larger context of what else are we doing in the city. We're getting ready to have the next conversation which is about sort of the global offerings of community services because that's something else we asked about. So we're going to hear from Ray in a second about, hey, we're thinking about this large investment. What does this do to potentially other program offerings? And what does that look like from your capability to do global programming outside the pool too? So, yeah, this is participation of public process. So it's not, I understand that there's not, you know, you don't have a clicker to say I like that, I like that. But showing up here does make a difference from an inflection standpoint. Even that feedback does. We do read it. Yeah, you bet. Yes, sir. I just like to say that Scowl said, by the way. I just like to say that I think engaging the community in the process, specifically, you're asking us to give you feedback on three different proposals that you're considering. It would be helpful to have access to what those three different proposals are with the bullet points are in those considerations. And I haven't seen that. Yeah. Well, what I'll say is the hard part about meetings like this is they're in a continuum. And we kind of did that in depth. Go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to say, Scott, on the city's website, if you do when you ski VT dot org slash pool, there is a sequential list of meetings with documentation that was submitted to council there. This meeting is not up there yet, but that's first thing on my agenda tomorrow morning. So that gives you from, like, oh, Craig, we can't open. I read over them. But I'm talking about for people here who are going to be able to engage in conversation, they have three very simplified lists of what those three proposals are would be helpful. The documents are very informative. They're not concise and they're not easy to understand if you're not familiar with the process. Yep. You appreciate that feedback. Yeah. Thank you. And I think too, clearly, if we're moving forward with an ask, obviously that work will most assuredly be done so people have a full understanding of what it is that's being asked for. So, but that's good feedback even for next time for council meeting if we can have a simplified version of that. And I'll try to take, I mean, I think this memo is fairly concise with the supporting documentation, but I'll take a stab and I may bounce it off a few people just to make sure I've been staring at this for a while. So it makes sense to me, but make sure it makes sense to somebody else too. And we'll try to get that updated tomorrow. Great. For the record, my name is Ron Stotten. I'm chair of the Community Services Commission. But I have to say I'm sitting here feeling a little conflicted because as a resident of the community I have ideas and thoughts about what the pool ought to be and because of my role on the commission and in particular because I was the designated liaison to the pool committee for most of the design and proposal process. I've become very familiar with what went on and the kind of discussions that went on, the conclusions that were made about the value of the various add-on pieces like for example, the slide. There were discussions about what that slide should be. Should it be simplified? And the conclusion was that the slide as proposed would be the best possible revenue producer. Anticipating that people would come from outside the community because of the existence of that slide. But as a resident of the community and a property owner in the community and the fact that I have two grandchildren living in Winooski I feel that the zero entry pool is really a very high level value and priority for reasons that were stated earlier to give a better experience for learn to swim kids. And at my age, though I'm not normally a person who uses pools, the zero entry is very attractive because it would allow me to get in and out easily and into a depth that I could feel comfortable at. I'm not a swimmer. You know, I'm certainly not a competitive swimmer. I cannot imagine being a competitive swimmer. But that part of the pool is equally important in my mind because we have a high school swim team that really needs a good quality, swim experience so that they can excel as competitive swimmers. I'm very concerned that we're talking about the difference between $30 between one model and the next model up. Especially when I look at the fact that the Main Street project has yet to come in with any kind of estimate about what it's gonna cost us as property owners and taxpayers. And frankly, you know, I'm asked for $28 million is a lot more scary than 3.3 million. So I really encourage the council to consider very carefully the value and the added value of the features that you were discussing as potential for elimination or shifting into a fundraiser mode by an independent agency in the community. Thank you. Thank you. Other questions, comments, concerns? And we're gonna probably take a few more and then we've got kind of a second path to this feature that we wanna give people an opportunity to hear too without staying too long. So I have a quick question. Now after tonight's discussion, are we gonna be closer to the bond vote and we're gonna be actually speaking for numbers? Is that what the purpose of this meeting is for the pool tonight? The purpose of this meeting is to get, to hear what the results were from the informational request we put to staff. Okay. Which was tell us what the number is and what the impact looks like if you scale things down from a feature perspective. So is that what we're sticking with for the bond or? We haven't made any decisions about that. We're just getting that information. We're essentially receiving that information tonight. There's no decision being made of any kind. This is again another opportunity for us to discuss it. We're moving that ball forward. These things don't get done in one meeting. Our two meetings, it's hey, we heard you last time you gave us information and facts. We asked some questions, asked for some new information we brought back. That's what's here tonight. Okay. So our next council meeting is June 1st. What's the next council meeting? 1st Monday and June. You got me? Okay. So then if the pool's on a docket, are we getting closer? We'll make that call as that comes. I mean, I think that's what the memo illustrates is by mid June, we've gotta have that, inform that I can assure you that it's going to be on the agenda in what exact format to be determined in terms of what that looks like. Because we're not done with the conversation today. The owners are asking to have a game outside question. And I don't know if it's to tell people that, you know, I'm not a full committee, but I don't really have the information to ball on yet. That's a lot. So I would hand in this memo is what I would do if they asked you that question. Because this pretty much summarizes what the options considered here were tonight and also provides a little snippet about what the next steps would be. Again, we've tried to make it as, I think concise as possible. It gives the monetary amount, lists out the different items that are being discussed in short of providing illustrated versions of it with long budgets, I think is a pretty concise way of relaying the information that's available right now covered tonight. Yes, sir. David Weisberg, to put this in the context of the Main Street Code, what