 We don't need to inform but we have some people here in the room. We have hopefully you can see us but I know we appear kind of small in the room. So we're the mayor and councilor Hightower who are joining us. We have councilor Carpenter, councilor Swiggy and councilor Barlow here in person. And various staff members who are presenting. And we're sorry you're not here in person because the first marvelous night does include snacks to make it a little bit more marvelous. But thank you for joining remotely anyway. So we have five budget presentations for tonight. It is our lightest night so buckle up the ones next week have eight or nine. So I think we can get through this pretty quickly. The first two I am doing so just give me a brief moment and I will share my screen here. We are starting with one that does not sound interesting. And yet it is the non departmental budget. So that is why we are starting with what is the non departmental budget. One of the reasons you should care about it is because this is the budget that includes the famous big five. And I've listed them here. The first one is property taxes. And as we know we talk about the property tax rate. But in reality this is made up of 13 individual tax rates. Some of them are dedicated to specific purposes. Some of them are like the retirement tax pennies for parks. And they just pass through the general fund. And they don't really affect that. And others go directly to the general fund bottom line. We also have these payments called pilot that are kind of like property taxes. And they are payments that are made in lieu of those taxes by nonprofit organizations. And that's why I have the picture of the pilot here because otherwise it would be pretty boring slide. And it was not so easy to find a female black pilot but you can find pictures if you search hard enough. The other three revenues that are included in the big five are franchise fees. And these are fees paid primarily by water and electric to be able to use our streets in the provision of utilities. And then gross receipts and local option tax. And we also talk more about gross receipts is also called meals and entertainment tax. And that is a 2% tax that we is collected by the state. But then we receive that money on any meals, entertainment, alcohol, hotel rooms. And the total option tax is an additional 1% sales tax. And that is both administered by the city and then that 1% is also retained by the city. Here is a historical view of pilot and I apologize if it is hard to see but I wanted to be responsive to some of the requests to go back to FY 18. And what you will see here is that we have a few different categories of pilot. The first one is what the state pays to us. The next three are all water. It's water wastewater and storm water. The fourth one is BED and then we have an other category and those tend to be small nonprofits that all told their pilot payments individually are very small. And that's why I've come by. You can see that in FY 18, 19 and 20, really until the reappraisal, the numbers under pilot were really pretty stable. And then we see wastewater and BED have dropped in FY 21. And that is because of the reappraisal. And these numbers are automatically calculated. We are in discussions and water, wastewater, storm water will be making up this difference in pilot funds that usually go to the general fund via an increased franchise fee. And we expect the same from Burlington Electric and I'll get to that in a moment. This is the historic view for gross receipts and local option tax. You will see local option has been surprisingly stable throughout the pandemic. One of you know that I jokingly have referred to this as the Amazon effect because when you notice during those months in early 2020 when people were not on Church Street, they were at home ordering things online. And the local option tax is destination based meaning if you order something online and receive it at your Burlington address, if it's something that is you were going to pay local option tax on it on Church Street, you would also be paying that from Amazon. So that has been a fairly steady revenue stream for us and you can see even during FY 22 we budgeted higher for that. We do expect to exceed our budget projections. And you'll see right now for FY 23. We had originally projected 2.8 million and that is before we knew that FY 22 would come in at 3 million. So at this point we're looking, could we raise that a little bit. For the gross receipts, you will see took a very big dip in FY 21 and FY 18 and 19 we were up above $4 million, FY 23, FY 21, 2 million. We are projecting to be back at 4 million this year and we are expecting that to continue in FY 23. After discussions with my staff gross receipts have historically kind of always tacked out around 4.2 or 4.3 million dollars. So while I think we will get back to that level. It's unclear if we will exceed that level. This is what I was talking about with the franchise fees. We could call this the most stable rate of all. It's up in at $2.1 million for the past five years. And this year, we are budgeting for an increase. And that is because of this issue I spoke about with the pilot expenses are in non departmental. So $11 million or more than half of the category is inter fund transfers. Again, there's no good pictures if you Google inter fund transfers that's what this tree is supposed to be. And again, there's many that are required to street capital petty for parks it's those kinds of items. Other expenses in non departmental include our debt service. And then there's some items and I've listed some of them here that are appropriate to have in non departmental because they're really city wide expenses are BT data charges electricity. The security chocolate thunder for city hall park or all city hall. Those kind of items. Normally in the non departmental budget, we reviewed the detailed tax rates. We're not quite ready to do that. So we're going to push that to next week. But that's I'm sure everyone's favorite chart where in the end we wind up with what our proposed tax rate is, but we'll go through in great detail. Each of those dedicated tax rates. And that's it for non departmental. So we're discussing what anybody have. I have a question about franchise fees taking up part of the pilot is that you explain what a franchise fee is and then. Secondly, are we handling pilot for BED and wastewater differently this year. We have historically because of these franchise fees. Hello. The franchise fees are fees that come from companies that need to use our streets to provide services. So these are natural gas cable TV electric. They used to be like a landline telephones. I doubt that's much of an issue now. And they pay these fees to us as compensation for actually using the streets. And it is a percentage of the company's gross revenue. I believe it's 3.5% do not quote me on that part but if you're very interested I will find out. And we have been in great discussions with Megan Moyer and chief in because how pilot has worked with water wastewater and stormwater pilot in general is very complicated. So I'm going to go ahead and do some calculations. And Megan has been working with some of my staff to try and simplify that and provide more predictability for her budget while also how do we make the general fund whole. So yes, we will be making coming to you with a change to franchise fee because we will, I think, need city council permission to increase that percentage, but that would then apply to all of the utilities, not just water. Any other questions. All right, great. Let's move on to the clerk treasurer's office. Great. Here are the functions of the clerk treasurer's office. It's not just budgeting and collecting taxes. As you know, we also issue a variety of license to keep all of your land and vital records conduct elections administer grants payroll retirement purchasing. If you don't know who does it in the city, there's a decent chance it happens in the city. In addition to our kind of keeping the lights on. These are some of the big FY 22 results. We implemented a very large project on project accounting to ensure that some of our large capital projects will really all of our large capital projects. We have accounting life to date information. And that was a big recommendation from our auditors and something that has been in work in the works for a couple of years. As you know, we are in the midst of a audit from the state auditor's office on the waterfront tip. We continue to oversee elections and try and innovate