 My name is Richard Shear, and this is Mount Piliar City Forum. We're going to be talking about town meeting, and this is one of a series of shows. We'll have all three districts, and we'll have the school budget, we'll have the city budget, and we'll have parks. In this case, we're back in District 2 again, my district, and we have Alex Geller, who's running for council for the first time. Hi. Thanks for inviting me. Absolutely. We're in District 2. I live on Kent Street, which, for those who don't know, is right off of Ridge Street, pretty close to the college. Okay, and for those of you who don't know, our gerrymandered city, District 2 goes all the way from Murray Hill down to Berry Street. Yeah, yeah, it does. Yep. No, go ahead. Yeah, it's an interesting district, it's pretty large, it kind of goes down Hubbard Ridge Street for a ways, and it just snakes its way through our neighborhoods. What's the commonality there? I mean, you have high income on College Street, you have low income on Berry Street. Yeah, it's certainly a diverse neighborhood for sure, or a district. I think that's one of Montpelier's greatest strengths is our diversity in demographics, and I think that's a beautiful thing. Is Montpelier a town or a city? That's a good question. I've always referred to it as a city, we got the capital here, that says a lot, but it definitely has that kind of town feel. You walk downtown, and you inevitably run into at least a couple people that you know on a busy day. How long have you been in Montpelier? Six years, yeah. What brought you to Montpelier, Vermont? Yeah, so I met my wife. It always starts that way. Life starts when you met your wife or your husband? It does, yes. So I met my wife, we lived in Weitzfield Valley, and I had been in Montpelier for probably eight years prior to that, excuse me, in Vermont, eight years prior to that, and we were looking to settle down, and quite honestly, I was looking to find an apartment in Montpelier with her, and we looked for months and months and months, and we couldn't find anything. That's Montpelier. It's unbelievably low vacancy, right? And so we started putting some numbers together, and I was shocked to find out we could actually afford a mortgage. And so if we could just find the right house, we would be all set, and luckily we did. It took a while, and our house was on the market for all the two days, and we lucked out big time. What can the city do about housing in town? Realistically. Yeah, great question. So the way I see it is we have two major problems. We have seniors that are really looking to downsize. There's over 200 of them that have joined in a group. And we also have young families that are really struggling to get on the property ladder, not only because of price, but because of availability, which has the effect of driving up price. So that's really concerning to me. And for us, in particular, just the cost of ownership and to rehab a house, we ended up having to do a lot of the work on our house ourselves. We didn't have the luxury of being able to hire somebody to do that work. So I see those as the two problems. And the solutions that I see, I'd really like the city to focus on improving our existing infrastructure, our housing infrastructure. How would they do that? So we have some underutilized houses, I think, that are, you know, let's say 3,000 square feet. And maybe there's a couple of people living in them. And that's problematic because we're not really utilizing those houses for the era that they were built in. Back in the 1900s, or at the turn of the century, the average household size is about 2.5, excuse me, it was 5. And now it's 2.5. So our demographics have changed substantially. And so those houses that were built 100 years ago aren't meeting the needs of today. But they still exist. They still exist and they're beautiful, and they are what make up the character of our neighborhoods, right? And that's what everybody wants to preserve here, is the character of our neighborhoods. And I think that's a beautiful thing that we do need to preserve. And so what I'd like to see is those houses filled with people again, you know, appropriately. And so I would like to see the city incentivize remodeling these houses or making them handicapped accessible or ADA compliant. How would they incentivize that in your mind? Yeah, so we have a housing fund, which is great, and I'm really thrilled that we do. And I think it does great things. And I think that's the avenue that we want to go down. We want to perhaps funnel some more money into that fund and expand the scope of services that they're allowed to dole that money out for. Were you following the master zoning plan, the revision of the master zoning plan? A little bit. And I'm familiar with the increased densities in nearly all of our neighborhoods that are permitted now, yes. Did you feel that, I mean, it was a long protracted struggle to come to that conclusion. Did you feel that it improved the city and if so, how? Well, I think that remains to be seen, right? Yeah. We'll see how the policies of the zoning affect the city and we'll see what happens. Like I said, it's very expensive to build a Montpelier, so we may not see all that much change. So I think inevitably, as a general trend across the nation, we have populations that are really concentrating on cities and with services and that kind of thing. And that's an inevitable trend that's going to continue most likely. So our population density or housing density will likely go up. But what I'm seeing right now is that we built our city with houses that were really large and we're not filling them with as many people as we used to, necessarily. And so what I'd like to see is let's take our existing infrastructure and right size it. How would you do that? Yeah. So I think we have some