I remember was that it was the potential tax increase was put in a percentage that was from four to six percent. So what is it at eight or eight cents? A thousand million in a percentage? We have a moment in history where we have the benefit of a percent and a penny actually being very, very, very close to each other. So now with the full, we're both over eight percent. We got it. That's roundabout correct. It'll be 8.2 or 7.8 somewhere in there, but it's about one penny is about one percent on the tax rate here. And that's gonna change over time. So people should pay attention to that sort of globally. Yes, sir. I have a flatment. So are there other bond proposals that are sort of quietly brewing that we don't know about, that we should know about so that there's a realistic hierarchy of not having the pool sort of looking like it's taking second place to illustrate that equation. So number one, you got any ideas? Anything else you wanna see bond in? You got it. No, in seriousness, I understand if people are showing up now or seeing one meeting and looking at this at one moment in time, that it can feel that way. There was a very deliberate discussion in this body about how do we max out the timing opportunities from being able to have as much information about the community's approval about the bond going around Main Street and our need to commit to those financing opportunities and the pool being done in a way that's sequential but not competitive. In other words, we're gonna have enough information to make potentially a decision on both. That's possible. And that's important contextually. So we from a funding mechanic standpoint had to have that main vote. There was no way around it if we did not do all seven of those pieces. We had to have that main vote for Main Street and we just had to from a technical leverage standpoint. There's lots of information on that. I'm sorry? Is it your experience that that sort of slides in and out of a schedule that you have to manage as something comes up? And this just from an opportunity standpoint, this was not ready, right? It just wasn't. We're getting there now and we've got two additional opportunities. It's a good thing because having special votes typically doesn't drive out a big turnout. We hope that the midterm's well. Yes, sir? So is it logical to assume it'll be a November vote since the window for August closes mid June? No, this body could ask for that to be pushed to have it done in August. That's absolutely gonna improve you. We still got time to do that. We've got potentially two minutes. But you have to have a language for August ready by mid June. That's correct. So we have to post that notice of what will be in the content of the vote. And again, it's very specified language. So is there enough time? There is. I mean, we have got potentially two meetings and quite frankly for other issues where we've come up against timelines, if this body has to have a special meeting, we've done that. We've made that work before. So that's kind of the next piece of this conversation. It's number one, what do you want it to be if that's what it is? Number two, do you want it to go to a vote? And number three, when do you want that vote to be? Those are the three things, I think. And after this one, and I apologize if anybody's got lingering ones. After this one, we're just gonna switch over just because I want people to have the opportunity to hear the other piece of that presentation too. I wanna know, is there a projected timeline for when this is gonna get built? And if the vote is in August versus November, is that gonna push it back into the year? It's our understanding from the past ones that that difference would not impact the schedule. Roy, do you wanna speak kind of generally the conversations with the engineer in regards to construction timeframes? Yeah, so generally the feedback from the engineer as we looked at those two potential dates was that one versus the other doesn't impact the start of a construction cycle. So the short answer is no. If we were to wait until November, we'd remain on schedule to have the same construction start date because of the seasons here. And has that been discussed, the construction start date? It has, and it was in, it's in the final report from Weston and Samson, and I will be completely honest that I don't recall offhand exactly when that is. It's two construction seasons over the next year. It's two construction seasons we're estimating because of winter shutdown. And Roy, speaking to the demolition timeline process, there was the extraction of stuff that's there that means to you, sorry. I believe it will be in 20, the start of construction season 2020. So we have, right now we've only done preliminary engineering, so it's about 30, design is about 30% done. So if we got to go ahead from the community to move forward with the project, we need to finish the engineering. So go from 30% to 100% engineering drawings. We need to go through permitting and then we need to bid out the work. So it's about a year's worth of work. So either that starts in September to end the construction, so that process would be done the fall of 19 and they're not gonna start construction right before the winter, or it's done in the winter of 1920 to start in the beginning of 2020. So does that mean it was not gonna open till 2022? 2023. So it would start in 2020 through 2021. So it would start in 2020 through 2021. Either end of 2021 or beginning of 2022. I'm sorry. No, it's either end of summer of 2021 or beginning of summer of 2022. Is when it would open. Correct. Okay, so we wanna give an opportunity again for the second half of kind of raised presentation here to be done and then we'll open it back up for additional questions. I just want folks who wanna hear that to have the opportunity to do that before we go and I'll say it pretty quick through this and it actually relies pretty closely to what Ira had brought up just in terms. I was asked to sort of look at, I don't wanna say opportunity cost, but other things that are kind of on the horizon or out there for community services in our kind of more global purview around human service work in the city. So within the memo here, there are a few bigger projects that we've had pretty advanced conversations about. So sort of similar kind of bond type projects that are here. I wanna say very clearly, these are not listed in any priority order and I'm not in any way suggesting there is, yeah. If we can just take any conversations that's not really coffee talking and how that would be amazing, thank you. Yeah, not suggesting these in preference over the pool. It's just again, in response to a question that was posed from council to say, here's some other things on our horizon as we think about the work we're doing. It's, let's put those sort of in the contextual mix as we're thinking about a cost impact here. So, certainly one big project that I think probably folks have some memory of in recent years is looking at the library, city hall and police department conversation at the O'Brien Center. So we had a price tag on that project from a few years ago now of about 8.7 million. And then another one from longer back, kind of right as I was starting here, it was that project was finishing up at Riverwalk East. So that's essentially an extension of the Riverwalk out through Cassavan and up towards the St. Mike's campus. That was at the time specced out as a $2 million project that was now six, seven years ago. So