as we are doing both in person and mail in elections. We are managing all of the ARPA revenues and expenses and reporting. And at long last, all city departments are using electronic timekeeping instead of handwritten time sheets. This is a current work chart. There have been some changes. I've come to you sort of piecemeal. One of the big things to take away from this is that I'm trying to eliminate the clerk slash treasurer's office and really integrate this team so that it's not one side is the clerk and one side is the treasurer. But really to make that a more integrated whole. Here is a picture of our team. We often parent does not want me to share this photo of her, but I think she looks great anyway. We often work and meet with the HR team. And this was a retreat we have last fall. And here is at a very high level, our overview of expenses and revenue. You can see our expenses are increasing, but so is our revenue. And as you know, because you have approved them, a lot of these additional personnel costs are not coming from the general fund. Those are coming from capital and ARPA. Usually in this meeting we talk about audit findings. So again, this is a year where we did not have audit findings. We did have three recommendations. We've been working hard to address those to ensure that our journal entries are completed in a more timely manner and we're hiring staff for that. Improving our capital accounting, which is continue to be a focus and working with DPW and solving the issues around the parking facilities. For our FY23 initiatives, we will continue to finish the TIF audit and implement all of the follow-up recommendations. We are getting ready to onboard a new grants director and associate so that we can get some more federal and state grant money, as well as a grants account and capital account so that we can build out that accounting team and be responsive to the audit recommendations. And as I mentioned, we will be integrating the accounts receivable and customer service teams under the operations director. And I thought I had a question slide, but I don't. And I'm happy to take questions if you have them. Yes. I have one question. I can't remember when it was that the retirement administration was brought from HR to the court treasurer's office. I'm feeling like it really wasn't that long ago, but time is a way of running away with itself and maybe it was five years, I don't know. I'm assuming it was before your time. It was just about when I got here. It hasn't been five years. I'm feeling better. But yet that is a position that is vacant. So where are people going when they need other than going to Rich, who probably has a few other things to do? Where are people going when they have retirement questions or is it rich? It's a combination of rich, their HR manager, if they're an employee, and we do have a couple of additional resources in CT and we realized we were leaning on some of those people who do have other day jobs as well. And that's why we needed to bring the retirement administrator back. So what actually happened when I started about two and a half years ago, we had the retirement administrator about a year in as H&H had come on. We thought having them would be enough and we wouldn't need like just one person in the city for people to go to. Then we realized over that next year and a half we did in fact need someone to go to. People are just aren't comfortable with the company they don't know or with technology. So there are certainly fewer calls that even the two years ago that I've been here for retirement. But it's still a needed source. And so right now, it's essentially dividing up between three people and we would like that to be with just one person. So, okay, so thank you. So that is a vacant position when you go into the personal expenses first 23. Are you including that position? Yes. 328,000 is the difference? Yes. I don't know if you counted it in 22 and haven't filled it. No. So it's all things being equal or if in fact that is an additional position and I don't know, you know, I don't have the top of my head know the grade 19. How much that factors in terms of personnel, wages, benefits, etc. That is one of the new positions that is factoring in because we didn't have it in FY 22 and those costs are born by the retirement fund. So it's similar like with the capital account pool. It also makes it look like the CT, you know, if you just look at expenses, it looks like they're going up but that's being paid for by the capital fund. So it's not a true cost. Of course it's a cost, but it's not a cost being bought by the general fund. Yeah, but so that actually makes it I mean that makes a pretty big difference. Yes, you know, I mean that's not just semantics that's a difference. So if that's the case then shouldn't there be another category that talks about what is actually being formed by the general fund which is really was responsible for tax increases although of course the retirement is one component. Yeah, but I mean it seems as though that 328,000 I'm just wondering is that number 328,000 dollars more out of the general fund and it sounds to me like the answer is no. No, so that's what I was attempting to capture at the bottom I'm just going to put this slide back up here. You mean in terms of that note on yeah at the bottom exactly so it's really 450,000 so the difference is 328 but really there's $450,000 worth of increased costs and I didn't mention retirement but it's capital retirement assigned fund balance are and I'm not sure if there's any others that I missed. Okay, I mean, I guess it probably could include retirement just so yeah it's obvious but yes that's a pretty clearing, you know, decision that is open. Yeah. And I assume that's the same thing with the customer service associated although that is general fund. That's correct. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Yes. I have a related question around the ARPA money. Is there any ARPA money that's being used to pay expenses in this upcoming budget year that will then have to become part of the structural budget. Yes, it is for the grants accountant and the idea behind that is this first year is paid for by ARPA and then as the grants director and associate are bringing grants in. We build that grants accountant into those grants so that it becomes not a part of the structural budget but built into new grants that are obtained over the next year. Approximately how much is that? The grants account position it's about 65,000. We did one other smaller questions when you're talking about operating expenses so we mentioned that in FY22 we did three elections plus a recount. Yes. Now assuming for FY23 you're only putting two. Yes. So that's part of a little bit part of the 15,000, although it's probably more than that. Unfortunately, while we're going to have fewer elections, we are going to have some increased costs. The state is bearing most of the costs for all of the new equipment that we're going to get. But we're supposed to get new tabulators and all this stuff but we wanted to build in, you know, a little bit of cushion because of all of that transition. You know, there are questions. All right, let's move on to human resources. I will come sit next to you but I don't know where. Okay, so this is my first time presenting for the budget. It's my first year at the city. I'm really happy to be here. I think everyone here knows what human resource does. We are, you know, we are the staff, I think really important to say when we're looking at this is that staff from the city, you know, can go from anywhere from, you know, 600, I think it's 680 full-time employees. But then it can go up to over 1200 during our seasonal times during our, and it can really, we're right in the middle of seasonal time, we're going to be onboarding hundreds in June. So, one of the things that I did when I got here to stabilize the department, I came after the department was, we didn't have a director for over a year and a half. And so I realized right away that it was important to have an assistant director. We didn't have a appointed position. Should I vacate position or should something else happen? I think there needs to be legacies, stability. I was able to come to the board of finance, asked for that, and was granted that the assistant director covers benefits and risk management. And the reason for this is the city bears claims of a million, about a million dollars a month. And that includes our regular medical claims, but also workers' cop claims. We've seen a steady decline