houses right now that are, like I said, not fully utilized or large and that there's just a couple of people. Well, you take a house into a duplex or something? Possibly. Yeah. And incentivize it. Leave it up to the owner to do that, to make that call. Certainly not allow the city to make that call, but incentivize it. We have some houses that are perhaps not as well-capped as others. And what if we could incentivize, if necessary, taking those down and rebuilding them with something that meets the needs of today? Is that'll increase the neighborhood aesthetics? We don't have to bring new utilities to that infrastructure? We certainly don't need more water. Yeah. We have water capacity. Yes, we do. More than enough water capacity. But if we're talking about building on Greenland, which we have in very, very short supply, we're also talking about incurring major infrastructure costs. We have to build a road out there, power lines, utilities. All that stuff needs to go out there. And then all that traffic pattern changes. And so that has other considerations. Do you think that Saban's pasture will be built in your children's lifetime? You think we'll get housing soon on Saban's pasture? Yeah. And if so, how would you see the development of Saban's pasture? So I think that's largely a decision that's up to the Zorzi family, the owners of the property. I think there's been any number of efforts to figure out what an appropriate solution to that area is. What I'd like to see is certainly along the Berry Street corridor there. We have all that infrastructure there. It's ready. I know that the VCFA is pursuing the possibility of building some housing there as well. And I think that makes sense. We already have the infrastructure there. There's nothing that is truly spectacular about... Well, we also have infrastructure coming from the distillery. That's true. Yes, absolutely, which I think is fantastic. So that can really prop that neighborhood up. And certainly that first 500 feet or so from the road, the setback, I don't see why we wouldn't try to encourage building of new homes there or new facilities or whatever the zoning kind of prescribes. But the upper part of the pasture is it's a gem. And if you haven't seen it, I would highly recommend asking people that have going there yourself. It's a true gem. I don't know. I'm not a planning expert by any means, but I would love to see that preserved somehow. In March, when City Council is elected, they meet in a caucus and they determine their goals and their objectives for the next year. I'm going to put you on that council. You won. Okay. In a hypothetical you've won, you're sitting in that room. What's your goal and objective? You get two goals and objectives that you would like to put on that white board for the council to look at. What areas of expertise would you bring that you would like to see go on that board? Well, I'll step back a second. And I think that, you know, I've looked through the annual report and the budget and all this. And I see all the goals that we have and we have a lot of goals. There are so many goals. And I just, I wonder sometimes if we're not spreading ourselves too thin, if we could instead concentrate some of our efforts, where would you go major goals? I think that would be great. Give me a few major goals. Absolutely. The economy and housing. Those are two beautiful goals that I think we could really, we could make a lot of progress on. So for housing in particular, if we can facilitate seniors being able to downsize. And if we can get young families on the housing ladder, I think that would be beautiful. And our economy. So how many visitors are we getting? How many businesses do we have? How many livable wage jobs do we have in Montpelier? And what do we want that to be? What's our target, right? I think those would be great things for city council. So you supported the establishment of the Economic Development Council? Oh, absolutely. I was, yeah, I was actually involved in some of the forums that they hosted. I participated in that. And I've read the report and I think it's absolutely fabulous that the city decided to focus on this opportunity. Using the food and beverage tax to finance the effort. Yeah, absolutely. What about our infrastructure? Oh, what about it? Everybody complains about our infrastructure. It's your turn now. So I actually have somewhat of a background in infrastructure planning. So I work for the state and so my specialty is information technology. And what I have been working on recently is asset in the asset management domain. Now, they have a saying that you can only be young and dumb once, but you can be old and stupid a long time. What is asset management? OK, yeah, asset management. So you look at that fire hydrant, that bridge, that sidewalk, those are all assets that the city has. In fact, our buildings are assets too. And it's enormous that we have so much maintenance that we have to perform on all these assets. And I think as some people realize, our roads are crumbling. And underneath the roads. And yeah, our water mains are bursting. We have really old infrastructure. We're a New England town. And there's a lot of work that needs to be done. And I'm so happy that the city council has been paving the way, no pun intended, with their capital improvement plan, by steadily increasing funds to devote to infrastructure planning and investment. And I think that is definitely part of the solution. We are underfunding our infrastructure. We have the highest tax rate in our area. And one of the highest municipal tax rates in the state. How do you do that and still maintain an affordability that allows young people to get that foothold that you want in our community? Right, so one of the things that I really hope to bring to the council is my knowledge and experience