I suspect that that number has changed, but those were projects that we had some engineering work done on and had numbers for. You know, I do think the O'Brien Center just in general is one that's out there that we know as a facility sort of capital investment is a need. And I think we've talked at length with this body about just the sort of relative lack of capital resources for perks facilities. That's not an area where there's been sort of consistent investment over time. I think the more recent councils have allocated some funding in capital, which has been much appreciated, but I think looking at the system and the needs of those facilities over time, I think that will to keep them up to snuff and improving will require some more capital investments. We haven't done a lot of a deep dive there to say, it's gonna be $10 million here or $5,000 here or we need a new water fountain or a new bench here, but those are, those park related conversations I think are out there and important, certainly to kind of just have on the radar. And then jumping up and down here, but you know, because of our capital question, the other piece that I modeled here is just some different operating scenarios. Again, not suggesting any one of these necessarily as the top pick or the top need, but just as a comparative. So the operating component of the council model pool ends up being about $83,000 annually. Just that's the cost to run the thing, not the cost to build it and finance it. And then there's some comparatives here. You know, a full-time employee at the library, fully benefited, runs about $57,000 annually. So as a comparative, you know, there's a rec staff here, roughly $45,000 annually for full-time. We've talked at length about the O'Brien Center budget gap and the fact that that's been shifted into the general fund now. So that's at the moment projecting as things stabilize to be about a $30,000 annual impact on the tax rate. So then a few other pieces here that we've modeled out for consideration, largely related to staffing. I think as we look at growth as a department, that's really the area where we are most constrained to grow at this point. I don't know if there's specific questions or things here that you'd like some details on. I tried to keep that at a pretty high level just to compare, you know, bottom line numbers across. Questions, comments, concerns? You know, I would understand somebody's saying the library, I kind of cut that one out mentally. I think it's right to keep it in the larger context from an infrastructure expenditure standpoint, but when we're looking at investment in particular areas of the city, while there's a recreation component to the city, that's really like overall in Australia, that's an investment in public safety and the library, yes, and all those other places. So I agree with that. I think some of these other conversations were probably the more interesting ones to think about balancing, but any questions, concerns? Yeah, do we have any founded thoughts about timeline on some of this stuff? Say more. So like one of the items here is replacement of buildings and bathrooms at Landry. Like do we have thoughts about when that really would need to happen or is this all pretty malleable at the moment? It's pretty malleable, I mean. So I think that's really a priority conversation for you all. One of this is work that we are currently actively working on. Okay, great. The question we were trying to, or the answer we were trying to put forth is if you're asking us how we, how, what, with the pool conversation, what are other conversations that could be, again, kind of a diverse point, on the horizon in the future, this is the list of those conversations. We are not actively working on any of these. When you say you're not actively, you look like there's no discussion about it. We don't have concrete proposals in front of us with any kind of numbers. These are ideas that at some point or another have popped up that haven't really, in the grand scheme of things, been prioritized from a workflow perspective. They're not currently in the capital improvement plan having set-asides for them. They're just, they're things we've either studied, thought about, or identified as potential needs in the future. What we asked of Ray in this scope was, is there anything, you know, especially if a couple new council has come in, that we might be precluding by moving forward with this, that we should understand? Other questions for Ray and council? Still there? I am, I don't have any questions at the moment. You were actually just testing to see if you were paying attention. I am, you're in president. Good. Questions, concerns from the public? And so, having heard this, given there's no additional ones from council, this is a time too, if you've got other summary questions regarding the pool conversation, as it's been had here this evening, to put those forward too. We just want to make sure that got in in case some people really know of that. Yes. So the last time I was at a meeting at council meeting, the pool was talked about. There was a discussion of a bond road in August and the pool would be opening in 2021. And now I just heard Jess say 2022. So I really don't understand, it seems like every time I come to a meeting it gets pushed back here. So I'm wondering where that 2022 comes from. So my logic on that was if the bond vote passes in August of 20, if we get to go ahead in August of 18, we have about a year worth of permit, final design permitting, bidding out the work, building up the construction. So that would have us wrapping up that project in August 2019. And then the question for the contractors, are they going to start construction with a month or two left of the Vermont construction season? They could. They likely would wait until the spring of 2020. And this is an estimate. We've been told that it's about an 18 month, two year construction cycle. So if they start in April of 2020, that's the 2020 construction season, the 2021 construction season, depending how things go, and if there opens at the end of 2021 or opens in the spring of 2022. There's no way to see that process of the management of the 2019 construction season? I mean, it's a question we could pose to our engineers. I, you know, traditionally engineering and permitting is not somewhere that you've gained time. We could pose it to our engineers. Incentivize. It's very hard to do municipal contact. I will say we've talked a lot about this Murphill liner tonight, but that is one piece too, that as we looked at construction could help us save some time because it's, again, they build it off site and drop it in versus having to set the concrete and wait. So it is possible that that could expedite the process, but one thing I'll say is they've not used those a lot in the Northeast. So I think there's a little bit of looking at that and figuring out procedureally how best to get the footing set, and they want to make sure they do that right so that it doesn't start shifting around and bucking around. So again, I think a safe end of 2021, beginning of 2022 is a pretty realistic and safe timeframe. Other questions, comments, concerns? Yes? Did Mark from Western Samson say that we got the bond hold in pass, that construction would start probably 19, or did he say that was a possibility? I thought, just for some reason, these numbers are off to me from what I remember being on the board committee. I could have sworn that he said that. And I'm