since COVID, but since we hired all these new folks, we don't want to see that number go back up. So, that person will look at employee safety and also, you know, oversee our benefits, our benefits vendor, which is SIGNA. And then we have the rest of the department, talent recruitment, that is Vanessa. Also, you folks know Vanessa or have met Vanessa. Three HR managers. We did hire an administrative coordinator because we do have a door to our office now. We open, we are on site five days a week when we've been there since last June. So we are an in-person department. And I feel really strongly about that. Our employees, many of them first responders are here on site, so that's what we do. And then we have a generalist. We did, that was a promotion that I went before the board of finance to cover. That person was just really serving in between two roles. So that's Corrietta, and she does all of our generalists work. And here's the FY23 budget. Salaries and benefits take up most of it. I will just go over briefly the changes of them, ask if there's any questions. This year, we feel really committed to digitizing our processes. That's going to be an efficiency that we're going to realize very soon. We're not traveling to do training. We have an amazing system here supported by our IT department, which is Neil Guv, a lot of training through that system. And then you can see the rest of our expenses there, our lease, our utilities, all the really exciting things about the HR budget. We are investing, do the next slide. Our focus this year is centralized recruitment. We do, I did increase the budget on this one, and that's probably fairly obvious. Sarah is sitting on that chair of the HR committee. This is one of the toughest labor markets in history. We are having, we've actually been fairly lucky to have folks, you know, we've had some success filling positions when I got here. There was over 70 right now, there's still about 70, but a lot of those are seasonal. We're also trying to recruit for talk to field positions, fire, police, recycle truck driver. So this is just some language to talk about how we decided to centralize it this year. So we were divided by departments, but we decided that, you know, maybe we would look at that and restructure a little bit differently since most people who were using centralized recruitment over spent. So, and we don't want to see those expenditures fall and not be able to be tracked. So we're looking for a little bit more money so that we can be responsible for that next slide. We overspent some departments really had those crisis. We came to the board of finance many times asking for things like retention bonus sign on bonus. We really, you know, tried to get super creative. We've been fluent folks wanted to have more of an EU group. So we brought some people in from out of state to do some EEL recruitment. And so those those are what those dollars are used for and looking at the creative ways folks use to build those roles advertise for those roles. We need a little bit more money to keep on the path that we've been on local advertising is very expensive. We found that out we really did some problems and an on site job fair for TPW. And we're thinking about we need to use the enhanced LinkedIn and indeed now we don't we can't just use the free versions of those it's not working for us. Right. Enterprise funds. Do you charge back to them like we need to. We operate over. Right. Enterprise funds. Well, like the airport and electric department. Yeah. We operate solely general fund and the operators overhead. I don't know. I'm I'm afraid I'm not understanding it. Well, on the revenue side today. Okay. All of the mayor can enter this question, but all of the enterprise funds paid for HR services to the attorney and those shared services. I think yeah, that's a more detailed. Yes. So we have zero revenue. So this is really just breaks down the focus areas. You are going to focus more on centralized recruitment. This is just basically breaks down how we plan to do that. I can slow down if there's any questions on centralized recruitment, why we're doing it. Well, I'm going to say why we're doing it. I just like my question was that, you know, some some of the comfort ones like. I care for him be a tougher or expensive. That that would be part of their departmental budget. Well, it does come out of their budget. So this this is where we build it around, you know, the expenses to come. We're centralizing it in our budget, but they're not keeping it. Certainly we didn't just come up with this budget line and put it in here. So no, no, no, everyone's. We just find it easier. Say, for example, say, for example, any of these things they just don't have the operation. I understood I was just trying to track it on the revenue side because because they're fee based. Yes, versus the other departments, which may be general fund based. I mean, I'm happy to speak a little bit further to it. I mean, there's a lot that goes into making sure that costs that should be allocated to the enterprise fund. Okay. There's a lot that goes into making sure that costs that should be allocated to the enterprise funds and utilities. That's a fair and appropriate way where there's like a direct cost where it's, you know, isolated and, you know, the centralized team has done something that, you know, there's a discrete costs that can just be billed to to an enterprise fund we do it that way where it's more general. There's a lot that goes into it such as the city attorney's time HR directors time mayors time there's a big administrative fee that there's a lot there's a lengthy formula that goes into it that allocates out all these shared costs and an appropriate defensible way to the to the various non general fund entities. I do think you know it's a fair, it's a good question and counselor carpenter I do think when we're we do something new like this it's, you know, worth flagging and double checking that this is getting worked into those formulas appropriately but I'm confident like that is this a lot of sensitivity around what is the general fund costs versus a enterprise fund costs and a lot of effort put into making sure that the taxpayers only pay for what is really fair for them to pay for. Thank you. We've talked about services for provided by HR to linger on this. We have made some changes this year but in general this would be these would be founded most HR departments so very large department covers a lot of ground, I mean a large workforce. So we have like updated it to include our e-learning programs and we also have done a lot of work on internships and so this is just our services. And so this is the big one. This is our focus for FY 23. We are still focused on ensuring that Burlington is an inclusive employer of choice. I'm really excited about a lot of things. I'm not going to talk about those things unless I slide. We really wanted to improve HR capacity and service. I think I talked about digitizing processes. We don't want paper. We don't pay for applications. We don't pay for forms. We don't pay for CLS forms. So we're really working hard on that through the HRIS systems. You'll see some of those things that I mentioned. We do want to complete a compensation study. I think that's really important for folks to understand. I know Councillor Hightower had mentioned that. We do want to make sure that we are competitive and that we are offering folks fair wages. We did an equity study through BTV stat. We found the city to be very equitable across race and gender, which was really great. That was one of the first studies that I did. Then we're looking at diversifying our 457 options. We've got a fully staffed office. That was something that just happened. These are just some of our goals. We're definitely looking at bringing back in-person affinity and white accountability groups. That's something that ended during COVID. We are looking to do that and in place satisfaction surveys as well. On your compensation survey, we also look at benefits. They will look at benefits, but I think you and I can talk offline. Basically, we're looking at base wages right now just to make sure the city, again, that's another HR function. I work closely with SIGNA. We know that we're competitive and we can talk a little bit about how that adds to the base wage. By and large, we want to know dollar for dollar. What are people putting in their advertisements? What are people saying? We're on to the next slide. The other main focus is training and support for employees and managers. This