with asset management software at the state level. And I'm really happy that Department of Public Works just purchased a software package. It's called Beehive. It allows them to understand how many hundreds of thousands of assets do we have? What condition are they in? And what makes sense to work on first, right? Because we're always going to have a limited constrained budget on our assets. We're never going to be able to fund it. So there's always going to be that constraint. So it's not about fixing everything. It's about figuring out how do we prioritize this? And how do we get the most value for the taxpayer? So if we can start making smarter investments through spring our bridges, spring the salt off of our bridges that extends the lifespan of those bridges even longer. If we find that crack ceiling, our roads extends their lifespan even longer, then we're starting to bend that curve, right? We're starting to get more value for our tax dollars. In terms of getting to staying on the infrastructure, the rec center on Berry Street, that used to be the armory, it is one of our older buildings that's still in public use. What would you do with that? Yeah, that's a great question. I walk by it every day and I admire it. It's a beautiful building from the front for sure. And I'm aware that there are some structural issues that prohibit a lot of different types of uses that would be desirable there. And I'm not really entirely sure. I think if we can find some use for it to preserve it, that would be fabulous. But there's always that housing need. So if the city could possibly divest and reinvest in something else, like our infrastructure that we are having a really hard time maintaining in the first place, I think that would be wonderful. What about the net zero vision for downtown? It's fabulous. How so? It's got the tram that goes up to national life. Yeah, it's got the whitewater part. Exactly. Did that look realistic to you? I think those are intentionally aspirational, absolutely, to help you envision what's possible. So I work at the National Life Building, so I'd love to see a tram. Do I think it's reasonable in the next 10, 20, 30 years? Maybe not. I would say. I think there are aspects of that plan that are definitely worth considering. I would love to see total re-envisioning of our parking. How so? Yeah. I said I'm the parking committee, so we went through meeting after meeting and that. What's your view on parking? Because everybody complains about parking too. Yeah, I don't because I walk to work, but I'm fortunate enough to do that. So parking, it's interesting. It's a very complex problem. We have a lot of employers in town. We want to bring more employers in town, which means we're going to need more parking. We're building possibly another hotel, which is going to have even more increased need for parking. So I look at this from a transportation background, and I think, well, what's coming in the next 10, 15, 20 years? And one of the things I'm really excited about is autonomous vehicles. In that, if autonomous vehicles allow us to reduce our car ownership, say I move from one car down to two cars down to one car, then that's one less car that has to be parked. And if instead I hail a ride to work every day. What is an autonomous vehicle? Sorry. Yeah, so an autonomous vehicle is a vehicle that typically uses electric battery power to propel itself, but it also has a lot of very sophisticated computers on it and sensors that allows it to navigate neighborhoods actually safer than a human. Certainly, and right now I think they're at about two times as safe as a human in the future. They're hoping to get to about a thousand times as safe as a human. Do you see these what is now we're speaking in the future, we're not speaking next year, but do you see these as jitties that are going around the neighborhoods like the circulators do? Yeah, I think it's going to be tough to envision exactly how it's going to be. I know our transportation services are GMTA, they're extremely interested in this because one of their major costs, aside from maintaining these vehicles. GMTA being Green Mountain Transit 30? Yep. One of their biggest costs is personnel. That is a very attractive thing to them. If they can automate a bus route, that's a wonderful thing for them. I think there's also that Uber model. If people aren't familiar, it's a smartphone app, you can hail a ride like a taxi. If that can come to you without a driver and then drop you off at, say, half the cost because there's no labor involved, then that's a game changer, right? It's not so expensive anymore. But do you think Uber and that will ever take off in a town of 7,500? Yeah, well, there's already an Uber driver here, absolutely, and Chittenden County, I think Uber is a little bit more common and it's a growing trend, but yeah, I think we have, I heard, we have one Uber driver right now. And a couple of Air B and Bs in town. And a couple of Air B and Bs and we have a taxi next year and who knows when next year, but yeah, I think if our population continues to grow and the need is there, I think there's a lot of possibilities for the Uber's to come here. You've looked at the budget. Are there any areas that you feel that we could revisit for cost savings? Yeah, so I think with my experience, what I know about infrastructure planning, I think that we can reduce the amount of maintenance in our infrastructure if we do thoughtful, careful planning and that's reinvestment into our infrastructure. It's not going to be an overnight cost savings, but certainly a long term. The other thing I'd like to get away from is how much we bond. Yeah, so we bond for things that we know full well are coming down the pipeline and that's a little bit... What does that mean? Yeah, so when we borrow money, for example, to put