trying to pull it up on the website, but that information is not done. He said once the bond pass, we could start after every new department, unless our bond department would be, I mean, I don't know that process very well. Yep, yep. Well, I mean, I'll just say if there's mixed up there or any feedback on that, if we could just have that in the next update. I'm just wondering if you could clarify. Yeah, all right, sorry. No, no, no, I'm just wondering because if we can pass in August and November, we can't waste a whole year having a Cynthia with all construction going on. Well, so just to be clear, it's not wasting the time. It's doing the final engineering permitting and construction documents. There's a lot of work that happens during that time on the engineering side of things. It's just not seeing shovels in the ground. Okay, so are we taking on the same engineering firm, Weston and Samson, or are we getting another engineering firm in to do this? We have not made that decision yet. That's not the type of detail we'd be at at this juncture. Okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, we'd have to, there's a process for which we obtain bids and go through that. In a lot of cases, it turns out that the people who've stuck with it from the beginning, yes, do have the best qualifications because of all that previous work, but there's not like a guarantee at this point until we put the money in place. I've been curious about the permitting, too, since there's an existing whole structure there. I wouldn't think it would take a year for a permit to go past, unless if we were digging fresh ground and the facility wasn't there, I could see the point, but we need a facility that's already there that's in place in another facility. That's one that's, there's a bigger White House about 45 miles down the road for that discussion, because that's, I mean, once you touch dirt, there's a process. And it's not avoidable. So it's, yeah, I mean, that's one of those things that is what it is. There's not a lot of flexibility around it. Yeah, so, yes, ma'am. Hi, I'm Megan. I was recently joined Cindy and Mike on the group that's looking at some fundraising efforts. Just two quick things. First of all, I just don't appreciate that you called out my mom on the front page form. I think that's pretty funny. It almost feels like a hand slap. I would think you'd be excited that people would be energized about this discussion. You were looking for energy and you say front form isn't the way to go, but writing to you guys doesn't get the community all excited, firing at their responses. They come here for information, but that's a good place to start. So there's that. Secondly, we're going to the Memorial Day VFW picnic. And I just want to add to what the lady said here. Just from the concrete, so we have something to tell the people. What we need to tell them, I thought I understood you correct, Seth, was to write to you guys and let you know which they want to, whether full or the third tier, or whether it goes to a bond. I just want to be very concrete. So when we have something, we need to hand out on flyer to people, critical. We have hundreds of people coming to this from what I understand. What do we tell them in order to get it on the August vote and get this project moving so we have any shot of doing 2020 opening or whatever? What do we tell the people? Yeah, there's not a magic answer to that. The whole point is public feedback is what we do, right? We're public representatives or we're elected by people to try to synthesize the communities once desires needs and put them into tangible, actionable things, right? So what I'm pointing out is if you're looking for a way to give input into the process, it's by giving ultimately the people who have to make the final call on it, you're two cents, right? You know, putting in that public feedback is important and it does get read, it does get considered and it's part of the overall decision-making process. It's not like a pre-vote. So maybe put your email addresses on something and say here's what we're considering these three tiers. Please go to the website, please inform yourself about what these three options look like as best as Ray has laid out. Please write to your council members. We really would like for an August vote to already get this going. I just want to be clear that we're all on the same page. Sure, sure. And you could have a direction after a conversation that's going to happen to say, hey, you know, we're all feeling pretty good about option three and move forward. That could not be the issue. It could just be make sure it goes to a bond vote, right? Let's make sure it's stressing importance around it. If there's specific features they want to advocate for, that's great. But it's really about the overall movement of the project and putting forward the voters. Again, there's kind of three things, right? Going back to that, there's which proposal is going to move forward from an idea standpoint. Are we going to have a vote on it, right? Are we going to put this forward to voters because we think we all agree that that's a feasible proposal that we're comfortable as the taxpayers for. And then number three is when is the vote? Those are the three that I have to decipher from. So in case people ask us what the council would need to hear in order to make those decisions when we come here for the June meeting, well, what do I say? Like the more input the better or they're going to take everybody's feedback and sort of talk about it and move forward. Again, I know what they're going to ask. There's not a magic answer to that. I'm sorry, there's just no, I mean, people vote yes or no when things come forward. Public feedback comes in a lot of different forums and opportunities. I think the whole idea though of this beautiful democracy we have, right, is that your public officials are watching, listening, trying to gauge feedback and trying to make the best, most responsible decision on behalf of taxpayers resources and that we'll have the best benefit for a community. So I'm just- Thank you, Seth. I appreciate your answer. Thank you. Yeah, and again, it's not, I'm not criticizing front porch forum in any way, shape, or form. It's when there's question marks at the end of things, we just start, we like to just say, hey, try to reach out to a primary source on it from the city if you want detailed updates about where things are or try to get that information. Okay. Yeah. But I appreciate, really appreciate that. Councillor Campbell, consider maybe posting minutes of town council meetings on front porch forum? They actually, all meetings are warned on there and with the warnings comes a link to where you can find agendas, all the documents associated with the meetings including minutes from past there. So each time we do a public posting, each meeting we have a public posting, that's one of the areas we do post that information. It's just important to note on public forums like that, there's, it's not in our estimation in a lot of cases appropriate for us to jump in the middle of conversations that are happening on public forums. That's your forum, you're the public, right? That's your opportunity to have conversations where it's not being hunched over on behalf of the municipality or some other entity, right? And so, there's no interesting quell into free speech. The only point I was making is that from an informational aspect, I just encourage folks to reach out to primary sources with that information that, especially if you've just got a process question. Other questions, comments? In regards to the pool presentation tonight, on information, can this be considered? So we all appreciate all the participation and the folks coming in. So, I'll just turn it back towards council now to see if there's any reflections in regards to the conversation tonight from a directional standpoint. In terms of what folks would like to see next, if there's any gaps in terms of information, we feel like we need in order to consider making a final decision in terms of those three things I kept pointing out. I don't feel like adding new- We can just pause one second. Hey, I'm sorry, if we could just, any conversation, we can move it outside. We appreciate that. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. I don't feel at this point that adding new layers and levels of analysis is useful. I think we need to make a decision about when we're gonna bond vote, or vote, whatever, have a bond vote, and for how much. And I think my strong preference is to point to Cornus towards August. I think there's a lot of reasons why that makes sense. One of which is if it doesn't pass in August, we have an opportunity to regroup and potentially ask a different question in November. We don't have to wait a whole year or call another special election. So I think if we can get some input from the community over the next couple of weeks on, it's essentially slide and community room versus value engineered options, that's the middle ground or the full kit and caboodle, right? So it'd be good to hear from folks in terms of their priorities, but I'm hopeful that we can make a decision in the first or second meeting in June that has us mourning a vote for August. That's where I'm at. Listen. Is that a ditto? Yeah. Eric, any thoughts, anything going to add into that in terms of direction, in terms of what we're going to ask staff to bring back next time? No, I mean, I'm in the same boat. I think that we need to come back at our next council meeting and like Nicole said, make a decision. And I echo and lean in the same direction that I would prefer on an August bond vote on the issue. So I think taking that feedback, I think what we're asking to come back is these three options again. I think it would be good if we could just step through them to the comment back there in terms of exactly what they are just from a presentation standpoint. And then decide if I'm not hearing that there's really any additional information needed. I mean, I think that's a pretty simple memo and just keeping the financial analysis there in front of people and any clarification we can provide from a public perspective on any timeline pieces. I think that's the one thing I heard tonight that if there's any clarification we need to add around that would be appreciated. I do think it would be helpful to try to distill the three options and to really clear and Paul I'm sure can help in terms of like from a public information perspective, I think we've got a pretty, I mean, we've got a lot of detailed information at this point, if we're going to get good input from the community in advance of warning a lot of the clearer, but the options are the better. In the way that page has been set up as we kind of just as new things come up we kind of just stick it on the top of the page and all the history is there. But I think what I can do is take some of the information tonight and sort of boil it down to sort of three snapshots and kind of say that's largely what's being considered and here's what that means. Right. I don't know if it's possible to have that document available in advance of the Memorial Day event, but I think certainly if there's a group of people wanting to do some outreach having that in the end would be useful. Yep. Can you get that down? Right, I'm sure we're, I wasn't asking, I wasn't calling on all this. Yep. The council brought it up. Is that something that the city could do for us since it's not a fundraising option, it'd be kind of a pool committee oriented informational. I think what it is is the city's public information flyer or you know this is what the decision is and then anybody in the community can print it and print it with it, what you will. People will go through. Yeah, we're more than welcome to hand it out as it has to people. I mean, we want it all, so. No, I understand, I appreciate that. You know, and I think that's just a really critical clarifying point that I want to put on tonight's conversation in regards to the kind of fundraising relationship is fundraising was not the city's idea. It never has been, it's always been something that was actively said to us as there's capacity for this, there's interest and energy around this. And I think that's a really important staple as we move forward and as a result of these conversations. I think tonight's the first time we're hearing that there's really, as a council formally, that there's really not a lot of confidence around capacity to do that, which I think if that's honestly where that effort stands is really critical information for us as we make a decision between the last of those components. Cause you know, it says to me, basically if we want those things to be done we're gonna have to do it with tax. There's not really another issue on that. The only other clarifying point I want to wash for folks at home, especially who have hung in here for this whole time, is that you do not vote once on something like this. You vote for the bond issuance and that gives the city of the authority to start moving forward on all the mechanics of it. You have to again come back and vote for a budget in the spring and March that includes this tax capacity in that budget. So I just want to flag that for folks and remind them that it's never over at the end of the bond vote. So we're really gonna be having a seven month conversation about the various projects that we have going on that are leading into what we lovingly refer to as budget season. So I just want to flag that for folks too that that's an important reminder. Do you have a last question? Yeah, that's right. I'm wondering if there's any point where fundraising, if it becomes successful and you know, obviously people are more energized about it now. If there's ever a point where it's like too late for us as citizens to kind of say I started Kickstarter and we get, you know, 500 people each donating $100 at Memorial Day and then we get a bunch of, like say my little grocery wants to donate $10,000. You know what I mean? Like we really get energized about fundraising. Is there ever a point where it's too late? This is what the taxes are. It's set in stone no matter what we as citizens have raised. So I think from a strategic level we have now passed that point from our decision-making standpoint. You know, again, if the numbers were thrown around in the past by people saying that there was fundraising capacity of like a million dollars, a couple hundred thousand dollars, these are not numbers that we asked for, these are numbers that we were given and told. So without any kind of demonstrated progress on that we're at a point now where we have to look at these numbers and say it's go or no go. And it's these options in the city is gonna make that final call about what it looks like because you can't do a half and half. When you do bond issuances on a very technical level, so that's a strategic level I just addressed from a technical