is something that the team was working on before I got here. Obviously, we are all aware of the REIB anti-racism training program. I'm really excited to partner with Pitt and the team to support this with my team. We're going to be, hopefully, having new contracts and doing contract training. But the big focus is new manager leadership training, having those things as you come in the door, understanding how to deal with a worker's comp claim, understanding our policy, manual, and there's some other things listed here, ADA compliance. Pretty standard HR stuff of stuff that we want on a regular rolling annual schedule to ensure that everyone's getting within. Catherine's got a broke his breath, so that's why she left. So he's going to be okay, but that's why I stepped in for her and revealed. I have any questions? Any questions at all for me? The presentation, the budget? Yeah, presentation was so extensive. It's extensive, but quick. Are you tying yourself? I did. I did. I'm sorry, I can't find yours. This is my 50. You can probably just do it with those slides. The front page photo. Do you see the chance planned out? That was the first thing in the morning, shutting the street down. It's all about sunlight. All right, good evening. Just first introduced by two deputies, Michael Chance and Derek Libby. We really try to be a management team. So you always get us together so that we always can cover for one another and know we all know what's going on with the new organization. So you just go to the next slide. So we're authorized for 93 people. We have five stations and we have fire stations, community fire stations, specifically so that we can solve our response line. And so whereas police deploy from one facility, you know, we have five stations around the city with a goal of six minutes and 20 seconds for the time you call us so that we're in front of your door 90% of the time. And we want an email to your door within eight minutes. So that's the reason we strategically have fire stations around the city. I don't know if you're going to, this budget won't get into capital kind of expense. With the exception, I'll tell you a little bit about some of our needs. Okay, feels needs, but it does, if you just not get in. Well, I was curious on five stations after a very long time and kind of looking forward. Do we, how do you assess do we really need by kind of speak to it at the sort of because I have it to go from that later in the presentation. Thank you. And so, you know, we have a training division staff with just one person we have a prevention division staff with three majority of our work are the members in the street every day we have those that that's the bulk of our training for those that run just operations, our calls have returned, which is about a almost 300 calls last year calendar year. That was about returned a little bit more than pre pandemic or about pre pandemic, we took a pretty big reduction in 2020 to just in order to go to the hospital. So we saw a decrease during this is kind of our organizational structure. You see Chief Libby has mostly operations, while Chief, Chief LeChance has all the people problems and all the building problems. And so that is the why we love HR. But I mean, really, it's just that code just managing COVID or managing FMLA with 93 employees, there are a lot of activities that both of these gentlemen to those three big blocks of potential a shift B shift and C shift, or the majority of our workforce are there's 28 on each of those shifts. They work 20. They're scheduled to work 28 24 hours on 48 hours off. That's that everyone is working some degree of overtime and we'll talk about that later, almost every day. We are people here, we are people service so about 95% of our budget, sorry about 13.7 million expenses, 95% of that is people yet in our other fixed costs, so we have to have power, we have my gear, we have to buy hose, we're running, you know, we have discretionary spending only about 300,000 out of that 13.7 million. So we are really super league low showing our revenues versus expenses on 23 versus 24 22 versus 23. You know, basically, we're going to we're going to increase our revenues about 400,000 this year, and our expenses are expected to go up about 150. The vast majority of that 400,000 is all in animals transports. So we're going we're projected to do about 750 more transports this year than last year. And we've increased through fee structure, better collection, better documentation by our members we were doing our five year average before was about $365 of transport, we're about $410 of transport now. So, so that's how we generate our revenue, and I'll speak to you know how that helps us out on the next slide. I'm sorry. How much of your revenue is we project this year about 1.9 1.9 million. And we generate another 400,000 out of the fire marshal's office, the vast majority of that is we monitor fire alarms in about 350 buildings at 600 bucks a pop plus false alarm fees that generate plans review fees for certain sprinklers and fire alarms that generates about another 400,000. That's been pretty consistent my six years. So, major accomplishments for FY 22, you know in August of last year we deployed that 30 most of the new North and you know the major increase in investment the fire department. We feel like somewhat surviving and COVID goes on today, surviving stuff that staffing changes and only in a couple instances that we have to round it right out where we didn't have anybody to work a vine large probably less than two or three years. So, on the other hand, on one hand, we can count that we've had 22 people at work every day. And with cold between COVID and emergency leave and FMLA and entries on a normal year over the last nine years we spent about 12,500 hours of overtime. We're going to break 25,000. So, every day we are we're we're have someone working overtime every day, and it's highly likely we're mandatory someone that they can't go home in the morning. That is probably the biggest challenge that we have had the last few months, we thought it was going to get better in last January when we as new employees start on the line. And we could come good weeks but by and large we continue to struggle with that. And I'm sorry. She said at the time. I swear. No, you're, you're right. So you're right. You're right. You're correct. So we have three. We currently have this fiscal year we started three students in parametric schools. So we have 13 certified paramedics has the highest level for the hospital care we can have. We actually have six in school. So it takes about 18 months to get through it. So that's why we have six now it's the group that started really in the fall of 21 that they're winding down and we'll send three more this fall and so that takes by that the pipeline we always have to be starting in the pipeline because some of those 13 will retire or move on. And so in order to our goal is to keep at least 15 or get in but we'll have 19 here before long with HRs HRs help we did make a pretty significant investment in wellness equipment. So many of our all of our stations have a fitness equipment that we were able to get about 10 grand a special money from HR this year and to replace some aging aging stuff and stuff that we needed. And we made an investment and really hasn't been a monitoring investment before I spend time and leadership. Most of our executive team and retire anytime and in fact two of our senior leaders one left last month one leaves in two weeks. We're trying really hard to prepare the next generation. We are young departments. I think I've hired 52 people in my six years here. And so they're because of those reasons we really are putting some investment and in time and energy we're running our first commercial preparation class with something we've never done before but in order to help prepare the next generation of leaders. You know we're trying to make some real significant investment on our time. Next slide. So what's this this budget will sustain and really that sustains our current level of service. We were able to raise revenues. I think you are aware of departments for us to make financial reductions or 2.5% reduction. We were able to get through this without making any reduction on expenses by offsetting our so thanks for the raising our rates between raising our rates working hard on Amos collections. We were able to absorb that our delta was about 337,000. We expect about 400,000 increased grant payments revenue so we were able to accomplish that without making a