a new roof on a building, we knew that roof was going to be, was needing to be replaced. The day that we installed it, right, roofs have a very, you know, 15, 30 year lifespan metal roots, I think have a 100 year lifespan, right? So all this stuff. So we should have started saving that day instead of borrowing money to go and fix that 20 years later. How many...we were back to the El Gore lock box. How do you, in a city budget that's this tight, how do you save that? How do you put that aside when you've got competing needs going? How do you set up that lock box? It is, it's really difficult and you need to figure out how to squirrel away the money where you can and when you can and so that it's not severely impacting the services to our citizens. The human service budget, the allocation of $100,000 for human services that we as a community deem necessary. Is that necessary in your view? Human services? Yes. So... Human services. Do you want to give some examples specifically? Sure. The teen center. Yeah. Again, there's a committee that divvies out $100,000. Yeah. So the community fund. Exactly. It's our community fund. Yeah. I think Montpelier is a very caring place and that's also what makes it so attractive, right? We are a caring community and I think it absolutely has a place in our budget for sure. Now, of course, this being a small town, what about the dog issue? Yeah. So I own a dog. I was at city council last night just to observe and it looks like the leash law is getting ever closer to becoming a reality. This is, you know, it's unfortunate that we have to put ordinances in place to make sure that owners are responsible with their pets. Pets are going to do what they want. Owners need to control them. And as a dog owner myself, I realize that every day and, you know, unfortunate things happen and, you know, a few bad apples, you know, change ordinances, for example. I think, you know, this is not uncommon. I think there's a lot of other communities that struggle with the same problems. And I'm sad to see it, but, you know, I think it's probably the right thing to do. Moving the farmers market up onto State Street and downtown development. What's your view on the farmers market? I love the farmers market. I'm all for it being in the street for, you know, a relatively low traffic time of day, especially where there's alternate routes that are not terribly inconvenient. And I think it's probably a boost to a lot of the businesses downtown in general. So absolutely love it. I think Montpelier draws in a lot of people from other communities that come to our farmers market and we should do everything we can to support it. If you're in council, you'd be on various different agencies, you know, there's someone from council on the Public Safety Commission, there's someone on the library board, there's someone on Montpelier Life. Which organization would you choose? Yeah, so I'd love to engage with DPW and really focus on our infrastructure because I think that's where my expertise and background lie. Also, to the extent that I can lend my experience and information technology, I think that would be well-leveraged. So, yeah. Other than that, I think Donna Bates is already maybe the liaison between the Parks Commission, but if there's any opportunities to engage with that or the Parks Commission. How would you like to see Hubbard Park change? I don't think it should change. I think we need to recognize that it's a great thing. And it's perhaps at the point where there's too many competing priorities for it and let's continue a good thing and look for other opportunities to expand our recreation, right? So, the area, the section of woods between North Branch Nature Center and North Street. Right now, town property and there's a Vaskey Trail going through it, a couple of footpaths, not really much going on. The local mountain bike chapter is advocating heavily to build some mountain bike trails there. And I think that would possibly relieve some of the strain on Hubbard Park right across the road. I think that would be wonderful. One final question. Yeah. City Council people, you've watched City Council for six years now. Is there a City Council that you feel that you would model your style after? Oh, geez. Pastor present. That's a good question. I think I have, well, how about this? I've sat in the last few City Council meetings pretty much the whole, you know, three, four hours. The marathon. Yeah. Right. Right. And so the current Council, I guess I've appreciated John Holler's ability to facilitate those meetings. I think he's very effective and respectful. And I've also, I've respected Anne Watson for her perspective. I think she brings great counterpoints to the argument. And Justin Turcott, I think he's really fantastic in terms of getting into the weeds of things and really breaking out the magnifying glass and understanding some pretty challenging concepts. Geez, that's a diplomatic answer if ever I heard one. I want to thank you for coming. Yeah. It's been an excellent conversation. And for the people who are watching this, you've been able to see one candidate. We have all of the candidates in other shows. We also have a presentation coming on the City budget, as well as a presentation on the school budget. But the most important thing is that pick up the bridge, read what they have to say. If you get a chance to meet these people, at this point I've met them all and they're excellent candidates. And I would urge you, most importantly, to get out and vote. And urge your family to get out and vote on Town Meeting Day. And urge your friends to get out and vote. Because that's the vitality of our community. We've got tons of commissions. We've got tons of panels with the City. Join a committee. Join a commission. Engage yourself. Thank you so very much for watching.