level. If there were money that came in later that reduced the amount of bond obligation we had to take we could take less than the full amount. So when you do a bond issuance it's up to the amount. Technically we could take less. We wouldn't be bound to take the full amount, you know. So that's, yeah, you could reduce it but people would be effectively voting on the full amount in the tax rate in this case. And that's, again, what's very different between the two different bond conversations we've had is the mix of funding on the main streets very, very different. So the tax implications, the reason why they're moving is because they're dependent on other funding sources and subsidy. With this, those don't exist. So it's a very fixed number that we can come forward with. We know what the operational costs are and we know what that service looks like. It is this. I think we would all be reticent to say dependent upon a certain number of fundraising it could be this or this. That's a sort of different environment. Yes, you're welcome. Thank you for coming and speaking tonight. Okay, any other, let's see, Eric, before we close it out, just because this is a discussion item, any other items for me? I just want to verbalize that. I don't know, but thank you. Great. Okay, so with that, feels anti-climatic to not have some kind of big vote, but that's the new discussion item, right? I'm getting there. That's right. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ray. Thanks for all your time and thank you for the public. All right, item H, discussion, Main Street, your violation, next step. So as John comes up, just following the Main Street Bonn Vote on May 8th, we committed to providing you our kind of work plan of what we're working on in advance of bringing you back a full financing package. So we wanted to present that to you. That's in the attachment as a direct source of a sheet work plan. And then two items we wanted to specifically call out that have happened or are happening. We had a, hosted by downtown Winooski and staffed by Heather and John and myself, Main Street Business Community Meeting last week. Unfortunately, very sparsely attended, but Heather had done site visits at each of the businesses along Main Street as well and in advance, so a lot of the conversations happened in that context and not necessarily in the meeting context. But it was, we had a great conversation with downtown Winooski about how to, if the project goes forward, how to jointly work together on messaging and getting information out of communications and supporting the business community as it moves forward. We want to be sure to have those conversations now in the planning process so we know what to build in to budget potential project moving forward. And then Weaver Street pilot, Ion and John. Sure, so as discussed during the Alternatives Review Meeting, one of the items as we're looking at the bike facility, proposed bike facility for Main Street was encompassing improvements on Weaver Street. So incorporating the Transportation Master Plan recommendations, we are looking at a pilot, temporary 10-day protected bike lane, multi-directional. You can go out and kind of see some spot marks for that that's probably gonna land. We are having a public information meeting tomorrow night at six. Obviously a lot of concerns. We've been getting emails and we've seen some front porch form posts. Yes, my opinion is? Yeah, so, and that's great. I mean, and ultimately that's what we want to hear. We want to hear the full spectrum of comments on this. So I think one thing to really note is, we're not looking at a permanent bike facility right now. This is just tested out 10 days. Let's get some feedback. Let's get some data. So we're looking at RPC is supporting us with data collection. So we've got, you probably saw tubes out on Main Street ahead of this to kind of get some traffic counts and speeds. We had cameras out to look at, we'll kind of bikes go up and down right now and we would do the same thing during the pilot. So it's really data collection feedback. Let us know if this is something that looks feasible. I think that's really important because I've gotten a few emails where folks have spent a awful lot of time decrying process in this case because they think it's a permanent facility. This is an opportunity to give constructive feedback. It's always welcome, but any feedback that you have in regards to the pilot, this is not a fixed method going forward. This is something that came out of the public hearings on alternatives that we heard very clearly from people. Don't just tell us that you're going to study bike on, we want to see it. And I just want to commend you guys because I know there's some kind of quick reactions to it taking place right now for being so quick to respond and demonstrate to the public that we were responding to those concerns because that's what we asked. So thank you for doing that. So great opportunity for people to give feedback, look at it and I'm glad that all the studies are going forward on that too. Do we have like research questions that this is geared towards? Like, are we just trying to measure how many bicyclers there are in general or get a sense of like what this could look like on Main Street? So the data collection for Weaver will be actual traffic counts, vehicle traffic counts, traffic speeds before and after to kind of get a sense of, you know, we talk about bike lanes being the traffic calming device, let's measure it and see if it's true. The cameras will actually will look at how many bikes, they'll go through it in high speed and look at a number of bikes actually using it. So and we realize, you know, it would be a new facility. So there is a factor there of, you know, people trying it out. So it wouldn't be, we have that in the back of our head that it wouldn't be the standard. But we're also trying to capture it during the school year. So that's one reason we're kind of pushing this right now and trying to get in before school's out to see how many school children would use the facility. So those are the items we're trying to capture. And I think, and just to add to that, you know, these are, as the mayor said earlier, conversations that have been happening for a couple of years around the transportation master plan and some other visioning processes. And it's easy to see a bike lane, a cycle track on an engineering drawing, but to see it on the road is very different. So we're also trying to understand just operationally, is this engineered plan actually feasible on street? You know, obviously one of our largest community partners, St. Francis Church and the school is right there and uses the public facility and public parking a lot. So how does that work for them? What are other solutions we could put into place if this becomes a reality for the community? It's hard to just talk about that. It's easier to see it on the ground, see how it functions and then be able to course correct or not do it if it's prohibitive. Thank you. That's one question really, and it's not on either of those activities. But just in terms of managing our timeline and our schedule, if we're going to receive the complete financing package in August, one of the points of discussion we had early on was the need to address our housing ordinances. And I know that that in and of itself is a body work that has timelines associated with it. So I see it listed under other efforts, but there's a lot of other efforts. And