reduction in service. We did however move money around in that which is is detrimental. So, you know, our, I always say it's a little bit silly to say about $13 million budget means about $8,000 trash go. But when I started pre pre the recycling law with blue scraps, or we were paying on 4,000 for rubbish. Now we pay at 8,000. That's not that's that's a new expense that we have to absorb someplace else. And that happens with electricity and many other things. So we we're covering it without any increases, but we're moving money around and in being becoming more and more. It's not a sustainable way to cooperate, but we've been able to accomplish it. So what are we looking for you know we're excited on capital so the capital bond and just just passed included three new fire trucks and those have just been ordered and this contract signed on so we're excited to see those arrive in thought the next fiscal year. A new upgraded radio system which will be a public safety radio system so that good for our responders. We are seeing challenges, something that fire services almost never struggled with its recruitment and retention of staff. And for the first time in my career, we were unable to fill all of our positions authorized to be hired know we do things a little bit different similar police, we try to hire only once or twice a year so we. It's easier because it's a 14 week recruitment Academy. It's easier for us to bundle those and hold those positions open. And this is for the first time ever we haven't we're not able to fill our positions. Normally you would get. You know, these guys will say there was 300 people that applied for one job and they came on that they came on the job. And it was not uncommon that you have to test a couple cycles so that showed that you were interested in that was the only way you really got in was through return. We had 65 people apply. Last time only 30 of those not the minimum qualifications, we invited all 30, I think it was 32 for interviews. We, we saw 24 25 show up. 11 a job offers to we started in classes six, when we had nine of us. So we are the deputy chances really making an effort on recruitment, we're changing our cycle up perhaps we'll hit the college, the college students who leave with fire service programs using some of Karen's money. So we know that for the first time and we've had a higher tertiary. You know, our tertiary will last five years 31%, which is really high in my opinion really high for fires. Is that because of retirements or because of job. Those are people that came in and left that nothing to do with the that does not include people retired of that 51 we have 51 people we hire 31% of those in the last five years are no longer employed. A couple of them we hope to leave. But, but that's the that is not, not the majority. So, again, we have some, but we work at 56 hour work, which is versus authority to that much of the rest of the world is so there's a lot of things that go into. You know, talk about so this route, I describe it as deferred capital maintenance, we have two fire stations one over 100 years. You know, so we have five fire stations, one is over 100 years old one is approaching 100 years old tool that have common book rooms. When you're trying to hire females. That's a tough environment is we have common book rooms. At least, we have one station only has one bathroom. So, our facilities are old. In my professional opinion, our community certainly because we could we can cover the. And this has been shown by independently as well we can cover the fire this city with four fire stations strategically place fire stations so that's that that that that is the difference right so doesn't mean doesn't mean we just close. And plus it means we just don't close one and run out of for existing. It means that we have to we have to reload. And, but again with so understand that is that is something that is that concerns me keeps me up with that is the rear, the rear wall of a central fire station or certainly the ramp going down and it'd be impacted by the great streets project when some of the work that that's doing there that that wall is is is tough to get down there now the walls leading and we're having yes it's old it's older destruction. And certainly it will have it will be similar to the building just up the street from it it will be something that will have to eventually address one way or the other. And so the first main this is a big one, and then I can't finish presentation without the we still run three fire trucks with two people signed with. You know industry best practices for but three is what we run on our other trucks and and running to two people is not our not the industry best practice and certainly not at all, but again, so we can achieve that for our stations today. The same number of bodies just redeployed, but again it's it's finding and acquiring the land and all the complications that come with with a solution. Maybe it's an offline question or maybe it's a moral question about keeping the downtown station, simply because at some point we want to develop that whole life. And as much as we love that building it could be in the way. I think that's a moral question is, is that conversation come up and I think we've had deferred the mayor if you want to defer to you, I'll say I think any, any, any station consolidation would involve the movement of the downtown station. And it's, it's an appealing concept that at some level there, we've done analyses in the past that have suggested you could consolidate the central station in the station five. In a south end location somewhere on Pine Street, maybe around BED Callahan Park the challenge, particularly right now is, you know, we're looking at something north of $15 million for a facility, probably or, or more and we would have very limited I think there'd be a very limited offset in terms of the savings of the capital, the sale or trade if you will of the central station or something like the value in those buildings is limited. And there is value in, you know, potentially and there's some potential staff benefits that would seem to potentially justify it, how we, how we do that in our current position, given the upcoming high school needs and whatnot I think it's just very challenging right now. So it's, it's appealing it's something that's gotten a fair amount of attention, it's probably going to be some level of further discussion and our union negotiations is coming around. It's we don't have a clear path right now to doing that I would say. Councilor Hightower has a question. Yeah, and I think you actually answered my larger question and just as you continued in the discussion in terms of it's, I guess unfortunate that the downtown that that doesn't seem to be more of a that we don't think that that will have such a high sales value. And if we were to do anything else in different location. And I think my other question just to make sure that I understand the big picture and thank you chief lock I think your presentations are always very clear and give a good over you to folks who have no idea how to run a fire station, but just trying to kind of like, I think digging into the numbers will make this clear as well but it looks like overall the reduction kind of that the departments are being asked to do that you're mostly meeting that through an increase in revenue, which I think we saw that a couple weeks ago. So maybe he could just give kind of an overview of how that's affecting you all over the next year. And then on the deferred maintenance piece I assume you don't have a number on this but just, I guess like what the time span is on this like if it's a concern now like when that concern becomes like a urgent concern. So, yeah, so the first part is, yeah, we're we solved our entire budget offset with revenue enhancements so we're going to, we're going to see about $400,000 with the new revenue from Amos transports and we're forced, I hate to say this we're fortunate people call us and we transport a lot of people. So, but I don't know that we won't see that again next year you know we won't see another 400,000 next year I would not think our goodness gracious I hope not because that means we're taking a lot more people to hospital. So that part of it is solved all things actually all with increased revenue and we were able to then take any other monies that to move them around to target our expense out of the house, but I think that's how that was handled. So this deferred maintenance and I say that meaning basically our old buildings will will continue to keep them up our staff takes great care of them they really they love they love our old buildings I mean they're character and think about history and tradition, and the people that walk through the doors. Eventually, my biggest fear is that the truck ends up in the basement sometime in the middle of the night before collapse I mean, we're buying, you know, let's wait on a ladder truck 90 time. 87 ton fire truck backed into a building with a base founder station two is getting ready for a new floor that they're going to have to put up increase the best deal to hold up the new hold up the existing fire trucks. Years ago to not so many fire trucks into the port. So these are just long term problems and so I don't know that I can answer it well I mean I think that we've made some in hand you know we certainly made some improvements adding bathrooms that state you know station to use only have one common bathroom that at least has now three bathrooms with showers. I know I've said it, you know, I don't mean I'm a father of a daughter would I want her working in a fire station with in a common bed, bunk room and a cop with one bathroom. And so that's the type of thing that we've been able to dodge and weave. We're down to just one station that has one bathroom, but though that's where your uniforms kept to you know that's where the lockers are kept and it worked well in the 1920s when the fire station was built. It doesn't work so well. Thanks. Oh, sorry. I just said thank you we're good. Um, so yeah that is obviously a concern. My questions are. So first, um, I would say that probably as long as we've been talking about regional dispatch we've been talking about eliminating fire station. So this is not a new conversation. It seems as we talk about it and because it's not like a pressing priority. I think it will be a conversation and I think that's unfortunate, but I think that's with all the pressing priorities that we have for debt. That is the reality, but it will be addressed whether we want it to be and we may not get to choose when that happens. On my question is on in terms of and maybe this is I just want to make sure that I understand there are departments that are not revenue centers. They're, you know, they just aren't that's just not the nature of what they are. I was not aware that the directive that you received was if you can increase your revenue and you don't have to make cuts in your department, even though you're part of the general fund, whatever increases you have aren't shared by everyone. They're only within the fire department, which means that departments don't have any sources of revenue. Don't have the ability to be, you know, at all creative because of the nature of what they do. They will be forced to make cuts, but because you have found other sources of revenue, you don't have to do that. And I just want to make sure that I understand that correctly. I'll say this. I don't see Catherine. That was that that was how I interpreted the direction and how I dealt with the problem that was given to me with actually that's not true. I submitted two and a half percent with reductions. On top of I can also solve this problem by doing this. I will tell you that I cannot make two and a half percent reduction. I can make one percent reduction without cutting people. So, you know what? So my by plan for two and a half percent reduction now have it with is probably to cut nine people and close the animals that aren't there. So I would. I mean, given the fact that most departments are very dependent. I mean, they're, they're completely centric wages and benefits. They're probably are other departments who say exactly the same thing. They cannot make a two percent reduction. They can't even make a one percent reduction without a costume jobs. So I would I would imagine that you're probably in the same boat as everyone else. And certainly you can make the argument like I'm sure everyone does that their department is critical because it's public safety. Other people will make similar arguments that their department is critical for other reasons and I'm not not faulting you at all for making that argument. I would tend to agree with you. Public safety is very important. But I guess what I'm saying is I just want to make sure that I understand that that was the understanding was that if you were able to increase your revenue that you didn't have to make a cut. That's that's that's that's based. That's not exactly. That's not exactly the way it's phrased, but I mean, we've been very clear throughout these budget presentations that the million one in improvements have been made through a combination of revenue changes and expense cuts. The fire department as we discussed many times has even less flexibility and substantially less flexibility in the most departments on the expense side because the minimum staffing contractual requirements that we negotiate and have made there is not a lot of discretionary spending on the fire side. So I think we are fortunate in a year where we need to stretch ourselves. The fire department has this, you know, now approved way of increasing revenues. It's certainly a fire department, you know, many of our departments do you have revenue generation capacity and where there's a sensible way of approaching that it's something we have looked at here. I have an allergy to pursuing revenue enhancements where they're going to create serious equity issues and we had a good discussion about any equity concerns with this with the with this change. So, you know, we'll take this discussion on an apartment by an apartment basis. It's not the only place where where we are solving the problem in part with with revenue with a revenue change. Well, as I say, I mean, this is the first night. So, you know, I don't know if there are others that are in the same situation where, for example, partisan rack found other revenue sources and that was how they met their budget challenges. I'm just, I'm just asking the question and just be good. Like we submitted 2.5% with reduction. So, you know, the plan, if the plan is there, right, it's a public document that's been sent to the CEO on how the fire department is going to address the 2.5% budget reduction. So we did that exercise, but in the same document we provided an alternative. And then the so we'll defer them to the mayor and Catherine. You know, I want to add and just make sure people remember the history to it is, we certainly have chronic capital concerns with fire, fire, firehouses. Over the last decade, since we created a capital position to use the what was at the time back a decade ago relatively new. So in the form of the situation decade ago late McKess administration may sought and secured the ability to bond on an annual basis for capital improvements. When this administration started very little that money had been spent. There was structural problems, actually getting that money invested, we largely address that structural problem with the creation of the position that Martha Keenan occupied over the last decade. And so we benefited the fire department that a spouse of a former fire department official was was in a key role there. We've made many, many fire department investments with those capital resources over the last decade. We. I do think one of the things that was negatively impacted by the need to reduce the bonding amount. There was some less money going into buildings from the from the $24 million bond that was approved and had been in the $40 million bond. But we, you know, we are we are continuing to make to make it investments at this rate that compares favorably to what the city has ever done in recent memory. We also have done structural analysis and, you know, certainly chief it. If you're serious about the idea that you think we have structural concerns at that level. That is something that we I'm not, I don't believe that these the evaluations of the buildings that have been made in the recent property assessments, you know anything that arise that acute level of concern has been to my knowledge, addressed, and we will continue to be the way approach these things agree with President Paul that and again that I just want to be clear to this is not the the station consolidation has not been an idle conversation that has there's not been proactive work on the commission studies and analyses of this, the challenge. We have a very serious capital challenge in terms of pursuing it. So if you think it's something we are going to need to talk more about and probably talk and