I'm just wondering from your perspective, how you see that process dovetailing with this decision point in August? Sure. So I probably should have called that something else. The reason it's called other efforts is just the breakdown of grants and subsidy applications, revenue streams, partners, and then other efforts. It's not to make it a third, fourth class citizen, it's just only a little bit. There's a lot. I mean, there's clearly a lot that needs to be done. I'm committed to not losing sight of that, but I also, so I'm just trying to get a realistic picture. So I think the, I guess I'll answer one way and then ask Heather to weigh in as well as the staff person for that commission. We have heard loud and clear from the council that to make this decision in August or later in the fall, this is a lot of information that's going to be flying at you that part of that, you require that guidance to make that decision. The housing commission is the policy extension arm of your council. So your direction to them of give us some targets and ideas before that is the direction we have to implement. So I believe it's feasible. I think it's the charge that we have given them, but I'll turn it over to Heather who staffs those meetings monthly to comment further. Sure, we have developed a list of potential policies, incentives, et cetera that we're looking at now. We're looking at them kind of, I'm sending out information as I find good resources for people to look at. So part of it is grounding people in what those options are. In addition to that, for the last meeting, I've sent out projections of what different percentages of, you know, by income group of housing we could have and what that impact would be over a six year period. So you can see, you know, what the net units would be and how it would shift percentages. And that's something we'll be discussing at the next meeting. I think that it's possible for us to come forward with recommendations on what those targets should be specifically and what potential impact could be. And also a list of our recommended policies to implement in terms of actually writing new ordinance. I don't know what the timeline is for that to happen through the planning commission. Thoughts on that? So I think that's the, what we have tasked them with is bringing those ideas forward and then it would be up to you to say, yes we, yes we're going in this direction, yes we want to see these things. And then that ordinance drafting and process would go back to the planning commission for that public hearing. But with the recommendation from you that it moves forward. We are not going to be able to adopt new ordinances by August, but I don't think that that prohibits the policy decision from being made. And I would say it's going to be, they're going to be general policy recommendations and general policy sketches that are not going to be, this is not going to be the super in-depth detailed policies going to come forward. And I don't, to me that's never been the charge. It's to have those things analyzed and be ready. I think we've understood that the importance, the pressure has been to continue to push that along to ensure we're not having those conversations in a disparate vacuum, right? So I just want to say the qualitative judgment of what comes forward should be calibrated according to the timeline that it's being done in. I just don't want us to expect that we're suddenly going to get new zoning handed to us. It will not, right? Here's the policy levels and mechanics. Here's how you do this. Are there select portions of this list that look particularly appealing? Here's the ones we prioritized and why, these options. It's not going to be, the policy is not going to be done. Okay, so then how do we move from high level policy recommendations coming from the housing commission to this council, to an ordinance rewrite is underway because one thing that I'm interested in is sending a very clear message to the development community that they're looking at properties along Main Street. What are the expectations? Not a high level policy goal, but here's what that means in terms of an ordinance and here's the timeframe that we can expect so that construction doesn't begin and we still don't have, you know, whatever the ordinance modifications are going to be in place. Just to be clear, no point in time during any of our conversations was there agreement that we're going to have new ordinances passed, new zoning updated prior to accepting a funding package in August. At no point in time was that benchmarked as a requirement by council for that to come forward or that what we've said is we want the policy review done. We want those levers analyzed. We want to know what the feedback is as to what we think we can do to do that. So. So you have your perspective of what was asked for. I have my perspective. I didn't expect that the ordinances would be in place as of August, but I expected to be very clear about this is the direction that we're going and this is the timeline in which we expect to adopt these whatever changes we're gonna recommend or we're gonna approve. That it's not a high level policy discussion. It's a very concrete set of recommendations around targets and what ordinance changes are necessary in order to achieve those targets. I don't see what the, I don't see what value we gain from having high level sort of abstract policy discussions. In terms of informing the decision of whether or not to move forward with the project. So I think we clearly had different views of what where the housing discussion was going to be by the time we decided ultimately whether to move forward with the main street project. So anything that comes from the housing commission stops first at the planning commission, right? So it's not a, there's not a direct line here. I think from my perspective, and I guess I would challenge all of us to maybe go back and watch those tapes again and watch the conversation discussion and kind of recalibrate again what it is that we think the expectations were clue. Like it's been my expectation in the work that's being done is to put forward here those policy levers the ones we've analyzed. Here's the ones we think are on the table to create this outcome. It's not in the course of providing this to try to send some kind of message to the development community that has a specific agenda to it. It's to say, here's our housing outcome goals and these are the levers we think we can help to get there. It's not that we vote and all of a sudden everything changes and if we haven't passed every policy associated with trying to reach the goals that we think those policies will create is gonna happen that short of time. I think we need to be really clear about that or we're gonna have another meeting where we've set unrealistic expectations on staff in terms of what's feasible to bring forward. This is Eric. I do have frustrations though that we are so early on in a lot of those housing policy discussions that the train just hasn't really moved down the tracks very much at all. So I share some frustrations there. I would encourage you to take the time to look through the packages and look at what the housing commissions studied and maybe doing an update on some of that work next time in a formal way would be helpful for everybody to understand the work that's being completed there. And I would again ask everybody to maybe go back and look at some of those conversations about what we asked staff to do and bring forward. And I'm happy to be wrong if I'm wrong about it. But my perception of is bring us the policy lever for bringing us the goals and that's what the body's been pushing for. And I know that's what they've been pushing for because they go to their meetings. And I also know that there's a process to trying to say these are the exact policies that we're gonna have that require more deliberate conversation than we can try to force them to squeeze into two and a half months. That's not gonna be a reasonable timeframe. In part two, because the planning commission's got away and that's the body that stops that before it comes here. And that's an important order. So it might be useful just to talk about say if by August we're gonna get recommended policies, recommended targets, what does it look like to move from that to having something concrete in place? What is that timeline? Probably gonna be what has to happen to get there. Do you know the answer to that? No, I mean, I think we would, it depends on the policy, right? It depends on the policy lever and mechanism. If you're gonna say we want a full rewrite of zoning as a result of this, we wanna implement form or inclusionary zoning, that's not just something that we pull out of our pocket or do the work on with the presupposition that it might be supportive. The concept has to be vetted. The idea has to be vetted and then you write the actual policy to implement it. I guess I'm a little miffed as to any kind of perception that that policy is gonna suddenly be voted on in August prior to that being done. I just think that would be a disappointment. I think it's also very important and I know we've had this conversation a couple of times and we're now, I think, fully into a housing conversation not a mainstream conversation. I think housing in this community and how we stay affordable is the conversation we are going to be having for the next five or 10 years. I don't think any of this is we come forward with a recommendation, we put forward an ordinance and the next month it's, we're done. We've fixed housing. I think this is a process that's going to be iterative and look different across our community and different neighborhoods. I think looking, so we might wanna think a little strategically about what that looks like along Main Street to address some concerns and then what that looks like more broadly in the community. And I guess in my mind, how I was interpreting that is if we can come to agreement on targets, which is not only required, what I've heard is required for the Main Street project but is also required as part of the master planning process and then how we activate those targets along a very specific part of our city, i.e. the gateway zoning code. That is a bite at the city-wide housing conversation. But I think it's, I'm very hesitant to be able to say we are going to be able to, I think we really need to look at this piecemeal and not we're going to fix affordable housing or fix our value as a community around housing in the next two months or six months or nine months or a year. I think it's, I think these, you know, in communities that are being successful and growing and have a real identity about who they are, these are conversations that go on for years. And I think it's important to give ourselves time to have those conversations. So I think, again, in my mind, committing to bringing those targets forward, what those targets look like in new development, which is the data that Heather's put together for the Next Housing Commission. And then what are the policy lovers that we would pull to incentivize different levels of development and then look at that specifically through the lens of Main Street is something that we could put forward in August, but to put forward a comprehensive plan about housing. I just don't think that's feasible or in the best interest of the city. And I wasn't talking about a comprehensive plan for housing. I was talking about the gateway zoning ordinance that we have been talking about for, ever since we adopted it, there were questions about whether or not the incentive program was going to work. And so, you know, I'm not gonna go back and watch the tapes because I know very clear about what my intent was and the concerns that I raised and those I think need to be, I will continue to ask for them to be addressed before the vote in August and beyond. I have a question about the Next Housing Commission meeting. So the fourth Monday is Memorial Day. Yeah, I have a doodle poll out to the membership right now asking them whether they want to do Tuesday or Wednesday. So I'm waiting for the final response. Did I get that poll or? You did. I don't know, okay. You did, but I'll send you the invitation as soon as I have that set. Does one of them seem better to you than the other Tuesday or Wednesday? Feel free to email me that. Yeah, thank you. Any questions or comments or concerns regarding that? This is Eric again. And I think just harkening back, I'm wondering where we're at because I know as a part of some of the discussion around this issue we had to put the main street bond out to voters was that we'd be getting back a report in regards to timeline for the work plan for the Housing Commission so that we could have some assuredness that this work was moving forward. And I was just wondering when that's gonna happen. So I think the on our regular council schedule the second meeting in June is our regular housing update. I think maybe we fast-track that to the next meeting and can lay out all of this. Other questions, comments, concerns? And I think just globally appreciate this memorandum. And I think what we've heard loud and clear is there's a desire and interest in continued updates on this process, right? It's similar to the public outreach perspective. It's not just a one-time thing. It's something that is evolving. And the best we can do to keep the public informed of how the process is moving forward and how the decisions are being made, what information is being used to make those decisions is important. So thank you for that work. Any questions, concerns, comments from the public? So seeing and hearing none. We have concluded tonight's regular agenda. We have an item on the schedule for this evening for a potential executive session. The executive session will be pursuant to the SA3131E. And it's in relation to a matter that's a legal issue of pending litigation to which the city is party and to discuss in public would jeopardize both legal confidentiality. In some cases, it could also put the city a significant legal disadvantage. And this is in reference to UMBB, UMB Bank in a city of Wynuski, which is a formal case that folks can access too. So in regards to that, Jesse, is there anybody besides you that you'd like to come to? Okay, great. Eric, we'll try to carry you into that. As with every executive session, there's no vote or action being taken this evening. Any items that require action will be publicly warned and voted on in public. And this would conclude the balances of tonight's public portion of the meeting. The council will reconvene only to adjourn. I would entertain a motion to enter an executive session. So moved. Second. Motion by Christine, second by Nicole. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those of favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. Council member in the executive session now. And again, we'll reconvene only to adjourn. Thank you very much.