again is going to be an active conversation in the upcoming bargaining and I think we should have a further council conversation about what our posture is going to be on that before that bargaining begins. I was going to ask any time recently you've had to an external evaluation operations and I'm going to liken it to the CNA report which was asked for very different reasons, but, you know, of the 92 people, are there any different ways of doing things, different ways of staffing, and I'm not suggesting that there are and I'm not aware of problems but I'm sort of more curious. I mean, and, you know, if you've had any kind of external evaluation and or that's whether something we should think about, particularly in light of the amount of overtime you have to pay for coolment issues. And again, I'm not suggesting it for a problem but you know, going into the great new world. Are we going to have to start looking at things a little bit differently than they were done. So the short answer is no, we have not. I will say this like you would always welcome any type of review of the operations. One of the one of the real challenges comes is that there's not a lot of the scheduling of how firefighters work. You know, nationwide there's a few, there's a few models but we run a three-protein schedule. I mean, there's three shifts. So a lot of the country's on a four shift. And so, you already get an illustrator, that's a lot of people, a lot of people that we're not. So we're trying to find other ways within a three-protein model. But that gets our people some more time off. And I think so, but to answer your overall question, you know, we have not had an outside assessment. And I'm just, I'm asking out of curiosity and I don't see an urgency, but it's something, I mean, and I'm often asked probably more on the inlet side than the fire side, you know, are there different ways to respond on that side? And I don't have an instrument to ask that. I think we would love to change our deployment model on, you know, how we respond to medical calls. I think we would love to be able to, similar to the police, have a greater mental health component. And I think that that's obviously something that Mayor is working on. You know, we deal with many of the same patients every day. And often it's not uncommon for us to drop them off and they be discharged before we finish our people. So, but that's, that's not going to change. So I'm going to change quickly. No, I know what I think. And maybe that's phase two of this discussion in terms of the health crisis and the recycling. Psycho patients, but, you know, I mean, I frequency is, I had a question about the attrition, I just kind of alarming to me, 30%. So you say 30%. What would you attribute that to mainly so interesting. So, you know, if I was losing people to another fire, I'd be scared. We've lost one. And he went back home to New Hampshire where he grew up, right? Hometown kid. People are coming onto this job. It's not what we anticipated thing. It's not what we thought it was going to be. I want to, I tried it. Now I'm ready to go do something else. My generation, when we came on the job, you work through retirement is just what you did. That's no longer the workforce. So, you know, we've had people take leave to go do a landscape business on a backpack across the country. You know, so, unfortunately, and we're so sorry, the recruitment process is taking away the flashy photos of fires and telling people being very honest that you're going to be doing 75% of your calls are going to be the medical calls. A whole bunch of those are unfulfilling. And so it's not what I've heard. I've had people leave going in exit interviews. It's just not the workshop rewarding. Those same patients we dealt with, just the names and faces change, but the workforce has more opportunities and they want to do something different. So that I'll say a long way of saying it's not a singular issue. If it was, I think we very easily to fix, but it is quality of life. We work 2900 hours a year. Normal job is 2080. That you know that you're you're always either that work schedule you're always coming or going. My question about the assessment was sort of driven by by that. Again, I don't have any, you know, what, what are the young people. So we create if it's 75% ambulance, how do we train people that side versus so we interesting we we just have a behavioral health assessment survey and hire a contractor to do that. We that's coming out early to I would not be surprised if we didn't clean some information from that that tells us perhaps some internal cultural business that we may be able to use to help us. And this is this is more generic but since you're a big user and have your own Indian contract and I cannot discuss the need for the city and I'm saying this generically. It used to be like you said you went in you stayed with the fire department for 20 years you had the promise of a really good pension and I sense is a lot of young people only want a job for five years. You know, you know, you have to draw the pension may not be there you probably should be isn't something saying this is a word generic you have to be in front of me and I think as the city, we're going to have to wrestle with some of those issues. It is enough. Again, if it was unique to broken fire, how to be scared, but all of my colleagues around the country are doing the same thing so it's not. It's not here it's not stop the city it's not the state. All of us review all of us are stealing with this. We just never had any other questions now. All right. Thank you to assessor your presentation. I love you. See, that's how I know. I know. All right. All right, thank you. Here's a small department. I feel does a lot. What we do is right there on the list. Our goal basically is to have fair values for everybody. And started off with the reappraisal and trying to put values at market and be compliant with the state state rules and that also aligns the International Association. And it's also having a data access to the public so that they have the ability to review their own property values as well as other people's property values. And we hold hearings right now we are in the process of scheduling hearings for the board of assessors. And right now we have about 30 appeals that we will be holding two weeks. I guess that's the next one. We're a small staff. Currently we have a staff of three people. Myself a deputy assessor and associate assessor. We have some funds for. Another praiser, which I think would hugely benefit the city. And then we also have a little bit of funds for some temporary assistance as we get busy at this time here this spring trying to do our evaluation reviews finalizing them a lot of checks and business personal property comes up all at once. And so we are sort of through that process. And so we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to learn in the next month or two wrapping up the grant list for the year. In short, this year we, the grand list has is about $30 million more than it was prior to prior year. We have certain commercial properties that were affected by COVID, you want to increase those as they are moving away from COVID and their cash flows are stabilizing adding more value. Budget trends, not much to change. Although we came up with reappraisal year we had, we were doing the reappraisal we had approval for five people. And we have three currently, I would go a little bit of help, and we want to fill another position so that we have the ability to do more property reviews and inspections. Ultimately, one lesson I think that we learned is that if we were had the ability to visit and do an inspection of every single property that sales sales, that data would be correct, and we would have a snapshot of what the market pays for a particular property. And the data would be correct. So that goes, that's a very important step for understanding the market, market trends and building tables that are get completely readjusted during revaluation. So our goals, our goals are to hopefully do more inspections do more reviews. We always want to increase those to inspect the sales there's about 450 bona fide market sales a year. There's other transactions as well that fall off. And to do that, we're going to be to higher position. And then also currently there is about 20 property appeals going to the state of Vermont and to to court. It's actually less than that because we had a few results. We receive about $105,000 from the state of Vermont each year, or what we call a grand list maintenance and future reappraisals. So we're trying to put that money into a fund for the next revaluation and it'll help offset the cost. I think this past re-appraisal was about 1.1 million. So if we do a re-appraisal and hopefully in four or five years, we will, it'll offset some of that expense. I think we're all set ready. Happy to answer questions. Yeah, I don't know if you're going to get into this with the subcommittee that's looking at the re-appraisal process, but I would hope this is going to affect you this year but the part of that comes out with sort of alternate designs like if we could have more staff capacity or I don't know what the answers are but I'm going to help you kind of look at that and we definitely cannot wait 10 more years. So I just hope that picture gets looked at and it's painful to get it. And I think more modestly and I'm saying this also to the role that the 105,000 and is that something legislatively we couldn't should lobby for? And this basically because of the lag problem, there's been a series of conversations about how to fix that, but we should be mindful, I think, to try to tee up a few legislators about are there some changes we could and should make the next biennium that would benefit Burlington. I don't want to interrupt but the 105 comes from $8.50 per parcel and there's some movement to push that to have a change. I think that that's been around for about 10 years and it hasn't changed but the expenses have changed. So we're hoping that that's $13, $14 per parcel would be more fair and we help pay for that. Obviously, I think that the state is concerned because of the education at Grand List is really on them and I think that's why we were able to get that not just Burlington but all municipalities. And of course, the city has some responsibility to pay for a portion of it. But the state can pay for the entire amount. I think that this committee is going to be beneficial with some some good ideas. They are working hard. We did a presentation yesterday. They have an agenda. It's on the website. You can find that through the assessor's website. And I think that good things will come out of that. So, you know, Well, I encourage us and send this to them as well that early this fall and we have to split the site of items that we try to get those on people's radar early. Sooner than later. Okay, I don't have questions. I don't have questions other than, I guess I have a comment and, you know, we work on the board of tax appeal and just through constituent interaction it seems like your department is tapped out most of the time or has been which since I've been on the council it's like And it seems like a lot of the work comes sort of like in huge hunks. It doesn't the way the calendar is, you know, you get a rephrase all and then you have all of these appeals that your department has to spend a lot of time on. I'm sort of I am looking, I mean, I have no questions about your budget. I'm sure I think you probably, you know, are you're an important function of the city and probably operating to legally right now. And I welcome the idea of adding additional capacity to your office but it seems like I'm hopeful that there will be some adjustments to the way we do this, you know, systemic adjustments. The way we do the appraisals, the way the state appropriates money for them to sort of even the amount over time rather than having to be these huge sort of episodic things that happen, you know, in our last case what 15 years. That was unusual. But in the past, if you look at it, it was almost as though there was a reappraisal every 1011 years. That's still too long. I was here in 2005. 2001. So I was there for the last reappraisal. And it was busy just as well, just the same. There was a lot of appeals as well. And we were in an upmarket tremendous somewhere 2006. 2008 things slowed down. So what happened why this is longer is because the market tend to call the market crash for really values held pretty well in Burlington. Burlington's pretty resilient for a handful of years. So, equity sort of stayed the same at that point. And then the markets started changing over time and it just accelerated. So we were told to do this reappraisal 2017. And it takes a couple of years to gear up or because you have to go contract and then you have to go through the process of changing your software which is outdated every 10 years, and so forth. The process took a while at that same time, but it's still moving quite a bit. And then of course, COVID has a injury to the whole thing. But we're through it. And everyone has an opportunity to appeal. And we hope that the done the best job that we could. And then more staff and there was more time to pay more attention to every single property. But we do now, we are, we'll do it right up for every single appeal. We didn't have time to do that much. I just wanted to mention one thing, because Sarah, you brought this up. When you were talking about the work of the ad hoc committee getting into the queue sooner. So on our consent agenda, last meeting, we passed it. There was a letter from James Sunsworth. And he lays out a timeline. And I'm wondering, obviously this is not directly related to your budget, but I'm just wondering, you know, what he has said is that the goal will be to begin the work of the final report, following the October 11 deliberative meeting. And we passed this, you know, no one, no one said anything. But that doesn't mean that I mean, that's just, that's just a statement of fact. The fact, the other fact is that, you know, we can always go back to him is October 11 probably means the report won't come to us until the end of October. Is that too late. I mean, I would suspect I can't, you know, there'll be things the city can control and manage. I'm just thinking more stuff like if we want to make that fee $14 and I know you, there's an association of assessors. So there's going to be some key things to sort of get on the docket, which is kind of a little different than I think what the reports going to come up with. And so I was just suggesting some of those key legislative things you get on the docket, or not that. We can call again or meeting we get something like workers, good one. And it's a lot because they're all running through the state house and I was getting ways to get on the docket. It's about the time you pin it on a camera, but because they're already. But just, you know, I was saying, John, this is a few, a few flag issues we should flag, just do it. So parallel to this. And I'm happy to, in my two cents days or it's not studied or I think things like do we have more rolling re-appraisals? How is that going to work? How do we handle the public education for re-appraisals, all this stuff on all the questions that was asked in the resolution in coming after the report? October is probably fine. I was just trying to flag if there's a couple of other issues, we should just not let them wait too long. Well, as it gets closer to October, we may change our minds. But I think the letter that I got was incredibly proactive. And I think they're taking the work very seriously. And maybe they'll be ahead of schedule. Well, I think it's, I don't want to be one of the years of experience, but it's flagging what needs to be changed by the state versus what city can control or not. I think you're suggesting that we look at whether some inflator on this decade old fee is a really good one. And I don't know, we'll look into it. And you know, there's a cycle for reviewing fees by agency. I don't know if this fits into one of those. And we, but it's a good question. And we will track it down while in advance of next fall. A quick question about We have posted this in the past. It doesn't offer enough money. So there's no interest. I think I had someone that was interested during the reappraisal towards the end. And they just couldn't make it. But it's just not enough. So I'm hoping to ask for higher salary to to get that filled. And I hope that it continues on for the next couple of years. Because honestly, I think that we're going to have reappraisal to think about it as the way it's been moving. I know it'll slow down, but it's going to be better. Well, you can't find it. I mean, I can hear if I can. It's hard, right? Holding up. I mean, it's like the other way. Just started a story about a city employee on the house that came in. $27,000 higher. Because he didn't put it in. Any other questions? That was my last presentation. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Thank you all.